EDITORIAL SAMARTH: May 2010

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Editorial

month may 14, edition 000507, collected & managed by durgesh kumar mishra, published by – manish manjul

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THE PIONEER

A DANGEROUS GAME
KERALA'S NANDIGRAM
LET THE LOSERS RECUPERATE - PREMEN ADDY
CENSUS DATA ON HOUSING VITAL - VIVEK SHUKLA
CAST OUT CASTE POLITICS - KALYANI SHANKAR
AFFRONT TO FREEDOM - ANURADHA DUTT
ABSURD DEMAND TO PROSECUTE POPE - WILLIAM KILPATRICK

THE TIMES OF INDIA

NEW PARTNERSHIP
BREAK THOSE BARRIERS
IT'S A NATURAL ALLIANCE - RORY MEDCALF
'WE NEED TO REDEFINE THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT'
LIKE IPL, IT DOESN'T PAY TO MESS WITH MANGOES - JUG SURAIYA

HINDUSTAN TIMES

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY
MINISTER ON THE MOVE
WEAR AND TEAR - SAMRAT
WAIT FOR A GREEN SIGNAL
NO CLOSED-DOOR POLICY - RAJDEEP SARDESAI

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

IDIOM AND ABUSE
LEARN BY NUMBERS
AMONGST ALLIES
TRAI AND TRY AGAIN - RAJAT KATHURIA
LET THEM HAVE THE PAST - SEEMA CHISHTI
CONFRONTING CASTE, DEMANDING A CENSUS - SHARAD YADAV
THE ADVANTAGE OF BEING VISWANATHAN ANAND - JAIDEEP UNDURTI
THE MOTHER OF HUNG PARLIAMENTS?
RIGHT TO REMAIN CONSTITUTIONAL

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

A GOOD IIP YEAR
RURAL-URBAN CONTINUUM
ARE WE REALLY PARANOID ABOUT CHINA? - MK VENU
STILL CROSS CONNECTED ON SPECTRUM - MAHESH UPPAL
NEW PENSION, GOOD RETURNS - SAIKAT NEOGI

THE HINDU

CRUSHED BUT NOT BROKEN
A MASSIVE RESCUE PACKAGE
TOWARDS REDUCING TRUST DEFICIT - CHINMAYA R. GHAREKHAN
DAUNTING TASK AHEAD FOR KRISHNA, QURESHI - SUHASINI HAIDAR
ONE YEAR OF UPA-II: NUMBERS WITHOUT COMFORT - VIDYA SUBRAHMANIAM
PROFITING FROM FOOD AND FAMINE - ZOE WILLIAMS
PATENT COMPLAINT AGAINST APPLE - MAGGIE SHIELS

THE ASIAN AGE

A NEW TEAM TAKES CHARGE IN BRITAIN
THE NAVY INVENTED T20
THE PSYCHE OF TERROR

DNA

LANGUAGE POLICY
COOL IT, GUYS
A COALITION OF COMPROMISED OPINIONS - FARRUKH DHONDY
LOOMING INDUS CRISIS - YOGI AGGARWAL

THE TRIBUNE

NEVER SAY 'NO' TO DIALOGUE
WAR ON LITIGATION
EXIT FROM WORLD CUP
CASTE IS AGAIN THE KING - BY INDER MALHOTRA
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BISTARBAND? - BY ARADHIKA SHARMA
PAKISTANI CONUNDRUM - BY GAUTAM WAHI
THE 'DOCTORAL' DISORDER - BY BALVINDER
MUMBAI DIARY

MUMBAI MIRROR

THE JEWEL OF KALA GHODA

BUSINESS STANDARD

A PATENT SHORTAGE
DOES LITTLE CREDIT
THE EURO BAILOUT - AKASH PRAKASH
ASIA - LEADING THE GLOBAL RECOVERY - ANOOP SINGH
SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR: TEA, TOWELS AND TOILETS - SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR
GRECIAN SUMMER OF DISCONTENT - SHANKAR ACHARYA
STEEL AND POWER - KANIKA DATTA

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

ESPOUSING CAUSES
PENSIONS, TOO, MUST BE SOLD
WELL SAID, MR CHIDAMBARAM
LIMITED IMPACT OF CRISIS ON INDIA: BRETT HEMSLEY
RECASTING 2011 CENSUS: TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE - SONALDE DESAI
BRAND DISPUTE: NAME GAME IS TOUGHER THAN EVER - ABRAHAM KOSHY
THE CIRCUS OF OUR LIVES - MANOJ NAIR
CREATE IT, FILL IT, FORGET IT - MUKUL SHARMA
CHANGING GLOBAL TRADE PATTERNS - MANOJ PANT
WE ARE OVERWEIGHT ON ASIA AND EMERGING MARKETS: STEPHEN DAVIES, JAVELIN WEALTH MANAGEMENT
SAUDI PROJECT IS RITES'S ANCHOR DEAL: MD
IDRS A POWERFUL TOOL TO SHOW STANDARD CHARTERED'S COMMITMENT: PETER SANDS
LICENCE RAJ MUST FOR NET: CRAIG MUNDIE
SOUTH INDIA'S LARGEST MARKET FOR US: HIMALAYA - SARAH JACOB

DECCAN CHRONICAL

A NEW TEAM TAKES CHARGE IN BRITAIN
THE PSYCHE OF TERROR - BALBIR K. PUNJ
REBUILD PAK TO MAKE TIMES SQUARE SAFE - BY NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
WILL THIS ARRANGED MARRIAGE WORK? - BY JAMES FORSYTH
THE NAVY INVENTED T20 - BY ARUN KUMAR SINGH
THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY! - BY FRANCIS GONSALVES

THE STATESMAN

SOCIAL PERVERSION
PARTY THIEVES
OVERBOARD ~ AGAIN
KASAB AND KEHAR SINGH - BY RAJINDER PURI
WHY CORRUPTION CANNOT BE CONTROLLED
TINY STATE THAT BOUGHT THE WORLD - CAHAL MILMO

THE TELEGRAPH

BAD BRAND
COLOUR LESS
CHANGING SOUL OF BRITAIN - SWAPAN DASGUPTA
TIME TO CLEAN THE ACT - MALVIKA SINGH

DECCAN HERALD

REGRESSIVE MOVE
IN DEBT WE RISE - BY S NAGENDRA
THE SOUTH MUST DEVELOP ITS MEDIA - BY MARIO LUBETKIN, IPS
HAND ME DOWNS - BY S RADHA PRATHI
HOW IS THAT?

THE JERUSALEM POST

MISGUIDED IN MOSCOW

THE NEW YORK TIMES

CAN WE GET YOU ANYTHING ELSE?
THE WAVERING WAR ON AIDS
WHILE THE SENATE FIDDLES
THE ALIENS AMONG US - BY PAUL DAVIES
WE'RE NOT GREECE - BY PAUL KRUGMAN
GLIMMERS OF HOPE - BY DAVID BROOKS

USA TODAY

OUR VIEW ON AIRLINE CONSOLIDATION: FEWER, BUT STRONGER, CARRIERS COULD BENEFIT FLIERS
OPPOSING VIEW ON AIRLINE CONSOLIDATION: END MERGER MADNESS - BY JAMES OBERSTAR
REAL MUSLIMS DON'T ALLOW CENSORSHIP - BY HARRIS ZAFAR
AFGHAN BOSS' VISIT SHOWS OUR PHONINESS
PLAIN TALK BY AL NEUHARTH, USA TODAY FOUNDER
OUT OF WORK? WHY NOT VOLUNTEER?
COMMENTARY BY JOYCE KING
OPINIONLINE: TOP COURT NOMINEE FACES CLOSE SCRUTINY
DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE: EU WILL MUDDLE THROUGH - BY R. DANIEL KELEMEN

TIMES FREE PRESS

AN OFFICE IN DISARRAY
SAFEGUARDING THE PAST
TRILLION-DOLLAR OBAMACARE!
THE COMING DOCTOR SHORTAGE
PRESIDENTIAL OATH INTACT
HOW MANY MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS?
REPEATED MASS MURDERS IN IRAQ

HURRIYET DAILY NEWS

FROM THE BOSPHORUS: STRAIGHT - WHEN GRAY CHALLENGES HUES OF BLACK AND WHITE
WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING TO TURKEY? - SEMİH İDİZ
A WAR BETWEEN THE PIOUS AND THE LESS PIOUS - BURAK BEKDİL
ERDOĞAN'S LANDMARK TRIP TO GREECE - YUSUF KANLI
BUSINESS IS SOCIAL TOO
THE DEMOCRATIC MUDSLIDE OF SUDAN - HANY BESADA - IBI BROWN
PAPANDREOU: ERDOĞAN'S TRIP IS NOT AN ORDINARY ONE - MEHMET ALİ BİRAND

I.THE NEWS

MORE BAD NEWS
NEW GROUND
COUNTERPOINT
DANGEROUS DIAGNOSIS -- CLEAR SIGNS OF EXHAUSTION - AYAZ AMIR
THROWBACK TO BELLBOTTOMS - AHMAD RAFAY ALAM
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST HAZARA? - IMRAN KHAN
THE STATE OF OUR CITIES – DR MUZAFFAR IQBAL
THE UN REPORT IS A TIME BOMB - SHAFQAT MAHMOOD
SIDE-EFFECT - HARRIS KHALIQUE

PAKISTAN OBSERVER

HAFEEZ FOR MORE BURDEN ON GROANING PEOPLE
EVEN PPP MPS TALK OF 'BANANA REPUBLIC'
KILLINGS & NABBING OF PAKISTANIS ABROAD
RAMESH CHALLENGES HOME DEPT ON CHINA - M D NALAPAT
HILLARY'S DIATRIBE - SULTAN M HALI
SIGNIFICANCE OF MASJID - ATIF NOOR KHAN
CULTURAL EXCHANGES NOT A SOLUTION - DR FAROOQ ADIL
KARZAI'S WHITE HOUSE WELCOME IS A FAÇADE - OLIVIA HAMPTON

THE AUSTRALIAN

TONY ABBOTT NAILS HIS COLOURS TO THE MAST
QUESTIONS OF POLITICAL COURAGE

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

ONE HAND GIVES, THE OTHER TAXES
CHINA'S GAG REFLEX
DON'T DIMINISH COURTS' DISCRETION IN SENTENCING
REALISTIC ABOUT OBESITY? FAT CHANCE

THE GUARDIAN

IN PRAISE OF … SIR HUMPHREY
CAMERON AND THE ECONOMY: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE
GULF OF MEXICO DISASTER: OIL AND VINEGAR

THE GAZETTE

JUST WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WERE THESE LIBERALS THINKING?
POLICE DESERVE PRAISE FOR RESPONSE TO RIOT

CHINA DAILY

DEFLATE PROPERTY BUBBLE
NEUTRALIZE CHILD KILLERS
STRENGTHENING THE BOND
GREEK LESSONS FOR THE WORLD ECONOMY - BY DANI RODRIK
HISTORICAL RELATIONS DOWN THE AGES - BY ZHANG XIAODONG
DEVELOPMENT CAN BRING PEOPLES CLOSER - BY ZHENG XIWEN

DAILY MIRROR

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THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

A DANGEROUS GAME

US TAKES ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

Though it comes as a surprise, US President Barack Obama's recent comment at a joint Press briefing with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington that Pakistan has a "cancer" gnawing at its innards and it is this, not India, that should preoccupy Islamabad, gives us little reason to believe that there is change in American policy on the horizon. The fact is that the US seems to be getting used to taking one step forward and two steps back. It is not that the Obama Administration doesn't know that powerful elements within the Pakistani establishment are helping jihadi organisations carry out their nefarious designs — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already said quite a lot about this — but right now Mr Obama and his team are more interested in disengaging from Afghanistan as soon as possible — July 2011 has been set as the date for the beginning of withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. And it is in order to meet this deadline that Mr Obama, despite not being unaware of Pakistan's real intentions, insists on persisting with his current approach to the AfPak problem: Keep Pakistan in good humour and hope that it cracks down on terrorist organisations that directly pose a security threat to US troops across the Durand Line. The fact that the US is unwilling to link civilian and military aid to Pakistan with the latter's performance on the terror front shows how convinced Washington is that its present course of action will work.

It doesn't take much to realise just how short-sighted the Obama Administration's approach is. It continues to view the problem of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism simply in terms of the impact it has on its own interests in Afghanistan. Of late it has even started promoting the bogus concept of a political solution to the situation in Afghanistan that will seek to co-opt those elements of the Taliban that give up their association with Al Qaeda. Nothing can be more absurd. It is absolutely suicidal to discriminate between jihadi groups simply on the basis of nomenclature. The fact is that whether it is Al Qaeda or the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba or the Taliban, they all come from the same ideological mould that seeks to establish a global Islamic caliphate through jihad against non-believers. Besides, the follies of the Obama Administration's discriminative approach can have bizarre consequences. It is astonishing that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan is still not on the US terror list. This is despite the fact that the the group has openly declared war on US citizens and was responsible for the recent Times Square bomb plot. It is precisely because Washington believes that it can do business with certain sections of the Taliban that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan is still not officially classified as a terrorist organisation.

Meanwhile, Islamabad continues to selectively target only those jihadis that it feels won't be amenable to doing business with the Pakistani establishment. Simultaneously, it chooses to turn a blind eye to jihadis like Hafiz Mohammad Saeed who have openly declared jihad against India, for they represent Pakistan's 'strategic assets' to wage an undeclared war on India. Unless and until the Obama Administration recognises the pitfalls of its present AfPak strategy — which will leave Afghanistan in a vulnerable position post-2012, making it an easy prey for Pakistan to re-establish its hold over that country — jihadi terrorism will continue to be the scourge of the global community

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THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

KERALA'S NANDIGRAM

VILLAGERS RESIST FORCIBLE LAND ACQUISITION

The people of the sleepy villages in Kinalur of Kerala's Kozhikode district have been living in fear for the past one week after the police's terror campaign on May 6, in which more than 60 villagers were injured, and the subsequent round-the-clock raids. The police unleashed a brutal attack on a group of villagers, including women and children, which was protesting against a survey for land acquisition for the construction of a 30-metre-wide road to an industrial facility in Kinalur. Unable to control their rage, the police chased the people to their homes and mercilessly beat them up in their courtyards and verandahs. All this was done for the construction of a road to an industrial park where no big unit exists nor is there a proposal to build new factories. Industries Minister Elamaram Kareem, a neo-liberalist Marxist, has justified the police action saying that the protesters had thrown cow dung at the law-enforcers. Mr Kareem has described the 'cow dung attack' as an act by Islamists but there are no takers for this charge. Chief Minister and veteran Marxist VS Achuthanandan, enemy of those whom Mr Kareem represents in the Kerala unit of the CPI(M), has ordered the immediate withdrawal of the police and suspension of the survey. He is now being taken to task by the reformist-dominated State CPI(M) for that decision.

The CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front Government has now announced an all-party meeting on the issue. It has made it clear that all parties in Kozhikode district will be invited to the meeting, except the outfits that represent the villagers who stand to lose their homes and land if the road has to become reality. The plan for the road was originally conceived after the State-run Industrial Development Corporation announced an industrial city project in association with a Malaysian company in 270 acre acquired at Kinalur in 2007. But the land acquisition procedures for the road project allegedly began after the expiry of the MoU signed with the Malaysian firm. During that period, the villagers saw a flurry of activity by real estate agents from outside the area. Reports say that land sharks with CPI(M) connections have bought close to 3,000 acre at inflated rates around the industrial estate. With no mentionable project proposed for the site, these 'investors' are now facing the prospect of huge losses. The villagers allege that Mr Kareem and his neo-liberalist comrades are determined to build the road so that the real estate dealers can get enhanced value for their land. Amazingly, though at another end of the country, there are ringing similarities between what happened in West Bengal and what's happening in Kerala in the name of industry!

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THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

LET THE LOSERS RECUPERATE

PREMEN ADDY

Britain went to bed last Tuesday digesting the news of a Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition Government, the first of its type since World War II. The compact was sealed and delivered by the two party leaders, Mr David Cameron for the Tories and Mr Nick Clegg for the Lib-Dems. This is new territory for a country unaccustomed to such coalitions; on the Continent such arrangements have been par for the course as long as one can remember, based as they were, and are, on a proportional electoral system.

True, the British first-past-the-post exercise was less democratic, but it guaranteed political stability. Ruling parties significantly short of 50 per cent of the popular vote became the British norm. The Lib-Dems have campaigned vigorously for a reform of this system since they have most to gain electorally from the change. The Conservatives, who were the firmest supporters of first-past-the-post, have bowed to the new realities by agreeing to a referendum on the issue.

Beyond this was the give-and-take that invariably accompanies coalition talks: Taxation, Government spending and reduction of the spiralling national debt were priorities for both sides. Conservatives and Lib-Dem leaders are acutely aware of the depth of Britain's economic crisis. The explosive situation in Greece is a bleak reminder of what awaits a nation with a failing economy.

Numbers determined the Conservative-Liberal Democratic partnership. Although 20 seats short of an overall parliamentary majority, the Conservatives, with 306 MPs, were the largest party in the House of Commons; Labour was second with 258 seats and the Lib-Dems, with 57 seats, came third. Opting for a Labour-Liberal Democratic alliance would have been a partnership of the losers; it would have had a fractious and limited life-span and commanded little respect in the country. Working in tandem, the Conservatives and Liberal Democratics can ensure a critical measure of stable governance. It would send the right signals to the market and to Britain's partners in the EU and the US. That at any rate is the calculation, but there's many a slip between cup and lip and the best laid plans of mice and men do have a habit of going awry.

It could still be that the coalition with the Tories is a poisoned chalice for the Liberal Democrats. Their hallowed figures of the past — Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George — were reforming radicals, and the party's DNA is closer to Labour than the Conservatives. There is scepticism among the Lib-Dem faithful on the value of their party's alliance with Conservatism; looking through their glass,darkly, they fear an erosion of traditional Liberal idealism and the power and appeal of its ideas. History perhaps is with them. The Liberal-Conservative coalition strung together by Lloyd George in the closing years of World War I barely survived its aftermath, while Liberal participation in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin between 1931-37 reduced the party to a discredited rump, its fortunes restored in some measure in the early-1980s following the split in the Labour Party and the subsequent union between its departing Social Democrats and the old Liberals. It will be fascinating to see what the future holds. Will the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition deliver the goods or will it flatter to deceive?

That said, there was dignity and a touch of sadness as Mr Gordon Brown left 10 Downing Street and his youthful successor, Mr David Cameron — at 43, the youngest British Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812 — took over the reins of office. "There was a fitting simplicity about Mr Gordon Brown's departure from Downing Street, and a no less fitting simplicity about David Cameron's arrival," said Andrew Grimson, The Daily Telegraph's sketch-writer.

The departing Prime Minister in office usually came across as a dour Scot, notably deficient in human management skills, yet as the possessor of a formidable intellect (he had entered Edinburgh University as undergraduate at the tender age of 15) and an enduring capacity for hard work, Mr Brown cut little ice with his public. His words of farewell included the following passage: "I have been privileged to to learn much about the very best in human nature, and a fair amount too about its frailties, including my own." At that moment, he shone with a human light. Mr Cameron made a gracious acknowledgement of his predecessor's contribution to Britain's well-being and its influence abroad.

The British people had had the last word. They opted for a hung Parliament to register their dissatisfaction with the state of politics in the country, with the scams of its many legislators and the general arrogance of the good and great, bankers' bonuses and all. They have thrown down the gauntlet to those who will govern them, and the challenge is daunting on every count.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party in opposition will have time to reflect and, hopefully, to renew itself. Mr Tony Blair's Iraqi misadventure was a crime against humanity above all, and his massive, ill-starred deception in taking Britain into an unpopular war continues to cost the country dear. However, as the only radical party left in the land, Labour will become the lightning rod of the people's discontent when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat honeymoon is a distant memory. Labour's period of seed-time and remedy, encapsulating the ebb and flow of history, will surely have lessons for enlightened democratic governance the world over.

My afterword concerns an interview by Arundhati Roy on Al Jazeera television. It was a sustained rant against her pet hate, India. The purgatory of Mumbai's 26/11 and Islamist and Maoist terrorism generally was just reward for what she described as "India's Islamophobia" and its "brutal suppression of the Adivasis".

The interviewer was a svelte American who introduced Mahatma Gandhi into the discussion, I suspect, as part of the script's foreplay. The late Ulrika Meinof, leader of Germany's oncefeared Baader-Meinof terrorist gang, died in prison without recanting her past. Ms Roy, on the other hand, would be Joan of Arc for the dispossessed, the show recorded for posterity by a network priding itself as the acceptable face of jihadism!

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THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

CENSUS DATA ON HOUSING VITAL

VIVEK SHUKLA

As Census 2011 gets underway, this time around there will be greater emphasis on collecting data on the housing sector, covering the smallest of villages to each and every metropolitan city. It goes without saying that this data will play a critical role in shaping the Government's development programmes, especially those related to housing. Given the fact that a large number of Indians still do not have a roof over their heads, the data collected on the housing sector will be critical indeed. For, one can initiate development projects only if accurate data is available.

It is interesting to note that this time around the Census department has added an extra question on whether the particular household owns a computer or a laptop. This wasn't there in the last Census. Hence, now we will be able to gain some insight into how many people are computer savvy and how many households in rural India have computers. Apart from this, one also has to give details about the number of rooms in a particular house, the source of water and electricity, the availability of in-house bathrooms, kitchens, toilets, etc.

According to the last Census, there were a staggering 191.9 billion households in the country. There were only 27 million homes with three rooms, and 73.9 million households with just one room. It goes without saying that these figures are an eye-opener for all the stakeholders in the housing sector. The Government must undertake concrete efforts to provide the needy with cheap housing. For this to happen it must first provide property developers with cheap land.

But cheap housing alone is not enough. Shockingly, only 74.8 million households have the luxury of in-house water facility. This means that the majority of people in India have to fetch water from hand pumps, tube wells, and other sources of water not located within their household premises. Around 32 million households have to fetch drinking water from sources which are at least 500 metre away. Thus, it is also important that the Government ensures that along with a roof over their heads, the poor also have access to basic amenities.

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THE PIONEER

OPED

CAST OUT CASTE POLITICS

WHETHER A CASTE-BASED CENSUS WILL BE SOCIALLY DIVISIVE OR HELP ESTABLISH EQUALITY FOR ALL REMAINS DEBATABLE. BUT THE GROUNDS ON WHICH VALLABHBHAI PATEL SCRAPPED SUCH AN EXERCISE HOLDS GOOD EVEN TODAY. WE MUST GO BEYOND CASTE IDENTITIES AND POLITICS TO ESTABLISH A CASTELESS SOCIETY

KALYANI SHANKAR

Why did the Congress agree to take up the issue of caste-based Census in principle when the party itself is divided on this issue? Though many fear that a caste-based census would grant legitimacy to caste-based politics, some advocate that the data obtained would help in planning welfare measures.

Some suspect a deal between the Congress and the Yadav trio — Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav, Mr Sharad Yadav and Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav — in return for their support to the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill which was introduced on the last day of the Budget session. It is interesting to see that the Congress whose leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had dreamt of a casteless society has taken a step to perpetuate casteism.

However, it is to be realised that a caste-based Census is a double-edged sword. Religion and caste play an important role during elections. Therefore, it is natural for political parties, which thrive on their caste-based politics, to demand a caste-based Census. Moreover, the Backward Classes have grabbed power in some States and changed the nature of politics.

While parties like the BJP, the SP, the RJD, the JD(U) and the DMK demanded a caste-based Census, the Congress Government was dithering with a divided Cabinet. Even Union Home Minister P Chidambaram opposed the idea.

Social organisations' demand for a caste-based Census for the empowerment of the backward classes holds water. Why are political parties demanding caste-based enumeration in the ongoing Census? This is simply because the Census would equip politicians with statistics with which they can invoke the 'biradari' sentiment to reach Parliament and legislatures.

However, the Yadav trio argue that in caste-ridden society like ours caste-based Census cannot be wished away. Second, a headcount on the basis of caste will help in implementation of policies. Third, considering the complexity of castes and their significant bearing on the society, reliable data on castes should be available. However, these politicians are silent on the creamy layer which grabs the benefits.

Moreover, the BJP, the Left and most regional parties are backing the Yadav trio for their own reasons. The Congress is divided and would have liked an internal debate before agreeing for a caste-based Census. While OBC leaders in the Cabinet like Mr Veerappa Moily, Mr Vayalar Ravi, Mr A Raja and Mr MK Azhagiri supported it, others like Mr Anand Sharma opposed it.

Questions that arise are: Is there a need to resume a caste-based Census or will it result in more social conflict and social disorder? Will counting of castes help in reduction of inequality? Will it be diversity in unity or unity in diversity? These questions can be answered once the Census results are obtained. For now, there are arguments for and against which have their own merits and demerits.

The demand first came from the National Commission for Backward Classes to identify the OBCs. Second, the Social Justice Ministry has initiated such a move recently. Third, since the Women's Reservation Bill is on the agenda, a caste-based Census will help. Fourth, scholars would like such a census as it will help them study social order. Fifth, with more castes seeking inclusion and the courts disagreeing for reservation beyond 50 per cent, an authentic OBC list would go a long way in helping the Government to supply data to the courts.

The opponents cite the stand taken by India's first Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who decaled that such a Census would never be undertaken. Successive Governments since then had resisted it. The last such Census was enumerated in 1931 when Lord Irwin was the Viceroy. In 1941, there was no Census on account of the World War Second. After independence founding fathers were in favour of building a casteless society. Moreover, caste is a subjective and not an objective measurable category like occupation, age, sex and education. There is no uniform definition of the OBCs across the country. The Articles 15(4), 16(4) and 340 refer to "socially and educationally backward classes". In the past six or more decades some castes have changed and some others have merged and new ones have emerged.

The Government was naturally reluctant on the ground that the logistics of caste enumeration would be daunting. Mr Chidambaram gave a cogent argument as to why it cannot be done. Moreover, with over 6,000 recognised castes and sub-castes, it would be a nightmare for the Census officials to collect the data and collate it. The enumerators, who are mostly elementary school teachers, are not trained to deal with this complex issue. There is also a tendency to misreport and misrepresent data to gain benefits.

What happens when the Census figures come out after enumeration? Will it throw up some new figures? Will it create more confusion or will it destroy some myths? No one knows what kind of effect it will produce — good, bad or ugly — as the caste-based Census is a leap in the dark.

