Punjab’s financial woes
IT is not unoften that state governments run into a sticky financial phase. That is when the RBI mechanically applies the overdraft limit which it has fixed quite arbitrarily. The Punjab Government seems to have hit that roadblock, although Finance Minister Kanwaljit Singh is very firm that it has not.

Idiom of the gutter
MRS Rabri Devi was ordered out of her kitchen by her politically beleaguered husband and crowned the queen of Bihar in a distressing moment. Laloo Prasad Yadav had to undergo CBI investigations and face allegations of the worst kind of corruption and malfeasance.

Australia’s cricket scam
ONE of the noble principles of justice is to condone the trespasses of those who voluntarily come clean and express regret for their unlawful acts. By this yardstick both Shane Warne and Mark Waugh do not deserve the forgiveness they seek for having accepted money from an Indian bookmaker for providing weather and pitch reports during the Australian cricket team’s tour of Sri Lanka and Pakistan in 1994.

RESERVATION POLICY
by Sher Singh
THE people of India adopted, enacted and gave to themselves a Constitution for securing to all its citizens justice (social, economic and political), equality of status and opportunity and fraternity, assuring unity and integrity of the nation.

Global slowdown to
hit India
by S. Sethuraman
THE global growth slowdown in 1998, likely to get worse in 1999, mainly due to the severity of the Asian Economic crisis, reduced trade flows and decline in capital inflows to emerging markets will impinge on India’s growth prospects in 1999.

Vajpayee determined, optimistic
by Tavleen Singh
EVEN when the Prime Minister you are interviewing is someone you have interviewed many times before, something indefinable changes once he becomes Prime Minister. So, before my interview with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last Saturday, my first since he took office, I spent an entire day mulling over what I should ask him. In the old days, when he was just Atalji, I used to simply arrive at his house and play it as it came, usually with unexpected results.

The ugly face of Fascism
by Amita Malik
HOWEVER much one curses television, one must concede that it is still one of the most powerful weapons for political and social exposes of a kind that only visuals can tackle so much more powerfully than cold print. I think Rajat Sharma’s Janata ki Adalat on Star Plus last week was one of his very best.

With a pinch of salt
by O. P. Bhagat
HE visits me once in two months. When he came last, he looked rather sad. He said that he needed a pack of salt, but no salt was available in his locality. I told him that there was a grocer’s shop nearby. He would get it there. I took him to the store, but the chap drew a blank again.

75 Years Ago

Boycott British cloth
“I VERY much fear,” says Mahatma Gandhi in a recent issue of Young India, “that all the cogent arguments that are being advanced by Indian publicists, although they are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Lord Lytton’s policy, will be lost upon the Government, which has become habituated to treat public opinion with contempt.

Punjab’s financial woes

IT is not unoften that state governments run into a sticky financial phase. That is when the RBI mechanically applies the overdraft limit which it has fixed quite arbitrarily. The Punjab Government seems to have hit that roadblock, although Finance Minister Kanwaljit Singh is very firm that it has not. What has added to the wrong impression is the official admission that on as many as 127 days in this calendar year the government has dipped into bank funds to run its affairs. Paradoxically, the Finance Minister himself might have indirectly contributed to touching off the alarm bell. From day one he has been talking of years of financial mismanagement and stepped on the accelerator to first have a total picture of the government’s messy accounts and then come up with a cure. The detailed and imaginatively crafted report of the secretaries contains incendiary material but also practical remedies. Two bits of information are particularly revealing. The deficit has been steadily growing and during the current year it is likely to touch Rs 1500 crore, double the figure projected in the budget. Revenue has increased only by about 5 per cent since 1995, a steep fall from the earlier trend rate of about 14 per cent. Add to this the lavish concessions the Akali government has been holding out to various sections and the broad contours of the financial position easily emerge. Capt Kanwaljit Singh heads a three-man ministerial committee to mull over the report and draw up an action plan.

