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Modi and women
Margaret Thatcher |
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Prevent ragging
Exploiting the misguided sentiment
MBA after retirement
Baroness Thatcher: A heroine and a hate figure
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Modi and women Even though the BJP is yet to make up its mind and act, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has already appointed himself its prime ministerial candidate and started his home work. Since businessmen are already eating out of his hand he is focusing on other vote-banks like youth and women.
On Monday Modi addressed the FICCI Ladies Organisation. Though he spoke to women industrialists, he did not treat them as such. They were “sisters and mothers” and he was a patronising patriarch, upholding the traditional view of an Indian woman as a self-sacrificing home-maker, a victim and a bread-earner. He did not discuss business ideas or government policies or explain where they can invest in Gujarat. He did not raise the issue of poor representation to women in decision-making in government or corporate boardrooms. Instead, the Chief Minister regaled them with a few success stories from Gujarat: Jassuben taking on Pizza Hut by offering better pizzas or a cooperative of women achieving commercial success with “Lizzat Papad”. That he or his government had no role in their success is another matter. Selling the idea of women empowerment, Modi said his government had passed a Bill providing for 50 per cent reservation for women in the civic bodies but the Governor, a woman, had blocked the Bill. He was misleading the audience with half-truths. Governor Kamala Beniwal has actually welcomed reservations for women but opposed compulsory voting, which, she feels, is a violation of the principle of individual freedom under the Constitution. Modi raised issues which he felt would interest women -- like female foeticide – but did not mention that under his chief ministership Gujarat’s sex ratio had deteriorated. Malnutrition and the maternal mortality rate are high. When asked to explain once, the Chief Minister blamed this on young women for being beauty conscious. A smooth talker, Modi selects his audience carefully, comes prepared and connects with listeners with a personal touch and an anecdotal style. But at the end, he is a politician. Whatever he says has to be taken with a pinch of salt |
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Margaret Thatcher
Britain’s only woman Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died of a stroke at 87 on Monday, was easily the tallest leader in Britain after World War II. The longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century was admired by many, while others strongly reviled her. She left an unmistakable stamp on the nation she governed, and on the world. So strong was her commitment to the set of principles that formed the core of her beliefs, that these became an ideology named after her—Thatcherism. Her 11-and-a-half-year stint as Prime Minister was defined by various events and her response to them. A few years after she was sworn in as Prime Minister in 1979 came the Falkland war in 1982. The decisive British victory over the Argentinean forces that had invaded the Falkland Islands came at the cost of a bloody war but restored Britain’s sense of pride in itself. She was at the height of her popularity when she won the general elections, but her tough stand against the coal miners led to bitter divisions. She survived a bombing attempt by the IRA, and won elections again in 1987. The introduction of a widely unpopular ‘community charge’ in 1990 led to riots. By the end of the year, she lost support from her party over this charge, and also because of differences over Britain’s role in the European Union. Internationally, her close friendship with US President Ronald Reagan helped restore Britain’s prestige. She had a good equation with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and shared a degree of empathy with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. However, she failed to convince the Chinese leadership to allow Britain a role in Hong Kong after the UK’s lease ended, and did not enjoy a close relationship with her European neighbours. Even as the world pays tributes to Baroness Margaret Thatcher, and debates her legacy, the undeniable fact remains that she left a deep impact not only on Britain but also on many other parts of the world. |
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Prevent ragging Framing new laws to curb long existing social evils is a sign of maturing democracy. In this respect, after Aman Kachroo's tragic death due to ragging in 2009, the UGC (University Grants Commission) passed Regulation on Curbing the Menace of Ragging in Higher Educational Institutions. Prior to this the Raghavan Committee, in 2007 had given a proposal to include ragging as a special section under the IPC ( Indian Penal code).
