The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Calamity in Philippines
Repairing typhoon Haiyan’s damage

With over 10,000 people killed and thousands more rendered homeless, a state of national calamity has been declared in the Philippines by President Benigno Aquino. Typhoon Haiyan, which is one of the strongest on the record, has also been one of the most destructive and there is no doubt that there has been massive devastation and loss of life has taken place in Leyte and Samar, the two worst-affected provinces. Now after the storm, thousands of survivors desperately need aid.

Tacloban was a thriving city with a population of over two lakh persons, till it became a disaster zone after the storm struck. The sea level rose from 10 to 13 feet and sea water surged up the roads, inundating buildings and destroying them. Unfortunately, even some of the centres where people were evacuated were flooded by the sea water, or destroyed by gusts of destructive winds.

The United Nations and other international aid agencies have been quick to come to the rescue. However, this is just the beginning of the long road towards providing immediate relief to those who need it the most. As of now, not much seems to have reached the most affected persons. Thus, an effort has to be made to ensure that aid gets to the people it is intended for as soon as possible. Medical supplies are urgently needed, along with doctors and other personnel. Food and potable water are other necessities. Along with that, infrastructure too has to be restored. Roads need to be cleared and repaired, power and utilities restored. The reconstruction and rehabilitation effort needs to be sustained, since many people have lost the means to livelihood, and they have no social security. India too must contribute what it can to help out its Asian neighbour in this hour of need.

Drugged existence
Ex-DSP’s arrest a wake-up call

From a village boy brought up by his uncle to an Arjuna Award-winning international wrestler, then a DSP, before finally ending up in police custody for running a major global drug smuggling racket worth hundreds of crore. That's a story as amazing as it is horrifying. But within this tale of Jagdish Singh Bhola lie multiple narratives that are a reflection of many of our social and administrative structures. The man came from a village in Bathinda, a district known more for drugs than its massive oil refinery. His uncle was also allegedly into peddling drugs. Bhola's success in sports gave him an opportunity to escape all that's wrong, but such are the lures of easy money - made easier, ironically, by his job in the police and international contacts from his sporting days.

The Punjab Police has this year met with a fair amount of success in its concerted intelligence-driven effort against drug smuggling. However, at the retail consumer level of drug dealing there has not been much impact as the police force at large is not sensitised to this menace. The rise of Bhola - recruited as a constable - through the police ranks is a matter the top brass has to ponder over. How was a man of dubious character able to keep his true colours hidden? The policy of appointment of sportspersons in government jobs, especially the police, also needs revisiting. It is one thing to honour and incentivise sportspersons, and another to subsequently give them responsibilities for which they may not be qualified or trained. Here public good is at stake.

Sports is also seen by the Punjab Government as a means to lure youth away from drugs. Accordingly, it has tried to build sporting infrastructure, which is appreciable. However, to rescue the current generation of youth needs a lot more to be done, especially in education. While Punjab has seen its heyday in sports and has had a high representation in the Services, it has historically not been known for academics, barring individual exceptions. This has to change in this age of knowledge economy.

Thought for the Day

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

— Henri Frederic Amiel

ARTICLE

Empty rhetoric on non-issues
Indecorous poll campaign at the national level
by B.G. Verghese

With polling in the first round of elections in four states commencing this week, the electorate has heard a lot of empty rhetoric on peripheral or non-issues. The campaign at the national level has been indecorous and even abusive with the public all too often being treated to cheap theatre rather than an analysis of matters of moment and the road forward.

The recent serial bomb blasts in Patna on the afternoon Narendra Modi was to address a rally at the maidan was prima facie a security lapse that is being vigorously investigated. Rather than focus on the follow-up, the BJP, which rightly did hold the rally, went on to allege that Modi was targeted and should henceforward be given “prime ministerial security” as the declared electoral leader of the BJP's bid to form the national government in 2014. This is something of a non-sequitur as the BJP has no hope of forming a government on its own but could perhaps do so at the head of a NDA coalition which will want to elect its own leader.

As a Chief Minister and ranking BJP leader and a possible terrorist target, Modi already enjoys the highest level Z-plus security under NSG cover. The Minister of State for Home Affairs disclosed that Modi went to the Patna rally with 1,000 police personnel, 100 Inspectors and 12 DSP/DIG level officers, several of these sent from Gujarat. This security army must cost a pretty penny. Even so, the BJP parliamentary board resolved to ask for SPG cover which is only accorded to the Prime Minister, former PMs and their immediate families. As a wit wryly commented, Modi wishes to look prime ministerial without being a Prime Minister! With the government having now decided to conduct advance security drills before Modi visits any place, the man, like so many VIP red-beacon pretenders, seems to be on an ego trip, anxious to gain PR points to enhance his electoral allure.

