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Focus on
development BJP’s
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Lest we
forget
High
command as the final arbiter
The
gotra factor
SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY Shadow
of cops over Commonwealth Games
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BJP’s floor strategy
Just
when Congress floor managers in Parliament were grinning from ear to ear that the CBI chargesheet against and arrest of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s protégé Amit Shah would isolate the BJP from other Opposition parties in the current session, the BJP has confounded them by deciding to put the issue on the backburner. On present thinking, the broader issue of the misuse of the CBI by the government would be only one of the many issues on the BJP’s agenda. The focus instead would be on the price rise on which not only is the Opposition united but even UPA partners Trinamool Congress and DMK have decided to go with them. The sudden change in the BJP’s strategy is indeed a clever ploy. Even otherwise, if this marks a change in the BJP’s disruptionist attitude in Parliament and reflects a shift to taking on the government in parliamentary debates rather than boycotting proceedings and organising noisy demonstrations, it makes good sense. But, arguably, this may be too much to expect. While the Congress would be hard put to defending itself against a joint Opposition onslaught on spirally prices of essential commodities and of consumer items, relations with Pakistan and the strains between the Home and External Affairs ministries in full public view would also put the government on the mat. The same goes for the government’s mishandling of the Naxalite issue, the resurrected debate on the Bhopal gas tragedy and the haphazard planning for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. The Manmohan Singh government, in turn, would rake up the BJP’s role in the murky goings-on in Gujarat where killings in fake encounters are seen as part of a raw deal that the minorities get. Whatever be the issues, it would be refreshing if the parliamentarians were to debate and discuss rather than squandering away precious time in walkouts and unruly scenes which lead to frequent adjournments. It is rarely that an issue is debated threadbare in Parliament these days and it would be a boon if a sustained serious debate and due decorum were to return to the House of the People.
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Lest we forget
It
has been 11 years since the government officially declared that the limited war in Kashmir’s high altitude Kargil region had ended with India wresting control of portions of this barren and inhospitable geographical region earlier lost to surreptitious Pakistani occupation. The two-month war, which began with air strikes on May 26, 1999, ended after Pakistani forces were defeated by Indian troops and were forced to withdraw from the remaining occupied portions after US President Bill Clinton strongly urged Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to withdraw his Army which had violated the Line of Control
(LoC). After initially being caught completely unawares, the Indian Army assisted by air strikes valiantly fought the Pakistanis for every peak and ridge that the latter had occupied across the Indian side of the LoC. The assaults, led by young officers, some of whom were barely in the mid-20s, were testimony to the grit and bravery of the Indian Army which has served the nation with aplomb in the country’s 63 year post-Independence history. From nation consolidation comprising the 1947-48 Kashmir war and operations in Junagadh and Hyderabad to nation preservation comprising defence of India’s borders against Pakistani and Chinese intrusions, counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist operations and various other internal security operations including quelling riots and civic action programmes – the Indian Army is among the world’s busiest, most experienced and professional armies. The Indian armed forces’ apolitical character and the unquestioned supremacy of civilian control in an otherwise challenging region comprising countries ruled by military or authoritarian rule is a matter of considerable pride and achievement. The Indian armed forces have repeatedly earned the nation’s gratitude. But it remains important that the armed forces are constantly looked after. During the Kargil war, the Army was found to be deficient of even basic mountaineering equipment not to mention weapon systems. There was a near absence of military intelligence on the intrusion. Although some of these issues have since been addressed, there is considerable scope for further improvement. The sacrifices of our brave soldiers must never be allowed to go in vain.
