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Surjeet at it again Missing
voters |
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‘Preserved’
Pillay is back
The other side of
elections
Repelling the
reptiles
The man who won
Andhra for Congress From
Pakistan
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Surjeet at it again
CPM General Secretary Harikishen Singh Surjeet has once again emerged as the Bhishma Pitamah of the secular forces. However, the contours of secularism themselves became a bit hazy after the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Part-led National Democratic Alliance. Nevertheless, in the present context any party that claims to be anti-BJP has gained entry to this fast expanding club. The Andhra Pradesh verdict has put a new spring in the gait of the champions of a secular polity. Most parties and leaders have jumped the gun. It is a pity that the Lok Sabha election results will begin coming in from early today. The secular parties have already declared themselves the winners. The situation resembles a political stampede in the secular camp. In less than two days comrade Surjeet finds his daily engagement a bit crowded. However, he must be amused over having created a situation in which the left now plays an important part in keeping the secular flock in good humour. How can he forget that heady period when a rabid and a tad overdone anti-Congress agenda saw the left parties in a strange political environment that helped Mr V.P. Singh become Prime Minister; or the period when comrade Jyoti Basu was forced into making that "historic blunder”? Of course, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav is the most vocal secular voice at present. This voice had exposed in 1998 Mrs Sonia Gandhi's claim of having the support of 272 Lok Sabha members as false. He has not given up on creating a Third Front of secular parties. Mr
H. D. Deve Gowda is sulking in a corner over the comrades' newfound political respect for the Congress. But the Mr Surjeet’s immediate concern is to prevent the NDA from retaining power. There are other leaders, big and small, crawling out of the woodwork. Most of them are using Mr Surjeet as a sounding board for pushing their claims. In this situation if the non-NDA parties indeed manage more seats and political compulsions force the Congress to name a consensus candidate, Mr Surjeet will do the required leg work to sell his name. He has the requisite experience in the line. |
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Missing voters The problem of missing names in the voters’ list is becoming serious in every election, including the just-concluded Lok Sabha polls. Amazingly, this problem is widespread and not confined to any state or region. In a democracy, the right to vote is the most valuable right of a citizen. One can well imagine the disappointment of those who are deprived of this right when their names do not figure in the voters’ list even when they possess the voters’ identity cards duly issued by the Election Commission. A close look at the problem suggests that the Returning Officers are not fulfilling their duties properly. Certainly, the commission cannot evade responsibility on the ground that it cannot single-handedly ensure an error-free voters’ list. Official callousness in the revision of electoral rolls, especially in urban areas, cannot be ruled out. Do the officials follow some specific criteria for the inclusion or deletion of electoral rolls? How will they justify the large-scale omission of names of even those who have been casting their votes for years? In Hyderabad, for instance, the officials’ lame excuse is that they had to follow the commission’s diktat: the number of voters in each district should not exceed 66-68 per cent of the total population. And hence the peremptory deletion of the names! The Patiala example is even more shocking. The Deputy Commissioner quotes the Election Commission’s “new guidelines” in view of the use of the electronic voting machines. At one polling booth in Patiala, the voters’ strength rose from 1,200 to 1,500, and as a result, the polling booths of some voters had “naturally got changed”, he clarifies. While the officials cannot be absolved of the blame for this mess, the problem can be resolved effectively only if the enumerators make a thorough verification of the voters, and the list is subsequently cross-checked by the officials. The voters too should do their share of work in this onerous task. They should report to the Election Commission in time about the change of address and the revision of electoral rolls accordingly. This is one way of ensuring that a citizen’s right to vote is protected. |
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‘Preserved’ Pillay is back Odd
