The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Arms to Pakistan

BRITAIN’S decision to lift the ban on the sale of arms to Pakistan is bound to evoke a sharp reaction from India. Ten months ago British Prime Minister Tony Blair had condemned the military regime which overthrew the democratically elected government in Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf who installed himself as Chief Executive after putting the then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif, in jail has neither promised early restoration of civilian rule nor given any indication of withdrawing troops from the LoC in Kashmir to justify the lifting of the arms embargo. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who announced the slackening of restrictions on arms sales in the House of Commons, failed to answer the criticism that the decision amounted to giving legitimacy the military dictator. Britain was in the process of examining 46 requests for sales of arms to Pakistan in October last year when General Musharraf killed democracy in Pakistan and threw Mr Nawaz Sharif in prison. The coup forced the government to put the requests in deep freeze. Twenty applications have now been thawed and received the stamp of approval. Has the decision been forced on the government by the powerful arms lobby in Britain? Is there more to the decision than meets the eye? The decision to go soft on Pakistan could even have been prompted by the Church of England. After all Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was made to include a meeting with the Pope during his recent visit to Rome because of international condemnation of the incidents of Christian-bashing in India. It must be remembered that in most western countries the blasphemy laws protect only Christianity and no other religion.

As far as India is concerned, the decision is much more than a case of bad diplomacy. It amounts to providing direct encouragement to a leadership which had drawn up an elaborate plan to attack India. The intrusions in Kargil were detected in the summer of 1999. They were planned by General Musharraf, who was then the chief of the Pakistani army and were part of a diabolical scheme to dismember India. Mr Cook himself said as much in his statement before the House of Commons. He acknowledged that “we remain concerned about defence exports to Pakistan in the light of the incursion at Kargil”. He even indirectly admitted that lifting the ban on arms sales was bad politics in the context of the coup engineered by General Musharraf and “the possibility of diversion to undesirable end-users and continued regional tensions”. It is evident that Mr Cook does not need to be briefed about the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane by Pakistani militants and the subsequent release of Maulana Masood Azhar. He is familiar with the global perception about the potential of Pakistan in turning the bilateral Kashmir dispute into a major source of regional tensions. Yet, he has had the gumption to justify the sale of arms “ which cannot be used in Kashmir or for aggravating local conflicts” to a regime which supports Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and has no respect for civil liberties for its own people. For Defence Minister George Fernandes the decision should be a source of bafflement. He was recently in London to discuss the delay in the repair and renovation of two Indian naval ships docked in Britain for the past two years. The ships are neither being returned nor repaired, ostensibly under US pressure. It was a wasted trip. The same British government has no problem in clearing the sale of what are being described as spare parts for ships, naval helicopters and naval planes. It is a frightening scenario. Two Indian naval ships are lying idle in Britain. Mr Fernandes did not get any assurance of help when he discussed the problems related to the supplies for the Harriers and Sea Kings. The arms lobby has succeeded, in having the ban lifted on the sale of naval spare parts and other equipment to Pakistan. As far as Pakistan is concerned, Kashmir is no longer a region specific conflict. ISI agents have spread out to virtually all parts of India. They have found in Nepal willing allies for implementing their anti-India agenda [ the Indian Airlines plane was hijacked from Kathmandu]. Yet Mr Cook believes that Pakistan would not use the sea route for spreading terror in India!

Problem crops

THE Agriculture Ministry unloaded a tonne of pleasing statistics in the hope of taking a bow before a cheering crowd, in this case newspaper readers. This year there will be a minor explosion in kharif output, with more area coming under the plough and the monsoon progressing benignly. In other words, total production will overtake the revised estimate of 205.9 million tonnes for last agricultural year by something like four million tonnes. As is only to be expected, wheat and rice will contribute much of the increase with coarse grains production looking up marginally but remaining well below 25.20 million tonnes (mt) recorded in 1998-99 but higher than last year’s depressed harvest of 23.47 mt. Oilseeds present a depressing picture; after the steep fall in 1999-2000 the country needs respite which it might not get. Cotton is slightly better and sugarcane will yield an embarrassingly big crop. But the Ministry is talking of the overall picture but the expected boost is no cause for celebration. Take wheat and rice, the fine cereals. The country has a huge buffer stock which it does not know what to do with. Given the income level and stalled employment growth, it is naive to expect that this will go into the consumption basket of the people. Nor can it be exported because of high price. What is more, the expected higher output of fine grains will pose intractable problems of storage, maintenance cost and preventing deterioration in quality. Is it prudent then to break into a song and dance over the prospects of a bumper crop?