However, one thing is certain. It is bound to unleash new forces. New leaders may emerge and new equations may be established. Some castes may develop new assertiveness. It needs to be realised that Census is a great demographic exercise which should not be confused with the social order. The Census officials are asked to collect observational data and not information on self-categorisation. Whether the collection of caste data will be socially divisive or help in the quest for equality is still debatable.

The grounds on which Vallabhbhai Patel had scrapped such an exercise holds good even today. But the political parties are playing caste politics for their own narrow ends. Clearly, we need to go beyond castes, quotas and vote-banks and look for a casteless society, as was the dream of Jawaharlal Nehru.

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THE PIONEER

OPED

AFFRONT TO FREEDOM

POLITICISING KHAPS WILL GIVE HONOUR KILLINGS LEGITIMACY

ANURADHA DUTT

Omar Khayyam, in his celebrated Rubaiyat, dreamt of shattering "this sorry scheme of things entire" and remoulding it "nearer to the heart's desire". Now, northern India's khap panchayats want to recast Hindu society, but in their own sinister image, by amending the Hindu Marriage Act (1955) to incorporate their repressive practices. Supporting them are Haryana leaders such as Congress MP Naveen Jindal (who has since backtracked) and INLD chief Om Prakash Chautala. The fact that they can dare defy constitutional mores and a modern temper publicly is the consequence of political parties kow-towing to the interests of minority ethnic and religious groups at the cost of national identity and democratic and secular ideals.

Though Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily has stated that the Government will not accept the khaps' demand, instead amending the Indian Penal Code so as to charge perpetrators of honour killings with murder, his assurance of sympathy for personal laws is ominous. Jat khap panchayats, which function as a parallel, barbaric justice system, given to condemning same gotra and village couples to death or social exile, are pressurising politicos to initiate legislation that would allow them to function with impunity. If they manage to get their way, other retrogressive groups, in favour of reviving outlawed practices such as sati, polygamy, child marriages, denial of education to disadvantaged groups, and even untouchability — which have never really died out in the northern States and other bastions of orthodoxy — would be emboldened to convince their legislators to turn the clock back.

Stigmas against all categories, which suffered grievously during the period of Hinduism's decline, resulting in a mass exodus to heterodox belief systems, will again get sanction. On the verge of becoming a world leader, India is being pulled back by interest groups that have become rich and powerful on account of their vast land holdings and political leverage, but whose concerns are limited to ensuring social and economic precedence for their clans/baradaris/communities. Their worldview is extremely iniquitous. Females and the landless are marginalised, while the existing set-up is manipulated for their own ends. There is scarcely any sense of nationhood.

By capitulating to their demands to safeguard their customs, we would willfully undo the humane laws bestowed on Hindu society by British and Indian reformers. These include the ban on female infanticide (1795, 1802 and recent anti-foeticide laws); ban on sati (1829 and Prevention of sati Act,1987); law permitting widow remarriage (1856); Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929); and ban on polygamy (1955-1956), with the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill. Every initiative was strongly opposed by custodians of the old order. The difficult task of codifying Hindu laws of marriage and divorce, adoption, inheritance and related matters on equitable lines was accomplished under the supervision of free India's first Law Minister, BR Ambedkar. His was a liberating vision, discernable in the constitutional pledge of equal rights to citizens, irrespective of birth, religion and gender.

Under the democratic system, monogamy was made the rule for adult Hindu males; child marriage and sati banned; divorce and widow remarriage allowed; alimony provided to women by former spouses; daughters accorded coparcenary right, along with sons, to father's self-acquired property (and lately, ancestral property also); and demanding dowry and female infanticide made cognisable offences. Caste taboos and untouchability were also banned. Violations incur severe punishment. Sikhs, Jains and Buddhist, though free to observe their customs, come within the ambit of Hindu law. But Muslims are permitted to follow their personal laws for electoral reasons.

The stigma against union within the same or related gotras precedes the advent of Jats and others of their ilk. Old Hindu law books forbade such alliances on grounds of consanguinity. In 19th century Bengal, Kulin Brahmins' social interactions were primarily dictated by the intricacies of gotras. If any of the seven male ancestors along the father's line and five along the mother's line coincided, there could be no alliance between families. When five and three generations coincided in a marriage relationship, the Brahmin status was lost. Elaborate genealogical records were kept to compare the lines of descent. Kulin Kayasth marriages were similarly determined, as too alliances among other groups, aspiring for social dominance. But in the south, marriages between cousins or between the maternal uncle and niece are still common.

Customary laws, however, cannot replace national laws as these are the very foundation of our hard-won democracy though people are free to follow customs so long as these are civilised.

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THE PIONEER

OPED

ABSURD DEMAND TO PROSECUTE POPE

EVEN AS ISLAMISTS UP THE ANTE AND INSIST THAT EUROPE MUST CONCEDE THEIR DEMANDS, INCLUDING THE IMPOSITION OF SHARIA'H, LIBERALS ARE GUNNING FOR THE WRONG PERSON, WRITES WILLIAM KILPATRICK

It's a standard plot device in thrillers and spy movies: The police arrest or detain the wrong man — in fact, the only man who can stop the real murderer or foil the spies. Think of the Thirty Nine-Steps, one of Hitchcock's first masterpieces. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) has information that could prevent an international ring of spies from securing vital military secrets. Do the police believe him? No, instead they aggressively pursue him across England and Scotland for a murder he didn't commit.

The same formula is a staple in science fiction and monster movies. The authorities — police, military or CIA — detain the one person who has the code or the formula or the knowledge that will destroy the monster or prevent the aliens from conquering the planet. And, invariably, the authorities are portrayed as obtuse, unimaginative types, who can't seem to grasp the big picture.

What brings such movies to mind is the recently hatched high-brow plan to arrest the Pope. In April, Mr Geoffrey Robertson, a high-ranking United Nations jurist, called on the British Government to detain Pope Benedict XVI when he visits England in September. Mr Robertson wants the UK to send the Pope to the International Criminal Court to be tried for "crimes against humanity". Mr Robertson is backed up by celebrity atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. According to the Times of London, Dawkins and Hitchens have commissioned Mr Robertson and Mr Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to draw up a justification for legal action.

Let's see…Islamic religious leaders in the UK and around the world are spewing hatred at Christians and Jews, and are calling for the destruction of Israel, the murder of homosexuals, the imposition of sharia'h in Europe, and the defeat of "the Great Satan" (the US). Oh, and they want the right to marry 12-year-olds — maybe as many as four per man. But according to the twisted logic of the West's self-appointed virtue police, it's time to lock up the Pope.

Not that the Pope is the one man who can save the world from domination by Islam. Rather, he is representative of the handful of men and women who fully realise the threat from Islam, and who, in a sense, possess the formula or special knowledge necessary to halt the imposition of an alien moral order on the West.

Before he became Pope, Benedict wrote a series of books and papers which explained why an alien culture (not just Islam, but primarily a rootless secularism) was taking over Europe. Europe, he said, had succumbed to a "dictatorship of relativism" which opened the door to values based only on fickle opinion, or else on brute force. The "formula" for saving the West which Benedict offered is the recognition of god-given rights that "belong to man by nature" — "values that cannot be modified."

Likewise, in defending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights before the UN in 2008, the Pope said that human rights should not yield to a "relativistic conception" whereby "their universality would be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social and even religious outlooks". In case you're wondering why the UN's own Declaration of Human Rights has to be defended in the UN, consider that the largest voting block in the UN now is the 56-state strong Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Many of the OIC member states are quite adamant in maintaining that sharia'h law takes precedence over Western declarations of human rights. And from a multicultural/cultural relativism perspective, who can gainsay them? That's why Benedict insists that the multicultural experiment won't work if it's cut off from its Western/Christian roots.

It's no accident that the Declaration was composed for the most part by people who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what are the odds that today's Islamic-friendly assembly of multiculturalists at the UN would be willing to approve the Declaration if it were put to the vote again?

Will the Pope be arrested? Probably not — not this year, anyway. Others who won't genuflect to the dictatorship of relativism haven't been so lucky. Mark Steyn was hauled before three Canadian Human Rights courts on hate speech charges for simply observing that population trends would someday turn Europe into a branch of the Muslim world. Like Benedict, Steyn is also guilty of pointing out that a culture of relativism is essentially a suicidal culture. If the Steyn trials were a movie, the audience would be justified in thinking, "What thick-headed dunces. They've got the wrong man!" As more and more ordinary people are discovering, criticism of Islamic aggressiveness isn't the problem, the problem is Islamic aggressiveness.

On Monday: The case of Geert Wilders

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THE TIMES OF INDIA

COMMENT

NEW PARTNERSHIP

It's a new beginning for Britain. After nearly 13 years in the wilderness, the Conservatives are back in the saddle. But unlike the glory days of Margaret Thatcher, the Tories will be heading a coalition government, the first such instance since 1945. Though the new British Prime Minister David Cameron is confident that his party's alliance with the Liberal Democrats will last five years, it's going to be a testing time for the government.

One hurdle could be the ideological mismatch between the two parties. The differences between the platforms of the Tories and Lib Dems were pronounced during the election campaign. To mention just two, the Lib Dems are strongly in favour of an overhaul of the first-past-the-post system and prefer closer ties with the EU. The Tories, on the other hand, see no problems with Britain's existing electoral system and are euro-sceptics to boot. There has, however, been an attempt to reconcile these conflicting goals. The Conservatives have promised a referendum on an alternative electoral system under which voters will rank candidates by preference and second choice votes. On the EU, the government has said that no further powers will be ceded without a referendum.

In domestic policy, the new government will have its hands full. The British economy is in poor shape and is expected to expand by just 1.3 per cent in 2010. Worryingly, unemployment has touched 2.5 million, the highest since 1996. Cameron has already pledged an emergency budget, which intends to cut the deficit and government flab.

For New Delhi, the change in government augurs well. The new government has said it wants to establish a "new special relationship with India". It is also worth recalling that Cameron chose India as his first overseas trip when he became the leader of his party in 2006. We hope that in the next five years India will be dealt with on its own terms rather than being clubbed with China and Pakistan, as was often the case in earlier Labour dispensations. Economic ties will be the fulcrum of this relationship since India is now the second largest investor in Britain. A sticky issue, however, will be the cap on skilled immigration from outside the EU, which will hit India the hardest and become an impediment to business ties. A Tory-majority government, however, may be well disposed to cooperating with India on terror. It's also unlikely to cut and run from Afghanistan. If Cameron accepts Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's invitation for an early visit, some of these issues can be taken up.

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THE TIMES OF INDIA

COMMENT

BREAK THOSE BARRIERS

The stand-off between supporters of Naga rebel leader Thuingaleng Muivah and the Manipur government could worsen ethnic relations in the strife-torn region. Naga groups have blocked national highways that link Manipur with the rest of the country through Nagaland, leading to a scarcity of food, fuel and other commodities in Manipur. New Delhi's intervention to resolve the stalemate hasn't succeeded so far. The present crisis is the fallout of Muivah's move to visit his home village in Manipur. New Delhi seems to have cleared the trip without assessing its impact on Manipuris. A major demand of Naga separatists is the creation of Nagalim or a greater Nagaland that comprises all Naga inhabited regions, including those in Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. The hill districts of Manipur bordering the Imphal valley are home to large Naga communities and the demand for Nagalim has a resonance there. Manipuris fear that Muivah's visit could upset the delicate ethnic relations in the state and fuel the demand for altering Manipur's boundaries. The fear is understandable.

A tricky part of insurgency management in the north-east is handling the complex web of ethnic and regional identities. The slightest misjudgement could spark violent reactions. One reason why the Naga talks have continued for over a decade without yielding any significant breakthrough, following the welcome ceasefire between the rebels and the security forces, is that the demands of the separatists directly impinge on non-Naga communities. A political vision obsessed with state boundaries can't bring peace and economic stability to this region. Rebel leaders must realise that what they want to divide are also ethnic memories and cultural assets, which can't be divided or annexed but only shared. A fresh paradigm that imagines an ethnic identity without being restricted by state boundaries is necessary to break the impasse.

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THE TIMES OF INDIA

EDITORIAL

IT'S A NATURAL ALLIANCE

RORY MEDCALF

Australia and India are natural partners. So it is frustrating that the relationship continues to fall short of a truly strategic partnership in which each country contributes greatly to the other's resilience and strength. Our nations are multicultural democracies facing shared hopes and challenges in the Asian century. The new India's human capital, growth and buzzing spirit of enterprise are a perfect match for Australia's unique combination of resources, development and proximity. We are neighbours in the Indian Ocean.

What keeps us apart these days is a mix of flawed policy and flawed perception, especially on the vexed issues of student welfare and uranium. Australia is making a big effort to build the relationship, with expanded diplomatic representation, high-level visits, efforts to build defence ties and commitment to a free trade agreement. The recent visit by trade minister Simon Crean - one of India's best friends in the Australian cabinet - is further proof of this.

But Canberra is constrained by old-fashioned and ideological thinking in parts of the Australian Labour Party, which prevents the sale of uranium to India for civilian purposes an area where Australia could have led the world. That is a policy that desperately needs to change, as i believe it will within about 12 months. The Labour Party needs to gain a contemporary understanding of India as part of the solution on non-proliferation and other global strategic challenges. India's democractic and developmental mission led by Manhoman Singh and new-generation leaders such as Rahul Gandhi is surely in step with the basic Labour value of maximising human welfare.

Sadly, Australia-India relations have also been harmed by the unexpected fallout of an education relationship that grew too far, too fast in the wrong directions, plus the exaggerated negative coverage in some parts of India's hyper-competitive mass media. But the difficulties are not solely on Canberra's side. I fear the relationship is also being held back in parts of what one might describe as Old India including some quarters of the bureaucracy where there remain outdated, stereotyped attitudes about Australia's and India's own places in the world.

So the private sector needs to lead. India is Australia's fastest growing large trade partner: two-way trade has grown a staggering tenfold in the last decade, and our exports last year grew 50 per cent. Australia's coal, gas, copper, gold, education and other service industries all drive the development India needs.

At the human level, the potential is also great. Australia and India are nations that can do much to help each other meet the shared challenge of shaping the kind of globally-minded, innovative and adaptive citizens any nation needs to prosper in this era. There are many Indians and Australians of great goodwill towards each other, fascinated with each other's societies, and willing to work hard to build a strategic friendship. These stories are beginning to come out. Indeed, Australia's very first novelist, John Lang, was a great friend of India in the 19th century, a crusading newspaperman and lawyer who stood up to the East India Company on behalf of notable Indians such as the Rani of Jhansi.

Now is the time for a new generation of entrepreneurial, open-minded citizens of both our democratic countries to take the time and trouble to build their own creative links across the Indian Ocean. First up, we have some hard work to do. The finding of a new opinion poll by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, shows that almost three quarters of Australians believe that violence against students has damaged Australia-India relations.

The nationally representative survey of 1,001 adult Australians was made in March 2010, and follows almost a year of media attention on the problems facing some Indian students in Australia, including vulnerability to criminal violence and the poor quality of some vocational courses. The fact that 74 per cent of Australians perceive real diplomatic damage underlines the need for Canberra to sustain exceptional efforts to repair Australia's reputation in India. The good news is that those figures also suggest that most Australians are worried that we think the relationship matters and should be repaired.

Of course, the causes of the violence were much more complex than the racism that some Indian media reports have alleged. Canberra needs to clear the air, by releasing as soon as possible the findings of a criminological study into what actually happened, especially in Victoria. But one silver lining from the crisis over student welfare is a recognition by the Australian and Indian governments that they needed to treat the relationship as a priority.

Australia is more than just another middle power lining up for a chunk of India's future. Australia's hybrid character offers India a singular combination of qualities as a collaborator. It has vast resources, a developed economy and democratic polity. It is partly western yet also an Asian and Indian Ocean neighbour. It is allied with America yet has independent military and intelligence clout. It has democratic stability alongside population growth and multiculturalism. It has the same security uncertainties as India, including about terrorism and growing Chinese power. The potential for each of our democratic nations to help the other is huge. It is a catch we cannot afford to drop.

The writer is a programme director at the Lowy Institute, Australia.

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THE TIMES OF INDIA

'WE NEED TO REDEFINE THE MEANING OF DEVELOPMENT'

Bianca Jagger, founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, was in India to visit the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa where the local population is opposed to the setting up of a bauxite mine. Jagger spoke to Rema Nagarajan about the rights of indigenous people and the need for inclusive development:

What was your experience in Niyamgiri?

I was struck by a billboard at the Bhubaneswar airport, which said: "Mining happiness for the people of Orissa Vedanta." What cruel irony! Vedanta has received unconditional support from the government of Orissa to start an open pit bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri hills. The Kondh have been coerced into giving up their homes, their land, and their means of survival, in the name of 'public purpose'. They were promised employment and prosperity. Instead, the refinery has brought nothing but disease and impoverishment and it is an imminent threat to the sacred mountain of the Kondh and their way of life.

What are the similarities between what you saw happening in Niyamgiri and the situation in many Latin American countries where you have worked?

The Kondh tribe's battle to save their livelihoods illustrates the struggle for survival that tribal and indigenous people are facing throughout the world. It brings back memories of what i witnessed in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, among others. The struggle of tribal and indigenous people versus corporations and states, over ancestral land rich in natural resources, is a global issue. Throughout history, indigenous and tribal people have been oppressed and forcefully expelled from their ancestral land, their rights violated with impunity by governments that put the interest of corporations above their survival. This combination of factors has often led them to resort to armed struggle, in order to protect their families, their land, their livelihoods and their culture. Last year in Peru, hundreds of Amazonian Indians were wounded and arrested in clashes over oil and timber.

Why do you think indigenous people all over the world are facing displacement and discrimination?

Today, exploitation is no longer carried out by colonial adventurers aiming to discover new horizons for spices, tobacco or slaves. Now, it is often carried out by businessmen representing mining, oil and gas or logging companies. These policies are being implemented in the name of "progress and development". The mantra is "maximum production, minimum cost and open markets".

You say we need a new definition of democracy internationally. Why? And, what should the new definition be?

We need to redefine the meaning of "development". It must be sustainable. Any development project must take into account the needs and aspirations of the local communities and should benefit all sectors of society. As the UN Brundtland Report states, development must "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Measures of development need to be more holistic. We must ensure that corporations follow through with their pledges to adhere to ethical standards, corporate responsibility and sustainable practice. These principles have to be enforceable not as voluntary measures, but as a legally binding mechanism in international law. Corporate social responsibility is not only about how corporations spend their money, but about how they make it.

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THE TIMES OF INDIA

LIKE IPL, IT DOESN'T PAY TO MESS WITH MANGOES

JUG SURAIYA

What do IPL and the mango have in common? Indians love both, both are the centre of stormy arguments, and both can end up creating the most unholy mess. Indians are gaga over IPL, and they're orgiastic about mangoes. IPL is divided into teams, each of which has its assertive fans. There are the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings, to name only two (who are known, respectively, as the Mumbai Idiots and the Chennai Super Kinks by supporters of the other teams). Mangoes have their own competing teams, so to speak.

First is the Alphonso (which is also known to its intimates by its nickname, Haphoos). The Alphonso (or Haphoos) is claimed by its adherents to be the King of Mangoes. The Alphonsoese as Alphonso lovers sometimes call themselves claim that the Alphonso should be declared India's National Fruit, in support of which contention they quote the song composed by a famous poet which almost became the country's national anthem: Sare jahan se achchha, Alphonso hamara...

Codswallop, retort those who favour the Alphonso's closest rival, the Sinduri, which in some parts of the country is called Gulab Khas. (Mangoes, like cricketers, tend to go in a lot for aliases, like Sachin also being known as Master Blaster and Harbhajan as Bhajji.) The Sinduri or Gulab Khas is so called because of its patches of red which contrast prettily with the rest of its green skin.

Third some would say not third at all, but leading the pack is the curiously named Langra, which comes or rather, limps all the way from Benaras. No one knows why the Langra is called the Langra. However, an NGO advocacy group which champions the cause of politically correct terminology is believed to have launched a movement to have the Langra's name, with its derogatory connotations, changed by deed poll to PI, which is not a mathematical quantity but the abbreviated version of Physically Impaired.

But whatever the type of mango, eating it is a messy business. IPL creates a mess thanks to sweat equity. Mangoes create a mess thanks to squirt equity. Look at a man about to eat a mango. The mango is on a plate, beside which is a knife. The mango is the patient, the plate is the operating table, and the knife is the scalpel with which the man is about to perform one of the trickiest operations known to humankind: how to cut open and eat a mango without making a total muck-up of it. The man balances the mango on its broader end, tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth to maintain balance, and with the knife tries to cut off one cheek let's say the right cheek of the mango. The mango stone gets in the way. The man turns the mango around to make a second incision from the other side, so that two cuts can meet, thus enabling one hemisphere of the mango to come away free from the stone and the rest of the fruit. Frowning with concentration, the man completes the second cut. The two cuts don't meet. The cut mango is dripping juice, but its flesh is still inaccessible. The man decides to try cut off the other, the left, cheek of the fruit. Makes the two cuts. Same result. By now the mangled fruit is oozing juice and the squirt equity is coming into play. Plate and hands full of sticky mango squirt, the man, desperate by now, looks around to see no one of tender age or finer sensibilities is watching, says the hell with it, and tries to rip the goddam thing apart with sheer muscle power. There is a sound like an elephant pulling its foot out of quicksand and the mango explodes in a spray of yellowish orange guck that covers the table, the man's clothes and a part of the ceiling. The mango stone lands on the man's lap, as he holds the dismembered, dripping halves of the butchered fruit in each hand. End of civilisation as we know it. The man looks heavenwards and utters one short, sharp word. Mothers cover up the ears of their children. Susceptible auntiejis swoon in shock. Bouncers come and take the man away.

Mango? Not for this man, no. When it comes to the King of Fruits, i'm a strictly no-aam aadmi.

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

EDITORIAL

ADDING INSULT TO INJURY

Manipur, it would seem, is a state in permanent flux. Therefore, one would have expected New Delhi to be cautious and weigh the pros and cons before approving the politically sensitive and potentially explosive visit of the NSCN-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM) boss Thuingaleng Muivah to his birthplace at Somdal in Ukhrul district. Instead, it cleared the visit and asked the Manipur and Nagaland (where Mr Muivah is camping now) governments to make the arrangements for the proposed visit. As expected, the situation, if you take into account the history of discord, has now spiralled out of control with both parties

refusing to give the other an inch. The two central officials, Home Secretary G.K. Pillai and Naga talks interlocutor

R.S. Pandey, sent to salvage the situation, failed to do so.

There's a history of mistrust between Manipur and the NSCN-IM. While the latter has been operating a ceasefire with New Delhi since 1997, Manipur maintains that it does not extend beyond Nagaland. It had earlier banned Mr Muivah's visit saying it could stroke unrest in the state as the NSCN-IM had demanded that all Naga-inhabited areas in the Northeast be integrated to create a Greater Nagaland. Naturally, the face-off between Manipur Chief Minister Ibobi Singh (who heads a Congress-led coalition government) and Mr Muivah was a foregone conclusion. This round of trouble comes on the heels of the existing tension that has been unfolding in Manipur. Since April 12, the All Naga Students' Association of Manipur has blocked National Highways 39 and 53 (also known as 'ransom highways') over the amendment of the Manipur Autonomous District Council Act. For this landlocked state, this blockade and now the new stand-off between the state government and NSCN-IM, both looking for political mileage above anything else, have led to a sharp rise in prices with petrol being sold at Rs 150 per litre and LPG at Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 per cylinder.

Since there's no solution at sight at present, of the three parties — the state, NSCN-IM and the Centre — it seems the last has lost the match no matter what happens over the next few days. As it is, New Delhi suffers from a trust deficit when it comes to the Northeast. This mishandling of the situation on the ground will only heighten that feeling further. And, as always, the people of the state will pay for this political chicanery.

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

MINISTER ON THE MOVE

All those who are critical of Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilisers M.K. Alagiri's frequent flier propensities are missing a crucial point. It's not that the minister wants to be airborne every third day, it's that he is a family man. And as we Indians know, courtesy Karan Johar, it's all about loving your family. Yes, many may kvetch and grumble that he took off on a jaunt to the Maldives during the budget session, but please note that he paid for everything himself. And so what if he has airdashed to Chennai 61 times from May to December 2009? Not only was he demonstrating his faith in the domestic carrier but also showing what a devoted son he is to the DMK patriarch M. Karunanidhi. After all, without daddy, dear Alagiri would be rattling around Marina beach on a good day.

So, put a lid on it all of you who think this is carrying filial fondness too far. But his love for his kith and kin is not confined to Chennai. Now he is about to add to his six international forays since he became minister with a trip to the US to, you guessed, visit family members. In the process, he will miss the first anniversary bash of UPA-II. But then given his blink and you'll miss him appearances in Delhi, no one's likely to miss him. We think he is being considerate in staying away from the capital for such long periods. You see, the poor man is not comfortable in either Hindi or English. He does not want the government to incur the expense of hiring an interpreter for him.

What about all the air miles he has notched up, you may ask. That is in the larger cause of family and since his family is a crucial part of the government, he's, in effect, acting for the greater good of the nation. As for his work in the ministry, for God's sake, you can't, like our cricketers, expect him to travel so much and still be on top of things all the time. Really, sometimes expectations can be so unrealistic.

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

WEAR AND TEAR

SAMRAT

The French and Belgians are considering banning it. The Australians might follow. The Saudis and Iranians are quite appreciative of it. And in our own India, there are all shades of opinion about it. Considering all the excitement this garment generates, you'd think the burqa is, well, the bikini.

The battle of the burqa — or more accurately, the naqab, which is the veil that covers the face — seems to be about a lot of things. It pits the 'liberal' West against the forces of orthodoxy in Islam. It pits feminists against male chauvinists. It pits a secularism that denies individuals the right to exhibit religious symbols in public against those who wish to wear such symbols on their faces.

At core, the issue is really simple. It's about the freedom of adults to choose their wardrobes. If a person wishes to go about in a bikini, that's her choice. If she wishes to go about in a burqa and naqab, that's her choice too. No priest or government has any business telling individuals what clothes to wear.

Of course, priests and governments love to take themselves seriously. They love to exercise control. And they have power, of a sort, so defying them is not always easy.

This is where the MIB should come in to zap those evil control freak aliens in our midst. MIB, short for Men In Burqas, would subvert the orthodoxies of both the governments and the priests simultaneously.

It would subvert the governments very directly, by defying the ban against the garment. It would also subvert the mullahs, because it challenges their use of the garment, which is to establish male control over women.

If men in all the places where the burqa is a contentious garment begin wearing it voluntarily in public, it makes a mockery of all the illiberal forces battling over it.

