The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Taliban challenge
Need to review Afghan security

The Taliban attack on the “heart of Kabul” on Monday has provided fresh proof, if it was needed, that the extremist elements in Afghanistan remain even today capable of striking anywhere in the war-torn country. They carried out a series of blasts targeting the buildings housing several ministries and a shopping mall in Kabul’s high-security area, resulting in the death of 12 persons, including seven Taliban activists. Perhaps, the Taliban intends to convey the message that US President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to wrap up the multinational drive against the militant forces there cannot lead him to win the “war on terror”. The use of force alone is not sufficient to achieve the objective in Afghanistan. What course the coming international conference on Afghanistan, to be held in London, suggests remains to be seen.

Depending on the Afghanistan Army at this stage for mauling the Taliban, comprising highly motivated groups of insurgents, appears to be risky. Anti-US and pro-Taliban elements seem to have found entry into the ranks of the armed forces. The suicide bomber who killed eight American civilians, most of them CIA officers, in Khost province, bordering Pakistan, on December 31, 2009, was an Afghanistan Army officer. While the army needs to be cleared of elements of doubtful integrity, efforts are also needed to prevent the occurrence of incidents like the killing of civilians in anti-Taliban operations which strengthen anti-American sentiments among the people. Last year alone 600 civilian casualties at the hands of foreign forces were reported from various parts of Afghanistan.

What helps the Taliban more than anything else in breaking all security barriers is the widespread corruption in the government. The Taliban’s destructive designs cannot be defeated so long as the extremists are able to use bribes to send their suicide bombers into the areas having even the tightest security. In the villages, people no longer depend on the government’s security arrangements. They have started forming their own anti-Taliban fighter squads, of course, with official encouragement. The villagers’ initiative is a sad commentary on the capacity of the Afghanistan government and the multinational forces to make the people’s lives safe.

Government on a holiday
Punjab takes it easy

The Punjab Chief Minister’s immediate response to CPM leader Jyoti Baus’s death was to declare a holiday in the state on Monday. This is the usual way he and his government convey the depth of loss whenever a leader passes away. Far from being in mourning, employees rejoice at the idea of spending the day with their loved ones instead of venturing out on an extremely cold, foggy day to do the usual boring work. There are better ways of mourning the death of a beloved leader. Working hard to serve the people with renewed zeal is one sensible way of paying tributes to a departed leader.

A leader like Jyoti Basu, who donated his body for medical research, would not, perhaps, have appreciated a paid holiday on his death. Besides, a sudden, unannounced closure of offices inconveniences people, some of whom have to travel long distances to reach an office for some urgent work. Their disappointment on finding the office not officially working is understandable. Nobody in the government regrets the loss of their time and money. Even when in office, babus are not exactly known for helping out the needy. Office procedures are so complicated, paper work is so extensive and corruption so rampant that an ordinary citizen shudders whenever forced to deal with a government office.

Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal, the odd man out in the Punjab team, last year suggested curtailing the number of holidays. But his sensible ideas have few takers in the present dispensation. As Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh had reduced the holidays significantly, but a please-all Mr Parkash Singh Badal has gone back to the previous list. Maybe, he thinks it better to keep employees at home for the maximum number of days to save office electricity, petrol and other expenses apart from keeping the roads less congested and the environment less polluted.

Thought for the Day

The people have little intelligence, the great no heart ... if I had to choose I should have no hesitation: I would be of the people. — Jean de la Bruyere

ARTICLE

Jyoti Basu a political architect
He made CPM a significant force
by Hiranmay Karlekar

More than anything else, Jyoti Basu will be remembered for his contribution to the emergence of communists as a significant presence in India’s parliamentary politics. Central to the tortuous process leading to this were debates over their attitude toward parliamentary democracy, the national bourgeoisie and the Indian National Congress, initially under the ideological hegemony of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and then under the shadow of the Chinese revolution and the Sino-Soviet split.

Shortly after the suppression of the revolt of 1857, Frederick Engels wrote in the New York Daily Tribune of October 1, 1858, “the time may not be so very distant when ‘the sepoy and the cossak will meet in the plains of Oxus,’ and if that meeting takes place, the anti-British passion of 150,000 native Indians (an obvious mistake) will be a matter of serious consideration.” That did not quite happen though the CPSU began taking an interest in India after the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917 installed it in power.

At the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), Lenin advocated alliance with the section of the national bourgeoisie fighting imperialism. M.N.Roy opposed him, arguing that the national bourgeoisie was reactionary and prone to compromising with imperialists. Lenin’s view prevailed, though, at his instance, Roy’s thesis was also included in the records.

The Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1929 abandoned the strategy. The new line of opposition to the national bourgeoisie and the pursuit of an extreme revolutionary line, however, changed with the rise of Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, which followed the earlier triumph of the Fascists in Italy. The new United Front line, articulated at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress in 1935, provided for cooperation with bourgeoisie parties. In Europe this led, among other things, to the formation of France’s Popular Front Government.

Significantly, Jyoti Basu arrived in Britain in 1935 and was drawn to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the second half of the 1930s when the United Front line was ascendant. Hence, subject to further research, one can argue that this conditioned his basic approach to politics which was one of consensus building and pragmatism-qualities on full display in the tumultuous years that followed his joining the Communist Party of India (CPI) two days after his return to India on January 1, 1940.

By then, the new line was in disarray. The communists’ attempt to take over the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) failed by a whisker in 1939. Their ties with the CSP soured, and there was an open and acrimonious breach with the Congress when their party, which had switched from opposing to supporting Britain during World War II after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, opposed the Quit India Movement launched in 1942.

As World War II approached its end, an isolated CPI began reaching out to the Congress under P.C. Joshi’s leadership. Rajani Palme Dutt, a frequent mentor to it on behalf of the CPGB, endorsed the line which referred approvingly to Jawaharlal Nehru, and described the Congress as a party of a wide cross section and not just the bourgeoisie. Radical elements led at the time by B.T. Ranadive, G.M. Adhikari and Ajoy Ghosh disagreed, arguing that the party must oppose the bourgeoisie which was willing to compromise with imperialism to preserve its vested interests.

After much debate, the Soviet Union signalled support for the radical line at the Cominform’s first conference in September 1947. The CPI’s reversal of its own course, adoption of an uncompromising line toward the Congress, and denunciation of Joshi and Dutt, followed at a meeting of its central committee in December 1947. The party’s Second Congress in Kolkata in 1948 formalised the new line. Its Political Thesis declared that a “revolutionary upsurge” was under way in India, and that the final phase of the “people’s democratic revolution”, that of “armed clashes”, had arrived. The repression that followed crippled the CPI, which abandoned armed struggle and indicated its intention to contest the general elections in 1952, by adopting a new programme and A Statement of Policy in October 1951. Votaries of revolutionary violence, however, remained.

Meanwhile, Jyoti Basu was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1946. Returned to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1952, he remained its member continuously till 1972 when he was defeated in a controversial election. Re-elected in 1977 when he became Chief Minister of the state’s Left Front government, he remained in office until November 2000, winning every assembly election by a huge margin.

The bitter price that the CPI paid for its adventurist line of 1952, and the vicissitudes it underwent since then, however, must have reinforced his consensual and pragmatist approach. The vicissitudes were many. The party’s return to parliamentary politics, confirmed at its Third Congress in Madurai from December 27, 1953, to January 4, 1954, led to steady growth. Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the CPSU’s 20th Congress in 1956, however, devastated it and, shortly thereafter, it was torn by the Sino-Soviet split which became manifest in 1957. The formation of the first Communist state government in India in 1957 with E.M.S Namboodiripad as Chief Minister came as a shot in the arm and the Fifth Congress at Amritsar in 1958 seemed finally to confirm the adoption of a parliamentary line. Tensions over the dismissal of the Namboodiripad government in 1959, the Sino-Soviet schism and the strategy of peaceful transition to socialism, propagated by the CPSU, however, continued to haunt the party, which narrowly averted a split at its Sixth Congress in Vijayawada in 1961.

The 1962 conflict with China led to a formal split when the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was born at what it called the party’s Seventh Congress in 1964. Jyoti Basu did not play a leading role in the tense debates that raged over various issues then and earlier. The ranks of the ideologues included Namboodiripad, Ranadive, Bhawani Sen, Ajoy Ghosh, P.C. Joshi, P. Sundarayya, A.K. Gopalan, P. Ramamurthi and others. Nor did he play a leading role in the polemic over participation in elections that raged in the party in 1965-66. The formation of the United Front governments in West Bengal and Kerala, the latter with Namboodiripad as Chief Minister and the former with Ajoy Mukherjee at its helm and Basu as Deputy Chief Minister in 1967, was followed by the launching of a peasant struggle in the Naxalbari area of North Bengal by the opponents of the parliamentary path within the CPM. Thus was born the Naxalite movement.