Right now several states are facing a financial crunch. Jammu and Kashmir is the latest sufferer, but unlike Punjab its troubles are structural and not amenable to easy or early solution. Only a few weeks earlier, Maharashtra Governor P.C. Alexander embarrassed the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance government by summoning senior secretaries to know about the frail financial situation. Some years ago the Andhra Pradesh government extricated itself from the RBI wringer by asking the state electricity board to borrow money from a private source. Kerala once picked up a fight with the Centre, demanding a radical reform of the present arrangement. The Centre never faces such a situation for the simple reason that it has the RBI to come up with hundreds of crores of rupees with the pressing of telephone buttons. It is the basic thinking of the Centre that the states are reckless spendthrifts and need to be kept under check that gives rise to the RBI turning off the credit tap. Punjab will bounce back, if there is no political interference in revenue mobilisation, and Capt Kanwaljit Singh should ensure this. But its case opens the door to raise the larger question of the Centre monopolising all flexible sources of revenue-raising, condemning the states to inelastic avenues like excise, sales tax and stamp duty!

Idiom of the gutter

MRS RABRI DEVI was ordered out of her kitchen by her politically beleaguered husband and crowned the queen of Bihar in a distressing moment. Laloo Prasad Yadav had to undergo CBI investigations and face allegations of the worst kind of corruption and malfeasance. He did not want to abdicate. There was no person other than his wife who could be a surrogate Chief Minister acting under him in a servile manner. Even the legislators of his party had begun to see the vicious aspect of his political trickery and personal arrogance. Throwing established norms to the winds, he bought some legislators and coerced others into electing Mrs Rabri Devi party leader and Chief Minister. Those were the days of the prime ministership of Mr Inder Kumar Gujral. Thinking Indians and media experts expressed their revulsion at the elevation of a barely literate woman to the high office which required, among other things, education, a sense of history and knowledge of constitutional provisions. Might proved right. Mr Yadav thundered from his posh "detention" camp that he would continue to rule even from the Patna jail. The Prime Minister took a purely legalistic view of what had happened in Bihar. Rabri Devi began to sign on the dotted lines and her tenure moved from day to day. But, as they say in Bihar, even by making a thousand efforts, you cannot make a stork talk like a parrot and Mrs Rabri Devi was just a stork. She remains a stork today. Her language is extremely crude and the idiom she uses belongs to the gutter. It is a different matter that guttural sounds are technically produced just in the throat and are consonants. She has used intemperate speech in her utterances time and again. Those who come to listen to her think that they are listening to fragments of Mr Yadav's characteristically rude monologues.

On December 8, Mrs Rabri Devi did not commit a more grave vocal offence than what she is accustomed to committing. She abused Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari and made disparaging remarks against Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani. The Bharatiya Janata Party is demanding the dismissal of the foul-mouthed puppet's government. It will be enough, however, to see to it that she is thrown out of the Chief Minister's seat and a person able to communicate in civilised language with the people in rallies is placed there. Parliament has witnessed noisy scenes and heard words comparable to those uttered by Mrs Rabri Devi. This has done no good to the august institution. Even in a lower KG class, a teacher does not permit an innocent child to use abusive language. And here we are talking about rallies attended by thousands of people in a state capital and about Parliament. The signs of the times point to our cultural debasement and loss of the necessary sense of decorum in public life. Mr Bhandari has shown more helplessness than magnanimity in accepting the apology of Rabri-supporters. After several outbursts, the matter seems to have been forgotten in Parliament. The average Bihari will do well not to emulate his surrogate Chief Minister. There is a dire need to educate our masters. The Rabris of the flock must be exiled to cloisters of rustic insolence from where they have been brought out. Public offences deserve public punishment. President K.R. Narayanan and Prime Minister Vajpayee should not let the matter be lost in the din created by the mindless political ignoramuses.

Australia’s cricket scam

ONE of the noble principles of justice is to condone the trespasses of those who voluntarily come clean and express regret for their unlawful acts. By this yardstick both Shane Warne and Mark Waugh do not deserve the forgiveness they seek for having accepted money from an Indian bookmaker for providing weather and pitch reports during the Australian cricket team’s tour of Sri Lanka and Pakistan in 1994. Their crime is doubly reprehensible because they sought to deflect attention from their own dirty deeds by accusing Salim Malik and some other cricketers of offering them bribes for “tanking” a Test match during the tour of Pakistan. Equally questionable is the role of the Australian Cricket Board which imposed hefty fines on the two disgraced cricketers but tried to brush the controversy under the carpet. The International Cricket Council too must explain the reason why it accepted the request of the ACB to remain silent. In what can be called the cricket scam of the century the ICC, the ACB and the two players are equally guilty of bringing into disrepute the name of the game which they are expected to protect. Ian Chappell has raised a pertinent question in his syndicated column: What else is the Australian Cricket Board hiding? The Warne-Waugh controversy may never have seen the light of day had the media not got wind of the cover up. As far as the conduct of Warne and Waugh is concerned they were neither being “naive” nor “stupid” — as they claimed at the Press conference — in accepting bribes from a Chennai-based bookmaker. They, in a manner of speaking, are responsible for damaging the careers of several Pakistani cricketers. A high-level judicial enquiry is currently on in Pakistan against Salim Malik and other senior players on the basis of the charges of match-fixing levelled against them by Warne and Waugh.