This is one part. The low growth rate of agricultural production (1.2 per cent over the past decade) and a skewed production pattern are more worrisome. Coarse grains like bajra and jowar are the staple food of the rural poor and they are more nutritious. But their production has stagnated well below 30 million tonnes reached nearly 10 years ago and last year it fell by about 2 million tonne. They are the only crop suitable for rain-fed regions and cost much less. But no serious attention has been paid to improve production and productivity, creating a situation where some adventurous trader may resort to imports and upset a sensitive part of the rural economy. Pulses output has come down by 1.73 million tonne, oilseeds by 4 million tonne, cotton has declined and only sugarcane threatens to overshoot the target. It grew by 13.58 million tonnes and may well re-enact it. But it is no unalloyed blessing. Sugar mills are bulging with unsold stocks and are unable to accept the cane offered by the kisan. Nor is the export route open; like in the case of foodgrains, India has priced itself out of the world market. The real shocker is oilseeds. Farmers are forced to sell at a price below the cost of production. That is because of easy import of palmolien, nearly three-fourths of which goes into making refined edible oil for sale at fancy prices. This is particularly true of mustard growers and a study by a Rajasthan expert is a severe indictment of agriculture planners. The total projection of agricultural production may look rosy but a look into the parts exposes lack of planning and even a vision.

Fancy flight

DEPEND on the Chairman of the Virgin Atlantic group, Sir Richard Branson, to enact an elaborate drama during the inaugural London-Delhi flight of his airline. He donned a typical Punjabi dress, waved the Indian flag and did bhangra when the gleaming Boeing-747 400 landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport on Wednesday. All this can be dismissed as a cheap stunt but the fact remains that the “stunt” made a big splash and got him wide front-page publicity all right. That is what his business-driven mind was obviously aiming at. At the same time, he succeeded in sending a message of friendship to the sizeable Punjabi community among which there are many potential customers. In today's world such synergy is very important. Hype is not all that he has on offer. He is also providing better planes and better customer care. Limousine service for the business class passengers and massage, pedicure and manicure even in economy class are the kind of add-ons which give the traveller the feeling that he indeed is the king. Such attention, sadly, has been lacking in the Indian sky. In fact, Air-India’s services are notorious for shoddiness. The national carrier should thank its stars that the private airline will be working in partnership with it rather than in competition. The fruits of competition have been quick in coming. Rival British Airways has offered as much as 50 per cent fare rebate on the busy Delhi-London route. This should not be construed as an unhealthy battle. It only displays how high the margins are. Quite the same thing happened when the Indica car made its entry. Maruti was forced to reduce the price of one of its models by nearly Rs 1 lakh. Such benefits reach the customer and that is what competition is all about. Nobody can peg the margins too high. Every business venture functions at top efficiency in the Darwinian atmosphere of survival of the fittest.

Air-India has considerable bilateral rights which it has never been able to utilise in the absence of enough planes. The result is that seats are hard to come by even when it is not the peak season. The code sharing arrangement with Virgin Atlantic will earn the cash-strapped Air-India a couple of millions of pounds a year. And the seat availability will improve too. The private airline will run two flights a week to begin with and increase the frequency to three after September. While all this sounds lucrative enough for now, care has to be taken that this is not the thin end of the wedge. The details of the deal have not been made public. While dealing with a sharp businessman like Sir Richard, there is need for extreme caution. Air-India has a record of being short-changed. Now that it is about to go into private hands, it should get an equitable deal for itself. And at the same time, it also has to learn the finer nuances of wooing the customers. This art of hospitality has been almost forgotten in a monopoly situation.