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A promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code. — Robert W. Service
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High command as the final arbiter Now
that Sonia Gandhi would be the longest serving Congress president, when re-elected in the next couple of months, it shows that the largest and the oldest political party still has no internal democracy. Members are presumed to vote for her. It is not so much the dynastic obsession as it is the undisputed power she has come to wield in the party and the government. In fact, whatever the two main parties — the Congress and the BJP — may contend, they continue to be controlled by a coterie. The state elections, whenever and wherever held, show that the power has come to be concentrated in one person or one set-up. He or she distributes the party ticket to the favourites. The elected members are so afraid of the high command — the term coined for central control — that they themselves offer their head. They do not elect a leader in the state but leave it to the high command to do the job. We saw how in Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana and Mizoram the choice of leadership was as usual left to Sonia Gandhi. In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where the BJP won, the matter was referred to L.K. Advani. It was understood that he would consult the RSS, the final authority in the
BJP. Sonia Gandhi did not have much of a choice in Delhi after the Congress won the state election. Still Shiela Dikshit had an anxious time. A rumour that did the rounds at that time was that if Shiela could win Delhi for the Congress a third time, she could well be India’s Prime Minister. She was so afraid of the misunderstanding it could create that she said it was a canard and told many television channels that some of her opponents were spreading the lie. However, she ultimately got the position which she deserved. In the case of Ashok Gehlot, it had turned out to be a bit hard because some claimants had the ears of the coterie in Delhi. The voters in Rajasthan had returned the Congress because of him. Yet the final decision was left to Sonia Gandhi. Gehlot did get the Chief Minister’s kursi, but had to submit to Sonia’s fiat to have two Deputy Chief Ministers — one from the Jats and the other from the Meena community. Bhupinder Singh Hooda of Haryana, too, had a close shave. He had to camp in Delhi, waiting endlessly for an audience with Sonia Gandhi, and shuttled between Chandigarh and the national Capital several times before he was eventually installed as the Chief Minister of the state. The Congress barely survived when the state went to the polls after Om Prakash Chautala’s party, its coalition partner in the last election, contested on its own to give a severe jolt to the Congress. In the selection Sonia Gandhi made for the Rajya Sabha, her stamp was there, not that of the party. Nobody doubted the re-election of Satish Sharma, who was Rajiv Gandhi’s adviser. Incidentally, Sharma was indicted by the Supreme Court on the allotment of petrol pumps. The court rarely fined an ex-minister as it did in the case of Sharma. But Sonia’s criterion was loyalty, not integrity. Sonia Gandhi, or 10 Janpath, the bungalow where she lives, is synonymous with power. There is hardly any important position or decision that does not have her stamp of approval. She has found in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a person who carries out her word obediently. The Congress has instances where the party president and the prime minister were parallel authorities. Except Jawaharlal Nehru, who gave the party president full respect and even the final say, both Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi, particularly the latter, reduced the Congress president to a mere chaprasi, as Sanjiva Reddy, who became India’s President, had put it. Nehru did not want the Kerala Communist government, headed by EMS Namboodiripad, to be dismissed but the then Congress president, Indira Gandhi, was insistent on it because of the party’s political interests. She had her way, not because of being Nehru’s daughter, but because she was the president of the Congress, which had appointed him the Prime Minister. Nehru could have had his way if he had so desired. But he was stickler for norms and institutions. Shastri, his successor, felt K. Kamaraj, then Congress president, oppressive. Although he had helped Shastri to occupy the chair of Prime Minister, the latter cut him down to size. Kamaraj was not shown the list of ministers that Shastri had submitted to the President. Still Shastri was not ruthless, like Indira Gandhi. He did not allow Kamaraj’s prestige to suffer. When Indira Gandhi came to power with the support of Kamaraj, still the Congress president, she found him and his syndicate in her way. She defeated them when she got V.V. Giri elected as India’s President in place of Sanjiva Reddy, the official candidate of the Congress. Subsequently, she combined the posts of party presidentship with that of the prime ministership. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, followed her example. Sonia Gandhi is an exception. Her advantage is that she is the only person whom the Congress leaders have accepted as the leader who can get them back to power. And she has done it. After occupying the position, she has reduced the opposition within the party to pulp. Now that she has anointed her son Rahul Gandhi as prime minister, she will keep Manmohan Singh in power until she can put Rahul in the prime minister’s gaddi. In fact, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his maiden Press conference in Delhi that he would be ready to step down for Rahul Gandhi. As for the BJP, it had to “elect” Nitin Gadkari as the party chief when the RSS made its intentions clear. The party is different from the Congress in the sense that the remote control is at Nagpur, the headquarters of the RSS. Sonia Gandhi is her own master. Unlike the past, the members of both the Congress and the BJP in the legislatures and Parliament have been reduced to mere pawns, an assortment of pieces on a chessboard that the party chiefs play adroitly. The elected members have no say at all. The final verdict rests with the high command. It is the arbiter. Then why demand for better candidates when the selection is entirely dependent on Sonia Gandhi in the Congress and the RSS-backed Advani in the
BJP?
