EDITORIAL 30.04.11

Please contact the list owner of subscription and unsubscription at: editorial@samarth.co.in 

media watch with peoples input                an organization of rastriya abhyudaya

 

Editorial

month april 30, edition 000820, collected & managed by durgesh kumar mishra, published by – manish manjul

 

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

For ENGLISH  EDITORIAL  http://editorialsamarth.blogspot.com

 

THE PIONEER

1. PAKISTAN LOOKS TO CHINA
2. SHAMEFUL, BUT EXPECTED
3. ROMP AND PAGEANTRY - ASHOK MALIK

THE TIMES OF INDIA

1. BERTH PLACES, TRUMP CARDS
2. INDIA'S GILDED AGE - BAIJAYANT 'JAY' PANDA
3. ABILITY, NOT ORIGIN, MATTERS
4. GAVASKAR'S ON THE BALL - AJAY VAISHNAV
5. INDIA, US: ESTRANGED DEMOCRACIES? - KANTI BAJPAI

HINDUSTAN TIMES

1. IT'S PARTISAN POLITICS AGAIN
2. THIS IS OUR JAITAPUR - SEEMA ALAVI
3. A PERILOUS PATH - BARKHA DUTT
4. RIP: THE LITERARY PIANO - NAMITA BHANDARE

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

1. A VOTE TOO MANY
2. TAKING OFF
3. PEOPLE POWER
4. THE GREAT LETDOWN - SHEKHAR GUPTA
5. ALL ABOUT YOU - NANDAGOPAL RAJAN
6. WHEN CORRUPTION IS VIEWED FUZZILY' - ARUNDHATI ROY
7. INDIA GOES TO TOWNS - SURJIT S BHALLA
8. THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF POMP - DILIP BOBB
9. PROVINCIALISING KARACHI - RUCHIKA TALWAR

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

1. ARE PILOTS WORKERS?
2. STANDARD AND POOR
3. URBAN ROADS, TAKE ME HOME ... - SURJIT S BHALLA
4. THE MISSING MILLIONS IN CITIES - YOGINDER K ALAGH

THE HINDU

1. AVOIDING DEBATE
2. FROM KOMPA TO POLITICAL STAGE
3. BRICS SET TO OUTSHINE IBSA?  - RAJIV BHATIA
4. EMBATTLED ARAB LEADERS DECIDE IT'S BETTER TO FIGHT THAN QUIT
5. MICHAEL SLACKMAN AND MONA EL-NAGGAR
6. BEYOND THE STEREOTYPE   - HAROON SIDDIQUE
7. ANGER AS BP PLANS TO DRILL AGAIN IN GULF
8. DUTCH ANIMAL POLICE TO START TRAINING

THE ASIAN AGE

1. PAC DRAMA SETS A BAD PRECEDENT
2. THE POLITICS OF RESPECT - ANTARA DEV SEN
3. WATCH YOUR WORDS - KISHWAR DESAI
4. JUST A QUIRK, MY DEAR - FARRUKH DHONDY

DAILY EXCELSIOR

1. RESOLVING PARKING PROBLEM
2. PAC FIASCO
3. MENDING FENCES WITH KAYANI
4. LOKPAL AS A PANACEA? - BY ASHOK BHAN

THE TRIBUNE

1. BOOST FOR INDO-PAK TRADE
2. LONG ROPE FOR BUILDERS
3. INDIA'S NEW COACH FLETCHER
4. CHINESE INFLUENCE IN NEPAL - BY S.D. MUNI
5. MAID IN INDIA - BY VIVEK ATRAY
6. FARMING FOR THE MARKET - JOGINDER SINGH
7. RICH CROPS, POOR FARMERS - SUMAN SAHAI

BUSINESS STANDARD

1. ORDERING ORDINANCE - T N NINAN
2. RIGHT APPROACH, WRONG YARDSTICK - RAJEEV MALIK
3. RATING SOUTH INDIA'S THREE CAPITALS - SUNIL SETHI
4. THE SUBLIME AND THE ORDINARY - K NATWAR SINGH
5. A MATTER OF HISTORY - V V
6. MAN BEHIND THE UNIFORM - ADITI PHADNIS
7. A KEEN EYE ON HEALTHCARE - JYOTI PANDE LAVAKARE
8. PULSE OF THE NATION - LUX LAKSHMANAN

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

1. RIGHT CALL
2. NOT BY COMMITTEE
3. ALL IN A NAME
4. DO NOT MERGE SBI SUBSIDIARIES
5. THE DOHA ROUND'S PREMATURE OBITUARY  - JAGDISH BHAGWATI
6. POLITICAL FUNDING: NEED VS GREED  - C P BHAMBHRI

BUSINESS LINE

1. SAVING GRACE

MUMBAI MIRROR

1. PLANES, REACTORS AND DIPLOMACY

THE STATESMAN

2. JUDICIAL CLOUT
3. SUBALTERN VICTORY
4. GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
5. NO LAW, NO ORDER~II - BY BIBEKANANDA RAY
6. 'KILL GRAFT BEFORE LETTING STATE FUND POLLS'
7. ON RECORD
8. THE ROAD TO RECOVERY AND REBIRTH  - NAOTO KAN

THE TELEGRAPH

1. SHODDY SHOW
2. WHEN ALL ROADS ARE TAKEN  - K. DATTA-RAY

DECCAN HERALD

1. BULLDOZING TACTICS
2. MESSY STRIKE
3. CONTROLLING CORRUPTION  - BY BHARAT JHUNJHUNWALA
4. FRIENDSHIP OF MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY  - BY KHUSHWANT SINGH
5. A BIT OF OLD WORLD CHARM  - BY VATSALA VEDANTAM

THE NEWYORK TIMES

1. DITHERING ON REDISTRICTING
2. NOT A POLITICAL TOOL
3. CO-VICTIMS AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY
4. LEARNING TO BE A 'COUNTRY BOY'
5. WHAT THE WIND CARRIED AWAY - BY JAMES BRAZIEL
6. SILLINESS AND SLEIGHT OF HAND - BY CHARLES M. BLOW
7. INTRODUCING THE THINGS OF SPRING - BY GAIL COLLINS

HURRIYET DAILY NEWS

1. MARCH OF ANATOLIA AGAINST THE PLUNDER OF NATURE, CULTURE, CITIES - CENGİZ AKTAR
2. BASHAR AL-ASSAD NULLIFIES DECADE OLD TURKISH EFFORTS TO NORMALIZE SYRIA - BARÇIN YİNANÇ
3. ATATÜRK YOUTH AT WORK - MUSTAFA AKYOL
4. CAN THE ARAB AWAKENING BE A POSITIVE BLACK SWAN FOR TURKEY? - İLHAN TANIR
5. PARTIES' ENERGY VISION - GİLA BENMAYOR
6. MORE THAN JUST A ROYAL WEDDING - YUSUF KANLI
7. TOP CHARACTERISTICS OF TURKISH EXECUTIVES - ZAFER PARLAR
8. A BIRD'S EYE VIEW - CIVILIZATION - ONE FOR ALL, ALL FOR ONE - ADVENA AVIS
9. CAPTAIN ALI, CEMILE AND RAPE - CAN DÜNDAR

THE NEWS

1. BEGINNING ANEW
2. DANGEROUS NEXUS
3. MUKHTARAN MAI: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY
4. BRONWYN CURRAN
5. BLINKERED JUSTICE?  -  DR FARZANA BARI 
6. MANDATE TO REGULATE  -  DR SANIA NISHTAR
7. END-GAME IN AFGHANISTAN  -  SALEEM SAFI
8. OUR SICKLY DEMOCRACY  -  BABAR SATTAR
9. GEN BETRAY-US TO ICON PETRAEUS  -  ANJUM NIAZ 

PAKISTAN OBSERVER

1. NATION SHARES RESOLVE OF NAVAL CHIEF
2. PPP-PML(Q) BURY HATCHET, RIGHTLY
3. KASHMIR STANDS FURTHER MARGINALIZED
4. SELF-INFLICTED AFFLICTIONS - MOHAMMAD JAMIL
5. OF STATISTICS; OR A FISHY TALE! - KHALID SALEEM
6. STATE OF EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN - HUSSAIN MOHI-UD-DIN QADRI
7. ECONOMIC DILEMMA OF PAKISTAN - SHAUKAT MASOOD ZAFAR
8. SNUBBING THE FALLEN..! - ROBER CLEMENTS

THE AUSTRALIYAN

1. TIME IS RIGHT TO BANK THE BOOM
2. BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID
3. REAL COMPASSION IS ABOUT ENCOURAGING EMPLOYMENT

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

1. A SWELL PARTY, BUT WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
2. PM STRIKES RIGHT BALANCE ON CHINA

THE GUARDIAN

1. ROYAL WEDDING: A PECULIARLY BRITISH DAY
2. NORTHERN IRELAND: SO NEAR YET SO FAR
3. UNTHINKABLE? AN AMBEDKAR MEMORIAL

THE JAPAN TIMES

1. LEARNING FROM TRAIN TRAGEDY
2. THE END OF MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION? - By SERGEI KARAGANOV
3. NO TIME FOR POLITICAL GAMES AS JAPAN TRIES TO RISE AGAIN - BY KEVIN RAFFERTY

DAILY MIRROR

1. MAY DAY: SOME MEDITATION FOR WORKERS
2. THE OPPOSITION'S DILEMMA IN HANDLING THE UN PANEL ISSUE
3. THE CRISSCROSS OVER LIBYA
4. ALL WE TAMILS WANT IS TO LIVE AS EQUAL CITIZENS IN PEACE
5. LEGITIMACY OF THE PANEL WAS QUESTIONABLE
6. DOMESTIC DOCUMENT, NOT A UN DOCUMENT
7. PLANTERS ASSOCIATION REPLIES

GULF DAILY NEWS

1. MEDIA MOVES THE MASSES    - BY PAUL BALLES

TEHRAN TIMES

1. U.S. RETHINKS STRATEGY: WAR AS OPPORTUNITY IN LIBYA - BY RAMZY BAROUD
2. THE AFRICAN 'STAR WARS' - BY PEPE ESCOBAR

 

**************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

PAKISTAN LOOKS TO CHINA

TELLS AFGANISTAN TO DO THE SAME

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal that Pakistan is lobbying Afghanistan to ignore the US and instead build a strategic alliance with China may have angered policymakers in Washington, DC who feel betrayed by a long time ally but it nonetheless proves what the Americans have feared for quite some now: Pakistan is not on the same page with the US as far as a comprehensive Afghan strategy is concerned; worse still, Pakistan has its own plans that are tailored to suit its anti-India agenda. According to the report, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told the Afghan President Hamid Karzai at an April 16 meeting in Kabul that "the Americans had failed them both" and their plans to have peace talks while still fighting the Taliban "made no sense". This is total bunkum. If anything, it is the Pakistanis who have failed the Americans by supporting terror networks at home. Additionally, Mr Gilani also pointed to America's "economic problems" which according to him meant that the US would not be able to "support long-term regional development" (in other words, no more American dole) — instead, he recommended China: Pakistan's own "all weather partner." At this point, we can only hope that Beijing will know better than to get involved with Pakistan which has all but been labeled a terror state and that too, by no less an ally than the US. That Mr Gilani is reported to have rounded up his argument with references to the America's "imperial design" — something Mr Karzai himself has mentioned before — is also particularly worrying, especially when one factors in China's own aspirations to be a global leader. Mr Gilani of course is making the best of it all: He doesn't want to push the Afghans too hard and be labelled as 'interfering', so he has politely added that the decision would ultimately be that of the Afghan people, but has simultaneously made clear that he would oppose any such pact and ideally, Mr Karzai should forget about US military presence in the country.

At this point, it is important to mention that as the Americans plan their exit strategy, some 10 years after US troops landed in Afghanistan — a majority of the soldiers are expected to leave by the end of 2014 — several regional powers are working to find their niche in the new country. Apart from Pakistan, India, Russia and Iran are all lobbying for influence; the Americans too want to maintain their presence (otherwise they fear the Taliban will return and hit back with a vengeance). In this situation, Afghanistan is of course trying to get as much money as it possibly can. In fact, the WSJ report states that details of the April 16 meeting were leaked by Afghans who support a continued US presence in the country but would like to see their 'asking price' go up. Such negotiations are not uncommon but India must ensure that its own interests are not hurt.

 

***************************************

THE PIONEER

EDITORIAL

SHAMEFUL, BUT EXPECTED

CONGRESS SHOWS TRUE COLOURS ONCE AGAIN

The manner in which the Congress has sought to scuttle the findings of the Public Affairs Committee in the Great 2G Spectrum Robbery is, to put it mildly, shameful. What makes Thursday's sheer hooliganism — there can be no other word for the behaviour of the Congress MPs as also those of the DMK, the SP and the BSP — particularly revolting is that it should enjoy the sanction of the party leadership which does not tire of declaring that it is in the frontline in the war on corruption in high places. That declaration, it is now abundantly clear, is as hollow and lacking in credibility as Pakistan pretending to be a crusader against terrorism. It does not require much intelligence to figure out as to why the BSP and the SP should have opted to help the Congress to try and spike the PAC's draft report on the 2G Spectrum scam that deprived the public exchequer of a mind-boggling sum of money, qualifying it as the biggest scandal in independent India. Both Ms Mayawati and Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav are keen that CBI inquiries into their assets should not be taken to their logical conclusion. The Congress, which has mastered the art of using the CBI to secure political leverage in moments of crisis, would be only too happy to return the favour extended to it by the BSP and SP on Thursday. Hence, we can look forward to the inquiries against these stalwarts being put on hold — at least till such time they step out of line in the future. Nor are there any prizes for guessing as to why the Congress should continue to make common cause with its discredited ally, the DMK. Survival in power, let us make no mistake, is the sole objective of the Congress; it is willing to pay any price for this purpose. Therefore, Thursday's brazen attempt to debunk what is now common knowledge — how then Telecom Minister A Raja pulled off the scam, how Prime Minister Manmohan Singh maintained silence, and how then Finance Minister P Chidambaram pretended all was fine when it patently wasn't — should really not come as a surprise. It would have been stunningly surprising had the Congress acted in any other manner.

Yet it would be in order to recall how the Prime Minister had offered to depose before the PAC and the Finance Minister had sought to empower the PAC with an expanded remit before accepting the demand of the Opposition to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee to look into the 2G Spectrum scam. If the stalwarts of this Government were indeed so mindful of the sanctity of the PAC in our parliamentary system, how come they have no qualms about their party denigrating the same institution? Or are Mr Singh, Mr Chidambaram and others in the Congress hierarchy scared of a full discussion in Parliament on the PAC's findings? The Congress may yet ensure that the report gets an official burial. But that will serve little or no purpose. Nor will a doctored report by the JPC, in which the Congress and its allies have a majority, convince anybody of either the Government's or the Prime Minister's innocence. The people of this country now have no doubts that while Raja may have pulled off the robbery, there were others who helped him do so. Their reputation lies in tatters.

 

***************************************

 

 

THE PIONEER

COLUMN

ROMP AND PAGEANTRY

ASHOK MALIK

The world was charmed by the fairytale wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Three decades later, few were bothered about William and Kate's nuptials.

How things change in 30 years. When Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981, it was in many respects a bigger event than the wedding of their son, Prince William, to plain Ms Kate Middleton on Friday. A caveat needs to be entered here. In absolute terms, the television ratings for the wedding of 2011 may well have been higher. More cameras, a bigger contingent of journalists and news anchors descending upon London, merchandise doing brisk business: All of this was a given.

Yet the William-Kate wedding occupies a smaller quantum of the entertainment and leisure economy in 2011 than did the Charles-Diana wedding in respect to its contemporary economy in 1981. This is not just a reflection of Britain's economic troubles. There is a recession in the country today but frankly 1981 was scarcely better. The 1970s were a nightmare decade for the British and Mrs Margaret Thatcher had been elected only two years before that 1981 wedding. She still hadn't "put the Great back into Britain"; the Falklands War and the business turnaround were some distance away.

More than Britain, it is the response of global society to the William-Kate wedding that is telling. In 1981, Britain still mattered. Even if numbers and statistics and growth figures didn't justify its importance, it retained a certain heft by virtue of its imperial history and its institutional legacy. To understand countries such as India, for instance, foreign offices in European capitals and Washington, DC, inevitably turned to Whitehall. Today they make their own judgements, form their own equations.

Likewise, society too seemed to take Britain's establishment — its politicians, its cultural icons and of course its royalty — far more seriously in 1981. When he visited India a few months before his wedding, Prince Charles was treated as more or less a head of state. Every word he spoke was heard in sombre silence. On another note, Bollywood actress Padmini Kolhapure kissed him in public and set off a mini-controversy in a (then) less exhibitionist India.

What if Prince William had visited India this past winter? What if Bipasha Basu, to take a random name, had kissed him? It would probably have got the same coverage as, for example, a B-list Hollywood hunk turning up in India and declaring he loved Aishwarya Rai and she was the most beautiful woman in the world. More seriously, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew (and a host of minor royals) have come to India in recent years without anybody even noticing their presence.

What we are seeing is the diminution of the standing of Britain in not just India but many parts of the world, particularly its former colonies. However, there is a bigger phenomenon at work as well: The democratisation of celebrity. In an age of 24/7 television, of breathless and gasping celebrity-stalking journalism, and of media driving public opinion and fads, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between sustained, lasting and well-deserved fame and simply the flavour of the week.

That's why 30 years ago Prince Charles and Lady Diana were seen as part of a fairy-tale romance. Today, William and Kate are just another everyday 'beautiful people' story. The quantum of reportage may change but for some societies, some sections and some media markets, the wedding of the second-in-line to the British throne and the multicultural nuptials, some years ago, of model Liz Hurley and Indian-origin businessman Arun Nayar would be just as relevant.

Are William and Kate ever going to be as big a couple as Victoria and David Beckham or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt? Thirty years ago, would we even dared have asked that question? Fame is no longer a function of memory. It's a strange animal, one that requires Kate Middleton to compete with Katrina Kaif for the same space on Page 3.

If that is the broader context, there is a narrower one as well. It concerns the family Kate has just married into. Part of the reason for the contraction in the aura of British royalty has been simply its overexposure in the media and the public eye. Ironically, the blame (or credit) for this must go to Diana, Princess of Wales. As she moved from Shy Di, the teenaged girl — certified a virgin, as per palace protocol — who seemed so endearing when she got her husband's full name all mixed up as they exchanged vows before a worldwide audience, to future queen and then to immediate past future queen, something seemed to happen to her.

Perhaps that is untrue. Very little happened to her; she remained just where she was. It's the world that expected her to grow into a public role and grow up as a private person. She accomplished the first with aplomb but the second was a non-starter.

It is tempting to speculate what Diana would have turned out like were she still around. She would probably have become some sort of female Bill Clinton — strictly without the intellectual rigour — as an iconic rallying figure for the trendy Left, the limousine liberals if you like. She would possibly have been out on the streets, marching in protest against the war in Iraq. She would almost certainly have had an active presence on Twitter.

Diana's fame proved fatal, literally some would say. As history's most photographed royal, she was paradoxically also responsible for stripping British royalty of whatever mystique remained. The "People's Princess" became the Commonplace Celebrity. For all their love for their mother, it has made her children wary of an over-the-top public profile, one where the media is used to target your enemies — remember Diana's carefully scripted interviews on the state of her marriage, which admittedly followed Charles' gratuitous public announcements about his infidelity — but ends up hounding you as well.

Other than in learning lessons from Diana's life and tragedy, her son and daughter-in-law are also lucky in that the world will not obsess about them the way it did about the folks at Buckingham Palace a quarter-century ago.

This is the age of the lowest common denominator, not the highest common factor. It means man's voyeuristic instinct can be served as easily by a footballer, his girlfriend and their out-of-wedlock child as by, some day in the future, Kate Middleton (or Princess Catherine as she should be correctly addressed) making the Prince of Wales a grandfather and giving the British their king for the mid-21st century.

As we said, how things change.

malikashok@gmail.com

 

***************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE TIMES OF INDIA

 COMMENT

BERTH PLACES, TRUMP CARDS

 

"You're fired!" He's said that to business apprentices on a reality show. Now realty showman Donald Trump wants US prez Barack Obama laid off as well! He's exhumed an old debate about whether Obama is US-born or not. The latter would make him ineligible to be president. Not accidentally, Trump's eyeing 2012's Republican presidential nomination. So, from doubting Obama's natural born status to questioning whether his intellect matches Ivy League standards, the tycoon's in sniping mode. Only, by releasing a detailed birth certificate showing Honolulu as his place of birth, Obama's dodged the "birther" bullet. In true Hawaii Five-O style.

Donald's been ducked, with Obama reminding Americans of the "silliness" of getting birth pangs over non-issues when America faces serious economic challenges. But the billionaire businessman's vocal here as well. Courtesy rampaging China, Trump warns, America could "fall off a cliff" - presumably unless slayers of Asian dragons such as himself get elected. Does that mean Trump brand menswear, tie pins and teddy bears will no longer have Made-in-China labels? Either way, star Republican Sarah Palin's impressed, herself a moose hunter who's seen Russia if not China from her Alaskan window. Trump, she tweets, 'forced' Obama's Born In The USA gig. With two presidential apprentices uniting, Obama should worry. Isn't Trump now demanding that he display his academic grades? Spoof writers say Obama should go further and reveal his dental records next. For, tooth will out.

India-born, we know how birth-shatteringly important ID-related documents are. As army chief VK Singh has realised, when you're born counts as much as where. His birth year being 1950 or 1951 - the records show both! - means different retirement dates. As also nail-biting suspense for his successors. As for aam admi not yet UID-ed, they need a mountain of ID-certifying papers to access public services. This, besides often finding identity thieves thriving in their name at ballot booths or ration shops. Natural born or no, citizens anyway must sweat to acquire birth and death certificates, ration cards, PAN cards, driving licences, voter IDs, police-verified address proofs, passports, et al. Without greasing bureaucratic palms, few even obtain babu-attested 'evidence' to furnish Obama-style. Then, for many, fake papers will do. How else do under-qualified pilots get a licence to crash?

On their part, our netas must have certificates showing precise dates, hours, minutes and milliseconds of their birth, for the purposes of making political horrorscopes. It's in their electoral stars and not in themselves that they're winners or underlings. So, for them, fortune-tellers must certify auspicious timings to, say, cut ribbons, garland statues, declare proportionate assets, purchase party tickets or topple governments. Post-poll, numerology trumps star-gazing. Here's a berth certificate unique to us desis: it shows the numerical strength of the certificate-holder's party. The bigger the number, the better the ministerial berth.

Mind you, if not in the mood to fete berth anniversaries, voters can always use their Trump card. By saying: You're fired.

***************************************

 THE TIMES OF INDIA

TOP ARTICLE

INDIA'S GILDED AGE

BAIJAYANT 'JAY' PANDA

 

The public enthusiasm for the anti-corruption campaign headed by Anna Hazare has been a shock to the system. Despite a year of ever-larger scandals, many in the establishment had been convinced that this was a storm that would blow over. One of the arguments for this view was that corruption was largely a middle-class issue and not something that significantly impacted political fortunes. Very few still think that.

India is potentially at a major inflection point in matters of public probity. But this is not just due to the Jantar Mantar protest: the tide has been turning for sometime now, and in fact with the support of large numbers of Indians who are distinctly below middle class. A crucial role is now being played by the middle class (more on that later), but the call for change has deeper roots.

Conventional wisdom in Indian politics had two long-cherished rules. First, that the quality of governance was almost irrelevant to electoral results. Instead, the identity politics of caste, religion and region had disproportionate weightage in the country's political calculus. The second great belief was that the electorate voted against incumbents. The exceptions to anti-incumbency used to be those parties who got the first rule right, which is the vote-bank arithmetic, an example being the three elections in Bihar between 1990 and 2004.

The past decade has seen conventional wisdom being turned on its head several times by a few shrewd politicians who sensed an opportunity and aggressively championed good governance as a political strategy. The proponents of this approach have spanned the political spectrum, with the latest poster boy being the JD(U)'s Nitish Kumar. Before him, the BJD's Naveen Patnaik positioned himself similarly to win three straight elections. And the BJP's Narendra Modi, whatever you may think of his politics overall, has acquired a reputation for governance. Even the Congress in Delhi under Sheila Dikshit, before being hit by the CWG scandal, won three elections by campaigning on a governance platform.

These campaigns represent significant turning points in recent Indian politics, and all were made possible not by the middle class, but by hundreds of millions of voters who bought into the promise of good governance.

Ironically, this shifting paradigm seems to have escaped the attention of many national leaders. What else can explain the absence of anyone, or any party, attempting a countrywide extrapolation of a strategy that has succeeded repeatedly in various regions? There are sceptics who argue that an overwhelmingly governance-focussed political strategy would flounder at the national level due to coalition politics. But that is far from obvious. A cursory look at the regional successes cited earlier, particularly the coalition examples in Bihar and Orissa, shows that many politically risky decisions were taken in pursuit of good governance. Although these had the potential to implode, in fact they led to a surge of public support, enabling those leaders to either keep their coalitions in check or to dispense with them altogether.

A similar opportunity to refashion national politics has largely been squandered by politicians of all hues. The opposition parties may gloat at the discomfort that the government is in today, but in fact should be concerned about the damage to the credibility of politics on the whole.

On its part, the governing coalition faces severe challenges. None of the credit for the arrests of and chargesheets against prominent politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats has gone to it. Instead, it is seen as having resisted action until coerced by the activists, the media and the Supreme Court. Apart from the damage to the UPA's reputation, its very continuance must surely come under pressure as the process grinds on.

In all this, the role of the middle class will remain important. Long ignored by politicians for their electoral apathy and lack of numbers, something is now clearly changing. Their purchasing power attracts the national media to focus on the same things as them. And now perhaps their surging numbers through two decades of economic liberalisation, combined with their newfound activism, is reaching a tipping point. If that turns out to be true, Indian politics will be forever changed.

There are startling parallels between today's India and the experience of the other large democracy, the US, over a century ago. The latter part of the 19th century, known as America's Gilded Age, saw the rapid growth of its economy as well as unprecedented levels of corruption, exactly like present-day India. Enormous fortunes were made by new billionaires, the so-called robber barons, and massive corruption among elected officials became commonplace.

Nevertheless, sustained economic growth transformed a nation of farmers into an industrial superpower where the size of the middle class kept growing rapidly. Their sensibilities, and outrage, led to what is called the Progressive Era in American history, in the early 20th century. The progressive activists pushed through many political reforms that tackled corruption and underlined good governance, and even motivated the robber barons into turning great philanthropists.

The similarities with today's India are unmistakable, but the story doesn't end there. Besides the activism of the middle class, equally important was the emergence of a new breed of political leaders who made the cause their own. Many of them, both Democratic and Republican, went on to become presidents. What India needs now are political leaders who eschew point scoring on corruption in favour of non-partisan advocacy for reform.

The writer is a Lok Sabha MP.

***************************************

THE TIMES OF INDIA

TIMES VIEW

ABILITY, NOT ORIGIN, MATTERS

 

There is no reason to disapprove of the appointment of Duncan Fletcher as the new Team India cricket coach. The Zimbabwean has an impressive coaching record that includes presiding over English cricket's revival from 1999 to 2007. He also oversaw the English victory in the 2005 Ashes series, the first since 1987.

At 62, he is vastly experienced and spoken highly of by his peers. The suggestion by former cricketer Sunil Gavaskar that an Indian candidate would have been better for the job as he would have better understood the psyche of Indian players - Gavaskar's favoured nominee is Mohinder Amarnath - is not necessarily true. Three successive foreign coaches show such understanding is not a problem.

Given the stage at which Indian cricket is today, it is important to have a coach who can be a mentor to the young players and maintain a high level of performance. Being the No. 1 team in the world could easily lead to complacency. With his tough yet understated approach, Fletcher is the right man to ensure this doesn't happen. True, unlike his predecessors Fletcher's appointment comes without scrutiny by a selection panel. But outgoing coach Gary Kirsten - a South African - under whose tutelage Team India reached the acme of international cricket, had a glowing recommendation for Fletcher. Also, a foreign coach will be immune to behind the scenes politics and bring professionalism and fresh perspectives to the job.

In the age of IPL where international players regularly share dressing rooms, it is outdated to harp upon a local coach for the national team. A coach should be selected on the basis of experience and record, not origin. A foreign coach who is capable of bringing out the best, guiding the youngsters and pushing the seniors, should definitely be considered. Duncan Fletcher fits the bill.

 

***************************************

THE TIMES OF INDIA

COUNTERVIEW

GAVASKAR'S ON THE BALL

AJAY VAISHNAV

 

If the appointment of Duncan Fletcher as the new coach of Team India has been greeted with disapproval by legendary Indian cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev, then blame it on the BCCI. Gavaskar is spot on in expressing displeasure with the board's decision to not consider an Indian coach since the era of John Wright.

BCCI's mindset seems to be that only foreign coaches can work well in India. That the BCCI didn't even consider a single ex-Indian cricketer's name for the job indicates that this notion is now well entrenched in the corridors of the most powerful board in the cricketing world.

If Indian coaches are chosen from among former players for the Indian side, they would have better understanding of the pressures under which Indian players work. Not to mention, as Gavaskar has pointed out, that most Indian players are from the Hindi-speaking belt now. Personal chemistry is extremely important in motivating players, and only a native Hindi speaker can establish the personal rapport with players that is needed to make them gel as a team.

Indian cricket is no longer confined to metropolitan centres; instead, many of its most talented players come from small towns. As part of this evolution, we must now question the colonial mindset that favours foreign coaches and, instead, consider Indian coaches only for the post.

Not only that, in Fletcher's case, the BCCI arbitrarily bypassed the screening committee that was created to closely scrutinise the profile of applicants. The board's apparent fascination for foreign coaches stems from the warped perception that an Indian would get involved in the politics of the game rather than focussing on the job. It is wrong to presume that seasoned former Indian players like Mohinder Amarnath, Robin Singh and Venkatesh Prasad cannot rise to the challenge of coaching the high-pressure, high-profile team. And as a plus, they will communicate with Indian players better.

 

***************************************

THE TIMES OF INDIA

REBOOTING INDIA

INDIA, US: ESTRANGED DEMOCRACIES?

KANTI BAJPAI

 

India and the US matter to each other and have gone a long way in constructing a mutually beneficial relationship. The two 'estranged democracies' of the Cold War have become fairly robust 'engaged democracies' over the past decade. President Barack Obama's visit to India in November 2010 and his expression of support for India's UN ambitions was a high point in the India-US engagement. Six months later, however, we are at a low point.

There are many reasons India and the US should be close. Both worry about terrorism and Islamic extremism. Both have a stake in a stable Pakistan. The future of Afghanistan also is a vital concern. The safety of the high seas against piracy, particularly off the Horn of Africa and in the Indian Ocean, is a shared worry. The rise of China is unstoppable, but its behaviour internationally produces anxieties in New Delhi and Washington. India and the US have a growing economic relationship, one that is more consequential for India but increasingly so for the US as well.

The stability of the world economy is part of the conversation that the two countries are having bilaterally and multilaterally. Other global issues that demand their attention include nuclear proliferation, climate change, disaster management, epidemics and other medical threats, and the future of Africa and West Asia. There are a range of bilateral issues too that bind them - Indian immigrants in the US, Indian access to US higher education, work visas for Indians and Americans, development cooperation, and technology transfers and co-development, amongst others.

On these and other issues, India and the US have forged a dialogue bilaterally and in larger gatherings. As a result, India-US relations have a density and balance that is historically unprecedented. Yet, the signs going forward are not at all good.

