Proposals which have run aground
Here and Now
By Sunil Sethi
A mood of uncertainty prevails in the Capital.Call it prevarication, double-think or the floundering spirit of ad hocism but the feeling is intensifying that the BJP-led government lacks political resolve.

I am irresistibly reminded of that serial after the Indian women’s performance in the Asian athletics meet. By the here-today-gone-tomorrow standards of modern sport, P.T. Usha is not just a mother, but a great-grandmother. It is a shame India had to depend on a 33-year-old lady coming out of retirement to win its solitary gold at Fukuoka.

We must salute Usha’s achievements. But what should sadden us is that there is no young man or woman in the teens or twenties who is ready to take the Golden Girl’s place when her feet finally surrender to time. If we can stop drooling over India’s cricketers long enough, we should be concerned at how far the gap is widening between Indian athletes and their contemporaries.

Forget the traditional sporting powerhouses in Europe and the United States. Forget even those African countries that somehow manage to produce world-beating athletes. Have we at least managed to keep up with our peers in Asia?

It is heartbreaking to recall that in the first Asian Games, held in Delhi over 45 years ago, India walked away with the athletic honours. In the years since that halcyon day, we have become used to seeing China and Japan produce athletes who leave their Indian competition at the starting-block. But what we saw at Fukuoka was truly pathetic.

India was beaten to sixth spot in the medals tally, with even tiny Sri Lanka and Qatar beating us. The situation would have been even worse had it not been for the Chinese women being disqualified in the relay. India was all set to take the ninth spot in the table if that hadn’t happened.

What happened between the early fifties and the fag end of the nineties? How did India descend so precipitously down the table even as some rose and others — China and Japan — held on comfortably? Why is it that for the better part of 20 years the fate of India in track-and-field events has depended on a single woman called Usha?

No other nation has asked so much of an athlete. Usha’s contemporaries — Florence Griffith-Joyner, for instance, or Jackie Joyner-Kersee — retired long ago. Those two were arguably two of the best women athletes in history. But they knew they couldn’t push their bodies beyond a point in some of the most demanding disciplines of all.

Olympic history has repeatedly demonstrated what happens if the honoured names of the past seek to defy time. I shall never forget the fate of Olga Korbut, the great Russian gymnast who was the toast of the Munich Games. Four years later, in Montreal, she was literally reduced to tears. Don’t we owe P.T. Usha something better than that?

I am not for a moment suggesting that she should be asked to wash her hands off sports forever. No, we need her expertise, but in a different arena. We need her to identify her successors and to pass on to them the same spirit that drove her. I note that the Women’s Tennis Association has started a "big sister" programme, so that the young women on the gruelling international circuit can benefit from their elders’ experience. (Hingis, for instance, has taken the great Chris Evert as her mentor.)

Why can’t Indian sports authorities start something equally imaginative? Instead, we are in danger of losing all the heroes of yesterday. Their experience goes with them as they retire. A Sunil Gavaskar or a Vijay Amrithraj is anathema to the establishment; Indian sport has lost both to television.

"Usha" is the Sanskrit for dawn. Alas, the shadows are falling on the career of India’s sprint queen and there is no real hope of a new dawn!

Several important pieces of legislation to be placed before Parliament in the current session have been withdrawn or quietly shoved under the carpet. The new housing policy for example, loudly trumpeted by Urban Development Minister Ram Jethmalani as the answer to the country’s desperate housing shortage, was deferred by the Cabinet last week. So was the tabling of the Insurance Regulatory Authority Bill that proposed to increase competition by allowing the private sector’s entry into the monopolistic insurance sector. And the latest is that a discussion slated on the long-awaited Prasar Bharati Bill — the "Gill Bill" as it has come to be known — was removed from the Lok Sabha’s agenda at the last minute in deference to the Opposition’s demand of referring it to a select committee. So there goes I &B Minister Sushma Swaraj’s pet project of pushing the Bill through in its original avatar and thereby getting rid of the fiesty Prasar Bharati CEO S.S. Gill.

Several other promised proposals, from creating the new state of Uttranchal in northwestern Uttar Pradesh to shifting the burden of heavily loss-making state electricity boards to the state governments, have either run aground or been diluted to a degree that they bear no resemblance to the original idea. Even when an idea is repeatedly retailored to match government guidelines, such as the 20-year-old on-again, off-again proposal by the Tatas to set up a private airline, it is shot down, among other lobbies, by a cartel of MPs on the grounds that it will affect the profitability of Indian Airlines! The unspeakable delays apart, the logic of such an argument reeks of the kind of hypocrisy that this government has inherited from the last. For were it not for the entry of private carriers Indian Airlines would be permanently in the red — the only factor that has induced the state-owned carrier to show a profit after decades of being run as a politicians’ fief is the privatisation of the skies.

Instead of clear thinking, firm decision-making and forcing a degree of unanimity and consensus across the political spectrum, what the country has got is the bomb, rocketing prices of essential commodities and a series of strikes by blackmailing labour unions — postal workers, university teachers, nurses, junior hospital workers and any number of public sector employees who continue to hold the state to ransom. The government did manage to end the postal strike without abject capitulation to workers’ demands but its victory was phyrric; in effect, it has only deferred the matter and desisted from undertaking the serious reforms in government that it pledged in its manifesto.