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The gotra factor Gotra
is in the news but my domestic war over this issue has been going on with the wife for the last few decades. She has always claimed moral superiority over me as I am, as she thunders when in bad mood, like a stateless citizen. I confess that I, as expected of a fighting soldier, told her that I do not have the original papers to trace the family tree beyond two hundred years or so. It never occurred to me to get duplicate ones in original form made by feeding the appropriate experts ‘kheer and malpuras’ and greasing their palms with some green stuff. However, I am solely responsible for letting out this secret to my wife during our honeymoon. I narrated an incident that had occurred just a few months before our marriage. I had been posted to Officers Training School, Madras (now Chennai) after a long stint in an inhospitable area. One day, our South Indian accounts officer — a dignified affectionate gentleman with three horizontal stripes on his forehead — asked me as to why I was not married as I was past the right age. I told him mischievously that there were not many brave young girls keen to marry infantry officers. He was not convinced and asked me as to what my Gotram was. I must admit that I was foozled as I had never been told about any such affiliation. Neither had the Army ever asked connected information while filling multitude of forms. “No wonder you are not married,” was his parting shot. He, however, softened the blow by advising me to find this information from my parents. I was smarting from the gentle rebuke and asked my father during my visit to Delhi. He too was taken aback but countered that he was surprised that I, being a soldier, was dabbling in such mumbo jumbo. He was a historian and an author of some repute and told me the family information that was already known to me — that we belonged to the community that had been dabbling in money matters for centuries. However, lately we had branched out in other fields, including soldiering and achieved considerable success. But I had not got my answer. On my return to Madras, I asked another South Indian friend as to what his Gotram was. Having armed myself with the requisite information, I met the accounts officer: I told him that I am a ‘Vishwamitra.’ My word, he nearly fell off his chair. He had expected worse news. “And you — a Vishwamitra, a warrior — cannot find a nice wife”. I thought I was smart. But I told this story to my bride. From that day, she has never allowed me to forget that I fall into the twilight zone — neither here nor there. She is from a superior Gotra and she has papers to prove it. Neither am I ever granted concessions or privileges applicable to either side of the line. Such is
life.