The Supreme Court of India's interim order also makes it obligatory for academic institutions to file an official FIR( First Information Report) with the police in case of a complaint of ragging. This was done to ensure that all such cases would be formally investigated under the criminal justice system, and not by the academic institutions' own ad-hoc bodies. All these safeguards were designed to protect vulnerable fresh students from the tyranny of the seniors, who, in the name of having fun, sometimes become violent and harm them. Despite such safeguards, it is not uncommon to find clandestine ragging being hushed up by the college management. This is done to protect the name of the institution at the cost of encouraging anti-social elements in educational institutions, as was done in the Kolkata ragging case of a first year student of the Marine Engineering and Research Institute, who was allegedly slapped 40 times and made to do more than 500 push-ups. By upholding the judgment of the district judge, Kangra at Dharamshala, convicting the four persons accused of causing the death of Aman Kachroo and sentencing them to four years' imprisonment, and enhancing the fine to Rs 1 lakh to be paid by each of the four accused, the Division Bench, of Himachal Pradesh has sent the right message. But had there been proper monitoring of the guidelines by the management, five young lives could have been saved. Sadly, the college authorities lack requisite firmness to deal with such cases at their end, as is the practice the world over. Once treated under the criminal law, it leaves little room for their road to reform. |
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A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous. — Ingrid Bergman
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Exploiting the misguided sentiment The anti-Lanka agitation in Tamil Nadu has taken a bizarre turn with competing Tamil groups exploiting misguided sentiment through irresponsible one-upmanship for petty political gain. Scratch the surface and trace the trail of events and most will discover not so much a pro-Lanka Tamil agitation as a lingering pro-LTTE one.
For it is the LTTE that massacred and systematically removed all liberal Tamil voices in Sri Lanka and then used innocent Tamils as human shields in a vainglorious effort to bring international pressure to bear on the Sri Lankan government to end the fighting and give Prabhakaran a reprieve to live to fight again. The resolution unanimously adopted by the Tamil Nadu Assembly was an expression of Tamil chauvinism, a minority strand of opinion, and Jayalalithaa’s riposte to Karunanidhi’s anti-Lanka gambit and Vaiko’s fulminations. What was demanded otherwise too was to stop treating Lanka as a friendly nation, slap sanctions on it for “genocide”, demand a referendum on a separate
Eelam, boycott the next CHOGM meet in Colombo, and bar Sri Lanka cricketers from playing IPL matches in
Chennai. Earlier demands have included a ban on Sri Lankans training in Tamil Nadu under Central auspices and a ban on Lankan sporting teams coming to the state.
Vaiko has gone further in slamming the Sri Lankan High Commissioner in India for “sedition” and seeking his deportation for attempting “to instigate the people of North India, Orissa and Bengal” by arguing that Sinhalese in that island have their origins in these states, which is a fact. Innocent visiting Sinhala monks have been beaten up in the state. This is unconscionable and criminal and stems from the racist hysteria and hate generated artificially by criminal malcontents. The Sri Lankan government has been slow to fulfil its promises but is under pressure to get there, the UNHCR resolution being the latest demarche. The Government of India too is closely monitoring the situation even while it assists in housing reconstruction in the North and seeks reconciliation between the estranged ethnic groups. Pushing Sri Lanka into a corner simply will not help. Rather, it could hurt India’s long-term interests. The reckless statements and actions of all actors in Tamil Nadu violate the injunction of Article 19(2) to promote friendly relations with foreign states and constitute a dangerous bid to wrest foreign relations from the
Centre. This is no part of “federalism” and amounts to an assault on the Constitution in line with similar misconduct by West Bengal and some other border states. The Centre cannot stand by idly and needs to admonish and warn Tamil Nadu under the terms of Article 355 that enjoins the Union “to ensure that the government of every state is carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution”. Let no one be left with any impression that any stare or combination of states is greater than the Union. There will be howls of protest against such counsel and cheap political insinuations of the Centre using coercive powers in a bid to set the stage to win the 2014 polls by other means. The boot is actually on the other foot. For some shrill critics, low politics and a veneer of high patriotism appears a winning combination. All considered, in this context, surely Boswell got it right. Elsewhere, in another curious twist to an already tangled story, the Chhattisgarh High Court in a PIL filed by activist BK Manish has overturned the Centre’s ruling that in matters pertaining to the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution that seeks to protect and empower tribal India, the Governor shall be deemed to be acting in his discretion and not as Governor-in-Council. This runs counter to the written opinion given by the Attorney-General following a reference to him by the former President, Pratibha