are the ways of the Indian Hockey Federation. Last week, it had shut the door in the face of former skipper Dhanraj Pillay and Baljit Singh Dhillon while selecting 30 probables in preparation for the Athens Olympics. And now it has included the two veterans in a group of "elite nine" for an exclusive training camp in Germany from May 27 to June 21. Why this U-turn? The IHF has a neat but unbelievable explanation for this change of mind. It says the star players were never out. They were being "preserved" for the Olympics. Whether IHF chief KPS Gill says it in so many words or not, the fact is that Pillay and Dhillon owe their inclusion to the public hue and cry over the IHF faux pas. Pillay had been shunted out not because he was no longer fighting fit but because he had been fighting with the team management a little often. What was ignored was that he always picked a quarrel over a matter of principles. The IHF bosses would have wanted him to be a meek spectator like many others but he had an independent streak. Star players tend to be temperamental. They have to be treated in a special way. That understanding does not fit in with the IHF rough and ready methods. While showing him the door, it was forgotten that he was about the best talent available. As former India skipper Jude Felix has said, he (Pillay) can "sleep, wake up and yet play better than all the players in the team". That is the view held by most followers of the game. Such players should not be shunted out merely because of their outspokenness. Now that he and Dhillon are among the probables, it is to be hoped that the team will be a balanced mixture of youth and experience. Indian hockey has shown some revival, but it is yet to reach the old heights. Becoming a force to reckon with in Asia is only a trek to the base camp. Holding one's own on the world stage is going to be the real Everest climb. |
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But
a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on
Earth. |
The other side of elections NOW that electronic voting machines are about to disgorge their secrets, it would be pointless, indeed foolish, to hold forth on the likely outcome of the 14th general election, exit polls or no exit polls. But the battle of the ballot, now drawing to a close, has thrown up several important issues that must be taken up right away because to resolve them has nothing to do with who wins or who loses. The first of these is the painfully inordinate length of the electoral process. The election notification was issued as far back as on March 26. Nearly two months would have elapsed before the new Lok Sabha is constituted. The Minister for External Affairs, Mr Yashwant Sinha, spoke on a TV channel about the agony of having to wait for 23 days before learning the result of the voting in his constituency. More importantly, a whole lot of urgent work of governments, Central and state, has remained suspended for the duration. This causes hardship to the very people whose interest the Election Commission seeks to protect by preventing governments from taking recourse to reckless populism. To say this is not to downplay the enormous problems the commission faces in conducting a poll of staggering proportions in a bewilderingly diverse country of continental size that is plagued by a series of challenges to normal democratic functioning. These include cross-border terrorism in one sensitive state, chronic ethnic insurgencies in several others, and depredations of Maoist groups active in Andhra, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and parts of Maharashtra in an unbroken chain from the Nepal border to the Andhra seashore. Then there are horrifying activities of honest-to-goodness criminals that often enjoy powerful political patronage. Which other democracy can boast of such charming pastimes as booth-capturing and intimidation of voters, and where else can veiled members of private armies appear on TV to offer their services to the highest bidder “in the interest of keeping undesirable candidates out of the race”? It is only fair to add that the appalling law and order situation has been aggravated by the socio-economic conflict arising from the stranglehold of caste on the polity, caste-based reservations of jobs, and the growing gap between “shining India” and the “vast areas of darkness”. In this daunting situation, some of the state governments, instead of helping in the conduct of a free and fair poll, have themselves become a hindrance to it. Leave alone the notorious goings-on in Bihar, often called “Lalooland”, or in Gujarat, nicknamed by some “the autonomous republic of Modiland”. What has happened in the Left Front stronghold, West Bengal, is shocking beyond belief. The ruling front’s chairman, Mr Biman Bose, had openly threatened the Election Commission’s observers in the state that his “cadres” — a euphemism for thugs and goons — would “grab” the EC officials doing their duty by “the collar” and hand them over to the West Bengal police! The meaning of this effrontery being crystal clear, the commission did well to warn those concerned that it would be constrained to “countermand the entire election in West Bengal”. This appears to have had a sobering effect on the arrogant leaders, but the fact that they dared