In the past several months a number of developments have complicated the relationship, not the least of which is the resignation of ambassador Timothy Roemer, within hours of New Delhi's decision not to shortlist the US F-16 and F-18A aircraft in the Multi-Combat Role Aircraft (MCRA) selection process. Indeed, the consequences of the MCRA decision are going to be felt for years - and not positively. That the ambassador resigned so precipitately is surely no accident and is extraordinarily ill-timed for the general health of the relationship. To appreciate this, consider that there are only 18 months before the US presidential campaign enters its final phase in 2012. There is a good chance, therefore, that India will not have a US ambassador in town until 2013 and, if it does, he or she will be a lame duck. To compound matters, India's ambassador, Meera Shankar, is near the end of her term.

A series of developments have clouded the relationship. The US's sale of F-16 aircraft to Pakistan, the tardiness with which Washington reacted to India's desire to access David Headley (the mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks), continuing differences over Afghanistan, the US's tagging of Indian university students, worries amongst Indians about US H-1 visas, the humiliating 'pat down' of Indian ambassadors Meera Shankar and Hardeep Puri at US airports, New Delhi's handling of the nuclear liability issue, its decision to abstain on the Libya vote and its subsequent criticism of the western use of force in that country, US perceptions of the recent BRICS summit in China, and the WikiLeaks - all these have buffeted India-US relations.

Ambassador Roemer has said that he is leaving on a high note. While Roemer has been amongst the more successful US ambassadors in New Delhi, he leaves after one of the shortest tenures in recent memory (in recent memory, only Thomas Pickering has done a shorter term).

With New Delhi's MCRA decision, relations are in the doldrums. Looking ahead, the Obama administration's interest in India, never very high, will sink to nothing. On the Indian side, the meltdown of the UPA government means that serious decision-making on foreign policy is utterly stalled. The best we can hope is that India and the US don't delay in appointing new ambassadors. Those who wish India-US relations ill must be rubbing their hands with pleasure at the state of affairs.

 

***************************************

 

******************************************************************************************

HINDUSTAN TIMES

OUR TAKE

IT'S PARTISAN POLITICS AGAIN

It wasn't so long ago that the Congress leadership was all for the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) looking into the 2G spectrum issue. "The PAC is a joint parliamentary committee presided over by a senior member of the Opposition. I am willing to appear before it." These were the words of no less a personage than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee offering a multi-disciplinary investigative agency to assist the PAC headed by Opposition leader Murli Manohar Joshi. But the vehemence with which the UPA members of the PAC have rejected the report is puzzling and worrying. Allegations that the report was outsourced and that the PAC had no right to criticise the PM go against the very grain of Mr Singh's desire to resolve this issue.

The issue has moved from 2G to whether or not the report stands on the technicality of Mr Joshi having walked and a substitute allowing the report to be rejected by 11 of the 21 members. Significantly, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, arch rivals in UP, seem to have found common cause in scuttling the report along with the UPA. This is a most unfortunate development at a time when the corruption issue is exercising the country as never before. It would seem from this spectacle that our political establishment is unable to get away from narrow partisan concerns. It now appears that Mr Joshi will present the draft report to the Speaker who will take the final call. If the members who have rejected the report feel that their views weren't accommodated in it, they could surely have put this forward in a democratic manner. The atmosphere in the country today on the issue of corruption is such that this move will raise further doubts instead of making things more transparent. Allegations that the draft report was leaked may be valid but that alone is not reason enough to reject it in its entirety.

So after a short period in which both the Opposition and the ruling coalition seemed to be on the same side on the corruption issue, battle-lines have been drawn once again. This will only serve to further devalue our democratic institutions and lower the image of our elected representatives in the eyes of the people. If this is the fate of the draft PAC report, people will lose faith that the Joint Parliamentary Committee report will fare any better. The UPA government had just begun to recover lost ground with its decisive action against some of those under suspicion in the 2G scam, albeit a little too late. This signal that it means business on the issue of corruption will be meaningless in the face of these obstructionist tactics on a report from a committee that it endorsed earlier. So, in many ways we are back to the drawing board once again.

***************************************

HINDUSTAN TIMES

THIS IS OUR JAITAPUR

SEEMA ALAVI

 

This is in response to Bahar Dutt's article (Different Rules for different people, Comment, April 28). As someone who admires her reporting, I was surprised to find how ill-informed she is about the campaign against the waste-to-energy incinerator that is being built barely 2 kms from thickly congested residential areas in south Delhi. I do not wish to go into the technological merits and demerits of the incinerator and the environment versus development debate because Dutt and the anti-incinerators campaigners of Okhla are on the same page on that.

I do wish to clarify here that the Okhla campaign is hardly, as Dutt mentioned, one of 'posh south Delhi' alone, its certainly not about aesthetic concerns on 'stench of the garbage', nor are there any official 'different rules' for it. Instead the campaign identifies with other vulnerable communities and sees parallels with their protests. It is unfair and misleading to distort facts and trivialise the campaign as an elite time pass.

First, like Jaitapur, the residents of south Delhi's Okhla area were not consulted in any discussion on the incinerator. The so-called public hearing was a farce attended by three employees of the plant. The procedural laxity on the part of the Delhi government meant the exclusion from consultation of not just the 'posh South Delhi' residential areas of Sukhdev Vihar, Maharani Bagh and New Friends Colony, but also the thickly populated low-income group Muslim minority areas of Haji Colony, Ghaffar Manzil, Jamianagar, and Harkesh Nagar. The protest, therefore, is a rainbow coalition in terms of income groups, religious and professional categories.

Second, I am shocked that an environment journalist like Dutt can trivialise the scientifically proven toxic emissions from such waste-to-energy plants and reduce its hazards to mere 'stench of the garbage'. It is not only the stink and the aesthetics that has brought hundreds of people together. The neighborhood has been living with the stench of burning hospital waste from a bio-medical waste plant that shares the boundary with the Sukhdev Vihar DDA flats. It belches out pollutants and thick black smoke despite a high court order to re-locate it. And now the residents are worried about their own health and of that of the medically un-insured poor Muslim neighbours once the plant starts functioning. The current location is surrounded by Apollo, Escorts and Holy Family Hospitals, a Cheshire old home, Jamia Millia Islamia and, of course, the thickly-congested population of economically poor and medically vulnerable members of the minority community.

Finally, the anti-incinerator campaign sees striking parallels with Jaitapur and other such locations chosen for setting up nuclear and other energy plants. Indeed, it realises that all such campaigns across the globe share one referent: most sites are in low income, vulnerable minority- concentrated locations. The Okhla anti-incinerator campaign too is a victim of such a global universalism in the choice of locating both experimental and scientifically proven hazardous projects cheek by jowl with vulnerable residential areas.

( Seema Alavi is professor, University of Delhi )

The views expressed by the author are personal

***************************************

 

HINDUSTAN TIMES

A PERILOUS PATH

BARKHA DUTT

 

You don't have be a clairvoyant reader of tea- leaves to spot the paradoxical, but extremely illuminating patterns of behaviour that defined India's headlines this past fortnight.  

In Delhi, and perhaps in swish drawing-rooms across metropolitan India, the anti-politician chorus was hitting a crescendo. For a middle-class which was once too prickly to accept Slumdog Millionaire's portrayal of grime and poverty as a defining image of India, we were strangely delighted to have the western press discuss our democracy and compare Jantar Mantar to Tahrir Square. Why blame them? This is now our own stated self-image. And as we clicked 'Like' on all the dislike and hatred that was given vent to online, we breezily offered Facebook as an alternative to elections.

But as the internet generation declared its derision for all things political, it was simultaneously poll time in key states of the country. And outside the self-loathing bubble that we have created on our laptops and blackberries, was a very different and telling reality. The voter turnout was staggeringly high in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. West Bengal broke many previous records when the north of the state revealed that almost 85% of the electorate had felt engaged enough to vote.

Travelling through rural Bengal almost two weeks ago on finance minister Pranab Mukherjee's campaign trail, I marvelled, not for the first time, at the fact that even the absence of bijli, sadak, pani had not turned the voter here into an apolitical, perennially disgruntled creature. In Nalhati, where Mukherjee's son, Abhijeet, was fighting his maiden political battle in a seat traditionally held by the Left, a dusty, bumpy mud track wound its way around a cluster of impoverished families. There was no road for miles; and a single handpump belched out a muddy trickle that passed for water.

Yet when the chopper landed on the local school grounds throwing up a tornado of sand, the people still looked up at the skies as if searching for signs of possible change. I so vividly remember the determined expression on the face of an old woman, a thin-cotton sari wrapped around her fragile frame, as she pushed her way through the crowds to get a good listening seat at the rally that evening.

If Tahrir Square is the new metaphor for a determined citizen, why doesn't she get to represent that? Or must you hate politics, democracy and the electoral process to be celebrated these days? Or perhaps be a shoe-hurler before the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will want to write about you?

Did anyone notice that while we were so busy hating our democracy, panchayat elections were held in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in more than a decade. Usually, the right-wing loony fringe is not just well organised in the venom it orchestrates online; it is especially vocal against anyone with a nuanced perspective on the genuine issues of alienation in the Valley. Any talk of 'political solutions' to the Kashmir issue gets you labelled 'anti-national' and invites instant online stalking.

Yet, here was a historically high participation in the local polls, that mirroring the previous two assembly elections, had defied boycott calls and militant threats. While middle class India was seeking affirmation in autocratic regimes and wanting to be more like China or Singapore, a young woman candidate was shot dead in Budgam district.

Several candidates withdrew their nominations fearing the same fate. And yet, even after the killing, the multi-phase panchayat elections has seen voting figures hit an 80% turnout. This is the how high the stakes are to protect the vote in some parts of India. No one is over-simplifying the political conclusions that can be drawn from the Kashmir local polls. Veteran watchers of the state are able to separate the complex and seemingly contradictory strands of participation in elections and problems of alienation co-existing. But equally, no one can deny that every election that is fair and transparent and is able to draw on the engagement of the people is one step towards mending broken fences. And yet, we were so heady on our own 'people power' that we forgot to acknowledge the real and meaningful assertions of popular will.

High-voter turnouts are not signs of benign forgiveness of political misdeeds. On the contrary, statisticians will tell you they often herald decisive mandates and could thus be tell-tale symbols of popular discontent as well. But their participation in democracy entitles voters to anger much more than our arm-chair venom.

It is no one's case that democracy is an antidote for all our ailments. And electoral victories in the court of public opinion does not diminish the judicial accountability of any politician accused of violating the law. So, yes, India's democratic institutions are weak and we are correct to be sceptical, even cynical. But can we with any honesty opt out of a system and still feel entitled to pronounce on it?

While we may not remember him on most days, when it suits us we often like to cloak our discontent behind the dignity of quoting Gandhi. So here are some sage words from the Mahatma who presciently said: "Democracy is an impossible thing until power is shared by all but let not democracy degenerate into mobocracy." And talking of Gandhi, it's a matter of some irony that we think our own country is one where the political process is not worthy of our respect or attention. But we see no contradiction in spending the weekend drooling over a 'royal' wedding, vicariously feasting on our slightly slavish cravings, left over from the Age of the Commonwealth.

Er, "people power?"

( Barkha Dutt is Group Editor, English News, NDTV )

 The views expressed by the author are personal

***************************************

HINDUSTAN TIMES

RIP: THE LITERARY PIANO

NAMITA BHANDARE

 

News of the imminent death of the manual typewriter sent romantics all over our interconnected planet into a state of gloom. Neither the demise of the vinyl record nor the unsung departure of the rotary dial telephone triggered the sort of lamentation set off by a news report in the Business Standard: Godrej & Boyce, the last frontier for the manual typewriter, was stopping the production of its last brand, the Godrej Prima. The report went viral, inspiring requiems from Auckland to Vancouver. Not so fast, cautioned others. Apparently a New Jersey company still manufactures typewriters — including a see-through one that is very popular in prisons (easier for guards to spot contraband in its innards).

Phew, the manual typewriter still lives. Yet, what was surprising was the response, particularly by Facebookers and Tweeters, most of whom have probably never touched one. Why on earth would anyone shed tears over a gadget that can't store, won't google or spell-check and doesn't give you a choice of fonts and typeface? Surely, the typewriter's obituary is overdue.

Yes, the typewriter continues to have its more prosaic uses, outside our courts, for instance, where a small army of typists hammer out pleadings, replies, affidavits and other legalese. But their numbers are dwindling and you have to wonder: for how much longer?

Typewriting — the real thing, not the two-fingered tango — was once an essential skill. The school that admitted me to its journalism programme in 1986 insisted that I know how to type at a certain speed and so off I went to Rajesh and Naresh Gupta's typing school where I learned to mind my qwertys and asdfgs. The trick was 'touch' typing; the penalty for glancing at your keyboard was to type the page all over again.

When I went looking for my first journalism job, one of the considerable seductions of the now defunct Indian Post newspaper in Mumbai was that it had these new-fangled computers. Change was knocking at the door also at the Old Lady of Boribunder. But the Times of India hadn't reckoned with the resistance of its powerful Mumbai union which, bizarrely, didn't want computers. For over a month, every lunch hour, protesting journalists pushed back their typewriters to angrily bang their pens on their desks.

What accounts for our enduring nostalgia for the typewriter? The typewriter physically connected writer to paper. It forced concentration. You had to be sure of what you wanted to write — cut-paste was not a matter of hitting controls x and y, nor could you open windows to quickly skype a friend or buy a book on Flipkart. It was a private symphony between you and your sheet of paper. Even now, you can spot old-timers from the sound of their keyboard. I come down so hard on mine, the volume building with the speed at which my fingers fly off the keyboard, that many letters on the keys have been erased. When I try the genteel tip-tipping of my children, it just won't cut it: typing must have its accompanying music, even though many of the notes — the hard cc-rrunch of the roll when you fed in your paper, the polite ping when you reached the end of a line, the triumphant crack of the carriage return — are extinct. These were the sounds that led a Scientific American article in 1867 to describe the newly-invented typewriter as a 'literary piano'.

It's in the imagination that the typewriter lives for a generation of writers — sleeves rolled up, slouched over a Remington, cigarette dangling from mouth, a glass of whisky on the side, pounding out their masterpiece. It's an image that has stuck, from Mark Twain, apparently the first important writer to send out a typed manuscript, to Jack Kerouac who wrote On the Road single-spaced on just one roll of paper, 120 feet long, writers and typewriters just go together.

Sure, it's a no-contest. Given a choice, I'll choose my computer over a typewriter any day. That doesn't mean, however, that I won't feel a twinge when the last one heads to the museum.

( Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based writer )

The views expressed by the author are personal

***************************************

 

T tion c wo Indian scientists -- Ajay Anil Gurjar and Siddhartha A. Ladhake -- are wielding sophisticated mathematics to dissect and analyse the traditional medita- chanting sound `Om'. The `Om team' has published six tion chanting sound `Om'. The `Om team' has published six monographs in academic journals, which plumb certain acoustic subtlety of Om that they say is "the divine sound".

Om has many variations. In a study published in the Inter- national Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, the researchers explain: "It may be very fast, several cycles per second. Or it may be slower, several seconds for each cycling of [the] Om mantra. Or it might become extremely slow, with the mmmmmm sound continuing in the mind for much longer periods but still pulsing at that slow rate." The important technical fact is that no matter what form of Om one chants at whatever speed, there's always a basic `Omness' to it. Both Gurjar, principal at Amravati's Sipna College of Engineering and Technology, and Ladhake, an assistant professor in the same institution, specialise in electronic signal processing. They now sub-specialise in analysing the one very special signal. In the introductoy paper, Gurjar and Ladhake explain that, "Om is a spiritual mantra, out- standing to fetch peace and calm."

No one has explained the biophysi- cal processes that underlie the `fetch- ing of calm' and taking away of thoughts. Gurjar and Ladhake's time-fre- quency analysis is a tiny step along that hitherto little-taken branch of the path of enlightenment. They apply a mathematical tool called wavelet transforms to a digital recording of a person chanting `Om'. Even people with no mathematical back- ground can appreciate, on some level, one of the blue-on- white graphs included in the monograph. This graph, the authors say, "depicts the chanting of `Om' by a normal per- son after some days of chanting". The image looks like a pile of nearly identical, slightly lopsided pancakes held together with a skewer, the whole stack lying sideways on a table. To behold it is to see, if nothing else, repetition.

Much as people chant the sound `Om' over and over again, Gurjar and Ladhake repeat much of the same analy- sis in their other five studies, managing each time to chip away at some slightly different mathematico-acoustical fine point. The Guardian

******************************************************************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

A VOTE TOO MANY

 

For weeks it had been clear that the Public Accounts Committee was headed for a fracas — especially after Congress and DMK members took up their party line that once a joint parliamentary committee on telecom had been constituted, the PAC should desist from inquiring into 2G spectrum allocation. The argument was, and remains, flimsy. Yet, no one could have expected the meeting called to take a final view on the draft to collapse so fast into such unprecedented mayhem. After UPA MPs tried to force a vote, a move resisted by opposition MPs, PAC chairman M.M. Joshi adjourned the meet. But the UPA MPs — who with support from a BSP and an SP MP, held a 11-10 majority on the committee — stayed on and elected themselves a new chairman, Saifuddin Soz, and rejected the report. This is a tactic of such breathtaking recklessness that the UPA should consider what it implies for the committee system in Parliament and for the immediate need to bring a working civility to Parliament.

The PAC is a committee of long lineage, and after Independence it has been incrementally strengthened as a watchdog on the government's finances. Early on ministers were kept out of the committee, and by the mid-1960s a convention was adopted of appointing an opposition MP as chairperson. It is a convention that's mostly worked well, and it has served as a mechanism to nurture working relations between government and opposition so critical in a parliamentary democracy. This is why the UPA's ploy of forcing a vote is so reckless — it threatens to wreck the consultative and give-and-take mechanisms between treasury and opposition benches that steel the legislature into the sum of more than the ruling party/ coalition's numbers. Certainly, the current stand-off draws from the politically charged 2G context. And Joshi, as committee chair, could have done more to prepare the members for a more deliberative paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the draft, especially the contentious portions relating to the prime minister. He should have seen the polarised my-truth-versus-yours political environment and refrained from making his press conferences such a performance.

Of course, Joshi's job was not made any easier by the Congress's obstructionism. And ultimately, the PAC — by extension, Parliament itself — has been let down by the UPA. Forcing a vote — using brute numbers to overturn convention — is not always the

***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

TAKING OFF

 

After doing little for years, things are moving in A.K. Antony's ministry of defence. First the armed forces spent the entire defence budget for fiscal 2010-11 — after returning approximately Rs 5,000 crore in 2007-08, Rs 7,000 crore in 2008-09 and Rs 5,200 crore in 2009-10 unspent. Then the MoD asked for more, and the 2010-11 defence budget saw an 11.6 per cent hike — with 12 per cent more for capital expenditure meant for procuring, among other things, 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA). For the MMRCA, French Dassault Aviation's Rafale and the Eurofighter consortium's Typhoon have been asked to extend their commercial bids. In the process, Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet and Lockheed Martin's F-16 IN Super Viper were rejected, along with Russia's MiG-35 and Sweden's Saab JAS-39 Gripen. The MMRCA contract is worth $10 billion, and the diplomatic investment made by bidding nations meant rejections could leave a sour taste.

The salient facts of the process this time round must be noted and cheered. First, it has been transparent, with rejections made on technical grounds. The two MMRCA selected performed the best in trials and were seen to be closest to the Indian Air Force's (IAF) requirements. Second, it was the IAF's technical expertise that determined which contenders stayed on, without political interference. Third, the spectre of scandal in defence procurement that has haunted the UPA government would stop arms purchase at the slightest hint of controversy. As a result, while trials and tenders were falling prey to such fears, the Indian armed forces were being undermined as an institution, blunting our conventional response capability. The IAF itself has seen a sharp decline in squadron numbers. The MMRCA bidding process so far is encouraging, and it should mark a new beginning.

Large-scale military procurement must also consider offsets and indigenisation, access to technology, long-term time and cost optimisation. However, it is dangerous to reduce, or elevate, any military procurement to a purely political decision — as might have been the case if the MoD had chosen Boeing and Lockheed Martin despite the IAF thumbs down. Those who will use the equipment must have the word on what best answers their needs.

***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

PEOPLE POWER

 

Questions raised by Anna Hazare's Jantar Mantar protest still linger. Was it a victory for the people, on whose behalf a few fought for their seat at the table and their right to frame a law that held the powerful to account? Or is it a partial cause, with a few well-organised and well-connected making unsubstantiated claims to represent "the people"?

These questions are important because the worthy citizens rallied by that protest appear to be united by nothing but their antipathy to "the way things are" and their common sense of betrayal by those that India elected. Their solutions, certainly, are absurd. The Lokpal, as envisioned by five of them on the drafting committee, is an overweening, unconstitutional monster empowered to police and adjudicate anyone, fitted out with contempt of court powers. But who set up these people to decide for the rest of a diverse country? And what stops another interest group from hijacking legislation for their own ends, say a group that wants reservation in jobs and higher education or some other self-serving petition? These demands acquired critical mass because it was an easily understood middle-class issue, and excitable television anchors decided it was a picturesque cause. Its apolitical emptiness makes it easy to relate to, and easy to commandeer.

Electoral democracy involves filtering the demands of diverse publics through representative institutions. Without this mediation, and the inbuilt checks and balances of executive, legislature and judiciary, direct agenda-setting by "the people" can lead to many passionate errors — as witnessed around the world. The Lokpal agitation touched a real chord in its despair about the political system — how entry is a by-invitation-only affair, how elections are skewed by money and power, etc. That is difficult to deny, and equally important to reform. Certainly, elections alone are small consolation without constitutional arrangements meant to check the accumulation of power — we need a democratic government, and we need a deliberative government. The only way to adjudicate between competing demands is a system where one ambition counteracts the other. But the truth of the matter is that a democracy is only as good as its institutions. And to make democracy more meaningful, we need to keep chipping away at the problems that show up in these institutions — not to debunk those institutions for the lure of self-certified men and women of the people, for that is the way of dictatorships.

 ***************************************

 

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

COLUMN

THE GREAT LETDOWN

SHEKHAR GUPTA

 

There are parallels in the mandates that Rajiv Gandhi's Congress won in December 1984, and Sonia Gandhi's UPA in May 2009. In both cases an aspirational electorate brought back an incumbent to power on a promise of optimistic change. A fortnight from the second anniversary of UPA 2 you can also begin to see parallels in the pace with which the Congress of 1984 squandered its mandate, and the UPA now.

Rajiv Gandhi was undone by his party's old guard, who he had taken on frontally a bit too early in the day. He had not yet prepared his party, or public opinion, for the break from the past that he articulated so bravely in his speech at the Bombay AICC session (in 1985). When the formidable immune system of entrenched old interests struck back, he did not have the time, support base or firepower to fight back. The move downhill began just as his government entered its third year, and gathered momentum on way to the 1989 elections.

UPA 2 began its decline even before it was two. For one, it had brought along its Bofors from UPA 1, the telecom scam. But to call the telecom scam primarily responsible for UPA 2's predicament would be to oversimplify the case. Because in politics, a scandal or an event can spin so out of control as to destroy a strong, elected government and a popular, credible leader only if the political ground for that has been prepared by, what else, poor politics and leadership.

Rajiv Gandhi's politics started going downhill with his pandering to the Muslim Right on the Shah Bano judgment that alienated moderate Muslims within his own party, liberals among his voters, and gave the Hindu Right a cause. From then to Bofors, and the shilanyas at Ayodhya to please the devout Hindus instead, it was one long series of political blunders with no redemption or recovery. UPA 2's blunders are of a different nature, and a direct result of fundamentally flawed politics.

This government was voted back to power by a resurgent

India making a bold and widely hailed move from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration, something this newspaper also underlined on the day after the results in a front-page editorial ('Hands down', IE, May 17, 2009). But it would seem that, once elected, it forgot all about that aspirational young India and slipped back into its own, old, povertarian, everything-is-wrong-where-are-we-headed discourse. Not a step was taken on economic reforms, if anything some were reversed as so many Central ministers, now full of the arrogance of re-election, were back to the old Congress instinct of extortion and rent-seeking. The return of this depredatory governance fed directly into the alienation sparked by the government's inability to take the telecom scam head-on. The others that followed, Commonwealth Games and Adarsh (though the Centre had almost nothing to do with it), only fed that rising anger.

From day one, UPA 2 seemed like it was embarrassed by the very factors that had given its voters such an aspirational belief. It was shy of talking growth, employment generation, modernisation, even national pride. It was shy of even sending a thank-you card of some kind to those who had voted it back to power. In 2009, the UPA won almost every single city in a rapidly urbanising India. Yet, rather than reform urban governance, it sat silently as one urban agency after the other became more corrupt, more whimsical and more cruelly authoritarian, and most in cities under its own governments. Ask anybody in Delhi who has to take an MCD permit to build something or get a certificate from the DDA. Can you even get a birth certificate, a driving licence, a passport in time without paying somebody? You are first not told what you can build, and after you build, the same guys come to demolish it. In Mumbai, no apartment buyer knows how much square-footage he is paying for and what he will get. All cities are so short of school and college seats, and a child is doomed unless her uncle is a big shot who can swing her into a decent school. Dr Singh's government and Sonia's Congress party should have begun to address these issues from day one in their second innings. They did nothing of the sort, and the result is the mainly well-heeled, but angry and humiliated, city folk who are walking around with candles, "mera neta chor hai" tattoos and demanding that their MPs be fed to vultures or dogs, or both. An aspirational society is an impatient society. Even more so when it is so young, and getting younger.

Nobody in the Congress or the UPA has been talking to this India, whether in cities or villages. This has been the quietest, the most shy government in India's history, and nobody can govern this country from the trenches. If the mood at Jantar Mantar is anti-politician, or for an apolitical system, this has been an incredibly apolitical government, which is its own and India's tragedy. Because in a democracy, politicians must speak with people, to sell their ideas, plans, explain their mistakes, promise redress, and so on. But here, Sonia and Rahul rarely, if ever, speak in public. They almost never speak to the media or make an intervention in Parliament and rarer still on behalf of the government. The party behaves as if this government has been outsourced to bureaucrats. The prime minister too speaks rarely and his minders seem to not only draw great comfort from it, but also take pride in it, as if they have a prime minister they need to protect, and hide from public interaction and gaze. If you do not speak to the voters for two full years, they will turn to somebody, to the courts, to high-decibel TV anchors, to Anna Hazare.

Petrified Congressmen are today coming out in self-serving defence of politics and democracy. But their own party set up this government as if politics was India's curse and only what was apolitical was virtuous. How else would you explain the formation of the National Advisory Council (NAC) with a statutorily mandated position, and to which Sonia Gandhi related (in public perception) much more strongly than to her government? In the name of civil society, the NAC was not only given the powers to draft legislation but also to attack the government and its policies relentlessly. That is why the Congress now sounds so hollow when it questions the demand that "civil society" draft the new Lokpal legislation. If Sonia's civil society can do it, why not Anna's? And please stop giving us sanctimonious lectures on Parliament's sovereignty over law-making.

These, the de-politicisation of its own political approach, and a clinical but systematic distancing of the party and its top leadership from its government, are UPA 2's equivalent of Rajiv Gandhi's premature assault on the old guard and the Shah Bano bill. Telecom and other scams have filled the moral space thus vacated to become today's Bofors, and to symbolise popular anger. Howsoever good the results of May 13 for the Congress, they will not reverse this downslide. But they will provide a breather. If Sonia, Manmohan Singh and, most importantly, Rahul still want to reverse the slide, and not write off 2014 as well, they will have to totally reboot their politics. And remember not to repeat the mistakes Rajiv made in his government's second half, though the spectacle the Congress created at the PAC, unfortunately, reminded you so much of Shankaranand's shameful JPC on Bofors.

 ***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

ALL ABOUT YOU

NANDAGOPAL RAJAN

 

I was in Chennai last week, my first visit to the southern metro. To make sure I did not get lost in this strange city, I often switched on the Google Maps software on my phone to pinpoint my location and to search for directions. With just a few seconds of configuration using cellphone towers, I knew where I was. So did Google. And the rest of the world, for I was also logged in to Google's Latitude, which shows the location of users on a map.

Thankfully, my app works only when I switch it on. But if you are using an Apple iPhone or a high-end iPad with 3G, or a smart phone running on Google's Android OS, similar data is being transmitted to company servers all the time. So Apple and Google keep a record of where exactly their users have been, how much time they spend at a location and how frequently they visit certain spots. In most countries, a court order is mandatory for even government agencies to keep such records.

To make matters worse, people using the fancy iPhone and

Android apps unwittingly give away more private information. Apple knows you were in a certain part of a city looking for an Italian restaurant, or worse. You might have followed this up with a tweet or a Facebook post about your experience at the eatery. Thankfully, most companies don't misuse such information. But what if they did? The next time you went to the same part of town, you could get a message saying why not try ABC Italian Restaurant, since you didn't like XYZ last time.

If you think that is bad, the truth is this kind of data retention is comparatively less harmful. Take Facebook, for instance. What started as Mark Zuckerberg's little college website now knows the best-kept secrets of roughly 600 million people. Most of us don't care, but the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, knows everything about you — who you are married to, or dating, your favourite TV show, political affiliation, even the colour of your underwear, if you were stupid enough to post about it. Anyone who has used the Facebook photo uploader of late knows it can recognise most of your friends, and that too without any human help.

But then just a fraction of Facebook users ends up giving credit card information to the company. No such luck for the 77 million members in Sony's PlayStation network who have to give credit card details along with other personal data. After reports that most of this information was hacked into last week, Sony is running for cover. While the company is working with law-enforcement agencies to catch the culprits, it's also asking users to exercise caution. The only saving grace here could be the fact that most hackers attempt such breaches just for the kick of it, and don't intend to misuse data.

Meanwhile, faced with anger from customers and governments across the world, Apple finally acknowledged that it had made mistakes. CEO Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave, gave an interview explaining the company's delay in coming up with a response to what the blogs are now calling the "iSpy" controversy. "The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real. It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated," he said. "We haven't been tracking anybody... never have, never will." Google too conceded that it had collected similar location data through its Android phones .

It was up to the Apple website to publish a Q&A explaining that it was only "maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested". The company says all data with it is anonymous and encrypted and it cannot identify the source of this data.

But tech blogger John Grubber knows there's a bug in Apple's technology. He writes in his blog "Daring Fireball": "...historical data should be getting culled but isn't, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight, that is, someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that's meant to serve as a cache

of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history."

Apple is sure to fix the bug with a software update, but it's time we gave a serious thought to how much of us we should put online.

 ***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

WHEN CORRUPTION IS VIEWED FUZZILY'

ARUNDHATI ROY

 

We are here, all of us, because like many others in this country we are concerned about the rampant corruption that is hollowing out the institutions of our democracy. Twenty years ago, when the era of "liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation" descended on us, we were told that public sector units and public infrastructure needed to be privatised because they were corrupt and inefficient.

We were told the problem was systemic. Now that nearly everything has been privatised, when our rivers, mountains, forests, minerals, water supply, electricity and communications systems have been sold to private corporations, we find that corruption has grown exponentially, the growth rate of corruption has surpassed everything we could possibly imagine. In scam after scam, the figures that are being siphoned away are completely off the charts. It is not surprising that this has enraged the people of this country. But that anger does not always show signs of being accompanied by clear thinking.

Among the millions of understandably furious people who thronged to Jantar Mantar to support Anna Hazare and his team, corruption was presented as a moral issue, not a political one, or a systemic one — not as a symptom of the disease bu the disease itself. There were no calls to change or dismantle a system that was causing the corruption. Perhaps this was not surprising because many of those middle-class people who flocked to Jantar Mantar and much of the corporate-sponsored media who broadcast the gathering, calling it a "revolution" — India's Tahrir Square — had benefited greatly from the economic reforms that have led to corruption on this scale. (The same media has in the past ignored rallies of hundreds of thousands of poor people who have gathered in Delhi in the past because their demands did not suit the corporate agenda). It was not surprising then, that several corporate CEOs generously donated lakhs of rupees to support the campaign, cellphone companies weighed in with free SMS messages — here was their chance to undo the beating the public image of the corporate sector and corporate media had taken when the 2G scam hit the news.