Since an unsubtle attempt is made from time to time to project the cricketers of the sub-continent as cheats, it is about time the entire history of the acts of misdemeanours in international cricket need to be put in black and white. The infamous bodyline tactics were used by those who claim to represent the best interests of cricket. Who asked Trevor Chappell, the less gifted brother of Ian and Greg, to bowl under-arm to save an international match for Australia? In Sharjah had Chetan Sharma been asked to bowl under-arm to Javed Miandad, he may not have been hit for a six and India may not have lost the match to Pakistan. The fact that the Australian cricketers are more greedy about money than their counterparts elsewhere was established beyond an iota of doubt when virtually the entire playing XI joined the Kerry Packer circus and Bobby Simpson had to be pulled out of retirement to lead a new-look Australian side for meeting international commitments. Warne was the one to lead a virtual revolt against playing in Sri Lanka on grounds of “insecurity” during the 1996 World Cup. Muthaiah Muralitharan has been cleared of the charge of chucking and yet Australian umpire O. Hair in his book has said that “I would still no-ball him for his suspect action”. Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis have often been accused of “cheating” because of their ability to obtain reverse swing with the old ball. But the champions of “fairplay” overlook the fact John Lever, involved in the vaseline controversy during England’s tour of India, was not from the sub-continent. Mike Atherton, who was caught with sand in his pockets during a Test match, too is neither an Indian nor a Pakistani nor a Sri Lankan. It is a strange coincidence that the Australians and the Englishmen have a more tainted record at the international level and yet the two countries never miss an opportunity to raise controversies about the conduct of the cricketers from the sub-continent. Hopefully, the Warne-Waugh episode would make them realise the importance of setting their own glass houses in order.

RESERVATION POLICY
Need for transformation
by Sher Singh

THE people of India adopted, enacted and gave to themselves a Constitution for securing to all its citizens justice (social, economic and political), equality of status and opportunity and fraternity, assuring unity and integrity of the nation.

The question that arises is whether it is possible to evolve a policy of reservation within the parameters of these objectives.

In the absence of justice and equality of opportunity to all citizens, it becomes necessary to make special provision for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes of citizens as laid down in Article 15(4). Article 16(4) provides for making provision for reservation of posts in favour of backward classes of citizens which are not adequately represented in services.

The implication of the provision in these Articles is that for adequate representation in services, reservation will have to be made for seats in professional and other colleges without which adequate representation in services will not be possible.

Unfortunately, the criterion for reservation has been based on castes. This has generated agitations by castes not included in the list of backward classes. Now the so-called minorities are also clamouring for reservation. Such agitations have given birth to caste and communal leaders. The net result is that our country now has only caste, communal and regional leaders, and there is no national leader. The appeasement of these petty leaders has thrown to the winds the real interest of the nation. The unity and integrity of the country is in jeopardy. This obviously negates the fundamental duty of all citizens laid down in Article 51(A) part (e): “To promote harmony and spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending, religious, linguistic, regional and sectional diversities.”

Should we then say good-bye to reservation itself in the interest of unity of the people of this country? I emphatically say ‘No’, because if socially and educationally backward people do not get justice and equality of opportunity, it will sow the seeds of discontent and revolt, which will be equally dangerous for the integrity of the nation. Therefore, what is needed is not to end the policy of reservation but to mend it. We have to drastically change the criterion.