Patil, and conveyed to the conference of Governors, and returns to the previously held official position. This is not a matter that should be left hanging in the air as the latest High Court ruling virtually nullifies the original intent of the Fifth Schedule. It is another matter that critics take the view that the Fifth Schedule as enacted is undemocratic and unworkable as an unelected Governor, often a handmaiden of the government of the day, cannot override elected state governments and even the tribal advisory council. In any event, the Fifth Schedule, and even PESA legislated under its auspices, has not worked as intended as it is allegedly democratically inoperable. Where then does this leave the Constitution and the tribals for whose benefit the Fifth Schedule was enacted? The Tribal Affairs Minister is sincerely attempting to serve the tribal cause but finds himself in a bind and appears to be in a minority of one in his own government. The National Tribal Council, with the Prime Minister as chairman, has not met even once and neither Parliament nor the media seems to care. Meanwhile, the Adivasi Mahasabha and the CPI in Bastar have demanded application of the Sixth Schedule to that region on the ground that the Fifth Schedule has not been implemented. They believe that were the Sixth Schedule to be extended to
Bastar, it could have an autonomous council with legislative powers, as in the Northeast. This would enable the district to enact laws for the protection of tribal lands and forests, safeguard customary laws and social customs, bypassing indifferent or antagonistic state governments and powerless Governors. Things are stirring and matters cannot be allowed to drift with crocodile tears being shed for tribal India which is being ruthlessly exploited or left to its own pitiable devices in conditions of extreme deprivation, abject poverty and utter helplessness. Finally, the beating of breasts continues over the Supreme Court sentencing Sanjay Dutt to five years imprisonment (of which he has served three years) for his role in storing underworld arms at the time of the 1993 Mumbai terror attack. He is widely seen as a good fellow who has turned over a new leaf and shown remorse and reformed himself since. All sorts of busybodies have got into the act despite Sanjay Dutt stating with great dignity that he seeks no pardon and pleading not to be hounded by a cruelly intrusive media. Yet, second-guessing the Supreme Court cannot be applauded nor can the enormity of the planned Mumbai bloodbath by underworld dons in concert with enemies of India be lightly
forgotten.
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MBA after retirement
Time marches on. We cannot control the clock. Nothing good can last for ever. Every boom goes bust and every heart gets broken. Na hussan mein rahi voh shokhian Na ishq mein rahi voh garmian Retirement brings a qualitative change in life. Once the weaponry of office is out, people shrink. There is a sudden vacuum. High flyers and low life become flaccid and feckless. The cooing of psychophants disappear. “Chamcha” is one breed which likes a full plate. The retired and out of power people take to MBA For them MBA is ‘Marriage’, ‘Bhog’, ‘Ardas’. They do not like to miss any of these. On ‘bhog’ and ‘ardas’, one can go uninvited. The first thing in the morning they scan is the obituary column. The more enterprising ones even go to marriages uninvited. I know of a couple who are professional uninvited invitees. Funerals become places of chatting. People exchange gossip. The most solemn occasion becomes casual. I attended a funeral the other day. A friend asked me to play golf next morning because of one of their Four Ball had to go away. One of my old bosses was also there. He asked me for my car. He told me that he had to go to Mohali to give “shagun” at a marriage ceremony. Then he asked me to give him Rs 250 as he had forgotten his purse. I gave him a five-hundred rupee note as I did not have change. He told me that as I was very fond of walking, I can walk back to my home. The death of my friend’s grandmother cost me Rs 5000 and a long walk. Another politician who was present asked me to tell him about the political situation in Delhi. He was the least bothered about the close family members who were crying. People hate to be alone, lonely and unfavoured. Retired bureaucrats, cops and out-of-power politicians are always looking for some live company. The occasions do not matter. Being out of power brings some behavioural changes also. The old arrogance gets replaced with humility. Once I was sitting at the India International Centre in Delhi. A waiter brought a “laddoo” in a plate. I asked him the reason. He said, “Netajee apni birthday mana rahen hai” (Netajee is celetrating his birthday). I looked and found a former minister sitting there. I went and congratulated him, wishing him many more years to come and told him that he should celebrate his next birthday in a minister’s office. He beamed and offered me another “laddoo”. Most of the out-of-power people start living in their past . They cannot get out of the time warp. I know of a bureaucrat who was very arrogant. After retirement, he was expecting a lucrative job but his colleagues sabotaged it. After a few days I met him. He was giving the look of a school boy, who had lost both his parents. The female friends also drift away. Henry Kissinger called Power a “Great Aphrodisiac” “Panchtantra” advice is very relevant. “For the lost, the dead and the past the wise have no lament”. Most of the solutions for the problems of life are found in the medicine cabinet of mind. Yesterday is a cancelled cheque. Tomorrow is a promissory note. Today is a ready cash — use it. Enjoy the moment.n