When corruption is viewed fuzzily, as just a touchy-feely "moral" problem then everybody can happily rally to the cause — fascists, democrats, anarchists, god-squadders, day-trippers, the right, the left and even the deeply corrupt, who are usually the most enthusiastic demonstrators. It's a pot that is easy to make but much easier to break. Anna Hazare threw the first stone at his own pot when he shocked his supporters from the left by rolling Narendra Modi onto centre-stage, in his "Development Chief Minister" clothes. Leaving aside the debate on Modi's extremely dubious achievements in the field of "development" — many of us were left to wonder whether we were being offered a supposedly incorruptible fascist as an alternative to hopelessly corrupt supposed democrats.

I am not against having a strong anti-corruption body, though I would like to be reassured that it in itself does not become an unaccountable, undemocratic institution accruing great powers to itself. However I do not believe that we can fight communal fascism or economic totalitarianism (that has led to us having more than 800 million people in this country living on less than 20 rupees a day) with only legal measures.

As long as we have these economic policies in place, the National Employment Guarantee Act will never be able to do away with hunger and malnutrition, anti-corruption laws will not do away with injustice, and criminal laws will not do away with communal fascism, the twin sibling of economic totalitarianism. They will, at best, be mitigating measures. As the historian Howard Zinn said "the rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and power in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered."

Will the Right to Information Bill or the Jan Lokpal Bill force the government to disclose the secret MoUs with private corporations it has signed in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand for which it is prepared to wage war against its poorest citizens? If they do, then these MoUs will disclose the fact that the government is selling the country's minerals to private corporations for a pittance, a small royalty. It's not corruption. It's completely above board, it's legal plunder which is more scandalous, and has economic, environmental and human costs that will outstrip the 2G scam several times over. If we do get the information, what will we do with it? I do believe that if anyone present at the "revolution" at Jantar Mantar had raised the question of the secret MoUs, the adoring TV coverage and a good proportion of the crowd would have disappeared very quickly.

The lawyer Prashant Bhushan who is on the drafting committee for the Jan Lokpal Bill understands all of this very clearly. In his years as a public interest litigation lawyer he has consistently represented mass movements as well as individuals who have been fighting these policies with their backs to the wall. He is the counsel in the PIL in the 2G scam in which Tata and Reliance, the biggest corporations in the country, along with their allies in the government and the media, have been badly exposed. Yesterday in court he asked why only the paid employees of these corporations were being arrested and not their proprietors. Such a man must be targeted, taken down, right?

The viciousness of the smear campaign against him is proof of the threat he poses to vested interests. I have known Prashant Bhushan for years. First as a comrade and now as a close friend. We may disagree about some things, but I would vouch for his integrity anytime, anywhere. He is acutely aware of his family's social and economic privilege. Even more so of the fact that that most of that privilege is derived from his father to whom is he is very close, but with whom he has major ideological differences. Like many of us who are privileged compared to the majority of the people in this country (some of us by birth, caste, race, gender, and/or by virtue of writing a best-selling novel), Prashant had to decide what to do with that privilege. He chose to use his training as a lawyer to create as much space as possible for those against whom the Powers are arraigned. This is why he has been at the barricades of almost every issue of social justice that is being fought in this country. This is what has been turned against him. And this is why he is being hunted down.

In a filthy battle such as this one, in which facts are made up, none of us can ever be pure enough or righteous enough. None of us can hope to emerge untainted. However, the fight will continue. Retreat is not an option.

Presented at the 'Convention Against Corruption' in New Delhi, April 29

 

 ***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

INDIA GOES TO TOWNS

SURJIT S BHALLA

 

It was just five years ago that an expert investment committee, headed by Ratan Tata and set up by the prime minister, came up with a report that said India should aim for increasing the investment rate to the mid-30s over the next decade. Before the ink was dry, India was investing at that rate.

A large part of the demand for new investment was to be in infrastructure, and a just-released report on urbanisation from the ministry of urban development, by an expert group chaired by distinguished economist and policy wonk Isher Ahluwalia, argues that India needs Rs 39 lakh crore investment spread out over 20 years if India is to sustain, and improve, its GDP growth rate of 8 per cent per annum. This translates into an increase in urban infrastructure investment from 0.7 per cent at present to 1.1 per cent of GDP 20 years later. How realistic is this estimate? Or will it suffer the same fate as the Ratan Tata forecast?

Let us place the report, and its demands, in context. This will be the ninth year running that India will grow above 8 per cent per annum (yes, I know, there was global recession in 2008-09 when the growth rate dipped to 6.7 per cent). Yet, many learned scholars keep arguing that India is overheating and should be "proud" to settle into the non-overheating zone at the earliest opportunity. Of course, they never specify what that non-overheating zone is — because that is not the concern. It is inflation, and if inflation is 6 per cent with a growth rate of 6 per cent, well then, we are overheating! But that is to assume that inflation and growth are twins separated at birth. An untenable, and even ridiculous, assumption.

The latest budget places infrastructure investment to be around Rs 12 trillion, or about 13 per cent of the total budget, or about a third of the investment budget. While the definition of infrastructure investments has changed, and will change, a one-third share was last seen in the 1980s. Infrastructure investments in general, and investments in urban areas in particular, are likely to increase much more than that envisioned by the Ahluwalia committee. So on that score, the forecast is likely to be in error, and an under-estimate. And with it the fears that unless this investment was forthcoming, Indian GDP growth of 8 per cent will be in jeopardy.

Besides this unrealistic under-estimate of future urban investments, the report is excellent and spot-on. The most urgent need in India is to face up to the forthcoming urbanisation problem. To date, India has been able to side-step this issue because its rate of urbanisation has been much slower than predicted. Figures just released for China indicate that their degree of urbanisation has increased from 36 per cent in 2000 to 50 per cent today. Admittedly, China is three times as rich as India, but urbanisation has to do with both the level of income and its rate of growth. And with the kind of growth rate India has been experiencing — and this without any economic reforms — one can only conjecture what will happen to urbanisation, and growth, once there is reform renewal.

While I have quibbled with the forecast of the level of urban investments, I must emphasise that the report is brilliant in its dissection of the past, and its recommendations for the future. The future is outlined in eight different areas — water, sanitation, roads etc. But one among several real contributions of the report is in its emphasis on financing.

This is a big, and welcome, departure for Indian policy. It indicates that the report-writers are well aware of the changing world and domestic order. Infrastructure is a public "good" but it does not mean that there has to be a strain on the central budget. Cities will develop, and their development will have to be increasingly self-financed. Hence, the very welcome discussion, and recommendations, about how municipalities (urban local bodies) will have to be developed, strengthened, and given the right to administer and collect "exclusive" taxes. This will involve changing the all-important nature and structure of property taxes in India. The report does not discuss it, but capital gains taxes for property also need a major reworking, and reduction. It is high time our tax administrators realised that both governance and revenue maximisation involve lower tax rates — alternatively, lack of tax collection, bribery, corruption, black-money generation all require high tax rates.

The Ahluwalia report rightly stresses reforms and governance. We have had precious few of these in the last decade, and certainly none since the growth spurt started in 2003-04. Does that mean reforms are not necessary? Just the opposite. Both to sustain this 8 per cent plus growth, and to increase it, reforms such as those suggested will be absolutely necessary.

One area of infrastructure where we have known what to do, as testified by the several committee reports (the latest being the Kirit Parikh 2010 report), is on the pricing of domestic oil products. But these reports have made little difference to the fact that in terms of oil (an important element of infrastructure) the Indian government, and especially the UPA, has followed one of the stupidest policies in the world. So why would the Ahluwalia report not suffer the same fate and why will stupidity not reign supreme? Because, like the slow pace of urbanisation, those days are gone. Governments and those who frame inappropriate policies have no place to hide.

I don't want to end on a pessimistic note — it is not part of my DNA. But what ultimately proves worthwhile in the muddling through, but entertaining and exciting, society of ours, are studies like the infrastructure report. Most questions are discussed, analysed, and suggested paths outlined. If only India were to begin to listen. But it has! And at long last, even the UPA is beginning to recognise reality.

The author is Chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging market advisory and fund management firm. 

 ***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF POMP

DILIP BOBB

 

A few days before William and Kate gave us our royal moment, we had already been witness to one in our own backyard, less spectacular and without the public and media frenzy, but replete with ritualistic pomp and circumstance nevertheless. In Jaipur, a 12-year-old boy was honoured with the "raj tilak", or royal coronation, as he ascended the throne vacated by the death of Bhawani Singh, the erstwhile Maharaja of Jaipur. The fact that in today's age, we are still hosting coronations exactly as they were conducted during the height of privy purses and power, with other former royal families in attendance — and obeisance — shows our acknowledgment and enduring obsession with royalty and its ceremonial trappings. That has been clear in the way the London event was covered by every Indian media outlet worth its TRPs, and how life seemed to have paused as we found vicarious escape in a marriage in the House of Windsor.

What gives? This is the same House of Windsor that millions of Indians fought to shake off. Yet, the relationship has endured, albeit under the larger umbrella of the Commonwealth, but without too much rancour and bitterness. There are, of course, historical, political, diplomatic and socio-economic reasons for that, analysed threadbare by now; but it is really our need for a royal fix that seems to have endured.

Royals, whether Indian or foreign, are famous for being famous. Moreover, the bond between our erstwhile royals and the House of Windsor has lasted: Prince Charles comes visiting, as he did in 2010, and he and Camilla are hosted and feted by Amarinder Singh of Patiala and Gaj Singh of Jodhpur. Incidentally, all our former royals still refer to themselves in correspondence and on their letterheads as His Royal Highness. And, for many Indians, England's royals are our royals. Late last year, there was another royal wedding in Europe. The heir to the Swedish throne, crown princess Victoria, married her fitness instructor. The couple were young and attractive, the wedding procession was four miles long and the couple were transported by royal barge instead of royal carriage, yet not one media outlet in India saw fit to cover the event. Our royal allegiance is restricted to the Windsors.

We Indians also love ceremony and rituals and the British royals do pomp and ceremony better and more elaborately than any other. The Indian armed forces still carry on many of those ceremonial traditions. We also love our weddings and band baja baraat was in full display at Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and down the Mall.

There is also the fact that the Windsors have become more human thanks to a series of scandals, divorces, an annus horribilis, tragedy and generally dysfunctional behaviour. The little girl playing with her father in the Oscar-winning The King's Speech is the same person who struggled to respond to Diana's death, and is about to become grandmother-in-law to Kate Middleton.

Indeed, the royal nuptials in London bring back nostalgic memories of another fairytale wedding, Charles and Di. Her own marriage in 1981, its tumultuous aftermath and then her death, transfixed us. Now the elder son, who looks so like his mother, is marrying a commoner. Fairy tales don't get fairier than that. Let's not forget that it was at the Taj Mahal that the first signs of marital discord between his parents became apparent to the world.

Of course, the India connection goes deeper than that and the royal linkages are far more complex. Parts of India are still very feudal; we may celebrate our democracy and our millionaire entrepreneurs and our egalitarian society — but reality is far more complicated than that. The royals may have no legal standing, but, even stripped of their titles, most are still comparatively rich and powerful, and many became members of parliament and even senior cabinet ministers. Morever, they are still treated as superiors by their "subjects" back in their home states. We are still captivated by their aura, mystique and the fabulous lifestyles they led. The Windors are a more permanent throwback to that era.

Ultimately, the royal wedding is a modern fairytale; like the ones we all grew up with, the handsome prince and the beautiful princess. The Friday nuptials may have knocked the IPL off the TV ratings — but what explains the fact that so many IPL teams have a royal connect in their choice of names? We have the Royal Challengers, the Rajasthan Royals, King's XI Punjab and the Chennai Super Kings. That is subject for a larger psycho-analytical study — but, for now, here's the bottomline. Trapped in the midst of scams and scandals and with politicians, the judiciary and even corporate India hit by a major crisis of credibility, a royal wedding is the ideal distraction, a perfect extension to India's enduring connection to family far away.

 ***************************************

THE INDIAN EXPRESS

OPED

PROVINCIALISING KARACHI

RUCHIKA TALWAR

 

Provincialising Karachi

Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif created a furore in Pakistan's political circles by suggesting Sindh be divided and Karachi reconfigured as a new province. This was his response to the longstanding debate on the division of Punjab and the creation of a Seraiki state.

On April 25, Daily Times reported: Shahbaz said the PML-N wouldn't oppose the creation of a Seraiki province in Punjab if more provinces were created in Pakistan, including Karachi as a separate province." The PML-N is obviously opposed to the division of Punjab, and since this demand has been repeatedly raised by the PPP, Sharif chose to hit back by suggesting the division of Sindh, which is the PPP's stronghold. His statement elicited vociferous condemnation from PML-N's political opponents, the PPP, MQM and ANP. The protest turned violent as Daily Times reported on April 26: "Activists from nationalist parties on Monday attacked the regional office of PML-N over the statement of Punjab CM." However, as Dawn reported on April 26 Sharif not only retracted his statement but also restated it: "He contradicted reports that he had called for making Karachi a separate province... According to him, he had said that 'the PML-N is not opposed to the creation of Seraiki or Bahawalpur province, but as a national party it would decide the issue... at the party level and that where else in the country new provinces were to be created and whether or not Karachi should also be made a new province.' He regretted an attempt was made... deliberately... to wrongly interpret what he had said... which had hurt him personally."

Batting for ISI

The PPP was put in a spot after opposition leader in National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan questioned the mandate of the ISI chief to visit Washington earlier this month, reported Daily Times on April 26. PM Yousuf Raza Gilani, reported The News on April 28, retorted to Khan's question, giving a clean chit to Pakistan's intelligence apparatus: "'The country's institutions should not be looked at with suspicion... Whatever the intelligence agencies, including the ISI, do is according to the government's instructions and under the government's guidance.' Speaking about the DG ISI's visit to Washington, the PM said Pakistan and the US had multilateral cooperation... for the last 60 years."

Relentless onslaught

Karachi witnessed Taliban-sponsored violence this week. Interestingly, they now targeted the Pakistan navy, which temporarily closed its schools in Karachi to contain the damage.

The News reported on April 27: "Taliban spokesman, Ihsanullah Ihsan called The News from an undisclosed location and said they had targeted the navy in Karachi because it had been protecting US consignments at the Karachi seaport." Barely two days later, another attack took place. Daily Times reported on April 29: "Another bomb ripped through a Pakistan navy bus... in Karachi on Thursday, killing five... and wounding 13... among them seven civilians. It was the third attack on the navy... in the city."

 ***************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

ARE PILOTS WORKERS?

 

With each passing hour, as more Air India flights remain on the ground, it's safe to say the striking pilots will enjoy less and less public sympathy. Apart from putting the flying public to great inconvenience—which is why the Delhi High Court asked the pilots to withdraw their strike and later issued contempt notices when they didn't—the pilots would do well to consider the changed circumstances. At one time, Air India was the only show in town; today, its marketshare is down to 15% in the domestic market, and 25% of the ex-India market. While there is little doubt the strike is inconveniencing passengers, the government can still afford an Air India strike but will be badly affected by a Jet Airways strike. So the pilots' bargaining power is that much less today. There is then the larger question as to whether pilots can be considered to be workmen, and therefore whether they have the right to strike. When the right to strike was first promulgated, this was seen as the only way a largely illiterate and immobile workforce could stand up to managements; none of this is true for well-paid pilots who are well-educated and quite mobile. And since pilots command the aircraft, giving them the right to strike is a bit like saying managers must have the right to strike!

That said, Air India's top brass and more so the civil aviation ministry are very largely to blame for the current state of affairs. For one, when Air India had an equity of R145 crore, what was the government thinking when it got the airline to buy planes worth $11 bn—given that Air India would need to raise revenues 2-3 times just to service the debt, it was always obvious that its future was bleak. Similarly, had the government given Air India the go ahead to transfer half its staff to two new companies (for ground handling and engineering services), the airline's financials wouldn't have been as bad as they are today. To top it all, the aviation ministry decided it wanted to merge Indian Airlines and Air India, and paid little attention to the very serious issue of pay parity between the pilots of the two airlines, and how the Indian Airlines' pilot salaries drop dramatically with the airline reducing their flying hours. Whether the grievance is justified or not, the issue has been simmering for years and the airline's management—and that includes the aviation ministry that constantly indulges in back-seat flying—did nothing to address the problem. Despite this, ministry officials have the temerity to act surprised by the pilots striking work.

***************************************

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

EDITORIAL

STANDARD AND POOR

 

While the S&P500 continues to rise to the highest levels since 2008 thanks to excellent corporate results, the news coming out from the US is mixed. While first quarter GDP growth fell to 1.8%, as compared to 3.1% in the previous quarter, the fact that inflation is rising could complicate matters—from a hike of 0.4% in the previous quarter, overall inflation is up to around 1.9% now, and that for personal consumption expenditure is up to 3.8%, its highest level in the last 10 quarters. While much of the hike in inflation is due to the global spurt in commodity prices, especially oil, it lowers the Fed's room for manoeuvre. New applications for unemployment benefits also rose, underlining the fragility of any recovery that is not based on employment rising significantly. Some part of the problem is, no doubt, due to the legislative logjam in the US and is, therefore, transitory—defence expenditure in the quarter fell 11.7% and accentuated the fall in government expenditure. The fall in defence expenditure shaved off around 0.7 percentage points from the quarter's growth.

The larger problem, which doesn't look transitory, is that while private consumption expenditure has slowed, a large part of Q1's growth came from an increase in inventories (change in inventories contributed 0.93 percentage points to overall Q1 growth). A high contribution of inventory accumulation to GDP growth suggests the growth push in the next quarter will be muted to this extent. A Reuters Breakingviews columnist, Martin Hutchinson, points out that the bipartisan December stimulus included a one-year reduction in employee social security contributions, as a result of which around $112 bn extra was put into January pay packets—the reduction in growth in personal spending suggests this never got spent. Curiously, despite the dollar losing value, net exports grew by under 5% as compared to 8.6% in the previous quarter. Given the S&P change in outlook on US debt was a result of no credible plan to reduce government expenditure and debt levels, the US's future outlook looks a bit more cloudy than it did a while back.

 

***************************************

 

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

URBAN ROADS, TAKE ME HOME ...

SURJIT S BHALLA

 

It was just five years ago that an expert investment committee, headed by Ratan Tata and set up by the Prime Minister, came up with a report which said that India should aim for increasing the investment rate to the mid-30s range over the next decade. Before the ink was dry, India was investing at that rate. A large part of the demand for new investment was to be in infrastructure, and a just released report, under the chairmanship of distinguished economist and policy wonk Isher Ahluwalia*, is arguing that India needs R39 lakh crore investment spread out over 20 years if the country is to sustain, and improve, its GDP growth rate of 8% per annum. This translates into an increase in urban infrastructure investment from 0.7% at present to 1.1% of GDP 20 years later. How realistic is this estimate? Or will it suffer the same fate as the Ratan Tata forecast?

Let us place the report, and its demands, in context. This will be the ninth year running that India will grow above 8% per annum (yes, I know, there was global recession in 2008-09 when the growth rate dipped to 6.7%). Yet, many learned scholars keep arguing that India is overheating and should be 'proud' to settle into the non-overheating zone at the earliest opportunity. Of course, they never specify what that non-overheating zone is because that is not the concern. It is inflation, and if inflation is 6% with a growth rate of 6%, well then we are overheating! But that is to assume that inflation and growth are twins separated at birth. An untenable, and even ridiculous, assumption.

The latest Budget places infrastructure investment to be around R12 trillion, or about 13% of the total budget, or about a third of the investment budget. While the definition of infrastructure investments has changed, and will change, a one-third share was last seen in the 1980s. Infrastructure investments in general, and investments in urban areas in particular, are likely to increase much more than that envisioned by the Ahluwalia committee. So, on that score, the forecast is likely to be in error, and an underestimate. And with it the fears that unless this investment was forthcoming, Indian GDP growth of 8% will be in jeopardy.

Besides this unrealistic underestimate of future urban investments, the report is excellent and spot-on. The most urgent need in India is to face up to the forthcoming urbanisation problem. To date, India has been able to side-step this issue because its rate of urbanisation has been much slower than predicted. Figures just released for China indicate that their urbanisation rate has increased from 36% in 2000 to 50% today. Admittedly, China is three times as rich as India, but urbanisation has to do with both the level of income and its rate of growth. And with the kind of growth rate India has been experiencing, and this without any economic reforms, one can only conjecture what will happen to urbanisation, and growth, once there is reform renewal.

While I have quibbled with the forecast of the level of urban investments, I must emphasise that the report is brilliant in its dissection of the past, and its recommendations for the future. The future is outlined, in eight different areas—water, sanitation, roads, etc. But one among several real contributions of the report is in its emphasis on financing. This is a big, and welcome, departure for Indian policy. It indicates that the report writers are well aware of the changing world, and domestic, order. Infrastructure is a public 'good' but it does not mean that there has to be a strain on the central budget. Cities will develop, and their development will have to be increasingly self-financed. Hence, the very welcome discussion, and recommendations, about how municipalities (urban local bodies) will have to be developed, strengthened, and given the right to administer and collect 'exclusive' taxes. This will involve changing the all important nature, and structure, of property taxes in India. The report does not discuss, but capital gains taxes for property also need a major reworking, and reduction. It is high time our tax administrators realised that both governance and revenue maximisation involve lower tax rates—alternatively, lack of tax collection, bribery, corruption, black money generation all require high tax rates.

The Ahluwalia report rightly stresses reforms and governance. We have had precious few of these in the last decade, and certainly none since the growth spurt started in 2003-04. Does that mean reforms are not necessary? Just the opposite—both to sustain this 8%-plus growth, and to increase it, reforms such as those suggested will be absolutely necessary.

One area of infrastructure where we have known what to do, as testified by the several committee reports (the latest being the Kirit Parikh 2010 report), is on the pricing of domestic oil products. But these reports have made little difference to the fact that in terms of oil (an important element of infrastructure), the Indian government, and especially the UPA, has followed one of the stupidest policies in the world. So why would the Ahluwalia report not suffer the same fate and why will stupidity not reign supreme? Because like the slow pace of urbanisation, those days are gone. Governments and inappropriate policymakers have no place to hide.

I don't want to end on a pessimistic note—it is not part of my DNA. But what ultimately proves worthwhile in the muddling thru, but entertaining and exciting, society of ours, are studies like the infrastructure report. Most questions are discussed, analysed, and suggested paths outlined. If only India were to begin to listen. But it is! And at long last, even the UPA is beginning to recognise reality.

* Report on Urban Infrastructure and Services, Chairperson, Isher Ahluwalia, Ministry of Urban Development, March 2011

The author is chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging market advisory and fund management firm

 ***************************************

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

COLUMN

THE MISSING MILLIONS IN CITIES

YOGINDER K ALAGH

In my SK Dey Centenary Memorial Lecture in 2006, at the National Institute of Rural Development, I had argued that urbanisation in Gujarat was clearly underestimated. There were more than 122 large villages in Gujarat in 2001, which had, according to the 2001 Census, all the characteristics of towns but were not measured as such. The actual growth of urbanisation was around 5% and not half of that. We were right. In Gujarat, urbanisation went up from 37.4% in 2001 to 42.6% in 2011, not in line with official projections at 40.4%. For the country as a whole, we have argued that we are underestimating the needs of 10% of the labour force, which will move in addition to the official estimates from the rural to urban continuum. This number is 40 million people.

I am not quite clear why the rural-urban breakup of the population is not included in the preliminary results declared by the Census for all the states. But Gujarat and Kerala have done so on April 1, 2011. In Gujarat, the urban population was 42.6% of the total population, around 2.57 crore persons. But the projections of the urban population by the Technical Group on Population Projections after the 2001 Census was 2.4 crore and so, for almost a decade, we have made policies ignoring around two million people and their needs in Gujarat. The only other state that has released rural-urban figures is Kerala, which also has a highly decentralised pattern of habitation, as in, and actually more so than, Gujarat. Here, the missing rural-urban continuum is more serious. The projected urban population was 25.4% in 2011, the actual figure is 47.7%. We make such horrendous mistakes in policies on account of an inability to catch major societal trends and make policies in a knowledgeable manner. For the country as a whole, I have argued, in an invited contribution to the Planning Commission's journal Yojana on the Twelfth Plan, that we are underestimating the needs of 10% of the labour force, which will move additionally to the official estimates from rural to the urban continuum. The only other person I know with influence who has argued similarly is the Amul Baby, Rahul Gandhi, who, in an intervention in an IRMA meeting, said that we are ignoring the needs of millions who are moving from villages to towns.

In technical literature and our columns, we have argued that urbanisation in India is being underestimated, and projected that the rural population share will go down to 58% in 2020 and 55% in 2025, compared to the official projection of 68% in 2020 and 64% in 2025. The numbers used in so-called authoritative articles by consulting groups, Plan documents and mandated institutes are wrong for 2011 and 2015.

Rural population in 2020 will be closer to 738 million, out of the total population of 1,273 million. The Eleventh Plan projected the rural labour force as 45.7% by 2016-17, the last year for which they have given projections. The rural workforce will also be much lower than the figure of 404 million estimated for 2020 and similar figures for earlier years, on account of a much lower estimate of urbanisation.

When you grow at 7% in per capita terms, you need a lot of agricultural, rural products and services. The farmer will provide them and move to the markets to sell. Will we develop the market towns, roads, communication links, skills, health facilities, financial products and a lot else with which the farmer will do this or will we leave him (her) to the capricious mercies of the market, a great hand-maiden but a cruel master if the lessons of economic history and our own freedom movement are to be believed? The two very popular ideas that employment in crop production is not falling and urbanisation is not rising fast in India are incorrect.

The period of high growth in India is that of problems and opportunities. This was bound to be so as it was a period of transition in a rural-urban continuum. Change was inevitable and fast and the only question was if it would be benign or of the cruel kind in the early history of the industrial revolution. Millions of farmers, agricultural workers and artisans were moving from smaller villages to larger villages, from larger villages to smaller towns and from there to larger towns. They were doing so for better opportunities and that was good. If we create institutions to support them, the process would be benign, otherwise the transition would inevitably take place but it would be of a cruel kind. The numbers our policymakers use are moving to the bad options.

The author is a former Union minister

***************************************

 

******************************************************************************************

THE HINDU

EDITORIAL

AVOIDING DEBATE

 

That the Public Accounts Committee, which is examining the loss to the exchequer in the 2G spectrum allocation scandal, would split along party lines was expected. But the attempts by members of the ruling United Progressive Alliance to discredit and dump the entire draft PAC report have gone beyond tolerable levels of political partisanship — and now threaten parliamentary procedures and established norms. While some of the concerns about "factual discrepancies" in the report merited consideration, nothing could possibly justify the desperate methods adopted by the ruling coalition members at the PAC meeting. After committee chairman Murli Manohar Joshi had 'adjourned' the meeting, the UPA members elected Congressman Saifuddin Soz to the Chair and organised a 'vote' to reject the draft wholesale. The UPA just about had numbers, after winning over the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, which support the government from outside. The 'vote' rejecting the report was carried 11 to none, after Dr. Joshi and other opposition Members of Parliament walked out. But the appropriateness of the vote itself is in question, as Dr. Joshi says he adjourned the meeting seeking time to examine the allegations of discrepancies in the report. The proper course would have been to thoroughly debate the draft report, rectify discrepancies and errors, and then decide on submitting it to the Lok Sabha Speaker. Instead, chaos was engineered at the PAC meeting to avoid any discussion on the inconvenient issues raised by the draft report on the acts of commission and omission by the former Communications Minister A. Raja, and on the failure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Prime Minister's Office to prevent the defrauding of the exchequer through the manipulation of an already-flawed 'first-come first-served' policy.

Questions about the leak of the draft should not be allowed to divert attention from the work of the PAC, which succeeded in raising key issues in the 2G scam. It is just as well that the document is in the public domain, enabling people to read it and make up their mind on the contentious issues. The UPA, which shamelessly stonewalled demands for a Joint Parliamentary Committee probe by pointing to the PAC's work on the same issue, cannot be allowed to undermine the PAC in the name of an ongoing JPC probe. If the 21-member PAC is unable to agree on the report, Dr. Joshi might feel compelled to submit it directly to the Speaker, who will have the final call on its adoption. The ruling coalition members would be well-advised to discuss all the facts and issues brought up by the draft report, rather than seek to use its thin majority in the PAC to politically shield those involved in, or accountable for, India's biggest corruption scandal.

***************************************

THE HINDU

EDITORIAL

FROM KOMPA TO POLITICAL STAGE

The former kompa musician Michel Martelly has decisively won the Haitian presidential election in a runoff that was delayed after his supporters took to the streets alleging extensive fraud and intimidation in the December 2010 first round. Mr. Martelly apparently came third, but the Organization of American States (OAS) confirmed the allegations, and the purported front-runner, Jude Célestin of the ruling Unity party, was eliminated from the race. In the runoff, preliminary results show that Mr. Martelly has taken close to 68 per cent of the vote to trounce his rival Mirlande Manigat, a law professor. Distancing himself from his provocative stage persona, the new President has started off with a restrained statement of the tasks facing his country, one of the poorest in the world. He has called for political parties to work in harmony. He can expect strong support from the poor, who voted overwhelmingly for him. Haiti's problems are enormous. Nearly 700,000 people displaced by the colossal earthquake in January 2009 still live in camps; large amounts of rubble are yet to be cleared; and people living in rural areas are at risk of contracting cholera, a powerful strain of which has been brought in by U.N. Stabilisation Mission troops.

President Martelly also faces big political challenges. He may have to work with a Unity Prime Minister, as that party is likely to win both the 99-seat Chamber of Deputies and the 30-seat Senate. Even the composition of parliament is uncertain following a disputed Provisional Electoral Council move, which gave 17 seats to Unity by reversing several results. Secondly, Washington has stopped supporting brutal Caribbean dictators, but finds itself unable to stop intervening in the affairs of the region. U.S. government money for Haitian reconstruction has gone overwhelmingly to U.S. contractors — to the tune of 97.5 per cent of nearly $200 million allocated. In addition, Washington put pressure on Haiti and South Africa, where the ex-President Jean-Bertrande Aristide was in exile, to delay his return until after the election. Mr. Aristide, Haiti's first elected President and the victim of a Washington-aided coup in 2004, is now back in Port-au-Prince. He cannot contest the presidency again, but will probably have considerable influence; that could be a problem for Mr. Martelly, whose landslide win is based on a turnout reduced to 23 per cent by a ban on Mr. Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party. It is to be hoped that Mr. Martelly can rise to the challenges and give Haitians the stable democracy they badly need.

***************************************

THE HINDU

LEADER PAGE ARTICLES

BRICS SET TO OUTSHINE IBSA?

WHEN BRICS SPEAKS, ITS VIEWS ARE BOUND TO RECEIVE MUCH GREATER NOTICE THAN THOSE OF IBSA. IF IBSA DOES NOT BECOME STRONGER, IT WILL BECOME IRRELEVANT.

RAJIV BHATIA

In international politics, nations form new groupings or compete to join existing ones, sustain them for a while or long, and then abandon them, though seldom closing them formally. Following the recent summit of leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS), it is worth pondering what lies in store for the IBSA Dialogue Forum with India, Brazil and South Africa as its members.

The two groupings

Last April, before the second BRIC summit and the fourth IBSA summit, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) stated that BRIC was "still in a nascent stage," whereas IBSA, as "the older grouping," was flourishing well. This April, however, the perception has changed. According to an MEA official, BRICS has "a very good future." He added that South Africa's entry into BRIC, transforming it into BRICS, would not "diminish IBSA in any way." Is that a given or veiled signal that a serious internal debate is now under way to measure the relative utility, both actual and potential, of the two groupings?

Ironically, South Africa, which invested enormous diplomatic capital to secure its entry into BRIC, will host the next IBSA summit in 2011. And India, which has been in the forefront to project IBSA as a "unique" organisation of leading democracies, pluralist societies and emerging economies from three different continents, will host the BRICS summit in 2012.

