P A G E
Saturday, August 1, 1998
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E D I T O R I A L P A G E |
Saturday, August 1, 1998 |
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Courage
of conviction
Indian
political impasse |
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DAV
College, Lahore |
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Courage of conviction ONE cannot help marvelling at the grit and determination of Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who has just been dragged back to Yangon by the military junta after a six-day standoff. The frail Nobel laureate, who was suffering from dehydration and fever, would have continued her sit-in in her car after she was blocked by security men at a bridge about 65 km from the national capital had she not been forcibly taken away by military personnel. This was a clear-cut case of denial of human rights. After all, she was only going to meet the workers of her National League of Democracy when she was forced to stop. In true tradition of Gandhi and Mandela, she has announced that she will do exactly the same if her demands of releasing all her jailed supporters and setting a date for direct talks with the Opposition are not accepted by the ruling junta. The repressive bunch of army officers, which has ironically named itself the State Peace and Development Council, has predictably accused her of enacting the drama for the benefit of the ASEAN meeting in Manila. But the fact of the matter is that it is they who have been stage-managing minor relaxations in the excessively repressive regime to hoodwink the world community. The unfortunate thing is that the global powers have been looking the other way and thereby condoning these activities. China and the USA are among the biggest supporters of the regime, although the latter does make considerable noises against its activities for public consumption. Even the ASEAN made Myanmar its member on the pretext of using this kind of engagement for bringing about a change in the country. With one year having passed, there are no tangible results to show for this "engagement" and any voice raised against the government is brutally gagged. But the repressive efforts
are not really succeeding. The bomb which started ticking
on August 8, 1988, when students led thousands of people
onto the streets of Yangon, Mandlay and other major
cities against the then dictator, General Ne Win, is
close to explosion. Aung San Suu Kyi may be as firm about
ahimsa as she has always been but the people on the
street are fed up with the shenanigans of the generals.
Lessons must be learnt from what happened to Suharto in
Indonesia. As the 10th anniversary of the student
uprising approaches, the Burmese generals must give a
serious thought to what a public uprising can do to them.
In fact, there is one line of thought which is of the
view that the tough stand taken by Aung San Suu Kyi might
be a subtle message to the citizens of Myanmar that even
she is fed up with the delaying tactics of the generals.
Amidst all this, the silence of India is intriguing. The
nation of Gandhi must raise its voice strongly in favour
of the brave woman who is standing defiant against all
the might of the army. India's support is all the more
necessary because of the continuing assistance being
given by Myanmar to the militants who wreak havoc in
North-East India. |
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The communal bogey ARE we secular and non-communal enough? Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray thinks we, as a nation, are still to come out of the pre-partition two-nation theory mentality. He has pressed the panic button in Maharashtra before the tabling of the Srikrishna Commission report on the 1992-93 communal riots and the subsequent serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. He sees evil opposition designs. Political parties opposed to the Shiv Sena's ideology are "whipping up communal frenzy in the state over the contentious issue of the report". If the Sena's mouthpiece Saamna has the details of the report and Mr Thackeray is aware of them, there should be no difficulty in publishing them with appropriate interpretations, cautionary warnings and footnotes pointing to the truth. Mr Thackeray is not merely apprehensive. He seems to be convinced that the report is going to spark off violence. He accuses the opposition parties of trying to unleash communal tension "in the city and elsewhere", thereby creating a fresh crisis for the government. The motive, according to him, is to embarrass the BJP and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra on the twin-issues of the Srikrishna Commission report and the mass deportation of "Bangladeshis" from Mumbai. He appears to have forgotten to mention angry reactions to the latest Godse play! His fear of fear or pre-emptive verbal strike is glaringly manifest. Having accused opposition
MLAs and MPs of "beginning to resort to a physical
show of strength", he sends out ominous portents of
the shape of things to come. "From our side I can
guarantee that we will not resort to any (kind of)
untoward incident. But if my opponents on their own
engineer riots, we will not sit quiet." The word
"riot" in its prospective connotation is
dangerous. The pronouncements of an apparently afraid man
is more so. A few names have been mentioned in the
context of the Srikrishna Commission report—Mr
Thackeray's is one of them. Nobody disputes the status of
the Srikrishna Commission. It was a fact-finding body. It
made a serious attempt at gathering and compiling in a
meaningful legal pattern the factual information about
the 1992-93 communal riots. If the available information
points to communalists or communalism accusingly, nobody
should cock a snook at it. This commission is not an
alternative to a court of law. So, why condemn it before
assessing its findings? The air in and around Bombay is
polluted with rumours, instigations and violent thoughts
propagated by short-sighted politicians and mafia of
various descriptions. Mr Thackeray must not spread the
scare of communal or religious violence in Maharashtra.