PROMOTED HOSTILITY
Is Indo-Pak reconciliation possible?
by M. L. Chibber and R. Chibber

WE recently spent three weeks in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, the Chakwal area, Gujranwala, Lahore and Karachi. This was part of the ongoing mission for India-Pakistan reconciliation that we launched 15 years ago on September 1, 1985, the very first day after retiring from the Army. A letter was sent to Gen Zia-ul-Haq about this mission. It is dedicated to the children of the two countries.

The latest visit was the culmination of the correspondence with Gen Pervez Musharraf. As we did with most of his predecessors, this correspondence started when he took over as Army Chief in 1998. During the visit we met him and numerous other old friends, opinion makers and a few policy makers. The interaction also included participation in seven seminars. Perhaps the greatest input that we received was from a large cross-section of people other than what most Pakistanis call their “ruling establishment”.

The mindset of the persons who belong to the “ruling establishment” can be summed up thus: “Now that the Muslims of Kashmir are alienated from India, they must be allowed to join Pakistan, whatever the modalities.” A well-known barrister, at a seminar observed that time had come for “India to withdraw gracefully from Kashmir or face fragmentation of the country.”

They have no time for the truth: how the Kashmir problem was precipitated. They ignore the fact that the whole of the State is legally a part of India. They refuse to even talk about the role of the Pakistan Army in the sponsored insurgency in Kashmir (some, of course, compare it with what India did in East Pakistan) and overlook the reality that they are talking about 30 lakh Muslims in Kashmir from a total of 1300 lakh Muslims in India. The reason is that the “ruling establishment” has adopted a policy of permanent confrontation with India to whip up religious emotions in order to perpetuate their hold on power. Even the “penal code was amended to equate the opposition to the anti-India ideology with treason.” The recent issue of a small pamphlet to every soldier in Pakistan on “Jihad with India” is a part of this policy. They avoid talking about the grim reality that it is the unaffordable defence budget which is at the root of the economic problems in Pakistan.

However, even within the establishment, but more so among the vast majority of the non-establishment people of Pakistan, the desire for reconciliation is strong and palpable.

While waiting to catch a flight at Lahore airport, we met a Pakistani hockey Olympian. He was most enthusiastic when he learnt about our mission and said: “That is the only way to peace and prosperity”. He had visited India many times to play hockey and was full of happy recollections in all parts of the country. He was very critical of the wrong projection of facts in the Pakistani media. As an example he talked about a hockey match in India. “When the Indian team was losing, a few young enthusiasts threw five or six soft drink bottles at the Pakistani players. The situation was soon brought under control but the next day there were screaming headlines in the Urdu papers in Pakistan: ‘Pakistani team par qatilana hamla’ (Murderous attack on Pakistani team). It is this type of publicity which poisons the minds of the people. The media in both countries should be reined in”.

A young businessman at the same airport ruefully remarked that “those in power will never let reconciliation take place. They are more interested in their positions than the welfare of the people”.

A young man carrying a bag with “Yale University” printed on it was sitting next to us at another airport. He was on the way to the USA to do his MBA. He belongs to an affluent landed family, was educated in an elite school in Pakistan and had done his graduation from a university in the USA and then worked in that country for a while. After spending a holiday with his family, he was returning to America for higher studies. When he learnt about our mission, he became very communicative and said that during his school education he was conditioned with anti-India sentiments through the textbooks. He realised the truth about India only when he was studying in the USA and met Indians, and had access to reading material about India. He pulled out from his bag a book on Nehru that he was currently reading. His culminating observation was: “Why did you all let this line be drawn to divide the country.”