to stage the sordid episode at all is alarming enough. However, even after one recognises all this and accepts that 150,000 troops of the Central paramilitary forces have to be deployed, moving them from one area to another, the fact remains that this can be done over a shorter period than has happened this time around. In any case, potentially the most troublesome areas are located principally in the Hindi heartland, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. In most other states the poll can be easily conducted on a single day with the help of the state police and armed constabulary, supervised by the Election Commission observers and perhaps a small contingent of Central forces. According to one report, the EC had initially wanted to divide the election to Rajasthan’s 25 seats in two stages. It was at the state government’s insistence that entire Rajasthan went to the polls simultaneously and peacefully. To be sure, in sensitive and super-sensitive constituencies, the need for Central deployments will be much the greater. But why move them only by rail or road? Some Central police forces do have aircraft of their own though in limited numbers. There is no reason, however, why the massive transport fleet of the IAF and the Army also should not be pressed into the service of democracy. The widespread and mutually reinforcing nexus between crime and politics is doubtless a harder nut to crack. But that only makes the task of doing so all the more imperative. The number of persons, many of them generally believed to be “Mafia dons” with heinous criminal charges against them, who fought the elections from jail is frighteningly large. The Patna High Court tried to take liberties with the law and elementary principles of justice when it all but directed the EC to “countermand” all elections in which candidates included those behind bars. The Supreme Court has appropriately stayed this judgement. But the matter cannot be allowed to rest at that. Criminals strutting on the political stage can be put in their place only after they have been convicted. This cannot happen until the criminal investigation system remains as corrupt and incompetent as it is and judicial delays continue to be the order of the day. For this the judiciary that, like God’s mills, grinds slowly and the executive that, for reasons of its own, refuses to fill the large numbers of judicial vacancies must share the blame. To suggest, as the Law Commission has done, that anyone against whom charges have been framed by a court of law (not by the government alone) should be automatically debarred from seeking election would be a remedy worse than the disease. In a country where a judge could be “persuaded” to issue a non-bailable warrant against the President of India, what is so difficult about getting courts to frame charges against individuals targeted by the powers that be? The
N. N. Vohra Committee’s useful report on the subject of crime and politics is gathering dust. It was presented during Mr
P. V. Narasimha Rao’s time. Since then five governments have come and gone. But, leave alone implementing it, no government has even agreed to release it. Its contents continue to be a heavily guarded state secret. That is where the rub
lies. |
Repelling the reptiles “There
are two chhipkalis in the bedroom!” came the frantic call from my wife one fine evening. All alone at home a moment ago, she now had company, repellently reptilian. One had popped out of a cupboard; another had emerged from behind a curtain. “Come on, they are just lizards,” I said. “Just lizards?” she exclaimed, as if they were crocodiles. Her SOS was loud and clear: get rid of them. Now lizards and myself had coexisted peacefully during my bachelor days, with both minding their own business. The walls and ceiling of my room had been their domain, their happy hunting-ground. Apparently unaware of my “just married” status, they had now reappeared with the onset of summer. When I reached home, my wife greeted me with an ultimatum — drive them out of the room or I won’t sleep in it. She showed me the creatures that had dared to invade our marital territory. Seeing them through her eyes, they no longer looked innocuous to me. Their glistening eyes and twitching tails, so commonplace a sight in the past, now gave me a creepy feeling. Pretending to be unruffled, I set about the task in a systematic way. I inspected the “arsenal” at home. There was Lakshmanrekha chalk for cockroaches, naphthalene balls for moths, a mat machine for mosquitoes, but nothing to ward off lizards — a reminder of my past tolerance for the latter. Losing my mock equanimity, I removed a shoe and was about to hurl it when my wife stopped me. “Don’t kill them! Just shoo them out,” she said. I tried to do it with the shoe, but it merely made the twosome wriggle up the wall. Then I got hold of a broom and waved it at them. Showing some consideration for the newly-weds, one slithered down the wall, then along the floor and out of the room. Half the battle was won. When I tried to