It is a bitter truth that education in village schools run by the government (I call them desi schools) is only in name. Teachers hardly teach anything and are absent by turns. They manage copying and charge money from the parents for promoting their students to a higher class. The standard is hopeless. Those who can afford, send their children in English medium public schools. Only the poor who cannot afford costly education send their children to desi schools. Those who talk of competition between the children of these two distinct classes lack sense of justice and fair play. The reservation of 50 per cent or more should be for the educationally backward children who have studied in desi schools, both in services and admission to professional and other colleges. These young men come from all castes and communities. A similar provision could be made for children living in slums of the cities and towns. Competition should be between those who have equal opportunities. Let the children who have the opportunity to study in English medium public schools, compete for selection between themselves, so also children who have studied in desi schools with equal opportunity, should compete.

Supreme Court judges decided that the cream (malai) of forward and backward classes should not be allowed to take advantage of reservation based on castes. Let the cream compete with cream, and buttermilk (chhachh) with chhachh. The vested interests (malais of forward and backwards) have combined to resist the declaration of clearcut definition of creamy layer, and have monopolised all services and admission in colleges (professional and otherwise). The mock fight that is going on, is between these two malais. If reservation is on the basis of castes, the malai of the backward castes will share seats with malai of forward castes, even if they are low in merit. Their dispute is confined to this issue only. They do not bother about the fate of the chhachh in their castes, whom they want to exploit for all times to come. What a shame that even for being recruited as a constable, a jawan in the army and a chaprasi, the candidates belonging to chhachh have to pay from Rs 20,000 to Rs 80,000.

Should reservation be temporary or permanent? This will depend on three factors, if reservation is to be ended after 10 or 15 years:- (1) Improvement in the quality of education in desi schools with a view to bringing it to the level of costly schools for ensuring equality of opportunity. (2) Drastic change in the tests for determining the merit of the candidates. (3) Changeover from English to Indian languages in their respective fields both as languages of administration and media of instruction up to the highest level.

In villages there is neither the place nor the right environment in their homes for the students. The schools will have to be made semi-residential. Wherever necessary, the buildings of the village schools have to be expanded, improved and provided with electricity, so that the students sleep in the school building in the night. Retired teachers of ability and character may be re-employed for five years to help and supervise the study of students at night and also organise extra-curricular activities. The additional expenditure will be less than 20 per cent of what is being spent today. Equipping these schools with libraries and laboratories will be another item of additional expenditure. Necessary funds will have to be provided for both. For funding these necessities for improving education, two steps will have to be taken (a) subsidies on higher education will have to be reduced which can be done by charging fees between Rs 1,000 and Rs 2,000 per month for different courses from 80 per cent students, after giving 10 per cent freeships and 20 per cent half freeships to poor and deserving students. Interest-free loans could also be arranged for those who need and deserve. (b) All governments have been promising to allocate 6 per cent of the budget for education. Now only 3.5 per cent is allocated. The additional 2.5 per cent of the total budget could be provided for improving the quality of education in desi schools as suggested above and also for vocationalisation of education at the secondary level, easing the pressure on higher education.

Tests should not be confined to the information given in help books or in newspapers and magazines, but the knowledge of problem at the grassroot level and their practical solutions should also form an integral part of the tests, both written and oral. This will narrow the gap between the so-called forwards and the backwards.

Ours is the only country where one can be selected to the highest posts without knowing a word of Hindi, the official language of the Union Government. But without good knowledge of English, a foreign language, one cannot be recruited even as a junior clerk. This has been managed by the vested interests, the malai consisting of politicians, bureaucrats and rich people, as they alone can afford to educate their children in costly English medium schools. Today this conspiracy has to be exposed and defeated. Switchover to Indian languages as languages of administration and medium of instruction will reduce the gap between malai and chhachh.

Eightyfive per cent of the terminology has been evolved by schools in all Indian languages, and Indian languages can safely be made the medium of instruction in their respective states.

Migration from one university will not be difficult. With a revolving fund of Rs 1 crore released for each state in 1968, books in various languages have been published for most of the subjects taught in the universities. If arrangements for study of all regional languages as second languages are made in selected schools of all the states, and if reservation of some posts is made for each language in their secretariats, the problem of language gets solved.

The decision of the Supreme Court allowing admission to 50 per cent of the seats in professional colleges, to those who can pay heavy sums even if they are low in merit amounts to reservation for rich people. This should be withdrawn, as it cannot be justified by any argument.