Naxalite violence, coalescing with violent clashes between constituents of the United Front and the CPM and the Congress, brought West Bengal’s two United Front governments down. Rout in the 1972 Assembly elections led to five years in political wilderness and, almost certainly, introspection, resulting in deep political maturity, rooted in pragmatic wisdom, which made him oppose the CPM’s withdrawal of support to the Morarji Desai’s government in 1979, as that would bring Indira Gandhi back to power (which it did!), and which has been a crucial factor in the survival of the Left Front government for more than 33 years now. A political architect rather than a philosopher, he had a close colleague in Harkishan Singh Surjeet. The two built up the CPM into a significant political force, which would have become even more significant had the party not scuttled the move to make Basu Prime Minister in 1996.

MIDDLE

On cycling
by Sarvjit Singh

My father, 81, is a simple man and has been so as far as my memory goes. He was a lecturer of English first at Faridkot, then in Malerkotla, an oasis of Muslim culture in Punjab. And then at Patiala, I remember a change he had not found worth the effort but had given in to my mother’s constant nagging for the sake of our education.

Having found a house at some distance from Mahindra College, where his distant cousin, a police officer, had managed a posting for him using his influence with the then Education Minister, he dusted the saddle of the Hercules ladies cycle that my mother had carried along, but not used for long.

An archetype forgetful and respected professor, he would many times paddle to the college and walk back home with books held against his chest. Then as we would laugh and point out the missing bicycle, he would wipe his broad forehead with the left hand and say “I did feel I was missing something!”

His weekends were reserved for cycling to the university library that was 10 km away, to return the books that he had read and arrive home with a stack of fresh books pressed under the spring-loaded latch of the cycle’s carrier.

The realisation of the “cycling genes” having gathered momentum over a generation dawned upon me when at 14, I felt compelled to pick up my bicycle and paddle the 65 km between Patiala and Malerkotla to meet ‘old friends’. The fact that my father did not stop me and stopped my mother from stopping me raises suspicion in my mind, even today, that an agnostic apparently, he is a believer deep down.

My love affair with cycling has continued since then. As I grew up, pedalling 35, 70, 100 and 140 km in a day occasionally, I found cycling a meditative exercise. You can pedal long only if you attain the rhythm, letting your ‘dhyana’ percolate your leg, arm and chest muscles, the hip and the knee joints and maintain the pace that your lungs are good enough for. With practice body’s efficiency does go up naturally and you can keep increasing the speed and the range till a point.

The combination of fresh air, the close-to-ground feeling and the slowly shifting scenery, that gives you time to absorb that you desire, is a tranquiliser that is healthful too.

The roads are a piece of life more on a bicycle than in a car. On bicycle you meet the generous farmer sitting proud on his tractor-trolley, who seeing your sweat-soaked shirt, offers a free ride for the next 10 km where his village road branches out, and a neo-rich ordering you with a honk from behind or a flashing headlight from the front, to shift to the berms lest you want to be his next victim, and a rugged villager pedalling 20-plus 20 km every day not as meditation but to save on bus fare to balance the budget.

OPED

Ensuring voting rights for Indian diaspora
by Rup Narayan Das

Ever since the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was created as a separate and full-fledged ministry in 2004, there has been a slew of initiatives to engage the ubiquitous Indian diaspora in the development and political processes of the country in a meaningful manner.

The decision to observe three-day “Pravasi Bharatiya Divas”, concluding on January 9, the date on which Mahatma Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, is indeed a befitting tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, who espoused the cause of Indian immigrants abroad, particularly in South Africa.

Yet another major initiative in this regard is the scheme of overseas citizenship of India (OCI) in 2006 by amending the Citizenship Act, 1955. The scheme provides for the registration as overseas citizens of India (OCI) of all Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) who were citizens of India on or after January 26, 1950, or were eligible to become citizens of India and who are citizens of other countries, except Pakistan and Bangladesh.

A registered overseas citizen of India is granted multiple entry, multi- purpose, life-long visa for visiting India and is exempted from registration with the Foreigners Regional Registration Office for any length of stay in India.

Dr Manmohan Singh’s statement at this year’s Pravasi Bharatiya Divas that the non-resident Indians abroad would be able to exercise their franchise has raised a fresh hope for voting rights to Indian citizens living abroad.

The issue of granting voting rights to the non-resident Indians has engaged the attention of Parliament, the media and the judiciary for quite some time. As a matter of fact, as early as in 1998, a private members’ Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha securing voting rights for its non-resident Indians. However, the Bill never came up for discussion since the Lok Sabha was dissolved.