The Bombay Police and the State Reserve Police should be
kept on full alert. More importantly, men like Mr
Thackeray should remember Nehru who, in pre and post
partition days, saw greater decimation caused by
communalism than they have done in their lives. The first
Prime Minister said: "The alliance of religion and
politics in the shape of communalism is the most
dangerous alliance. It yields the most abnormal kind of
illegitimate brood. If any person raises his hand to
strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall
fight him till the last breath of my life." Let
facts come through the commission report undiluted. |
Making Delhi safe AFTER reading the reports of the meeting the Union Home Secretary, Mr B.P. Singh, had with senior officers of the Delhi Police for taking stock of the deteriorating law and order situation in the city the only conclusion one can draw is that no one has any idea about how to solve the problem. Perhaps, the wise men may not have even taken the trouble to discuss the issue at all had the Delhi High Court not sought a status report on the crime prevention measures in the city. What did the top men discuss during the so-called meeting? Going by Mr Singh’s statement, the Deputy Commissioners of Police were not doing their duty and hence the disturbing increase in the rate of crime in Delhi. So what does the Union Home Secretary do? He issues a “firman” that henceforth “each one of them will be personally responsible for any major crime, including robberies and dacoities, in their respective area”. To justify the decision he explained that “there is a tradition in the country that whenever there are communal riots the District Magistrates are held responsible”. Fixing responsibility at the highest level is one thing and evolving a collective strategy for crime prevention another. A better approach may have been to give more powers to the DCPs to deal with the situation before making them accountable for the crimes in their respective areas. In any case, before evolving a programme for combating crime it is necessary to understand the dimensions of the problem. While the meeting was called to discuss the law and order situation in Delhi, the Police Commissioner, Mr V.N. Singh, was quoted as having said that “it would be wrong to say that lawlessness existed in the city”. If there is no
“lawlessness” in Delhi, where was the need for
the Union Home Secretary to issue directions to top
officers to be prepared to take the rap for specified
crimes committed in their territories? The fact of the
matter is that the entire system of policing in Delhi
needs to be revamped. The Delhi Police must have a
special cell to deal exclusively with acts of terrorism
and militancy so that the rest of the force can get down
to the basic function of providing improved security to
the average citizen. As of today, a major part of the
existing force is detailed exclusively for providing
protection to VVIPs and VIPs. This function too should be
transferred to a separate cell. Creating more police
stations and increasing the strength of the existing
force may help in bringing down the crime rate in the
city. But a more practical solution appears to be to
involve the people in the task at policing by mohalla
committees. These committees may be in a better position
to give the necessary feedback to the local police
station about any abnormal development in the mohalla.