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

WAIT FOR A GREEN SIGNAL

Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh announced his intention to introduce a Bill related to the setting up of a new National Environment Protection Authority (Nepa) in the 2010 monsoon session of Parliament. With this, the Ministry for Environment and Forests (MoEF) seeks to bring in a new institutional structure for the governance of environment clearances for development and infrastructure projects. It's also to look at the dismal state of the monitoring and compliance (by project authorities) of the conditions laid out for projects and activities at the time of approvals.

At present these processes are carried out under the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA). Over the past 16 years of the existence of the notification, problems of flawed environmental assessments financed by project developers, biases and conflict of interest in advisory bodies, and little or no attention paid to the objections to projects have continued. The ministry seeks yet another administrative reform to address these issues.

The intent for Nepa was first announced by the prime minister at the National Conference of Ministers for Environment and Forests from all states in August 2009. A discussion note was then uploaded on the MoEF website inviting public comments. Even as few in the country were debating on Nepa's need and design, the prime minster, during his visit to the US, demonstrated a hasty commitment to the idea the UPA government cleared. Among the many agreements signed during the November 2009 visit there, one was with the United States Environment Protection Authority (USEPA) to help set up Nepa in India. In the same month, the MoEF also had a consultation with state governments seeking their response. The PM's intent and rush to commit to establish a Nepa has much to do with the USEPA's announcement of a grant for the establishment of such a legal authority. The USEPA grant to our government is for the enforcement of environmental requirements and technical assistance on matters of environmental governance, specifically through a new medium of Nepa.

Since then, there's been much activity — US researchers have been in India giving specific inputs to the MoEF.

The Natural Resources Defence Council, a leading US-based not-for-profit entity has been helping the MoEF shape up Nepa.

The MoEF says that it carried out a study on the USEPA in January 2010 and the Indian Institute of Technology was awarded a consultancy in February 2010 to propose a mandate and structure for an independent regulatory authority for the protection of the environment. While so much has been done and USEPA's grant spent, the public has remained an inconsequential body, useless to the government in these exercises. Even the parliamentarians seem to think that the question of Nepa is still an open one, as per the March 2010 Lok Sabha submission made by the MoEF.

There is no disagreement over the objective that our environment needs a better regulatory system. But there's been no consensus whatsoever that an institution like Nepa will be that better system. Rather than investigating into the causes of environmental problems only in faulty or inefficient institutions and dissolving/disempowering them and creating new ones in their place, we need a more nuanced and careful reading of the problem. The prime minister and the ministry have almost decided that Nepa is the key to our environmental problems and have made a grand declaration that such an apex national body of experts can solve complex issues that are political, social and ecological at the same time. Such a move takes the energy and attention away from the ongoing negotiations that are on between governments and people in different locations to find ways out.

Today there is a draft Bill to amend the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and institute Nepa. Such a predecided action on the part of the government needs public debate on basic questions about the causes of environmental problems and who can be trusted to help solve them well before parliamentarians take it up in the next working session.

Kanchi Kohli and Manju Menon are with Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group

The views expressed by the authors are personal

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

NO CLOSED-DOOR POLICY

RAJDEEP SARDESAI

What do Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh have in common? Both are incredibly bright, articulate men with impressive resumes: Jairam is a mechanical engineer with degrees from IIT and Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Tharoor is a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and has the distinction of getting a doctorate at 22, the youngest in the history of the prestigious institute. In a sense they represent the best traditions of Macaulay's children, "A class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect." And yet, both these fine representatives of India's liberal and cosmopolitan traditions find themselves under siege in a political milieu that appears to share an uneasy relationship with the English-speaking professional-turned-politician.

Tharoor was undone by the seeming impropriety of having acquired sweat equity for his sweetheart without informing the world. Ramesh is being pilloried for having questioned the home ministry's policies towards China. Both are perhaps guilty of forgetting their constitutional responsibilities as Union ministers. Tharoor paid for it by being banished from a ministry which could have benefited from his wide experience as a global diplomat. Ramesh may yet pay the price for his indiscretion by being switched from an environment ministry that has acquired a renewed energy and a forward-looking profile under his leadership.

The irony is that the charges against the duo appear trifling when compared with the monumental scandal and corruption that besets the political class. An A. Raja gets away with it despite the clamour for his resignation over the spectrum scam because as his leader, M. Karunanidhi brazenly told the UPA leadership, "Mr Raja is a Dalit". A sweat equity worth a few crores appears loose change when compared with the fact that the public exchequer lost a few thousand crores because of a minister's dishonesty. Again, while Ramesh may have overstepped his brief when commenting on the home ministry's China policy, how do his statements compare with the unabashed criticism of fellow UPA ministers by Mamata Banerjee? While Ramesh has to apologise, Banerjee remains unrestrained.

Which brings me to raise the larger question: are English-speaking, upper class, highly educated professionals soft targets in public life? An A. Raja gets the benefit of doubt because no political party can be seen to be anti-Dalit even if it means winking at corruption. A Mamata Banerjee enjoys the protection conferred on her by virtue of being a regional ally and a mass leader.

The problem is that both Tharoor and Ramesh are upper caste politicians with no mass base. Tharoor is a Nair, Ramesh a Mysore Brahmin. Tharoor was parachuted into the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram because of his proximity to the Congress leadership. Ramesh was made a Rajya Sabha member from Andhra Pradesh, again because he had a special relationship with the party's high command. Removing Tharoor as minister was an easy option because while it may have affected the twitterati, it will not affect the existing power equations in Kerala. Ramesh is also a politician who counts his numbers on a laptop, not in a public rally. In other words, both are seen to be easily dispensable netas.

The truth though is that Indian politics needs more of the likes of Tharoor and Ramesh, lateral entrants from the professional world who can add to the quality and intellect of public life. Just contrast a Tharoor as minister of state in South Block with some of his contemporaries. As diplomats from African and Latin American countries have admitted, Tharoor's experience in the United Nations and linguistic skills made him an impressive 'interlocutor' (ah! that dreaded word again) in their engagement with India. Contrast also Ramesh with his predecessors as environment minister, many of whom reduced Paryavaran Bhavan to a cash-and-carry ministry. Would you rather have a learned minister representing the country at climate change summits or a bumbling politician who has never heard of greenhouse gas emissions?

Across the western world, there are increasing examples of top-level professionals making a successful switch from the private sector to government. Unfortunately, in India, many of the individuals who aim to make this transition are typecast as English-speaking elitists who are disconnected with 'real India'. The charge of elitism partly stems from envy of the successful upper class Indian, partly from a certain condescension, even hubris, shown by the anglicised Indian towards his 'vernacular' counterparts.

For the traditional, feudal Indian politician, who survives on caste and family loyalties, Tharoor and Ramesh are gatecrashers into a closed system. The duo are a threat to the prevailing political order because they challenge the status quo: neither are they dynasts who are the beneficiaries of being the sons and daughters of politicians nor are they caste chieftains who will nurture their votebanks. They are instead, like millions of others, children of middle-class Indians who have become upwardly mobile through scholarship and hard work. Indeed, if politics is to prove aspirational and attract the best talent, then it is important that the likes of Tharoor and Ramesh succeed. Which is also why professionals like them need to be extra careful in their public dealings because the rules for their conduct will always be measured by higher standards than those imposed on the rest of the system.

Post-script: If Tharoor and Ramesh are looking for a role model, maybe they should take a lesson from Nandan Nilekani. The former Infosys chief executive is now shuffling through data in a government office, with the singular focus of providing the country's citizens with a unique identification card. No twitter accounts, no Page 3 parties, no glib talks, no dramatic statements, it sometimes pays in public life to be a low-profile worker ant.

Rajdeep Sardesai is Editor-in-Chief , IBN Network

The views expressed by the author are personal

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

IDIOM AND ABUSE

There's a right place and time for an idiom. Nor can it be used at will. Its individual syntactical components will be extracted and highlighted, although an idiom is nothing if not full. Certain idioms don't work at all. These are hard lessons BJP President Nitin Gadkari may be learning from his entanglement in the controversy over words he chose to describe the actions of Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav in a speech that chastised the RJD, SP and BSP for not supporting the NDA over the cut motion in Parliament. Gadkari may also be learning that when you've just entered a national spectrum of public life, adversaries' doubts about whether you should be there at all will persist. And these will be strengthened by gaffes.

In Parliament, and in politics, it has been observed how often abuse is resorted to and how readily offence is taken. In the delays to legislative proceedings and adjournments to the House, the role of disruption is widely noted, as well as the frequency and tenor of spats. Despite mechanisms to deal with unparliamentary language, there hasn't been visible willingness on our politicians' part to change their conduct. And similar conduct outside, in the wider political battleground, doesn't help at all.

Gadkari's offence is the use of foul language; and no excuse of "misunderstanding" what he meant or his idiomatic usage of Hindi will do. He has rightly apologised, and he would be advised not to stand on ego and finesse that apology. Lalu and Mulayam don't appear very forgiving at the moment; and the experience should deepen the BJP chief's understanding of the gravity of his new national stature. If there's a verbal line that cannot be crossed in civilised politics, it has no place for thoughtlessness either. Parliamentary language will not become more "parliamentary" if it's a free-for-all in the wider political flow that feeds Parliament.

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INDIAN EXPRESS

LEARN BY NUMBERS

After much carping from the sidelines, the information and broadcasting ministry has set up a panel to investigate and reform the entire business of television ratings. In a crowded market, attention-hungry news channels go to absurd lengths, degrading journalistic standards. In 2008, a news channel aired a sting operation that supposedly laid bare a porn racket run by a schoolteacher. The story was later revealed as fake, pure theatre designed to stoke TRPs. The government took a grim view of the matter. In fact, former I&B minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi had even called it a "game between the stock exchange and a company", with "five or six big corporate channels" gaming the system to their convenience and to the detriment of the viewing public. The data is riddled with inaccuracies. It fails to address much of the rural population or factor in advert-low viewerships from regions like Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast.

Television ratings systems have undergone several experiments, all unsatisfactory. In India, the business was long monopolised by a Nielson co-owned agency called Television Audience Measurement (TAM), which placed a few thousand people meters in sample homes across the country to assess viewing patterns. Although India because of sheer diversity needs more people meters than anywhere else in the world, the methodology has been picked apart by critics. Television networks criticised TAM when the scores made them look bad, and defended it when it swung in their favour. After irresponsible news reporting drew government scrutiny and much Parliament attention, the industry dropped TAM and formed the Broadcasting Audience Research Council to regulate their own workings, but that didn't make matters any better.

Would a different mechanism to generate ratings (one to be created by legislation) work better? Or perhaps, an accreditation body that would leave TRP generation to the industry representatives but screen their functioning better? It's a high-stakes game that will decide whether we get the TV we deserve.

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

AMONGST ALLIES

In assessing Barack Obama's ambiguous response on Wednesday to a blunt question from an Afghan woman journalist about Pakistan's role in fomenting instability in Afghanistan and beyond, India can agree with the US president's diagnosis but must wonder if he can administer a demanding regimen on an unwilling patient. Delhi naturally welcomes Obama's assertion, at a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House, that the existential threats to Islamabad come not from India but the cancer of violent extremism that is growing in Pakistan's body politic. India, however, has reasons to question his claim that he is persuading Islamabad to swallow some of the bitter medicine. More broadly, it is hard to fathom Obama's Af-Pak policy that points fingers at its partners in Afghanistan, but panders to the Pakistan army which provides sanctuaries to terrorists determined to destabilise Afghanistan.

Since he took charge in January 2009, Obama's top foreign policy aides have developed a surreal logic that declares Karzai the problem in Afghanistan and Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, the solution. Consequently, Washington put Karzai on short leash and cut a lot of slack to Kayani. Washington's red carpet welcome to Karzai this week does not appear to have altered the basics of Obama's Af-Pak policy. There was nothing in the Obama-Karzai press conference to suggest that the gulf between the two leaders on the tactics of counter-insurgency, the strategy of engaging the Taliban, and Pakistan's role in the Afghan peace process have been bridged.

Obama's reluctance to offend Kayani and Washington's rush to walk back from the threatening noises made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after the links between the Times Square bombing plot and the Pakistani Taliban came to light a few days ago underline two important realities. The US dependence on the Pakistan army to achieve any objective in Afghanistan is real and probably cannot be reduced in any significant manner. The US pressure on Pakistan to do more against terrorist groups on its soil runs into some big demands of Kayani, who insists that his army remain "India-centric" in its threat perceptions and exaggerates Delhi's role in Afghanistan. Kayani wants Obama to deliver India on a range of issues including Kashmir and give his army a free hand in shaping Afghanistan's future. The next few days will show how far Obama will go in accommodating Kayani. Delhi, then, should be fully prepared for a situation where Obama delivers more candies to Kayani in the hope of subjecting the Pakistan army to some unpleasant therapy at some unknown future date.

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

TRAI AND TRY AGAIN

RAJAT KATHURIA

Amidst the huge bids being generated by the 3G auctions which must have taken everyone by surprise, including the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued recommendations on a longstanding issue in the telecom sector in India. Spectrum assignment had become a contentious and litigious issue, urgently needing review.

Spectrum and licence have historically been bundled and there is no "market" for 2G spectrum at present. 2G is predominantly used to offer voice services. For licences issued prior to 2001, the amount of bundled spectrum was 4.4 MHz for GSM technology. Additional allocations beyond 4.4 MHz were through occasional administrative orders. When mobile and fixed services converged into the Universal Access Service (UAS) licence with effect from 2003, the bundled amount increased to 6.2 MHz for GSM and 5 MHz for CDMA.

Many incumbent mobile operators such as Bharti, Vodafone Essar, BSNL and MTNL hold around 10 MHz of spectrum in many strategic service areas on the basis of such administrative orders; this excess spectrum was given based on subscriber numbers, DoT "rewarded" a higher base with more spectrum. Since no fees were due for this additional amount, it often distorted operator incentives towards inflating their subscriber numbers.

That spectrum given to operators was severely underpriced was also to be proven subsequently when applications were invited in 2007 for additional UAS licences. In all, 575 applications were received from 46 applicant companies in 22 service areas in the country. After consideration, DoT issued 122 new licences out of 232 applications before the cut-off date at an entry fee of Rs 1659 crore for the entire country. Significantly, this was the amount paid by the highest bidder at the time the fourth cellular licence was auctioned in 2001.

Some applicants who successfully received bundled spectrum with the UAS licence, subsequently sold it in the market for several times the amount they paid as fee, extracting massive arbitrage benefits. We have reached a situation today in which licensees have varying amounts of spectrum ranging from 0 (awaiting assignment) to 10 MHz in discrete intervals.

Remember, spectrum confers market power on those who possess more relative to others.

Against this background TRAI had an unenviable and challenging task: to "level the playing field". What the recommendations essentially try to achieve is to establish a market for spectrum, which would predictably result in efficient pricing and utilisation of the scarce resource. For a start, all licences are to be de-linked from spectrum, that is, no more bundling. TRAI also believes that the contracted spectrum or the prescribed limit for all the access licences issued on or after 2001 is 6.2 MHz / 5 MHz in respect of GSM/ CDMA respectively. Anything above that is to be paid for at the same price as discovered in the ongoing 3G auction. For example, the price in Delhi after 153 rounds of bidding for each MHz of spectrum stands at a whopping Rs 125 crore for 20 years of use. Thus, an operator in Delhi with 4 MHz excess spectrum and with five years of licence period remaining will need to pay Rs 125 crore. At this price some operators might choose to return the "excess spectrum" adding to the pool of spectrum that will then become available for others waiting in the queue to reach the "prescribed limit".

Since demand will always remain greater than supply even after that, TRAI has also recommended priority in assignment. Licensees who were given initial start-up spectrum and are waiting to receive it will be first in the queue; followed by licensees who were assigned the committed spectrum, and are waiting to be assigned spectrum up to the prescribed limit. The last in line are those who are yet to receive the initial start-up spectrum. Operators in the last category will naturally be aggrieved, but one should bear in mind that TRAI is delicately attempting to correct errors of omission and commission made in the past. Any recommendations at this stage would throw up winners and losers, with losers willing to stop or delay the change.

In any case these are merely recommendations made under the advisory role of TRAI. To be notified as policy, DoT will have to first accept them, or at least some of them. Even if they're accepted as is, there is likely to be litigation that will in all likelihood end up at the doorstep of the Supreme Court. I have a suspicion that TRAI itself recognised this aspect and thus the recommendations have a striking quasi-legal construction.

There are a number of other important recommendations buried in the 400 odd pages produced by TRAI, such as uniform licence fee and the need for sharing of spectrum. However, it is the recommendations on allocation, assignment and price of spectrum that will continue to hog the limelight in the near future. We should perhaps brace ourselves for another round on intense litigation in the sector.

The writer is a visiting professor at ICRIER, Delhi

express@expressindia.com

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

LET THEM HAVE THE PAST

SEEMA CHISHTI

It has been a breathless session of Parliament. Momentous questions stalled for decades seem to have been swiftly dealt with, the women's bill passed by the Rajya Sabha and the Centre clearing the idea of census enumerators quizzing citizens about "caste" — pretty much how curious fellow passengers in an overnight train want to suddenly ask you after the tea and bonhomie, "But what is your caste?" It has also been a "sub" season, with demands for sub-quotas and now, surprisingly, by sub-castes with a Haryana MP making it his business to back the khap panchayats and portray them as rational forces vital for social cohesion at the village level and important for any politician who wishes to continue getting votes the easy way.

The Centre is expected to take a line different from the one Om Prakash Chautala has taken and have a bill that squarely addresses the problem of these "cohesive village forces" turning murderous. But it perhaps did not surprise those of us watching successive politicians tie themselves into knots to rationalise khaps. One virtually invoked Gregor Mendel, as he advocated hybrids and not marriage within "sub-castes" as a scientific hypothesis. Another called khaps "informal organisations, like NGOs". We are yet to hear from the top party leaders of any party active in Haryana on khaps — the hesitation, while a quick back of the envelope is done, is so evident that we can almost hear the rustle of paper. Of course khaps may have started out as bodies of village elders that provided a forum, helped life get on and preserved the status quo and centrality of land ownership patterns in the area. Marriages were but another way of extending or managing property. Khaps allowed widow remarriage several years before Ram Mohun Roy made it an issue — a very big step, but keeping land sorted and organised being the sole driver.

But NGOs and genetic rationalisation in today's context of honour killings and ostracising of those who defy

the khaps' rules about who may marry whom? The answer needs to be a straight one, without any hmms and haws.

The track record of the interface between public life, representation and social change in India is mixed. And the record of the early years of independence is a tough act to follow. The early modern Indian leadership stuck its neck out to fight old frozen identities and articulated the idea of India and made it politically viable, well before the majority thought it possible, or perhaps even advisable.

The south is full of examples of leaders and movements when figures in public life tied the idea of social change to their politics and fused the two, boldly. The thought of being able to construct a majority behind a certain idea must often have been paramount, but consider what was happening in Tamil Nadu, when old and powerful caste shibboleths were demolished, or the entry of Dalits into temples like in Vaikkom was won. These are things we now take for granted but they were hugely unpopular steps at the time that did not have the vocal influential elite onboard at all. Yet eventually, sustained effort led to durable leaderships being built around these ideas.

Remember, these were times when devices to judge what was representative were not institutionalised. Even then, there were those who thought about public life as a calling, not a family or business enterprise. When Pandit Nehru piloted the Hindu Code Bill, he did it at a huge risk, with surly opposition from important sections in his own Congress party and with open opposition from President Rajendra Prasad. Several reformist moves and decisions such as Periyar's or Ambedkar's would not have happened but for calculated risks of alienating elitist wisdom entrenched in the power centres of the time.

For those unable to reach Naveen Jindal on why he set out to empathise with khaps, one has to only check with Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on the perils of trying to fiddle with the status quo. The land question which he merely commissioned a report on, by the now famous West Bengal bureaucrat, D. Bandopadhyay, has effected a grand coalition of the upper castes led by the landed elite to somehow unseat the chief minister. And this, 60 years after the abolition of zamindari.

Social change and political representation have not always co-existed smoothly. Leaderships have mostly veered around the conservative and vocal base. Look how the "Muslim" vote is perceived — it is seen to be mediated by the most reactionary section of the community. Most politicians, unmindful of the huge numbers of puzzled and silent Muslims, those who lie between the Khan stereotype of the Bollywood Muslim and those delivering the (totally illegitimate and unauthorised) "fatwa" on a divorce or marriage.

Perhaps our "representatives" are so cut off from those they claim to represent, that the distance between their ears and the ground is too large to be ever bridged. It's easy for them to bank on those who claim to speak for the "grassroots", those who are fighting the last-ditch battle to secure a feudal system on the wrong side of history.

Perhaps our representatives are missing a vital moment, a moment of change that the average Indian is experiencing, social and economic — some change for the worse, but lots for the better.

At that moment of social unshackling, if our leaders claim to attempt to stand for those who are fighting change, it's a moment they will rue soon.

But then, sometimes one wonders if our very ideas of modernity need to be reviewed. Democratic India once proudly and confidently shook off titles like "maharaja" and "prince" — but now these are back, with shocking regularity, with people described, even self-referentially, as the "ruler of...". The last sigh of the feudal edifice, or perhaps, worryingly, a sign of the indifferent new order that cynically lives on? After all, it can always be explained away as an idea close to the "masses". In reality, these are dangerous choices being made by a lazy and populist elite unmindful of what's being unravelled.

seema.chishti@expressindia.com

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

CONFRONTING CASTE, DEMANDING A CENSUS

SHARAD YADAV

After the Lok Sabha's unanimous suport for a caste census, it was natural for the Central government to agree to the demand. A full-fledged debate reflected the mood of all speakers, and the government, which is accountable to the Parliament, has to respect that wish.

In fact, it was unfortunate that the caste census was discontinued after Independence. The last census of caste took place in 1931. In 1941 it was discontinued because of World War II because the war needed more funds. State governments were asked to pay for a caste census if they wanted information. This means that even the British government was not against the caste census in principle.

But after Independence, the caste census was discontinued. It was a wrong decision on the part of the government of independent India. It is said that the caste census was discontinued because it is divisive. It is a funny argument. India was divided because of religion, not because of caste, but the religion census continued. So religion was the culprit, while caste was punished. If you are interested in knowing the figures related to religion, which proved to be divisive, why are you not interested in knowing the figures of caste?

Caste is a reality of Indian society, though it is a bitter reality. We should get rid of it, but we cannot do it by just ignoring it. To annihilate it, we have to understand it in its entirety and make an all-out assault on it. But the Indian government, which is credited with stopping the caste census because of the divisive nature of caste, did nothing to end the caste menace in 60 years of its existence.

Now people are arguing that our Constitution makers were not fools and their decision to forgo the caste census should be respected. The fact is there is no provision against a caste census in the Constitution. It is done by executive orders. Yes, our Constitution makers have amended it to ensure adequate representation of backward class of citizens through the first amendment, but that Constitutional provisions could not be sincerely implemented until now.

Other backward classes of citizens had Constitutional provisions for reservations 60 years ago. It was the right step to fight the menace of the caste system, which allowed a few castes to perpetuate their hold on power. After Independence, they strengthened this hold, and the majority of people who belonged to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes were further subjugated. If the discontinuation of the caste census was the sincere desire of the government to do away with the evil of caste divisiveness, why was there no attempt to annihilate the caste system?

Great people, like Guru Nanak, Guru Gobind Singh, Kabir, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule, Mahatma Gandhi, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan and many others fought against the evils of the caste system. The Lingayat sect in South India came into existence by fighting the caste system. One of the reasons for the founding of Sikhism was also to end the caste menace. Even Swami Dayananda of the Arya Samaj and Swami Vivekananda opposed it. They did what they could to campaign against the system of caste.

My question is, what did the government of India do? What is their record of the fight against caste, which it considered divisive, when the question of caste census came up in 1951? Caste based reservation is the single measure which nails this caste system. Those who enjoy high caste status and privilege dislike only one thing related to caste, and that is caste based reservation. The policy of reservation is the most badly implemented policy of the government after Independence. It has been never implemented with honesty.

They say that SCs and STs are not throwing up enough eligible candidates to fill the vacancies meant for them. That is why seats meant for them remain unfilled. But what about OBC candidates? OBC reservation in Central government services has been implemented since 1993, but their representation in Central gazetted jobs has not exceeded 5 per cent. According to the report of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), the UPSC is active with all kinds of conspiracies to minimise the recruitment of SC, ST and OBC candidates. They take a separate interview in order to give lower marks in oral exams.

So all kinds of attempts are on to strengthen the people seated high on the caste ladder and deprive others. They want to perpetuate the caste system to perpetuate their own stronghold. When the issue of caste census comes up, they turn into revolutionaries against caste and start preaching that caste is divisive and hence we should not count it. They are ready to do sample surveys of caste, but not a census. They have some caste figures from their fake sample surveys and they pit those against the caste census figures of 1931, but they do not want a fresh caste census, because they

are aware that their sample survey will fall flat.

Caste cannot be eliminated without an assertion of their caste identities by the so-called lower castes. So long as they suppress their caste identities, they will lose. Dominant castes readily assert their caste identity, but the others are ashamed of these identities, because of the social stigma. This only paves the way for caste domination. A caste census gives an opportunity to deprived people to know their numbers and assert their identities. Lower castes are nothing but suppressed social identities. Assertion of their identities will help them challenge the power establishment. That is why there is such hue and cry against the caste census, which will give the correct number of people of all castes and their domination over the system. Let us face reality. Let us remove caste from our society by knowing it more clearly.

The writer is convener of the National Democratic Alliance and president of Janata Dal (United)

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

THE ADVANTAGE OF BEING VISWANATHAN ANAND

JAIDEEP UNDURTI

Viswanathan Anand is a master calculator, but even he was unable to predict the effect that the volcano with the unpronounceable name would have on his title defence. Anand was due in Sofia, to play a best-of-12 game match against Veselin Topalov, the hometown favourite. He was en-route from Madrid and with his requests for postponement denied, it looked like Anand's campaign was over before it began. The airspace over Europe was shut, and they had to wend their way through Eastern Europe to reach Sofia.

After this arduous journey, the first game was as anti-climatic as they come. Topalov launched a fierce attack. While Anand had already prepared for this sequence of moves with his team of grandmaster helpers. he could not remember the move, at the crunch. With the clock ticking, he desperately searched the chambers of his memory (an immense library built move by move, book by book over the two decades that he has been a top level player). Rejecting a bishop manoeuvre that commentators said was necessary, Anand finally moved his king from the firing line. Topalov's response was as brutal as it was rapid. A knight smashed into the fortress of pawns around the black king. Anand attempted a flight to safety but it was too late. The white pieces corralled His Majesty in the centre of the board and with checkmate imminent, Anand had to throw in the towel. As he once said in an interview, "It's funny, you may remember every single thing. But if you don't remember that you remember, that is also a problem."