Perhaps the most revealing observation about the hostility between the two countries was by a Pakistani scholar. He wanted to understand how the Siachen Glacier problem erupted. The truth about it has since been revealed in a book titled “Pakistan Leadership Challenges” by Lt-Gen Jahan Dad Khan, published in Pakistan. We showed him the few pages in this book dealing with the Siachen problem. Jahan Dad was the officer-in-charge of the Pakistani operation to occupy the undemarcated glaciers. In a decision made at the GHQ under the chairmanship of General Zia, they were to launch their operation in May, 1984. The Indian side pre-empted this move by starting two weeks earlier and occupying the key passes in April. Obviously, since General Zia himself was involved in deciding and planning the operation, the truth about this “failure” was kept hidden from the people of Pakistan.

After reading these pages, the scholar became very friendly and communicative. When he was getting ready to move away, he made an observation: “You Indians have inflicted a lot of atrocities on us. We can forgive you for everything. But we can never, never forgive you for one.” Naturally, we were anxious to hear about the unforgivable crime and requested him to explain.

With a twinkle in his eyes, he said: “Why did you send Gen Zia-ul-Haq to us? You should have kept him in Jalandhar.” (As is well known General Zia hailed from Jalandhar before 1947). He then went on to explain how Zia Islamised and fractured the Pakistani society by promoting sectarianism. Also how he formalised the hold of the Pakistani Army on the country and laid deep foundations for perpetual hostility with India as a means for the Army to be always in power.

Whether in Rawalpindi or Karachi the reaction from shopkeepers, tailors, managers, academicians, journalists, teachers and management students was by and large similar. When they heard about our mission, their reaction was the same whether a person’s parents or grandparents hailed from what is today Pakistan or had migrated from Ludhiana, Shimla, Delhi, Lucknow or Bhagalpur: “Fauji nahin hone denge” (The Army will not let reconciliation take place).

Pakistan is a fact of history that cannot be undone. However, the Pakistan Army has created a myth that India wants to establish Akhand Bharat. It was a matter of satisfaction that no one raised a question when it was explained that Akhand Bharat was never the agenda of the Indian Army or any political party. This myth, however, has a bearing on reconciliation.

There is generally an observation made in India as well as in Pakistan that only the individuals of the pre-partition generation who have at the most about 10 years left can bring about reconciliation because they understand each other and have friendship with people. This is only partially true. It is also this very generation which has the memories about Partition. Many of them still carry their hurt and hate and refuse to face the great tragedy that was inflicted on the people by this event.

Those of this generation belonging to the “Pakistani establishment” are just not prepared to face the truth that collectively Partition was a great tragedy inflicted on the Muslim community. They, in fact, react sharply. They feel that any talk about Partition is designed to undo Pakistan. They refuse to see the reality that the Muslim community has been fractured into three nation-states. The largest segment continues to be in India where after decades of being leaderless it is only now coming into its own by the immense power of one-person-one-vote.

The second segment is in Bangladesh which is the most thickly populated area of the world with very little resources. Only the third segment is in Pakistan where it has been ruled, directly or indirectly, by the Army since 1958. The worst sufferers have been the Urdu-speaking Pakistanis who migrated to the promised land and are having a difficult time in Sindh. They make no bones about the raw deal they have received. Reconciliation will not undo Pakistan. If anything, it will mitigate the ill effects of this tragedy.

In the evolutionary process, mankind is on an irreversible march towards the “unity of man, global economy and eventually earth citizenship”. There, invariably, was the most enthusiastic response to a suggestion that Mrs Chibber used to make at seminars wherever she had an opportunity. She proposed that children from Pakistan should be sent to India as ambassadors of peace for short visits to live with the families willing to play host to them. Her explanation that “Mothers’ heart are full of love and children are pure as diamond” drew loud and instant clapping.

The most encouraging experience that we had about this trend for peace was in Karachi. There was an open-to-public seminar on India and Pakistan with five eminent Pakistani panelists and two of us. The hall was full. The seminar was conducted by a brilliant young woman journalist who, towards the end, raised a question about the mindset of the youth like her fostered by the educational system. She enquired: “How can this mindset be undone?” To us, the mere fact that such a question was raised at all by a young person and that too a girl, indicates the winds of change.