However, the larger issue can only be tackled by making
the concept of counter-magnets for Delhi work. The Delhi
Police Commissioner was not wrong when he told the
Parliamentary Standing Committee attached to the Home
Ministry that the city’s “population in 1985
was only 80 lakh. It had now risen to 1.63 crore, going
by the figure available through ration cards. Add to it a
floating population of about five lakh per day to
understand the mind-boggling dimension of the problem
which the Delhi Police has to tackle. |
INDIAN POLITICAL IMPASSE ALTHOUGH he is rather out of favour with Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the real power in the Congress, Mr Sharad Pawar, the Maratha strongman who is also the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has done the country some service by putting his finger on the core of the political crisis because of which we have had no fewer than four governments in less than two years and, even more depressingly, are now saddled with the BJP-led coalition that is unable to govern and unwilling to quit on its own. With characteristic bluntness the Maharashtra leader has proclaimed over the TV what other Congress worthies admit only in private, that to topple the Vajpayee government at this stage would turn out to be a classic case of the remedy being worse than the disease. In fact, Mr Pawar has talked of such an exercise leading to “political chaos” which the country cannot afford any more than it can another election within a few months of the previous one. He has, of course, spoken of an “appropriate time” when his party would be ready to provide the country with an alternative government to replace the one headed by Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. The latter part of Mr Pawar’s pronouncement is rather vague and may mean different things to different people. Even so, his basic prescription, imprudence of bringing down the Vajpayee government immediately is eminently sound. It is greatly to be hoped that his wise counsel will douse down the exuberance of those — such as the two Yadavs, Mr Mulyam Singh and Mr Laloo Prasad, who have since been joined by the tallest of the CPM leaders, Mr Jyoti Basu — who are clamouring for the immediate removal of the BJP-led government and its replacement by a Congress-led government to be headed by Mrs Sonia Gandhi. What an irony there is in this topsy-turvy situation and the concomitant sea-change in the deeply entrenched attitudes of the various actors in the dismal political drama. The whys and wherefores of the tremendous transformation need to be explored carefully. No matter what close anyone tries to put on it, the fact remains that since 1989 at least — to say nothing of the earlier period — the principal impulse behind the kaleidoscopic changes in the polity has been the people’s desire to see the lost of Congress rule. After the brief interlude of Mr V.P. Singh and an even shorter one of Mr Chandra Shekhar (essentially a creature of the Congress), the Congress party was doubtless able to return to power under Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao’s leadership, and stay in power for full five years. But let no one be oblivious of the truth behind this fact. The Congress party’s return to power in 1991 was due almost entirely to the sympathy wave following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination when the elections were more than halfway through. Of Mr Rao’s methods of first stabilising his minority government and then converting into one with a small majority, the less said the better. In any case, the sordidness of what he did is being exposed to the wide world in various courts of law where he is being arraigned, the first Indian Prime Minister to be in this humiliating position. There is nothing to show that the Indian voters are any more favourable to the Congress today than they were in 1996 or 1989 or during the elections that were completed just over four months ago. It is the standard cast of leaders of numerous (and still proliferating) political parties and groupings who have suddenly developed deep love for the Congress party and want to pitchfork it into power without delay. The state of affairs is rather bizarre. During the nearly two years that the United Front (now vanished into thin air) was in power under Mr Deve Gowda first and then under Mr Inder Gujral, the very idea of accepting the Congress as even a junior partner was revolting to the UF leaders. The CPM was so, opposed to it that Marxist leaders threatened to withdraw their support to the UF if Congressmen were invited to join the creaky government to stabilise it. The two Yadav chieftains were even more vociferous in refusing to countenance any kind of partnership with the Congress. This was the state of the
play at a time when Mr Sitaram Kesri was the Congress
president and very friendly with Mr Laloo Yadav who had
not yet been pushed out of the office of Bihar Chief
Minister and prosecuted for the fodder scam, largely at
the instance of the Left Front. Mr Kesri was thrown out
of his gaddi shortly after Mr Laloo Yadav. If Mr Yadav
installed his wife in the Chief Minister’s chair,
the Congress leadership predictably passed to Mrs Sonia
Gandhi whose intervention in the election campaign is
believed to have saved for the party at least 40 seats