It is astonishing that the electronic and even the print media devoted so much time and space for this and other non-issues. Modi now accuses the Congress of using the CBI and Indian Mujahideen to counter him. He protests too much.

The latest issue to rile the media and political commentators is the so-called effort of the government to “censor” the manner of reportage of the Prime Minister's Independence Day address, with a threat of penal action if future violations occur. What are the facts? August 15 is a national day on which the Prime Minister unfurls the flag and addresses the nation, as chief ministers do in their respective capitals. Modi and the BJP have repeatedly challenged the PM to a televised election debate as between US presidential candidates. But in the US these are presidential candidates, unlike in the parliamentary system where several candidates, some of them coalitional leaders, are in the ring. Moreover, the next parliamentary election has yet to be announced and what we are witnessing today is electioneering for four state assembly polls.

Snubbed on his challenge to Dr Manmohan Singh to enter into a “prime ministerial” electoral debate with him, Modi took the opportunity to deliver his Independence Day speech in Ahmedabad on August 14 and then fly to Bhuj on August 15 to take on the Prime Minister who had delivered his Independence Day address to the nation from the Red Fort a couple of hours earlier. Taking note of the latter's remarks, he launched an electoral diatribe heaping scorn on Dr Singh and the record of the UPA. Was this the occasion for such a duel? More than Modi himself, some media outlets juxtaposed the two in subsequent reports and commentaries to suggest a gladiatorial contest. The national day was trivialised for petty sensation.

According to a TV channel website, "the Gujarat Chief Minister slammed the PM’s speech as uninspiring, picked holes in Dr Singh’s words and offered a lacerating comment on the Congress-led UPA government’s policy on China and Pakistan”. This is not to suggest that the PM cannot or should not be criticised. But was this the occasion for an exercise in tasteless journalism? The speech and its reportage were objectionable and this is what the I&B Ministry alluded to in its admittedly belated press note. Those trumpeting freedom of expression and freedom of the Press should ponder over the matter and reserve their ire for a worthier cause.

Close on this came the coverage of Tendulkar's last Ranji Trophy match against Haryana and his penultimate (199th) Test against the West Indies in Kolkata. Tendulkar got non-stop coverage of his life and career that crowded out everything else from national attention. It just went on and on with breathless animation, hyped beyond measure. He was not in the best of form and on the final day at Eden Gardens, when Shami, a new and youthful wonder bowler did India proud, one newspaper headline noted that cries of “Shami, Shami” took over from “Sachin, Sachin”. Not altogether Sachin’s fault, but a bout of media madness.

The Mars Mission was well covered too but soon degenerated into another hyped and somewhat exaggerated controversy following the former ISRO chief's comment that the effort should have focussed on developing the Geo-Stationary Launch Vehicle Mission, ISRO's future and more powerful workhorse, instead of pursuing a less important mission to the Mars with a progressively diminishing experimental payload.

This was a scientific argument that might have been left at that, although it was not necessary to denigrate the current effort for which the next optimal window of opportunity will not be available until after the elapse of another 26 months. Further, similar Mars probes by China and Japan having failed, the success of the so-named Mangalayam mission will bring India on a par with the US, Russia and Europe, giving a huge boost to national morale and Indian science.

Unfortunately, the media debate revolved around the cost of the Mars Mission. The Rs 450 crore, critics said, could have been better devoted to wiping out poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and poor health. That is a wholly mistaken argument. The money spent on anti-poverty programmes is not small by any means but is not well spent, with many leakages and administrative impediments. The Rs 450 crore expenditure on Mangalayam is affordable and if “saved” could well have been misspent on some fraud or folly, examples of which abound.

Word is also now out that the Prime Minister will not attend the CHOGM summit in Colombo in deference to Tamil “sentiment”. This is an abject surrender to Tamil chauvinism that has time and again dictated India's Sri Lanka policy to its detriment and shame. Foreign policy is increasingly being subject to blackmail by provincial satraps in West Bengal, Assam and elsewhere. This is a most dangerous trend.

http://www.bgverghese.com

MIDDLE

Tennis in uniform
by Rajan Kashyap

The whole world loves a spectacle. Every audience is delighted at a grand display of smart uniformed forces on parade. Awesome is the sight of warriors in serried phalanx, marching in rhythm to the musical notes of an inspiring military tune. But there are rare occasions, as on the playing field, when our powerful guardians of the law discard their medals, flags and emblems of authority. On view is an amazing transformation. The venerated hero, whom you had only gazed at from afar in his immaculate khaki, becomes suddenly a nondescript commoner clad in white shorts and a T-shirt. The baton, tucked under a stiff arm, is replaced by a standard tennis racquet.

I was witness to just such a change of image last week. The occasion was an assembly in the city of hundreds of police officers from all over the country. The law enforcers had congregated, not to discuss law and order, security and terrorism, but to display their prowess in a game of skill, tennis. The prizes at stake: not medals for gallantry, but trophies for excellence in a popular sport.