In terms of key indicators, BRICS will have little difficulty in outshining IBSA. The former accounts for 26 per cent of the world's area, 40 per cent of its population, and 22 per cent of global GDP. Therefore, when BRICS speaks, its views are bound to receive much greater notice than those of IBSA. It also helps that those drafting BRICS declarations are far more concise and self-disciplined than their colleagues in IBSA who still seem to be driven by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)-style urge to be long-winded.

Sanya declaration

More important, as the Sanya declaration — the outcome document of the recent BRICS summit — demonstrated, five of the largest emerging economies now have "a broad consensus" of views not only on key international economic and financial issues but also on certain global political issues. The need for effective implementation of G-20 decisions, the demand for the reform of financial institutions of global governance — enabling developing countries to enjoy a greater say in them — and monetary reform, including the re-drafting of Special Drawing Rights (SDR), fall in the first category. The idea of a broad-based reserve currency which serves as an alternative to, but not a substitute for, the U.S. dollar would be studied further. The decision in principle to establish payment of credits in local currencies instead of the dollar has been noted widely.

On the political side, three key issues deserve a brief mention. BRICS has voiced support for a comprehensive reform of the U.N., including the Security Council. In this context, Russia and China have underlined the importance they attach to the status of India, Brazil and South Africa in international affairs, committing themselves "to understand and support" the three countries' "aspiration to play a greater role in the U.N."

This is an advance, albeit a modest one. On countering international terrorism, a common position has emerged, which is significant, considering that South Africa has for long nurtured the notion that a blanket condemnation of terrorism should somehow exclude genuine liberation movements.

On the Libyan crisis, however, BRICS has managed to create an ample air of ambivalence. Prior to the Sanya summit, four countries abstained on the U.N. resolution, thereby providing a cover for western intervention, and one (South Africa) supported the resolution. At the summit, however, all five member- states expressed support for avoiding the use of force and ensuring respect for the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a nation. As the South African President has been playing a mediatory role under the African Union mandate, he succeeded in securing support for the AU High-Level Panel Initiative on Libya, although it has not been getting anywhere so far. BRICS is struggling to cater to its numerous constituencies that are in conflict with one another.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the development of BRICS is the focus placed on promoting internal cooperation. Their Foreign Ministers have been meeting regularly since 2006. Three summits in less than two years have provided a fillip to discussions involving Finance Ministers, Agriculture Ministers, National Security Advisors and others including national statistical institutions, business communities and Track- II organisations. BRICS has decided to advance its cooperation "in a gradual and pragmatic manner," making it "inclusive and non-confrontational." The declaration has put intra-BRICS cooperation in three categories, namely existing cooperation, new areas of cooperation such as health and joint research on trade and economic issues, and new proposals for cooperation pertaining to culture, sports, green economy and pharmaceutical industry.

Comparison with IBSA

How does IBSA compare with the dramatic expansion of BRICS? Quite favourably so far, but it could change quickly.

Since the first meeting of its Foreign Ministers in 2003, IBSA has acquired an institutional character as well as considerable dynamism. Journeying through four summits, its member-states have bonded well, and the new leaders in two of them (South Africa and Brazil) have reiterated their commitment to the Dialogue Forum. Of its four principal facets, the Forum has regularly coordinated its positions on international and regional issues; it has been managing diverse development projects in seven Least Developed Countries (LDCs); it has sought to forge mutually beneficial trilateral cooperation through 16 Working Groups in areas ranging from transportation and agriculture to health, taxation and IT; and, above all, it has innovatively developed people-to-people contacts encompassing business, media, women, academics, and parliamentarians.

However, now that BRICS has emerged as a potential competitor to IBSA, the latter needs to re-calibrate its strategy and refine its unique selling proposition. Four suggestions merit consideration here. Articulating views on world issues should now largely be left to BRICS, the more influential grouping. Secondly, IBSA should dramatically raise its profile as a partner of LDCs. Thirdly, intra-IBSA cooperation now needs to move beyond the phase of trans-continental travels, meetings, studies and MoUs to viable and demonstrable projects. Let IBSA establish effective maritime and civil aviation connectivity, develop a liberal visa scheme, and strive to operationalise India-SACU-Mercosur trade arrangements soon. Finally, more substance should be imparted to people-to-people contacts.

In a short span of two years BRICS has travelled "a long distance," as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh put it. However, an exercise in fine balancing is desirable. Geopolitical considerations would dictate that India should prevent BRICS from acquiring an anti-U.S. orientation on political issues. Thus, while on key financial and development issues, the IBSA countries may go along with Russia and China, on political and security questions, they would need to strike proximity with Washington and European Union capitals.

External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna asserted recently that BRICS has emerged as "a major voice" in world affairs. India will be in a better position to shape that voice when it succeeds in strengthening IBSA. If IBSA does not become stronger, it will become irrelevant. As the senior most among IBSA leaders, Dr. Singh bears a special responsibility. MEA can help him by being clinical and courageous.

(The author is a former Indian ambassador.)

 

***************************************

 

THE HINDU

OPED

EMBATTLED ARAB LEADERS DECIDE IT'S BETTER TO FIGHT THAN QUIT

THE CALCULATION APPEARS TO BE BASED ON THE SHORT-TERM RESULTS OF THE ARAB SPRING.

MICHAEL SLACKMAN AND MONA EL-NAGGAR

Arab leaders facing public revolt have increasingly concluded that it is better to shoot to kill, or at least to arrest and imprison, than to abdicate and flee.

That calculation appears to be based on the short-term results of the Arab Spring. Those who have left, namely Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, face the humiliation of a criminal investigation, a trial and possible imprisonment. Those who have opted to stick with the use of force, like the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, have retained power and appear to have leverage to negotiate immunity should they leave, regional analysts said.

"I don't think we're going to see rulers run away, like Mubarak," said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. "We passed this stage. They will not run or abdicate. They will take their chances."

The wave of Arab uprisings, which began with popular protests that quickly ousted entrenched autocrats, has evolved into deadly confrontations in Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, with leaders willing to use sustained lethal force against a public convinced that persistence is the key to victory. It is a face-off, a test of wills, which has left thousands dead and opened a dark chapter in what was initially called the Arab Spring.

Each side has drawn lessons from the early days of the Arab unrest and the popular push for change. The leaders have settled on a formula that consists of three elements: limited concessions; a narrative that blames a third party, like a foreign nation or al-Qaeda; and security forces that are authorised to take any steps necessary, including shooting to kill, to get people off the streets. In Bahrain, officials have tried to recast the narrative altogether by asserting that the protesters started the violence, while the government has imposed what amounts to martial law on a majority of the population.

The next stage

The question surfacing now concerns the next stage of this unpredictable Arab season of protest. Can this repression prevail, and if so, for how long? There is no certainty, and there are competing indicators from moment to moment. Nevertheless, there are some reasons to believe that the leaders who turn to bloodshed may not, ultimately, win out, experts said.

The choice of sustained, violent repression has been most evident in Libya, Yemen and now Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's forces have killed hundreds and his tanks have rolled into civilian neighbourhoods.

Those tactics of fear and force first succeeded in Bahrain, where the monarchy crushed a popular uprising. That was possible in large measure because it is a tiny nation with a small population that is more easily controlled, and because the United States was willing to look the other way to assist an ally. The United States Navy's Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain.

But that same impulse can also be seen with Saudi Arabia, which sent its tanks into Bahrain to help end the revolt there; in the United Arab Emirates, where government critics have been jailed; in Oman, where security forces have crushed protests; and in Jordan, where the police have attacked protesters.

"President Saleh was about to resign, but now he will fight and do everything he can in order to hold on to his seat so that he does not end up in the same position as Mubarak," said Abdel Rahman Barman, a human rights lawyer taking part in the uprising in Yemen.

But, Mr. Barman added, the example of Egypt has also inspired the Arab street to persevere, the second half of the dynamic that for now is defining the second, bloody phase of the season of Arab unrest.

"What the revolution has managed to accomplish in Egypt by putting Mubarak and those around him behind bars has given us even more hope and a stronger drive," Mr. Barman said. "Before," he said, speaking of Mr. Saleh, "we demanded that he leaves. Now, we want him tried for the crimes he committed against the Yemeni people and for his corruption." (Mr. Saleh has signalled a willingness to step down under a transition agreement, but only under certain conditions, including immunity.)

Under public pressure, Egypt's ruling military council detained Mr. Mubarak, who is now in a hospital in Sharm el Sheik and is being investigated for accusations of corruption and for his role in the killing of hundreds of demonstrators. His sons have also been detained and are now being questioned along with the leadership of his former government and party.

That has spooked Arab leaders who now feel that Mr. Mubarak and Tunisia's former President, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, did not hold on long enough, said a high-ranking diplomat from the Persian Gulf region, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to discuss nations other than his own.

Mustapha Kamel el-Sayyid, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo said: "No Arab leader is immune from facing the prospects of Mubarak. If the pharaoh himself is going to stand trial, then the other non-pharaohs are likely to face the same prospects."

In Libya and Yemen, leaders have indicated a willingness to fight on, while also signalling an openness to deal, although critics question their sincerity. In Syria, Mr. Assad has mixed an iron fist with airy promises of reform.

'Need to adapt quickly'

But also in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, warned last week in an essay in The Washington Post that repression ultimately would not work, and that the only way forward was through change. He was writing about the Gulf states, but his point could easily apply to the rest of the region.

"If the ruling families of the gulf want to maintain their legitimacy, they need to adapt quickly to the changing times and enact substantive political reform that reflects their people's aspirations," Mr. Sager wrote. "Time is no longer on their side. If they wait too long, their rule cannot be assured."

But for now, leaders around the region and under the greatest popular pressure do not seem to see it that way. Instead, they have decided to open fire, leading to a deadly standoff.

"It shouldn't happen this way, where there are hundreds or thousands killed," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political science professor at Kuwait University. "People are earning their liberation by their blood."

—   © New York Times News Service

— 

—    ***************************************

THE HINDU

OPED

BEYOND THE STEREOTYPE

MUSLIM WOMEN FIGHTING AGAINST EXTREMISM FACE PERSONAL ATTACKS AND THREATS OF VIOLENCE. A LOOK AT SOME OF THEM WHO ARE CHALLENGING EXPECTATIONS WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THEIR COMMUNITY.

HAROON SIDDIQUE

Tehmina Kazi wears a modest western dress and believes in plurality and diversity within her faith, Islam. For her pains, she has been labelled a *****, admonished for not wearing the hijab and accused, inaccurately, of wearing short skirts by people she has never met, writing online.

When she defended Usama Hasan, the London imam who faced death threats and was suspended from Leyton mosque last month (March) after he said evolution was compatible with Islam and defended women's right to not wear the veil, she had to go to police after receiving threats of her own.

Despite the threats, Kazi, the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), remains defiant in her role as one of the small but growing number of British Muslim women openly challenging and combating Islamic extremism. Campaigning against any extremism is not for the faint-hearted, but for Muslim women it requires a special kind of resolve. "It takes a lot more courage to do this if you're a woman because the type of criticism you get is very different," she says, highlighting the personal nature of the abuse. "They always talk about what you wear."

Kazi believes women should be free to wear whatever they choose — it is stereotypes about Muslim women that she aims to confront. BMSD, which, despite not being a women's organisation, has always had female leadership after being founded by columnist Yasmin Alibhai Brown — supports a young Muslim leadership programme, counter-demonstrates against extremist groups, such as Anjem Choudary's Islam4UK, and attempts to get moderate voices heard in debates about Islam. The group emphasises the underutilised weapon of humour in taking the fight to the extremists.

In one video on the BMSD website, an archetypal "angry young Muslim" begins ominously, "I have a message for those who insult Islam," before adding: "Let's agree to disagree." It campaigns against both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia — Kazi cites the example of "the preacher going to the mosque and saying women who wear perfume are adulterers", as well as stereotypes of Muslims that suggests all women are marginalised.

'Patronising'

"It's quite patronising. I am a British Muslim woman, and I have never had any problem with my identity," says Sara Khan, who set up Inspire two years ago because she felt there was no organisation helping Muslim women to achieve their potential. "To say Muslim women are oppressed or don't contribute is just so patronising — no community wants to be stereotyped." Khan makes no attempt to hide her frustration as she rails against the wider perception of Muslim women, which, for her, manifests itself in the media preoccupation with the hijab. Khan wore the hijab for 15 years before she tired of the "obsession" surrounding it. Despite Khan's frustration at stereotyping, she is not blind to the fact that not all Muslim women have had the same freedom and opportunities as she has, recognising that there are "Muslim women not allowed to go out of the house".

Khan, who sat on the U.K. Home Office working group tackling extremism and radicalisation, and Inspire are behind an event at City Hall in London for 200 activists, academics and policy-makers called Speaking in God's Name: Re-examining Gender in Islam next month (May), in which religious experts will aim to debunk restrictions conservative Muslims seek to place on women. Khan says it is the first event of its kind. "Let's have a real debate about the role of women," says Khan. "That debate is not happening. You get the same 'No sister, you're not allowed to travel on your own'."

She blames the lack of Islamic literature for female followers and provisions for women at mosques for what she describes as an increasing terrorist threat from women. Citing the student who stabbed the MP Stephen Timms, she says: "It's not surprising Roshonara Chaudhry learned her faith from the internet." Khan argues that the government's much-criticised preventing violent terrorism scheme, now being revamped, suffered from a lack of female involvement.

She makes a compelling case for women to be central in the battle against extremism. "Women shape values in children," she says. Inspire runs workshops to educate mothers in countering al-Qaeda propaganda, arming them with religious texts they can use to rebut the arguments of extremists that their children may hear.

Like Kazi and Khan, Houriya Ahmed, who until last month worked for the Centre for Social Cohesion — a think-tank that issues briefing papers on radicalisation and extremism — has had insults about not wearing the hijab, or as she puts it "not being Muslim enough." But she is less inclined to attribute them to gender, believing anyone who challenges extremists is likely to face abuse.

As she works not for a Muslim organisation but for the CSC, her experiences are different from the other Muslim women interviewed. "I don't want to be seen as a Muslim woman doing this," says Ahmed, who sees her religion as a private matter that is irrelevant to her job.

Strengthening faith

Other campaigners disagree. Rabia Mirza, who is involved with Cheerleaders Against Everything speaks about how involvement in fighting extremism has strengthened her faith. A disparate group with an anarchic sense of humour, reflected in its title, it has managed to get under the skin of both Islamic extremists and left-wingers. It mounts counter-demonstrations and pickets against extremists groups, and members go on extremist forums to argue their case.

Cheerleaders has informal links with Kazia's BMSD as well as, more controversially, with the English Defence League. Ex-EDL members, who remain committed to challenging extremism but quit the far-right group because of a belief it was indiscriminate in its attacks on Islam, have joined with the Cheerleaders to form an organisation called the Nice Ones. Mirza says the idea is to link with those — "very few" — within the EDL whose goal is genuinely to combat Islamic extremism, rather than just oppose Islam.

However one views such an association, it is unarguable that this type of alliance would be unthinkable to the Muslim groups usually rolled out as constituting the frontline in the fight against extremism. Despite breaking the mould, Mirza accepts that women need the cooperation of people who the extremists can identify with more readily. "If we formed a group of women who are highly liberated, it will annoy them, so we need a middle ground," she says.

"We Muslims need to take a bit of an active role," says Mirza. "We need to educate our women, liberate women and that will lead the way. Every country where they have educated their women, the country has thrived." There is a big gulf in the level of experience of Mirza, who is still at university, and someone like Khan in trying to shake up the way Muslim leaders respond to the issues affecting British Muslims, but they are equally convinced of the need for change.

Khan says she is sick of traditional male-led Muslim organisations failing to come up with solutions, and responding to each Islam-related controversy with the mantra "Islam is a religion of peace." She is working to change the situation and hopes others will join her. "Muslim women are so frustrated with the leadership," she says. "We need the discourse of women — they will bring a whole new dimension to it." But ultimately it is not just the conservative male Muslim leadership that Muslim women want to change their ways. They want society as a whole to see what Muslim women can do if people will only set the stereotypes aside. "There's a perception that Muslim woman are sitting at home, not doing anything," says Khan, "but that's not the case at all."

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2011

 

***************************************

THE HINDU

ANGER AS BP PLANS TO DRILL AGAIN IN GULF

AMERICAN REGULATOR SAYS NOTHING HAS BEEN DECIDED YET.

TERRY MACALISTER AND SUZANNE GOLDENBERG— © GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERS LIMITED, 2011

Environmentalists have reacted angrily after BP predicted it would be back drilling in the Gulf of Mexico within months despite facing billions in financial penalties over the Deepwater Horizon disaster — and despite balls of tar still washing up on beaches.

The oil giant's finance director, Byron Grote, told City of London analysts: "We expect to be back and actively drilling during the second half of the year."

Such a return would be a major victory for BP — which last summer was threatened by a proposed law to ban the company from the Gulf for up to seven years.

"BP's reckless approach led to the worst oil disaster in American history, but one year later they're off the hook and ready to take more risks," said Phil Radford, director of Greenpeace USA.

"It's a testament to the political influence of these big oil companies that right now Tony Hayward is sailing his luxury yacht rather than facing criminal charges," he added.

BP wants to resume drilling at its Thunderhorse and Atlantis fields, but the American regulator told the Guardian that nothing had been decided yet. "They have not received any shallow or deep water permits," said Melissa Schwartz, spokeswoman for the U.S. government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Reactions

Another regulatory official said privately that BP expressions of confidence were "p****** people off" in the Obama administration and would not influence any decision on new drilling permits. BP has already set aside over $40bn to cover claims and damages over the blowout whose first year anniversary was marked last week by a raft of lawsuits. These were both from and against BP as blame for the disaster in which 11 workers lost their lives continues to be pinned on a variety of parties including rig operator, Transocean, and services company, Halliburton. Meanwhile some environmentalists remain concerned that the damage to the Gulf still runs deep, with large amounts of oil continuing to cause damage.

—  ***************************************

THE HINDU

DUTCH ANIMAL POLICE TO START TRAINING

Dial 112 if you're in trouble. Dial 144 if your dog is.

From October, Dutch police officers will be trained to answer the call, ready to enforce laws protecting pets, livestock and wildlife against abuse, the government announced on April 29. The Netherlands, the first country to elect an animal rights party to Parliament, will begin training 125 police officers next month, who "will be 100 per cent dedicated to tackling animal abuse," said Justice Ministry spokesman Job van de Sande. The recruits will be drawn from the regular police force, already trained to fight armed criminals.

A new special animal emergency number, 144, will also go into effect. Marianne Thieme, leader of the Party for Animals, said last year the national animal protection agency gets some 8,000 reports of abuse each year.

The government said prosecutors will also begin demanding tougher sentences for those convicted of abusing animals.

— AP ***************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

 

PAC DRAMA SETS A BAD PRECEDENT

The mind-boggling and deeply mortifying events that took place in Parliament's Public Accounts Committee on Thursday have brought down the image of the most important committee of the nation's legislature, further discrediting our MPs in the eyes of ordinary people. It might just make us wonder if there is any point at all

in having such groups of MPs culled from the larger parliamentary chamber. Considerable decline in political ethics and political conduct has come to be noticed across the spectrum in the country in recent years. But even by contemporary standards, what was witnessed in the PAC was a plunge so shameful that it could hardly have been envisaged. A sadder day for our Parliament has not been seen in a long time. We had a justifiable small boast to make — that while at times the proceedings of Parliament get too embarrassing to watch, so vile our elected representatives can become as they proceed to speak on our behalf, the committees of our Parliament are really quite different; these allow politicians of seemingly irreconcilable persuasions to be altogether more thoughtful, more reasonable, and in the end more productive. That little boast is surely now a thing of the past.
It was clear from the beginning that the 2G spectrum allocation issue might excite political passions, but we had faith in the robustness of the process which has held quite well over time. However, PAC chairman Murli Manohar Joshi gave us a glimpse of undue partisanship from the beginning when he began holding press briefings after each session. Parliamentary committees were able to deliberate an issue with reasonable balance and stick to the merits of a case primarily because they conducted their business away from the public glare. In the event, going public day after day was a clear breach of established norms. The leaking to the media of the preliminary draft of the findings — with the aim of causing acute embarrassment to the government and to the Prime Minister in particular — was a logical extension of the trend Dr Joshi set from the beginning, and can only be called an act of extreme partisanship, indeed considered brinkmanship in an already fraught atmosphere. It was no doubt also silly in the extreme as the document had not been discussed enough to attract consensus. As it turned out, the so-called draft was a minority view and those dissenting from it were the majority. What transpired subsequently was no less disquieting, with the UPA parties and their associates as good as throwing out the chairman and "electing" a new chair from among themselves. It might have been best if were spared the spectacle.
It is clear that a draft that does not enjoy majority support cannot be deemed to have been passed. Dr Joshi would be compounding the miseries for parliamentary process further if he were to seek to present the draft to the Lok Sabha Speaker pretending that it is the finished document. We can only hope that the Speaker would not dignify him by accepting such a piece of paper. But the story cannot end here, of course. Since the draft is already in the public domain and gives the impression of the Prime Minister being placed in a position of extreme vulnerability, along with former finance minister P. Chidambaram, a way needs to be found on an urgent basis — using both the processes of Parliament as well as political wisdom on both sides of the divide — to overcome the current impasse. If our Parliament fails in this endeavour, we cannot have much expectation from its next session. With a joint parliamentary committee also covering the same subject — the 2G scam — the chasm can possibly only get wider.

***************************************

THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

THE POLITICS OF RESPECT

ANTARA DEV SEN

Which is worse — calling one of our finest politicians and a respected elder statesman a mummified corpse, a dead man who has no business opening his mouth? Or saying that the spirited woman leader and challenger to the Communist throne of Bengal ignores funds from Bengaluru to get money from the United States, much like bazaar women

forget smaller clients when they get bigger patrons? Going by the collective shock and horror, the latter comment wins hands down.
What? He called her a prostitute? Do they stop at nothing? Veteran Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader and member of Parliament Anil Basu was promptly pilloried by all concerned, including his own party members. West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee apologised publicly, censured Mr Basu and pulled him out of campaigning. What he had said was uncivilised and unbecoming of a Communist, lamented the mortified chief minister. It was unpardonable.
True. Mr Basu had used shocking language and imagery, suggesting (thanks to the blinding hatred for the US that Communists have) that the US was Mamata Banerjee's "bhaataar" (slang for a woman's keeper) now, so she didn't have to look at smaller homegrown patrons in Bengaluru, Chennai or Andhra Pradesh. Like the women of Sonagachhi (Kolkata's red light district), she had dumped smaller babus for bigger ones.
Now, I hate to break this to our slanderous comrade and gentlefolk horrified by the insult, but moving from smaller to bigger clients is not the business strategy of prostitutes alone. It's common sense. It happens in all professional and business dealings, in all societies and in all times. So Mr Basu's sex-worker imagery was not about the logic of fund-raising — it was about using degrading stereotypes to insult a woman.
This jibe shows how regressively patriarchal even our Communist bastion is. Sex workers can be invoked as an insult in a state that came to power professing to fight for workers' rights and dignity of labour and clung to power for more than three decades with the muscle provided by lowly workers of all kinds. Could the comrade have made similar derogatory allusions to low-caste tanners or to Doms who burn corpses? Perhaps not. But chastity is such a deep need of Indian patriarchy that even a seasoned Communist can snigger at sex workers. They aren't really workers, just fallen women. More than Ms Banerjee, it is prostitutes who have been insulted here.
But the intent was to hit out at the deviant woman who dared to challenge the status quo. And this is not the first time that Ms Banerjee — herself adept at insult — has been attacked with sexist tools. During the Singur agitation, when she was busy taking our breath away with her astounding dramatics, this same Mr Basu had declared that if he had his way he would have dragged her by her hair and plonked her back home instead of allowing her to sit in dharnas. Clearly, for this little caveman in a dhoti, home is where the woman belongs. Not on the streets or in sit-ins. Not in politics.
In fact, the cunning Trinamul Congress chief has been called "brain dead" by the Communists — an accusation so far from the truth that it makes you wonder whether the Communists have completely lost their minds. And when Ms Banerjee first came up with her slogan "Ma, maati, maanush!" (mother, earth, people) some Left leaders had sniggered, "But she isn't a mother — what does she know of motherhood?" In a patriarchal society, the good woman is domesticated and acceptable as a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law. But if you are an unmarried politician woman — gosh, you have a problem, sister! You don't fit in, you are hugely inadequate.
And it is not always men who point out this inadequacy. Some time ago, the feisty Renuka Chowdhury, then minister for women and child development, had hit out at Mayawati on the Aarushi Talwar murder case. She herself was thinking as a mother, she announced righteously, but Ms Mayawati was not a mother, she could only think as a chief minister. And was therefore wrong, of course. Shortly thereafter, Maneka Gandhi was not allowed to flout rules to meet her son Varun in a Uttar Pradesh jail. Ms Mayawati is not a mother, Ms Gandhi hit back, how could she understand a mother's concerns?
Ages ago, a young Indira Gandhi was called a "goongi gudiya" (a dumb doll) by her respectable opponents. When she grew to become the most powerful Prime Minister India ever had, she was lauded as "the only man in her Cabinet". Patriarchal symbolism plays a vital role in our perception of political leaders.
The wife, widow or daughter-in-law is very readily acceptable, and most of our women leaders play that role beautifully. And those who don't — like the unmarried Ms Mayawati or Ms Banerjee — have many extra battles to fight. One way of sidestepping this is to become the universal mother, like "Amma" Jayalalithaa. But the "Behenji" or the "Didi" can only be stereotyped as a dry, heartless, careerist old maid.
But plugging into derogatory stereotypes has been part of the game of politics. What I find alarming is our refusal to see such insults when they are not included in the high-profile, politicised identity groups. Casteism in poll campaigns can get you jailed. Sexism is appalling and can get you in trouble. But ageism, however mean and hurtful, is acceptable.
Which is why I am shocked at the jibe of Bratya Basu, theatreperson and Trinamul Congress candidate in West Bengal, at Somnath Chatterjee. The former Lok Sabha Speaker, though expelled from the CPI(M) for putting the Indian Constitution before the party during the confidence vote, had generously agreed to canvass for CPI(M) minister Gautam Deb. Quick as a flash, Mr Bratya Basu — the challenger in the minister's constituency, the "intellectual" and first-time politician — attacked the elder statesman, calling him a mummified corpse out of a coffin. Why should anyone listen to him? An Egyptian mummy, he grimaced for effect, why is he talking in Bengali? He should talk in hieroglyphics!
Maybe civil campaigning is indeed the language of the dead. Maybe lumpenised politics does not need informed debate — either on the campaign trail or in Parliament, the highest seat of rowdy ruckus. Our democracy can just ride on vulgar name-calling and derogatory stereotypes. The vulgarisation of politics has bred a new language for a new age of ungracious, uncivil, illiberal politicians. And unless they are checked, this crude lot will breathe their own mean spirit into our wounded democracy.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com

 

 

***************************************

THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

 

WATCH YOUR WORDS

KISHWAR DESAI

Because everyone is going to be talking, writing, blogging, tweeting about the biggest TV wedding ever (two billion people watching at last count) I thought I would break away and write about something that has landed British Prime Minister David Cameron in quite a spot this week! So far, post-election, the Premier has been walking

a tightrope between divided public opinion and coalition politics, managing not to tumble down from his high wire act. But strangely for such a seasoned performer, during Prime Minister's Questions in Parliament, he has managed to single-handedly annoy a large swathe of British women. And so he may be pondering over more than what he wore for the wedding, this weekend, perhaps a little peeved about his purported gaffe. Was it really a slip, or was it just a joke gone wrong?
Even Mumsnet, a website on which young UK mothers collectively write and keep in touch with each other, was disapproving of Mr Cameron. And that could be worrying. The website has become a barometer for popular opinion among young women, and from all reports the bloggers were registering their distaste with Mr Cameron casual remark, in Parliament. In his defence, he says, it was meant to be funny. Yet, for many it ended up sounding sexist. Gender discrimination is something the modern British woman takes very seriously and before Mr Cameron could say "Catherine Middleton" he was being back to lampooned as a typical Tory, an image he has desperately tried to overturn.
The supposed "insult" took place during a heated exchange (as often happens during Prime Minister's Questions) over the National Health Service (NHS) reforms. This has been a difficult area for Mr Cameron to negotiate because in his pre-election promises, he had supposedly ring-fenced the NHS. However, the overall budgetary cuts have meant that the NHS is also going to be tinkered with. The proposed reforms also suggest that general practitioners (GPs) be more involved about how the local services are going to be shaped. In essence, it appears a perfectly reasonable proposal and even one which has been allegedly supported by a GP, Howard Stoates, also a former Labour Party member of Parliament. Mr Cameron used his reference to support his argument for NHS reforms, and this worked like a red rag for the Labour Party.
During the noisy war of words, Angela Eagle, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, corrected Mr Cameron about a factual error, and Mr Cameron is supposed to have then said in response "Calm down dear, calm down". The response was swift and acrimonious.
Now for Indian readers, these might come as innocuous words. However, in the context of fraught British gender battles, this phrase appears patronising, and suddenly the whole debate in the media shifted from what Catherine Middleton was going to wear for the wedding to whether the Prime Minister is a closet sexist?
While the Labour front bench was up in arms (and they do have quite a few very vocal women shadow ministers) saying that no modern man would have used those words towards a woman, Downing Street was forced to issue a clarification stating that the words were taken from a "comic" advertisement for insurance a few years ago featuring Michael Winner.
However, to be fair to Mr Cameron, the annoying words do come from the highly-successful commercials, which were undoubtedly also very irritating from all accounts. But they worked very well as an ad campaign pulling in more than a million policies in four years for the insurance advertiser. Perhaps, it had a high recall value because it was so annoying! Certainly enough recall for the Mr Cameron to use the catchphrase "Calm down, dear, calm down" not just once but twice during his Prime Minister's Questions defence. He had used it once before in 2007.
In fact, Mr Winner, the man in centre of the irksome ad campaign (which is no longer on air), is immensely pleased that Mr Cameron used his catch phrase and is wondering whether Britons have lost their sense of humour.
So now opinion is divided whether Mr Cameron was somehow showing his real colours by being "patronising" towards a woman member of the shadow front bench, or was he just genuinely trying to deflect the argument by using humour? In either case, Indian parliamentarians may take heart from the fact that the chamber became so overheated and noisy that the Speaker was forced to ask the members to quieten down, if not calm down.
Whilst Mr Cameron may have just been trying to get a laugh, it is important to remember that women parliamentarians and their supporters need to be vigilant about sexism because they have struggled hard to get their share of respect from their peers. It was not so long ago that they were barely able to register their presence in Parliament and the men even used to snigger when women got up to speak. Things have changed and strong women like Margaret Thatcher and now Harriet Harman from the Labour Party have ensured that men politicos give them equal status. Thus Mr Cameron, perhaps, needs to be more mindful when he speaks.
He should take a leaf about Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's book, who has been unceasingly courteous to his women colleagues. How can we forget that during one of the noisiest and most acrimonious debates over the recent scams, Dr Singh suddenly took the wind out of the Opposition sails by addressing Opposition Leader Sushma Swaraj with the words of Allama Iqbal :
Mana ke tere deed ke qabil nahin hun main
Mera shaukh toh dekh, mera intezaar toh dekh….
(I accept that I may not be worthy in your eyes,
But, at least, appreciate my passion, and my patience)
In the midst of the pandemonium, it brought a moment of calm, without Dr Singh asking for it. Perhaps Dr Singh could give a few lessons to Mr Cameron on urdu poetry?

Meanwhile, while the world was betting on all kinds of things about the Will-Kat wedding I was most intrigued by the "balcony kiss". This would have been Catherine's most difficult moment: she has been an intensely private person so far. Thus, without betting on it, I wondered if this would be a diffident peck on the cheek, or a prolonged lip lock? Or would it be a joyous, whole hearted embrace, accompanied by an enormous sense of relief that now she was finally married to the man she had waited for nearly a decade? Given the kind of woman she is, I would have happily placed my bet on the last option.