which might otherwise have been lost. Her ascension became a red rag to those in the so-called “third force” who have always been intensely hostile to the “dynasty” at the helm of the Congress party’s affairs, no one could have detested the dynasty more than the staunch Lohiaites, the Yadavs from UP and Bihar. The West Bengal Chief Minister, Mr Jyoti Basu, usually a polite person, sought to dismiss Mrs Sonia Gandhi as a mere “housewife”. Now the two Yadavs and the West Bengal Chief Minister are vying with one another in trying to persuade Mrs Gandhi to agree to head a government, fully supported by them, so that the Vajpayee coalition can be sent packing and there is once again a “secular” dispensation in New Delhi. Mrs Gandhi has refused to rise to the bait and for very good reasons. For she realises that her first task is to put the Congress party’s house in order. There are factionalism, lethargy and even fraud in the party organisation in many states. The estrangement between Mrs Gandhi and Mr Pawar is a direct outcome of the Congress discomfiture in the Rajya Sabha poll in Maharashtra where money power was on naked display. In such populous states as UP and Bihar, once the Congress bastions, and West Bengal and Tamil Nadu the party no longer exists. As an astute observer of the scene has recorded, the total Congress vote in UP in the 1998 poll was less than the party’s claimed membership in the State? Under these circumstances, for the Congress party to be seen to be in a hurry to recapture power at the Centre by hook or by crook would be counter-productive in any case. What makes this course even more hazardous, perhaps dangerous, is that an alternative government can be formed only with the support of the self-same Ms Jayalalitha, Ms Mamata Banerjee, the two Yadavs, Mr Kanshi Ram and Ms Mayawati, to say nothing of the Congress satraps and others lurking in the wings. Never mind what the imperious Ms Jayalalitha might do. Mr Pawar is entirely right in pointing out that the CPM general secretary, Mr Harkishan Singh Surjeet, is bound to dictate to a Congress government exactly as he used to lay down the law day after day for the governments of Mr Deve Gowda and Mr Gujral. Considering the plight in which it is, the Hindutva crowd, including the BJP, might try to draw comfort from this impasse. But any such comfort can only be very, very cold. It was under the banner of
“Stable Government, Able Leader” that the BJP
climbed to power in March. Since then it has shown not
the slightest sign of either stability or ability. Its
performance, such as it is, has been appalling. Not only
has the government been utterly ineffectual (witness the
impunity with which traders, the saffron party’s
traditional supporters, are raising prices) but it has
exposed itself to ridicule on several counts. The
shenanigans of Ms Jayalalitha and other allies are only a
few of these. There is also the strange spectacle of BJP
ministers talking in different voices and Mr Yashwant
Sinha’s budget, pedestrian to begin with, being
virtually rolled back. There seems substance in the
belief that the longer the BJP government lasts the
greater and lasting damage it will do to the BJP. |
Malnutrition in children EVEN after 50 years of independence there exists wide spread malnutrition in India — specially in children. According to the official data about two third of our children are malnourished and underdeveloped. This should indeed be a matter for anxiety and shame. There are two basic reasons for this malady. The first cause is of course the acute poverty in India where one-third of the population is below the naked poverty line. The second reason which is even more distressing is the lack of awareness in many people about the nutritional requirements of growing children. We must know that the food and nutritional requirements of a growing child are much more than those of a middle aged or old person. This is so because the increase in height and weight of a growing child is necessarily the consequence of the protein and fat intake of the child and their proper digestion and assimilation. On the other hand, the protein requirements of middle aged or old persons are less because they have already completed the process of body growth. That is why it is essential that food intake and habits must be moderated suitable with advancing age and changing physical activities of an individual. A diet which is good and necessary for a growing child may not be so far a middle aged or old person and vice-versa. And this brings me to a very important point that needs to be highlighted here. Several studies conducted on middle-aged persons show that excess (e.g. daily) intake of red meat and eggs could be injurious for the health of middle-aged and old people and hence they are advised to take these non-vegetarian items sparingly or even give up taking them. Now, it would be grossly erroneous to generalise these findings and proclaim that all non-vegetarian food items are injurious for the health of all persons, including children. We all know that there are several studies that show the adverse effects of butter and ghee on the health of middle aged and old persons. Could we, therefore, proclaim that all dairy food items are harmful for all people (including children)? The advocates of “vegetarianism for all” on health grounds must refrain from such gross generalisations and from spreading harmful misinformation about non-vegetarian food items. We must be aware that malnutrition makes the child more prone to infection, recovery is slower and mortality is higher. Undernourished children do not grow to their full potential of physical and mental ability and their growth remains stunted. So malnutrition is harmful for not only the present but also the future of our nation and hence the malady must be tackled urgently. Apart from fads (e.g. vegetarianism etc) and lack of awareness the prime cause of malnutrition in India is indeed our grinding poverty. Now, even if the government takes up immediately the task of poverty alleviation with all seriousness, still it will take quite sometime to get the desired results whereas the children’s malnutrition needs urgent solution. So what is the way out? I think compulsory primary education with mid-day meal duly supplemented with the one half-boiled egg per day is perhaps the only solution to begin with. Yes, the government will
have to find adequate resources to run this programme in
an earnest way. But this should not be much difficult as
all our political parties are already committed to making
primary school education compulsory and also to implement
the mid-day meal scheme in schools. So the only
additional thing that I am proposing here is to provide
one egg per day to every child except of course to those
who do not want to take eggs on religious grounds and
hence need to be taken care of in some other way. But the
sustainability and success of this programme would depend
solely on our ability to put a strong brake on our
rapidly growing population failing which the programme
will certainly get drowned in our rising numbers. |
ACCORDING to the Principal of the College, admissions to the first year class of the DAV College, Lahore, will commence on Monday. Application for admission can be made any time before the end of the week by post or in person at the College Office with a remittance of Rs 5 which will be refunded in case of the rejected candidates, and credited to the account of the accepted ones.Candidates will be interviewed for selection after a few days. * * * * Bookmakers’ troubles A verdict of murder and suicide, while of unsound mind, was returned at an inquest at Wandsworth on the bodies of a bookmaker and his wife who were found shot dead at their residence. A letter written by the
bookmaker stated that unsuccessful backers owed him £
1,200. He was unable to stand it any longer and was
taking his poor wife with him. The coroner, sympathising
with the bookmaker, expressed opinions that the time was
coming when the State must supervise betting
transactions. |
TV my guru I AM a compulsive TV viewer and I have a good memory. I have always had a grudging admiration for the unknown gentleman who had befittingly christened the “Idiot Box”. Whenever I view a programme on the television I feel exposed and inadequate. My ignorance and the shortcomings in my mental faculty stand highlighted. With the revelations I have experienced, I have always felt enlightened and a wiser man after almost every TV programme. No! I do not watch the “Discovery Channel”. One of the early instances of such enlightenment I experienced was while watching a TV programme compared by the inimitable Mr Vinod Dua on Doordarshan. Mr Dua — he was not his exaggerated self then — said: “All (of us) Indians suffer from the same malady. We talk of our glorious past and our bright future but do not spare a thought about our bleak present.” What a profound thought for every Indian to introspect! On another occasion, again
in a programme anchored by Mr Dua, it was Mr Gulam Nabi
Azad, who cast the pearls of wisdom. Referring to an
opposition party, he said: “How can they ever think
of matching resources with us — a party which has
been in power for the last 40 years.” It was no
small revelation that it was the prerogative of the party
in power to amass resources. Dr Manmohan Singh, the respected economist of yesteryear — astute politician of date, in an interview after his maiden budget observed that, “Every flight into Switzerland is packed with Indians — if only we could get them to make available their funds locked up in Swiss accounts...”. Involuntarily I started keeping track of visits by MPs, Ministers and other politicians to Switzerland — till my arithmetic failed me! Was Dr Manmohan Singh presumptive or privy to secrets? — I have since been contemplative. I started admiring Mr Sharad Yadav, whose confession led me to believe that there were still traces of honesty left in Indian politicians. Others accused in the Jain Hawala Case had chosen to maintain silence. Alas! Honesty is not the best policy. While rest of them got away due to lack of corroborative evidence, Mr Yadav was done in by his “confession”. While on the subject of the hawala scandal, it was Mr M.L Khurana who added to my knowledge. In an interview after he was exonerated, he said that he was considering filing a suit for damages against the CBI. He said, “Mera kitna nuksan kiya hai. Mai mukhya mantri tha”. Believe me ! I had not known that the Chief Minister’s office was a profit centre. But I had the best piece of enlightenment while watching the recent debate on the confidence motion. I witnessed MPs addressing empty benches — which were getting progressively emptier — for almost every member was speaking his piece and leaving the House. Quite a few of them were sarcastic and not so subtle in felicitating the Speaker (I wonder whether he understood it all) and the Parliamentary Affairs Minister was interrupting every serious speech from the opposition with his proposal for extension of time or announcement of dinner. Our neighbour’s
five-year-old son Dennis (nicknamed after the cartoon
character) walked in heaving a sigh of relief, I changed
over to the cartoon network as we normally do, to keep
him out of mischief. He said, “Pehla wala channel hi