It is pertinent to mention in this concern that under Article 326 of the Constitution of India the right to vote has been accorded a constitutional status. Article 326 stipulated that every person who is a citizen of India and who is not less than eighteen years of age and is not otherwise disqualified under the Constitution or any law made by the appropriate legislature, is entitled to be registered as a voter.

As per the provisions of the Constitution, non-residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or corrupt or illegal practices have been listed as disqualifications for restriction as a voter.

While Article 326 of the Constitution entitles the voting right to the citizens which is, in fact, one of the most basic democratic rights, Article 327 of the Constitution empowers Parliament to make provisions by law with respect to all matters relating to, or in connection with, elections to either House of Parliament or to the House or either House of the Legislature of a state, including the preparation of electoral rolls.

In exercise of such power, Parliament had enacted the Representation of the People Act, 1950. Section 28 of the Act has conferred the power to make rules on the Union Government after consulting the Election Commission for carrying the purpose of the Act. In exercise of such power, the Union Government has promulgated the Registration of Election Rules, 1960.

Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, prescribes the conditions of registration viz. (a) not less than eighteen years of age on the qualifying date; and (b) ordinary resident in a constituency.

Section 20 the Act deals with the term ‘ordinary resident’. A sub-section thereof stipulates that a person absenting himself temporarily from his place of ordinary residence shall not by reason thereof cease to be ordinarily a resident therein.

Thus the Act only refers to the term “ordinarily resident” and exceptions thereto but it does not exactly define the term. The definition of the term has been left to be decided by the Central Government in consultation with the Election Commission of India through a notification in the official gazette.

Under the directions of the Election Commission of India, it has been left to the decision of the electoral registration officers to decide about the ordinary resident status of a person desiring to get his name included in the electoral rolls.

It was against this background that with the objective of giving voting rights to the non-resident Indians, the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, 2006 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on February 17, 2006. Conferring such rights will enable them to participate in the elections and boost their involvement in nation-building. Accordingly, the government proposed to make a provision through legislation to enable the Indian citizens, absenting from their place of ordinary residence in India owing to their employment, education or otherwise, to get their names registered in the electoral rolls of the constituency concerned.

The Bill sought to amend Section 20 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. As per the parliamentary practice, the Bill was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievance, Law and Justice by the Chairman, Rajya Sabha, on March 14, 2006. The committee submitted its report in August, 2006.

After taking into consideration the views and suggestions received from various quarters the committee recognised the fact that Indians living abroad take keen interest in the affairs of the country. The report mentioned that the estimated number of persons abroad outside India due to employment is five millions and the grant of voting rights will boost their involvement in nation-building.

However, the committee felt that the proposed amendment in its present form has got far-reaching consequences and may create some problems for a conservative society like India. It further observed that the term NRI has not statutorily been defined anywhere. The committee noted that Section 20 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, already contained a number of exemptions to the term ‘ordinary resident’ and felt that it would have been more appropriate if all the exemptions were provided in a single exemption clause.

After Dr Manmohan Singh’s announcement regarding the voting rights for non-resident Indians, it is hoped that the government will amend the legislation providing for voting rights to the non-resident Indians.

Haiti tests Obama’s diplomacy
by Mary Dejevsky

How many demons must President Obama exorcise as he leads the US response to the catastrophe in Haiti? Demons, to be sure, of past neglect alternated with bouts of heavy-handed intervention. And there is a view that another demon belongs in the pack as well: that of his predecessor’s response to hurricane Katrina.

To lay the ghosts of New Orleans, Mr Obama has to show himself concerned, up-to-date with what is happening on the ground, competent, and in command. Everything that George Bush so patently was not.

Yet, except in the broadest category of competence, Katrina is a distraction here. It is not just that an earthquake and a hurricane are different things, or that New Orleans was a first-world city in an advanced country, while Port-au-Prince most definitely was not. It is that New Orleans was unambiguously a US responsibility.

Part of the delay in co-ordinating emergency help might have stemmed from disagreements and misunderstandings between the state and federal authorities. But Katrina presented the distressing spectacle of a national government comprehensively failing its own citizens in their hour of need in the most elementary way.

Not only the logistics were at fault, but the appraisal of what was required; indeed, the understanding that there were any people, let alone tens of thousands, in desperate need at all. This was an emergency response that seemed to sum up in all sorts of ways the failings of George Bush’s presidency. If a state cannot provide the most basic assistance to its own disaster-victims not two hours’ flying time from the capital, what use is the state at all?