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Baroness Thatcher: A heroine and a hate figure Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister since Queen Victoria was on the throne, died in the Ritz hotel at the age of 87. She had been ill for some time and barely seen in public life for a decade. While a heroine for many people, she was equally a hate figure for others. Indifference was not an option. She was one of the two great Prime Ministers that the UK has had since the Second World War. The first was the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee (1945 to 1951). The Conservative Party broadly accepted what Attlee had done until Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) challenged the post-war settlement. Attlee had founded the welfare state, created the National Health Service (NHS) and nationalised major industries and public utilities. The NHS remained inviolate but one of her first actions as PM in 1979 was to give council tenants the right to buy council houses at a discount. Over a million were sold before she left office. And denationalisation, or privatisation as she called it, was one of the most prominent aspects of her tenure. Indeed we largely live in Thatcher’s Britain. One to remember Not many Prime Ministers remain in people’s minds long after they have stepped down. Lady Thatcher was one, even becoming a character in plays and films. Only Winston Churchill exceeds her in stage and broadcast impersonations. Fewer still have been the British Prime Ministers who have given their name to a political philosophy. The only other example since the war is “Blairism”, but what is that, other than a skill in political marketing? Its only followers are, bizarrely, the present Prime Minister and a handful of those close to him. To this day, “Thatcherism” is used across the world to describe a brisk, unsentimental pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach. It can indicate political obstinacy and has become synonymous with “cuts”. Moreover our political parties still advance and retreat across the very same battle lines that she first laid out — free enterprise versus state ownership, self-help versus reliance on government, further curbs on the unions versus preserving their privileges, and acting on the world stage as if we were still a great power versus focusing on aid for poor countries. Lord Lawson, a chancellor of the exchequer, recently urged David Cameron to start modelling his premiership on Thatcher rather than on Blair. Many Conservative MPs agree. “Thatcherism” was given its final definition on November 22, 1990, when she made her last appearance in the House of Commons as Prime Minister. It was a poignant moment. She had won three successive general elections and had vowed to go on and on. Nonetheless she had learnt she would not have the support of many senior colleagues in the annual poll that was shortly to be conducted by Conservative MPs for the party leadership. She had to withdraw and announce her resignation. Technically still Prime Minister, at 4.50 pm she rose to oppose the motion of no confidence put down by Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party. Thatcher was not a natural orator but she achieved her purposes by a mastery of her brief and force of character. That day, she was excoriating in her scorn of Kinnock yet within the bounds of parliamentary custom: neither mean-minded nor petulant. At one point she declared: “I am enjoying this!” The essence of Thatcherism was expressed thus: “We have given power back to the people on an unprecedented scale… We have done it by curbing the monopoly power of trade unions to control, even to victimise, the individual worker… We have done it by enabling families to own their homes, not least through the sale of 1.25 million council houses… We have done it by giving people choice in public services… Labour is against spreading those freedoms and choice to all our people. It is against us giving power back to the people by privatising nationalised industries… Labour wants to renationalise electricity, water and British Telecom. It wants to take power back to the state and back into its own grasp – a fitful and debilitating grasp.” Some good, some bad By now she was very much the finished article. But she didn’t arrive in politics displaying the qualities for which she became famous. When she took up her first government post as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Pensions in 1961, she proceeded carefully: the main lesson she took was that civil servants had their own agendas and these were not necessarily the same as the government’s. When Edward Heath became Prime