rahne do. Who jyada achcha tha”. (Do not change the
channel. The earlier one was more entertaining.) |
On the spot Lessons Bangladesh can teach LAST week I went to Dhaka to interview the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Haseena Wajed. And, by an odd sort of coincidence, returned to Mumbai just after they had thrown out a handful of allegedly illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. It was a sad sight to see those desperately poor people dragged out of the hovels, which the city of Mumbai provides them by way of housing, and flung, handcuffed, on to a train to Calcutta. But the story made me laugh because it made me realise how out of touch our political leaders are with realities of any kind. If they weren’t they may have noticed that illegal immigration from Bangladesh is no longer the big issue that it was 20 years ago and the main reason is that the country, that Henry Kissinger once described as a basket case, is now on the edge of overtaking us in many ways. Bangladeshis no longer need to flee across our borders in vast numbers which is probably why even our most Hindu of Hindu governments in Maharashtra never manages to find more than a couple of hundred to deport. Many Indians, influenced by Hindutva propaganda, continue to believe that millions of Bangladeshis cross into our country illegally every year and ruin the pavements of Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta by setting up their shanty colonies. What nobody is able to answer, though is why if there are so many around we never manage to find more than a handful to deport. Bangladesh, I had read and
heard, had changed in the 10 years since I last went to
Dhaka to cover a general election in 1986. The main
impression I came back with from that trip was of a
desperately poor, hopelessly backward country with a
capital city that looked like a sleepy backwater rather
than a metropolis so, despite what I had heard, I did not
expect dramatic changes. My first surprise came at Dhaka airport itself. We disembarked at a gleaming, new terminal which looked more modern and was better air-conditioned than the arrival terminals at either Mumbai or Delhi airport. Calcutta looks positively mofussil by comparison but, I must mention, that there are older parts of Dhaka airport that look as bad. At immigration there was a separate counter for foreigners bringing investment into Bangladesh which indicated to me that wooing the market was obviously a priority now compared with the socialist hang-ups that had earlier beset this country. From the airport I travelled in a Japanese car which compared well with the scruffy, falling-to-bits, Ambassadors that serve as taxis at our own airports. Many foreign investors who come to India form their first impression of the country on the basis of our airports and airport taxis and the impression formed is usually that of a country caught in a time warp. From that point of view Dhaka’s second-hand Japanese cars help create a slightly better impression. On the drive into the city I noticed that it had, itself, changed quite dramatically. There were shopping malls and brand new apartment and office blocks and the roads, although crowded depressingly with cycle-rickshaws, were better than those we see in most of our own cities. One big change, according to a Bangladeshi friend, was in the number of restaurants that had come up in Dhaka in recent years. “You can eat almost any kind of food here now Korean, Thai, European. On this street alone I can count for you 25 new restaurants”. It certainly made a change from the Dhaka I remembered. We ate that night at the Dhaka Club, renowned for its Bangladeshi fish preparations, and I noticed that the club was full of what seemed like a new Bengali-speaking middle class. Everyone had mobile phones and everyone seemed to have recently made money. When I asked about the source of this visible, new prosperity I was told that one of the reasons was that garment exports had really taken off in Bangladesh. Many of the biggest investors, ironically, are Indians who have found that it is easier to invest in Bangladesh than in our own country. Bangladesh has an export growth rate that is currently much higher than India and, when I met the Prime Minister the next day, she mentioned that Bangladesh’s GDP growth rate for the current year was likely to be 5.7 per cent which, by the gloomy prospects here at the moment, could make it higher than our own. Am I painting too rosy a picture? Perhaps. Bangladesh still has miles to go before it deals with its terrible poverty. Dhaka’s swarms of cycle-rickshaws tell their own story. It has a literacy rate that is much lower than our own and its healthcare is even more medieval than our own but the point that I am trying to make is that Bangladesh is, in many ways, doing better than us. The story of its NGOs and their work in rural areas is so remarkable that it is often held up as a shining example to the world, our own by comparison have little to show for their efforts despite the fact that they probably have access to more foreign money than our government does post-sanctions. The lesson we need to learn from Bangladesh is that if a country that seemed such a hopeless case only a few years ago can do even the little that it has managed to do then our own leaders should realise that it is only their short-sightedness that is holding India back. Instead of worrying about Bangladeshi immigrants and whether schoolgirls should wear skirts in Delhi we need a government that concentrates its energies on the economy. So far there is not the faintest sign that the Prime Minister has understood this. He seems to be so obsessed with foreign policy that all his aides seem to be concentrating only on this. We have Jaswant Singh abandoning the Planning Commission to wander about the world telling our side of the nuclear story and we have the Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary, Brajesh Misra, also spending his whole time trying to be some kind of super-Foreign Secretary. Is there anyone thinking