Reservation made for the chhachh could also be ended, if three steps suggested above are taken in right earnest.

The conspiracy of the malai of all castes and of the trio of politicians, bureaucrats and lobbies of the rich have to be exposed and defeated for ensuring justice, equality of opportunity and unity and integrity of the nation.

(The writer is a former Minister of State for Defence.)

Global slowdown to hit India
by S. Sethuraman

THE global growth slowdown in 1998, likely to get worse in 1999, mainly due to the severity of the Asian Economic crisis, reduced trade flows and decline in capital inflows to emerging markets will impinge on India’s growth prospects in 1999.

This broad picture emerges from the latest reports of the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on global economic prospects for developing countries and the annual trade reports for 1998, respectively.

India’s GDP growth declined to 5.1 per cent in 1997-98 and the current year is expected to end up with no more than 5.5 per cent while exports on downtrend since 1996-97, will be the hardest hit in the current year, which has already seen a negative growth of 5 per cent in the seven months (April-October). As trade deficit soars, the government estimates the current account imbalance will rise to 2.3 per cent of GDP, the highest since 1990-91.

While foreign exchange reserves held at $ 26 billion should take care of balance of payments management in the current year, in spite of relative decline in investment inflows, the position may begin to deteriorate for 1999-2000.

The Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, now begins his preliminary exercises for the Union Budget for 1999-2000 after his maiden budget botched up economic revival, and he will have tougher challenges, economic and political, in formulating a realistic fiscal exercise which would help to promote growth with price stability and contain fiscal deficit.

There is total disbelief that Mr Sinha would be able to hold the deficit in the current year at the targeted 5.6 per cent notwithstanding his confident assertions, and even if he manages to ensure that the fiscal deficit does not exceed 6 per cent, he could pat himself. But this achievement would come, if at all, by slashing plan expenditure and he hoped for substantial realisation from the “samadhan” scheme which throws a bait for tax dodgers and evaders.

Recession-hit industries expect relief in the next budget, though the promised packages in the current year itself had not taken of till early December. With poor recovery in industry and the debacle in exports in 1998-99, Mr Sinha can hardly hope for the economy regaining the momentum lost since 1996. Much would also depend on the so far unsuccessful efforts to coax private capital into infrastructure.

By comparison, in the worst year of the East Asian crisis, India along with China and Taiwan may shine in GDP growth but the unfavourable external environment will act adversely on India’s trade and capital flows in 1999 when the crisis-hit East Asian economies would begin their recovery.

The World Bank says although the financial contagion of the East Asian crisis largely bypassed South Asia, the reduction in exports and trade (in India and Pakistan) have taken a toll. Besides the Asian crisis, the effects of economic sanctions and “wavering” attention to reform are clouding the region’s prospects.

The World Bank, and the IMF earlier, are concerned with the fiscal deficit which, taken the Centre and the States together, would persist at more than nine per cent of the GDP. Such high levels of fiscal deficit would enlarge public debt, aggravate inflationary pressures and can have a spillover effect on balance of payments. Mr Sinha wants the Centre’s fiscal deficit to be brought down to 3 per cent of the GDP within two to three years. He will hardly be able to make any progress in this direction, and a herculean efforts would be necessary if he were to peg it to 5 per cent of the GDP in the next budget.

India has nearly missed economic recovery in 1998 and the World Bank’s prediction is that growth in developing countries as a whole would be down to 2 per cent in 1998 from last year’s 4.8 per cent and would only show a modest rise in 1999. South Asia’s estimated growth rates for the two years are 4.6 and 4.9 per cent, respectively.

Grim messages from the World Bank are that the global economy would be slowing down to 1.5 per cent this year with a dramatic decline in world trade and that the outlook for exports and financing remains difficult. Though foreign direct investment flows have held up so far, other private flows are crashing, such as international bank lending to Asia which fell by $ 51 billion in the first half of 1998.

The risks present for the world economy are the possibility of deeper recession in Japan, cut in private capital flows, fall in stock prices and the steep decline in commodity prices. According to the WTO, while merchandise exports grew by 10 per cent in 1997, the growth rate would be four to five per cent in 1998. Oil and non-fuel commodities prices have fallen by 30 and 15 per cent respectively on average. Prices of manufactured goods have also continued to decline, though not as significantly. Intra-Asian trade decline by 25 per cent in the first nine months of 1998, Latin America will have little growth next year, mainly due to Brazil, worst affected by the Asian contagion. — (IPA)

With a pinch of salt
by O. P. Bhagat

HE visits me once in two months. When he came last, he looked rather sad. He said that he needed a pack of salt, but no salt was available in his locality.