Minister in 1970, she was appointed Secretary of State for Education with a seat in the cabinet. She stayed there for the full three years and eight months of the government’s life. In many ways it was the least suitable job that she could have been given. Education was supposed to be above politics; the government’s only role was to supply the funding. The idea was that professional educators rather than ignorant politicians would deal with policy. That would surely make Thatcher tear her hair out. Given her later reputation, she was very good at extracting generous budget settlements from the Treasury. Her civil servants admired her for that. They had kept her out of policy while she efficiently found the cash. In fact Thatcher’s first period in high office was to prove an embarrassment for her when viewed from the standpoint of the early 1980s, when she was an insecure Prime Minister, neither wholly admired by her colleagues in government nor much loved by the public. Stick to the guns If the Thatcher that everyone remembers, the free enterprise warrior, had yet to emerge, her ferocious working methods were visible from the beginning. She was by nature a problem solver rather than a speculative thinker. She read and made notes on every document that crossed her desk or was left in her box to be dealt with overnight. One of her biographers, John Campbell, wrote: “With juniors and seniors alike, she was always determined to win arguments, at whatever cost in bruised egos. If she was losing the main point at issue, she would abruptly change tack to pick up a different point in order to win on that.” A ministerial colleague stated: “These battles are totally exhausting… They cannot be good for government. They’re a quite unnecessary expenditure of energy. They almost never result in any clarification, mainly because of her habit of going off at a wild tangent and worrying away for half an hour at a minor detail.” Her cussedness in argument had a good side. It was transmuted into the robust, courageous leadership she provided when Argentina invaded the Falklands on in 1982. As Campbell noted: “It was as though Grantham [her birthplace] had been invaded by the Germans.” Hugo Young wrote: “She would be damned if she did not get the Falklands back. But she would be double-damned and destroyed, probably alongside her government, if she tried and failed.” Indeed the difficulties of retaking them were immense: the islands were only 300 miles from the Argentinian coast but 8,000 miles from Britain. Winter was just beginning in the South Atlantic. That was just the start of the problems. Could a task force be swiftly assembled to sail south? It could. It left port on the following Monday. Would it be able to provide the air cover necessary for carrying out an opposed landing? Not as conventionally defined, but in the event 4,000 men were successfully put ashore. Would our soldiers, sailors and airmen lose their lives in the conflict? Some 255 British military personnel died during the fighting. Some 777 were wounded. Six ships and 20 aircraft were lost. Argentina had surrendered. Apart from Churchill, no other Prime Minister of recent times could have seen the war through to success with such vigour and a sense of righteousness as she did. The undoing Thatcher opened up a new front again that led to a pitched battle, this time at Trafalgar Square in central London. These were the poll tax riots. The idea was that everyone who used council services should pay equally towards their cost. March 31, 1990, saw what were described as the worst riots seen in London for a century engulfed Trafalgar Square. Eight months later, she had resigned. What brought her down were two factors. One was the widespread feeling that she had run out of steam and the second negative was her intransigent attitude to further European integration. She thought the European Union should be a free-trade area with limited cooperation between sovereign nations. As she said in a famous speech in Bruges that was widely criticised: “Working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy... We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” With this speech she reversed the Conservative Party’s attitude to Europe. This led to the resignation of her Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe. She later lost her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, for different reasons. From that it was only a short step to losing the confidence of most of her cabinet. And that in turn led directly to her resignation. Europe was her “greatest failure”, Campbell, wrote nearly 10 years ago. The late Peter Jenkins told readers of The Independent that “had she ever managed to rise above her small-town shopkeeper prejudices, Mrs Thatcher possessed the authority and qualities of leadership which could decisively have reconciled the British people to Europe. Sadly, rather than play the card of European patriotism she preferred to bang the dismal drum of nationalism.” But in light of the perpetual crisis in eurozone have found themselves — as a result of misjudged integration — since the onset of the financial and banking crisis in 2007, those negative judgements now appear wrong. In this respect, she was an example of the prophet without honour in her own country. — The Independent |
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