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SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY By Steve Connor
The idea came from Karl Morris, a Manchester sports psychologist who was asked to help Oosthuizen improve his concentration before starting his swing after a string of disappointing results in previous golfing events. "His pre-shot routine was all over the place. I suggested he changed his whole game plan after he told me that when he played in the US Open, he was making split decisions instead of thinking about what he should have been doing. One of the tips I gave him was to put a red spot on his glove and to focus on it during his swing," Dr Morris said. The ability to focus on the task in hand is one of the key techniques that sports psychologists try to refine when dealing with professional sports people. "There is a lot of evidence that the best sportsmen and women have a lot of psychological skills that allow them to concentrate and to control anxiety," said Tim Rees, a qualified psychologist who specialises in sport at Exeter University. Psychological skills may be more important in some sports than others. Endurance sports such as rowing, for instance, require a very different psychological approach from less physical sports like golf where the actual playing of shots constitutes a tiny fraction of the time it takes to complete the course. Rowing and other endurance sports involve intense activity for prolonged periods, whereas there is so much more time for sports like golf. "There is a lot of evidence to show that once someone gets to a certain level of skill, it is the differences in their psychological approach that differentiates people at the very top," Dr Rees said. The red spot on Oosthuizen's glove was one way of focussing his mind on the process of playing a shot, rather than thinking of the consequences. It is a classic example of what is known as "process goals" in sports psychology, when the athlete is asked to focus on something, however minor, to stop him from thinking of what happens if the shot goes wrong - it brings them back to the "here and now" before the shot is actually played, Dr Rees explained. Other mental tricks may focus on "thought stopping". Instead of dwelling on a missed shot, whether it is a failed penalty or disastrous return on the tennis court, the athlete is trained to put such negative thoughts into a mental "black box" that can be dealt with after the match. A simple trick is to get the athlete to think of a stop sign immediately after they make a mistake. "It allows them to park the problem so they can deal with it later. It takes a lot of practice to get it to work but it allows them to focus on what they have to do next rather than what they have just done," Dr Rees said. Almost all sports involve what psychologists call imagery. Athletes often describe how the day or night before a crucial game, they mentally rehearse what they intend to do - even to the point of walking up to the winner's podium. According to Rees this is why so many first-time winners often look relatively relaxed and at home on a podium because they have rehearsed the moment so many times in their heads. David Beckham, for instance, is said to have stored and replayed mental "video clips" of how the ball will bend when he takes a free kick at goal. Skiers at the top of a run often close their eyes briefly and sway from side to side just before they take off down a slope, as if they are rehearsing the difficult movements they are about to make. "Imagery is most effective when it is used in conjunction with actual practice," Dr Rees said. Physical perfection, skill and technique are obviously critical to athletic performance, but the whole point about sports psychology is that the mind can so often be employed to overrule matter. This is never more true when it comes to the sort of psychological support that can decide whether a player wins or loses. Several studies have shown that the emotional support given to an athlete from family, friends and even professional managers can make a significant difference to sporting performance. Olympic gold medallists Dame Kelly Holmes and Sir Chris Hoy, for instance, have both cited the support of their loved ones as a major factor in their success, and this is supported by empirical research. In one study of 197 male amateur golfers, for example, Dr Rees found that the social support they received before a game affected how well they did. "While training, tactics and luck all play a part, the encouraging words or kind gestures of a partner or friend can make the difference between a footballer scoring that winning goal, or a sprinter achieving a record time," he said. Even the emotional support of a relative stranger can boost performance, according to another study by Exeter colleague Paul Freeman. Just listening to an athlete's problems and offering simple advice and encouragement can make a significant difference to an athlete's success, Dr Freeman said. "It is significant that the support I offered, as a relative stranger, had such a marked influence on their results. The findings suggest that amateur and professional athletes would benefit from seeking social support, whether this is from a friend or family member or even from a professional," he said. This is why even a manager can make a psychological impact that makes the difference between winning and losing. — The Independent