Kishwar Desai can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com

 

***************************************

THE ASIAN AGE

EDITORIAL

 

JUST A QUIRK, MY DEAR

FARRUKH DHONDY

"Love has its woes
— the river flows.
A lover grieves
— the tree grows leaves
Betrayal is fate
— the planets rotate...

From Song of the Ruined Boys by Bachchoo
Except for the very unfamiliar or the very well-brought-up, none of my email correspondents bother to begin a missive with "Dear Farrukh/Mr Dhondy/f/etc". Some begin by omitting "dear" and using my name or initials, some dispense with all introduction and get straight to their point.

Some don't bother to sign their correspondence. Perhaps they regard emails not as a form of correspondence but rather as a continuing conversation — after all one doesn't begin each sentence of conversation with "My Dear Tehmul/Dinaz or Hormuzd (Err — no, I don't only speak to Parsis, this was just par exemple).
There was a time and place where and when I did pick up the habit of addressing people in a conversation with the prefix "dear". Arriving with some trepidation from India and knocking on the door of my tutor's rooms at Cambridge I heard a voice above the languorous notes of a Chopin nocturne he was playing inviting me in.
"I suppose you had better come in, dear boy."
I didn't quite understand the form of address but soon found it was quite common among the senior members of the university and even among the more supercilious undergraduates. It was a conceit I thought a trifle outrageous, but one which I, subconsciously, very many years later when some calculation in the back of my brain told me I was old enough to condescend, adopted. Not regularly. I threw in the phrase now and then as a distancing device in an interlocution.
I have, I am told, also cultivated the conversational habit of calling men and women "darling" or "sweetheart". Until it's pointed out to me, I don't notice I am doing it. These endearments have two sources: the first is a variation of the "dear boy" phrase and the second is an adoption of working class pub idiom in which people, mostly female, are addressed as "darlin'" or in the north of England where I spent a year as "me dook" — that being their pronunciation of "duck". I have never stooped to calling anybody my duck and I strongly protest that when I use the phrases I admit to there is not a hint of campery about them. No one would mistake my "dear boy" or "I tell you, sweetheart" as anything other than sly linguistic punctuation, a pause in the flow while the brain catches up.
There was, though, an embarrassing moment which ensued from this verbal conceit. A lady professor in Germany called me to conduct a seminar with her post-graduate students. It consisted of several sessions with about 15 students and the professor herself who chaired the proceedings. At one point in my discourse she politely interjected and made a scholastic point with which I thought I disagreed.
"I don't think so, my dear..." I may have said — and there was a sudden hush in the room. The lady professor frowned. I put my views as clearly as I could and she didn't push hers any further. She seemed determinedly silent.
After the seminar, walking to her office, she was distinctly not effusive. I asked her if that went all right. Yes she replied, except she didn't think that calling her "my dear" was appropriate and even though she understood it was a trope of my speech understood by the British, her German students would take it as some form of endearment and that was embarrassing. I said I was sorry and would put it right.
So the next day at the seminar I began very consciously, when answering the student's queries, to address several of them as "my dear" so they would understand that this was more a universal quirk of mine than a particular endearment.
And now just such a phrase has become a matter of public outrage and debate in the UK. Keep in mind that this is the week in which Prince William, the heir but one to the throne gets married, in which the lunatic Islamicists are threatening to disrupt the wedding, the Syrian government is killing its own people and the United Nations is poised for a response from the Europeans and America about how to stop it and a week of not such good news on the economic front.
Parliamentary time and subsequent space in the media were preoccupied with the furore over a phrase. Westminster was debating the National Health Service and plans to reform or change it. Enough substance there to keep a hundred Parliaments engaged for a considerable time. It's a knotty subject and David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was thumping on about his intentions and evasions at the dispatch box when a Labour member of Parliament, one Angela Eagle interrupted him and began to voice her indignation and contempt for his arguments. She was in a battling mood and wouldn't let him get away with the point he was making and insisted on the debating procedure, however disruptive and unparliamentary, on which she had embarked.
"Calm down, dear!" was what Mr Cameron shouted back at her, pointing as he characteristically does, with his open right palm.
All hell broke loose. Ms Eagle and several women on the Labour benches protested as Hecuba must have when Achilles dragged her son's dead body behind his chariot below the walls of Troy. They called Mr Cameron names, taking him to task for his patronisation of women encapsulated, they protested, in the injunction to "calm down" and in the condescending "dear". The bulls of the world would adopt red rags as their communal flag before the linguistic feminists will tolerate being addressed so.
As a Labour spokesman (oops! I meant "spokeswoman") Ms Eagle can and no doubt will doubly redouble strokes upon the government's ill-conceived and even deceptive plans for the National Health Service. As a warrior on the linguistic barricades she will no doubt try and get "dear" banned from parliamentary and perhaps even all other discourse.
Oh dear, oh dear, I suppose it's time I stopped saying "dear boy", my dears!

 

***************************************
 

******************************************************************************************

DAILY EXCELSIOR

EDITORIAL

RESOLVING PARKING PROBLEM

 

Phenomenal increase in motor vehicles plying on narrow streets of Jammu has become one of the major worries of the citizens as well as the traffic control authorities. There is no control on the number of vehicles especially private cars that should be allowed to ply on city streets or in selected segments of the city taking into account the level of congestion, conditions of roads and streets and the frequency allowed to public transport. Anybody can purchase any number of cars at any time he likes. Congestion of traffic is such that it is difficult as well as hazardous to cross the road unscathed. The question of zebra lines on the streets at points of heavy crossing does not arise and if there are any zebra lines, neither the drivers nor the pedestrians are understanding the culture of foot-walking. There is a strange situation of chaos and confusion in Jammu traffic. The worse is that the government is hardly concerned about traffic woes in the city. There is no major or minor plan for modernization of the winter capital. Over-population, over crowding, violation of civic rules, party politics and larger political interference all coming together have made life difficult and miserable in the city. A couple of years ago, there was a lot of propaganda that the Government had decided to shift the bus stand in the peripheries of the city to relieve it of congestion and traffic jams as the bus stand was located in the heart of the city. But vested interests brought political pressure and got the entire plan scuttled. No attention was paid to the difficulties it caused to ordinary people. And now with the Chief Minister announcing that a multi-storey parking complex would be raised at the place to provide parking space for nearly fifteen hundred buses has sealed the fate of the present site as permanent site for Jammu's main bus stop.

 

In any case, in given circumstances, it is encouraging that the chief minister has sanctioned 130 crores of rupees for construction of three multi-tier parking structures in the city. This is the right step and should be implemented as early as possible. Jammu has become commercially very important city and the commercial hub of the entire state. In view of large increase in the flow of pilgrims to Mata Vaishno Devi shrine, and summer tourists to Kashmir valley, Jammu is bustling with activity and business. The infrastructure of Jammu city should be compatible with the needs, which at the present is not the case. There are other schemes for reducing traffic congestion and these should also be implemented. The Jewel-Bohri-Anand Nagar area is the most congested area of the city and incidentally the Government houses for the ministers and the spacious Circuit house, too, are located in the area. This link is complete bottleneck and traffic jam and electric power cuts are now everyday affair for the vast civil society of this area. Vested interests play a major role in not either widening the link by covering the canal area under pipes or creating flyovers to reduce congestion. Likewise there are also some other congested areas of the city that need to be addressed without delay. Power department seems least concerned in playing its role in easing traffic situation. Electric poles enroute the entire link need to be relocated and so as to make space for free flow of traffic. Change in existing electric phases is necessary to ensure adequate voltage to localities that are densely populated. Some time back it was heard that the central Government and the World Bank had sanctioned funds for modernization of Jammu city. How and where those funds were utilized is not known. In short, the State Government must constitute a technical board of town planners to conduct a study of the city and suggest a comprehensive plan for modernization of this ancient city without losing the heritage sites and symbols. The raising of parking structures as an isolated and disjointed project may not be really helpful at the end of the day.

***************************************

DAILY EXCELSIOR

EDITORIAL

PAC FIASCO

 

The country must be laughing in its sleeves on how the most important public institution, namely the Parliament, and its subsidiaries like PAC are trivialized by the elected representatives of the people. To what depths of moral turpitude our law makers can sink is shown by the way the PAC proceedings went. There is a limit to acrimony, and there is a limit to defamation. These members seem to have found themselves free wrestlers in the arena of the PAC where a formal meeting turned into a fish market fracas instead of a rectifying body expected to inject moral and constitutional values to its decisions. The entire exercise seems to have lost the sight of its responsibility towards the electorate and the masses of people of the country whose destiny they are deciding within the precincts of the Parliamentary building. In the first place what was the hurry for the chairman to come out with a report before trying hard for a consensus on the findings even if it meant more time? He knew that implicating the Prime Minister of the country overtly or covertly was a very sensitive issue and should have been dealt with a fair amount of caution and diplomacy. Secondly, of course there was breach of propriety when the report was leaked before its formal release. And the onus of this breach of propriety comes to the doorsteps of the chairman. But at the same time, the UPA members seem to have made it a personal rather than a public affair. Sullying the chairman with slanderous charges akin to personal vendetta is not the way how parliamentarians should behave. The PAC Committee meeting turning into a fish market of sorts has left a very bad impression on the mind of the people. Moreover the UPA members should not have attempted to violate the prescribed norms of conduct of business. How can a group elect a new chairman without going through all formalities? Where was the consent and approval of the Speaker? How come a member who is not from Lok Sabha is elected as new chairman contrary to the established norms? These are all technical issues and should have been adhered to. Well, with all said and done the county would want a very convincing proof of fairness on the part of the PM in handling 2G Spectrum scam case.

 

***************************************

DAILY EXCELSIOR

EDITORIAL

MENDING FENCES WITH KAYANI

 

If last week's report in a London daily, suggesting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has established a direct line of communication with the Pakistan Army Chief, Gen. Pervez Kayani to resolve bilateral issues is true, it could only illustrate the helplessness of the civilian government of Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani.

The low-profile General who succeeded the former military leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan's Army Chief has made it amply clear that "low profile" or not he is no dummy, very much a man with his own agenda.

He served notice months ago of his ability to ignore "silly" norms like the Army Chief having just one term by granting himself an extension followed by a year's extension to the favoured ISI chief Gen. Pasha. Am I contradicting myself by underscoring the point that Kayani is very much his own man? Look at the number of times he, in his own inoffensive way, has ticked the Americans off. That elements within the US administration are very skeptical of the General is common knowledge although the same US sources may be behind advising India to mend fences with Gen. Kayani, the Army to be more precise.

It is not wholly untrue that even in a democratic Pakistan the Army continues to call the shots, but is that good enough reason for Dr. Manmohan Singh to pick up the phone to ask "Kayanibhai, bahut hua, ab yeh Jhagdha Khatam Karayiye" or for Khayani to respond "Manuji, mein janta hoon aap Pakistan mein hi paida huye thhey par kya karein yeh jihadi aur Taliban saans bhi leney nahin dete".

One would probably have been tempted to accept the suggestion made in the London report but it could have been plausible only if Kayani was just another Pakistani military dictator. See, how close Musharraf was to striking a deal with Manmohan Singh just before he raced into exile. Things cannot be that easy for a weak civilian Government headed by Pakistan's least admired politician, Asif Ali Zardari. True, that the man and his entire government has to spend more time keeping on the right side of the Army, the rest going to outguessing the Muslim League (N) and its leader Mian Nawaz Sharif.

It's no breaking news to be told about back-room channels being used by New Delhi and Islamabad; these have been there even when the two had massed troops on either side of the border. The interesting thing is that the two countries are this time over officially talking in terms of talks. The meeting between the two Prime Ministers in Manali did indeed open up a new (hopefully) chapter in the tortuous course of the off again, on again Indo-Pak dialogue.

Pardon me a digression, what kind of message would we be conveying to the world and the civil society in Pakistan by choosing to talk directly/indirectly to the Army Chief, bypassing the duly elected government. As it is, history tells us that Indo-Pak agreements, a rare phenomenon, have never been achieved via a military dialogue. The only one to have lasted all these years is the Indus Water dispute the resolution of which was completed when Nehru and Liaqat Ali headed the respective governments.

Even the Musharraf plan for Kashmir which had found a large measure of agreement became possible because the then Pakistani military leader realised that the separatists in that State had moved away from Pakistan to 'Azadi'.

The Americans who had hitherto to trod softly on Pakistani military's ties to the fierce Jehadi Haqqani group despite intelligence leaks that the two had worked together in bombing Indian embassy in Kabul. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was very well known that the ISI has a longstanding understanding with Haqqani for supporting, funding, training fighters that were killing Americans and killing coalition partners. "And I have sacred obligation to do all I can to make sure that doesn't happen", Mullen said.

The public airing of these and similar facts brought a strong retort from Gen. Kayani. In a statement put out by the military, Kayani defended Pakistan's stance against terrorism in general while acknowledging that the trust deficit between the institutions and the people existed in Pakistan and the US. This is an extract from the many such angry exchanges the US and the Pakistan Army chief have had in recent weeks.

Take this one from Gen. Kayani has said to Adm. Mullen: "I strongly reject negative propaganda of Pakistan not doing enough and Pakistan's Army lacking clarity on the way forward. Pakistan Army's ongoing operations against the militants are a testimony of our national resolve to defeat terrorism." This even as he expressed his country's strong anger over the bomber attacks on targets in Pakistan. The Gen. wanted these stopped forthwith. Not that the Americans or their allies have paid any heed to such challenges. But Pakistan had found another covert way to hurt the US; it turns a blind eye to jihadists and Taliban in cutting of the American supply lines on the only road leading into Afghanistan from Torkhum. Hundreds of trucks laden with supplies are burnt down, forcing the Americans to seek another route through a friendly Central Asian State.

Meanwhile, the Americans are dropping subtle hints that they mean to withdraw from Afghanistan in July this year which begins an end game in that country. That doesn't look good for India's prospects of maintaining influence or keeping the Taliban out. It is interesting to note against this backdrop that Marc Grossman, the successor to the late American pointman in the AFPAK region, Richard Holbrooke is due be in India shortly. The envoy is expected to inform India of the hastened pace of Pak efforts to make up with Afghan Taliban, hopefully with Hamid Karzai's blessings, and the increasing intensity of Taliban attacks in Afghanistan.

And the Afghan President, worried about his own survival, is believed to be tilting Pak's way. Karzai may publicly remain close to this country but the postponement of a Manmohan Singh visit seems intriguing. May be that is why the Americans are thinking in terms of fostering a friendlier relationship between India and Pakistan. Whatever the source of the London report about US having told some Indians that they should directly engage Generals Kayani and Pasha, it does sound a bit credible, however far-fetched it may seem. The Pakistan Army may indeed encourage the civilian government to step up the dialogue with India but only after it has made sure of a take-over as Afghanistan's big brother. It needs no repetition to say that Afghanistan has remained one long obsession with a succession of Pakistan Army Chiefs.

It goes back to the time of partition when a British Officer was commanding the Pak Army, one who wished to "undo" the damage done to Pakistan's cause in Kashmir by his countryman who drew the Radcliffe line, providing a vital link connecting India with the princely State of the Hindu Dogra ruler of the State.

I have spoken to dozens of Pakistani defence experts over the past four decades and this "injustice" sticks out as a sore thumb. Afghanistan from that day onward became "vital" to Pakistan's strategic depth. I don't for a moment believe that Gen. Kayani would be in any hurry to talk to India. His long-term strategy continues to be India, Kashmir-centric if you will. Something tells me that if the civilian Government in Islamabad tried to quicken the pace of bilateral relations it might be sealing its own doom. A long "warm, in frank and friendly" exchange of views between then Prime Ministers Narasimha Rao and Mian Nawaz Sharif in Davos in the 90's was followed by Sharif announcing February 5 as Kashmir day or a Black day-within 24 hours of his touching down at Islamabad. To put his official seal on it he declared the day as a public holiday as well.

***************************************

DAILY EXCELSIOR

EDITORIAL

LOKPAL AS A PANACEA?

BY ASHOK BHAN

The unsavory debate over the persona on the drafting committee for the Lokpal Bill and the questions about the constitutionality of such a committee has diverted the nation from the core issue of fighting corruption. Are we drifting from the issue of corruption, which has got institutionalized in the system, to redressing ego hassles of a few activists, whose intentions can not be faulted? Is Lokpal a panacea to eradicate corruption from our society?

To have a correct appreciation of the situation it will be worthwhile to understand the mechanics of bribing and kickbacks. There are, broadly speaking, four types of criminal misconduct by public servants at different levels of the executive hierarchy. The first, in which all levels extensively indulge in, is misuse of transport, telephone, frequent flier bonus points earned from Government paid travels, fake medical bills, photocopying personal documents and a wide range of similar official facilities for personal gains. Many employees carry out private business during office hours. In far and remote areas teachers seldom attend the schools. A stage has now reached when this misuse is labeled as 'perks' and no questions are asked. All this can be prevented through internal vigilance and accountability. Civil service conduct rules are never invoked to teach erring public servant a lesson. No one wants to become unpopular by taking a deterrent action. When no action is taken such misconduct never ever gets reflected in the appraisal reports. The muck which should have normally settled down is able to float and go to the top.

The second and the more serious one is the graft for public services. A common citizen is affected by this every day when he is compelled to shell out money to get his legitimate job done from a public servant. This in terms of volume of each transaction may be 'petty corruption' but it adds up to a huge sum as large number of public servants at the lower level are indulging in it at all times and in all parts of the country and to varying degrees in all public utility departments. It is this bribe about which common man talks about and is fed up with. Anna Hazare's fast gave a platform to the vast majority of sufferers of this 'coercive corruption' or 'jaabraana'. Fortunately, the element of coercion in this category of graft induces hatred and victims are willing to take recourse to law when demand for money is made. There are many complainants willing to get the public servant 'trapped' through law enforcement agency. The number of willing whistle blowers swells if the anti-corruption agency enjoys credibility. They do it despite being fully aware of harassment they are likely to encounter during their future visits to the department where a successful 'trap' is laid. They want to teach the public servant a lesson. In Jammu and Kashmir from January 2005 to the end of first half of 2008 the State Vigilance Organization registered 136 trap cases out of a total of 270 FIRs. Revenue department led the field followed by Police, Engineering departments, finance/sales tax/excise, Rural Development, Forest and so on as far as number of traps goes. A series of successful traps create a chain reaction of complaints. Initially the rates of bribe per activity may increase but a prolonged crusade breaks the resolve of corrupt public servants. The investigation agency must ensure that an honest public servant is not harassed and humiliated through a false complaint. The complainant must produce enough evidence of demand of bribe and that there is a cause for paying it before a 'trap' is laid. 'Trap' is the most potent tool to target this 'coercive corruption'. The complainant is protected by section 24 of the Prevention of Corruption Act and he can not be prosecuted for giving bribes.

The third category of corruption prevalent at the middle and top level of bureaucracy includes kickbacks from development projects, social welfare schemes, purchases, recruitments and transfers, to cite a few. Collections made at the lowest level through 'petty corruption' get shared up to the top for retention of a public servant at the 'lucrative post'. As we go up the ladder corruption becomes more and more 'collusive' in nature as the bribe is given as 'shukraana or nazraana'. It is rare to find complainants as both the receiver and the giver share the spoils. The exchanges take place in cozy drawing and bed rooms away from public gauge. Occasionally one comes across a rival to spill the beans or a conscientious insider acting as a whistle blower. The best treatment for this category is to strengthen internal vigilance, make systemic changes for transparency by introducing e-governance in purchases and payments and take legal action for misappropriation, purchases at exorbitant rates and possessing assets disproportionate to known sources of income. The bureaucratic system of checks and balances needs to be restored. Prosecuting alone does not help much in getting rid of the malaise more so because prosecution is a long and time consuming affair in our country and unfortunately criminal justice is 'purchasable'. Drive against corruption has to be made a management function and not a punitive exercise through investigations and prosecution alone. A mix of preventive internal vigilance coupled with deterrent criminal action holds the key.

Let us pause here for a while. An overwhelming majority of cases of corruption have been covered under these three categories. Legal provisions exist and each state and the center have law enforcement machinery of one kind or the other. Then why have we not been able to effectively check corruption of these categories? There are a host of reasons beginning with need for large sums of money by political parties for elections and lack of will of the political executive to fight corruption. Every ruling party patronizes corrupt bureaucrats so that unquestioned free flow of kickbacks is facilitated. The Bureaucracy must be made accountable to the constitution and the law. It must not act as a stooge of a political personality or a party.

There are delays in the criminal justice system and on an average it takes 10-15 years to get a verdict in a corruption case and this is followed by the statutory appeals. Witnesses feel harassed and at some stage walk away in despair. A delayed conviction fails to create deterrence as people have forgotten the case. As the Prime Minister remarked on the Civil Services Day, "people expect swift and exemplary action and rightly so". Why can't we have enough Special Courts to ensure that a trap case is decided in 6 months and other cases in a year or so? And till criminal justice remains 'purchasable' the corrupt will buy it with their money power. Indulging in corruption has to be made a costly affair. Jammu and Kashmir Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act 2006 provides for attachment during investigation and forfeiture on conviction of a property acquired through proceeds of corruption. The UN Convention against Corruption, which India has not ratified yet, also provides for 'freezing' or 'seizure' and eventual 'confiscation' of property derived from proceeds of crime. A hard look needs to be taken at these provisions. The proceeds of corruption must return to the State.

We are yet to take a serious look at 'induced corruption' by the Corporate Houses by inflating the costs of goods and services so that palms of greedy public servants can be greased. For the present, the Prevention of Corruption Act is largely public servant centric with inducer or bribe giver being dealt with for abetment. This is not enough and the inducer must be made a principle accused. The arrest of some top corporate executives in 2G spectrum allocation scam should set the trend for a comprehensive legal provision.

So there is so much to be done to fight corruption of three categories listed earlier. This all is achievable if there is the much elusive political will. Prime Minister has rightly pointed out the growing feeling in the people that our laws, systems and procedures are not effective in dealing with corruption. Once effective checks are in place the upward movement of graft money will get squeezed. The activists spearheading the anti-corruption movement must focus on these areas. The increased public anger must be utilized to put pressure on the Government to introduce reforms so that we can move out of the present state of affairs.

And finally the fourth category of corruption related to policy decisions taken by the political executive and top echelons of bureaucracy which is in public focus at present. There can be no two opinions that the corruption staircase is best cleaned from top downwards. Here not only criminal misconduct but also mal-administration needs to be dealt with and the existing system under the influence of political executive has failed to deliver goods. The Lokpal is definitely the answer. A Lokpal who is independent like the Supreme Court or the EC and does not tread on the powers of other pillars of democracy. A Lokpal who can receive complaints directly, investigate through a designated Agency but leave the trial to a Designated Judge. The selection must be carried out by a Committee headed by the Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister can be trusted with defending the territorial integrity of the country why can't we have faith in his judgment to select a Lokpal? The CVC fiasco has made everyone wiser. The elected Chief Executive has the responsibility to lead the country. He must be given power to choose the tools. The Prime Minister can feel the pulse of the people.

(The author is a Retired IPS Officer and former Commissioner of Vigilance of Jammu and Kashmir.)

 

***************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

BOOST FOR INDO-PAK TRADE

MFN STATUS FOR INDIA WILL HELP

 

India and Pakistan are on their way to expanding trade relations in a big way. Pakistan has ultimately agreed to grant India the much-needed Most Favoured Nation status for purposes of business deals. India gave this facility to Pakistan a few years ago. Pakistan had been unwilling to reciprocate India's gesture on various pretexts, but India continued to press for it.

 

The Commerce Secretaries of the two countries who met in New Delhi on Thursday discussed the issue closely with the realisation that both countries would be major beneficiaries if India was give the MFN treatment by Pakistan. This means the end of the Pakistani discriminatory regime for trade with India.

 

There is a massive trade potential between India and Pakistan, but it could not be realised substantially because of Islamabad's unwillingness to accept India's viewpoint on the MFN question. That is why the present trade volume between them is merely $2 billion. It has the potential to go up to over $14 billion soon. Their indirect trade through a third country may get reduced once the Pakistani decision on the MFN status to India is implemented. They have finalised a mechanism to enhance trade in petroleum products, and this means cross-border pipelines and an increased use of rail and road networks.

 

Growing trade relations between the two may lead to a better political climate in the subcontinent, helping to resolve their disputes in the days to come. There is need to hold more and more trade fairs which will not only increase bilateral trade but will also lead to increased people-to-people contacts, strengthening the peace constituency on both sides of the Indo-Pak divide. This will then reduce the tension between the two countries. Once the two major South Asian nations develop their stake in economic advancement through mutual trading arrangements, the atmosphere of distrust and ill will can become a thing of the past.

 

***************************************

 

THE TRIBUNE

EDITORIAL

LONG ROPE FOR BUILDERS

TOWERS OF BABEL GALORE IN SHIMLA

 

Shimla, once considered the "Queen of Hills", seems hell-bent to turn into a hi-rise town, its environment and beauty be damned. In the name of development, construction activity is going on even in green areas through the convenient escape route of "special exemption". While the common man would find it difficult to cut even a branch of a tree, colonisers can bend the rules to suit their needs. The end result is that many monstrous eyesores abound.

 

One of the curious cases is that of the Jakhu aerial ropeway. As if the permission granted to raise an 11-storey, 39.55-metre high structure in the green area, where there has been a blanket ban on construction for a decade, was not enough, the company setting up the ropeway later raised two more storeys, taking the height to 43.92 metres and even proposed to increase it to 46.90 metres. Mercifully, the Himachal Pradesh High Court has halted work on the controversial project, saying that if the court does not intervene, they (government officials) would permit this Tower of Babel to increase in height indiscriminately.

 

The excuse given by the company was weird. It claimed that the increase in height had been necessitated by the fact that when the initial survey was conducted, there was some error and difference of three metres was not noticed and the height of trees was also miscalculated. Naturally, the court has expressed its shock that a company which proposes to run a ropeway could make such "miscalculations".

 

Its observation that "officials of the state government seem to be more interested in protecting the interests of Jagson Ropeways rather than the environment of the area" should occasion a serious re-look at the entire gamut of construction activities in the state capital. The "core area" of Shimla is in need of decongestion. Instead, there is an underhand attempt to change the land use from "residential" to "mixed" wherever possible. A similar self-defeating exercise goes on in other hill towns also. Nobody seems to realise that this will sound the death-knell for tourism, to promote which all this commercial activity is being ostensibly allowed. It is necessary to assess whether the towns bursting at the seams are at all in a position to sustain mass tourism. 

 

***************************************

 

 

 

THE TRIBUNE

COLUMN

INDIA'S NEW COACH FLETCHER

NOTHING MUCH TO WRITE HOME ABOUT

 

The appointment of former Zimbabwe captain Duncan Fletcher as Team India coach has come as a bit of a surprise especially given the fact that he has been out of a regular job for quite a while. But the Board of Control for Cricket in India seems to have a penchant for providing gainful employment to many who are in need, and Fletcher is the newest name on the list.

 

The surprise indeed lies more in the fact that Fletcher had a lacklustre stint as coach of England, culminating with the World Cup disaster in 2007, after which his relations with the British media made it impossible for them to co-exist.

 

While the players affiliated to the BCCI are not really in a position to comment negatively about the appointment, at least a couple of former India captains have been very critical of the choice. Kapil Dev has been quite derisive about Fletcher's credentials as a cricketer and stressed that players like Robin Singh or Venkatesh Prasad would have been better choices as coach. Sunil Gavaskar on the other hand thinks that Mohinder Amarnath would have been a better choice. A strange observation, considering that Gavaskar was in the panel which chose Gary Kirsten ahead of Amarnath when the coaching job was up for grabs last.

 

Fletcher is not known for his flair and eloquence, and according to former England captain Michael Vaughan, never understood how the media works. So his tenure in India isn't likely to be too cordial, especially when it comes to the media. But in terms of profile, Fletcher fits the Indian scheme of things perfectly. He is a behind-the-scene kind of person, something that John Wright and Gary Kirsten understood quickly was the ideal course in India, which Greg Chappell never did. In any case, top cricket teams do not need a coach but a man manager. However, Fletcher's man management skills are uncharted and untested, so one can assume that it will be an interesting tenure, from the media point of view at least.

 

 ***************************************

THE TRIBUNE

ARTICLE

CHINESE INFLUENCE IN NEPAL

A MAJOR CHALLENGE FOR INDIA

BY S.D. MUNI

 

For the past couple of years, India has been trying to get its grip over slippery relations with Nepal. Towards that end, former Foreign Secretary and envoy to Nepal Shyam Saran was sent to Kathmandu in August 2010. This was followed by present foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao's visit to Nepal in January 2011.

 

Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna's three-day visit to Nepal in April (19-22) should be seen in continuation of these visits. Though formally Mr. Krishna had to inaugurate a newly built check-post on the Indo-Nepal border in Birgunj, his main mission was two-fold: to express India's growing concerns on the security of its stakes in Nepal and to assess the prospects of faltering peace process and constitution making, for which the deadline is only five weeks ahead - May 28t.

 

The security of India's interests in Nepal has come under severe pressure; not only due to personal attacks (with stones and shoes) on the Indian Ambassador, but also by defacing of Indian flag, politically inspired breakdowns and disruptions of Indian business establishments, the continuing use of Nepal for the flow of fake currency and terrorists into India and the expanding space of China's strategic presence in the sensitive neighbour. Krishna articulated these concerns strongly and frankly to his Nepali interlocutors and pressed Nepal to move forward on the India-initiated pending proposals of tying up loose ends in this regard, including the conclusion of bilateral Treaties of Extradition and Mutual Legal Assistance. Maoists being the principal driving force behind the attacks on The Indian Ambassador and business establishments, Mr Krishna forcefully conveyed India's displeasure while talking to Maoist supremo Prachanda.

 

Mr Prachanda reassured Mr Krishna that the Maoists valued the importance of constructive engagement with India, but without mincing matters regarding his party's reservations on India's interference in Nepal against the Maoists since 2008, specially during the various rounds of elections For the Prime Minister in 2010.

 

 

The prospects of the peace process and constitution making in Nepal are passing through a dismal transition. Failure to accomplish these tasks by the deadline of May 28, may create a highly unstable and chaotic situation in Nepal with unwelcome adversary implications for India. The breakdown of consensus among major political parties and internal fragmentation within these parties on account of ideological differences and competing power ambitions of the key party leaders are the reasons behind the prevailing political stalemate. While the peace process is stuck on the question of integration and rehabilitation of the Maoist armed cadres, constitution making is held up due to unresolved power-sharing among the principal stakeholders and the resulting breakdown of national consensus on critical issues of federalism, nature of the executive and the basic structure of the polity.

 

Days before Mr Krishna's visit to Kathmandu, indications of a positive turn in Nepal's political situation had emerged. Internal tussle within the Nepali Congress, between its President Sushil Koirala and former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, on the question of Working Committee nominations had been resolved amicably. Similarly, Maoist leader Prachanda had distanced himself from the party's line of "people's revolt" and come out with a new document for speeding up the "peace process" and "constitution making". This was the result of his swing away from his hardline mentor and Vice- Chairman Mohan Baidya, and towards the balanced and moderate ideologue, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai.

 

Mr Prachanda also realises that realistically, it is fool-hardy to resort to a second "peoples war" in Nepal now.

 

It may be recalled that the Maoists shift from the "people's war" to democratic mainstreaming during 2005-06 had been led by the Prachanda-Baburam duo. There have also been signs of softening between the Nepali Congress and the Maoists. While Mr Baburam has been openly asking for the Maoists and the Nepali Congress to work together, the Nepali Congress hardliners are also realising that the Maoists demand for the integration of their armed cadres need to be considered carefully.