After that disastrous start, though, Anand fought back in the very next game and felled the Bulgarian with some exquisite play. The scores were levelled. What followed over the next three weeks was an epic battle as the two grandmasters went at each other. From torturous endgames to fierce battles in the middle-game, to pieces of outstanding preparation in the opening, the "thrilla in Sofia" saw them all. They did not play perfect chess. Far from it. Its splendour came from the clash of two absolute wills consumed by thoughts of victory.

Much of the excitement was provided by the contrasting personalities and their unique approaches to the game. Anand's opponent Topalov was once a champion himself. In 2006 he had lost his crown to Russia's Vladimir Kramnik in the most infamous world championship match of all time. Kramnik had gotten off to a 2-0 lead when Topalov's manager Danailov entered the fray. Accusing the Russian of visiting the loo once too often and getting computer assistance, Danailov threw the match into chaos. Eventually Topalov was dethroned by the Russian in a bitter battle.

Topalov was a 12-year-old prodigy with a difficult childhood when he caught the eye of Silvio Danailov. Danailov himself was a master who nurtured ambitions as a player. Once he saw Topalov, however, he sacrificed his own career. A Canadian grandmaster who knows the duo wrote: "Danailov took Topalov to his apartment and told him 'From now on, you live here and this will become your new home. I am not just your trainer, but I am also your mother and your father. I am your cook. I am the one who will wash your clothes. I am the one who will pay your bills and expenses to tournaments. All I want from you is to think only about chess!"

Topalov shot through the ranks — by 19 he had already defeated Kasparov. This lonely and obsessed East European could not be more different from Anand. And yet, in some ways they understand each other. Like all specialists in a very narrow field, there are only two ways of reacting to them — indifference or awe. To be admitted into their secret world, you have to know the rules. An amateur once congratulated Bobby Fischer on a "great game" - the legend snapped back "How would you know?" Chess is unique in that unlike football or cricket, you need to have a modicum of understanding even to spectate. And as the level becomes higher, even understanding the moves becomes difficult.

Topalov performs best when there is an air of "aggro" — an

atmosphere of menace and pressure. He tried provoking Anand, proclaiming that he would not offer or accept draws — he would fight to the death. Anand calmly offered draws anyway. Topalov had the unpalatable options of either playing on in a completely drawn position or accepting the hated offer.

This contradiction would impose its fatal pressure on Topalov in the final game. Eleven games had gone by with scores even. Now everything depended on the final encounter. Again the position began looking equal and Anand made a tacit offer of a draw. If this game too was drawn then the match would enter tie-breaks, a further match of four games played in "rapid style". And Topalov had lost to Kramnik in precisely the same fashion. With that on his mind, Topalov disdained the draw. He instead played in kamikaze style, with an all or nothing attack. Anand calmly retaliated and won a smashing final victory.

Like in all sports, you can be haunted by memories of a traumatic loss. Topalov spent much of the time after 2006 futilely arguing for a rematch. Topalov was obsessed with Kramnik, and Anand's biggest failing in the eyes of Topalov was that he wasn't Kramnik. Meanwhile, Anand was defiant in defeat, resolute in the struggle and magnanimous in victory. While a stunned Topalov could barely speak, Anand complimented the organisers and called his rival a great attacking player. And it is this — not his trophies, his rating, his hundreds of tournament victories — that make Viswanathan Anand a true champion of our times.

The writer is a chess enthusiast and graphic novelist

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

THE MOTHER OF HUNG PARLIAMENTS?

A reliable rule in politics is that whenever something is decried as an unprecedented innovation, you can be sure that this is a tradition with many precedents.

The British have just experienced a strange election campaign, and then a convulsive few days. But, as ever, there is little new under the sun. For the first time since 1974, no one party won an absolute parliamentary majority, meaning 326 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives came nearest with 306, followed by 258 for Gordon Brown and Labour, 57 for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats and 29 for others.

So on Friday the party leaders began horse-trading to see if some alliance could be arranged. What that meant was that the Liberal Democrats played one side against the other. On Tuesday evening their negotiations with Labour broke down, seemingly leaving Clegg with no alternative but to shake hands with the Conservative leader, David Cameron. This is far from historically unique. Whether it has been seemly is another matter.

One genuinely new factor was the televised debates between party leaders. Clegg outshone his rivals in the first debate, although, looking back, to appear less wooden than Brown and less glib than Cameron was not really such a feat. For a while, "Cleggmania" gave his party a surge in the polls, but it didn't last until the day that mattered, when the Lib Dems won fewer seats than five years ago. Yet since the Tories had failed to win an outright majority, they had to start looking for partners, while Brown stayed put uneasily at Downing Street. For the next three days there were intense discussions between the Tories and the

Lib Dems.

All this was dramatic, but not quite so novel. When Disraeli said that "England does not love coalitions," it was only partly true. The very term "hung parliament" is a recent coining, and would have puzzled the Victorians. In their day, parliaments usually had no one party with an absolute majority. Allegiances were much more fluid, and Parliament was sovereign, dominating the executive — rather than, as latterly and regrettably — the other way round.

Only one government has fallen on a parliamentary vote in the past 80 years, on that indelible evening in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher challenged the Labour government in a confidence vote and the government lost. Yet every government from 1837 to 1874 fell after a Commons vote.

Nor is today's predicament unheard-of. Exactly 100 years ago there was a "hung parliament." In fact there were not one but two general elections in 1910, with almost identical results. The second election gave both Liberals and Tories exactly the same number of MPs — 272 each when 336 was needed for a majority. So the Liberals continued in office, but with the support of Irish nationalists and Labour, for which concessions were exacted in return.

What was aberrant in hindsight was the two-party dominance in the middle of the 20th century. The story of the first half of the century was the rise of Labour and the fall of the Liberals, so that by 1951 Labour and Tories shared almost 97 per cent of the total vote. That has fallen, thanks to the revival of the Liberals, who are now the Liberal Democrats, and the rise of separatist factions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

One consequence has to been to raise more sharply the subject of electoral reform. The Commons is elected by what's sometimes called the Westminster system: individual legislators are chosen in discrete electoral districts on a simple plurality, which always disadvantages third (or more-than-third) parties.

Not surprisingly, while the Lib Dems have many planks in their electoral platform, their chief demand is a proportional voting system which would give them a number of seats more in alignment with their share of the national vote. Not surprisingly, either, there has long been resistance to that from Labour and the Tories.

There are arguments on both sides. Plainly "Westminster" gives too much power to the largest party — five years ago, Blair won 54 per cent of seats with 36 per cent of the vote. But then proportional representation can give too much power to the smaller parties, as we have witnessed from Israel to Ireland — and as we have just seen here by way of a foretaste of what proportional representation would be like without even changing the system.

Although the election was a severe defeat for Clegg, it left him the most powerful player in the game. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former Tory foreign secretary, called the Lib Dems duplicitous, and David Blunkett, a former Labour home secretary, said that they had behaved "like every harlot in history." One may not agree with those precise sentiments. But it really hasn't been a very elevating spectacle — or much of an advertisement for the very change Clegg demands.

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THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

RIGHT TO REMAIN CONSTITUTIONAL

Since its adoption after a landmark 1966 Supreme Court decision, the Miranda warning has worked its way into not only everyday police procedure, but American culture as well — even if you've never been arrested, you probably know the words "anything you say can and will be used against you." But as the Obama administration considers carving out an exception to the Miranda rules for terrorism suspects in the wake of the arrest of Faisal Shahzad, accused of being the Times Square bomber, it's important to note how little people understand what Miranda does and doesn't mean.

First, the failure to give a Miranda warning does not result in a case being dismissed. It only results in the inability of the police to use a confession and its fruits in evidence. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of successful criminal prosecutions do not involve confessions.

The warning's genesis lies in the Fifth Amendment, which says that the government may not compel a person "in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The framers knew how easy it was to obtain a confession through torture or other forms of overt coercion, and how tempting it was for a government to use such tactics. To prohibit this, the founders said, in effect, that a person could not be forced to confess. The problem was trying to determine what counted as a coerced confession. The methods of police interrogation were so diverse, and the effects of isolation, intimidation and defendant ignorance so varied, that appellate courts found it difficult to determine whether a confession had been voluntary.

Finally, in 1966, the Miranda decision established a universal standard, requiring people in police custody to be read their rights before being questioned. Under most circumstances, failure to comply with this rule would lead to a suppression of the confession. However, contrary to common belief, the Miranda warning doesn't confer rights; it simply reminds arrestees of the rights already granted to them by the Constitution. Moreover, talk-show hosts and television police dramas have led people to believe that before the police may interrogate or arrest a suspect, the Miranda warning must be given. That just isn't the case. Neither arrest alone nor interrogation alone (if there has been no arrest) requires the warning to be given. Miranda applies only to in-custody questioning; a statement made to the police by a suspect not in custody is not subject to Miranda. Still, many supporters of Miranda exclusions argue that the rule hamstrings law enforcement. This is wrong, too.

When Miranda was decided, we envisioned wily defence lawyers using Miranda to suppress a confession, often the strongest foundation on which to build a conviction. Over time, however, police compliance became second nature, and the warning has become a routine part of post-arrest interrogation. Today, judges only rarely suppress confessions because the warning wasn't given. This doesn't mean that Miranda is irrelevant, or that there isn't a place for exceptions. In 1982, while I was a judge on New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, we heard a case in which a man entered a supermarket with a loaded gun. When the police detained the man, they found him wearing an empty holster, and asked him the whereabouts of the weapon. After he showed the police where he had hidden the gun, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon.

The lower courts held that he should have been given his Miranda warning before being asked the location of the gun. I wrote an opinion, later embraced by the Supreme Court, that created an "emergency exception" to Miranda, allowing the police to defuse a dangerous situation before administering the warning.

But resolving immediate emergencies is about as far as we should go in delaying the Miranda reading or creating exceptions to it. To open non-emergency exceptions, like the one proposed by the Obama administration, would be to go down a road toward the eventual nullification of the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The Miranda rule enables us to protect a fundamental right without forcing the courts to allow the legitimacy of every confession to be proven before it is allowed into evidence. To compromise the rule would be counterproductive to the freedom we enjoy — a freedom that terrorists would like nothing better than to destroy.

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

A GOOD IIP YEAR

Now that the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) figures for the fiscal year 2009-10 are finally in, it is time to take stock and read the signals. The overall record is impressive as the double-digit growth of 10.4% achieved has been surpassed only twice in the last 16 years that the current index has been used, once in 2006-07 and earlier in the mid-1990s. But what makes the most recent achievement impressive is the speed of the recovery as the slump pushed down growth to 2.8% in 2008-09, the lowest in the last 16 years. But then one can also turn this argument around and point out that a substantial part of the current boom can be attributed to the low base year, which is very unlike the case in the earlier instances. Another aspect that makes the current boom rather unique is the structure of growth. In both the earlier cases the double-digit aggregate growth in industry was uniformly reflected across almost all the major sectors. In sharp contrast, the current scenario is highly skewed. On one side are the impressive numbers spewed out by the investment goods segment. Growth in all the three important segments and sub-segments of this sector—capital goods, machinery and transport equipment industries—have hit a 16-year high, shooting up to the 19-24% range. Equally impressive is the gain made by the intermediate goods sector where the 13.6% growth is the second highest since the mid-1990s.

At the other extreme is the consumer goods segment whose 7.4% growth is lacklustre considering the double-digit growth registered by the segment in all the three years up to 2006-07. And what is even more surprising is that the two sub-segments of the consumer goods sector are treading at the extremes. While the 1.5% growth recorded by the non-durable goods or articles of daily consumption was the second worst recorded in over 16 years, the 26.1% growth achieved by the durables goods segment was the best during the period. Another striking aspect of the consumer goods segment is that the pick-up in some of the labour-intensive sectors, such as textiles, has been impressive, while those linked with agriculture, such as food products and beverages, have been very unimpressive. So boosting slack consumer demand is an important prerequisite for sustaining recovery. Bountiful rains and booming exports, both outside the control of government, will play a key role here, given the limited leverage that fiscal and monetary tools have in the current scenario.

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

RURAL-URBAN CONTINUUM

Lately, marketing gurus and policy planners have made common cause of celebrating the rural market in India. While urban India and the world took a hit from the global economic slowdown, India's rural economy offered the rainbow of resilience. FMCG majors, telecom giants, auto players—the list of sectors that have had cause to revel in this rainbow is long. But our columnists have been drawing attention to how the binary simplicity of a rural-urban formula is fast becoming inadequate to describe a fast-evolving scene where rising incomes and infrastructural investments are imbuing suburbs and satellite towns with new energies. Following alongside such analysis, FE reported yesterday that peri-urban areas is where it is all happening. This sizeable and (also) resilient market lies between India's urban hubs and rural centres. It has been variously clubbed under umbrella terms such as tier I, II, III or IV centres or small towns, depending on the marketers' diverse industry criteria. A new study by Indicus Analytics that looks to overcome this confusion by classifying peri-urban markets based on population size finds that they are the ones that really helped India's consumer product companies and automakers to report gains at a time when most corporates feared the effects of the global financial crisis had on their bottom lines. From Dasna, which is a short 40 km off Ghaziabad, to Hodal in Haryana's Faridabad district and Niwari, which is located off the Hapur road in Ghaziabad, to take some examples that are really close to the capital and its expansion, we have instances of how traffic between urban and non-urban centres is throwing up startlingly new amalgamations.

In Niwari, FE reports that the local panchayat has dug into its pockets to set up solar street lights. Across Dasna, Hodal and Niwari, we know that educational institutes are proliferating. Whatever be their quality, they offer definitive evidence of a desire for higher education amongst the locals in this twilight zone. This evidence, in turn, is indicative of shifts in labour profiles as well as reflective of how infrastructural developments like roads and telecom have been transforming labour aspirations. All the energies evidenced in these buffer zones between rural and urban centres also affirm that more efficient delivery of markets, communication infrastructure, electricity et al indeed translate into more potent growth delivery. But both marketing gurus and policymakers have to recognise the significance of the rural-urban continuum before they can reap its advantages.

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

ARE WE REALLY PARANOID ABOUT CHINA?

MK VENU

It is just as well that the minister of environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh, personally called on the home minister, P Chidambaram, to explain why he had described the home ministry as unduly paranoid about Chinese businesses wanting to enter India. The place and occasion Jairam Ramesh chose to vent his frustrations were certainly wrong. But P Chidambaram would be the first to admit that in recent years the bureaucracies at the ministries of external affairs, industry and home have never treated China on par with the western countries, as far as inward investment is concerned.

When Chidambaram was the finance minister, the Chinese had complained to him about the Indian bureaucracy's discriminatory attitude towards Chinese businesses wanting to enter India. I recall the Chinese ambassador told Chidambaram that of all the business visas given by China and India to each other, nearly 80% were extended by the Chinese until a few years ago. So, Chidambaram agreed that if visas were a proxy for the openness of an economy, the Chinese were more open than us.

Again, as finance minister, Chidambaram, and several other Cabinet ministers, had the good sense to oppose a draft proposal mooted by the then national security advisor (NSA), MK Narayanan, that China must be clubbed with Pakistan and Bangladesh in a negative list nations from where no investment proposal should get automatic clearance. In his first draft proposal, which went for comments to various economic ministries, the NSA had actually sought to put this negative list of countries as part of a national security legislation Act to 'safeguard India's national interests'.

Better sense prevailed as most Cabinet ministers then opposed the draconian idea of placing China on a negative list of inbound investors. Of course, later the NSA himself piped down and diluted the idea, after the Prime Minister firmly voted against any draconian legislation that treated China as pariah. It would be totally self-defeating to treat a global economic power in our immediate neighbourhood as pariah, it was argued.

Significantly, looking at Chinese investments with suspicion is a mindset that exists across the government. This is not just a home ministry problem. For instance, most investment proposals, even for innocuous consumer goods, are referred by the industry ministry for security clearance to the home ministry. I remember the investment proposal from the Chinese global white goods major, Haier, was held up for nearly two years before getting security clearance! Would Samsung from South Korea and Electrolux from Sweden be treated like this?

Two years ago, Jairam Ramesh himself led a campaign urging Indian power generation companies to buy equipment from Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) and not from Chinese companies, which were selling at 30% to 40% less price. There was a whisper campaign that the Chinese power equipments were inferior. However, power producers like Reliance Power and GMR had no complaints. In fact, after Jairam Ramesh persuaded BHEL to offer a better price to Reliance Power, it was found that Chinese equipment was still cheaper by 30%. As the minister of state for power then, Jairam Ramesh proposed that the Chinese must be forced to set up operations in India and value-add up to 30-40% here before selling power plants to domestic power producers.

I asked the head of General Electric in India whether Chinese equipment was indeed inferior. He told me that General Electric had fully transferred technology to the Chinese and they were adding more than half of India's total capacity every year! So what is wrong with Chinese equipment?

Let us face it. We are suspicious and even paranoid about China. There is no point blaming the home ministry alone for it. This suspicion has permeated the entire government. It is fuelled by strategic experts who are encouraged by the establishment, that is the ministry of external affairs, to constantly generate more suspicion about China. Clubbing China with Pakistan is the biggest disservice strategic experts do to this nation.

Actually, we are still totally unsure how to deal with the Chinese. Here is a classic example. Recently FE published a report based on the minutes of a meeting held by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board under the ministry of industry. There was a foreign investment proposal from the Chinese telecom equipment company, Huawei, which has presence across 40 countries in the world. Huawei also powers the telecom networks of half of 14-odd telecom operators in India. However, the government has observed in the minutes that Huawei is a company promoted by an officer of People's Liberation Army and has the capability to remotely manipulate the equipment it supplies to operators. Mind you, in the past this company has supplied equipment even to public sector companies such as BSNL and MTNL. This would certainly qualify as 'paranoia', for Huawei has a huge research centre at Bangalore powered by Indian minds. It has registered a large number of patents in telecom hardware earned by these very Indian minds. So why would Indian IT professionals work for a company run by the People's Liberation Army? Am I being paranoid?

Indeed, paranoia can also be part of conscious policy. British Historian Paul Kennedy describes the US's foreign policy approach to China brilliantly. He says American foreign policy towards China is marked by schizophrenia. One half consciously wants to convert China after America's own image. The other half is paranoid that a morphed China will become a huge threat. So at least there seems to be a method in their madness. Is there one in ours?

mk.venu@expressindia.com

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

STILL CROSS CONNECTED ON SPECTRUM

MAHESH UPPAL

Users, telecommunications operators, equipment manufacturers and the government have a stake in transparent and predictable rules for the allocation and pricing of spectrum. Trai would have been expected to understand this best. Alas, it doesn't. India's spectrum rules were put together in the early 1990's, when few observers or even experts expected the current explosion of demand for spectrum; expensive mobile services were going to be toys for the rich. Subsequent events demonstrated that these rules reflect little of the value of this critical resource and that they, in fact, encourage wastage since companies receive 'free' spectrum once they acquire a threshold number of subscribers. The government collects a share of revenues as fees, but no upfront fee. There was an incentive to overstate subscribers and grab spectrum available at bargain prices. The minister for telecommunications stretched this anomaly to the hilt by creating rights to cheap spectrum for even more companies several of whom, as expected, sold them at roughly six times the price.

Trai's challenge was to reconcile the many conflicting interests in the market place which have arisen because of—let us be direct—the government's sins of omission and commission. It had to recommend rules that encouraged efficient use of the resource to protect India's long-term interests in wireless technologies. There was urgent need to help consolidate a sector which, thanks to irrationally cheap spectrum bundled with licences, has an unprecedented 12 mobile operators in each service area when in other countries this number rarely exceeds four. Much like land, which has many of the same features as spectrum, market-based rules for allocation and pricing of spectrum had to replace arbitrary administrative rules. Like in most important regulatory regimes, spectrum had to be separated from mobile licences.

Yes, Trai has delinked spectrum from licences since companies will have to apply for and pay separately for spectrum after they acquire their licences on payment of nominal fees. But the price proposed for spectrum has been linked to that for 3G spectrum. This has serious limitations since the chief reason for the high 3G prices is that the over one hundred licences issued by A Raja in 2008 have created an artificial scarcity and incumbent players, with huge investments and networks at stake, see little chance of receiving spectrum any other way.

Trai's recommendations seem more about fees. Were they to be accepted, older GSM players like Airtel, Vodafone and even BSNL/MTNL can expect to pay several thousand crores of rupees for spectrum. This would not be an issue, if the idea was to require all those who receive cheap spectrum to pay its actual value. Sadly, some beneficiaries of brazenly arbitrary decisions of government functionaries will be punished, while others actually rewarded.

The problem with Trai's recommendations is that they so obviously protect the interests of licences allotted in A Raja's regime by throwing all rationality, fair play or transparency to the winds. The Indian mobile market was one of the most competitive and crowded in the world before the new licences were awarded at bargain prices. It assures new players—many of whom have yet to even start services and others who have cashed in on the cheap spectrum—of 6.2 MHz. The same amount is now due to erstwhile CDMA players who have been awarded GSM without any public process.

To make matters worse, while GSM players with over 6.2 MHz will have to pay extra, the dual technology players will get to keep the their GSM and CDMA spectrum and not pay extra for either, because contrary to all accepted principles, Trai does not want the latter's spectrum supplies combined. So, even though Reliance may have 9.4 MHz of spectrum in several circles and serve comparable or fewer subscribers, only GSM incumbents will pay for spectrum above 6.2 MHz. Indeed technology neutrality, which Trai claims to abide by, demands that the spectrum be treated in a unified way so that companies choose technologies that are most effective for the services they wish to offer.

An even more bizarre example of helping dubiously licensed late comers is the approach adopted for spectrum in the 900 MHz band, which early GSM players received in the processes far more transparent than those seen recently. Trai has proposed that this spectrum will go—and be replaced by less valuable spectrum, when licences are up for renewal, even though other spectrum can be retained at a price. There is admittedly a case for re-farming 900 MHz for 3G. That Trai seeks to do it in a brazenly arbitrary fashion, demonstrates an ignorance of its responsibility towards serious players and orderly growth.

The author is a telecom consultant

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

NEW PENSION, GOOD RETURNS

SAIKAT NEOGI

The New Pension Scheme (NPS), now extended to all citizens of the country, has given a return of 12% to investors, a good 4 percentage points more than PPF and EPF. Despite the high returns, however, the scheme for unorganised workers has been able to attract only 6,000 subscribers with a corpus of Rs 10 crore, as compared to 4.5 crore subscribers in EPF.

Analysts say that NPS will have to show consistent results for a longer period of time to attract more subscribers and Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) will have to take proactive steps to market the scheme so that subscribers in the unorganised sector are aware of. Surprisingly, even after the government's announcement in this year's Budget to credit Rs 1,000 to new accounts opened after April 1, 2010, it has not generated enough encouragement for subscribers to queue up. The PFRDA will now have to aggressively increase the point-of-presence and gradually increase the number of pension fund managers for more competition.

The NPS, unlike existing pension funds like EPF and PPF that offer assured benefits, has defined contributions and individuals can decide where to invest their money with returns dependent on market conditions. One of the major irritants for subscribers under the current provisions is that withdrawals under the NPS attract tax under the EET (exempt-exempt-taxable) system, which means that while contributions and returns to the NPS are exempt, withdrawals attract tax. Analysts say that considering the marginal risk involved in the scheme coupled with the fact that the scheme is meant for the common man who does not have access to any comprehensive social welfare scheme, the government will have to look into this issue and grant complete tax exemption for the scheme. This will attract a lot of fence sitters as savings and retirement schemes in India are more tax-driven.

Going ahead, the government will also have to come out with clear guidelines on the co-ordination between PFRDA and Irda so that another Sebi-Irda like spat over Ulips does not crop up in the future.

saikat.neogi@expressindia.com

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THE HINDU

EDITORIAL

CRUSHED BUT NOT BROKEN

The National League for Democracy in Myanmar, the political party of Aung San Suu Kyi — the main symbol of resistance against the junta for over two decades — has ceased to exist, a victim of mala fide by the country's uniquely repressive military rulers. Earlier this year, the State Peace and Development Council (the name the junta has given itself) brought in a new law requiring that political parties register for the national elections (expected to be held later this year) or face dissolution. A party would not be allowed to register unless it expelled members who had been convicted. The law was clearly aimed at excluding Ms Suu Kyi, who was convicted by the junta of violating the terms of her house arrest. Faced with the May 6 deadline for registration, the NLD chose principle over pragmatism and decided that it would disband rather than dump its leader. It is true that there are signs of fatigue among the people over the prolonged standoff between the junta and the pro-democracy activists. There have even been suggestions that the NLD might have helped serve the cause of democracy better by agreeing to participate in the election. Indeed, some members of the defunct NLD were quick to announce plans to contest the elections under the banner of a new political party but this is unlikely to take them anywhere.

By now, it is abundantly clear that the kind of democracy the SPDC wants to usher in will be nothing but military rule in another garb. The Constitution framed by the junta has a provision reserving a quarter of the seats in parliament for the military. In addition, several generals who recently stepped down are expected to contest the election as civilians. This will boost the number of military men in the new parliament. The NLD's participation can only legitimise a pre-rigged process. By making the difficult choice of staying out, the NLD has ensured that issues of legitimacy will plague the new set-up. This in turn will have implications for the outside world's constant search for engagement with fuel-rich Myanmar. The moral high ground of Ms Suu Kyi will be a constant reminder to international and regional powers, India included, of the ineffectiveness of their efforts to help her. For the NLD and its Nobel Laureate leader, the challenge now is to keep alive the political link with the people without the infrastructure of a political party. The immediate response has been the announcement of plans to launch social service programmes as a way to do political work. Whether the junta will allow this, given its track record, is highly uncertain. After all that she has endured, it seems the real battle for Ms Suu Kyi has just begun

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THE HINDU

A MASSIVE RESCUE PACKAGE

Acting with unusual speed, the European Union has come up with an unprecedented $750 billion rescue package to combat the fast-spreading debt crisis that has engulfed Europe. Another $321 billion is to be provided by the International Monetary Fund. On the day the package was announced, financial markets across the world bounced back sharply reversing the steep declines of the previous three days. In India, the benchmark stock indices staged one of the biggest one-day rallies seen over the previous year. Since then, the stock markets have moderated, as it came to be felt that this huge package will only provide a breather and not address the basic causes that brought about the crisis in the first place. The urgent task is to check the rapid spread of contagion. The crisis that had its origins in Greece's fiscal problems has spread to the rest of Europe, although only three other countries — Portugal, Spain and Ireland, all with high levels of public indebtedness — are seen to be particularly vulnerable. The fears that the troubles in Europe would morph into another global crisis seem exaggerated. However, in the United States and many other developed countries, the European crisis might choke the already feeble recovery.