It’s impossible to hide the truth and put a ceiling on human mind. It is the youth in India and Pakistan who will ensure that the clouds of deliberately promoted hostility are swept away by the winds of economic wisdom. In peace and stability lie their and their children’s future. They are in a mood to stop poisoning themselves with the past and look towards the great future that awaits our region. We have come back convinced that India-Pakistan reconciliation will take place sooner than most of us think it possible.

We met no hostility from any person in Pakistan during our visits to that country. However, an obsession with the Kashmir problem was palpable. This obsession will erode if the basic truths about India and Pakistan hostility and the Jammu and Kashmir problem are put across to the people with patience and perseverance.

The best we could do in Pakistan for the solution of the Kashmir problem was to share with the people there the result of our research relevant to the irreversible march of mankind towards the unity of man, global economy and eventually earth citizenship.

The closest parallel to the Kashmir valley that exists in the whole world is of Alsace. A small enclave, it has been for centuries contested by France and Germany, and has frequently changed hands. A region of predominantly German culture, it once again became a part of France after World War II. It has taken Western Europe almost 40 years to overcome their hurts and hates promoted by their rulers in what the scholars now brand as the “foolish civil wars”. They have converted battlefields into bridges built with bricks of economics. Today then have moved forward, and significantly the European Parliament as well as the building housing the European Human Rights Commission are in Strassburg, the capital of Alsace.

India and Pakistan are ancient civilisations. It is our conviction that Kashmir can be converted into a bridge rather than a battleground in far lesser time than it took Europe to adjust to the emergence reality.

(M. L. Chibber retired as GOC-in-C, Northern Command. Dr R. Chibber is his wife.)

Made for each other
by M. K. Agarwal

THE inspiration of this piece is twofold. One, the old, well-known advertisement of a cigarette company, with the background of a joyous couple, captioned “Made for each other”. The name of the manufacturing company, WD & HO, printed on every pack was interpreted by us as: “Wife demands and husband obliges”. I don’t smoke as a habit, but so striking was the message and the image it conjured up has remained etched in the memory. The other, of recent origin, is the dedicated and sacrificing care bestowed by a friend’s wife on her husband who was bedridden with slipped disc. My appreciation of the intensity of her devotion elicited a simple reply: “Bhai Sahib, we are, after all, made for each other.”

The phrase “Made for each other” evokes in the mind not just the usual kind of physical, matter-of-fact and happy-go-lucky relationship, but something deeper and more subtle. It seems to embody sensitivity, love, rich understanding, spontaneous and warm communication, and much more. Is every marriage so felicitous and is every couple so blessed, one may ask? No, as we can all see. In fact, the stock experience is quite different. Covey sums it up all so well when he says that in most marriages the two people simply live together in a respectful and tolerant sort of way. The relationship is often sustained by children, sex, social pressure, or image protection. If the veneer of respectability and pretence breaks down, as it often may, a climate of uneasiness, even of hostility, erupts. Bonafides of each other get questioned. With whom did you spend the afternoon? Where has all the money gone? Why on earth are you late again? What do you take me for-a hireling? Amidst these verbal duels, accusations and insinuations only sullen moods, slammed doors, self-pity, and emotional withdrawal can be expected.

Of course, love between husband and wife can survive every vicissitude, assures Bowen, if there is commitment, shared interests, unselfishness, physical attraction and the ability to accommodate. If there is, we are further told, faith that trust will not be betrayed; hope that circumstances will improve; comfort that a bad decision will be forgiven; confidence that low mood will be understood and a particular clumsy act not played up. Even if the sky ceases to be blue for these people, they have the certainty that it will not fall.

Outside the conjugal arena, we come across a variety of other, fascinating vignettes of “Made for each other”. The politician and the ministerial chair, the bureaucrat and the office, the doctor and the patient, the priest and the sinner are prominent examples. The affinity between them is strong as well as natural. The former, really speaking, is incomplete, useless and eternally restless without the latter. He is, therefore, always at pains to ensure complementarity.