 

How can the process of mainstreaming the Maoists be accomplished without proper rehabilitation of their militant cadres? Some in the Nepali Congress are willing to accommodate as much as 6000 of these cadres through the integration in security forces. There is now even a proposal formally advanced by the Nepali Army for integration of militant cadres, and the response of the Maoists to this proposal so far has not been negative.

 

Mr Krishna in his public pronouncements had pleaded for the completion of the peace process and constitution making. He also underlined the need and significance of political consensus among Nepal's political parties towards that end. The extent to which his parleys with the political leaders focused on this process and will help in advancing it will be known only when political moves of these leaders unfold in Nepal in the weeks to come. Mr Krishna has been assured by the Maoists that they do not have a policy to hurt India's interests in Nepal. There are reasons to believe that the Maoist attacks on Indian diplomats and business establishments have mostly been in reaction to their perception that India wants to keep them on the margins of power-structure in Nepal.

 

These perceptions were reinforced by the outcome of the visits of Mr Shyam Saran and MsNirupama Rao in the midst of prime ministerial elections.

 

The Maoists are the largest party in the Constituent Assembly and they think that they should legitimately be accepted to lead any coalition government. They want India to be helpful by remaining at least neutral, if not supportive, to their claims in the process of government formation in Nepal. One does not know if there has been any change in India's stance in this respect. The Maoists should be expected to change their calibrated hostility towards the Indian establishments in Nepal if Mr Krishna has succeeded in impressing upon the Maoists that India indeed wishes them well. But has he?

 

There have been unmistakable signs of China expanding its presence and influence in Nepal. The latest evidence of this was provided by the visit of a powerful Chinese military delegation to Nepal in March (23-26) under the leadership of the PLA chief, General Chen Bingde. An MoU was signed during his visit offering Chinese assistance of $19.9 mn to Nepal for medical equipment and construction machinery.

 

Mr Krishna must have explored the extent of growing Chinese influence in Nepal, particularly during his talks with President Ram Baran Yadav, Prime Minister Khanal and Nepal's army chief General Chhatra Man Singh Gurung.

 

Indian policy makers must accept the hard reality that the assertion of influence by a rising China in Asia, including in India's sensitive neighbourhood, is inevitable and Indian diplomacy has to equip itself strategically, politically and economically to face that reality. In a country like Nepal, it is the deficiencies and failures of Indian diplomacy that will be exploited by an assertive China to its advantage with the help of all those Nepali political forces that feel alienated from India.

 

The writer is Visiting Research Professor, Institute for South Asian Studies, Singapore

 

***************************************

 

THE TRIBUNE

OPED

MAID IN INDIA

BY VIVEK ATRAY

 

Indian cities are witness to a revolution of a very different kind these days. The maids are taking over!Schedules, appointments, wakeup times, meals, birthday parties, vacations, and even weddings are dependant these days on the convenience of the all-important family maid. Make no mistake, she has veto rights of the kind that no Head of State enjoys anywhere in the world.

 

If the maid of the house says she has a toothache, no food will be cooked in the yuppie household that day. And God-forbid, if the maid decides that she should visit her grandmother for a week, the man of the house may have to take time off from work to help out at home.

 

These formidable ladies need no training and no tutoring. They are immensely more talented and capable than their employers. They know how to cook, make beds, take messages, iron clothes, and provide beauty-treatment to their lady-bosses.

 

At birthday parties, maid-power is at its most evident. Since the practice nowadays is to invite only the kids and not the parents, such occasions are witness to large-scale maid re-unions. Sometimes two maids accompany each child and the hosts have to arrange many boxes to cater to these hungry guests.

 

At a recent party, however, the poor hostess was in a real quandary. What happened was that the maids refused to eat from the 'maid-boxes' and demanded plates and seats like the guests. They did not wait for formal approval from anyone and walked up to the table to dig in to the 'apple-turnovers' and 'blueberry pies'. So compelling was the hunger from within and so large the number of maids that the food on the table vanished in no time.

 

It is anybody's guess as to who had to eat from the 'maid-boxes' in the end.

 

My sister-in-law has her priorities in perfect order. She has identified the specialist maid who would chaperon her second baby and has booked her in advance even though the said woman is working elsewhere nowadays.

 

The only thing that remains to be decided is whether and when she is to have the second baby.

 

In my own home there is a very old and very imposing looking maid who is like someone out of the history books, but who works more effectively than any maid of the modern era. My wife goes out of her way to look after her, and we all call her 'Mataji'.

 

I must also confess to being a little afraid of her; so intimidating is she. She bosses me around whenever I'm around and often asks me to move away from the room that she's busy cleaning.

 

She is quite a born leader, it seems. In fact I hear that she might soon take over as the President of the All India Maids Association. The whole country had better watch out!

 

***************************************

THE TRIBUNE

OPED

FARMING FOR THE MARKET

WITH THE GROWING CONSUMERISM DUE TO AN INCREASE IN DISPOSABLE INCOMES, A HIGHER LEVEL OF EDUCATION, INCREASING URBANISATION AND THE CHANGING TASTES OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION, A CONSUMPTION-ORIENTED MARKET SYSTEM IS BECOMING MORE EFFECTIVE THAN THE ONE DRIVEN BY PRODUCTION

JOGINDER SINGH

 

The Green Revolution, which was ushered in the mid-sixties in Punjab, faded away in the early nineties, leaving agriculture to struggle for its mere sustainability. This is apparent from the fast-sliding compound growth rate in this sector from 5.37 per cent in the Sixth Plan to 1.90 per cent in the Ninth Plan and 2.28 per cent in the Tenth Plan period. Without visualising emerging problems, the political, economic and social systems continued to thrive on the past performance.

 

Apparently, there is little scope for improvement in productivity of food-grain crops due to technology fatigue. The government and policy planners kept high hopes on the research systems without rectifying the policies, particularly in terms of inadequate funding the research and development, lack of initiative for value addition, non-economic use of a huge mass of crop residue, encouraging overuse of most precious resources such as electricity and water and paralysed export infrastructure.

 

With the taking off of the state economy during the Green Revolution era, there was a strong need for shifting people from agriculture to manufacturing and the service sector. This process demanded a fast growth of these sectors. In Punjab the banking, insurance, communication and trade, tourism, construction and manufacturing sectors did not catch up with the growth of majority of other states. Hence as much as about 33 pe cent of the gross state domestic product of Punjab is still contributed by the slow-growing agriculture sector whereas almost all right thinking states of the country are concentrating more on the secondary and tertiary sectors.

 

Diversification

 

The farm sector is facing serious environmental problems due to the declining water resources, deteriorating soil health, direct human health hazards caused by pesticide residues, air pollution etc. About 30 million tonnes of crop residues are burned every year in Punjab. This calls for immediate attention of its use for livestock, degeneration as humus for soil, making industrial use such as manufacture of cardboard, paper, packing material, energy generation etc.

 

There exists a vast production potential of various alternative crop and livestock enterprises which can replace rice and wheat crops but their contribution to the overall production is not responding due to lack of processing and other value addition processes, domestic market and export infrastructure. Still on paper, diversification of agriculture is our motto. In the light of this, our planners are unsuccessfully forcing some unviable crops such as soybean, banana etc whereas their roots are refusing to enter the soil. In the attempt at diversification, clear-cut agro-climatic regions should be used as guiding indicators.

 

The state has south-western districts covering about 7.5 lakh hectares as a clear-cut demarcated cotton belt having brackish underground water. Following a long spell of failure of cotton, the paddy crop infiltrated this area and farmers had to explore deep groundwater by investing in submersible tubewells. Now, the cotton crop is on the recovery path, particularly with the introduction of Bt varieties. Apart from offering diversification possibility of agriculture from rice to cotton on another about two lakh hectares in the state, it has a high potential of employment and value addition in the secondary and tertiary sectors.

 

The production of fruits, vegetables and various other farm products can be accelerated in the state but lack of processing facilities due to their seasonal production, high carry-over cost and lack of processing attributes are some hindrances. About 9 per cent of the geographical area of the state along the Shivalik hill range having undulating topography, popularly known as Kandi belt, which by default, is more suitable for organic farming of horticultural crops such as fruits, vegetables, spices due to agro-climatic conditions. This could be encouraged through training, developing internal and external inspection system, and encouraging Self Help Groups of farmers. All these examples highlight the role of processing industry in not just processing products but also contributing to R&D for boosting production of their raw materials.

 

Supply chain management

 

To ease the situation within agriculture, it is suggested to strive for the Second Green Revolution through value addition. Most of the potential alternative produce is highly perishable and requires special treatment with quick transportation, delicate handling, storage at specific low temperature, processing in different forms, scientific packaging, sound market information and outlook services and development of export infrastructure. Now, the question is that what can be the most suitable agency to carry it out. Incurring such heavy investments is obviously not within the reach of an average farmer who is handicapped by constrains of inadequate resources. A vast majority of farmers' cooperatives have not been successful due to various technical, administrative and social reasons and thus lack initiatives to take up such activities. Autonomous investment is also a remote possibility as the state government has already washed off its hands with the excuse that it is starved of financial resources, obviously due to various measures adopted on different fronts. The initiation of contract farming was an interesting positive step taken by the state government a few years back. This experiment too could not succeed due to a number of obvious reasons, especially inbuilt constraints and over-interference of the government. The buying agencies thrived on trading rather than appropriate value addition processes. Still the only ray of hope is investments by big business houses with backward and forward linkages in spite of certain possibilities of certain exploitative practices.

 

Consumer is king

 

The fact remains that our farmer got expertise on production system, which he has nicely demonstrated on the ground. Now with the opening up of the economy, we need to view the things in diametrically opposite perspective. The production system has to be volatile to cater to consumers' requirements. To capture the need of well-to-do sections of society in terms of consumer's taste, product quality, safety, nutrition aspects etc, the essential services are required to be provided, necessitating the opening of retail chain stores in the state. Therefore, to demonstrate the technical and pricing efficiency, organised retailing through horizontal and vertical market linkages, harnessing the scale economies can be a feasible solution. Moreover, with growing consumerism due to an increase in the disposable income, a higher level of education and urbanisation and the changing tastes of the younger generation, a consumption-oriented rather than production-oriented market system is becoming more effective with the passage of time. Let the successful farmers' cooperatives and individual farmers also coordinate and compete within the system. Going a step further, the market view should not be limited only to domestic consumers but also to potential global markets.

 

Market information is another important dark area which, if cared for prudently, can help in facilitating the process further. Marketing innovations are coming up at a fast rate and sale, which was once effected on the physical display of produce, is now done by samples, by quality description, by grade standards or even by display on the internet. Therefore, a regular monitoring of the domestic and global markets by taking stock of demand, prices, quality requirements and other market forces along with the tariff structure is needed for guidance to farmers and market agencies to facilitate their safe entry. Since small farmers do not have the capacity to develop such market infrastructure, it is for the state to work through the farmers' commission in this direction for some worthwhile performance.

 

The writer is a former Prof. & Head, Department of Economics & Sociology, PAU, Ludhiana.

 

***************************************

THE TRIBUNE

OPED

RICH CROPS, POOR FARMERS

SUMAN SAHAI

 

This year the wheat crop, by and large, is good. Western and Central Uttar Pradesh produces surplus grain like Punjab and Haryana and since the days of the Green Revolution, these have been important centres where rice and wheat are procured for the Central pool.

 

In the earlier days this worked well for farmers but in the recent years, procurement has become an exercise to torment farmers rather than support them. First, the minimum support price (MSP) is never paid in full.If the price announced for wheat is Rs 1,120 per quintal, as it is this year, the real price that the farmer will get can be anything from Rs 750 to Rs 950 per quintal. Corruption locks farmers in a vice-like grip because they have no storage facilities and must sell their produce immediately after harvest.

 

The procurement agencies and where relevant, private buyers, know this and turn the screws on the price since they know the farmer has no choice but to sell. Other strategies that are used to press prices down is to tell the farmer that their grain has not been dried sufficiently (whether that is true or not) and will not be lifted. As soon as palms are greased, the grain dries miraculously. Other tricks are to declare the grain too 'light', not fulfilling the standards set by the FCI. The FCI's exacting standards are equally miraculously met once farmers' pockets have become correspondingly lighter.

 

Often there is an unholy nexus between FCI agents and private companies. The deal is that the procurement agency will reject much of the grain on one pretext or another. Farmers have to travel to procurement centres with their grain, for it to be inspected, weighed and lifted. If they do not have their own bullock carts, they hire these or rent trucks or tractor-trailers to bring their grain to the centre. Every day of delay costs the farmer in rental money. It's like ports charge demurrage charges if you do not lift your goods. Each day the port holds your goods, it charges you a fee. The bullock cart, tractor and truck owners do the same. So if they have to wait till the farmer can negotiate the deal, the cost of hire keeps going up every day.

 

This eats into the farmer's profit. When the farmer's grain is held up and he is desperate to sell it, private companies step in and buy up the grain at low prices. In this way the back-breaking effort put in by the farmer and the little subsidy he gets on fertiliser and diesel to irrigate his fields goes to benefit private companies. Despite a good harvest the farmer may not make a profit. Sometimes he cannot even recover his cost and in this way he gets poorer and so desperate that he wants to abandon agriculture.

 

This is not my version. The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) discovered this in its survey in 2007 when almost half the country's farmers said they would abandon farming if they could find another occupation. This should set the alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power. If the farmer does not grow food what will we eat? Import food? But there is nothing available on the international market to buy! Drought in Australia and Russia, floods in New Zealand and turbulent weather everywhere has ensured that guaranteed food surpluses cannot be counted on. The biofuel drive in the US has drawn away the American corn into ethanol production so that wheat is diverted to animal feed and both corn and wheat are now in short supply.

 

It is not a rocket science to understand that we need to make agriculture work if we as a nation are to get anywhere. Pursuing the dreams of 9 per cent growth while leaving large chunks of India out of the ambit of such growth is fraught with danger as the developments in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are showing us every other week. Internal security, the Prime Minister says, is the country's largest crisis. Fixing agriculture and putting money in the farmers' pocket is a dead-sure way of finding our way out of the crisis of internal security. When will we get that?

 

The writer is the Chief Editor of the New Delhi-based GeneNews

 

***************************************

 

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

EDITORIAL

ORDERING ORDINANCE

T N NINAN

Much of the initial comment in the Indian media on the shortlisting of two of the six contenders for a Rs 42,000-crore fighter aircraft has focused (predictably, perhaps) on the elimination of the two American contenders. The US ambassador has made some gratuitous comments: he is "respectful" of the selection process which, he has been assured at the highest level of the government, is "fair and transparent" (so what did he expect?). Mr Roemer's counterparts from Russia and Sweden, whose aircraft offers too have been rejected, have chosen wisely to hold their peace. All of them must have had a good idea of what was coming; it was fairly obvious some time ago that the final choice would be between the French Rafale and the four-country Eurofighter. And so it has turned out to be. Two newspapers in New Delhi have commented editorially that India has lost a chance to forge a stronger relationship with the US; no one here has commented on how it might have done the same with Russia, whose aircraft will be replaced by the new ones. <I>The Wall Street Journal </I>though headlined its report "India snubs US, Russia…". Snubs? As the Godfather would have said, this is not personal, it is strictly business.

So it might be a good idea to look beyond American disappointment (understandable) and pique (avoidable). The important thing is that a decision on the contract for seven squadrons of multi-role combat aircraft will be made before long. The air force is already about 10 squadrons short of its ideal strength of combat aircraft (said to be 39.5 squadrons). Indeed, of the 29 squadrons in service, the perennial problem with spares means that a good number of the aircraft in those squadrons are not airworthy. Given the time line for delivery of the planes that are to be ordered, there has been speculation that another four squadrons may have to be ordered, taking the total order to 11 squadrons.

 

It is worth noting that the Pakistan air force has been on an expansion and upgradation drive, and has significantly reduced its longstanding force disadvantage vis-à-vis India. Likewise, the Chinese air force has enhanced its capacity for air operations from the Tibetan plateau. Between the two, they now have more fighter aircraft to deploy against India than the size of the air force — for the first time in a quarter century and more.

What is true of the air force applies to the armed forces as a whole. India's defence spending this year will be 1.8 per cent of GDP — the lowest level since the wake-up call that the Chinese gave in 1962. Ten years ago, the defence-GDP ratio was closer to 2.7 per cent. Unless correctives are applied, India's ratio of defence spending to GDP is in danger of slipping to the level of some European countries that face no real security threat, and which in any case have an American security umbrella available.

The problem is not just the failure to spend money, it is also the procurement process — the invariably rocky path to ordering new ordinance. The planned order for light howitzers that can be airlifted to frontline positions has just gone into another tailspin; an order for heavy-lift C-17 Globemasters is stuck because the asking price is much higher than Australia paid. Domestic weapon development projects have made headway but most of them, including the missile programme, have also been subject to massive delays. The end result has to be stated baldly; India's defence readiness has suffered at a time when the country's security environment has unarguably deteriorated.

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

EDITORIAL

RIGHT APPROACH, WRONG YARDSTICK

RBI'S UNIQUE FOCUS ON WPI INFLATION IS MISGUIDED EVEN AS DEMAND-DRIVEN FACTORS HAVE BECOME RELATIVELY LESS IMPORTANT

RAJEEV MALIK

 

The key issues for the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its upcoming monetary policy review for 2011-12 will likely be dissecting the growth-inflation trade-off, taking a closer look at demand- versus supply-driven factors affecting inflation, and deciding whether to raise the policy rates by 25 or 50 basis points (bps). On the surface, it appears puzzling that wholesale price index (WPI) inflation continues to be higher than expected despite a hefty cumulative increase of 350 bps in policy rates since early 2010 and increasing indications about moderation in growth. However, a little bit of digging reveals that there is no puzzle (more on this later).

 

 In my opinion, the RBI's forecast for GDP growth for 2011-12 will probably be in the 8.0-8.3 per cent range, while the WPI inflation for March 2012 will be pegged in the 5.0-6.0 per cent range. The actual inflation outcome will probably be higher but the RBI is unlikely to announce that just yet and the high base for March 2011 will flatter the year-on-year comparison for WPI in March 2012.

Judging the growth-inflation trade-off accurately is more crucial than ever before, as is analysing the drivers of inflation. The RBI has actually been successful in managing aggregate demand but the supply-side nature of inflation (including higher global commodity prices and the delayed changes in local administered prices) is what is surprising on the upside. My own sense is that demand-side factors have become less important than supply-side factors in contributing to inflation. Growth is already moderating and aggressive rate increases from here on will risk a far greater slowdown than what is needed, especially since monetary measures work with a lag and we have not seen the full impact of the tightening done so far. Car dealers are reporting a slower off-take owing to several factors including higher interest rates, and the investment upturn is weaker than expected. Also, the pace of monetary expansion is not excessive and the current credit growth mainly reflects higher working capital (as input prices have increased) rather than stronger aggregate demand.

There is a lot of noise that real interest rates in India are negative and are contributing to inflation. While it is true that real policy rates (as measured by WPI inflation) in India are negative partly owing to the nature of supply shocks, real lending rates, which matter for aggregate demand, are well into positive territory. The picture also changes if one buys the argument that using WPI in place of an accurate consumer price index (CPI) overstates inflation. Indeed, credit growth would have been a lot higher and economic growth would not be decelerating if real lending rates were very attractive for borrowers to cause a lending boom.

The run-up to the policy review offers a good time to question the RBI's choice of the WPI as a key measure of inflation when the practice throughout the world is to use the CPI. Indeed, it is a mistake to use the WPI as a replacement for the CPI, which is what it has emerged to be for policy purposes and for market participants in India. The distinction between the two has become more important owing to the sharp upturn in global commodity prices that impact input price inflation far more than final goods prices as captured by CPI inflation. The latter is what central banks actually attempt to manage by affecting aggregate demand. Either the central bankers in the rest of the world have got it wrong or the RBI has it upside down and needs to explain the unique tools it has to manage input price changes.

But whatever the compulsions of using WPI as a key metric of inflation, it is a faulty measure for deciding interest rates. Actually, India's unique focus on WPI when global commodity prices are rising probably overestimates the underlying inflationary pressures, even as higher commodity prices will keep inflation higher for longer, essentially a new higher normal for inflation.

Obviously, there is some impact of final consumer demand on input prices but it is unlikely to be 100 per cent of the pass-through of higher input prices that are captured in WPI inflation. Thailand offers a good example (but not the only one) of inflation dynamics in an economy where the output gap has closed. In 2010, inflation measured by the producer price index (PPI) was 9.4 per cent but CPI inflation was only 3.3 per cent. The Bank of Thailand (BoT) focuses on CPI, not PPI. If it focused on input prices like the RBI, the BoT's monetary policy would have been on a totally different – and incorrect – trajectory.

The RBI's characterisation of higher non-food manufactured goods WPI (a crude measure of core input inflation, not core final goods inflation) as reflecting stronger aggregate demand affecting inflation is totally incorrect, in my humble opinion. Indeed, higher global commodity prices and/or upward adjustment in domestic administered fuel prices will result in higher core WPI inflation, even if demand conditions remain unchanged or are weakening!

Should the RBI raise rates by 25 bps or 50 bps on May 3? The most bogus argument for a 50-bp increase is that it will restore the RBI's credibility — not the first time we have heard that. I'd vote for a 25-bp hike accompanied by a hawkish statement that accurately lays more emphasis on inflation now being less affected by demand-side factors owing to the ongoing policy response. The RBI has rightly stayed away from a one-step 50bp hike so far in the current tightening cycle, and it is not necessary to alter that approach this late in the cycle, especially since it meets every six weeks. Also, we do not know how the monsoon is going to play out.

The RBI needs to act but it should not go overboard now even as it attempts to clarify its misconstrued focus on WPI inflation for setting interest rates. Indeed, a risk-reward assessment still favours staying with a 25-bp increase. Financial stability in a topsy-turvy world remains important and we must avoid a repeat of the mid-1990s experience of killing inflation by killing growth.

The author is senior economist at CLSA, Singapore
The views expressed are personal

***************************************

 BUSINESS STANDARD

RATING SOUTH INDIA'S THREE CAPITALS

SUNIL SETHI

A whistle-stop five-day tour of three south Indian state capitals (Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad) yielded a variety of impressions but here is my overall verdict: Bangalore is the worst-managed of the three and Hyderabad by far the best.

All that you have heard about Bangalore traffic is true. It can take up to an hour to get to a residential suburb like Koramangala, where many commercial enterprises have also moved, and much longer to Whitefield which is as Gurgaon is to Delhi. The first phase of the Metro in the city centre is due to open soon but it is not for this reason alone that large tracts of road are dug up, potholed or diverted. Planning and maintenance in this once stately, well-preserved and tree-filled city have nosedived. So has its temperate climate. Rabid construction has taken a toll on its cool weather.

 

Mercifully, some landmarks still thrive, upholding the city's tradition of hospitality. Principally, Koshy's, the famous street corner coffee house that remains an atmospheric shabby-chic meeting point with Prem Koshy, its genial owner, dispensing reasonably-priced food with warm smiles. (Among the off-the-menu delicacies I sampled was a delicately flavoured, piping-hot tender coconut soup.) Bangalore is also the most exuberantly cosmopolitan of the three capitals, buzzing with young professionals. At Indigo, the popular rock music radio station where I was a guest, Assamese RJ Shweta Rao, who has set up radio stations in Mumbai and Dubai, was a marvel in multitasking: pattering for 40 minutes, losing neither a chuckle nor cue, working cell phone texts, laptop and headphones, while dexterously playing hits by chartbuster Adele.

Chennai retains its graceful mix of the old and new, adhering to both civic sense and civility. It has a modernising but manageable aspect: lively, well-written newspapers, excellent journalists, and denizens vigorously engaged in intellectual, political and cultural pursuits. Arriving after polling day, the chief topic of discussion naturally was the expected return of Jayalalithaa, whose shop-soiled image is being given a new polish. Many of her old sins of omission and commission are forgotten or glossed over. Novelist-turned-journalist Vaasanthi's sympathetic new biography of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader is a hit. Topic number two of debate is the ongoing battle for control of The Hindu, the venerable Mahavishnu of Mount Road. Everyone, including my hotel manager, had an opinion, as if it was his personal family feud.

Hyderabad is the southern capital with the greatest sheen; its airport is the best-designed, managed and efficient, far better than Delhi's unwieldy T3 with its hideous carpeting and freaky murals. The freeway to the city is speedy and splendidly landscaped; and though the natural rock forms of Banjara Hills are replaced wall-to-wall by office complexes and shopping malls, some past treasures jostle for attention with Hyderabad's modern skyline.

I visited two of the most talked-about heritage restorations: the 19th century Chowmahalla palace near the Charminar and the Falaknuma, five kilometres south. The first, a former home of the Nizams, is now a large orderly museum open to the public, its gardens, chandeliered marble halls, fountain courts and galleries drawing throngs of visitors. The Falaknuma, an ostentatious European-style home of a prime minister, let to the Taj group on a 60-year lease, has taken 15 years and an investment of Rs 100 crore to create the last word in luxury. Perched on a hill, a giddy blue-and-white confection of decoration, it offers vistas all the way to Golconda fort.

Ranjit Philipose, the hotel's general manager, who has managed Taj properties in London and Boston, took me on a tour. Together with the exacting taste of Nizam's Turkish-born wife, Princess Esra, he has succeeded in recreating a vision of restrained splendour. "I was given two years to create the number one hotel in India and the world. When the Nizam visited this winter he said, "Pehle se behtar hai" (It is better than the original). I took that as my best compliment."

 

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

COLUMN

THE SUBLIME AND THE ORDINARY

K NATWAR SINGH

I was fortunate to have had an audience with Sathya Sai Baba on two occasions. The first time was in the winter of 1971, when I was in Bangalore with the prime minister of Poland. Mohan Lal Sukhadia, Karnataka's governor at the time, narrated a few "miracles" of Baba and later arranged for me to go to Whitefield. I returned with the ashes that Baba had conjured. The second time was at a friend's house in New Delhi. I never became a follower, but always admired and respected this holy man who provided solace to so many people all over the world. It is India's genius to give birth to people with exceptional transcendental powers.

Now from the sublime to the mundane. You've got to hand it to the Chinese for practising such a sure-footed foreign policy. In 1997, Hong Kong changed hands. It returned to the mother country after being a British colony for 99 years. Mao Zedong's China could have terminated the lease any time after October 1949, when the People's Republic of China (PRC) was established. Britain was in no position to take on the PRC. Hong Kong figured nearly at the bottom of China's immediate priorities. It never gave up its claim on Hong Kong. Mao and Deng Xiaoping decided to wait so that once the apple was ripe, it fell in Beijing's lap.

 

 No drastic changes have been enacted in Hong Kong in the past 16 years. Capitalism and communism share the same bed. This embrace will continue till 2047. China thinks in terms of centuries, not five-year plans.

Let me provide some historical masala here. In 1962, the United Nation's (UN's) Committee on Decolonisation prepared a list of colonial territories, protectorates, dependencies and trust territories. Since Hong Kong was a British colony, the Committee was within its rights to include Hong Kong in the list. The Chinese delegation objected. It argued that Hong Kong was on a lease to the British, and it was part of China, so the Committee could not, and must not, include it in the list. The UN accepted China's point. Clearly, China plays the waiting game. This also applies to our border dispute. China is in no hurry. The status quo suits that country.

I have given this background to highlight the finesse with which the PRC handles diplomacy. At the end of the BRICS summit in Sanya, a statement was issued which, among other things, mentioned that Brazil, India and South Africa deserved to play a greater role at the UN including the Security Council. The statement was not India-specific. Nor did it refer to permanent membership. Yet, our officialdom went lyrical: "China supports India." To put it mildly, this reaction was immature and misplaced. India will become a permanent member only when the five permanent members agree on a package before the UN charter is amended to enlarge the Security Council. The sensible thing would be to practise dignified restraint and avoid exuberance.

A few weeks ago, I asked in this column: Does India have an Arab policy? So far it appears that it does not. Has the ministry of external affairs (MEA) deplored, if not condemned, the brutality that Presidents Bashar Assad and Ali Abdullah Saleh continue to inflict on the people. Jawaharlal Nehru had unambiguously declared that India would not sit quiet when freedom and liberty were endangered. Who is minding the MEA diplomatic shop when the prime minister is on his all-too-frequent jaunts. Is it S M Krishna?

The level of the national political dialogue is going down. Unseemly name calling, verbal overkill and unbridled point-scoring, at a time when vital issues are at stake, are most lamentable. Anna Hazare is the latest whipping boy of one or two of the Congress "worthies", who persist in their folly even after the Congress president has praised, not denigrated, Mr Hazare. Efforts are afoot to block the horizon of civil and social societies. It's time to put an end to the odour emanating from certain political dens.

Tailpiece
Indira Gandhi is often presented as a solemn and severe person, and is rarely given the credit for her sense of humour. Her information adviser for 16 years, the late Sharada Prasad, had an impressive stock of jokes and amusing stories.

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

COLUMN

A MATTER OF HISTORY

V V

A fact is like a sack — it won't stand till you've put something into it."
– Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936): Six Characters in Search of an Author

Every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of facts. So does a historian looking back into the facts of history. So we must study the historian before we study the facts because his selection might determine what we might believe happened in history. Bernard Lewis, the prolific Princeton Orientalist, who is best known as the Middle East (West Asia and North Africa) specialist in America, has come with Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (OUP, America, $24.95) — a follow-up to his earlier work, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle East Response (2002), which coincided beautifully with the September 11 attacks. As he explained in his preface, the book was related to the attacks, "explaining not what happened and what followed, but what went wrong — the longer sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded and in some measure produced them".

 

Mr Lewis does much the same here with a focus on the failure of Muslims to adapt their religion and tradition to present requirements, unlike their age-old Christian rivals who embraced modernity in its entirety. In this book, he has recycled his articles and lectures that feature "the clash of civilisations" between seemingly "incompatible entities" called Islam and the "West". What Mr Lewis tells his audiences is this. Islam, conflated with the Arab-Muslim world, has no functioning democracy or successful industrial economies. Besides, Islam is not just a religion "but a complete system of identity, loyalty, and authority that provides Muslims with the most appealing and convincing answers to their problems".

In the Western world, he says, the basic unit of human organisation is the nation which is subdivided in various ways, one of which is religion. Muslims, however, he says, tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups, but a religion subdivided into nations. There were historical reasons for this, one of which is that most of the nation states that make up the modern Middle East were relatively new creations, left over from British and French imperialism that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. As a historian, Mr Lewis has drawn heavily from history to explain why the two cannot meet. But you need to read the nitty-gritty of his arguments and decide which are plausible.

What is central to his argument is this statement on democracy in the Middle East: "What is entirely lacking in the Middle Eastern political tradition is representation of what goes with it — the idea that people elect others to represent them, that these others meet in some sort of corporate body, and that the corporate body deliberates, conducts discussions, and most important of all, reaches decisions that have binding force… In Roman law and in most of the European systems derived from it or influenced by it, there is such a thing as a legal person, a corporation, an abstraction that nevertheless functions as a legal person."

It is this absence, which he says is derived from Islamic Sharia law that has no concept of a legal personality, that goes to the heart of the "democratic deficit" of many Middle Eastern politics, where family, tribe or sects tend to subvert the authority of public institutions at the expense of civil society. Thus, real power gravitates towards the armed forces guided by the exigencies of military logic rather than the ebb and flow of democratic politics.

In the long run, forces that brought down the Mubarak regime and shook others in the region would have come to grips with the power of the military with its networks of properties and other vested interests. Ever since the Anglo-French stranglehold was weakened, the institutions of civil society have been corroded by the top-down military-industrial complex that has left little space for democratic structures. Mr Lewis rightly argues that democracy can only flourish if institutions that are accountable to civil society are allowed to develop; their absence in Muslim and Middle East societies has led to the present crisis. But, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the region have demonstrated that it is the internal forces, facilitated by globalised information technologies, that can bring about any meaningful change.

Mr Lewis, however, misses one important factor that has shaped the Middle East. This is the unique longevity and intensity of the western imperial grip on the region over the past century. From Morocco to Egypt, colonial control of North Africa was divided between France, Italy and Britain before the First World War, while the Gulf became a series of British protectorates. Formal decolonisation was accompanied by virtually uninterrupted sequence of imperial wars and interventions in the post-colonial period. It is this colonial experience that has shaped these societies and to a large extent stifled the growth of democratic institutions.

 

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

MAN BEHIND THE UNIFORM

DESPITE HIS LACK OF INTEREST IN POLITICS KAYANI IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MAN IN PAKISTAN TODAY

ADITI PHADNIS

The denial earlier this week that the Indian prime minister had used the back channel to contact Pakistan Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani ahead of the match at Mohali had Pakistanis puzzled. Of all the army chiefs Pakistan has had, they said General Kayani is the least interested in politics. Why would anyone want a back channel with him when he has been so open, they asked.

Kayani meets a select group of journalists for lunch every month. At one such meeting, he was asked what his (the Pakistan army's) view was on talks with India. He said quite clearly: "We will go along with the government on this." When the Malakand and FATA operations – where the army was trying to militarily overcome Pakistan's own people – were undertaken, Kayani got the director general military operations (DGMO) to brief Parliament and got elected representatives to suggest what should be done next. "There is no reason for the army not to be on board on India. If he'd wanted a coup, he would have done one by now," commented a retired Pakistani General about Kayani.

 

Kayani has recently been given another three years in the job, in itself unprecedented. Three years is plenty of time to improve his current golf handicap (average, at 18), and to try giving up smoking (he's a chain-smoker and though he succeeded in kicking the habit once, he restarted when he was DGMO and Operation Parakram was on).

So here are some must-knows about Kayani.

A reserved man, Kayani has a reputation of talking little but getting a lot done. He has very few friends but if he shares anything he shares it with these men. His dearest friends are Defence Secretary, Lt General (retd) Syed Athar Ali who took over in November 2008; and Lt General (retd) Imtiaz Hussain who heads the Army Welfare Trust. Both are infantrymen who have trained at the Command and Staff College, Quetta with Kayani in his salad days. If anyone knows what is going on in Kayani's head, it is these two.

Kayani is an infantryman, the son of an army non-commissioned officer. He received his commission in the Pakistani army in 1971 in the prized Baloch Regiment. His father died when he was training at the military academy. The task of supporting his family – he was the oldest of four brothers – fell on him.

In 2002, he was appointed commander of the key Rawalpindi Corps. Why is this key? Since theoretically, while the army is fighting crucial battles in Swat and Balochistan, it is Rawalpindi that is the centre of political – and strategic – action.

In 2003, then President Pervez Musharraf gave Kayani charge of investigating two assassination attempts on him. All intelligence agencies in the country were tasked to work with him. In a few months, Kayani had unravelled the two plots and arrested many culprits, chiefly from the lower ranks in the Pakistan Air Force. On this basis, in 2004 he was promoted to head the ISI. Musharraf promoted only two Generals to 4-star: Kayani and General Tariq Majid, now retired, who became chairman joint chiefs of staff committee.

After General Musharraf shrugged off his uniform, Kayani gave no indication of wanting to wear a civilian hat. In fact, he likened coups to temporary bypasses that are created when a bridge collapses on democracy's highway. After the bridge is repaired, he said to a Pakistani newspaper, there's no longer need for the detour. Kayani is the most important man in Pakistan today: not for what he does, but for what he is unlikely to do — hobble the working of the civilian government. You could argue that this is unnecessary because everything the government does, he knows about. But the difference between him and General Musharraf is: the element of unvaunted ambition is missing here. Kayani has been correct to the point that General Musharraf has complained to friends that the new chief has not spoken to him even once after Musharraf left the country.

Kayani's favourite general is the chief of general staff — Lt General Waheed Arshad — from the Armoured Corps. He is the de facto number two in the Pakistan army, which has no vice chief of army Staff. Arshad was made chief of general staff without having commanded a corps. Three generals who had worked with him in the ISI are now his most trusted Corps Commander — General Asif Yaseen Malik in Peshawar; General Rashad Mehmood in Lahore from his own Baloch Regiment; and Lt General Mohammad Zahirul Islam in Karachi. So the ISI is very much in the Pakistan decision-making loop, but legitimately so. Rawalpindi is occupied by Lt General Khalid Nawaz Janjua, also from the Baloch Regiment.

In other words, there is no danger of a coup from within the army. The chief of army staff is a man immune to the seduction of civilian and political power. And what is more, he is in the saddle for at least another three years. So the Pakistan army, as much for India as for Pakistan, poses no danger to peace. For the moment.

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

A KEEN EYE ON HEALTHCARE

INNOVATIONS BY START-UPS IN EYE DIAGNOSTICS MAY HELP DETECT AILMENTS MUCH BEFORE THE FIRST SYMPTOMS APPEAR

JYOTI PANDE LAVAKARE

For someone who plays so little sport, I've sat across from a surprisingly large number of sports physicians, especially while living in California — it's the standing joke in my family. However, the tables were turned recently, when a skiing accident finally caught up with the real sportsperson in our house, and I found myself sitting outside the operation theatre in an Indian hospital, waiting for news about a finger surgery under general anaesthesia.

What struck me was the extreme makeover private hospitals have had in the less than half decade that I've been away from India. Between the gleaming granite interiors, cool cafés and smartly turned out staff, I fully expected a welcome drink – antibiotic-laced, no doubt – and a cold towel, while registering my patient.

 

It's truly amazing how far behind these hotel-like hospitals have left their state-run counterparts. My last visit to a government hospital left me feeling sick to the stomach at the stench and filth in the corridors — though I was still impressed with the quality of its overworked doctors. It's the sheer numbers that makes it all unmanageable. Or is it?

If populous countries like India focused aggressively on preventive healthcare, most of which can easily be done off-site, state hospitals wouldn't get so overloaded. Most patients waiting at state-run hospitals come from satellite towns and rural areas, usually in advanced stages of a disease, by which time intense treatment becomes inevitable, and both costs and mortality are higher. What if these millions could be caught at beginning stages before the first symptoms manifest and much before the disease has proliferated — without overworking existing doctors?

This is exactly what a start-up called Forus Health Pvt Ltd is trying to do. Forus, founded last year, focuses on the preventive healthcare space. Its first product – a pre-screening optical device called 3nethra – can detect up to five common eye problems non-invasively even before first symptoms appear. Without a doctor behind the controls.

"India has 25 per cent of the entire world's blind population," Dr Shyam Vasudeva Rao, president and CTO of Forus Health, told me in Bangalore earlier this month. "Over 80 per cent of that is easily preventable." If that isn't shocking, Rao's statistics are relentless. "Diabetic retinopathy, cataract, glaucoma, cornea and refraction problems constitute 90 per cent of all blindness. Our ophthalmologist to patient ratio is approximately 1: 60,000. This is much worse in our villages — because of which only 10 per cent of people at various stages of blindness are screened and treated today."

India's entrepreneurial eco-system is coming alive with start-ups like Forus in the healthcare space – curative, preventive, palliative or as part of the new "wellness" industry – and technology is mutating existing models. These start-ups are devising innovative products and ideas aimed at democratising healthcare and making it more affordable. Hospitals are testing telescreening and remote diagnosis as viable options, and if successful, these could end up transforming the existing medical terrain.

Such improvisations help funnel patients to the required specialists, making treatment more effective, detecting diseases before they get critical thus taking some pressure off hospitals. These and hundreds of new ideas are stirring up some serious action in the medical field — eye diagnostics is one.

The World Health Organisation has launched a global initiative to eliminate avoidable blindness, called Vision 2020 — The Right to Sight. According to WHO estimates, 284 million people globally are visually impaired, 90 per cent of these are from developing countries — imagine the economic burden. The Indian government is participating in Vision 2020 — which means devices like 3nethra, NetraScan and others can become important tools in detecting early-stage impairment. NetraScan, a hand-held optical prototype is currently being incubated by Remidio, another Bangalore product design and development company, which plans clinical trials in its next stage of development.

"3Nethra does retina and cornea imaging, refraction index measurement and intelligent image processing to classify whether the patient needs to visit an eye doctor or just a optics shop. If an eye doctor — a diabetic retina specialist, glaucoma specialist or cataract surgeon?" It can also catch premature birth infant blindness, another large statistic, Dr Rao said. "All this can be done without pupil dilation or local anaesthesia, making it easy and safe to use. Plus its tele-medicine-enabled, making it best-suited for remote diagnostics."

Forus is focusing on the low-cost, high-volume zone to ultimately move patients out of hospitals to health kiosks and camps, which also increases rural outreach.

"These sorts of devices can be very useful for community work — as long as they stand the test of time," Dr Hem K Tewari, former chief of the Dr R P Centre for Opthalmic Sciences, said after seeing the product at an opthalmological conference a couple of weeks ago.

And it's not just the poor who benefit from eye examinations. A routine eye check-up can detect serious health conditions like diabetes, hypertension, even cancer, in addition to glaucoma and cataract. "Opportunistic screening in a diabetologist's office – just like a blood test – can easily prevent diabetic retinopathy," and 3nethra has a strong price advantage, Dr R Kim, chief medical officer of Aravind Eye Hospital, Madurai, said. Aravind, the world's largest eye-care provider, has bought two machines from Forus last month and is currently test-using them to analyse the clarity and quality of its digital images compared to existing pre-screeners. Its USP is that anyone can be trained to operate it — Forus suggests undergraduates from the local population since local skilling also provides rural jobs while freeing up doctors for more specialised functions.

This is just one area in the medical space where innovation is making inroads — there are several others. Whether or not these ideas take off, one thing is clear — entrepreneurship has seeped into India's medical healthcare space and is here to stay.

Feedback? Write to garagegigs@gmail.com

 

***************************************

BUSINESS STANDARD

PULSE OF THE NATION

LUX LAKSHMANAN

The critical state of India's food security is only getting worse each year. Besides, the cost of food items is rapidly increasing beyond affordability to a majority of people. Added to these woes are the short supply of pulses and edible oils that the central government is forced to import.

Pulses play a critical role in the Indian diet because large sections of people are vegetarians. Proteins play a key role in the human diet in that it is the body building nutrient that develops muscles and is responsible for body strength, endurance and productivity at the workplace.

 

 It is established that a human body requires a daily intake of about 50 grams of protein. Whereas people in developed countries and most developing countries have a satisfactory protein intake, India's per capita daily intake is only about 10 grams, endangering the health and work performance of people.

Proteins are amino acids and out of the 22 amino acids required in the human diet, the body supplies 14 of these. The remaining eight have to come from the food we eat. If all the eight amino acids are present in a single food item, it is called a complete protein food.

Whereas all proteins from animal source are complete proteins, it is easy to satisfy the dietary protein requirement of non-vegetarians. However, the main sources of protein for vegetarians are leguminous plants to which pulses belong. In general, pulses have lower concentrations of protein than animal sources. Besides, none of the pulses are complete proteins, except soybeans. Therefore, combinations of two or more pulses are needed in a vegetarian diet. Dairy products that are complete proteins may also be used to supplement the pulse proteins in vegetarian diets.

Having emphasised the important role that pulses play in the human diet, it is now our responsibility to increase its availability indigenously. The commonly held belief that without new high-yielding varieties, the country will have to continue import of pulses and edible oils to meet its requirements is not true.

The possibility of improving productivity per acre two to three times using existing varieties is demonstrated time and again in grower fields in India. However, it is not done through just following present crop production practices but through the adoption of entirely new but simple and farmer-friendly technologies and tools presently not available to Indian farmers.

The underlying problem of Indian agriculture that threatens the food security of the country is the extremely low productivity of crops per acre. For example, rice productivity is only a third achieved elsewhere. Cotton productivity is only a sixth of yields in developed countries. The cases of all other crops are no different. In order for us to progress, our mindset on the following two factors needs to be changed:

·      It is not the farmer who makes the food. He is only a facilitator. Food is actually made by plants. Therefore, it is important to understand the requirements of plants and supply them without restrictions in order for plants to deliver food. Since plants do not talk, their needs are understood through research and experimentation.

The current policy of pampering farmers with subsidies will get us nowhere when it comes to achieving crop productivity improvements. This is well understood not only in developed countries, but also in developing African countries like Malawi, where from a basket case of poverty, malnutrition and food shortage, crop productivity improvements are made to the point where the country now exports surplus food to neighbouring poor countries.

The lesson we will have to learn is that instead of subsidising food for people, plants need subsidised food such as fertilisers and other inputs in order for them to produce the food for us to achieve food security. 

·      The mindset that breeding is the solution to all our maladies has to change. Nurturing plants is several times more important in crop productivity improvement than hybrid seeds per se. A hybrid variety will not produce if planted in a non-fertile beach soil. But will produce several times more if planted in fertile soil.

Brazil has learnt this lesson several years ago and completely stopped financing breeding for new varieties. Instead, it scouts around the world and selects promising varieties for testing their adaptability under Brazilian climatic conditions and then provides funding just for that. They have taken stem cuttings of black pepper varieties from Kerala in India and spent money and effort on crop production practices. Now their pepper yield is 1,500 kg per acre compared to India's average of a mere 350 kg an acre, the lowest among pepper producing countries.

India has about 50 million acres of irrigated land and is second only to the US with 60 million acres. In the US, it is possible to take only one crop per year due to weather constraints. However, India has the potential to take three crops per year, provided we learn how to sustain the fertility of our soils. This will be equal to 150 million acres of irrigated land. At present, our system of monitoring soil fertility and maintaining it is flawed and needs urgent attention.

The author is Director, California Agriculture Consulting Service, USA.
drlux@hotmail.com

***************************************

 

 

******************************************************************************************

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

RIGHT CALL

THE RBI IS RIGHT TO PROPOSE DEREGULATION OF SAVINGS RATES BUT HAS TO TIME IT RIGHT

 

The Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) 'Discussion Paper' on deregulating the interest rate paid by banks on savings deposits should more correctly have been called 'Position Paper'! While setting out the pros and cons of deregulation, there's no mistaking that the Bank's preference is to deregulate. Thus, it quotes with approval the recent experience of Hong Kong, where interest rate deregulation increased the efficacy of monetary policy by improving the correlation between retail bank deposit rates and market interest rates. It also points out that savings rates are not regulated in developed markets (though there are usually strict limits on the number of transactions permitted). To the extent the savings bank (SB) deposits interest rate is the only regulated rate and has remained unchanged at 3.5 % since March 1, 2003 even as the RBI's policy rates have varied, there is no doubt the former too should be determined by market forces. Savings deposits account for about 13% of financial savings of the household sector; so the Bank is entirely right that deregulation will improve monetary transmission (in the present Indian context raise both real and nominal rates) and encourage product innovation.
The debate, therefore, is not about the need to deregulate; it is, rather, about the timing. It is here that the RBI's confidence regarding the limited downside to deregulation could be overdone. SB deposits account for 22% of total deposits of scheduled commercial banks. Deregulating the SB interest rate could enhance asset-liability mismatches, as banks treat a large part of these deposits as 'core' deposits and use them to make long-term loans. The share of term loans increased over 2000-09 even as the share of term deposits came down, suggesting maturity mismatches have increased. The other consequences of deregulation, more competition and volatility are less worrisome. More competition is good and volatility is part of the game. As banking sector regulator, if the RBI feels the fallout in terms of maturity mismatches will not derail banks, it should go ahead. But not unless it is very sure! Else, it should bide its time for now.

 

***************************************

 

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

EDITORIAL

NOT BY COMMITTEE

PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEES SHOULD STICK TO ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

 What the fiasco over the Public Accounts Committee's report on the spectrum scam shows is that parliamentary committees should stick to evaluation and assessment, leaving investigation to professional agencies equipped to perform the task. The PAC report has gone into limbo, with the majority rejecting the draft prepared by the chairman and, further, alleging bad faith and worse in the drafting of the report. Quite clearly, both the finding of the report and its rejection depended on partisan views on the government rather than substantive merit. While finding fault with telecom minister Kapil Sibal for questioning the finding of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the draft report plumps for a figure of loss from the spectrum scam that is . 14,000 crore higher than the upper limit of the CAG's range for estimated loss, . 57,000-1,76,000 crore. So, the CAG is not infallible, after all. The PAC is not losing its way over controversy on ministerial probity and loss to the exchequer for the first time. During the BJPled NDA government as well, the PAC had come out with a draft report on the so-called coffin scam, relating to the import of caskets to carry the bodies of soldiers who died in the Kargil battle, allegedly at inflated prices. Then, it had been the turn of the BJP and the allies to reject the report and push the report into limbo. Given this track record, it is not difficult to imagine what would be the fate of the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been constituted to go into the spectrum scam. Since the JPC is headed by a Congress member of the House, it would be up to the BJP and other Opposition members to reject the draft presented by the chairman and create a ruckus.

The focus of our hon'ble MPs should be on rational policy to boost the spread of telecom, specifically high-speed data connectivity of which voice is but one functionality, across the length and breadth of the country. Whether X, Y and Z or A, B and C get to deliver those services matters a lot to the community of operators, not so much to consumers. MPs should leave corporate battles and investigations alone, and focus on productive policy.

***************************************

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

ALL IN A NAME

IF ANNE HATHAWAY MOVES BERKSHIRE STOCKS, LET'S NAME COMPANIES RAJNIKANTH

 

The islanders of New Hebrides, not having met outsiders for centuries, developed a consistent belief system. One of the pillars of this system was that body lice produce good health. It was blindingly apparent: healthy folks harboured lice. The few sick ones didn't. Ergo, lice made people healthier. Confounded by this belief, anthropologists were forced to, well, scratch a little deeper and what they found was this: almost all healthy New Hebridians were infected by lice, which they were loath to remove because of their strong beliefs. But when people fell ill, sometimes as a result of harbouring the pests, their temperatures rose and the lice deserted their hosts. Thus, an apparently indisputable belief fell apart under closer scrutiny.

Something similar is happening with the stocks of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of billionaire Warren Buffett. Whenever actress Anne Hathaway — star of films like T h e D e v il W e a r s P r a d aand B r i d e W a r s— is in the news, Berkshire Hathaway shares move up. In January 2009, the day B r i d e W a r s opened, the Berkshire stock jumped more than 2.6%; in February the next year, when V ale n t i n e's D a yopened, Berkshire went up more than 1% and in November the same year, when L o v e a n d O t h e r D r u g s opened, Berkshire responded with a 1.6% uptick. There have been other instances, including the day Hathaway (Anne, not Berkshire) was announced as the host of the 2010 Oscars, which correlate with jumps in Berkshire. Is this just lice and good health? Or are automatic algorithmic trade software, which search for buzzwords in the news to make trades, to blame? In any case, why don't we have Bollywood stars named Bajaj Auto or TCS? And why aren't more companies called Rajnikanth or Katrina Kaif?

***************************************

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

DO NOT MERGE SBI SUBSIDIARIES

THE SINGLE BANKING BEHEMOTH WILL DEFEAT THE CAUSES OF COMPETITION AND INCLUSIVE BANKING

V RAGHUNATHAN

CEO, GMR VARALAKSHMI FOUNDATION

 There have been many signals that in the government's opinion, India needs more banks. That is why, following the finance minister's announcement in the 2010-11 Budget, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) put out a discussion paper in August inviting views on whether banking licences should be issued to industrial houses, and also whether non-banking finance companies should be allowed to convert themselves into banks or to promote banks. There have also been calls in the government circles for more banks in the rural sector. Last week, deputy governor of RBI, Shyamala Gopinath, had observed: "Despite 40 years of nationalisation of banks, over 50% of the country's population is without a bank account!" Well, the need of the hour does seem like more banks; not less.

Currently, India has 89 scheduled commercial banks— 27 public sector banks, 31 private banks, and 31 foreign banks. Together they account for about 53,000 branches and 17,000 ATMs. Of course, in addition, there are the regional rural banks, local area banks, urban cooperative banks, state coop banks and district central coop banks. However, their role is at best marginal.

So then, what do we mean by the need for more banks? Do we mean more branches, or more banks — as in distinct legal entities? In all probability, we must mean a bit of both. This is because it is only when we have more banks, that in the aggregate we may have more branches; it is only when we have more banks that we will have more competition; it is only when we have more competition that we will have a greater range of products and services and a better quality of both; it is only under these conditions of healthy competition that the customers may more likely get a fair deal at the hands of the banking sector. Imagine the plight of customer service if most of the branches were controlled by a small number of banks.

It is in this context that State Bank of India's earlier merger of its subsidiary State Bank of Indore and its current announcement of intended merger of two more of its 100%-owned subsidiaries — State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Hyderabad — is disturbing. The report also states that the remaining five subsidiaries too may be in the queue; to be merged sooner rather than later. At a time when government's stated intent is to increase the number of banks, for its own largest bank to move towards becoming a monolith by merging all its subsidiaries seems to make little sense.

Worldwide, research indicates that the value of the single merged entity is almost always lower than the sum of the values of the individual entities that entered the merger. The reason for this loss in value is usually inherent to the loss of competition, which makes the merged entity more sluggish and more complacent. For example, in the last 12 months, there were any number of occasions when the fixed deposit rates offered by the State Bank of Travancore, a profit-making entity, was better than the rates offered by the parent. It is this kind of competitiveness that works in favour of the customers and hence the sector as a whole. Consolidating all the subsidiaries under a single umbrella is bound to make the bank less attractive for the public and investors alike, because it increases the distance between the top management and the field of action, namely the marketplace.
    Of course, SBI is a competent bank and it may be that the management knows what it is doing, which may be to pave the way for the management to preside over a world-sized bank. Nor is there anything wrong with such ambition, if it is also in the best interests of the owners and the customers whom the bank is supposed to serve.
The recent financial crisis proved that being very big is not necessarily very good for the health of financial institutions. Nor is size an insurance against risk of non-performance. On the other hand, size is anti-competition. Size is anti-market and pro-monopoly and pro-oligopoly. Size is too many eggs in one basket. In fact, what we need in India is the reverse. In the spirit of diversification of risk, no bank should be allowed to grow too big. Leave alone merging the subsidiaries, SBI should ideally be demerged into, say four large, but agile Davids instead of a lumbering Goliath. Even the size of a single bank, private or public, ought to be capped, so that once they hit a certain size, they are required to demerge into two smaller banks, each nimble enough to grow dynamically all over again. Mergers may make sense only when a very weak bank is taken over by a stronger one in order to give the former another lease of life. One often wonders how banks get away forcing their borrowers to variable interest rates, while simultaneously pushing their depositors to a fixed rate on the FDs. Is the situation symmetric and fair to the customers? Are the customers entitled to a choice? One would expect that such imperfections are more likely to be corrected with more banks in the system rather than less.

SBI is bound to justify its decision based on the recommendation of this or that consulting firm. But then, consulting firms are known to 'create their value' by alternatively recommending firms to diversify or concentrate; to merge or demerge; to manufacture or outsource; to shorten or widen their span of control; in short, the reverse of what the firms may be doing, for they can hardly expect to be paid a big fee for recommending continuation of the status quo!

 

***************************************

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

NEURAL NET

THE DOHA ROUND'S PREMATURE OBITUARY

JAGDISH BHAGWATI

The Doha Round, the first multilateral trade negotiation conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, is at a critical stage. Now in their 10th year, with much negotiated, the talks need a final political nudge, lest Doha — and hence the WTO — disappear from the world's radar screen.
Indeed, the danger is already real: when I was in Geneva a year ago and staying at the upscale Mandarin Oriental, I asked the concierge how far away the WTO was. He looked at me and asked: "Is the World Trade Organization a travel agency?" The threat of irrelevance is understood by leading statesmen, who have committed themselves to putting their shoulders to the wheel. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have unequivocally endorsed the recommendation of the High-level Expert Group on Trade, which Peter Sutherland and I co-chair, that we ought to abandon the Doha Round if it is not concluded by the end of this year.

Our idea was that, just as the prospect of an imminent hanging concentrates the mind, the deadline and prospective death of the Doha Round would galvanise the world's statesmen behind completing the last-mile of the marathon. (The analogy is all the more appropriate, given that WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, who has brilliantly kept the process going, is a marathon runner.)

But even as these efforts are gathering momentum, Financial Times, which used to be a staunch supporter of multilateral free trade, dropped a cluster bomb on Doha, even congratulating itself that, in 2008 (when a ministerial meeting failed to reach closure), it "argued that leaders should admit the negotiations were dead." But if sceptics forget Mark Twain's famous response to a mistaken obituary —"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" — were the negotiators who have continued to work since then akin to Gogol's "dead souls?"
FT recommends working out a Plan B here and now, which would sabotage the political efforts to conclude the Doha Round. Despite rhetorical bromides about requiring "ministers to unlearn ingrained habits and focus on substance, not rhetoric," and about "business associations engaging with the granular detail of what companies want", this proposed Plan B would strengthen the bilateral and regional trade initiatives that have diverted energy and attention from Doha and the WTO. The irony here is that the proliferation of such preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is usually justified by pointing to the lack of progress in concluding the Doha talks. Never have cause and effect been so dramatically reversed in arguments over trade policy.

It has become increasingly obvious that such PTAs are what I call "termites in the trading system". Indeed, evidence is mounting that they foster harmful trade diversion by increasing discrimination against non-members through differential use of anti-dumping actions. Thus, recent work by economists Tom Prusa and Robert Teh has produced convincing evidence that antidumping filings decrease by 33-55% within a PTA, whereas such filings increase against non-members by 10-30%.

More importantly, PTAs are used by hegemonic powers to foist on weaker trading partners demands unrelated to trade but desired by domestic lobbies, at times in a markedly asymmetric way. Thus, Peru saw its labour legislation virtually rewritten by United States Congressmen indebted to American unions before the US-Peru PTA was concluded. Similarly, Claude Barfield has documented how Colombia has been intimidated into making it acrime (with prison terms of up to five years) to engage in acts that "undermine the right to organise and bargain collectively". Colombia must also pass a law dictating prison terms for anyone who "offers a collective pact to non-union workers that is superior to terms for union workers". Will the US administration start filing criminal charges against the governor of Wisconsin and the many other Republican leaders who are doing precisely what the Colombian government is being bullied into not doing?

Such overreach is typical of what goes on in hegemon-led PTAs, unlike at the WTO, where stronger countries like India and Brazil cannot be so intimidated. The danger is that overreach will lead civil society and voters in democratic developing countries to react against self-serving displays of hegemonic might by jettisoning free trade itself, on the assumption that such openness is little more than neocolonialism.

(Jagdish Bhagwati is Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University) ©Project Syndicate, 2011

 

***************************************

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

GUEST COLUMN

POLITICAL FUNDING: NEED VS GREED

C P BHAMBHRI

 Democratic legitimacy of elected political representatives seems to be eroded to the extent that a person of the status of the Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi, on the basis of his latest experience of recent state assembly elections, made a public statement on April 12 that 'there is large-scale electoral corruption. The role of criminals and money power is rampant.' Indeed, the democratic electoral process has been completely polluted by political parties and their leaders who are prepared to adopt every conceivable corrupt practice to win elections.

In spite of strict vigilance exercised by the EC on unfair and criminal activities indulged in by the parties and contesting candidates during the elections, these malpractices have not come to an end. Hence, there is an urgent need for addressing this problem and an important step in this direction is to examine the institutional mechanisms which have been created by democratic countries in the industrialcapitalist West for not only checking but even eliminating the practices which pollute and delegitimise democratic elections.
The late 18th and 19th century history of elections in the US and England shows that the offices of elective representative assemblies, Parliament or Congress were 'bought' by rich sections of nobility, the aristocracy or, in the case of the US, the owners of large landed estates and slave labour. This system of purchase of elective offices by wealthy people was described as 'pocket-borough' in England where money was openly offered and accepted for electing a representative and American historians have described the early phase of their democracy as being controlled by 'robber barons' who had wealth and slaves. A very prestigious publication, Money in Politics Handbook, enlightens the practices which have been adopted by various democratic countries to ensure the elimination of unaccounted money spent by individual candidates or parties to influence voters by purchasing votes.

The first important step in making politics clean is that every individual candidate for any elective office should 'disclose' the source of donations received by him for participating in the elections. Laws have been passed in some democratic countries to bind every candidate to 'disclose' his sources of funds for elections. The justification for disclosure laws was summed up by the Prime Minister of Thailand as 'corrupt people fear information. What the government knows, the people should know'. This led USAID to sponsor a survey conducted by the International Foundation of Election Systems with a purpose to find the status of 'Disclosure Laws' in 118 countries. North America and Europe, which began their democratic journey with complete corruption in their electoral process, have achieved 80-100% compliance of the Public Disclosure Report by candidates.

Further, donations are collected not only by individual candidate but also political parties and the task will be half-done if candidates, and not parties, are put under legal obligation for public disclosure of their income and expenses and also names of donors of parties. Political parties in a democracy are a public institution and many countries have stringent laws for auditing the accounts of parties and individual candidates. For example, Western Australia has a comprehensive law of 'Offences under the Electoral Act, 1907, or 'Offences under the Electoral (Political Finance) Regulations 1996' and neither candidates nor parties can evade these laws except if they are prepared to face stringent punishment amounting to hefty fines or imprisonment. Why cannot India frame laws for disclosure of political finance and why cannot election activity, including sources of donation, be made transparent? The source of corruption in elections is the 'secrecy' practiced by every party and leader about the sources of their funds for elections. It is a well-known fact that every party has a 'loyal and faithful' fund collector who is accountable only to the supreme leader or dynasty-based regional bosses. India has taken an important first step that candidates contesting elections have to declare their personal financial and property interests, but this is not enough because every candidate or party gets funds from private promoters for elections.

Parliament should create a separate constitutional autonomous authority of an auditor-general to ensure disclosure of the sources of funds which are invested during the elections. The system of election petitions has completely failed to check the rot in Indian polity and the credibility of democraticallyelected representatives can be restored by appointing an ombudsman for acting as a watchdog of the parties. Unfortunately, in India, need and greed for funds has become interchangeable and this has polluted and corrupted the electoral system. It's time to change that

***************************************

 

******************************************************************************************

BUSINESS LINE

EDITORIAL

SAVING GRACE

International experience in deregulating savings rates has been encouraging and bolsters the case for freeing these rates sooner than later.

Deregulation of interest rates on savings deposits is an idea whose time has come. For eight years now, interest rates on savings bank deposits have remained capped at 3.5 per cent a year. Given that nearly a quarter of the deposits in the banking system come under this category, bank margins gained considerable stability from this 'cost control' measure, though it was not very fair to bank customers. Given the high levels of inflation over the past few years, real rates of interest for such customers have often been in the negative. The Reserve Bank of India's discussion paper on the subject signals the direction of change. A year ago, the RBI had asked banks to calculate savings bank interest rates on a daily basis rather than on the minimum balance in a month, though this was pushed through only after overcoming resistance from banks entrenched in their ways.

Banks were allowed to offer lower rates on savings accounts because customers could withdraw their balances any time and put through a relatively high number of transactions. However, studies show that customers tend to use these accounts more for savings than for transactions. Only, it is not clear how long they keep their 'savings portions' in these balances. And banks, recognising this behaviour, have treated a substantial part of such savings balances as 'core deposits' for long-term lending and to account for asset-liability matches. Deregulation of the savings rate will foster competition among banks, pushing up interest rates and enabling product innovations to benefit depositors. New banks may certainly benefit as they can afford to offer their savings bank customers rates that are a tad higher rather than pay the much higher market rates prevailing for wholesale deposits. Yes, banks will find their interest expenses moving up and their margins coming under a bit of pressure in the short run, when rates are freed. But, as the discussion paper points out, fears of unhealthy competition in setting savings bank rates are perhaps exaggerated. Going by the experience of decontrol of term deposit rates, there may be a hiccup or two down the line, but nothing more serious.