The opening ceremony was glamorous. Dance and song by lissome damsels and smart young men formed a prelude to the forthcoming cut-throat competition. The Tennis Stadium had never seen a house as full with wildly cheering spectators, not even when the cream of Indian tennis competed with other national teams in Davis Cup matches. What drew the thronging crowds to the arena? Was it the curiosity of the common public to observe the human face of raw authority?

I had the totally unexpected privilege of basking in reflected glory that had been magically created at the tennis courts. I and some visiting foreign friends were to play a friendly game in the morning, well before the scheduled ceremonies of the Police Championships, but on the same centre courts. At the entrance to the premises we faced an unexpected and piquant situation. The requirements of security for the police championships required all visitors to prove our identity. Since we had come on bicycles, and not in the marked official cars, the policemen on duty at the entrance were entirely correct in blocking our humble means of transport as unauthorised for entry. The racquets that we carried were no substitute for official entry passes. Fortunately, a senior officer appreciated our dilemma, and allowed us egress.

The sight that greeted us on court left my foreign guest players astounded. Never had they had an opportunity to present their amateur tennis skills in front of so many thousands of colourful spectators. Nervous in the extreme, all the four members of our team nevertheless took the plunge and began practice. We dreaded hitting any strong winning shots, lest they be lustily cheered by the audience under the mistaken impression that we were among the participants from police teams that they had come to watch. As quickly as we could, we ended the ordeal, and sought the anonymity of the pavilion to watch the proceedings.

The police games that I witnessed subsequently showed that sport is a great leveller. Junior officers rubbed shoulders with, and even vanquished on court, Inspectors General. The norms of behaviour expected were encapsulated in a stern directive issued in advance to all participants. Players were exhorted to carry their own bags and equipment on court, and not to use helpers for the purpose. The games demonstrated that a uniform ensures discipline, even when you are not wearing it. Most importantly, they showed us the human face of the police.

OPED — HISTORY

A letter, straight from the heart, to Chacha Nehru
As the year-long celebrations to mark Jawaharlal Nehru's 125th birth anniversary begin, The Tribune looks at his legacy
Vijay Prashad

Jawaharlal Nehru interacting with children. File photos PIB

Dear Chacha Nehru,

It is odd for me to be writing to you. Neither you nor I believe much in god or an afterlife — you were a Fabian socialist with a strong rationalist brief; I am a Marxist atheist. But, nonetheless, there is something comforting in writing to you — for you, who died in 1964, were an active presence in my early years. Statues of you had already been erected in our cities and towns, and November 14 — your birthday in 1889 — had already been selected as Children's Day, to honour Chacha Nehru, the uncle to Gandhi’s father of the nation. My generation, born in the 1960s, read your Letters from a Father to a Daughter, (1928) alongside our NCERT textbooks (where I first encountered the work of Romila Thapar, a precursor to reading your own reconstructions of old India — to craft a national narrative out of a million discrete stories). We cut our teeth on your ideas, on the stories of the sacrifices of your generation. So, from one atheist to a rationalist — greetings on your birthday.

Shadow of Emergency

When I came of age, under the threatening shadow of your daughter’s Emergency and its confusing aftermath, I took refuge in Marxism and then in its radical politics. The Congress became rancid for me — the Emergency was the backdrop, but the 1984 Delhi riots decomposed the ideals of Indian nationalism that had been shaped by your writings and example. The hurry of your grandson to turn India into a neo-liberal shopping mall distressed me — not because I have an aversion to modernity or want to deprive the Indian masses of goods but because it had become clear that the model being proposed would sharpen deep inequality and prevent many hundreds of millions from any access to the kind of modernity being promised by the new kind of nationalism. Your grandson broke the locks at Ayodhya, allowing worship at a site of great dispute, inflaming Hindu-Muslim tension in the aftermath of the Delhi riots. This was a conflict that you had done a great deal to temper — writing in December 1949 to the then UP Chief Minister G. B. Pant to demand that the Ram statues be removed from the Babri Masjid because otherwise “a dangerous example is being set there.” It was an ugly period — the 1980s — with the Congress tilting so far to the Right that it created the platform upon which the Bharatiya Janata Party would ride through its rath yatras to national prominence and power. Your writings and example had become shop-worn by then, with your name an invective against secularism and state-led national development — Nehruvian pseudo-secularism on the one hand, and Nehruvian socialism on the other. I can see L. K. Advani's mouth curl into an ugly sneer as he said your name — all this was a gift to the Right from your own party, which had tacked to the far Right, handing over India into the arms of the BJP.