I told him that there was a grocer’s shop nearby. He would get it there. I took him to the store, but the chap drew a blank again.

This was at the beginning of November. Onion shortage and its soaring price had already upset many. Now rumours of salt scarcity spread around.

In no time there was salt scare too. Those who wanted one pack, or none, bought five or 10 packs. As a result salt vanished from the market.

Luckily, the panic did not last long. Timely action saved the situation. But its critics and rivals kept rubbing salt into the ruling party’s wounds.

It must be admitted that salt — that is, the absence of it — can cause more tears than onions. You can do without onions for days, but without salt hardly for a day.

You may put choice spices into a dish. But unless you add salt, it does not have the right taste. If it is eggs, more than any sauce you need salt. Those who have nothing else, sprinkle a little salt on their roti and eat it.

Very aptly do the English say that salt seasons all things. Why, you even take a tall story or too high a claim with a pinch of salt.

It is strange that there has been no salt war. But salt satyagraha was there. This was when Mahatma Gandhi defied the British by breaking the salt laws — an important milestone in our freedom struggle.

In ancient Rome they served out rations of salt and other necessaries to soldiers and civil servants. Together these were known as salt. Later, money was given in place of the rations. But the stipend was called salt.

The word salary has its root in salt. In the phrase, not worth one’s salt, salt stands for wages. And in the phrase “true to one’s salt” it means loyalty to one’s employer. Both refer to the salt issued to Roman soldiers.

Among the Arabs salt created a sacred bond between the host and the guest. If you have eaten of another’s salt, you should not speak ill of him or do him any harm. From this comes the words namakhalal and namakharam.

A thief’s story underlines it in its own way. One night he entered a house. As he was groping in the dark, he happened to touch salt in a pot and tasted it. He at once left the house because he had partaken of its owner’s salt.

In Sholay we see the lighter side of it. Kalia is one of the three dacoits who fled from the village they had gone to. Enraged, Gabbar Singh decides to shoot them. Seeing the gun, Kalia pleads, “Sarkar, main ne apka namak khaya hai.” “To ab goli kha,” retorts Gabbar.

There are many salt tales. However, poets have written more of sugar or honey than salt. To them sweetness is almost all. But some of our film song-writers at times do call their sweethearts namkeen — “Samundar mein naha kar aur bhi namkeen ho gayi ho.”

Salt figures in old books like the Bible. Also in many old sayings. You add salt to bread, not bread to salt, goes a Polish proverb. We mean almost the same when we say “ate mein namak ke barabar”.

Salt superstitions are galore. To ward off evil eye, Punjabi mothers wave a little salt over their children’s heads and throw it into the fire.

In the West spilling salt is considered unlucky. But you can avert bad luck if you throw a pinch of it over your left shoulder. There are do’s and dont’s for giving salt to a friend or using it at the table.

A little salt also serves as a shield against witches and evil spirits. For that reason it is offered to a newborn baby or taken as the first thing into a house by those moving in. And a lot more.

Pass the salt, please.

Vajpayee determined, optimistic

by Tavleen Singh

EVEN when the Prime Minister you are interviewing is someone you have interviewed many times before, something indefinable changes once he becomes Prime Minister. So, before my interview with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last Saturday, my first since he took office, I spent an entire day mulling over what I should ask him. In the old days, when he was just Atalji, I used to simply arrive at his house and play it as it came, usually with unexpected results. Most memorably I once got him to admit his unhappiness with being in the Bharatiya Janata Party in the words “Jayein to Jayein Kahaan”. The Sunday Observer, for whom I was doing the interview, was delighted with his use of the words from the old filmi song and made a front page headline of them. It attracted more attention (and more flak) than Vajpayee had anticipated but he took it in his stride. Over the years, there have been other interviews, other conversations.

But, since he became Prime Minister I have observed him mainly from the sidelines, as journalists do leaders, and been more than slightly disappointed with his inability to rule more effectively.

For his part, he has been quite upset with some of the things. I’ve written. Before we set a date for the interview he called to tell me what hurt him particularly. “You wrote that there were Cabinet Ministers and industrialists at my grand daughter’s birthday party. This is completely untrue...It was a children’s party like any other she has had with only her schoolfriends and family present”. He was also upset that I have been unduly critical of his style of leadership without taking into account the problems involved in running a coalition Government.

So, in the day I spent pondering over what to ask him one of the first things I decided was that it would be best to begin on a personal note to lessen the sort of acrimony that political and economic questions inevitably invoke. My first question to him was; “Prime Minister, there are people who ask where that other Atal Behari Vajpayee has gone, the one who had magic in his voice and a dream in his eyes?” He laughed and a gleam came into his eyes as he said: “That Vajpayee is still here, very much so, but then I was in the opposition and things looked different because I didn’t have the responsibilities of being Prime Minister”.

Since we were meeting within days of the BJP having lost disastrously in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh State Assembly elections my first political question was about the defeat. “Hum morcha haarey hain, ladai nahin”. We have lost a front (battle) not the war, he said, but went on to admit that mistakes had been made. “We knew that Rajasthan and Delhi would be difficult to win but Madhya Pradesh was a shock. Of course, prices were an important reason (for the defeat) but also the wrong people were given tickets. People were sick and tired of the same old faces but we were so confident that we repeated them and this was also a reason”.

Did he see it as a vote against his own Government at the Centre. As Prime Minister he accepted responsibility for this was all he was prepared to say. We moved to my favourite subject and one of the main reasons for my disappointment in his Government. Why had his Government not been able to show any newness in its style of governance. There were other methods of governing, better less wasteful methods, and some of us had hoped, I said, that the nuclear tests would give him the chance he needed to impose cuts in government spending.

In more modern methods of governance you did not, for instance, have a hundred people doing one person’s job, you did not have unnecessary ministries and you did not waste hundreds of crores of rupees on Government factories that provided no returns.

“We are trying to cut Government spending” he said “but its not as easy as it seems. We know the problems...There are factories which have been closed for years. Their workers sit at home and collect their salaries. We don’t have the money to revive the factories and if we had a two-thirds majority we would have considered closing them down but we now need the support of all the other parties. We will have to sit together and work something out.”

The Prime Minister’s problems, alas, do not end here. The Central Government is riddled with officials who have spent a lifetime in devoted service of the Congress. Some of them are well-known devotees of the Nehru-Gandhi family and many BJP ministers complain that they have been in non-cooperative mode from day one. Usually, they are clever enough to get the media on their side so the Principal Information Officer, S. Narendra, who as chief spokesman of the Government has failed abysmally to project the Government’s viewpoint, got instant support when rumours of his removal began to surface, Delhi’s newspapers were filled with stories that described him as a sort of fall guy, a scapegoat. Nobody asked why he had never managed to project the Government’s achievements like the fact that there have been no communal riots since Vajpayee became Prime Minister and that not a single ministry has so far been involved in a scam.

The Prime Minister seemed bitter about this lack of projection and admitted that there had been failures of communication but he refused to blame the bureaucracy. They were doing their job, he said, and this was to serve whichever Government was in power.

At the end of the interview the overwhelming impression I was left with was of a Prime Minister who was determined to do something before he left office but who was not quite sure if he would be able to. Every time I caught him off guard the expression on his face was of a man under siege. He refused to accept that he was being forced to do certain things on account of pressure from the RSS but when I asked him if it wasn’t true that he was not their first choice for Prime Minister he laughed. “Why don’t you do some investigation” he said “and come and tell me about it”.

The Vajpayee we see on television looks tired, old and depressed. The Vajpayee, I met last week, looked determined and optimistic. The question I came away with, though, was whether he would have a long enough chance to do something with his determination and optimism and whether he could fight off the siege from within his party and Government.

The ugly face of Fascism

by Amita Malik

HOWEVER much one curses television, one must concede that it is still one of the most powerful weapons for political and social exposes of a kind that only visuals can tackle so much more powerfully than cold print.

I think Rajat Sharma’s Janata ki Adalat on Star Plus last week was one of his very best. He rounded up the conveners of three organisations very much in the news, the Bajrang Dal, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and the Shiv Sena and questioned them mercilessly on the shameful events and decisions that have recently taken place with their approval.

One always expects researched and fearless questions from Rajat. But what shocked one was the brazen, aggressive, mindless manner, completely without any form of intelligent reasoning or humility, which characterised the answers. One would like to think that the crores of viewers who watched this programme would have had a chastening glimpse of how these bodies think and operate. And make up their own minds. Indians have a large degree of tolerance and the Hindu religion is one of the most tolerant in the world and accommodates a wide range of views. The people who spoke were very poor representatives of that great religion.

Questioned about the belief that the Bajrang Dal was trying to scare the minorities considering what happened to Fire in Delhi and Mumbai, banning Pakistani cricketers and the attack on the Sufi shrine in Karnataka, its convener Surendra Jain bluffed and bludgeoned his way through in a most arrogant manner, saying the rape of nuns was an isolated criminal incident in which no fundamentalists were involved. Faced with the actual burnt pages of the Bible from Gujarat and then the burning of Hussain’s painting after 20 years, he said: “Hindus will no longer be weak, we shall throw stones now” and added that, if required Mathura and Varanasi will meet the same fate as Ayodhya. About Fire, he said national culture was being sacrificed for the sake of money. When questioned about the red carpet treatment of Michael Jackson, he ducked, saying it was to open the eyes of Indians.

Murlidhar Rao of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, slightly less militant, was not able to defend a single one of his theories when asked if they were not trying to take the Indian economy backwards, but soldiered on nevertheless in a most unconvincing way. Madhukar Sarpotdar of the Shiv Sena minced no words either. Casting aspersions on the judiciary, he said the law may accept something but the people will not accept it, because the law does little to protect Indian culture. So the people will protect the Izzat of Indian culture. He capped this by saying: “Our religion enjoins on us the duty to resist attacks on our culture.

The “judge” in this case was the elegant and sophisticated Saeed Naqvi and fortunately his sense of humour came to the rescue. He sentenced Jain to listen every night for a whole year to bhajans and kirtans sung by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. And Sarpotdar to watch Fire with his wife and then decide if it was worth banning. It relaxed the atmosphere after that exhibition of naked Fascism. Many people have commented that the last few weeks of attacks on freedom of information has been sadly reminiscent of the burning of books with which the Nazis started and amply demonstrated earlier on the same screen with the hooliganism in Mumbai and at Regal Cinema in Delhi when Fire was savagely attacked by goons.

In the middle of this bedlam, two channels have started with new ideas. Discovery Channel in collaboration with the BBC is launching a new channel called Animal Planet, which will obviously be about animals, more of an entertainment channel and aimed more at women and children. It will have familiar animal stars like Lassie and also, of course, documentaries, magazine programmes and fiction. Starting as free-to-air it will soon become a pay channel. Then Star Plus has at last confessed that it is going desi. Well, we knew all along and even if it has to compete with Sony with blockbusters, we sincerely hope it will not become a rich man’s Zee with the focus on English programmes shifting to Star World.

About Star World, its programmes are very badly publicised and hardly ever in print. I am still searching desperately for Barry Norman. I am not very impressed with its Asian News and sometimes only the Hong Kong programme timings are given, as if India does not exist. Much worse, its general fare, particularly films and serials, are B grade and of the type much favoured by British suburbia. I find much more solace in the BBC, although some of its India-based programmes are not really of BBC standards. The moral of the story is: Don’t go desi and keep your own identity.

75 YEARS AGO

Boycott British cloth

“I VERY much fear,” says Mahatma Gandhi in a recent issue of Young India, “that all the cogent arguments that are being advanced by Indian publicists, although they are almost unanimous in their condemnation of Lord Lytton’s policy, will be lost upon the Government, which has become habituated to treat public opinion with contempt.

Hence it is that I say that if they would add force to their argument, they must ply the charkha.”

The first part of the observation will command general assent. As regards the second, the Mahatma would be on firmer as well as surer ground if, instead of the words “ply the charkha”, he use the words “boycott British cloth and such other British goods as can be boycotted without inflicting any serious injury upon India.” The difference is substantial, because the mere plying of charkha is not, and cannot be, synonymous with the boycott of British cloth, and by itself would take an infinity of time to bring that pressure to bear upon England which Mahatma Gandhi has obviously in view.