Savings rate deregulation will remove one of the last vestiges of administrative control on interest rates. As the regulator admits, this will also help improve policy transmission mechanism. International experience in this regard has been encouraging and can only bolster the case for freeing these rates sooner than later. Of course, no deregulation is an unmitigated blessing. Savers, especially pensioners, who lock up a large part of their savings in such accounts, may look back wistfully at an era when they got an assured return. For rates that go up can also come down when banks have enough money on their hands. It is up to banks to bring in innovations while minimising the disruptions, so that customers get a fair deal.

**************************************

******************************************************************************************

MUMBAI MIRROR

EDITORIAL

PLANES, REACTORS AND DIPLOMACY

AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY TILT TOWARDS INDIA WILL BE DISAPPOINTED BY INDIA'S REJECTION OF THEIR MILITARY AIRCRAFT BIDS

 

By a strange coincidence, the United States Ambassador to India announced his resignation within hours of a decision by the Government of India, that two American companies had been rejected as suppliers for fighter jets.

 

Officially the two events have no linkage, but you can't help thinking that American disappointment is being conveyed by the top diplomat. American diplomacy has always sought to further their commercial interests. Even though India's decision was based purely on technical merit, it is obvious that India will pay a price, and the relationship will cool down further.

 

The Indo-US relationship came out of deep freeze in 2006 when President Bush declared that he was going to sign a nuclear deal with India. This was after a thirty-year boycott, which was like nuclear apartheid, under which India had been isolated, and denied any nuclear technology and fuel (uranium).
    India never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) since it gave unfair exemption to the Big Five, i.e. the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Hence India's nuclear progress, including the test blasts of 1974 and 1998 was homegrown, and the tests themselves did not violate any international law. The American embrace of 2006 was welcomed by India, and Bush was more popular here and than even in his own country.
    The entire NPT club was persuaded (some grudgingly) to accord India a special status, an exempt country, who could access reactor technology and uranium even without signing NPT. Our Prime Minister even risked a Parliament vote which might have toppled his own government, to ratify the Indo-US nuclear agreement. Even President Bush risked alienating his nuclear establishment, who had been instinctively anti-India all these years. So was there any quid pro quo?

 

The skeptics said yes. The US wanted to use Indian friendship to "contain" China. It was also looking to tap into India's huge upcoming market for nuclear energy, aerospace and defence – three areas with special American expertise. Hence notwithstanding official denials, this bonhomie was not without commercial considerations.

 

 India has emerged as one of the largest arms purchasers in the world, with a prospective market size worth 100 billion dollars in the next ten years. We don't have a big enough domestic production capacity to produce sophisticated guns and planes. Hence we import. Traditionally we have depended mostly on the erstwhile Soviet Union, and now Russia for arms and ammunition. But now we wish to diversify. We have bought the Bofors guns from Sweden, which proved to be a boon during Kargil.

 

 In the coming years India will buy 126 fighters called the medium multi role combat aircraft (MMRCA), worth 11 billion dollars. The initial list of contender suppliers included the Americans (Lockheed and Boeing), Russians (Mig), Swedes (Saab Gripen), French (Dassault), and a European consortium (Eurofighter). Now on technical grounds, only the last two remain, and the rest have been rejected. Boeing and Lockheed have lost on technical grounds, and also because they weren't offering their latest topof-line fighter jet models. The U.S. also had a lot of conditions on end-use scrutiny and monitoring, which India does not like.
    America's love of India is really being tested. Their nuclear reactor companies watched with dismay when it was the French (Areva) who were tasting early fruits (Jaitapur) of the Indo-US nuclear deal. They were also dismayed when India's domestic nuclear liability law made it tougher to operate here. Now comes the rejection of Lockheed and Boeing. Air India's order of fifty Boeing aircrafts is also being questioned by CAG. Hawks in Washington weren't happy when we abstained from voting against Iran. Their President has been pushing for anti-outsourcing legislation, which can hurt India. How do we now make up to the Yankees?

AJIT RANADE

 

**************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE STATESMAN

EDITORIAL

JUDICIAL CLOUT

RESULT OF EXECUTIVE INEPTITUDE

 

ONLY half-right was P Chidambaram when questioning the tendency of some judges to think there was a judicial solution to all problems. The half-wrong part was a reluctance to accept that judicial overreach ~ no, he did not use that term ~ was actually the consequence of executive ineptitude. A vacuum had to be filled, and under the prevailing circumstances the judiciary seems to do that best. A stark reminder of how strong that sentiment runs comes from the organisation headed by the very person Chidambaram backs to turn around what he slams as the worst-governed state in the nation. Rather than proceed through normal channels, in this case, the home ministry, the Railways have sought the assistance of the apex court in establishing an agency empowered to deal with situations like the blocking of tracks by agitators. While that plea was obviously made in the wake of court orders ending the highly disruptive "rail-roko" protests on  tracks in UP, Haryana and Rajasthan in some proximity to the Capital to press a demand for reservations for the Jat community, it also indicates a lack of confidence in the home ministry taking a lead in finding a way out. With the executive ever playing politics, and refraining from tackling law-and-problems firmly and decisively (why should the central paramilitary or army have to counter home-grown insurgency?), the judiciary has truly became the sole source of succour. And not just in regard to a breakdown of law and order ~ the range of public interest litigation testifies to the public's lack of faith in the administration.

It could, of course, be contended that law and order is a state subject and hence Chidambaram is not to be faulted ~ though far from impressive is the police or safety situation in the Capital over which North Block presides. But that line raises the question of whether the Centre's writ runs only where it exercises control? Is it not required to show the way, lead the states, pull up the laggards? And, more positively, to inspire? That is what leadership is all about: commanding the respect and stature to carry others along with you. Such "presence", however, will never be acquired when ministers holding key portfolios at the Centre descend to the gutters to scrape up votes in elections to state legislatures.

 

SUBALTERN VICTORY

MAHARASHTRA LIBERATES THE BAMBOO TRADE

THE subaltern has won a critical victory ~ and without the spillage of blood ~ in Maharashtra's Maoist village of Gadchiroli. The tribals have won a 30-year battle to grow, harvest and sell bamboo, indeed acquire control over part of the resources in the jungles where they live. Wednesday's transfer by the state's forest department of the cultivation and trading rights over bamboo to the Gondi tribe signals a watershed development in what social historians must record as a fruitful phase of the subaltern struggle. As much has been acknowledged by the Union minister of environment and forests, who along with chief minister Prithviraj Chavan was present at the ceremony to hand over the permits. "This is a historic day. Bamboo has been liberated from government control." Jairam Ramesh's realistic statement stands out in refreshing contrast to  P Chidambaram's off-the-cuff reference to tribals  ~ "They live in the jungles." The liberation of the Red Corridor may be a long way away, if at all; but the transfer of a segment of forest rights to Gadchiroli's predominantly Gondi tribals is doubtless a major forward movement. Lekha-Mendha may be an obscure village on the map of Maharashtra; it now ranks as the first village in the country where the tribals have won their rights over bamboo, a profitable cash crop. That they have acquired control over the sale of a major forest produce is testament to the assistance that has been extended by the Maharashtra government and without renewed confrontation. It is above all an expression of meaningful rehabilitation under the Forest Rights Act, one that stands out in contrast to the fiasco over such packages in Bengal, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.

The striking feature of the handover is that bamboo has eventually been placed in the category of grass and not timber. This is concordant with the perception of taxonomists and botanists. For decades, this had been a thorny issue in negotiations between the State and tribals; both the Centre and the states have classified bamboo as a tree and, therefore, not a minor forest produce. Happily, Maharashtra's forest department has modified its stand in favour of the tribals and on the prodding, as it now turns out, of Mr Ramesh. "We can change the law, the rules, but it's time we changed our mindset." That mindset was changed in Lekha-Mendha on Wednesday; the re-classification gives the tribal total control over the sale of bamboo or "green gold" in terms of market value.

 

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

THE HAMAS-FATAH UNITY AGREEMENT

Apart from the change of guard in Egypt and Tunisia, the Arab Spring has yielded another momentous development ~ Thursday's unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas. The two warring factions in Palestine have agreed to set up a transitional government and hold elections. As was only to be expected, the political reconciliation has promptly been trashed by Israel on the rather unconvincing plea that both factions face the risk of popular revolts as in Egypt and Syria. Hence the anxiety to weave a patchwork quilt. We do not know the compulsions just yet; they would be clear only as developments unfold. What we do know is that with Hosni Mubarak and his deputy, Omar Suleiman, no longer in the vanguard, the understanding that has even taken Washington by surprise was a remarkably smooth political engagement. It was relatively easy for the present Egyptian authorities to broker a deal in Cairo. While the long-term implications are as yet fogbound, the reconciliation is indubitably a forward movement in West Asia's geo-politics. The patch-up will undercut the standard Israeli argument that since the Palestinians are a house divided, there is no credible partner for peace. Logically, the deal ought to buttress the Palestinian pitch in the UN General Assembly for recognition of a Palestinian state in accord with the 1967 boundaries. It is an open question though whether the agreement will help Hamas to establish control over both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as feared by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Arab world is in ferment; paradoxically the dangers have also yielded opportunities that can hopefully be showcased in a unity government. The response of the comity of nations will be crucial in the scheme of things, pre-eminently the degree of realism that was manifest on Thursday. However, a range of thorny issues remain to be settled: crucially the composition of the interim government; whether Salam Fayyad will cease to be the Prime Minister of Palestine not least because he has enemies both within Hamas and Fatah; and the role of Hamas in the PLO, the negotiating authority with Israel. Give peace a chance. Let scepticism be kept on hold for now in Washington and the capitals of the European Union. And also, of course, let the belligerence of Israel be kept in check.

 

***************************************

THE STATESMAN

ARTICLE

NO LAW, NO ORDER~II

DECLINE OF POLITICAL CULTURE MUST BE STEMMED

BY BIBEKANANDA RAY

Terror and mayhem peaked in the early Eighties.  According to Central intelligence figures, there have been 40,000 political murders in West Bengal since June 1977 when the Left Front came to power. Going by other estimates, the count is 55408. Chronologically, the major incidents under the United Front and the Left Front are the  Sain bari killings in Burdwan in 1970, the economic blockade and police firing on the settlers in Marichjhanpi, the death of 17 Anand Margis on Bijon Setu and Bondel Gate in south Kolkata on 30 April 1982, the terror in Keshpur, Garbeta, Bhaja Chauli, Chhoto Angaria, and Chamkaitala in Midnapore. Eleven farm labourers were killed in Nanoor in Birbhum. More recently, villagers have been killed in firing by armed cadres and the police in Nandigram and Netai. Besides, there was the notorious incident of rape in Bantala. A Unicef employee was a victim.

There have been several incidents of mayhem that stunned India and the rest of the world.  The first occurred soon after the CPI-M took over in June 1977. East Pakistani refugees, who were settled during Dr BC Roy's dispensation at Dandakaranya in Madhya Pradesh, were languishing in inhospitable conditions. They had been told by some Left leaders that if the CPI-M came to power, they would be rehabilitated in West Bengal. Lured by this assurance, the refugees left their colonies en masse after the Left Front came to power  and reached Basirhat, from where they left for Marichjhanpi. Jyoti Basu, then the Chief Minister, was alarmed over this influx and ordered the police to get the islands vacated. When the settlers did not leave the islands willingly, the police stopped the supply of food and water. The refugees were forced to return to the mainland, utterly famished and shattered.

The second major disaster for the government occurred in Chhoto Angaria in West Midnapore district. On 4 January 2001, eleven Trinamul workers were holding a meeting in a local club. Suddenly, the door was bolted from outside and the straw-thatched hut was set on fire, killing everybody inside. People in the nearby villages ~ Chamkaitala, Uttarbil, Reuri and Upajjaba ~ fled their homes out of fear. A CBI enquiry was ordered by Calcutta High Court and the accused were identified. However,  the police did not arrest them, although two of the suspects, Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali, who were 'absconding' according to police records, were often seen in the area.

Six years after the incident, they were arrested at Egra on 14 March 2007, while they were fleeing from Nandigram in a jeep after helping the party cadres assault villagers, including women. The CBI case fell through, as no villager dared to turn up as witness.

The violence in Singur in Hooghly in December 2006 and Nandigram in East Midnapore on 14 March 2007 have been well-documented and are too recent to need recall. They mark the turning points in the CPI-M's political fortunes. The Chief Minister makes and admits mistakes, but does not learn from them or prevent their recurrence. The police/cadre reprisal in Nandigram took place in two phases ~ March and November 2007.
The most recent disaster occurred at Netai in Lalgarh (West Midnapore). On 7 January this year, a large number of villagers thronged the house of a local CPI-M leader to protest against the forcible induction of their children for arms training. The armed cadres, who had been holed up inside the house for months, fired at the crowd. Seven people died on the spot and many more were injured. A CBI enquiry, ordered by Calcutta High Court, noted that 21 party activists were involved in the incident. It was planned at a higher level. The mayhem at Netai has turned out to be the flashpoint in the joint offensive against Maoists in Junglemahal. It bears recall that there was a counter-mobilisation by tribals after they were attacked by the police in the wake of the landmine blast along the Chief Minister's convoy in March 2008. The CPI-M was anxious to clear the area of Trinamul supporters and ensure victory of Left candidates from the 41 Assembly constituencies in the district. Hence the setting up of camps for armed cadres.

Over the years, the CPI-M has got rid of some of its activists as well. The killers of the party's local leader, Phalguni Mukherjee, in Mangalkote on 15 June 2009 belonged to, or were hired by, the party. The involvement of the party is not ruled out in the deaths of Sudin Choudhury, a treasurer, Dr Sailen Das, a doctor and chairman of Dum Dum municipality, Akhilesh Sharma who protested against cadres' involvement in the trafficking of women and the mysterious disappearance of Manisha Mukherjee, Calcutta University's Deputy Controller of Examinations in 1994. She was then in her late 30s and had served as an aide to a top state CPI-M leader. According to Intelligence reports, she had protested against the party's directive to manipulate the university's results. As Vice-Chancellor, Santosh Bhattacharya had infuriated Jyoti Basu for his book. In her book, When The Pendulum Stops, Kalyani Choudhury, a retired IAS officer, has narrated how senior bureaucrats were subdued and marginalised by the Left Front ministers.

The fact of the matter is that most of the incidents of political violence over the past 34 years could have been avoided if the party and government were more restrained. The Chief Minister has on occasion appealed to the cadres to apologise to the people ~ with folded palms and bended knees ~ for their sins of omission and commission. This is akin to an accused pleading to the judge to release him and and give him a chance to correct himself. The CPI-M cannot abjure  terror and mayhem just as a leopard cannot change its spots.
If a non-Left government takes over in May, it should set up a tribunal to investigate the political killings over the past 34 years. The decline of West Bengal's political culture needs to stemmed and a measure of sense and sensibility restored.

(Concluded)

 

***************************************

THE STATESMAN

ARTICLE

'KILL GRAFT BEFORE LETTING STATE FUND POLLS'

 

Prof Trilochan Sastry is the founder-member of National Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) which won a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court that made it compulsory for candidates to declare their financial, criminal and educational background at the time of elections.
An alumnus of distinguished institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, Prof Sastry taught for several years at IIM, Ahmedabad, before moving to IIM, Bangalore. He is currently dean (academics) at IIM, Bangalore. He has taught in other universities in India as well as in Japan, Hong Kong and the USA and has published a number of academic papers in Indian and international journals.
He spoke to RANJEET S JAMWAL about the role of money in elections, measures of deterrence and new trends in India.
 
Large amounts of money have been seized during the ongoing Assembly elections. How do you see it?
I think it's a very good thing (seizure of money). First, we should congratulate the Election Commission for the job. Secondly, the basic problem with the kind of democracy practised in India is that voters can be bought. We need a whole set of measures to correct this, including changes in law and more strict vigilance and monitoring. Voters also need to be told that they should not accept money as it gives them nothing else but bad governance.
 
Do you see elections as playing a role in breeding corruption?
Yes, there is definitely a very strong connection between the two. At least one chief minister is on record saying that election expenses are at the root of corruption. In this era of competitive politics, candidates feel that they need to spend more and more to win an election and once they win they have to recover the costs. And, to do that, they indulge in corruption and perpetuate it because elected candidates also set aside money for contesting the next election.
 
Is it proper for business houses to donate to political parties?
This is a complex issue. If businessmen or corporates donate money to political parties in an open and transparent manner, there is no problem. But if it is not done in an open and transparent manner, it would not be wrong to conclude that corruption is involved. Several other leading democracies are also facing this problem and there is no single solution. Lot of transparency is required with regard to election funding and it should be made very clear who is funding whom and what's the amount involved. Also, there should be a ceiling on donations. Lastly, there should be penalties. We are a soft state in this regard. Despite scams galore, we see very few people going to jail. Penal action should be swift and appropriate.
 
Is state funding of elections a solution?
The current Chief Election Commissioner has gone on record to say that his fellow commissioners and himself are opposed to this. The opinion on this is divided. Our position in the Association of Democratic Reforms and the National Election Watch is that first we need to put in place the necessary laws to root out corruption and then go for state funding of elections. Otherwise, without deterrents, candidates will carry on with wrongdoing despite receiving state funding to contest elections. So, we need to cleanse the system first and then think about state funding.
It is because of the important role that money plays in elections that political parties give preference to millionaires as candidates?
There is nothing wrong in being a millionaire if the money is earned through honest and legal means. But by selecting millionaires, millions in this country are not represented adequately. Many reports put the number of people living below the poverty line in India at between 300 and 700 billion. How well is this segment represented in Parliament? If a large number of MPs are millionaires, this spawns a crisis of equitable representation.
 
Have you witnessed any new trend in these Assembly elections?
We have been getting reports about some voters who actually started returning money that had been offered/paid to purchase their votes.
 
What do you think is the reason?
It happened because of a combination of factors. Some civil society groups such as National Election Watch have been working with voters in Tamil Nadu. They are telling voters that selling a vote is like selling one's dignity. Second, people have started realising that one may get Rs 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 for every vote cast but it doesn't really help in the long run without good roads, water or electricity and teachers who come regularly to schools.
Accepting bribe translates into bad governance because the candidate who is buying a vote is clearly not interested in acting as a people's representative in the true sense of the word. We are trying to generate awareness here.
The world is changing very fast because of cellphones and the Internet. The younger generation is thinking things through. It is my hunch that we will see many positive developments with regard to voter responsiveness and responsibility in the next 10 to 15 years. Increasing awareness will dig out more dirt regarding corruption in public life. And, we as a nation should have the fortitude to weather it. It's a positive sign, actually.
 
Have you noticed anything new in West Bengal?
I think 85 per cent polling in the second phase of election is fantastic news. It shows people are expressing themselves much more strongly than they had done in the past. 

 

***************************************

THE STATESMAN

ON RECORD

 

The standard of education in Bengal has fallen. In 2001, Bengal's position was 18th but in 2011, it has come down to 20th.
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at an election rally in West Bengal

The Prime Minister is a respected person. He had received his MA degree from my late father. It hurts me to find him denigrating Bengal's education system. Actually, somebody must have written the speech for him and he was made to read it out. It really hurts when our respected Prime Minister makes such utterances.
Former Lok Sabha Speaker Mr Somnath Chatterjee

People want to take a breath of fresh air by crushing the corrupt and inefficient government.
Union finance minister Mr Pranab Mukherjee on the third phase of Bengal election

Bengal is the worst-governed state and I had repeatedly brought this to the notice of the chief minister in my famous correspondence with him. Now change is coming to West Bengal.
Union home minister Mr P Chidambaram

Chidambaram has come from Delhi to heal us, but I say, Doctor babu, heal yourself. We know how to heal ourselves.
West Bengal chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee

The third phase will decide who forms the government. The CPI-M, with the help of some policemen, resorted to rigging the poll at Jadavpur constituency to bail Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee out. Rigging took place in several polling stations. We have already lodged a complaint with the Election Commission.
Trinamul Congress chief Miss Mamata Banerjee after the third phase of polling in West Bengal

It was (Suresh) Kalmadi's role as chief of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee's executive board that led to his arrest. A Swiss firm was paid more than thrice the amount of Rs 46 crore sought by the only other bidder, MSL of Spain.
CBI spokesperson Ms Dharini Mishra

The committee wonders if it is not the duty of the PMO or the Cabinet secretariat to enforce Cabinet decisions in letter and spirit.
From the Public Accounts Committee report

The news of the death of Sai Baba of Puttaparthi has greatly pained me.  He was a spiritual person whom millions followed. His life inspired people in this country. At this sad hour, I express my deep condolences to his followers.
UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi

We lost but we expected our supporters to understand our situation and support us, not throw stones at us.
Mohun Bagan skipper Ishfaq Ahmed

 

***************************************

THE STATESMAN

THE ROAD TO RECOVERY AND REBIRTH

NAOTO KAN

At 14.46 on 11 March, Japan was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. We are now making all-out efforts to restore livelihoods and recover from the series of tragedies that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake. The disaster left more than 25,000 people dead or missing, including foreign citizens.
Since 11 March, Japan has been strongly supported by the international community and our friends around the world. On behalf of the Japanese people, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude for the outpouring of support and solidarity we have received from over 130 countries, nearly 40 international organisations, numerous NGOs, and countless individuals from all parts of the world. The Japanese people deeply appreciate the Kizuna (bonds of friendship) that has been shown to us by friends around the world. Through this hardship, we have also come to truly understand the meaning of "a friend in need is a friend indeed".
I am very thankful that, immediately upon learning of the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh sent me his message of heartfelt condolences, expressing India's full solidarity with the government and people of Japan, and offering to help Japan in any way required. The members of both Houses of the Parliament read out messages of condolences. Indeed, the government of India sent us blankets, bottles of mineral water and packets of high-calorie biscuits, all of which have come in handy and are truly appreciated by the evacuees. In addition, India dispatched a 46-member National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Response Force team to join in the relief efforts in the affected region, demonstrating India's true friendship and feeling of goodwill towards Japan. Support has poured in, not only from the government but also from numerous groups and organizations and individuals, as countless messages of sympathy, functions of condolence, charity events and donations for relief. I wish to express our sincere thanks for all the sympathy and assistance extended by the Indian people.

That Japan has experienced nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi plant whose severity was assessed as most serious based on an international scale is extremely regrettable and something I take very seriously. Bringing the situation at the plant under control at the earliest possible date is currently my top priority. I have been working at the forefront of efforts to tackle this troubling situation, leading a unified effort by the government. I have mobilised all available resources to combat the risks posed by the plant, based on three principles: first, give the highest priority to the safety and health of all citizens, in particular those residents living close to the plant; second, conduct thorough risk management; and, third, plan for all possible scenarios so that we are fully prepared to respond to any future situation. For example, we continue to make the utmost efforts to address the issue of outflow of radioactive water into the ocean from the plant. In addition, the government has taken every possible measure to ensure the safety of all food and other products, based on strict scientific criteria. We have taken highly precautionary measures so that the safety of all Japanese food and products that reach the market has been and will continue to be ensured. In order to assure domestic and foreign consumer confidence in the safety of Japanese food and products, my administration will redouble its efforts to maintain transparency and keep everyone informed of our progress in the complex and evolving circumstances at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

I pledge that the Japanese government will promptly and thoroughly verify the cause of this incident, as well as share information and the lessons learned with the rest of the world in order to prevent such accidents from occurring in the future. Through such a process, we will proactively contribute to global debate to enhance the safety of nuclear power generation. Meanwhile, from a comprehensive energy policy perspective, we must squarely tackle a two-pronged challenge; responding to rising global energy demand and striving to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. Through the "Rebirth of Japan" I would like to present a clear vision to the entire world ~ that includes the aggressive promotion of clean energy ~ that may contribute to solving global energy issues.

The Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami are the worst natural disasters that Japan has faced since the end of the Second World War. Reconstruction of the devastated Tohoku region will not be easy. However, I believe that this difficult period will provide us with a precious window of opportunity to secure the "Rebirth of Japan." The government will dedicate itself to demonstrating to the world its ability to establish the most sophisticated reconstruction plans for east Japan, based on three principles: first, create a regional society that is highly resistant to natural disasters; second, establish a social system that allows people to live in harmony with the global environment; and third, build a compassionate society that cares about people, in particular, the vulnerable.

We, the Japanese people, rose from the ashes of the Second World War, using our fundamental strength to secure a remarkable recovery and the country's present prosperity. I have not a single doubt that Japan will overcome this crisis, recover from the aftermath of the disaster, emerge stronger than ever, and establish a more vibrant and better Japan for future generations.

I believe that the best way for Japan to reciprocate the strong Kizuna and cordial friendship extended to us by the international community is to continue our contribution to the development of the international community. To that end, I will work to the best of my ability to realise a "forward-looking" reconstruction that gives people bright hopes for the future. I would wholeheartedly appreciate your continued support and cooperation. Arigatou!                                                   

The writer is the Prime Minister of Japan

 

*************************************

******************************************************************************************

THE TELEGRAPH

SHODDY SHOW

It wouldn't have mattered a tinker's damn if Murli Manohar Joshi had made only himself look ridiculous over the public accounts committee. What is truly regrettable is that he has by his behaviour made the PAC and, by association, Parliament look ludicrous. What is evident from the unnecessary controversy over the PAC's draft report on 2G spectrum allocations is that Mr Joshi, as chairman of the PAC, was more interested in making a political point than in arriving at the truth. He tried to make the PAC into a partisan body. Mr Joshi was too keen to name the prime minister and his office in the draft, and the majority of the committee members were not in agreement with this. In response to the majority opinion, Mr Joshi walked out in a huff. This bizarre situation suggests that Mr Joshi, as the chairman of the PAC, did not work to ensure unanimity within the committee. Rather, he worked overtime to create a division. This has reduced the credibility of the PAC.

It is worth noting here that Mr Joshi has from the beginning preferred confrontation to consensus. In fact, his first battle was with his own party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which was at that time trying to force the government to a joint parliamentary committee. But Mr Joshi, perhaps to further his own agenda, wanted the PAC to take up the 2G issue. The BJP rightly saw this as a division of energy and Mr Joshi had to climb down and accept the need for a JPC. This, however, was only gesture since what he really wanted was to have the PAC investigate the 2G allocations and submit its report before his term as its chairman came to an end. It would be no exaggeration to infer that Mr Joshi's ego took precedence over his responsibilities as the chairman of the PAC. This is the main reason why he now has fallen flat on his face. His behaviour only furthers the general perception that parliamentarians, even senior ones like Mr Joshi, pay scant attention to their public duties and are more concerned with self-aggrandizement.

Parliamentary committees, like the PAC and the JPC, are important elements of the democratic process since they are designed to serve as checks and balances within the system. Their abuse in recent times cannot take away from their original purpose. Reports submitted by such committees to Parliament are supposed to represent a factual account on the basis of the available evidence. A controversy like the one that has come in the wake of the comptroller and auditor general's draft report shows up the committee in an exceptionally lurid light. It reveals that parliamentarians, instead of trying to establish the truth, are more keen to pursue their narrow political interests. This erodes trust in democratic institutions. This is where Mr Joshi has done a great disservice to Parliament — the institution that has nurtured him and to which members of his constituency sent him as a representative.

***************************************

 

THE TELEGRAPH

EDITORIAL

WHEN ALL ROADS ARE TAKEN

 CAN A NEW BROOM SWEEP AWAY THE INDOLENCE THAT GRIPS THE STATE? SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY

A shepherd lad who fancies himself a poet in O. Henry's story, "Roads of Destiny", leaves home late one night after quarrelling with his fiancée "to seek fame and honour in the great world outside". David Mignot excitedly anticipates the day when his poems "are on every man's tongue".

Halfway through the election, West Bengal is already exhilarated like Mignot at the prospect of the change surveys and the media proclaim is inevitable. The new broom that is expected to sweep Writers' Buildings on May 13 will sweep away a Rs 1,92,000-crore debt and, with it, all those cracks about outsourcing the state that were once made about Lalu Prasad's Bihar. Eager lenders will save the new government from defaulting on salaries, interest payments and subsidies that eat up 85 per cent of receipts. If borrowing jumped up by 167 per cent when the only collateral Bengal could offer was the past, the sky's the limit now that the "better and brighter tomorrow" the Trinamul Congress promises can be mortgaged.

We are old hands at financial juggling. Asim Dasgupta may be stolidly convinced that three minus three must be zero but his book-keeping reflects his boss's more adventurous arithmetic in which "two and two does not always add up to four, sometimes it can be three, sometimes five". When the nawabs of Murshidabad received visitors in state, the current Jagat Seth ("Banker of the World", the title bestowed on a family of Rajasthani jewellers and gem traders) waited in the wings to take back the crown and other royal ornaments pawned to him. They were lent to the rightful owner only for the occasion. No doubt the accommodation meant a premium on interest which compounded Murshidabad's bankruptcy.

That stranglehold extended to Calcutta whose splendour was as deceptive as Murshidabad's. Bengalis inhabited the city but it wasn't a Bengali city. Those well-loved sobriquets, 'City of Palaces' and 'Second City' (after London), excluded the smelly Indian quarter. With that alien provenance in mind, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, undivided Bengal's chief minister, declared in 1946/47 that "Calcutta and its environments (were) built up largely by the resources of foreigners". It was "inhabited by people from other provinces" without "roots in the soil". They had come "to earn their livelihood". It could be called "exploitation".

Since making money is the source of civic vitality, several questions must be asked as West Bengal stands on the cusp of change. First, will the prospective new rulers offer as generous opportunities as the Left Front did, at least to its chosen few? Second, can money-making by a few be directed also to benefit the many? Finally, will Trinamul attract productive industry? Jagat Seth added no value. Neither do his heirs and successors so long as they acquire assets (thriving British companies instead of the nawab's jewels) only to strip them to make a fast buck. West Bengal's salvation can lie only in permanent investment that adds to capital growth, generates revenue for further investment, creates jobs and boosts exports. Suhrawardy believed in 1947 that American capital was "waiting on the door-step". Marwari capital will do just as well if it's productively deployed under the guidance of state authorities who demand more than a cut for the party in power.

This is not hope's first outburst. The legislative assembly building and grounds exploded in disciplined exuberance the day that the United Front dislodged the Congress from office for the first time in 1967. But the pleasure and promise lasted just nine months. Ten years later a visibly overjoyed Basu sat in his dusty flat like a chieftain receiving tribute as Burrabazar snaked up the narrow stairs bearing trays of sweets, flowers and gifts. Since he had been talking on the stump of bypassing the established hierarchy to set up direct links between the government in Calcutta and the people, I told him (having just visited Sri Lanka) that Sirimavo Bandaranaike had appointed a ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party member as political officer in each district and dealt with problems only through him.

The barrister in West Bengal's chief minister-elect was horrified at this breach of propriety. "That will mean duplication!" he exclaimed. "It will cause confusion!" How then would he redeem his campaign promise? Giving his electoral commitment serious thought for possibly the first time, Basu came up with mahila samitis as a safe conduit. He had probably picked up the knack of making promises lightly from Prafulla Sen who, as he records, "suddenly announced" a few days before the 1967 voting "that 3,000 primary schools would be opened in the state immediately and 10,000 teachers would get employment".

Political chicanery is only half the reason for Bengal's troubles, and not necessarily the bigger half. A minister from one of the ruling coalition's smaller partners and therefore with scores to settle had no compunction about saying out loud that the more than Rs 100 crore sanctioned for Aila victims had not been distributed because of partisan politics and administrative negligence. One would like to think that Left Front, especially Marxist, supporters will not be penalized too much under the Trinamul sun, but can anything be done about the indifference and arrogance that has eaten into the marrow of West Bengal's bureaucratic bones? Jawaharlal Nehru was right to regard not scrapping the administration his "greatest failure". But he was wrong to condemn the colonial bureaucracy. Paternalistic they might have been, but the Founders and the Guardians were knowledgeable, caring, hard-working and honest.

Mamata Banerjee may be disappointed in her pursuit of good governance if she expects bureaucrats who led the descent into hell to pioneer the ascent to a new elysium. The plea that they were only obeying their politica