about the economy? Outdated laws and procedures continue
to make investment so hard that foreign investors go
elsewhere. The government desperately needs money but
instead of getting out of areas that it does not need to
be in by reducing its stake in public sector companies it
recently decided, against the wishes of the Disinvestment
Board, to hang on to the ITDC (Indian Tourism Development
Corporation). Unless, we manage to find ourselves a Prime
Minister who understands that all that really matters is
the economy we could, one day, end up being considered
more backward than Bangladesh. It will be our illegal
immigrants that they will be deporting. |
Sight and Sound Same experts, different
channels AS usually happens with deadlines, this column is being written on the eve of the Colombo conference and we are missing by a hair’s-breadth Saeed Naqvi’s expert coverage on three nights running for Star Plus. Coverage of the conference will have to wait till next week. However, it is some consolation that we watched the Indian Prime Minister’s arrival and the efforts to feed sugarcane to the Indian present to Sri Lanka of a baby elephant, which still seemed very homesick and mournfully turned away its face. However, there was a good
deal of action before the conference and one of the most
watchable was Vir Sanghvi’s Question of Answers
about Indo-Pak relations which had the novelty of a large
number of Pakistanis in the audience. While two
professional diplomats, the Pakistan High Commissioner
and J.N. Dixit slugged it out along predictable lines,
B.G. Verghese spoke in his usual quite undertones and
restored a degree of calm. And at the end of it all, it
was heartening to find that while the expert panel agreed
that the nuclear explosions will have a sobering effect
on both nations more than 70 per cent of the audience
voted for peace between the two countries. Verghese was
again on DD on the same subject and watching the other
channels as well, one came to the conclusion that all
such discussions are not only invariably Delhi-based but
they seem to feature the same experts, at times
simultaneously. Why not panels from Mumbai, Chennai,
Calcutta and the rest? One did not mind both Rahul Bose and Rageshwari figuring on more than one channel. Rahul is an asset to TV, as he is to the theatre and the cinema and he packed in more of the atmosphere of Mumbai in a brief episode of the BBC’s style than the gooey programme Bombay Times in several weeks , in spite of those strengthening sips of tea. And it says something for different cinema that two channels screened English August within days of each other. I watched both times, because it is the most sharp as well as entertaining film on contemporary India one has seen in years. As for Rageshwari, she always bubbles on the screen and while Kishwar Ahluwalia, an experienced interviewer, played it cheerfully on Good Morning Today, Shireen and Sharad, on Good Morning India gave Rageshwari more of her head and she ran away with the show I feel, however, that the duo was not really equipped for interviewing Rahul Bose.There could have been much more to the interview and these instant interviews are becoming a little superficial. I have again devoted some time to programmes from the TV Today stable and I find its best bet so far is Alka Saxena. She has poise,intelligence and experience and puts them to good use, while some of S.P. Singh’s batch of reporters also keep the flag flying. Where I feel Good Morning Today gets out of tune is in being too hearty, with no relief, which is exhausting in the morning. I see no reason why newscaster Aparna Kala should speak so loud and highpitched with no break in the monotony of voice and inflexion. This makes the whole programme highpitched instead of soothingly cheerful. Reviewers can seldom watch
only for pleasure, but my most pleasurable programme of
the week was the Udham Singh Show on Channel V with his
excruciatingly acid comments on the music and performers
in the show. Udham is a TV natural as well as a
piercingly funny comedian and the best thing to happen on
the music channels after One-Man-Murugun. I relax with
both Channel V and MTV in the late and early hours after
a hard day’s work and find them irresistible.
Without wishing to take sides, since I love them both, I
still think MTV scores highest with its outstanding
graphics, while some of Channel V’s anchors, like
Ruby whom I first met in Hong Kong as a demure Miss
Canada-India just venturing into TV, have become a
permanent part of TV lore. I also sometimes stumble
across good classical music, sadly neglected by all
channels,on the lively channel Music Asia. DD’s
National Programme of music, with its dreary presentation
by overdressed girls drowning in zari saris has remained
static since it began. While its National Programme of
Dance as drearily introduced, continues to patronise the
overweight wives of bureaucrats, mostly retired. Time
both programmes got a facelift. |
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