Unflattering portrait

In this climate, I began to see you through the eyes of R. P. Dutt’s 1940 India Today and EMS Namboodripad’s Nehru (1988) — unflattering portraits that nonetheless introduced me to a side of you that had been buried in the Uncle Nehru portrait, namely your hesitancy in the face of popular struggles during the freedom movement and your deep antipathy to the Communist movement in the 1950s. These views were clarified for me when I did my Ph.D. on the Balmiki community’s history, whose own struggles from the 1920s to the 1950s were ignored by you, and whose strike in 1957 in Delhi ended with a ghastly police firing — you didn't lift a finger to lift the sorrow from a community that lived on Mandir Marg, not far from Teen Murti House. Incidentally, I first read about that police firing in the papers of Brij Krishen Chandiwala which are housed in Teen Murti, now a library and archive, and it is in those papers that I also found out about a day trip you took to understand the plight of the new slum dwellers in the capital (a story I also heard from L. K. Jain). That old socialist outrage at poverty was married to a modernist's impatience with the embarrassment of poverty — it was a combination that often allowed you to tilt toward the latter and egg the bulldozers on rather than to make policy from the former and improve the conditions of life of the people where they had settled. Your instinct was not so unlike that of your other grandson, who would almost ride the bulldozers himself into Turkmen Gate in the 1970s — an area not so far from where Chandiwala had taken you in the 1950s.

Non-Alignment policy

When I began to write about the Third World Project and Non-Alignment, I came to have a different sense of your accomplishments. Limitations on the domestic stage were made up for with a canny and able leadership of the newly emergent states out of colonialism on the world stage. From Bandung (1955) to the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade (1961), your intellectual leadership was essential. It gave Nasser and Tito, Sukarno and Nkrumah courage and strength and it drew in the bulk of the new states to create an institutional alternative to both the West and the East. In 1960, an Egyptian newspaper published an encomium that had become all too familiar at that time, “Abdel-Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, Tito, Nkrumah and Sekou Touré are the custodians of a trust on behalf of no less than a quarter of the inhabitants of the world.” That was the kind of place you had taken India to on the world stage — not as a toady of any world power, but as an equal partner in a project whose broad goal was to lift the masses to political and economic power, as well as cultural and social justice. The ship you helped build with the other post-colonial states, the NAM, was like a little sailboat made of rickety wood that nevertheless braved the tsunami of Cold War antagonisms. It was a gesture of great courage, however ill-starred a venture.

Refuge in bloodline

Nothing is like that today. What remains of your party should not have become a dynastic vehicle for your family, elevating your great- grandson for whom politics does not seem to be a natural vocation. In the absence of a clear programme for the betterment of the lives of the majority of Indians, the Congress has taken refuge in your bloodlines, to maintain a link to you that is otherwise non-existent in its policies. The Congress leadership craves the fickle attentions of Washington, and is saved from abasement by its membership in the BRICS bloc. The BJP, its adversary, has anointed a man who is culpable in an anti-Muslim pogrom and whose brash style recalls the kind of politics of testosterone that Gandhi had tried to steer India away from — and that you saw behind the dogged eyes of Sardar Patel. The Congress is the caterpillar of India’s rightward turn with an old secular socialist exoskeleton no longer able to hold together its commitments to Hindu-majority led neo-liberalism. As it moults, out will come the BJP butterfly. “A dangerous example is being set there,” one could say — this time not in the confines of an ancient mosque in Ayodhya but in all of India.

Entitlement to pleasure

Times have changed. The seduction of commodities has rendered insensate an Indian elite that would once have been constrained by the ideals of the Freedom Movement. It cannot see the immensity of the agrarian crisis, nor the moral challenge posed by slum clearance for mall construction. It is unwilling to question its own sense of entitlement to pleasure. The main political parties have given themselves over to the narcissism of India's wealthy. Two alternatives stand before India: Either nothing changes and the degradation of the millions will lead to a social conflagration that can only end with the hoof beats of the Apocalypse upon the four corners of the country; or there is the growth of the Left which is the only political force capable of engendering a 21st-century nationalism rooted in the class needs of the working people and in a global solidarity with people across the planet who are fed up with the pampered policy of neo-liberalism.

No alternative

A younger Nehru, say when you became Congress President in 1936 and surrounded yourself in Anand Bhawan with Communists such as Sajjad Zaheer, Dr. Z. A. Ahmad, Hajra Begum, Mahmuduzzafar Khan and Rashida Jahan, would perhaps immediately see that there really is no alterative — that the second road is the one that intelligent people need to fasten on with due speed. It is an alternative gestured at by a few people who claim your mantle but they have neither the courage nor the honesty to take that road. They would not even understand the terms in which you spoke in 1928, when you told the newly formed trade union movement, “The class war has existed and exists today. By our trying ostrich-like to ignore it, we do not get rid of it. Only by removing the causes are we likely to bring peace.” A theory that develops out of an understanding of those causes will be worthwhile for our present. The rest lies with the gods.

The writer is the Edward Said Chair, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon