E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

THE TRIBUNE MILLENNIUM DEBATE

Population growth a foremost challenge
Courageous leadership can make a difference
by A. P. Venkateswaran
LONG years ago, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had asked rhetorically: "Who lives if India dies, and who dies if India lives?" The answer to this, clearly, is that we shall all die if India dies, and we shall all live if India lives.

Slipshod work and sloth cannot take us far
Time for introspection, dedication
by Harwant Singh
WITH one-sixth of the population of the world, India is the largest democracy. Indians are undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and mentally robust people, inheritors of one of the oldest civilisations and developed societies, deeply religious with tremendous capacity to endure hardships. When properly led, guided, provided the wherewithal and the right environment, they are capable of achieving almost the impossible.

The expanding ‘knowledge industry’
A mix of trash and excellence
by Ashok Chopra
MORE than 50 years after independence where have we reached in the intellectual world of books? How much can we truly claim to be our own and not a pale imitation of the left-over of the Anglo-American world?

PROFILE

Preacher to Union Minister
by Harihar Swarup
WHEN it comes to picking up a fight, Uma Bharati does not distinguish between a friend and a foe or between leaders of her party or that of the Congress. She wants action irrespective of the position she might hold and, as if, itches for a confrontation if there is a lull for long. She is also good at throwing tantrums which can rattle even the most seasoned politician. Forceful speaker from the public platform as Bharati is, she can sway rural folks. she became a "katha vachak" (religious preacher) at the age of six and her formal education is confined to sixth standard only.

DELHI DURBAR

Ploughing the furrow all alone
IT is a habit so typical of politicians. Swarm and mill around a leader when he is in authority and ignore him when the leader bows out — or better pushed out.

75 years ago
January 23, 1925
After the Allahabad riots
THE startling development that has taken place in connection with the Allahabad riots is of obvious and undoubted significance. The Sessions Judge, who tried the shooting case, held that all the Mahomedan witnesses for the prosecution and all the Hindu witnesses for the defence had perjured themselves and given an account of the affair which was wilfully false and on which not the slightest reliance could be placed.

Population growth a foremost challenge
Courageous leadership can make a difference
by A. P. Venkateswaran

LONG years ago, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had asked rhetorically: "Who lives if India dies, and who dies if India lives?" The answer to this, clearly, is that we shall all die if India dies, and we shall all live if India lives. However, every sensitive and patriotic Indian will have to agree that today we are fast reaching the end of our tether, and will have soon passed the point of no return if we do not swiftly mend our ways and work hard, with determination, to give back to Mother India at least some of the bounty that we have gained from her in the course of our lives.

Why has this not been happening? Is it merely our selfishness or something else which goes much deeper into our psyche and makes us helpless pawns, buffeted by every passing wind? Courage, it has been said, is the first amongst virtues. Without courage one cannot achieve anything worthwhile in life. That is why, when Mahatma Gandhi was asked, many years ago, whether poverty was not the biggest problem facing India, he had answered, without any hesitation, that it was cowardice and not poverty which posed the biggest problem to the country! The Father of the Nation knew his people only too well, and no one can deny that what Gandhi said then holds true to this day. Suffice it to point out that in Gandhi’s eyes non-violence represented the highest form of courage. Towards his last days, Gandhi himself admitted that he had come to realise that many of those who claimed to follow his teachings, merely used it as a convenient cloak to hide their cowardice.

"You do not beat your enemy by raising his banner", is a well-known saying attributed to that great Russian leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. While Lenin is almost forgotten today, following the collapse of communism in the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe, Gandhi, too, has not fared much better in the country of his birth. Almost all the ills from which India suffers at present, whether corruption or sycophancy or willingness even to suborn the national interest, can be traced to the glaring absence of courage in her ruling elite, if one glorifies it with that appellation. This singular lack of courage to stand up and be counted for whatever one believes in, can be seen everywhere in this country. It can be seen in regard to the few instances where we have somehow managed to take belated action, and also in the far larger number of cases where we have held back pusillanimously and failed to act because we are petrified with fear.

The first and foremost among the actions that are overdue, as far as India is concerned, is a courageous and sustained effort by the leadership of this country to limit the burgeoning growth of our population. Otherwise, whatever gains that are achieved through economic development will come to nothing, and the country will be caught in a web of want, hunger and disease. The excuse that due to the negative experience of the Emergency in 1975, there is an allergy to pursue family planning vigorously, is neither here nor there and is nothing else than the desire to take the easier path of populism. There is no reason why Parliament should not limit by law the size of a family to two or three children, at the most. After all, if the Government has the obligation to ensure that no one starves, it should also have the right to demand certain obligations from its citizens. As it is, 300 million people here are below the poverty line, but many more millions will be joining them unless the trend is checked.

Again, according to the government’s own statistics, only 40 per cent of our population has access to safe drinking water, and the WHO is on record that 70 per cent of all diseases in the countryside are due to bad drinking water. It is a dismal reflection on our democracy that, after 50 years of independence, we are still not providing this basic amenity to our people. Next, but no less urgent, is the need for universal literacy, in regard to which, too, we have been dragging our feet and have failed miserably. Surely, this objective can be achieved in a short period and does not require astronomical investment. ‘Each one teach one’, was a good slogan, but never got translated into practical terms. How can a democracy function effectively if citizens are denied the fundamental right of every human being to be able to read and write?

Looking at just these two instances of gross neglect and the public apathy that has allowed this parlous situation to continue, one may be forgiven if the conclusion is drawn that it suits our politicians to keep the vast majority of our people poor and illiterate. A people kept poor and in perpetual want can be more easily exploited and bent to the politician’s will. Kept illiterate and ignorant, they can be easily manipulated and led in the direction that the politician wants them to move. That is, perhaps, why the great Tamil poet, Kambar, in his version of the Ramayana, described Ramrajya as a place where ‘no one had less than enough; and no one had more than enough.’ Kambar understood that if one had more than enough, one could use the surplus to exploit others. On the other hand, if one person had less than enough, another who had more could exploit him.

It may seem that over the past few centuries, we have lost confidence in ourselves, as free men, and acquired the mentality of slaves. We are today more likely to accept the views of an outsider than to repose faith in our own people. For example, even Prime Minister Nehru, who cannot be lightly accused of having such a mentality, had chosen to take the case of Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir to the UN, egged on by Lord Mountbatten, ignoring the advice of his own Deputy Prime Minister, Sardar Patel, who had argued against such action. Patel had argued that the Indian Army needed only a few weeks to push out all the Pakistani intruders from Kashmir, whereas the attitude of the UN could not be predicted. The rest is history. If only Patel’s view had prevailed there would have been no Line of Control nor would the Kargil situation have arisen.

Coming to present times, the basic difference between a free man and a slave is that a slave has to be driven to work, whereas a free man works of his own volition. Instances are too many to enumerate, but a few would serve the purpose. In particular, the policies followed by us from 1985 onwards have been largely dictated from outside, whether it is on liberalisation and economic reforms as put forward by the IMF and World Bank, with their prescribed conditionalities, or the docile acceptance of the WTO provisions in 1995, which are heavily weighted against developing countries like India. It is pathetic to witness the Indian delegation which went to the Third Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Seattle at the beginning of December, boasting of its great success in defending our intersts by preventing the inclusion of labour standards and environmental issues on the agenda. The truth is that an informal working group has already been set up at the Seattle meeting and it is only a matter of time before our delegation’s heroics give way to abject submission!

To cave in to outside diktats on issues which affect our security and economic interests is bad enough, without trying to make that appear as a victory to our people. Alas, in this country we seem to have become adept at projecting defeat as victory. Instead of confusing our adversaries, we merely succeed in misleading our own people. A prime example of such obfuscation is the deliberate confusion created in our media about the intrusions across the LOC near Kargil. That had been preceded by the so-called historic bus diplomacy, which would have been laughable, but for the tragic developments that followed it. What is more, we have a strong penchant for swinging between extremes of elation and depression, either beating drums to project our successes, or beating our breasts if things do not trun out exactly the way we wish.

Our hope now rests upon the younger generation. They have gone abroad and begun to understand that given the opportunity, they can be equal to the best in the world. Mother India’s womb is not sterile and her sons and daughters can stand comparison with anyone. We taught the world the numerals that are used and we gave them the Zero, without which there could have been no mathematics or science. Indian doctors and scientists in the US are proportionately many times more than the actual percentage of their population would warrant, many of them holding top positions. To cite some instances, the CEO of Citybank in New York is an Indian, and so are the CEOs of two of the largest management firms in the world, Arthur Anderson and McKenzie & Co. It is, therefore, only a matter of time before people of the same bio-genetic stock, who have preferred to stay back in this country, recover their lost confidence in themselves and bring greater glory and renown to India, than ever before.

(The writer is a former Foreign Secretary)

Slipshod work and sloth cannot take us far
Time for introspection, dedication
by Harwant Singh

WITH one-sixth of the population of the world, India is the largest democracy. Indians are undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and mentally robust people, inheritors of one of the oldest civilisations and developed societies, deeply religious with tremendous capacity to endure hardships. When properly led, guided, provided the wherewithal and the right environment, they are capable of achieving almost the impossible. In spite of these great attributes, India still remains one the poorest countries with education and health care facilities dismally low and the near absence of modern infrastructure places us below some of the sub-Saharan countries.

There is squalor and filth all around. Islands of prosperity are overwhelmingly engulfed by shanty towns and grinding poverty. While the world marches on to greater prosperity at breathtaking speed, we are mired in religious feuds and caste politics. Our law makers, instead of replacing outdated and redundant laws with new ones, waste their time and the nation’s money in squabbling over trifles and remain bogged down in irrelevant issues.

At the dawn of independence the country was led by leaders of stature, courage and reputation. Unfortunately, they were innocent of governance and ignorant of complexities of modern economics and its increasing role in state craft and progress. On the one hand they failed to carry forward the British policies in India and on the other, could not radically change these to suit a developing nation in a fast changing world. We embraced democracy with all its potential for free enterprise but adopted the economic policies of socialist countries and the communist USSR. Thus in the field of economics we fell between two stools, ending up in state enterprise (rather undertaking) and tight controls, ushering in stifling, suffocating controls, permit and inspector raj. While others who were on a par with us at the cusp of Indian independence marched ahead leaving us far behind. In one area where there has been no government control or ‘guidance,’ that is information technology, Indians have excelled themselves.

Of all the ills, the most debilitating and soul destroying is the all pervasive corruption which has eaten into the vitals of our people and seeped into the blood stream of the nation. In range and scope its spread has travelled from the very top to the lowest levels of government and society. Nothing ever gets done in a government office unless one or the other palm is greased or influence exerted. Manufacture of spurious life saving drugs and adulteration of foodstuffs besides much else, is practised on a wide scale without any compunction. Those who accept this curse of society and are not willing to raise their voice or merely acquiesce at this state of affairs, are being dishonest to themselves and the nation.

There has been an erosion of the value system. Pride in one’s work and skill, no matter what the field or the level may be, has been on the decline. Chalta Hai has become a mantra and the easy way out of commitment, involvement and hard work. Slipshod work and sloth is encountered across the board, with few exceptions. We are not amenable to community living and not adapted to social responsibilities. Self-interest dominates our concerns with little consideration for others. We dump our waste and filth over the wall, on to the road and to hell with everyone else. Our rivers are highly polluted because we think nothing of dumping untreated industrial waste and municipal sewage. Our environment is vastly degraded due to the greed and plunder by a few and the government’s connivance.

We perhaps have the worst governance. The nature of organisations and in the end, the politics and the kind of governments that have historically grown in India to which, so far, all invaders had generally come to conform, have been self-serving. The British set a system and form of government to suit imperial interests. We marginally altered this legacy, because this peripheral change eminently served the bureaucrat-industrialist-politician nexus. Speed money and influence have become the prime movers of files and cases. In the near absence of accountability, indecision and delay dominate the government’s working. Though accountability is nearly absent in the government’s functioning, yet decisions are never forthcoming on time. In a warlike situation it took the government over two weeks to take the decision to deploy the IAF at Kargil and in the more recent case of the hijacked IA aircraft, events kept overtaking us till the plane left Amritsar.

Time has no value in the government’s reckoning. Cogentrix had to serve an ultimatum to quit to energise the Supreme Court and make the Government of India come out with the counter-guarantee in a matter of a few days on which both had been sitting for over a year. Trains and air flights never run on schedule and VIPs are never punctual. We do not stick to a given time frame in completing our work or commitments. Consequently targets are not met as required. There are invariably time overruns on our projects. Committees seldom complete their work and submit reports on time. These repeatedly seek extensions and the courts’ conscience is not stirred by the painful delays in the dispensation of justice. In short, as a nation we do not value time. Time is of essence in an era of instant communication, expanding horizons of knowledge and a shrunken world. We will be entering the next millennium with no concern for time.

As a people we are docile and subservient. The number of Chamchas that surround any person of importance, leave alone a VIP, bears testimony to this observation. In our long history there has never been a revolution. For us, all is in the hands of Parmatma and thngs happen according to His will and design. This outlook and resignation to fate has sustained us through very hard times and through centuries of slavery and abject poverty. In more recent times this very attitude has been a dampener to shaping our destiny and missing out on progress and prosperity.

We also lack self-discipline with honesty levels fairly low. If the possibility of being caught is remote, we have no compunction or inhibition in jumping a traffic light or helping ourselves to something not rightly ours. We demand all kinds of facilities but do not like to pay taxes. Our march into the next millennium with ever increasing population, widening economic disparities, more and more people sliding below the poverty line, 65 per cent of the population illiterate, poor governance and the all-pervasive corruption is full of uncertainties and apprehensions.

We need to focus on our failings and weaknesses and strive hard to remove these through introspection, concerted and collective effort, hard work, involvement and dedication. Indians abroad have done remarkably well. Given the right leadership and conducive environment we can do the same here. We have tremendous potential and capacity for hard work. We need to realise our potential and seize the emerging opportunities knocking at our doors.

(The writer is a retired Lieut-General)

The expanding ‘knowledge industry’
A mix of trash and excellence
by Ashok Chopra

MORE than 50 years after independence where have we reached in the intellectual world of books? How much can we truly claim to be our own and not a pale imitation of the left-over of the Anglo-American world? While no limits can be set to the expanding world of knowledge, can we claim to be reasonably self-sufficient in the basic educational needs of our schools and undergraduate courses, tailored to our needs and interests? What has been the progress in the regional languages, which provide the staple diet for over 90 per cent of the school population? The world of books is a microcosm of the country at large, a huge paradox where islands of high intellectual excellence coexist in a sea of mediocrity with thousands of graduates without communication and comprehension skills of the most elementary kind after twelve years of schooling and at least three of college life. Where have we gone wrong?

Publishing in India has a symbiotic relationship with the educational structure, simply because books are a luxury and are bought to fulfil a basic need. All the fuss and fury that we see when another Indian writer in English hits the jackpot in the West is just window-dressing for an infinitesimally small English speaking miniority. It is not the real picture where lice lurk in every nook and corner of the book world.

Begin with the schooling system where the foundations are laid for all later development in science, technology, medicine, the arts and humanities, and the professional courses. Basically, two factors are responsible for the rapid decline of standards. First, the numbers — with a population of a billion and more and still growing, this would be true for just about everything — that make management so much more difficult. Second, the rapid erosion of all languages, the regional languages as well as English. Of course there are other factors like the relevance of courses to our lives and needs, the quality of teachers, educational facilities available and so on. But the hub around which the school system revolves is the numbers and language or the means of communication.

In the last two decades, school numbers have trebled with an estimated school population of over 200 million (sadly, precise all-India figures are not available) in the three main boards of education, the state boards of school education, the Central Board of School Education (CBSE) and the tiny little board of the Indian Council of School Education (ICSE). To begin with, if we leave out the state boards which account for 90 per cent of school education and concentrate on the CBSE and the ICSE, the picture that emerges is somewhat as follows. CBSE and ICSE schools are what can be safely described as elite schools. They have much better facilities, better paid staff and all the infrastructure such as libraries, science laboratories, and computers in classrooms, that make for a good school. But something has been going hopelessly wrong and a rapid decline in standards makes many school-leavers inadequately equipped to face the rigours of the world outside. At least, part of the reason for this is numbers.

In every major English speaking school of any worth, there are at least four sections which means 200 students in each class. No teacher or a group of teachers can provide individual attention to this number. They simply run through the syllabus and hope the student or the parents and/or the private tutor will fill the gaps that are inevitably left in the hurry to cram information down the throats of the young learners. And this is not all. In some metros like Calcutta, Bombay and Chennai, big schools have started three shifts — morning, afternoon and late evening — which triples the number in each class. Of course, no one teacher or one group of teachers handles all three shifts; there are separate groups but this means there can be no standardisation. Generally, the better (or richer) students get the morning shift, the weaker (and poorer) are shuffled off to the afternoon and late evening shifts. The assembly-line approach to school teaching has led to a sharp decline of standards which is reflected in the tests for admission to elite institutions like engineering and medical colleges. No institution worth its name admits students on the basis of school-leaving results. They hold their own tests.

Quite apart from the numbers and the emphasis on ‘facts, facts, facts’ without any attempt to relate the information to practical, everyday problems, something has to be said about the syllabii and the examination system, or rather the kind of questions that are asked in school leaving examinations. Broadly, the syllabus is divided into three sections: two languages, English and the regional language; social studies that consist of history, geography and civics, and the sciences which include mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and computers. Give or take a little, this is also the syllabus of most school-leaving examinations in other countries, and, therefore, nothing is wrong with the content. What goes wrong is the emphasis that is placed in the regurgitation of facts rather than applying the facts to the test of real-life situations. Examining bodies like the CBSE and the ICSE and the apex body, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), are well aware of the problem but are quite helpless to do anything about it.

The reason? A school final examination must cater to the lowest common denominator of the mass which means levelling down questions to simple yes or no answers that can be checked by computers! (Here again we go back to the numbers syndrome.) Understanding and application are out because this would lead to lower pass percentages that again could have unpredictable political fall-out on a fragile educational system. Therefore, ‘play it safe’ is the golden rule; no critical questions and no critical assessments.

The consequences are all there to see. The school-leaver is hopelessly equipped for higher studies and the colleges have, therefore, to complete the job that the schools ought to have done. What this means is that our schooling which should equip us with the basic tools of communication and comprehension is really completed after 14 years instead of 12 as it is made out to be. Push this time scale further, and you can figure out why our graduate student takes five to six years to qualify as a semi-literate.

If the health of the elite schools is not much to talk about, what happens in the state boards of education where the vast mass of the school-going population goes, can well be imagined. And it is not just a question of coping with numbers. Ill-equipped schools, poor quality of teaching, a high drop-out rate because of parental indifference, pose a big problem. Between the state boards and CBSE schools there is a clear class divide. The former are very poor cousins of the elite institutions with all that it implies. What we get from the state schools is too pathetic in every sense of the word.

The baggage of an ill-prepared school student is now taken over by the universities. You would imagine that the pressure of numbers would diminish in higher education but this is emphatically not the case. The same numbers pass on to the colleges, give or take a little. And the reason for this is simple; the school-leaver is unemployable and has therefore to "park" himself in a university for three years or more before getting out in the big, wide world outside. Sadly, because the foundations are so weak, the university experience does not prepare him for the challenges of the market outside. With increasing privatisation and computerisation, where jobs are given because you fulfil a need, the condition of the average Indian graduate will worsen in the years to come.

And yet there are students coming out of the decrepit educational system that are world class by any standards. How does this happen? Is it an act of God or some other miracle that cannot be explained by simple cause-and-effect calculations? The answer can perhaps be provided by the silent middle class that has realised that the ‘knowledge industry’ will be the big thing in the coming decade. The investment this class has been making in the knowledge sector is unbelievable; better books, private tuition, home computers have become the tools to beat the system. The middle class knows that it has to ‘figure it out itself and that neither state nor society would be of any help.

(The writer is the Executive Director with the India Today Group)

Preacher to Union Minister
by Harihar Swarup

WHEN it comes to picking up a fight, Uma Bharati does not distinguish between a friend and a foe or between leaders of her party or that of the Congress. She wants action irrespective of the position she might hold and, as if, itches for a confrontation if there is a lull for long. She is also good at throwing tantrums which can rattle even the most seasoned politician. Forceful speaker from the public platform as Bharati is, she can sway rural folks. she became a "katha vachak" (religious preacher) at the age of six and her formal education is confined to sixth standard only.

There are also little known facets of her personality; when in her normal mood she is extremely docile and soft spoken. What endears her to the people is not her aggressiveness but the quality of helping the needy and the poor. This explains her five successive electoral victories despite the change of her constituency from Khjuraho to Bhopal in the last election. Her’s is a very complex personality indeed and only a top psychologist can analyse her behaviour pattern.

It was, therefore, no surprise that in a fit of frenzy, she forgot she was a Union Minister and resorted to dharna in front of the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Mr Digvijay Singh’s official residence. It was left to the Home Minister, Mr L.K. Advani, to remind her that she had breached protocal and her action may embarrass the Prime Minister. His advice to Bharati was not to carry out a public agitation against a State Government while being a member of the Union Council of Ministers. She took little time to send in her papers to the utter surprise of the leaders of her own party with the terse announcement: "I have thrown off my shackles and I am now free to fight against the Digvijay Singh Government" and "Ab yeh aar par ki ladai hogi" (now it is going to be a do or die battle).

Why should the youthful Chief Minister evoke the wrath of the saffron-robed "sanyasni" and was the issue so important that a Central Minister should quit her post to fight against an opposition party’s duly elected government? The issue was not all that earth shaking; it concerned alleged beating of BJP corporators during the Bhopal Municipal Corporation Chairman’s election.

An enquiry could have been held into the alleged police excesses and the court moved if there were malpractices in the Mayor’s election. Evidently, a Chief Minister does not have powers to rescind a Mayor’s election as demanded by Bharati and her partymen. It does not behove members of the ruling party at the Centre to physically target a Congress Chief Minister.

Mr Digvijay Singh was not only the Chief Minister who had to face the wrath of Uma Bharati. She also clashed with her party’s Chief Minister, Mr Sundar Lal Patwa, in the early nineties. Both are known to be sharp tongued and never pulled on together. She was then Vice-President of the Madhya Pradesh unit of the BJP and invariably targeted the Chief Minister. So upset was Mr Patwa with her tantrums that he once quoted to a group of newsmen a Sanskrit sloka to bring home unpredictability in her behaviour and it was so apt — "Triya Charitram, Purushsya Bhaggam, Devo Na Janatti, Kuto Manushya" (women’s mind, man’s fate gods do not know what to talk of human beings). The off — the — cuff remark by Mr Patwa was enough for Bharati to kick up a big row and ultimately the Chief Minister had to deny that he ever made such a remark. She did not pull on well with many state-level leaders. Mr Patwa is now Union Minister for Rural Development and Uma Bharati holds the independent charge of the Ministry of Tourism as Minister of State but the equation between them still continue to be estranged.

She became a Minister for the first time at the Centre during the last term of the Vajpayee Government and her first act was to pick up cudgels against her senior Minister, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi, in the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Her complaint was that Mr Joshi had not given her any work and virtually marginalised her; the grievance, possibly, was justified. Since then Mr Joshi was at the receiving end and must have regretted sidelining the junior Minister. Bharati is basically a loner and a domineering woman. That was, perhaps, the reason that the Prime Minister allocated her the non-controversial Tourism Ministry with independent charge. It appears doubtful if the Prime Minister will accept her resignation and she may be persuaded to withdraw it. At the time of writing this column she has yet to return from Madhya Pradesh and meet Mr Vajpayee.

Her alleged close friendship with the BJP ideologue Govindacharya raised many an eyebrow in the Sangh Parivar. Tongues started wagging about the relationship but she fought back with ferocity against her detractors whom she accused of carrying a campaign of character assassination against her and described the friendship as between "guru" and "sishya". A book — "The Saffron Wave"— published last year by the Oxford University press says on page 180: "Uma Bharati, who took the sannyasa vow after rumours of a secret love affairs with a leading pracharak of the BJP, was projected as an OBC leader and......".

Uma Bharati came to the limelight in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December, 1992. Widely photographed and shown on TV clips along with Mr Kalyan Singh, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi and Mr Advani, she, along with 49, is an accused in one of the worst vandalism of the 20th century.

Though devoid of formal education, she has written three books — Swami Vivekananda, Peace of Mind and Manav ek Bhakti Ka Naata. Born in a backward class family of Tikamgarh district of Madhya Pradesh, she was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1989 when she was barely 30.

Ploughing the furrow all alone

IT is a habit so typical of politicians. Swarm and mill around a leader when he is in authority and ignore him when the leader bows out — or better pushed out.

Last week, former Congress President Sitaram Kesri made a quiet appearance before a local court which is hearing a defamation case filed against him for his statement on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

The statement was during the course of the general election of 1998 when Mr Kesri, as the Congress chief, charged the RSS vis-a-vis the bomb attack in Coimbatore, a place which was set to receive BJP leader L.K. Advani.

Immediately after the March, 1998, elections Mr Kesri was shown the door by the Congress Working Committee which installed Mrs Sonia Gandhi. Since then Mr Kesri has been going it alone in the legal battle. He has at several instances expressed anguish over the treatment meted out to him and "no help" is being extended by the party which he headed once.

Last week was no different. Mr Kesri was practically left alone in the court room. There was hardly any leader of standing with the AICC being represented by a Secretary in Mr V Narayanswamy. One does not know whether he came in his personal capacity or as part of any official work.

People present in the court room could hear Mr Kesri remarking that he was prepared to be imprisoned only to be gently reminded by someone that the place was a court room and not a political arena.

Incidentally, the experience of Mr Kesri of being ignored can be no different from his predecessor and former Prime Minister, Mr P V Narasimha Rao. When Mr Kesri and his supporters hounded Mr Rao out of the Congress Party in Parliament, he too was facing a series of charges in several cases. He too was practically left alone. It is another matter that the latter has started making more public appearances after being cleared in one of the few cases pending against him. The band of supporters, though thin, can be seen again at his residence.

Faithful Subba

Remember Mr Mani Kumar Subba, the Congress MP from Tezpur in Assam, whose renomination as party candidate had been opposed by Mr Manmohan Singh and Mr A.K. Antony because they felt he was "not clean"?

It is history that after consulting legal experts including a former Chief Justice of India, Mrs Sonia Gandhi overruled these objections and upheld the majority view of the Assam PCC while renominating him. And, he won the election again. Now Subba has repaid the debt by vacating his official bungalow at 1, Talkatora Road to enable party spokesman Ajit Jogi to have a house in downtown New Delhi.

Ajit Jogi threw a house warming party this week on entering this house after vacating his Shahjahan Road accommodation. Subba will be living in his own private house in Mehrauli.

In sharp contrast his bete noire in Assam politics Mr Matang Singh, who is no longer an MP, continues to enjoy a sprawling bungalow on Teen Murti Lane. Along with the review of security cover of Congress vintage "VIPs" will the NDA government also take a fresh look at the occupancy of prime location bungalows in the Capital?

Taxi blues

The Capital city of India, has acquired a dubious distinction of being a place where its taxiwallahs and three-wheeler autowallahs are known for fleecing their hapless customers, especially if you are not a denizen.

However, an equally strange incident has occurred here. Some enterprising taxi drivers from Punjab are said to be at the receiving end, this time from the authorities — transport and police. The taxi drivers behind the wheels of spacious "Sumos" who ferry passengers between the state and the Indira Gandhi International Airport have been up in arms. So much so that their cause has been taken up by former Union Minister Balwant Singh Ramoowalia and other MPs.

During the week, Mr Ramoowalia led a delegation of taxi drivers to meet senior police officials of Delhi Traffic who assured that their grievances would be addressed to. Apparently what clinched the argument was the threat by some youth reminding of the incident at Lucknow when a Sikh youth committed self-immolation protesting harassment by police. They promised an ‘encore’. No more arguments after that !

Crisis of change

With assembly elections in four states round the corner political parties have started claiming the lack of finances, or at least they want everyone to believe.

A nationalised bank on Parliament Street recently received an unusual request from a party manager of a national outfit — change note of Rs 500 denomination into Rs 100. The request was simple but wait a minute the amount was Rs 50 lakh.

The request was that the same would not be routed through the bank accounts but cash brought in smaller bundles on subsequent days and change collected from the vaults. It is not known whether the request was accepted although the bank officials did not want to antagonise their prized customer. After all these are the days of valued-added services.

Laloo’s monopoly

The BJP has been at its wits end trying to bring the Janata Dal (United) and the Samata Party together in arriving at a seat-sharing formula in Bihar. The differences between the two parties, it appears has its origin in Railway Bhavan. According to BJP sources, there has been considerable mental-distancing between the two sides and this is particularly noticeable in the case of the JD (U) leader, Mr Ram Vilas Paswan, and the Samata Party leader, Mr Nitish Kumar. The reason both were Railway Ministers at one time and both feel that they are best suited for the Chief Minister’s post in Bihar.

Apart from the clash of the leaders, the unity talks between the three parties also revolve around whether they should have a common manifesto. According to the BJP General Secretary, Mr K.N. Govindacharya, the three parties were likely to have a common agenda of governance, on the pattern of the one evolved for the National Democratic Alliance at the Centre. Asked if a common agenda of non-governance would be more apt as it involves Bihar, Mr Govindacharya quipped: "that is the monopoly of Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav". His answer is a clear indication that whatever be the differences between the NDA partners, they at least have a common rival in the former Bihar Chief Minister.

Sharif’s fate

Will the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, Mr Nawaz Sharif, facing criminal charges of murder and conspiracy in a Pakistan court, get the death penalty? The question has been a matter of speculation all around the world and factually speaking only time will tell the answer.

However, according to a Delhi-based astrologer, Mr Ramesh Sahni, who hails from Amritsar Mr Sharif will emerge unscathed from the whole affair and once again return to the glorious position he once enjoyed before military rule was imposed in Pakistan.

His forecast is based on a detailed study of a ‘Prashan Kundli’ and a horoscope drawn on November 19, 1999 at 11.50 a.m., the time of committal of Mr Sharif to the court at Karachi. "I am of the firm opinion that Mr Sharif will not face capital punishment and he will attain and regain his respect and reputation. He will get back all the comforts he enjoyed before being sent to jail", says a confident Mr Sahni, who claims his forecasts have never come wrong in the past.

Mr Sahni claims that he had also correctly forecast the safe release of passenger and crew of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane from Kandahar.

(Contributions by S.B., T.V. Lakshminarayan, K.V. Prasad and P.N. Andley)

75 years ago
January 23, 1925
After the Allahabad riots

THE startling development that has taken place in connection with the Allahabad riots is of obvious and undoubted significance. The Sessions Judge, who tried the shooting case, held that all the Mahomedan witnesses for the prosecution and all the Hindu witnesses for the defence had perjured themselves and given an account of the affair which was wilfully false and on which not the slightest reliance could be placed.

In a subsequent order, he stated that the evidence given by these witnesses, including three constables, constituted so gross a scandal that it was quite impossible for him to refrain from accordingly proceeded to make a formal complaint of perjury to the District Magistrate against all these witnesses.