Four months after it took office, postponement, not achievement, remains the hallmark of the BJP government. Other than its avowed aim of exercising the nuclear option there is not a single important decision that characterises it as being any different from any of its predecessors. On the contrary, it has had to suffer public embarrassment on a number of ill-advised and foolish moves initiated by the Hindutva brigade, from the faux pas of a State Minister in Delhi threatening to remove churches from the list of religious institutions to the more threatening spectacle of the VHP preparing prefabricated structures for the temple in Ayodhya. Large sections of the BJP’s traditional support base of trading communities among the urban middle class are alienated from the party they helped put in power. Delhi where the BJP has been in power for nearly five years, is a a case in point. Chronic shortages of power and water, rising crime and wildcat strikes by state employees, have compounded the problems of a civic infrastructure that is at an advanced stage of collapse. Yet everyday, some alarming new scandal or peccadillo of the capital’s ruling BJP elite comes to light. Only last week it was discovered that the Chief Minister of Delhi’s wife was getting free treatment in a luxury suite in the city’s most expensive private hospital. When asked why, Sahib Singh Verma brazenly replied: "Why should I pay? A CMand his family are supposed to get free treatment, irrespective of whether the bill is Re 1 or Rs 1 lakh."

His inolent response is an ominous portent of the BJP State government’s future when Delhi goes to the polls in a few months. It is also a pointer to the rocky and imperiled future of the BJP-led coalition.

Vasundhara is the fourth child of Maharaj Jivaji Rao, the last popular ruler of Gwalior state, before the princely states merged in the Indian union. Jivaji Rao, evidently, did not believe in family planning or, as the princes of those days thought, the large number of progeny is the sign of prosperity and good luck. Unlike many of the princes, who pined for issues and, several adopted their inheritors, the Maharaja of Gwalior was lucky: he produced five children of whom only Madhav Rao was a male.

Of her four sisters, the eldest Padma Raje, is no more.Only Vasundhara jumped in the political fray and, perhaps, proved to be the brightest of all her sisters. Judging by her 100-day performance in the ministerial office, she may supersede her elder brother, Madhav Rao, who acquired the image of an efficient Minister in the governments of Rajiv Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao. While Madhav Rao became a staunch Congressman within years of his initiation in politics and turned a BJP baiter. Vasundhara drew inspiration from her mother and remained in the BJP.

Madhav Rao naturally felt proud of his sister’s performance in the Lok Sabha, even though they belong to rival parties, and he could not resist the temptation of praising her from the opposition benches. "I congratulate the Minister of State for External Affairs," observed the scion of the erstwhile princely state of Gwalior, who was himself quite apt in dealing with Opposition barbs when he occupied the Treasury Benches.

Both Vasundhara and Madhav Rao were born in Mumbai though she is eight years younger to his politically rebel brother who vociferously disagreed with the BJP’s ideology and, much against his mother’s wishes, joined the Congress. Vasundhara got her higher education at Bombay University.

Vasundhara is quite popular in Parliament and has good friends in the Congress party too because of her amiable nature; she does not have airs of royalty and mixes freely with everybody. This was, perhaps, the reason why she was elected for the fourth time from Jhalawar constituency of Rajasthan. Those who have seen her on mass contact tours of her constituency say an outsider would not believe that she was a princess. She makes it a point to visit her constituency every weekend and listens to the problems of "my people".

In the External Affairs Ministry too where she says " I have to learn a lot," Vasundhara never pulls her ministerial rank unlike her predecessors — Salman Khursheed and Salim Sherwani. Both are in her age group, bright and articulate but they preferred to show off their ministerial authority. Vasundhara is not hierarchy conscious and she demonstrated that trait in public life too. She stood her grounds well at NAM ministerial conference and at the ASEAN meet.

Though she became a member of the National Executive of the BJP at the age of 34, her thinking, behaviour and style of working is in sharp contrast to the party’s basic ideology. Her thinking is more open, forward looking and devoid of communal bias. She belongs to the moderate section of the BJP which disapproves acts of vandalism like demolition of Babri Masjid and putting Mathura and Kashi on the party’s agenda.

Born in Mumbai and brought up in the sprawling and ornate Gwalior Palace, Vasundhara’s field of political activity has been Rajasthan. She was elected to the Rajasthan Assembly in 1987 when she was in thirties and simultaneously became an activist of the Yuva Morcha of the BJP. Soon she rose to the position of Vice-President of the BJP unit of Rajasthan. She made her debut in the Lok Sabha in 1989 and since then there is no looking back for her.

Resignation of members

I HAVE read with pain the manifesto issued by the outgoing members of the Lahore Municipality. I have read it several times since its issue and every time with an increased pain and greater despair in the destiny of my beloved motherland.

The situation created by these members is worse than ever and undoubtedly much more harmful than it appears on the first thought.

It will entail indescribable damaging consequences to the country and it is doubtful if those who have set the ball rolling have correctly foreseen the results which are bound to follow.

I do not join issue with those of the signatories who had not subscribed to the Congress creed but I make bold to accuse some of our leading Congressmen in this Province of creating an impasse. They have landed us, where they know not! My friend and fellow Congressmen, Mr Santanam, the President of the Provincial Congress, Professor Ruchi Ram Sahni, the President of the Provincial Swaraj Congress Party, Dr Gopi Chand, the President of the City Congress Committee, and Choudhry Ram Bhaj Datt, a leading Congressman, have by their action in signing the manifesto without any qualification contributed to undo all what our great saint and leader Mahatma Gandhi, and they themselves in his following, had seriously striven to do in the last three years.

Lahore (Dr) MAHOMED ALAM