The task facing Mr Obama and his administration in dispatching aid to Haiti, beyond trying to project concern and competence, is quite different. In some ways, it is almost the opposite. In New Orleans, the US administration had a responsibility to take charge – and for too long, lamentably, did not do so. In Haiti – unless Mr Obama’s United States wants to be in the business of colonisation and coups – it must avoid conspicuously throwing its weight about, or any appearance of trying to grab control.

The US administration’s words and deeds since the earthquake, and most particularly Hillary Clinton’s brief trip to Port-au-Prince, have provided a compelling study in post-Bush US diplomacy. The US may be sending troops – 3,000 initially, with another 7,000 committed, which makes the total akin to the whole British contingent in Basra – but this is an exercise that tests the practical limits of the sort of “soft” power Mr Obama favours.

First, the US is stressing that this is an emergency relief operation, not a move with any ulterior motive, such as extending US political or military sway. Mrs Clinton’s official plane doubled as an aid-transport; on its return journey it evacuated US nationals.

Second, there has been a deliberate attempt to avoid any proprietorial inferences. The President, his spokespeople and above all his Secretary of State have been at pains to treat Haiti as a sovereign state, albeit one desperately weakened by catastrophe. Mrs Clinton made a point of meeting President Preval and his Prime Minister, in line with diplomatic protocol.

And there was a joint US-Haiti communiqué. The message was that the US wanted to support what remained of Haiti’s always fragile state structures, not to undermine them. Both Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have also used every opportunity to state their respect for the leading role of the United Nations in the relief operation. They appreciate, and are careful of, international precedence.

The difficulty is that appearance and reality conflict. The US is not only the closest developed state to Haiti, but probably the only one anywhere with the capacity to deliver relief on the scale required here. One of its first moves was to take control of the airport – prompting charges that US flights were being given precedence.

But few countries have the capacity to move so quickly, and the airport had to be secured and made operational as an absolute priority. As its troop numbers increases, the US will find it ever harder to claim that it is just another benevolent contributor.

What the US does or does not do in Haiti will not determine the reputation of Barack Obama’s presidency at home, as Katrina coloured the second term of George Bush. But it will directly affect US relations with Haiti in coming years and convey a message about US intentions around the world. So far, Mr Obama, with the able support of Mrs Clinton, has tiptoed as delicately around the eggshells as it was possible to do. It will only become more difficult from now on.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Happiness should be on poll agenda
by Geoff Mulgan

People don’t normally associate politicians with happiness. Most hope that they’ll keep public services ticking over and the economy on track but see happiness as something we struggle with in our private life.

That could be changing. This year’s election could be the first when party policies are interrogated not just for their effects on economic growth or the NHS but also for their effects on happiness.

The main reason is a flood of evidence now available – from psychology and behavioural economics, neuroscience and sociology – about what does and doesn’t make people happy.

It shows that although there is a strong genetic influence on wellbeing, people tend to be happier in democracies than dictatorships, with competent governments than incompetent ones and with equal societies rather than unequal ones.

Some evidence confirms common sense: for example, Henry James’s comment that “true happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self. But the point is not only to get out, you must stay out.

And to stay out, you must have some absorbing errand”. Some is surprising: most people have a stable level of happiness, bouncing back from setbacks (like a disability or divorce) and lucky breaks (like a lottery win).

Over the past five years such evidence has started to directly influence public policy. Dozens of schools in Tyneside, Manchester and Hertfordshire are teaching children how to be resilient and showing measurable results; lower depression, antisocial behaviour and better academic results.

Some journalists mocked the idea of “happiness classes” – before meeting teachers and children who’d experienced it and became converts. Many cities are encouraging neighbours to talk to each other – responding to evidence that, on balance, we’re happier when we know our neighbours.

Much of this work is being led from the ground up, by imaginative local authorities. But it’s also seeping into national argument and policy. The Department of Health has steadily expanded investment in mental health services, last year announcing plans for counselling in response to evidence that two in five people made unemployed over the last year have experienced mental ill-health.

President Sarkozy is the only international leader who feels at home in this space – last year commissioning a group of Nobel Prize winners to advise on how France should measure its progress.

But no British politician has seriously engaged with this field. David Cameron briefly toyed with it, suggesting two years ago that “it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general wellbeing”. He soon got cold feet.

As the manifestos come out we should be asking whether politicians have considered the effects of their policies on wellbeing. It’s not the only thing that matters. But it’s a very odd political culture that sees spending on alcopops and cars, flat screen TVs and Channel perfumes, as somehow more real than human fulfilment.n

The writer is the co-author of The State of Happiness report, launched on Monday by the Young Foundation and the Improvement and Development Agency and is available at www.youngfoundation.org