Our list will be incomplete without the winsome duo of “the poet and the wine”. Poets, in general, but Urdu ones in particular, depend on this kinship for sublimity of thought and ardour of their outpourings. Innumerable are the verses sung by them of the splendid virtues of the wine and of their own cravings for the “nectar”. Some were prepared to barter their every possession, even life, for the intoxication of the drink.

Coming to individual prodigies, some of them have been so gifted in their chosen field and so passionately devoted, almost wedded, to their art that it is difficult to think of the one without the other. The examples of Lata Mangeshkar and the melody, Dhyan Chand and hockey, Ramanujan and mathematics readily come to mind. Lata has sung in every language of the country, in every style, for every occasion, moved every heart and imparted to the melody a unique richness and enhanced dimension. It is said that when Dhyan Chand played hockey, the ball seemed to defy all the laws of gravity as well as of geometry. About the innate genius of Ramanujan for mathematics Prof Hardy wrote: “Ramanujan was the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics. One gift his work had and which no one can deny is profound and invincible originality.” The personality of these luminaries is inextricably twined with their respective endowment, the one having got nurtured from the other.

I must here confess two omissions: the mother and the child, God and the devotee. This is intentional, for their ties are too pure and too noble to admit of an earthly treatment like this.

In conclusion, let us ask ourselves an honest question: “Where do we stand? For whom or what, can we say, we are made?”

Human development is more important
by Tavleen Singh

THIS year’s report said the UN representative, as she released the Human Development Report in Delhi last week, is ‘unapologetically provocative.’ Her tone was not. It was ‘unapologetically’ patronising as she praised India for being the country with the single most references in the report ‘most of them positive’. This year’s report shows that in matters of human development India still ranks below little Maldives and troubles Sri Lanka so there is little to celebrate, but at the press conference where the report was released, you would never have guessed it. There was an atmosphere of good cheer and self-congratulation as if the Everest of human development had been achieved because India moved up four notches to number 128 in the listings. Mrs Brenda McSweeny at least managed to slip in one provocative, and crucial, remark when she said that poverty was as much a human rights issue as torture.

When she handed the floor to the chief guest, Najma Heptullah, all we got were the usual banalities. The choice of Mrs Heptullah to release the report was in itself strange since in her long political career she has been known more for politicking than human development concerns and she made her ignorance of the subject instantly evident. She missed completely the point about poverty being a human rights violation and chose instead to make a series of forgettable remarks on the Indian Constitution, democracy, economic reforms and minority problems. Justice Venkatachalliah, former Chief Justice, was a slightly better choice as a speaker on the occasion but even he chose to paper over India’s appalling human development record by hinting that part of the problem was that rich Western countries were using up all the world’s resources. All in all it was the sort of dreary press conference that most newspapers would have ignored were it not for the importance of the report.

Ever since the Pakistani economist, Mahbub-ul-Haq, started his human development index in the early nineties it has been an important annual record of which countries are doing most for their people. Not just in terms of increasing GDP but in terms of making their lives better through access to education, healthcare, sanitation and clean water. South Asia has, sadly, had an abysmal record always managing to come just above sub-Saharan Africa and even below some African countries when it comes to things like primary education.

We do not need a Human Development Report to know how bad the situation is — a quick trip to an Indian village or an urban slum should suffice — but sometimes statistics bring a sharper focus. So, although we now rank 128 out of 174 countries 15.8 per cent of Indians cannot hope to survive beyond the age of 40; 44.3 per cent of adults are illiterate and 35 per cent of all Indians continue to live on less than a dollar a day. If this were not already bad enough, we also have 71 per cent of our population living without access to sanitation, 25 per cent without access to health services and 18 per cent without access to safe water.

Despite this we continue to have Chief Ministers and Prime Ministers who place human development ministries at the very bottom of their list of priorities. Not only are budgets for these ministries shamefully low, especially when compared to what we spend on guns and soldiers, but even the Ministers that are given chargeof them are usually political nonentities. The result is that there are very few countries left in the world where people live in the sub-human conditions that we consider normal for poor people here.