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Shadow of cops over Commonwealth Games Perhaps, a tinge of appreciation with a back- handed compliment for his boldness also. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar branded the Commonwealth Games an "enormous waste of money", thereby rubbing the feathers of those who are directly connected with the "infrastructure development" of the Games. Aiyar's point is that "India's poor would not have access to India's biggest sporting event and that the money spent on the Games could have been better utilised for anti-poverty and welfare
programmes". Understandably, Sheila Dikshit, the Chief Minister of Delhi being the prima donna of the "grand " show of the first decade of the 21st century, is upset. She feels, somewhat meekly though, compared to Mr Aiyar's forthright matter-of-fact statement, that "it is not fair to make such comments, now when the Games are just a few months away. I would just like all people of Delhi as well as of India to be proud of the Games." A defensive Dikshit clarifies further, "its not that only NDMC areas or select places will benefit. What could be done is being done for all areas". Between the individual understanding and divergent views of Aiyar and Dikshit, however, crops up the present top cop of Delhi's prophecy-cum-advisory- to the citizens of Delhi. It stipulates that the 12 million people of the Capital of India's 1.2 billion should stay put at home for 15 days during the Games so as to avoid inconvenience. Proud we all should be of the Games, but then, how does that pride get reflected or celebrated? By staying cloistered for a fortnight to avoid being "inconvenienced" as suggested by the Cop-in-Chief of the Capital of India ? If indeed it should be like that, then why does not the Delhi Government issue a fatwa imposing Taliban-like official curfew in the Capital to ensure that people do not go out, stop working and the old, sick and emergency patients go uncared for and unattended to. Let the would-be-mothers take care of themselves at home by the midwives of yesteryears. Let the students loiter around their respective areas and not go beyond their jurisdiction. One is constrained to ask the top cop of Delhi, what would be his advisory to the criminals, gangsters, terrorists and militants, the sleeper cells of anti-national elements and to the land-grabbing mafias with links at high places! Have they also been suitably sermonised not to venture out and stay indoor for 15 days (at the cost of their livelihood) thereby avoiding inconveniencing themselves and saving the foreign guests, visitors and players from seeing and facing the dark side of the Indian Capital and the few thousand privileged spectators of the Games ? Indeed, one is surprised and shocked at the Delhi Police Chief's sanctimonious sermon. The Police is a law enforcement agency of the state, the primary duty of which is to save the innocent from the crooks and criminals. It certainly is not the business of the Police to control the lives of 12 million Delhites for a full fortnight. Is Delhi the first and the last city to host a Commonwealth Games ? If indeed the Games are to succeed by keeping the 12 million Delhites indoor for 15 days, then why are we spending billions of taxpayers' money for "development" projects of Delhi-2010? In 1982 IXth Asian Games, during Indira Gandhi's premiership, construction of stadia was done in record time, without any scam and scandal. And now! Hear the rumblings ? Thus, we still have the J.N.Stadium, I.P.Stadium, Tughlaqabad shooting range, Talkatora swimming pool, Harbaksh Stadium, several fly overs, five star hotels and the Asiad Village. But how many new stadia have come up for Delhi 2010 with a lead time of more than 4 years ? Barring the Games Village on a controversial plot ("soft river bed") , how many "2010 exclusives" have been constructed ? Indira Gandhi, if memory serves right, did not burden the people of Delhi with taxes in the name of the IXth Asiad, the way it has been done now for "Delhi 2010 Games"! Also, we had that dynamic and honest non-political Rajiv Gandhi as the Friend, Philosopher and Guide to make the "Delhi 1982" a grand success. Unfortunately, there is no Rajiv Gandhi today. Instead, it is now the curse of the cop to stay indoors for 15 days in October. Or else !
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Corrections and clarifications n
The use of “next” in the headline “India, Pak may next talk at UN meet in Sept” (July 24, Page 2) is not appropriate. “Hold talks” would have been appropriate. n
“Border villagers” and not “Border belt” would have been right in the headline “Border belt consuming arsenic-laced water” (July 24,
Page 4). n The headline “DGP fined Rs 1,000 for carrying phone in Assembly” (July 24, Page 8) was wrong. The DGP was fined for using his cell phone and not carrying it (taking a photo in the Assembly). n
“On” should have been added to make it “Sehwag stays on top…” in the headline “Sehwag stays top in Test rankings” (July 24, Page 22). Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them. This column appears twice a week — every Tuesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error. Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is
kanwar@tribunemail.com. Raj Chengappa
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Sporting professionals are increasingly turning to similar mind-training tricks to improve their performance on the field. It may involve mental imagery that allows them to rehearse a game in their heads, or psychological blocking techniques that stop them from dwelling on past mistakes. In the case of Oosthuizen, an outsider who was widely expected to collapse under the pressure of the final day, it was a simple dot on his glove to make him focus on his swing.
M