There are some similarities between the latest crisis and the previous one. Both had their origins in what were unlikely sources. The U.S. sub-prime housing market was hardly a familiar name even to bankers in many developing countries. Greece with just 2.5 per cent of the euro zone's GDP was least expected to threaten the euro and the monetary union or export its problems to many parts of the world. As in the previous crisis, the globalisation of financial markets has meant Greece's domestic problems rattling markets across the world. Private capital has stopped flowing into countries with strained finances. The euro has sunk to a 14-month low and the bond markets, reflecting the uncertainty, are quoting at increased spreads. Financial markets and governments will be looking for positive cues in the wake of the massive package. It is not clear in what shape the euro and the monetary union will emerge after the crisis. Euro sceptics are having a field day pointing out, among others, the relative inflexibility of the euro mechanism to tackle a crisis such as the one in Greece. In India, the crisis in Europe has, apart from having its impact on stock prices, raised question marks on the private sector's overseas borrowing. And once again, the crisis has shown the fickle nature of foreign portfolio money managers.

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THE HINDU

LEADER PAGE ARTICLES

TOWARDS REDUCING TRUST DEFICIT

THE PEOPLE OF INDIA ARE NOT AGAINST TALKING TO PAKISTAN. WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT IS INDIA GOING INTO THE TALKS WITH ITS EYES CLOSED.

CHINMAYA R. GHAREKHAN

'Trust' is too loaded a term to be used in inter-state discourse; 'confidence-building' is a well accepted phrase and is safer to employ. The new buzzword in India-Pakistan dialogue is 'trust deficit.' Trust 'deficit' presupposes that there is trust, only its quantity or/and quality have diminished. Was there ever a time when there was 'trust' between the two countries?

The circumstances surrounding Pakistan's creation and its aggression in Kashmir ensured that there could be no 'trust' between the countries. Indira Gandhi tried 'trust' — she trusted Z.A. Bhutto to deliver on his promise of internationalising the Line of Control, made to her in Shimla — on the basis on which she agreed to all that she did in Shimla. Did Manmohan Singh trust Pervez Musharraf? We do not know but Indians cannot forget that the General was responsible for Kargil which cost us the lives of more than 800 of our best and bravest. Atal Bihari Vajpayee surely did not trust him after his experience at Agra.

It came as no surprise that our Prime Minister went all the way in Thimphu, responding positively to Pakistan's demand for resumption of dialogue at the political level. He jumped the several steps on Pakistan's 'road map' and met his Pakistani counterpart in Bhutan for over an hour. Thus the road map suggested by Pakistan got reversed; it started at the highest political level and will be followed up at the ministerial and Secretary levels. He has set himself the vision of establishing cordial relations and is determined to shame Pakistan into good neighbourly behaviour.

Sometimes, this approach can work. Going by media reports quoting unnamed MEA sources, Pakistan seems to have sold the line that Yusuf Raza Gilani has armed himself with new and enhanced powers under the 18th amendment to Pakistan's Constitution, making him a worthy interlocutor for the serious discussion of all weighty issues. This may be overstating things a bit. Perhaps the 'official sources' felt the need for this argument to justify to the public as well as sceptics within the ruling coalition the resumption of dialogue. The real question is whether Mr. Gilani has the authority to take decisions that the army, including the ISI, might not approve of or whether he would have to clear all the issues in dealing with India, Afghanistan, Kashmir, etc. first with the military. As for the Pakistan Peoples Party, Asif Ali Zardari seems to be in control, as evidenced by the fact that the government has decided to declare the Swiss cases against him 'closed.' Mr. Gilani's claim to be the valid interlocutor with Dr. Singh must be taken with a fistful of salt.

It is essential that India does not engage Pakistan in talks without a clear idea of what it expects of the neighbour in terms of reducing the 'trust deficit'; it cannot be simply a case of making a subjective judgment on whether Pakistan has done anything, or enough, to reduce the deficit. There are quantifiable criteria which can be spelt out and even publicly announced by our side.

At the same time, we must be objective in our analysis and approach. As for prosecuting the perpetrators of 26/11, a judicial process is on in Pakistan. After the role the judiciary has played in toppling Gen. Musharraf and considering the role it wants to play in applying the revocation of NRO to Mr. Zardari, it would not be fair to doubt its independence. By the same token, it is unfair on the part of those in Pakistan who cast aspersions on our judicial process — whereby the two Indians co-accused with Kasab were acquitted of all charges. We must note that the Pakistan government has not joined in these allegations.

The most important criterion has to do with terrorism. A statement by the Pakistan Prime Minister that his government will not allow Pakistan's territory to be used for terrorist acts against India does not, by itself, carry much meaning. It should be accompanied by specific action. There should be credible evidence of Pakistan vigorously pursuing the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts. We need not keep harping on the slow pace of the process, so long as we are satisfied with the seriousness of the prosecution. Pakistan can certainly do more to contain Hafiz Saeed. It takes recourse to the unconvincing argument that it is unable to produce admissible evidence against this terrorist, but it can definitely take administrative action to bring him under control.

A related test is the rate of infiltration across the LoC. Our government has officially declared that it has gone up, and is a matter of concern. It should not at all be difficult to determine whether Pakistan has taken any measure to eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, infiltration. Similarly, the terrorist training camps — the existence of which in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and elsewhere is a known fact — should be dismantled. This is another assessable factor.

Pakistan managed to introduce Balochistan in Sharm-El Sheikh in the official India-Pakistan dialogue. However, no less a person than its Foreign Minister said, post-Thimphu, that Dr. Singh had categorically assured his Pakistani counterpart that India had no intention of destabilising Pakistan. The fact that Shah Mehmood Qureshi mentioned this to the Pakistani media suggests that he and his government were satisfied that India was not in any way involved in Balochistan; it should, therefore, refrain from bringing it up in future discussions with us or others.

It follows that Pakistan should stop objecting to the presence of our consulates in Afghanistan. Similarly, it should stop protesting against our development assistance to Afghanistan which has no hidden anti-Pakistan agenda. In fact, it can join India in some of the projects. This will help in persuading General McChrystal not to make gratuitous remarks about our assistance to Afghanistan — of the kind he made in his written report to President Barack Obama.

We should expect that Pakistan too will have its yardstick to assess whether or not India has done enough to reduce the trust 'deficit'. Kashmir would be on top of its agenda. We should not shy away from discussing Kashmir. After all, it is our territory it has occupied illegally for the past six decades; why should we not discuss with Pakistan the ways and means of getting the occupied territory vacated? If it brings up the long-dead United Nations resolutions, as its Foreign Minister recently did raise in its National Assembly, it will indicate that it is not serious about discussing Kashmir. In any case, is Pakistan ready to pull out all its forces, regular and irregular, from PoK, which is a condition precedent to the holding of any referendum? It is also worth recalling that the U.N. resolutions give only two options to the Kashmiri people — accession to India or Pakistan. Azadi is not an option.

We must not feel embarrassed or go on the defensive if Pakistan wants to talk Kashmir. We must also not revive the Musharraf deposit about his so-called four-point proposal. We must not leave Pakistan in any doubt that the only solution, which in any case will need endorsement from the Indian Parliament, is to convert the LoC into an international border. If Pakistan does not agree, we will be under no compulsion to offer anything by way of 'out-of-the-box' proposals. In any case, we must not agree to any 'confidence-building' measure which would give Pakistan a locus standi, however indirect, in the affairs of the Valley, in a consultative or any kind of mechanism. 'Trust' must have its limits. We can certainly agree on and encourage more people-to-people contacts, etc.

Of late, Pakistan has whipped up domestic sentiment against India on the water issue. It will certainly bring it up in any dialogue with us. Here, it is important to acknowledge that Mr. Qureshi has publicly admitted that the water woes of Pakistan are a consequence of its own mismanagement of its resources and that India is not to blame. If Pakistan has specific complaints, it should be encouraged to raise them within the framework of the Indus Waters Treaty. However irrational, Pakistanis are not suicidal; they know that the IWT is much more generous to them than to India and they would not want to renegotiate it.

The people of India are not against talking to Pakistan. Indeed, nearly all political parties support dialogue. What they do not favour is India going into the talks with its eyes shut. What they do not approve of is profession of good neighbourliness unaccompanied by matching action, and repetition of the usual mantras of not allowing Pakistan's territory for terrorism against India. They are also not convinced that asking for American intervention is the right or dignified thing to do; it gives an image of an India that is not self-confident. We must have well defined criteria or benchmarks, some of which have been spelt out above, to judge whether or not Pakistan has done anything to reduce the 'trust deficit.' If the civilian government in Islamabad can deliver on the issues, we would welcome it.

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THE HINDU

DAUNTING TASK AHEAD FOR KRISHNA, QURESHI

UNLESS NEW DELHI AND ISLAMABAD ARE ABLE TO FIND SOME COMMON GROUND ON TERROR, THEIR TRUST DEFICIT CANNOT BE OVERCOME.

SUHASINI HAIDAR

Bridging the trust deficit — the task handed down to Foreign Ministers S.M. Krishna and S.M. Qureshi by their Prime Ministers is indeed a daunting if not an impossible one. Yet, it is a task the two sides would better prepare for if they come closer in their understanding of the terms involved: primarily, terror. It's no secret that the trust deficit both sides refer to is euphemism for India's belief that Pakistan supports and nurtures the very terrorist groups that seek to destroy India. And to Pakistan's belief that India sees only its own pain, not the destruction caused by daily attacks to Pakistanis, adding to a general sense of injustice on issues like Kashmir and Water. Added in the mix, is the United States, with its daily push on Pakistan to act against groups that target the U.S., but not with the same dedication against groups that threaten India. The trust deficit is, as a result, a wide chasm that exists between all three countries when it comes to their definitions of fighting terror.

Interestingly the groups they are fighting today were once equally divided. Broadly put, these groups can be categorised as the Taliban (Afghan and Pakistani, including TTP — Tehrik e-Taliban-Pakistan), the Punjabi Taliban (comprising the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Jhangavi and the Sipah-i-Sahiba) and the Kashmiri Jihadis (Hizbul Mujahideen, Harkat-ul Ansar, etc.). In the past decades they have differed on ideology (Deobandi vs Ahl-e-Hadith), and on targets (anti-India vs. anti-U.S. vs. anti-Shi'a). But today, each of them has found ways of linking to each other and up to the larger Sala'fi grid of Al-Qaeda — in terms of training, funding and logistics. Yet the U.S. continues to focus on the Taliban, India on the Kashmiri groups and the LeT, while Pakistan, a state that was the puppet master to these groups is finding itself strangled by the very strings it once wielded — fighting the Pakistani Taliban, but not the Afghan Taliban, and refusing to act in a concerted manner against the Punjabi Taliban.

For India, terror's blind spot has meant a refusal to look for larger players in big attacks: from the IC-814 hijacking of 1999 to Mumbai 26/11 in 2008. In Mumbai, for example, Ajmal Kasab and the others were no doubt members of the LeT, but the choice of some of their targets: the Chabad House, western hotel guests, as well as their access to technology should have pointed our investigators to their Al Qaeda links more closely.

Perhaps there were none, and perhaps we'll never know. But shying away from the threat of groups other than the ones that openly challenge India will leave India unprepared for the next threat, just as underplaying the threat the LeT poses to the U.S. will cost America as well. Stephen Tankel — author of the soon to be released Storming the World Stage - The story of Lashkar e Taiba" — details the close operational links between the LeT and Al Qaeda's global jihad today. " Support takes two main forms:," writes Tankel, " as a training provider or gateway to Al-Qaeda, and as a facilitator for attacks in western countries. Lashkar trains not only on its own, but with other groups in the FATA. Some of its members are believed to be instructing at other groups' camps as well. The organisation also collaborates on infiltrating fighters into Afghanistan and on other logistical matters related to that front."

For Pakistan, whose ISI has been closest to the Lashkar and other members of the Punjabi Taliban — the signs of the new collaboration should be the most worrying. During the siege of the Lahore police academy in March 2009 and the strike on the Sri Lankan team before that, the gunmen were heard speaking 'Seraiki' (South Punjab dialect) with each other. The truck that detonated and destroyed the Marriott Hotel in 2008 carried a Jhang licence plate, while the explosives were sourced to Waziristan. In fact, the suicide bomber caught alive during the GHQ attack in Rawalpindi in October 2009, and also wanted for the Marriott bombing, was perhaps the perfect example of terror's threads tying together. Col. Usman left the Pakistan Army medical corp in 2006 to join the Jaish e Mohammed in Kashmir, and trained with the TTP to carry out the GHQ attack in retaliation for drone bombings in Waziristan. Pakistani magazine Newsline estimates that between 5,000-10,000 Punjabi "boys" are now enlisted with the TTP to fight the Pakistani Army.

In particular, the prosecution of three men — Hafiz Saeed, David 'Daood Gilani' Headley and Faisal Shahzad should sum up the completely fluid lines that exist between terror groups based in Pakistan as they draw on expertise from Kashmir, Punjab and Waziristan. As the motivator, Saeed stands convicted of sending men from Punjab to train in Kashmir, drawing on global Jehadi know-how for the Mumbai attack. It should be fairly clear to Pakistani authorities that every passing day of denying his role or choosing to portray him as a 'harmless cleric' only serves to widen the 'trust deficit' between India and Pakistan, even as it bolsters the Lashkar and JuD. For the U.S., the case of David 'Daood' Headley should be a key indicator of the bigger role groups like the Lashkar now aspire to — he may have been convicted for planning Mumbai's terror, but he was originally held for planning to bomb the Danish newspaper building over the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. Finally, completing the circle, Time square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad, who reportedly took terror lessons from the TTP — that he reached through a Jaish-e-Mohammed mosque in Karachi.

Ironically, the last time we heard the phrase 'harmless cleric,' it was the Indian government referring to the JeM chief Masood Azhar while releasing him at Kandahar. During the IC-814 hijacking too, the refusal of the U.S. and Pakistan to acknowledge the common terror threat allowed for men like Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed free to fund the 9/11 attacks, and execute the gruesome killing of journalist Daniel Pearl, while Azhar himself ordered the 2001 parliament attack in Delhi.

A decade later, failing to join the dots is just not an option. Lashkar, Taliban, Al-Qaeda-terror's foot soldiers and masterminds are disregarding their differences when it comes to plotting their next attack. It's about time that their targets too — India, Pakistan and the U.S. — see their united colours as they plan to counter them. Perhaps one step will be taken when Home Minister P. Chidambaram heads to Islamabad next month for SAARC and bilateral meetings on tackling terror. Track-2 discussions over the past few months have been counselling that meetings between the intelligence chiefs and the military heads be set up as well. Because unless New Delhi and Islamabad are able to find some common ground on terror, their trust deficit cannot be overcome. In the larger context, they along with Washington will each be left holding two sides of a terror triangle; missing pieces of the deadly puzzle that holds all our futures hostage.

( Suhasini Haidar is Deputy Foreign Editor, CNN-IBN.)

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THE HINDU

ONE YEAR OF UPA-II: NUMBERS WITHOUT COMFORT

THANKS TO LEFT SUPPORT, UPA-I FACED NO SERIOUS THREATS FOR MUCH OF ITS TERM. BY CONTRAST, UPA-II IS DEPENDENT ON FLY-BY-NIGHT SUPPORTERS TO STAY IN POWER.

VIDYA SUBRAHMANIAM

On April 27, 2010, courtesy of a historic ruling by Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, sections of the Opposition moved cut motions on the demand for grants which are not discussed in the House. However, as the division of votes showed — 289 for and 201 against — the challenge did not really stretch the government.

Yet as the second United Progressive Alliance Government completes one year in office, it must fervently hope that such tests do not come up more often. For, the final scores point as much to the disarray in the Opposition as to the government's precarious numbers. Take away the Bahujan Samaj Party's 21 MPs, and it is immediately apparent that UPA-II is a minority regime dependent on fly-by-night supporters to keep it in power.

The irony is difficult to miss. When the Congress breached the 200-mark in the May 2009 election, the consensus in the opinion-making class was that freed of Left support, UPA-II was assured of a trouble-free five-year term. As if to confirm the impression, the Congress was besieged by post-poll suitors. Smaller parties like the Bodoland People's Front and the Sikkim Democratic Front quickly signed up to be a part of the ruling alliance. Yet many more queued up outside 7, Race Course Road : the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (secular) and the BSP. All four parties sent letters of support to Rashtrapati Bhawan, enabling Manmohan Singh to take the oath of office with numbers upwards of 300.

More make-believe than real

In truth, the numbers were more make-believe than real. All four external supporters had had a bitter falling out with the Congress. Besides, three out of the four, the SP, the BSP and the RJD, were from the heartland, where the compulsions of State elections would soon take over from the politics of Central give and take, rendering even a medium-term understanding with the Congress unviable. But that was in the future. For now, the Congress was happy to bask in the overwhelming show of hands. The illusion of strong outside support won over the hard reality of actual numbers.

As a consequence, Congress strategists opted for a minimalist government — not in terms of ministerial strength but in terms of party participation. Only five parties were sworn in with the Congress. They were: the Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the National Conference and the Indian Union Muslim League. The combined strength of the five parties in government was only 51. Of course, there were members of the UPA who were not in government, among them the All-India Majlis-E-Itehadul Muslimmen, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, the SDF, the BPF, Kerala Congress (Mani) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (no longer in UPA). But even with all of them on board, the UPA was short of a clear majority, and worse, without a steady and bankable external ally.

Contrast this situation with the real comfort of numbers through much of the UPA's first term. UPA-I started out as a pre-poll alliance of 12 parties which together won 219 seats — only a few seats more than what the Congress on its own picked up five years later. But in compensation the alliance got the rock-solid backing of the Left Front's 60-odd MPs. The Left cover rendered immaterial all other props. As in 2009, the SP and the BSP were only too keen to join the UPA-I bandwagon, but whether they did so or not had no bearing on the government's stability.

Over the next four years, the Congress had its share of troubles — both with its UPA partners and its external allies. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi quit the UPA in 2006 followed by the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 2007. The Congress-BSP relations took a downturn in U.P. However, thanks to the overarching Left umbrella, UPA-I never once went into the danger zone. It was only in July 2008, when the Left finally withdrew support over the Indo-U.S. civil-nuclear deal, that UPA-I felt the heat of its dwindling numbers. The Congress' frantic search for a replacement brought the SP to its doors, and though Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh bailed out the government during the July 22 vote of confidence, their support came at a huge cost. Predictably the Congress-SP pact came undone before the April-May 2009 general election.

Data compiled by PRS Legislative research show that during the term of UPA-I, the Lok Sabha Speaker called for a division of votes on 21 occasions. Twenty of these were non-serious divisions, posing no threat whatever to the government. The only time division portended danger was after the Left's withdrawal. The division of numbers on July 22, 2008, the day Prime Minister Manmohan Singh tested his majority in the House, was: 275 for and 256 against. It was a close shave for the government, but fortunately for UPA-I, its first and only serious test came towards the end of its term — with just eight months left for the general election. As against this, the UPA-II government's first big test came within a year of taking office.

The Congress and the Left had a tension-filled relationship. But because the Left had a clear agenda and was upfront about the redlines, the Congress was spared nasty surprises. The Left was also committed to the Manmohan Singh government in a way its current external allies are not. The Left kept the government going for four years. On the other hand, the SP, the BSP and the RJD are fickle allies who will keep the Congress on edge if only to able to strike last-minute deals. The Congress-SP-BSP-RJD understanding, which was dramatically visible at the time of the formation of the UPA-II government, came unstuck inside of a year over the Women's Reservation Bill. Yet only a month later, with the cut motions slated to come up in the Lok Sabha, the BSP was ready with its rescue act. The SP and the RJD too staged a walkout, allowing the government to pull off an easy victory. What is the real story behind these intriguing moves? No one knows for sure. Will these parties stick around the next time division is called? No one knows for sure. But this much is obvious: The Congress can lower its guard only at its peril.

Within UPA-II, the odd behaviour of the Trinamool Congress and the strained relationship between the Congress and the NCP have added to the Congress' troubles. Mamata Banerjee is spoiling for a fight, and though logic strongly dictates a Congress-TC pact for the coming State election, she can never be trusted not to up and quit. She seems to have convinced herself that she can win that election all by herself. If that happens, the Congress' dependence on the SP-BSP-RJD trio will increase, making the party more vulnerable to pulls and pressures. The NCP, which was the target of much IPL-related mud-slinging, is looking to get back at its senior partner.

To be sure, the Congress' opponents are in far worse shape. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has been haemorrhaging so much, there is little left of it. The BJP has currently only three allies: the Shiv Sena, the Akali Dal and the Janata Dal (U). The Left has a tough election to fight in West Bengal while the other parties are scattered. More importantly, there is simply no one around who has the energy to fight a general election so soon after the last one. All of which suggests that UPA-II will have near fatal accidents, die many deaths, and yet survive for some time to come because of the sorrier state of its opponents.

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THE HINDU

PROFITING FROM FOOD AND FAMINE

AS THE WORLD IS HIT BY A FOOD CRISIS, THE MARKETS SEE NOTHING IMMORAL IN SKIMMING OFF A PROFIT.

ZOE WILLIAMS

The price of cheddar is going to go up by 10 per cent over the next six months. This is quite a rare food story, now, in terms of price rises: it's localised; it pertains directly to British weather conditions (too wet — cows don't like it); it feels containable, finite. This makes it a marked contrast to the general run of agricultural stories, which foretell total disaster. The U.N. this week made its report, tangentially about food, foreseeing price hikes, shortages and wars, all plausible consequences of the world's failure to halt biodiversity loss.

This issue was widely reported in 2007—08, but global recessions are at least good for something, and the spike in food prices fell back. As the economy picks back up, so does the cost of feeding yourself. When even the cheese-eating developed world is hit, things are much worse in developing countries. Studies in 2008 yielded some data on the impact of expensive food: not just the obvious results, some people starving, some people substituting cheaper, lower-quality nutrition; children are taken out of school; people go without medicine; in urban areas there are riots.

So I was a bit surprised to read the ad for MoneyWeek magazine which gave, in its list of helpful features, "How to profit from higher food prices." It's just so bald, isn't it? This phenomenon, both directly and indirectly, has already killed people and will kill many more. In India, lentil prices have tripled since 2008; urban families typically spend 55 per cent of their income on food. Even if gambling on food insecurity weren't likely to destabilise the situation further, it would still be a little bit tasteless, wouldn't it? You'd never see Homes and Gardens running a story on what bargains you get when people's homes get repossessed, or Elle passing on fat-busting tips discovered by chance in a refugee camp. I called MoneyWeek for a comment, but Wednesday is their busy day. I'm sure they wouldn't have been embarrassed. Capitalists capitalise — it's what they do. They never pretend to have a moral compass.

Nevertheless, the market — in the shape of business leaders, interpreted by city analysts — retains a bearing of authority. It presents itself in loco parentis over the childish hubbub of politics; bankers and "business leaders" pass judgment on what kind of government would suit them best. On what basis could anyone without morality claim authority over anything? Traditionally, on the basis that they are perfectly rational: that, free of morality (which is a passion of sorts), they are liberated from the heat of the human condition and can make cool, logical decisions. Each player may be motivated by self-interest, but self-interest will at least assure stability, since chaos serves no one.

That would be some consolation if it were true, but we don't even need to look back a year to see what hogwash it is. Markets panic, and that alone makes them dangerous. Even worse is this behaviour, described by Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," he said in 2007, justifying the overleveraged loans his bank was still making. They're not in the least bit rational, these people — or they simply accept that if their position runs counter to what peers and competitors are doing, that in itself makes it irrational. The crash and its causes all gave an insight into herd behaviour, but the whole caper is delinquent, manic and riotous: it's like some kind of penis panic (you might have to look that up).

It's been de rigeur since 2008 to talk about "greedy bankers." That doesn't really do it, though — greed is a broad and inadequate explanation for the bizarre spectacle of a cohort that is proud of its own unscrupulousness, amused by its own hysteria and yet self-righteous and unshakeable in its demands for political influence and respect.

I've come reluctantly to the conclusion that the problem is not the busted humanity of the people themselves but the process of engaging with financial markets. It divides people from themselves. It voids their sense of shame, and even the magazines that serve them are shameless. The pursuit of money has to be undertaken with no rules: if you want to be a human being afterwards, fine, give the money away — but in the making of it, you're basically a wolf. The whole business is not dissimilar to stepping into a driving seat. The bonds of community and etiquette dissolve. That's why we have a Highway Code. Item one, then, for a Market Highway Code: when people across the world are struggling to keep up with the spiralling cost of staying alive, maybe try not to skim some money off the top.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

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THE HINDU

PATENT COMPLAINT AGAINST APPLE

MAGGIE SHIELS

Taiwanese mobile phone maker HTC has filed a patent complaint against Apple, asking for the US sale of iPhones, iPads and iPods to be halted. The move comes after Apple sued HTC in March, alleging it infringed 20 patents relating to the iPhone.

Meanwhile, the world's biggest mobile phone maker Nokia is also embroiled in a patent suit with Apple. Analysts say firms frequently argue over patents, but the rows rarely lead to product bans. In its case at the U.S. International Trade Commission, HTC argued that Apple had infringed on five of its patents. The firm asked for a ban on the importation of Apple's products, which are manufactured overseas.

"We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industrial partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones," said Jason Mackenzie, HTC's vice president for North America.

In March, when Apple launched its action, co-founder Steve Jobs put out a statement which said: "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it."

Industry watchers are not surprised by the escalating patent disputes surrounding Apple. "It's tit-for-tat to a degree because Apple sued HTC first and this is HTC fighting back," Van Baker of research firm Gartner told the BBC.