Diseased, barefoot children begging in our city streets are such a routine sight that we do not even bother to notice that it is a sight that is quickly becoming unique to India. You do not even see them in Sri Lanka, ravaged though it has been for more than 10 years by civil war.

Countries like Thailand are now so far ahead of us that their village roads look better than some of our highways. I have met many a Leftist politician who has sneered at the idea of roads being important. “Roads are for those who drive Mercedez cars” former Cabinet Minister Jaipal Reddy once memorably said to me. Clearly, he has either not travelled in the countries that were behind us 20 years ago, and have now streaked ahead, or he may have noticed that it was roads that made the difference in Malaysia and Thailand. It is roads that empower people because they bring schools, hospitals and modern technology to villages which have sometimes not known the name of the nearest town. But, look at the kind of ministers Mr Vajpayee has so far given us in Surface Transport. For a while there was Bihar’s chief ministerial aspirant, Nitish Kumar, who spent so much more time in Patna than in Delhi that people joked about whether he knew which government he was a member of. When he went off to seek his fortune in Patna the Prime Minister replaced him with Rajnath Singh whose only ambition is to become Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.

The government, though, is not the only one to be blamed. One of the tables in this year’s Human Development Report analyses the media’s emphasis on things like primary education. According to this table “in one year’s newspaper articles (there were) 8550 on foreign investment, 3430 on foreign trade, 2650 on defence, 990 on education and 60 on rural primary education.”

That rural education should be a fascinating subject for aspiring investigative journalists can be gauged from other figures in the same table. The survey found that although 58 per cent of schools had at least two rooms, 60 per cent had a leaking roof, 89 per cent did not have a functioning toilet, 59 per cent did not have drinking water and 33 per cent of teachers were found to be absent on the day of survey. Add this to 42 per cent of teachers being engaged in non-teaching activity and you realise that there is not much learning going on in our rural schools.

As someone who has spent most of my career as a journalist travelling in the wilds of India allow me to tell you that there is not a single, rural school I have seen that would be considered a real school anywhere else in the world. Let me also tell you that one of the things us travelling hacks never do is drink the water outside Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Calcutta and that one of the things that makes rural travel a nightmare is the almost total absence of decent toilets.

Now, let me tell you about a drive I took through rural Thailand. We stopped at a petrol pump to use the toilet. It was cleaner than most toilets in our finest cities, there was a supermarket attached to the petrol pump and local farmers carried their produce around in Japanese trucks. As for us, we will only move out of our mud hut, bullock cart lifestyle when we realise that human development is more important than anything else. Four notches up this year means nothing at all.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

It is easy to look down on others; to look down on ourselves is the difficulty.

— Lord Peterborough (1658-1735), English general

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Heaven’s gates are not so highly arched as princes’ palaces; they that enter there must go upon their knees.

— John Webster (1602-24), English dramatist

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God walks with the humble; he reveals himself to the lowly; he gives understanding to the little ones; he discloses his meaning to pure minds, but hides his grace from the curious and the proud.

— Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), German ecclesiastic

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Deal not treacherously with the substance of your neighbour. Be ye trustworthy on earth, and withhold not from the poor the things given unto you by God through His grace. He, verily, will bestow upon you the double of what ye possess.

— Baha’u’llayh, cited in The New Garden

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When ye are greeted with a greeting, greet ye with better than it or return it. Lo! Allah taketh count of all things.

— The Holy Quran, Surah IV. 86

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When others criticize and speak ill of you do not check them, because due to these things, you will increase your virtue.

— Impossibilities Challenged, 214

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If we all belong to one unity, how can one be superior, and how can one be inferior? There is no comparison possible because there is only one existence. With what to compare it? With whom to compare it? A really humble person knows no comparison. He will not say, “I am more humble than you” — that is impossible for a humble person to say or even to think. He will say, “I am you and your are me”. And when one can understand that one is so vast, misery cannot exist.

— Osho What Is, Is, What Ain’t, Ain’t

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Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

— Walter Lippmann, Some Necessary Iconoclasm, A Preface to Politics