brush away the other one, it disappeared behind the dressing table. Banging and shaking the piece of furniture perturbed my wife more than the lizard. She quickly removed her fragile cosmetics items from the shelf. Meanwhile, I got down on all fours to locate the tricky little thing. But it was nowhere to be seen. “Why don’t you move the table?”, she suggested, now that her items were safe. Rather gingerly, I moved it a bit. There it was, the scaly devil, clinging to the rear of a drawer. I hesitated at going too close to it, for an unfamiliar fear of the species had gripped me. As I failed to dislodge it, there seemed to be only one option left — to drag the dressing table through the door out into the terrace. Perhaps emboldened by my “not-so-bold” efforts, my wife volunteered to help me. In a joint (ad)venture, using our feet more than hands, we managed to push the object out of the room. But despite all the pushing and shoving, the creature clung on tight. Not stopping to wonder why, we rushed inside and bolted the door. At last we were in, they were out, and I clung to the hope that things would stay that
way. |
The man who won Andhra for Congress
He had famously vowed to take “political sanyas” if the Congress failed to come to power in Andhra Pradesh in these elections. Many thought it was his frustration that made him make such an impulsive statement. But YSR, as Dr Yaduguri Sandinti Rajasekhara Reddy is known, knew that this was his last chance to the coveted post of Chief Minister. He went all out and ran an indefatigable campaign against TDP supreme N Chandrababu Naidu, who everybody thought was difficult to fight against. The 55-year-old firebrand leader, who assiduously built up a mass base for himself and the party through his arduous “padayatras” across the state, has finally realised his long-cherished dream, a dream that eluded him many a time in the past, when on Wednesday he was unanimously elected as the Congress Legislature Party leader. Born into a Protestant Christian family at Pulivendula in Cuddapah district on July 8, 1949, Reddy graduated from M R Medical College at Gulbarga in neighbouring Karnataka and served as a Medical Officer at a missionary hospital in Cuddapah district before setting up a 70-bed charitable hospital at his hometown Pulivendula. Dubbed a “perpetual dissident” by his detractors within the party, Reddy started his political career at a young age of 28 and was first elected to the Assembly in 1978 from Pulivendula, a constituency that has returned him five times so far. Reddy had served four terms in the Lok Sabha, following his election from Cuddapah in 1989,1991, 1996 and 1998, before returning to state politics to lead the party in the 1999 elections. A Gandhi-Nehru loyalist to the core, Reddy lost out on his claim for the post during 1989-1994 to Congress groupism. Embittered over the denial, Reddy, who never lost an election in his 26-year long political career, led an internal revolt against former Congress Chief Ministers M Channa Reddy and K Vijayabhaskar Reddy and came to acquire the image of an impulsive leader. Now a much-mellowed Reddy has recast his image as a charismatic leader of the masses through his relentless fight against the government in the last five years. After he was made leader of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) in 1999, Rajasekhara Reddy led the party from the front and gave it a direction. His forceful attacks on the Chandrababu Naidu government and the agitation programmes that he had continually taken up since then have truly turned the Congress as a serious challenger from being a pretender. The watershed in his long political career came in April last year when he undertook a gruelling 70-day, 1,500-km padayatra, covering 11 districts, to highlight the ‘misrule’ of the TDP government. This historic journey helped him overcome the tag of “Rayalaseema faction leader” to be the front-runner for the Chief Minister’s post. Reddy was a political contemporary of Chandrababu Naidu during the Youth Congress days, but the two leaders later found themselves in the opposite camps when Naidu chose to join his father-in-law’s Telugu Desam Party after the Congress was routed in the 1983 poll. Reddy later became a bitter critic of Naidu, never losing an opportunity to denounce the latter’s economic policies as “anti-poor.” Now, Dr Reddy claims that his priorities as Chief Minister would be “farm sector, irrigation, industrial growth and employment generation” and focus on rectifying regional imbalances. But running the new government may not exactly be a cozy affair for the doctor-turned-politician, who is not comfortable with the ally Telangana Rashtra Samithi’s strident demands for a separate Telangana state. TRS chief K Chandrasekhara Rao does not consider YSR a friend either and will try to make life a little difficult for the Congress government on the Telangana issue. While Reddy always stuck to his position that the Congress will only recommend for the constitution of a second State Reorganisation Committee to go into the issue of separate statehood for various regions in the country, Rao wants a firm commitment on securing a separate Telangana within six months. The other issue that will test the mettle of the new government will be fulfilling the promise of free power to the agriculture sector. YSR vowed that the first task of the Congress government would be to sign on the file providing free power, which is easier said than done, considering the state’s frail financial health. The Naxalite issue is another problem that the new Congress government is saddled with. The Naxalites, most prominently the People’s War Group (PWG), had for the first time, openly declared their support to the opposition parties and warned people against voting for TDP-BJP combine. In this backdrop, the Congress government would be morally bound to lift the ban on the militant outfit and put a stop to the so-called encounter killings. Which again is a tough decision to take from the administration’s point of view, considering that the police has been waging a relentless war against Naxalism in the state for years now. The pressures of group politics, for which the Congress is synonymous, is another thorn that Dr Reddy will have to live with during his hopefully longer tenure than his Congress predecessors. |
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From Pakistan KARACHI: Renowned scholar and educationist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy earned accolades for his well-produced documentary film, “Crossing the lines — Kashmir, Pakistan, India”, which was screened on Tuesday by the Pakistan Peace Coalition in collaboration with the Eqbal Ahmed Foundation at the auditorium of the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs. While the movie went down very well with the audience, who mostly shared Dr Hoodbhoy’s ideas about the need for the immediate normalization of relations between India and Pakistan, a few censorious critics said that the documentary film disregarded quite a few aspects of the subcontinent’s history and was not balanced on the whole. The 45-minute documentary film traces the history of the Kashmir issue in a very analytical style. The opening shots show frenzied communal activists on both sides of the border vowing to destroy each other’s countries root and branch.
— Dawn
Clampdown on journalists
LAHORE: More than one dozen local journalists and photographers, besides Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) representatives, fell victim to the police highhandedness on their way to Allama Iqbal International Airport
on Tuesday. The media persons, attempting to proceed towards the airport for the coverage of PML (N) leader Mian Shahbaz Sharif’s arrival and deportation, were beaten up and thrashed by the police personnel deployed at Amjad Chowk, some four-kilometre away from the airport. The heavy contingent of the police deployed at the road leading to the airport, stopped their vehicles forcing them to go back as no coverage was allowed by the government.
— The Nation
Tension in Waziristan
WANA: The situation in South Waziristan Agency was again tense after differences emerged between the government and tribal representative Nek Mohammad over the registration of the foreigners. Though the government has not yet started any action against the foreigners and their local shelters, the military and paramilitary troops from adjacent settled districts and other tribal regions have started moving towards South Waziristan Agency. Meanwhile, the elders of the Zalikhel Ahmadzai Wazir tribe have decided to organise a traditional Lashkar (force) comprising 1,800 youngsters for carrying out action under their territorial responsibilities against the foreigners.
— The Nation
Altaf demands ban on Jamaat
KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement Chief Altaf Hussain has alleged that the Jamaat-e-Islami is involved in the Hyderi Mosque bomb blast and appealed to President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali to impose a ban on the JI as, he said, the party is against the Pakistan movement. Addressing the last election rally held at Malir, Azizabad and New Karachi on Monday night, he strongly criticised the JI and the MMA for creating sectarian unrest and for promoting negative thinking among the masses. He warned the religious parties not to test the patience of the MQM and warned that the situation would change if he allowed his party workers to reply. |
He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own. — Confucius A rich man shall hardly enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. — Jesus Christ The Devas are ever pure and in harmony with each other. — The Vedas The name of God is the only remedy for the suffering humanity. — Guru Nanak Be sincere in your practice, words and deed. You will feel blessed! — Sarada Devi A true Muslim is thankful to God in prosperity and is resigned to His Will in his adversity. — Prophet Muhammad |
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