— © BBC News/Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate

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THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

A NEW TEAM TAKES CHARGE IN BRITAIN

Not unexpectedly, David Cameron is Britain's new Prime Minister. It was indicated in these columns that the Conservative Party might not have won a Commons majority but it was the best placed to head the new government. After all, the direction of the vote was for change. A coalition of Labour and Liberal Democrats would have been a government of losers. Labour had been defeated and the LibDems won fewer seats than in the last election. This last factor was an argument for keeping Nick Clegg's party out of any ruling coalition. Indeed, Mr Cameron's Tories opting for a minority government might have best reflected the vote. Apprehension was expressed that such a government might always be fearful of being defeated on the floor, and what Britain needed was stability, above all, especially when the post-recession economy needs shoring up through deft economic and political management. This was a reasonable anxiety, but only on paper. The politics of the day are such that no party would dare risk being foolhardy enough to try topple a minority government, particularly parties that had been defeated at the hustings. The British people wouldn't stand for it.
While there can be no question that stability is the key variable, the Tories and the LibDems are ideologically and politically hopelessly mismatched. Mr Clegg being ideologically to the right within the LibDem fold does help, but not nearly enough. This is why the leaders of the two parties sought to give a spin to their coming together, suggesting they were offering not just a new government but a new politics. Anyone can see this is just fluff. The country needs reassurance simply because this is not a natural alliance that has been brought into being to rule Britain. Clearly, this is also the reason that the pact between the Tories and the LibDems specifies that their relationship would not be sought to be undermined before the expiry of the five-year parliamentary term. The leaders of the coalition parties may have reached such an agreement, but a lot that happens in Parliament is driven by what happens in the constituencies. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg would need to be watchful on this score. In Mr Clegg's party, there would be many who might be keen to remind him that he courted the politics of opportunism to become Deputy Prime Minister.

The choice of ministers in the coalition government appears a good one. Home, defence, and the foreign office have been given to individuals with political experience. Some may harbour concerns over the inexperience of the new chancellor of the exchequer, who will be mainly responsible for steadying the economy at a time when Britain's sovereign debt is among the highest in the world and its deficit over 10 per cent of GDP. If the coalition partners don't pull against one another, the experienced Vince Cable from the LibDem side — who is credited with having predicted the international banking collapse — might offer useful support in husbanding the economy in his capacity as business secretary. Mr Cameron is said to want a special relationship with India and is thought to be comfortable with the idea of India acquiring a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has written him a letter of felicitation and telephoned him as well. The international economy was reportedly the main subject of conversation. This is a good base on which to build meaningful ties. On the political side, New Delhi also needs to establish links with foreign secretary William Hague, who will now be articulating the British position on Kashmir and Afghanistan. New Delhi should have every reason to hope that it can have fruitful ties with the Cameron government.

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THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

THE NAVY INVENTED T20

Given the recent series of sensational cricket scams and spy stories, this article may appear to be boring, but it is relevant as it narrates how in 1989, at the height of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgency in Trincomalee port, Sri Lanka, a few good men from the Indian and Sri Lankan navies accidentally "invented" Twenty20 (T20) cricket, and used it to defuse a volatile situation.

On April 23, 1989, an Indian Air Force (IAF) AN-32 aircraft dropped me at the Trincomalee military airport. I took over my new assignment as Indian Navy Commander, Trincomalee. As an Indian Navy Captain (equivalent to an Army Colonel), I found myself in an unfamiliar territory and on an unfamiliar mission, but the Indian Navy has a unique method of training its officers which prepares them well to deal with any situation.
I was part of the IPKF (Indian Peace-Keeping Force) which comprised the Indian Army, the Indian Navy and the IAF. The situation was rather grim, with the IPKF fighting the LTTE, and also under attack by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, a Sinhala grouping responsible for an uprising in 1971 and various acts of bombing. Some of whose cadre were suspected to have infiltrated the Sri Lankan military in 1989.). Indeed, the Trincomalee port was under constant threat from the LTTE and JVP activists, with bomb blasts and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) taking almost a daily toll of Indians and Sri Lankans. Added to this were the odd, sudden attacks by snipers who fired a single fatal shot and then melted into the surroundings.

Practically the entire Indian Navy detachment, including myself, went about our chores of water front and coastal patrolling, liaising, meetings etc. with loaded weapons in our hands. The overall Indian Navy presence in Trincomalee comprised a few dozen hardworking officers and sailors who, along with their Army and Air Force counterparts, did their best to keep the Indian flag flying high in very troubled waters.

Even though over 90 per cent of the Sri Lankan Navy personnel had been trained in India, and were very well disposed towards us, the tension in the air was palpable, with almost everyone moving around with loaded firearms. Our detachment was located next to the Sri Lankan naval base, and when I called on the Sri Lankan Commander East, Commodore W. Fernando, I discovered a friendly officer who had done all his training in India. I invited him for dinner. The evening was a great success and became a weekly event, with the commodore eating parathas and pooris with relish. Very soon the fame of our cooks reached the Sri Lankan Naval Headquarters in Colombo and the Sri Lankan Navy Chief sent a team of his Navy cooks to learn how to make various Indian dishes, the emphasis being on "parathas and pooris". I recollect that our enthusiastic naval cooks trained some three teams of their Sri Lankan counterparts.

The ice was slowly breaking with the "paratha and poori" diplomacy, but then a particularly nasty IED killed a few Army troops nearby, and tensions shot up again. Nobody was sure if this incident was the handiwork of the LTTE or the JVP, or any other unknown group. At this juncture, with things going from bad to worse, I suggested to Commodore Fernando that we play a cricket match on the coming Sunday. He readily agreed and arranged for the gear and a post-match lunch.

With just three days to go for the match, I had a very difficult time trying to pick 11 players who could play a reasonable game of cricket. Finally, a team of 11 (with no substitutes available) was selected. But a short training session at the nets resulted in a couple of injuries and it was decided not to practise any more. After all, the aim was to play cricket to reduce tensions, and so it was important that 11 fit players took the field on Sunday.

The Sri Lankan Navy, with a local pool of a few 100 men, took the forthcoming match seriously, with daily net practise. As I watched the Sri Lankans practise in real earnest, I wondered if I had made a huge mistake and we were heading for a washout!

Discussions with the Sri Lankans resulted in the match timings being fixed from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm. Elementary calculations of "over rate vs time available" resulted in a decision to play a 20-over (each side) game, and thus, unknowingly, "unrecorded history" was made many years before the world thought of T20!
Security for the cricket match was very tight, given a series of blasts the day before. After a sleepless night of vigil, our team went to play a good game of cricket. I remember that as captain of our cricket team, I had driven to the ground with a loaded service pistol which I handed over to one of my subordinates just before going for the toss.

I will not dwell too much on the match. We played our hearts out but lost narrowly to a far superior team. Our gracious hosts served a fabulous lunch (which included parathas and pooris, along with some fantastic local cuisine), and good relations were firmly in place after that. Both sides could now confidently focus on the daily threat. I believe that this happy state of affairs continued till the IPKF finally withdrew from Sri Lanka.
After my return to India I learnt that Commodore Fernando had been subsequently promoted to Rear Admiral and had taken over as the Sri Lankan Navy Chief. Sadly, he was later assassinated by a motorcycle-borne suicide bomber whilst driving to office in Colombo.

Lord Wellington (who studied at Eton from 1781 to 1784) after his victory over Napoleon in 1815, reportedly said, "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton". Another historian records that many years later, while passing an Eton cricket game, Wellington remarked, "There grows the stuff that won Waterloo". Obviously, Wellington was referring to qualities of "leadership and espirit de corps" which cricket inculcated in the future military leaders of that era.

Wellington's era is long past. Cricket is no longer a gentlemen's game. In cricket-crazy India money-spinning modern cricket has spawned a new breed of entrepreneurs. It would, of course, be ridiculous to compare the Battle of Waterloo with the rather insignificant and unrecorded Trincomalee T20 cricket match of 1989, but it's worth recording that in those difficult times a few unknown Indians did their duty in Sri Lanka. There are countless unknown Indians who daily contribute their little bits to the economic rise and security of India. The same cannot be said of those few involved in the recent scam and of spies.

Vice-Admiral Arun Kumar Singh retired as Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command, Visakhapatnam

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THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

THE PSYCHE OF TERROR

Where does the civil society stand in its war against terror? Are the hi-tech security measures and strict policing sufficient to deal with this menace? The failed car bombing in New York's Times Square has underlined the grim reality that the civil society cannot hope to win this war till the religious mindset — which is the motivating factor behind mindless violence — is not suitably dealt with.

The strategy of these "terror minds" is to fuel vulnerable individuals and groups that are sold out to the superiority and inevitability of Islamic domination and turn them to act independently to cause mayhem. In America, for instance, the Times Square bomber Faizal Shahzad is the latest among the American and European citizens sent to wreak havoc. And all — from David Coleman Headley to shoe bomber Richard Reid, from underwear bomber Syed Ahmed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to the Virginia Five — have a connection with Pakistan.

Nearer home, their counterparts are the Indian Mujahideens, like the Bhatkal brothers who were behind the Pune German bakery blast on February 13, 2010, the groups in Kerala led by T. Nasir, now captured, who recruited young Muslims for training in Pakistan, and the Delhi bomb blast accused Salman aka Chotu who operated from Nepal. All of them have been working under orders from the jihadi organisations based in Pakistan, described in a recent Time magazine article, Beyond Times Square: The Threat from Pakistan, as "ever lengthening list of extremist groups operating in Pakistan's northern wilds".

The jihadists working from Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and other places are not just targeting India or the United States — they are targeting the entire civil society. Their aim is to establish what they consider a Quranic society where girls would not be allowed to go to school, women would be fully covered from head to toe when stepping out of the house, the criminal and civil laws as adumbrated in their holy book would be enforced strictly and anyone even uttering a word against the content of the holy book would be beheaded.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has warned Pakistan that it will face serious consequences if the next terror attack is traced to Pakistan. Her statement follows Shahzad's confession that he received training in South Waziristan, Pakistan. The way the jihadi threat is evolving, terror groups will only laugh at the US' warning. And anyway, what has the US actually done? It has persuaded the Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani to resume his force's war against the Pakistani Taliban. But America's warnings seem ineffective against the jihadi wall that the Pakistan establishment has built to promote a medieval society.
It must be galling for the Americans that the terror plots are now being hatched in their vulnerable urban conglomerations and that jihadi terror can so easily cross the Atlantic and mingle with citizens of the US. "There is no doubt that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and other Pakistani groups are now recruiting among Americans", says the Time magazine report.

In India, too, they are succeeding in recruiting. If the Pune bomb blast is any clue, the local recruits could well carry out an attack as vicious as 26/11 in Mumbai. As in the Times Square plot, it would be Pakistani jihadis who would be directing this event from their safe havens while our "secularists" would be shedding tears for the "innocent" young men conducting the murderous event.

Is there something in the way Islam is preached and practised that makes its faithful vulnerable to jihadi propaganda? This question can no longer be swept under the carpet with the claim that Islamic scholars have denied any connection between the interpretation of their faith and the terror mindset.
Look at the type of demonstrations which are held even if a single doubt is expressed about the practices of the religion, let alone its doctrine.

A cartoon in far away Denmark provokes violent demonstrations in Meerut, followed by calls for fund collection to reward the man who comes forward to murder the cartoonist. In fact, one of the tasks given to Headley by his Pakistani handlers was to plot the murder of the Danish cartoonist. Is this total rejection of any dissidence, any questioning and any discussion of the faith responsible for creating a mindset that is vulnerable to terrorist propaganda?

India has had a long tradition of Hindus and Muslims living together. The proliferation of cloistered madrasa education and its funding by the orthodox Wahabi regime in Saudi Arabia have widened the divide between the two communities even where harmony existed before.

A true scholar of Islam like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad failed to win mass support in his community while a lawyer-turned-politician, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, led the community and partitioned the country. Why did the bulk of Muslims in pre-Independence era reject a man like Mahatma Gandhi and choose to follow Jinnah who was not even a practising Muslim?

A report has now surfaced about how Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamic cleric in New York who spent 21 of his 39 years in the US as an imam and proclaimed that post-9/11 his people had come to the US to build and not to destroy, is now hiding in Yemen leading terror attacks on America. Awlaki recently declared on his website: "America as a whole has now turned into a nation of evil… jihad against America is binding upon myself. Just as it is binding on every other Muslim".

What connects the Times Square bomber and the German Bakery bomber in Pune is such an overarching mindset. Worldwide cooperation in anti-terror plans can succeed in averting incident after incident but the terrorists count on one event succeeding out of a hundred failures. Unless the civilised nations threatened by such relentless terror begin to focus on attacking this mindset itself, we cannot hope for a terror-free world.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbalbir@gmail.com

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DNA

EDITORIAL

LANGUAGE POLICY

English is not the ubiquitous language it appears to be despite its overwhelming presence on the internet. There are many other languages out there, and linguistic diversity is a pleasant reality despite the problems it creates in communication.

So, one of the recommendations made in Maharashtra's draft cultural policy, which was accepted by the state cabinet on Wednesday, that ministers should speak in Marathi at state functions and with foreign dignitaries, is quite valid.

It is easy to dismiss this as linguistic chauvinism, but isn't it also a fact that Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Russian leaders speak in their own language because they do not know English?

There are, of course, a few who stick to their own language despite being conversant in English — for example former Chinese president Jiang Zemin — as a matter of protocol and as an expression of national and cultural pride, but that's not the norm.

On the bright side, the Maharashtra decision will create more jobs for interpreters who will be encouraged to learn Marathi as well as other languages because an interpreter has to be, by definition, multi-lingual.

On the negative side, we could be stoking the fires of regional one-upmanship if the idea is taken to its extreme and politicians insist on talking in their mother tongues to one another. Just think of the sparks that could fly if the chief ministers of Maharashtra and Karnataka decide to talk at one another in Marathi and Kannadiga over Belgaum.

But the more serious issue is the sheer number of languages in India: if all state politicians decide to implement the Maharashtra policy internally, every state would need 15-20 different kinds of interpreters at each level of government. It would become an unmanageable babel.

Clearly, beyond a point, the spirit of pragmatism should prevail. Due to an accident of history, English has emerged as a link language in India and it has proved to be a valuable asset in building bridges with the world outside. It has also made Indians nimble global business players.

So, it is not necessary to dump English to prove one's love and loyalty to Marathi or to any other Indian language. Indians have always been speaking languages other than their own. They have been excellent polyglots and they should not lose this natural flair.

The truth is that languages in India thrived and survived through centuries and it has not always been because of government directives.

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DNA

EDITORIAL

COOL IT, GUYS

The Indian cricket team's failure to make it to the semi-final stage in the ongoing World T20 Championships and captain MS Dhoni's apparently introspective observation that some players should have apportioned their time better between IPL parties and matches has led to the expected storm.

At the best of times, Indian cricket fans can be adulatory, worshipful and loving. Equally, when crossed, they can be vengeful, angry and bitter.

The current rage is directed against the players and their attitude (they are alleged to care more for money than the game), at the cricket administration, at the selectors and at the IPL, which is now the favourite whipping boy and presumably the repository of all the ills of cricket. Yet, this over-the-top reaction is all-too-familiar — we see it every time the Indian cricket fails to perform or has just had a bad day at the office. Part of the reason is the hysteria that is whipped up by television, where often irrelevant issues become matters of national concern merely by repetition and lack of volume control.

This is not to suggest that nothing is wrong with the Indian cricket team's performance. Certainly, there was not enough preparation between the end of the IPL and the beginning of this tournament. There were some issues with selection and, at the end of the day, none of the three disciplines — batting, bowling and fielding — was good enough. Even more important, the other teams were better.

The solution has to be a cricketing solution, not a witch hunt. Many international players also took part in the IPL and they have performed reasonably well in the championship, so it cannot only be about parties. The fact that India failed to win a single Super Eight match suggests that there has been much complacency after IPL-3. A domestic league tournament cannot be a training ground for an international competition where the world's best are taking part and yet that is how the cricket administration seems to have played it.

Once again, it might be a good idea to look at Australia. It fared dismally in the earlier T20 tournaments, went back to the drawing board and came back stronger and better.

But we seem to have learnt nothing about handling short-pitched deliveries on the world's perkiest pitches. Perhaps, Indian cricket needs a little less conversation and a little more action, as the great Elvis Presley sang it!

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DNA

A COALITION OF COMPROMISED OPINIONS

FARRUKH DHONDY

Britain has its first real coalition government in three decades. They are a bit trepid because as a monarchy and tradition of patriarchy which only recently gave way to feminist bullying, they have a culture of having one distinct boss —queen forcountry, daddy for family or lately mum. A sharing of power has never been part of the lyric of the tribe.

European countries get along with coalition governments. In Germany, with a recent record of stable coalitions, there were nine Weimar coalitions between 1920 and 1924.

Left and right wing partners would hold the centrists to ransom over some demand and bring the government down when the ransom was too high.

In Israel there are perpetual coalitions with several shades of fundamentalist Judaic parties holding the balance of power and blocking all progress towards a settlement of the Palestinianland and peacequestion.

In India the coalition government is a natural result of the democratic heritage that the Freedom Movement bequeathed to us. It was understandable that the Congress Party, seen as the prime mover in getting rid of the colonial power would hold the allegiance of a population with ballot papers in their hands.

Dr Ambedkar may have framed the Constitution that gave Indians universal adult franchise, but his Dalit followers were not yet a constituency or a political force in the country.

The Congress was the only party with a viable economic platform and the Nehru administrations with their five year plans, protectionist policies, careful foreign alliances, built the infrastructure for the great capitalist leap forward which subsequent Congress and other governments nurtured.

The greatest con-trick that these early administrations played on history, was to win from it the label of 'socialism'. Slipshod Indian journalists and politicians still label those years 'socialist' and a little patch ofmud in Highgate Cemeteryrumbles as one Karl Marx turns in his grave.

The universal adult franchise and this Nehruvian foundation for capital growth allowed different formations to group together and vote themselves to power. The first rumblings — at the ballot box — were regional. India got linguistic states.

Then the attention turned to religion and caste and vote banks were born. Democracy decimated the monolithic vote. Regions went their own voting way with the DMK and AIDMK (All India DMK, a silly name for a Tamil party?) and the rise of the Shiv Sena which wanted Mumbai for Maharashtrians.

The greater democratic quantum leap was brought about by the formation of religious and caste parties. The Akalis and the caste formations of UP and Bihar threw up state governments and scores of MPs at the Centre.

Vast sections of India who had not, for thousands of years. dared to demand were acquiring a sort of atma vishwas. It would lead to the fragmentation of power and the resulting formation of coalition alliances and governments. It's what India has and can have no other, till our economic development brings a proletarianised country into conflict with its capitalist classes. End of Marxist lecture. It will take some time.

The point of the analysis is that the Indian electorate is split into interest groups that necessitate coalitions. Britain is not.

The government that the Liberal Democrats have entered to shore up the not-quite majority of prime minister David Cameron's Tory party is not so much a coalition of interests as a coalition of compromised opinions.

Broadly speaking the Tories are for the rich and for free enterprise but the people who vote for them are not necessarily rich or have any stake in free enterprise. They have opinions and voice them in the pubs.

The Lib Dems are backed by people who believe in fairness even though they may have nothing to gain by it. It is purely a party of opinion. Opinions and interests clash and my humble prediction is that Britain is not ready for coalition. Watch this space.

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DNA

LOOMING INDUS CRISIS

YOGI AGGARWAL

Kashmir, and the questions of identity it raises, has so far dominated the barbed relations between India and Pakistan.

Now, a more troubling and fundamental issue of water, which can threaten the livelihoods of people, is becoming a bone of contention. The sharing of Indus waters, a matter of life and death for farmers in Pakistan, is now being raked up not only by many extreme elements inimical to India, but by many mainstream political parties.

The language used is strong. While Hafiz Saeed, chief of Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD) and founder of the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba, has threatened jehad against India over water, other mainstream politicians are equally strident. There is talk of "water terrorism of the regional hegemon," and that "the territory of Kashmir may not be as important as the water issue," and of a war over water.

Yet all opinion is not anti-Indian. A leading Pakistani paper, The News, soberly noted: "Water will continue to top the bilateral agendas for some time."Earlier this month, Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi stated at a press conference that Pakistani authorities have a tendency to "pass the buck" and exaggerate differences with India over the sharing of river waters. He conceded that mismanagement within the country is resulting in the loss of 34 million acre feet of water of the 110 million acre feet that reaches the river system.

Pakistan faces a severe water problem, mainly because of climate change and increasing population. Poor water management and excessive use of ground water have aggravated the problem in a country where 77% of the people are entirely dependent on the Indus river basin. The per capita availability of water has gone down substantially in the largely arid country and is expected to fall further.

On a train journey from Lahore to Karachi recently, I saw how the plentiful Indus was reduced to a mere nullah after the Kotri barrage near Hyderabad in Sindh. Punjab and the Sindh are forever squabbling over their share of the water. Even though under the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan gets 80% of the waters of the six rivers of the Indus basin (it gets the entire output of the three western rivers, the Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab) this is not proving enough as the rivers dry up.

When the Indus Waters Treaty was finalised after more than a decade of negotiation with the help of the World Bank, it represented the best possible compromise. That it has worked well for 50 years with only an occasional hiccup is an indication of its soundness. There is no need to renegotiate what has worked so well.

As a responsible upper-riparian state we are in the same position vis-a-vis Pakistan as China is in relation to us in building power dams on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra (known as the Tsangpo) in Tibet. Besides, unlike the Indus river system, which is the lifeblood of Pakistan, the Brahmaputra is only of vital importance to the north-eastern states.

While Pakistan has objected to the Baglihar and Kishan Ganga hydroelectric projects that would supply much needed electricity to Jammu & Kashmir, the proper place to resolve the disputes is the Permanent Indus Water Commission.In fact, international mediation on the Baglihar project ruled in India's favour, but now Pakistan has put up the Kishan Ganga project for arbitration. These matters are best left to the assessments made by experts rather than be used to incite political passions. They may even help change our image of being 'hegemonic' and make our neighbours better inclined towards us.

But for terrorists and others inimical to this country or fearful of it, the Indus issue can become a rallying point for what might turn out to be another form of jehad. As defenders of that country's vital economic lifeline, they may strike a stronger chord that Kashmir or Islam ever did. This is what India needs to watch out for.

The reduction in the waters of the six rivers that pass through Punjab is really an environmental problem that is aggravated as rainfall tapers down and temperatures rise. To tackle it properly, both countries need to share information and technology on better use of water. This is going to be one of the major challenges that South Asia will face in the coming decades. If Bangladesh is confronted with coastal areas getting submerged by rising sea levels, Pakistan will face water famine.

This calls for a mature approach. At the very least, we have to be prepared for a large influx of environmental refugees from our western and eastern neighbours. It is in our vital interest to understand, plan for and try to minimise the damage that global warming will unleash in the sub-continent.

As the largest and most developed country in the region, with the only consistently democratic system, India has the responsibility to take a larger view of the problem. It could give us greater leverage among our neighbours, but that depends on many other factors in the realm of politics.

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

NEVER SAY 'NO' TO DIALOGUE

IT SERVES THE CAUSE OF EXTREMISTS

BJP President Nitin Gadkari is not realistic in saying that "India should not hold any talks with Pakistan —- our party is against it". He has come out with the negative viewpoint during an interview with The Tribune at a time when India and Pakistan are poised to resume dialogue at the political level. First Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram will visit Islamabad on June 26 for a briefing on the trial of the arrested 26/11 plotters and then External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna will be there on July 15 for talks with his Pakistani counterpart, Mr Shah Mahmood Qureshi. India will continue to put pressure on Pakistan to honour the commitment it has made on fighting terrorism. But it is prudent that it decided to move forward when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh interacted with Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani at Thimpu (Bhutan) during the recent SAARC summit.

It is true that India and Pakistan could not settle any major contentious issue during the composite dialogue process, which continued for a long time. But the peace process, which was interestingly initiated during the BJP-led NDA government headed by Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did result in opening rail and road links between India and Pakistan. The peace constituency on both sides of the border also expanded considerably owing to the two countries remaining engaged with each other. There were demands for increasing people-to-people contacts as much as possible. Track II diplomacy had reportedly led to a blueprint being prepared for resolving the Kashmir question. The world had started noticing the atmospheric change in the subcontinent.

This, however, did not suit the enemies of peace. They struck a heavy blow to the peace process by enacting the Mumbai death dance. Terrorists and extremists in Pakistan feel uncomfortable when they see New Delhi and Islamabad busy finding solutions to the contentious issues keeping them apart. The BJP will be playing into the hands of such elements if it sticks to its "no talks" line.

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

WAR ON LITIGATION

PROMISING START TO NEW CJI'S INNINGS

The new Chief Justice of India Justice Sarosh Homi Kapadia began his innings well on Wednesday by issuing a stern warning against filing of frivolous public interest litigations. He said that these PILs not only make judges "work like tehsildars" but also waste valuable time of the court. His warning that heavy costs would be imposed on those filing such petitions comes at a time when concern has been mounting over the huge backlog of cases in various courts. There are over three crore cases pending in courts of which 2.5 crore are in lower courts, 40 lakh in high courts and about 52,000 in the Supreme Court. Remarkably, Justice Kapadia has set an example by hearing 37 cases in 29 minutes on his first day in office. Equally noteworthy is his decision to dispense with the daily practice of oral mentioning of urgent cases before lunch. Hereafter such urgent matters will have to be filed a day before to be considered for listing the next day.

Justice Kapadia's fast track approach is particularly commendable because despite so many recommendations by expert committees over the years, the wheels of justice in the country move at a snail's pace. Consider the problem of the Supreme Court itself. Though it is meant to decide only constitutional matters of great importance, nowadays it is expected to scrutinise every judgement passed by about 600 judges of 22 high courts and a large number of tribunals. Consequently, this has increased the workload of the court by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, despite the apex court's guidelines to govern the effective management and disposal of PILs, the courts are not exercising due discretion while admitting them. Though the original intent of PIL was to protect the interests of vulnerable sections, vested interests have misused it as a tool of harassment since frivolous cases could be filed without the heavy court fee as required in private civil litigation and deals could then be negotiated with the victims of stay orders obtained in the so-called PILs. This abuse of PIL can be regulated if the court ensures that every petition is genuine and not aimed at making personal or political gain. All this is not to undervalue the importance of PILs, some of which have blazed a new trail. It is the misuse of this potent weapon that is our concern.

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THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

EXIT FROM WORLD CUP

IPL FATIGUE AND POOR TACTICS DID US IN

India's ignominious exit from the Twenty20 World Cup after all the hype about the possibility of it bringing home the cup should lead to introspection and some hard decisions. While Indian skipper M.S. Dhoni's much-heralded captaincy left a lot to be desired in this tournament, his contention that the Indian Premier League post-match parties and the gruelling travel schedule took their toll cannot be brushed aside. It was indeed very difficult for the squad to maintain the intensity with which the members had played for six weeks in the IPL that preceded the World Cup. There is no denying that the Indian players looked jaded and tired through the World Cup. Lacking discipline and application, players tended to often stay up partying the whole night. A sense of responsibility was lacking in the team. Making huge money in the IPL, the players tended to over-indulge, disregarding the effect that it would have on their game when they would wear India colours. Besides, the IPL robbed the players of the necessity of travelling to the West Indies at least a week before the tournament to acclimatise to the conditions.

It cannot be denied that it was not the fatigue factor alone that caused India's defeat. Indian batsmen have always been found wanting against rising deliveries and so were they in this World Cup. From the slow Indian pitches in IPL, they went to the Caribbean tracks where short balls flew past the nose.

It is time we learnt a few lessons from the experience in the West Indies. Crass commercialisation is grievously hurting our performance. Not merely the excessive partying but too much involvement in ads and in TV reality shows too is disturbing the sense of application and concentration of players. Also, there is need to prepare wickets which have the kind of bounce that we encounter abroad. Overall, the accountability of players needs to be sharper. The unacceptable part is not that we have lost an important tournament. It is that we did not look like a winning side with poor drive in leadership and lack of fire in the team's attitude.

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THE TRIBUNE

COLUMN

CASTE IS AGAIN THE KING

DISTRESSING DECISION ON CENSUS

BY INDER MALHOTRA

THERE can now be no escape from the caste-based census that independent India had wisely never had before. Even during British days when caste of everyone was recorded during the enumeration of population, the pernicious and divisive practice had ended in 1931, exactly 80 years ago. Bad and depressing in itself, the decision of the Congress-led UPA government is, it was taken most casually. Hardly had Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram concluded his reasoned speech politely declining to include caste in census forms than the Yadav trio - consisting of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav - forced an adjournment of the House. Thereafter the three Yadavs met Pranab Mukherjee, the ruling alliance's ace troubleshooter, and the deed was done.

For, as soon as the House reassembled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a short statement indicating that his government was aware of the sentiment among all parties and the "Cabinet would take a decision soon". Ignoring this, the beaming Yadav leaders marched to the treasury benches, thanked Mr Mukherjee (who later made the decision public) and were even more profuse in expressing their gratitude to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. To be fair, there is strong sentiment in favour of caste-based census even within the Congress party. The Cabinet itself was divided on this issue. However, the 180-degree change in the established Congress policy is rooted in the need to placate the Yadav threesome. It was with their support that the government comfortably defeated the Opposition's cut motions. It needs their backing to see through the controversial Nuclear Liability Bill and deal with similar contingencies. In other words, political expediency has prevailed over high principle.

Another way of looking upon this dreary development, with profoundly deleterious potential, is that today's rulers have slapped it on the country rather like V. P. Singh had Mandalised India in 1989 primarily to contain his deputy and rival, Devi Lal. Ironically, this did not save his government. But it enabled Mulayam Yadav, Lalu Yadav and others of their ilk to come to power. After the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the general impression was that the caste-based and regional politics had "run its course", and that was welcomed. What an irony it is that the victors of 2009 have surrendered to the demands of the vanquished. Caste is now to the fore again. It has been a divisive force in the past and it will remain divisive in future. The casteists would consolidate their waning power. Moreover, because the flawed first-past-the-post electoral system suits the divisive forces eminently, its perpetuation also seems unavoidable.

Since Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh are the principal makers of the decision that should never have been taken, it would be useful to recall the firm stand that Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi took against the Mandal report when they were Prime Ministers. It was the Janata government, headed by Morarji Desai, that had appointed the Mandal Commission on the "Other Backward Classes". Mandal, who converted classes into castes (listing as many as 2,399 of them), submitted his report when Indira Gandhi was back in power. She mothballed the report. Nobody squeaked. Rajiv Gandhi followed her policy. When one of his ministers asked him what he proposed to do about the Mandal report, he replied: "It's a can of worms. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole". When V. P. Singh implemented the Mandal report to reserve 27 per cent government jobs and seats in educational institutions for OBCs, the Congress opposed him strongly. When virulent anti-Mandal riots began, Rajiv told two of his aides: "V. P. Singh is the most divisive Indian after Mohammed Ali Jinnah".

It is a different matter, however, that after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination when the Congress was back in power, with P. V. Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister, the party clambered on the OBC bandwagon. So did the BJP that had opted for the Mandal versus Mandir fight to prevent the fragmentation of the Hindu society. Last week, the UPA found itself in a tight corner. But was it necessary to give the exploiters of caste divisions such a tremendous boost at this stage?

There has been an important change in the scramble for privileges in the name of caste since the unleashing of the Mandal genie. The demand that the OBC reservations must be shared with the backward castes among Muslims and Christians has been gathering momentum. The Rangnath Mishra Commission's recommendations are roughly on the same lines. The judiciary, too, has endorsed the concept. The writing on the wall is thus clear. It is all the more necessary therefore that whatever is done for the sake of minorities is done on the ground of backwardness and caste, not religion; also within the overall OBC quota, not in addition to it. The argument that there are no castes among Muslims and Christians simply would not hold water. There was a chief minister of Pakistani Punjab who was proud of being a Jat, indeed a descendant of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He also held a ceremonial meeting with a fellow Jat, the then Chief Minister of Indian Punjab.

Two warning signs about the shape of things to come because of the encouragement to casteists need careful watching. The first is what the medieval khap panchayats of Jats in Haryana are doing. They are making a virtue of killing young couples that dare to marry out of caste or within the same sub-caste. The state government has done absolutely nothing about it. When the Jats of Haryana burnt down the entire Dalit colony in Mirchpur village, Rahul Gandhi visited the spot, and Sonia Gandhi admonished the state Chief Minister, to no visible effect. On the contrary, Congress MPs, including the sophisticated Navin Jindal, have had the temerity to announce that they would seek an amendment of the Hindu Marriage Act to give effect to the Khap creed!

Secondly, a former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) leader, H. D. Deve Gowda, has let the cat out of the bag. He has declared that the share of OBCs in reserved jobs is restricted to 27 per cent because of the ceiling of 50 per cent imposed by the Supreme Court on all reservations. Because he believes that the OBC population is much larger than at present estimated, after the census he plans to challenge the 50-per cent ceiling, and seek enlargement of OBC reservations. To go by the Tourism Ministry's slogan, India is indeed incredible.

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THE TRIBUNE

COLUMN

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BISTARBAND?

BY ARADHIKA SHARMA

The ubiquitous bistarband or bed-roll, as it was called in its literal translation, was such an essential part of travel that it was with something like shock that I realised that it was almost obsolete. The only people you see carrying these nowadays are faujis on furlough. The realisation came when we were sorting out the store-room one Sunday. From one of the battered trunks emerged a bistarband, looking a bit worse for wear but with its leather straps and buckles in tact. We put it out in the sun to get rid of the mouldy smell.

"Didi, what's that lying outside?" My young maid asked, when she came to clean up.

"What?"

"That green cloth thing…

It's a bistarband! Don't tell me you've never seen one before! I admonished.

"No didi, I haven't. What do you do with it?'

"You travel with it…you carry things in it." Although I hadn't travelled with a bistarband for decades now, I suddenly felt a rush of defensive affection for this symbol of travel in the past, lying on the terrace soaking in the sun. I'd been thinking of donating it to the maid, but seeing the disrespect the girl had exhibited, I decided that she didn't deserve it.

The girl, supremely unaware that she had failed miserably in my value judgment, cheerfully went about her work, leaving me to reflect upon how much a part of travel the bistarband used to be.

My parents preferred first class train travel and that, for a family of four, entailed two bistarbands (a couple of suitcases, a trunk and a surahi to keep water cold, a basket of food and another hamper of goodies). This much luggage was essential for a month-long vacation, to our grandparents' home in Chandigarh.

The bistarbands were laid out flat on the ground and then packed with neatly folded mattresses, sheets, towels, and if it were winter, blankets or thin quilts.

On either side, which was folded inwards, would be stuffed pillows, and extra clothes for the journey and the books and games that we needed for entertainment. Once my mother even put a watermelon in there (to eat on the way, of course).

]

After asking everyone, if anything else needed to be put inside, my father would roll up the bistarband tightly and then heave mightily at the thick leather straps to try and make it as compact as possible. It was no mean task, I tell you. It would leave him breathless. In the train, the bistarband would be unrolled and everyone would be handed out their quota of 'bedding'.

The bistarbands had long lives. I don't recollect replacing ours too often. They used to come in two sizes — smaller and larger. They were mostly in two colours: dull olive green and a duller khakhi.

Would I carry one for old time's sake?

Umm…well…no, actually. I'll take a pass! Prefer to travel light you know.

And OK…I'll take my value judgment back! The maid gets the bistarband!

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THE TRIBUNE

OPED

PAKISTANI CONUNDRUM

US POLICY MUST CHANGE

BY GAUTAM WAHI

The arrest of Faisal Shahzad for plotting to bomb the Times Square in the heart of the financial capital of the United States has again brought the terror crosswire onto Pakistan. Every time the spectre of a possible terror attack looms large on the American firmament, there is the usual noise about the genesis of the same being in the lawless tribal belt of Pakistan.

It is surprising, therefore, that there is still a talk in the American establishment about "Good Taliban" and "Bad Taliban". In spite of all signals to the contrary, there is still a worldview that persists in the American establishment that distinguishes between what it claims to be different entities.

The most obvious example of a similar folly that was committed by the US in the 1980s is how the Frankenstein created by the Americans to fight their ideological proxy war against the Soviets in the scraggy mountains of Afghanistan turned around to hit back the US with a vengeance on 9/11.

While it is to the credit of the American law enforcement agencies and their strict security drills that the country has so far staved off a major terror strike, however it still does not seem to have dawned on the American establishment that the oxymoronic "Good Taliban" is just another version of its real enemy, al Qaida, which has not trained its gun on the US yet. No amount of mollycoddling the same would yield any result. The moment the situation becomes more conducive to this fanatical breed of tribesmen, it would most certainly get back at the US.

It needs to be understood that the current state of Pakistan polity is but an outcome of years of radicalisation of all institutions of the state in Pakistan. What made perfect sense during the Zia-ul-Haq regime of the 80s has turned out to be the biggest headache for the Americans.

However, it is strange that the United States is investing in the outcome of the problem rather than treating the malaise itself. What is required is not just a military operation on ground with the aim to eliminate the highly motivated armed militia. What is required is a purge of the Pakistani establishment of all the fanatical elements that have infested it.

It needs to be understood that thanks to the fanatical discourse being doled out to generations of the Pakistani establishment, there is now an overwhelming support to all radical activity against the so-called 'aggressors' which are often seen as the West, Israel and India.

There seems to be a martyrs syndrome prevailing in Pakistan where every ill is blamed onto external forces with little introspection. The greater challenge is that the very raison d'etre of the Pakistani nation is an exclusivist vision of an Islamic state. So long there is any entity which is based on an exclusivist worldview there is little possibility of its peaceful mutual co-existance with any other entity that is deemed to be the "other" by it.

The radical "Islamisation" of the institutions has to be painstakingly reversed. The process has to start from changing the very pedagogy and by incorporating massive changes in the syllabi of Pakistan's educational institutions. It would take a generation of effort to reverse the radical thought process. It is here that the Americans need to make a more proactive intervention.

Instead of linking the dollar flow to just military co-operation, American assistance should be linked to efforts being undertaken by the leaders of Pakistan to bring about a change the mindsets of the people of Pakistan. A greater monitoring of the public discourse and school syllabi has to be undertaken.

It is time for the leaders in Pakistan to bite the bullet and take effective steps to bring about institutional changes in that country. The US can ensure that the Pakistanis look at Turkey as a worthy example to emulate and thereby prevent Pakistan going down the dangerous slide whereby the country becomes a peril not just to the other nation states but to its own very existence.

The US policy of differentiation between the so-called good Taliban and bad Taliban will have to go. At the same time the situation is ripe for serious introspection by the Pakistani establishment and set its house in order.

It is amply clear that using terrorists as an instrument of aggression by any nation is not only a morally wrong option, but also at the practical plane is akin to riding a tiger which would one day devour its rider.

The writer is an Assistant Commissioner of Customs in Mumbai. The views expressed are personal.

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THE TRIBUNE

OPED

THE 'DOCTORAL' DISORDER

BY BALVINDER

In good old days only a few genuinely bright students and teachers used to go into the rather laborious and genuine research-based task of getting a doctoral degree. No wonder, they used to get well-deserved exceptional respect in academic circles.

What has brought the situation to such a pass that now the once-exalted Ph.D. degree has lost both respect and relevance needs to be probed rather thoroughly.

For now a majority of literary doctors are seen, more than often, with suspicion, especially when one knows, rather intimately, their inherent incapability in basic communication skills and the mean means through which one can buy "original research" with ease!

The rot began perhaps with an irrational decision that the UGC (University Grants Commission) took long ago. It made research-oriented degrees mandatory for getting a teacher's post in colleges and universities.

This certainly created a big market for these degrees and initially gave a sharp rise to the number of ghost writers. A simple economics formula of keeping a balance between demand and supply led to a big money-spinning racket, which rests chiefly on cut-and-paste plagiarism.

Here it would be interesting to note that while appointing even a nursery schoolteacher one is required to have certain specialised skill in the craft of teaching toddlers. But while appointing teachers in colleges and universities the candidate need not have any professional training in pedagogic skills.

Is it not funny that an irrelevant doctoral degree, which in no way prepares one to learn teaching methodologies, is considered a must. Of late even lawyers are required to pass a professional test before being allowed to practise in law courts. A very sensible and practical decision indeed, as one often encounters lawyers who are incapable even of drafting a case correctly.

There is a craze for acquiring the Ph.D. degree even if this degree is not needed for promotion or other benefits. Maybe because the charm of being addressed as "Doctor Sahib" gives a high, a boost to the ego and higher status at least amongst the less enlightened!

Perhaps that is why the use of "Dr" before one's name by a literary PhD holder is reportedly considered as a criminal offence in Germany and can lead one to a jail term.

Giani Zail Singh flaunted for quite some time an honorary doctoral degree that was awarded to him by a local university. It is another matter that he soon realised its drawback and dropped the tag.

In this context I must add that this malice is not the sole property of us Indians alone.

In one of the issues of PUNCH, a British weekly magazine of humour and satire that ceased its publication in 2002, I had read an illustrated article that gave a graphic picture of many renowned universities of London where ghost thesis writing professors were available at an affordable price of £ 15-20 per hour!

Interestingly, the article had also published copies of a couple of forwarding letters that were appended with a thesis. For, as per the local convention every seeker of the degree was expected to write a brief forwarding synopsis in his/her own hand. Surprisingly, they were awarded degrees despite those illustrated letters were penned in an atrocious language.

The only saving grace was this that these degree holders, chiefly from Asian countries, were never given any weight while giving a job or admission even by those very varsities that were awarding them doctoral degrees for a price. Obviously, these were meant for Asian consumption alone.

No wonder we have many snob "Doctor sahibs" having maneuvered doctoral degrees from prestigious English universities, sitting on high positions in our institutes of higher learning.

What worries one the most is another sad fact that now college teachers are also being considered to be given the authority to act as guides to new research scholars.

My worry is based on the fact that I have observed, during my more than three decades of teaching career in a college, that a majority of my colleagues rarely visited the college library, leave aside getting even a single book issued in their name, textbooks being the only exceptions.

However, the rot does not stop here alone. When my both daughters entered the local university after doing their under-graduation in the nineties I asked a close teacher friend at the varsity for his guidance in selecting some profitable course of study that they should pursue. "Since your daughters have scored well in their previous examinations, they will have the choice of joining any course. Let them have their choice and keep your own weird ideas to yourself. However, never, I repeat never, allow them to do a PhD here. I know the entire community of wolves in the guise of teacher-guides!" was his piece of sincere, may be a bit exaggerated, advice.

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THE TRIBUNE

OPED

MUMBAI DIARY

RNRL SHAREHOLDERS IN SHOCK

SHIV KUMAR

Shareholders in Anil Ambani's Reliance Natural Resources Ltd were left shell-shocked as the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. The stock, originally positioned as an arbitrage play, buying gas from RIL's Krishna Godavari basin at US$ 2.4/MMBTU for sale at nearly double the price suddenly looked like junk.

The scrip plunged sharply and closed more than 22 per cent lower. Punters who accumulated RNRL in the run-up to last Friday's court ruling in the hope of making a killing saw huge erosion in capital.

But, as they say, stocks are bought on hope and sold when reality bites. And eternal optimists are those who make the markets. Several analysts popped up on television indicating that something may still be salvaged by those holding this stock.

Among the rosy scenarios touted by the optimists include a possible takeover of RNRL by Mukesh Ambani's RIL or if nothing at least some gas sale deal which would allow the company to earn some trading profits. All eyes are now on Kokilaben, mother of the Ambani siblings, who they hope will ensure justice is done towards the younger brother.

Meanwhile a close look at the ticker indicates that the smart money had exited RNRL long ago and the stock was down sharply in the past year even as the overall market showed a sharp recovery.

Wanted: a hangman for Kasab

The Maharashtra government is looking for a hangman. The vacancy was last filled till 1997 when the then incumbent, R Jadhav, retired. Since then no one has come forward to take up the job despite unemployment being rampant in the state. Each hanging will get the hangman a 'fee' of Rs 150.

There are 11 convicts on the death row in the state with the latest, Mohammad Ajmal Amir alias Kasab, joining them last week. Those earlier in the queue were convicted for assorted murders with several of them found guilty of carrying out the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993.

But no one seems to be interested in taking up the job though there wouldn't be any shortage of people willing to hang Kasab, admit senior police officials. The last hanging in India was of Dhananjay Chatterjee who was found guilty of the rape and murder of a 14-year old school girl.

Husain's long-distance film direction

Out of sight is surely not out of mind for M F Husain. The veteran painter, who renounced his Indian citizenship for a passport from Qatar, is coming up with new ways to be in the spotlight back home. The buzz is that Husain is directing yet another film. While Husain has already completed the script of the yet untitled film, he is busy preparing to direct it as well. Or rather direct it by proxy. Husain's son, Owais, will be doing the actual direction based on instructions given by the veteran painter by email and over the phone.

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MUMBAI MIRROR

EDITORIAL

THE JEWEL OF KALA GHODA

BUILT IN 1870 USING MALAD STONE, THE DAVID SASSOON LIBRARY AND READING ROOM IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF MUMBAI'S HERITAGE. THE MAN IT IS NAMED AFTER SHIFTED TO INDIA FROM IRAQ IN THE 1830S

If you are looking at the historical landmarks around the BSE, be careful not to miss the stately structure opposite Jehangir Art Gallery: the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room.

An integral part of the art deco district, the library has been called "The Jewel of Kala Ghoda". Built in 1870 it is now classified a Grade I heritage building. It was one of the first buildings to be built on the southern end of the Esplanade - originally planned as a large, open, level area outside fortress or city walls to provide clear fields of fire for the fortress against incoming infantry or artillery - when the walls of the old fort of Bombay were demolished.

David Sassoon was born in 1792 in Baghdad, Iraq, into a "Nasi" (traditional leaders of the Jewish community) family which had settled in the city since the 12th century. Most members were bankers to the rulers. David was the son of Saleh Sassoon, a wealthy banker and treasurer to Ahmet Pasha (Governor of Baghdad) who was appointed as "Court Jew" (a very influential position) but when Ahmet Pasha was overthrown for
corruption in 1829, the Sassoons fled to Bombay, which was on the trade route not only to the interior of India but also, more importantly, the Far East.

David arrived in Bombay somewhere between 1830 and 1832 with his family and a small part of his family's wealth. He originally acted as a middleman between British textile firms and Gulf commodities merchants. He started business with a counting house - a building, room or office in which a business firm carries on operations, particularly accounting - and a small carpet godown. A shrewd businessman, David was very soon one of the richest men in Bombay and by the end of the 1850s, he had interest in silver, gold, gums, spices, cotton, wool and wheat while at the same time he had made huge investments in harbour properties.

In 1847, a few young mechanics and foremen of the Royal Mint and Government Dockyard established a museum and library for mechanical models and design known as the Sassoon Mechanic's Institute but with the imperial government stopping its annual grant to the institute, Albert, son of David Sassoon, came up with the idea of having a library in the centre of the city. David Sassoon provided Rs 60,000 towards the cost of construction out of a total of Rs 1,25,000. The rest was borne by the Government of Bombay Presidency. It was only in 1938 that the institute was renamed as David Sassoon Library and Reading Room.

David Sassoon did not speak English but became a British citizen in 1853 and finally died in his country home in Pune on November 5, 1864, of fever. Albert migrated to England, became a Baronet (the holder of a hereditary title awarded by the British crown known as the Baronetcy) and died at his Brighton house on October 24, 1896.

The building was designed by Scott McClelland and Company while J Campbell and G E Gosling were the designing architects and yellow Malad stone was used for the construction.

There is a white stone bust of David Sassoon above the entrance. The library has about 40,000 books, some of which are extremely rare dating back to 1798. A picturesque garden in the backyard enhances the beauty of the structure and adds that degree of serenity so badly missing in the frenetic lifestyle of Mumbai.

Next Week – The eighth part of a close look at some of the historical landmarks near the BSE

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******************************************************************************************BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

A PATENT SHORTAGE

INDIA NEEDS A MORE EFFICIENT PATENTS OFFICE

From one extreme to another. That seems to be the tale of patenting in India. Accussed earlier of not doing its job fast and efficiently enough, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) now seems to be in overdrive. It is being accused of over-speeding patent clearance without adequate scrutiny. This would raise questions about the quality of patents granted. The number of patents granted annually by IPO has risen sharply, while the infrastructure and the staff strength of the patent office has remained more or less the same. The number of patent examiners, whose role is critical in ensuring that only deserving inventions get intellectual property protection, has not increased since the early 2000s. Yet, over 40,000 patents have reportedly been cleared in past three years, against less than 2,000 a year before that. Obviously, approval of frivolous patents cannot be entirely ruled out. Little wonder then that the number of court cases challenging the grant of patents has also spurted in recent years. This has led to a peculiar situation where the patent office grants patents and the courts overrule them or put them on hold. The prime objective of granting patents — that is to encourage innovation — is, thus, lost. The main sufferers are the chemicals and pharmaceutical industries which account for a sizable chunk of patents.

Interestingly, the number of patent applications has risen sharply since the amendment of the Indian Patent Law in 2005, and the switch to a product patent regime, as laid down by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This despite the fact that awareness about intellectual property protection is still insufficient in India compared to developed countries and even China. Going by the numbers put out by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation in its 2009 report, the total applications filed in India was 28,940 in 2007, against a whopping 2,45,161 in China. India too will see these numbers rising. This means speeding up the much-needed revamping of the patent office. Better infrastructure and more trained and qualified patent examiners are needed. At present, the patent office has branch offices only in Chennai, New Delhi and Mumbai, besides its headoffice in Kolkata. More branches would be needed. The government recently conceded in Parliament the acute shortage of patent examiners but said it planned to create only 200 posts of examiners in the 11th Plan. This may not suffice as it would merely double the patent office's staff strength while the number of patent-seekers has risen manifold and is set to surge further. One recent sensible move by the patent office has been to enter into an agreement with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to outsource part of the patent scrutiny work to this scientific body. But considering that even today over 70,000 patent-seekers are awaiting disposal of their applications, many more such measures would have to be conceived to clear the pending applications without putting the credibility of the patents at stake.

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

DOES LITTLE CREDIT

INFORMATION BUREAUS NEED BETTER DATA

Credit information bureaus are going to become more important. First, there are now more of them, three new ones are being added to the earlier single bureau. Secondly, after the financial turmoil of the past two years accompanied by sharply rising retail loan defaults, lenders are increasingly seeking to hold the hands of the bureaus in rebuilding portfolios while walking up the slope of another recovery. Thirdly, the bureaus' remit is extending to a massive new area as microfinance institutions (MFIs) try to tackle the twin problems of multiple borrowing and calculated default with their help. Thus, since increasingly a large number of customers of industries ranging from consumer durables to housing will be affected by the working of the bureaus, it is in the interest of both business and the lay public that they run well. Against this need, the performance record so far has been distinctly patchy. Anecdotal stories abound of how loans repaid still show up as current and, what is worse, borrowers who have been able to restructure their loans and pay them off are still shown as defaulters.

This has been so for several reasons. A nascent service with a single operator needs time to get its act together, something that is aided by the process of complaint redressal itself. But more important is the fact that a lender who has passed on information in bulk to a bureau has no incentive to make sure that it is correct. After all, it costs money to clean up the data and make it up-to-date. Second, and this is more serious, what do you do when there is a dispute between the borrower and the lender? It is understandable that a disputed loan will show as a default, but what if a loan closed after a negotiated settlement still officially shows in the lender's books as outstanding. The only relief for the customer till now is that she can pay a fee and see her own credit record after which she at least knows where she stands. The bureaus say that they can show a customer what pertains to her but cannot change the data as that can only be done by the data supplier. On finding an inaccuracy, the only thing borrowers can do, and have been doing, is to take all the papers to a new lender and try and convince him that there is no earlier default.

There is every need to maintain information depositories of defaulters and assets pledged. It should not be possible for more than one bank to lend against the same car or plot of land unknowingly, and a fraudulent person should not be able to carry on his craft by taking advantage of information gaps among lenders. For its part, the Reserve Bank of India should devise and put in place a method of quick complaint redressal and dispute settlement. Some kind of an ombudsman may be in order, though care must be taken not to let cumbersome procedures grow and delay disposal. That is already the bane of the Indian judicial process

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

THE EURO BAILOUT

MARKETS SHOULD DO FINE IF THE RELEVANT COUNTRIES CAN DELIVER CREDIBLE FISCAL ADJUSTMENT PLANS

AKASH PRAKASH

Last week's panic in financial markets finally forced European policy-makers into taking decisive action. Convinced that inertia would potentially lead to the collapse of the euro itself, European Union (EU) leaders effectively threw the kitchen sink and whatever else they could at the issue. The outcome was a new financial stabilisation package of up to euro 750 billion. There are three pieces to the package: First, opening up the EU balance of payments facility to all euro area countries and increasing its ceiling from euro 60 billion to euro 110 billion. Secondly, a new European stabilisation fund, which will provide guarantees worth up to euro 440 billion. Finally, an additional International Monetary Fund (IMF) facility of up to euro 250 billion. In addition, ECB has announced that it will intervene directly in public and private debt markets, and in conjunction with the Fed has re-opened USD swap lines, allowing European banks to obtain USD funding against euro collateral.

These measures have been accompanied by a strong commitment from the respective euro area governments to ensure fiscal sustainability. Portugal and Spain have committed to additional fiscal consolidation measures in 2010 and 2011, which will be presented on May 18. Governments have also committed to reform the Stability and Growth Pact to ensure fiscal discipline. It was also made clear that any country drawing down on any of the above facilities will have to subject itself to strict IMF conditions and monitoring.

These measures are critical in importance not only because of the size of response, but also the speed and cohesiveness of the policy action. Investor negativism towards euro assets over the past few months has been based on more than just the deteriorating fiscal. For, in reality, the euro area's deficits and debt ratios are no worse than many other developed economies. The aversion to euro assets was based more on the EU institutional weakness, exposed while handling this crisis. The core problem of Europe not having a strong, centralised and empowered political leadership which can take quick, decisive action was shown up. The initial reluctance on the part of Germany to support Greece, the need to constantly revise the rescue package and the need for parliamentary approval in each country further highlighted the fractured decision-making model.

The sovereign credit crisis has brought Europe to a critical fork in the road as to its own existence. It can choose either closer political and fiscal integration or eventual disintegration. This crisis is similar to the ERM currency crisis during the early 1990's which eventually pushed the main body of European countries towards a monetary union.

While the real efficacy of the announced policy package is still to be tested, it clearly shows that the EU leadership is not prepared to give up on the single currency, and, in fact, seems to be prepared to move further down the road to much greater cooperation on fiscal and budgetary issues. This crisis may go down in history as the turning point wherein Europe accepted the need to move towards a loose fiscal union with far greater coordination and monitoring of each other's budgetary matters. As to the outlook for markets from here, there are two clear schools of thought.

One group is of the view that this package does nothing to address the fundamental issues of sovereign solvency. All we have done is given Greece, Portugal and Spain some time to get their fiscal house in order (without even addressing the issues in Italy and Ireland). This group is not optimistic about the ability of these countries to actually implement fiscal adjustments of the magnitude of 10 per cent of GDP and that too in a few years, and without being able to devalue the currency. The bears don't think there is enough political will or willingness to endure hardship in the above-mentioned countries, and a serious moral hazard problem. This group also questions the entire burden of adjustment having to fall on the local populace of these countries (through the fiscal consolidation). A more fair adjustment process would involve creditors also taking a haircut (be they banks on their bonds or other countries on their fiscal transfers). The bears fear the burden of adjustment on the local populace will be too high, growth will collapse, leading to a negative spiral of contracting GDP and rising debt ratios, and some type of debt restructuring will be inevitable and still lies ahead.

The counter point to this is an interesting study done by BCA which points out that in the past 30 years, there have been seven instances of successful fiscal adjustment in Europe where we have seen a fiscal correction of more than 10 per cent of GDP. In each of these fiscal adjustments (except for Greece), GDP growth actually accelerated as the relevant country gained competitiveness and sustained productivity improvements. Key success factors which enabled these fiscal adjustments were a focus on expenditure cuts rather than tax hikes and a societal consensus supporting the necessity for the fiscal retrenchment. One may need to track the progress of Greece, Portugal and Spain on both these counts, to better handicap their chances of successfully completing the fiscal adjustments needed. The BCA study shows that it can be and has been done before.

The bulls point to the fact that global growth continues to surprise on the upside, with the latest US employment numbers surprising positively and purchasing managers indices (PMIs) improving across all regions. The current earnings season also continues to surprise positively, with the majority of companies continuing to beat analyst estimates. With strong earnings and low rates, markets screen cheap. Liquidity conditions will also continue to be supportive, as the latest crisis will only further push out any attempts at normalisation of monetary policy on the part of both the Fed and ECB. Markets thus continue to be in the sweet spot of very easy liquidity, super low rates but improving growth and earnings. For this camp, any corrections are a buying opportunity, as they continue to believe in the inevitability of markets rising till such time as the central banks remain on hold. Risk assets will get a bid, and capital will keep moving towards those asset classes and regions where growth is strong and benefiting from very easy macro policy settings.

It looks like being a very tough call, but I would tend to slightly tilt towards the bulls, and thus would remain invested, but have portfolio protection to safeguard against another potential shock. The markets should do fine if the relevant countries can deliver credible fiscal adjustment plans (based on spending cuts, not huge tax hikes) and we see greater buy-in from the local populace in understanding the need for austerity. In the absence of local buy-in, sharing the adjustment pain more broadly through debt restructuring comes back on the table, with potentially very serious consequences for the EU banking system and global liquidity. The only clear trade seems to be a further depreciation of the euro.

Net net, stay invested but remain paranoid...

The author is the fund manager and chief executive officer of Amansa Capital

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

ASIA - LEADING THE GLOBAL RECOVERY

THIS TIME AROUND, ASIA'S RECOVERY IS PREDOMINANTLY BEING DRIVEN BY DOMESTIC DEMAND

ANOOP SINGH

As the world climbs out of the deepest recession in recent history, Asia is leading the global recovery. By end-2009, output and exports had returned to pre-crisis levels in most of Asia, including the hardest-hit economies. In our recently-released Asia-Pacific Regional Economic Outlook, we envisage that, on average, Asia will grow by 7 per cent this year and next, buoyed by growth in China, India and other countries. While activity in advanced countries remains held back by high unemployment and weak household and bank balance sheets, in Asia the picture is relatively more robust.

In the near term, we expect that Asia will continue to lead the global recovery. What underlies this robust growth picture? While public stimulus is being phased out in some countries, growth should be sustained by the momentum that has developed in private domestic demand. Private consumption is growing on the basis of high asset values, growing consumer confidence and good labour market prospects, and private investment is being boosted by increases in capacity utilisation to more normal levels. In addition, the recovery of demand in advanced economies, particularly the United States, is expected to continue fuelling a re-stocking of inventories through most of 2010 that will boost Asian production and exports.

At the same time, the fragile nature of the global recovery still poses a risk for Asia. The global risks remain tilted to the downside, and a turn for the worse in the outlook for advanced countries or renewed negative shocks in world financial markets would present problems for the recovery in Asia as well as other regions.

In India, growth is expected to rebound strongly in 2010-11 to 8.75 per cent with both private investment and consumption expected to make substantial contributions. Improved business sentiment and favourable financing conditions should boost investment, while better employment prospects and an anticipated normal harvest should support consumers' incomes. The challenge in the short term will be to manage inflation: to address it, the authorities have rightly started to withdraw monetary and fiscal stimulus, and are expected to continue doing so in the rest of the year. Measures to ease supply bottlenecks will also help over a longer horizon to raise potential growth and reduce inflationary pressures.

For the first time in recent history, Asia is leading a global recovery and contributing an increasing share to global growth. Also, historically unprecedented is the fact that, this time around, Asia's recovery is predominantly being driven by domestic demand. Finally, capital inflows, which returned only slowly following previous downturns, are now surging into the region. These capital inflows partly reflect the extremely high levels of global liquidity, but are also a testament to Asia's improved resilience and growth prospects.

The strong capital flows do, however, carry risks that will need to be carefully managed. These inflows have the potential to lead to overheating in some economies and to an increase in vulnerability to asset price booms and busts, inflation, and macroeconomic volatility. Asset price inflation in most of Asia has so far been contained, but the increase in excess liquidity in many economies does raise some concerns. We, therefore, welcome the measures that many policy-makers are continuing to take to ensure macroeconomic and financial stability against the build-up of imbalances in local asset and housing markets. Still, more may be needed to be done in the future, if the region's bright economic growth prospects and its widening interest rate differentials with advanced economies attract even more capital. While the right package of measures vary across countries, in many of them it may be appropriate to allow more exchange rate flexibility, which could forestall short-term inflows and help make financial conditions less accommodative.

In India, sustaining rapid growth over the medium term will require addressing structural bottlenecks, notably infrastructure. The authorities are thus making great efforts to step up implementation of infrastructure projects and other structural reforms. As infrastructure investment takes off, it will need to be supported by adequate financial resources. Deepening the domestic corporate bond market, increasing the availability of instruments to help manage risks, and expanding the participation of domestic institutional investors in the funding of infrastructure could all play an important role. A complement to financial reforms will be reducing the public sector's claim on resources: the fiscal consolidation announced in this year's Budget is a welcome step in this regard.

For our part, the International Monetary Fund remains closely engaged with the region. Our policy dialogue with Asian authorities is being deepened through initiatives like a Regional Advisory Group, which draws senior figures from Asia to advise us in our work in the region. In addition, in July, we will hold an important conference in Seoul in partnership with the Korean government, to bring together senior figures from the region and draw lessons from Asia's success in managing this crisis for the future and for the rest of the world.

The author is director of the IMF's Asia and Pacific Department

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR: TEA, TOWELS AND TOILETS

THAT'S WHAT WORKER-MGMT MEETINGS DECIDE ON NOW, AND THAT IS WHY THEY WILL REMAIN JUST STATUTORY SHOWPIECES

SHYAMAL MAJUMDAR

Labour Minister Mallikarjun Kharge is doing his bit to take forward his party's (Congress) aam aadmi agenda. That explains the revival of efforts to push through a two-decade-old legislation, Participation of Workers in Management Bill, 1990, which was put in cold storage after its introduction in the Rajya Sabha.

No one can fault the minister for lack of sincerity. As reported in Business Standard yesterday, he held wide-ranging discussions with representatives of various interest groups to find consensus on a move that has faced stiff opposition from industry in the past.

The Bill seeks to ensure "specific and meaningful" participation of workers in management in company boards. The government wants public sector units (PSUs) to take the lead, and the minister hopes "thereafter, it may also be possible to evolve consensus among other stakeholders".

That may, however, just remain wishful thinking. A day after the minister's meeting, the HR head of a PSU said the move will be a disaster. "We will have no option if the owners (the government) force us, but the managements will treat worker-directors as nothing but showpieces for the ultimate industrial democracy," he said.

The HR director said his company did have workers' participation at the plant-level in the form of work councils, etc. But the decisions were generally restricted to "tea, towels and toilets", as the workers' representatives were just not interested in scaling up their involvement. Managing is your responsibility, we want the benefits, he said, is the theme.

Trade union leaders have returned the compliment by saying that managements are just not interested in sharing meaningful information with workers' representatives in these meetings due to what they call a class bias.

These views can be termed extreme, but they also show lack of trust between the two sides. And trust is the minimum that is required for any such experiment to succeed. It is doubtful whether law can change people's minds.

Some Indian public sector banks do have employee-directors. But most bank managements say the experience hasn't been too good either. In many cases, these directors haven't attended board meetings citing political work pressures, or have been harping on just one theme — higher benefits for employees. "Directors need a holistic perspective. You can't carry your trade union baggage to the board room," a bank director said.

Supporters of workers' participation in company boards say the workers' representatives on the board can play a useful role in safeguarding the interests of workers; he or she can serve as a guide and control element; can prevail upon top management not to take measures that would be unpopular with the employees; can guide other board members on matters of investment in employee benefit schemes like housing, and so forth.

But those against the proposal say the focus of workers' representatives is different from that of the remaining members of the board. Also, communication and subsequently relations between the workers' representative and the workers suffers after the former assumes directorship as he or she tends to become alienated from the workers. As a result, the workers' representative may be less effective with the other members of the board in dealing with employee matters.

HR experts say the proponents of workers' participants in management often cite the experiment in Germany, which was the first country to adopt such a practice. Known as Mitbestimmung, meaning co-determination, the practice started during Germany's economic re-emergence after the second world war, with a series of laws culminating in a 1976 decree that requires that just under half of companies' supervisory board members are representatives of workers. Shareholders and trade unions elect members of a supervisory board which is meant to set the company's general agenda. The supervisory board then elects a management board, which is actually charged with the day-to-day running of the company. The management board is required to have one worker representative.

For many years, the German model was considered to be the ultimate example of how industrial democracy can and should work. But the enthusiasm of its supporters seems to have taken a few hard knocks in recent times. Many experts say the system of co-determination made managers less willing to take tough, unpopular decisions and more likely to make trade-offs. Supervisory board support for the performance-related pay of executives would often be traded with cash bonuses for the workforce, or the appointment of a new top executive would be linked to job security pledges for employees.

This has also led to corruption charges. For example, a couple of years ago, German car maker Volkswagen was in the news for all the wrong reasons. It was reported that managers in the company paid for exotic holidays to works councillors, etc.

India is certainly better off in this respect, but forcing workers' participation in boardrooms without ensuring that it first succeeds at the lower level, is nothing but putting the cart before the horse.

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

GRECIAN SUMMER OF DISCONTENT

MACROECONOMIC POLICY WILL BE EXCEPTIONALLY CHALLENGING IN THE MONTHS AHEAD

SHANKAR ACHARYA

Back in January, during a discussion with this paper's editorial brains trust, I had mildly suggested an edit on the emerging Greek budget problems and its wider consequences. This was greeted with indulgent smiles and suppressed mirth of the kind usually reserved for doddering uncles. Which reader would be interested in the fiscal predicament of a small and distant European nation? Some four months later, I confess to a feeling of vindication. Greece's public finance problems have ballooned into a major European crisis with global ramifications. The evolution of the crisis has accelerated over the last fortnight and sent world financial markets into a tizzy.

Today, Greece is in a bad place. Its GDP fell by 3 per cent in 2009 and is expected to drop another 4 per cent this year. Its fiscal deficit of 13.6 per cent of GDP in 2009 is slated to be brutally chopped to 3 per cent of GDP by 2014 under the huge euro 110 billion EU-IMF bailout programme agreed early last week. Despite such extraordinary fiscal compression, Greece's towering 115 per cent ratio of government debt to GDP is expected to climb to nearly 150 per cent in three years. GDP is expected to contract a further 5 per cent by then. As Martin Wolf has pointed out (Financial Times, May 5), even if everything goes according to plan, in 2014 Greece will be having to run a 4.5 per cent of GDP primary fiscal surplus to service the 7.5 per cent of GDP of interest payments on its government debt. Will Greeks put up with the deep and sustained cuts in public wages and pensions, and massive hikes in taxes that all this entails?

Commentators (and markets) are sceptical. They point out that if Greece had faced a similar problem 12 years ago, the obvious solution would have included devaluation of the drachma and a restructuring of the debt (an euphemism for organised, partial default). Today, being a member of the eurozone rules out devaluation. And debt restructuring for Greece would fan the flames of contagion that are already warming Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy (the other PIGS). Herein lies the rub. Greece is missing crucial options for adjustment because she is an eurozone member. Conversely, the likely political and economic infeasibility of Greece's harsh fiscal compression programme is damaging Europe by sustaining the threat of contagion and calling the entire single-currency experiment of the euro into question. And this is why the travails of little Greece (with GDP equal to about one-fortieth of the European economy) are plaguing the European Union, still the largest single economic entity in the world. A dozen years ago, many had doubted that a monetary union could be sustained without a fiscal union. Analysts, such as Paul Krugman, have pointed out that California's major fiscal problems are containable precisely because US federal fiscal policy cushions their impact on both Californians and the rest of the US. The euro-sceptics are waxing eloquent today.

How will all this pan out? The honest truth is that nobody really knows. The crisis is still unfolding. And fast. Recall that hardly three weeks ago, Europeans were still negotiating over a euro 45 billion bailout package for Greece. Months of dithering by Germany and others helped catalyse the recent downgrades by credit rating agencies, which amplified the Greek problem and its contagion potential, and nearly tripled the scale of the final package. That didn't prevent international financial markets and the euro from plunging towards the end of last week, triggering a weekend of frenetic activity among European leaders, with stiff doses of advice injected by the Obama administration. The result was the announcement on Monday, May 10, morning of the mammoth euro 750 billion EU-IMF standby, bailout package of loans and guarantees plus the European Central Bank's (ECB's) arm-twisted readiness to purchase European debt for quantitative easing. After an initial, reassuring bounce, international markets again turned jittery on Tuesday, underscoring the continuing doubts about a lasting resolution of the fiscal-debt problems of Greece and other PIGS.

There is a chance that the Greek polity will accept the fiscal compression demanded. It's possible that contagion (much of it irrational and fuelled by financial herd behaviour) will be contained through wise, anticipatory policy by the governments of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, and adroit actions by ECB and the European Union. In that case, just maybe, European recovery from the Great Recession will simply stutter a bit in 2010 and then resume the positive trajectory outlined by the IMF's World Economic Outlook of late April.

The problem is that such wisdom and courage, if shown, will need to be sustained. And the track record, thus far, is not wholly reassuring. Thoughtful analysts believe that there is a better than even chance that something major will go wrong in the many weeks and months of fiscal and financial stress that lie ahead for Europe. Then the unthinkable might happen: Greece could leave the eurozone or default or both. In that case, contagion could spread across Europe and undermine otherwise healthy economies. No realistic estimate can be made presently of the pan-European and global consequences of such events. But the continuing turbulence in financial markets worldwide suggests that people are thinking about the unthinkable and its consequences.

What are the possible consequences for India? It's too early to tell but one can speculate. If the crisis is successfully contained and European recovery resumes, then there may be no significant external trade shock to India. With more money sloshing around in international markets, capital inflows into India will grow and exacerbate the already big problem of a substantially overvalued rupee. Oil prices will resume their upward march and magnify India's petroleum subsidies and fiscal stresses. At some point, perhaps quite a few months later, the unsustainability of India's fiscal, debt and external current accounts will come home to roost.

On the other hand, if the Greek crisis spirals into a larger European sovereign debt crisis and possible fragmentation of the eurozone, then global trade and capital flows will be badly hit. How badly and how much this will hurt India is impossible to assess at present. The only silver lining could be a drop in international oil prices, implying a lower oil import bill and reduced petroleum subsidies for India.

Either way, macroeconomic policy will be exceptionally challenging in the months ahead. Let's hope the ministries and institutions responsible for the conduct of India's macroeconomic management can summon the requisite competence and will.

The author is honorary professor at ICRIER and former chief economic adviser to the Government of India. The views expressed are personal

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BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

STEEL AND POWER

CONGRESS MP NAVEEN JINDAL'S SUPPORT TO THE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVES IN HIS CONSTITUENCY KURUKSHETRA IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND

KANIKA DATTA

Businessmen and society have a strangely contradictory relationship. The economic activity they generate can be an agent of social transformation and progress — a quick look at the changes in Indian society in the last two decades would be one indicator. Yet, businessmen in themselves are rarely conscious promoters of social progress.

This is hardly unexpected. Business inherently seeks a stable environment in which to flourish, so businessmen tend not to be tethered to ideologies beyond the opportunistic. Even by those standards, Congress MP Naveen Jindal's support to the ultra-conservatives in his constituency Kurukshetra is hard to understand.

Jindal is a hip, polo-playing, emerging steel and power tycoon. Why should he bother his head with demands to amend the Hindu Marriage Act to ban marriages within the same gotra (ancestral clan) and village?

His protestations that he's only acting as the messenger for his Jat constituents are a tad disingenuous and certainly contradictory. Presumably, as an educated young industrialist — he holds a business management degree from the University of Texas — he has views of his own about how society should be shaped. His detailed and carefully crafted website positions him as a dynamic young patriot. These credentials stem from his famous seven-year campaign to have the flag code amended to enable private citizens to fly the Indian flag freely. "Our National Flag is the greatest symbol of our country and we all must respect it, love it and above all fly it to spread the message of peace, harmony, brotherhood and prosperity," he is quoted as saying under a section titled (no kidding) "Patriot".

First, it is not clear how pushing the cause of extra-judicial local community bodies that condone medieval-style honour killings can be construed as promoting "peace, harmony, brotherhood" etc. Second, Jindal, who beat a chief minister's son at the hustings, lists an impressive array of things he has done for his constituency, both via the MP fund and his own non-profit outfit. He claims to "have transformed the face of Kurukshetra from being a sleepy town to a modern, developed city which is on the threshold of becoming a major tourist destination". If we take his word for it, it is even tougher to see why he should feel compelled to give in to the importuning of a decidedly reactionary element in his constituency. (Ironically, his constituency is not that far from Gurgaon, the hotspot of IT and multinational investment, that teems with many young men and women who may well be contemplating matrimony without reference to gotra, caste, religion, and so on.)

In his support of the khap panchayats, Jindal cannot be accused of business opportunism. The units owned by the extremely successful $2-billion Jindal Power and Steel, of which he is vice chairman and managing director, are not based in the state in which his family is a strong local force. They are, in fact, almost 1,000 km away in raw material-rich Orissa, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, mineral-rich states that, incidentally, desperately need investment in social infrastructure to pull them out of the current spiral of Maoist violence.

Jindal's motives come down to the purely political. Various local elections are due in Haryana over the next month and a half and most local politicians are wary of antagonising the powerful but conservative Jat community in the state. This is understandable in the larger interests of realpolitik. But it is worth wondering whether such active support for their retrograde agenda was called for — Jindal could as well have not said or done anything at all.

Jindal's latest move is, however, no more misguided than, say, Ratan Tata, Anil Ambani or Sunil Mittal. Last year, these leaders of India's most powerful corporate groups chose to heap lavish praise on Narendra Modi for his pro-industrialisation drive in Gujarat. This is okay — no one will deny that Modi has made Gujarat an unusually industry-friendly state, hugely beneficial for investment-hungry businessmen. But surely, given Modi's openly expressed communal proclivities — even Vajpayee considered asking him to resign after the 2002 riots — none of them needed to go as far as to endorse him as India's next prime minister.

Such amorality is worth thinking about as more and more businessmen eye a political vocation as a way of capping successful business careers. Their growing number in both Houses of Parliament — Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rahul Bajaj, Rajkumar Dhoot to name a few — may raise hopes for a more progressive outlook towards society, but as Jindal has shown, this need not be the case.

As for Jindal, his electoral opportunism may be less hard-headed than he thinks. Here's what one of his, presumably youthful, constituents wrote about him, passionately if ungrammatically, in response to a news item on his support of khap panchayats: "I belong to Kurukshetra and feeling ashamed that Mr Naveen Jindal represent our constituency in parliament. The person who claims to be youth Icon for modern india, just be popular as politician and secure vote for future is doing the rubbish."

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

ESPOUSING CAUSES

What more can a man do for a beloved spouse than offer himself up for sale? It may sound like a scene that Rahul Mahajan would opt for to win over his TVwedded wife on some reality show, but it is not.

Instead, it's former US President Bill Clinton's novel way to help his wife raise funds to cover her pending $771,000 election campaign debts — and enjoy the task, presumably. Okay, so it's not one of his best 'come hither' lines, but it's at least one that his wife will not have to rue: "How would you like the chance to come up to New York and spend the day with me?"

This email entreaty may sound alarmingly familiar to those who followed the events of the Clinton era White House of the late 1990s but impressionable interns and special investigators can rest easy. Face time with Clinton for the nominal minimum online donation of $5 from starry-eyed donors is pretty innocuous — and also pretty smart.

After all, Mr Clinton's gallant gesture to offer himself as the grand prize for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's sake will achieve much more than wheedling phone calls or suave panhandling. If he succeeds in getting the public to cough up the moolah, he will give politicians all over the world a novel new avenue to raise funds in a tight market.

Ms Mayawati has demonstrated how individual donations can add up to a lot, but monetising charisma via direct marketing has not been tried so blatantly and charmingly before. Lucrative speaking tours and bestselling memoirs are fine, but the 1946-born Mr Clinton's way of testing his pulling power is a wonderful reworking of the Beatles' eternal question: When I get older, losing my hair/many years from now/Will you still be sending me a valentine/birthday greeting, bottle of wine?/If I'd been out till quarter to three/would you lock the door?/Will you still need me,/ will you still feed me,/when I'm sixty-four?

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

PENSIONS, TOO, MUST BE SOLD

The new pension system (NPS) for private citizens generated a return of 12% last fiscal year. This is higher than what the Employees' Provident Fund has achieved , and higher than what fixed deposits of banks yield.

However, it is significantly lower than what could have been achieved in a year in which stock indices doubled. It transpires that the NPS started investing in equity only a little late in the year and secured a modest 26% returns on equity investments. One has to wait for a full cycle to get a clear picture of how the NPS performs. However, the most striking feature of the NPS' first year of performance after it opened up to voluntary contributions is that the corpus of such contributions amount to a meagre Rs 10 crore.

This is remarkable under-achievement for a well-structured , well-regulated scheme with an asset management charge as low as 0.0009%. Of course, there is a disincentive in the form of discriminatory tax treatment of the NPS, as compared to savings schemes like the Public Provident Fund (PPF). Withdrawals from the NPS are taxed, while those from the PPF are tax-exempt. The promised harmonisation of the tax treatment of all long-term savings schemes is yet to materialise. But the NPS is floundering essentially because of a faulty marketing model. A course-correction is imperative for the scheme to succeed.

The government now contributes Rs 1,000 to the pension account of every new NPS subscriber. It will cover the cost of starting an account with the central record-keeping agency and of carrying out transactions, and give a positive return on the very day of joining the NPS. But this incentive to the subscriber does little to spread awareness of the scheme, to market the scheme. And the biggest problem with the NPS is that it is relatively unknown.

With a wafer-thin asset management fee, fund managers can hardly afford to market the scheme using their money. The pensions regulator PFRDA does some publicity for the scheme, but this is not enough. The government must offer distributors, the so-called points of presence — banks that open NPS accounts for subscribers — and others, reasonable incentives for roping in subscribers.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

WELL SAID, MR CHIDAMBARAM

Signalling that the top leadership of the government and the Congress are now on the same page on the strategy to counter Maoism, home minister P Chidambaram has stressed the need to address the alienation of the people in areas where extremism holds sway.

Addressing the annual general meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry, Mr Chidambaram urged industrialists to work to remove the trust deficit that makes room for Maoists. His statement comes in the wake of a high-decibel debate on the subject in which Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh criticised the policing-focused strategy of the home ministry.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh then highlighted the importance of complementing policing with development activity, in order to take on the Maoist challenge. The ministry of home, it transpires, has, in any case, been trying to orchestrate developmental activity in the areas affected by extremism.

Now, with the home minister making it clear that ending popular alienation that paves the way for Maoist interference calls for not just state action, whether policing or otherwise, but also mobilisation of civil society, particularly its more dynamic segments that create jobs and build new prosperity, the message is not just clear, but also more holistic.

This newspaper has argued that the roots of Maoism lie in a deficit of democracy and development. Combating this calls for state action — policing, and delivery of development schemes — no doubt. And conscious efforts by industry and voluntary organisations. But the most crucial part is political mobilisation of the people by parties that see deliverance in this world, not in some post-revolution utopia.

The UPA government, in its first term, had enacted three crucial laws that enable such political mobilisation: on forest rights, employment guarantee and the right to information. Corrupt, insipid administrations will not change the existing power structure just because some laws have been passed. Only democratic assertion can do that, articulating the will of people conscious of and determined to secure their entitlement as citizens. Political mobilisation of this order is a task for political parties, not the government or NGOs.

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THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

LIMITED IMPACT OF CRISIS ON INDIA: BRETT HEMSLEY

EDITORIAL SAMARTH

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Friday, May 14, 2010

EDITORIAL 14.05.10