E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Contest, no challenge 
INNER-PARTY democracy is only a battle cry in the election to Congress presidency. Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s rival, Mr Jitendra Prasada, actually insists on three nearly impossible concessions as a price for withdrawing from the contest and giving a walk-over to her. 

Don’t blame Sharjah
Sharjah has seldom been a happy hunting ground for Indian cricketers. The storm which Sachin Tendulkar had whipped up a few years ago, more destructive than the one caused by the elements, against the redoubtable Australians was the proverbial flash in the pan. Seldom has the Indian cricket team returned from the desert kingdom with happy memories. Horror stories about its performance in Sharjah, however, come cheap.

Hacking Microsoft
THE hacking of Microsoft Corporation’s development unit has underlined the concern regarding security on the Net. If hackers can break into what could be called the Fort Knox of the cyber world, they can do it anywhere. A hacker is a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and finding ways to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

OpinioN

Uneven Playing Field
Too little & too late for agriculture
by Joginder Singh
HUMAN memory is proverbially short. To a great extent, the national memory is no different. At the time of Independence of India, in 1947, when the population was reckoned to be 300 million, the immediate problem before the government was of feeding the teeming millions. In a flush of enthusiasm, a number of agricultural universities were set up in the country, including Punjab Agriculture University, at Ludhiana. Similarly, other states like Karnataka (at Bangalore) and Uttar Pradesh (at Pant Nagar) also established their universities.

One-hour revolution
by Bharat Wariavwalla
IT was a “one-hour” revolution — the time the demonstrators in Belgrade took to capture the Parliament building — to bring the fall of the Milosevic regime. It was in early autumn that people began gathering spontaneously before the Parliament building, peacefully demanding Mr Slobodan Milosevic to honour the verdict of the presidential election held on September 24. The result was the victory of the 18-party coalition headed by Mr Vojislav Kostunica.

MIDDLE

The book “pest”
by G. S. Aujla
“NEITHER a lender nor a borrower be/for money loses both itself and a friend” — said the Bard of Avon, or something to this effect. Whether it is true in money matters or not it is certainly true in the intellectual world where lending books is considered a matter of established courtesy. In usually bookish discussions it is construed to be fashionable to start talking of one’s latest acquisitions by way of books: “Have you read so & so’s —?”.

by P. Raman
As lobbyists take over Delhi
DISMANTLING of the licence-permit-quota raj, we were repeatedly assured, would automatically wipe out corruption and favouritism. Along with this, the whole institution of lobbyists, liaisonists and law-benders would vanish and the polity will be free of sleaze, slush money and smuggling. Sadly, none of this has happened. Instead, nearly a decade after the collapse of the old regime, things have taken a turn for the worse.

Contest, no challenge 

INNER-PARTY democracy is only a battle cry in the election to Congress presidency. Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s rival, Mr Jitendra Prasada, actually insists on three nearly impossible concessions as a price for withdrawing from the contest and giving a walk-over to her. He has repeatedly told senior leaders who went to him with peace proposals that Mrs Gandhi should dismantle the coterie around her, go back to the Pachmarhi declaration and sever all links with the Rabri Devi government in Bihar and the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. He is thus scripting a policy package and owning it up will look very much like a surrender to a rebel. It was only when the established leadership rejected his demands that he went ahead and filed his nomination papers. He cannot be serious about injecting a heavy dose of democratic spirit into the organisation while contesting the election, and vigorously at that. His homage to Sitaram Kesri and Rajesh Pilot who slugged it out in 1996 is also an admission that the days of one-horse race are well and truly over. He may be right in pointing out that in several states senior leaders have complained of serious irregularities in preparing the delegate list. Former Gujarat Chief Minister Chabildas Mehta and former central Minister Thangkabalu from Tamil Nady are among the protestors. They are not, however, in the Prasada camp, at least not till now. He is also right that the party is in poor shape in several states and continues to lose popular support. He wants the Congress to articulate the problems of the people and agitate for their redressal. He is merely raising this issue to attack the leadership. For, as a veteran he knows that barring West Bengal and during the days of Ms Mamata Banerjee, his party has kept itself severely aloof from the agitational path, preferring instead to cash in on the mistakes or misfortunes of other political formations. That strategy worked as long regional parties had not come centrestage, edging out the Congress to the political periphery.

Also, Mr Prasada has been a persistent protestor, unlike Rajesh Pilot who concentrated on core issues. He has kept up a war of words with the party chief and particularly after his removal as UPCC chief. He thus managed to impart a personal angle to his professedly political demands. This is so glaring that most senior leaders are reluctant to support him or are noncommittal about their feelings. Added to this are two other factors. He is not known outside his region in UP and he lacks charisma. That is the reason why he has failed to fire the imagination of party workers; only the print media is interested and that is purely temporary. The painful fact is that the Congress looks and acts as a tired old party and inner-party democracy will not change that. In the monsoon session of Parliament its failure to highlight major issues and to attack the government’s inability was spectacular. It was always on the defensive on all major issues. Worse, it did not even claim credit for voting for reforms laws. Congressmen place immense faith in the leader leading them and do not believe in collective leadership. What passes for collective leadership is coterie control. The party members love to display their loyalty and any occasion is good enough to turn into sychopants. The organised mobs on the two days of filing nominations and the brief skirmish are born out of this long tradition. The tragedy for the party is that the people have moved away from all this, orphaning it.

Don’t blame Sharjah

Sharjah has seldom been a happy hunting ground for Indian cricketers. The storm which Sachin Tendulkar had whipped up a few years ago, more destructive than the one caused by the elements, against the redoubtable Australians was the proverbial flash in the pan. Seldom has the Indian cricket team returned from the desert kingdom with happy memories. Horror stories about its performance in Sharjah, however, come cheap. Ask Javed Miandad why he whacked the last ball of the 50th over bowled by Chetan Sharma for a six when Pakistan needed only four runs to beat India in a closely fought final. Ask another Javed — Aqeeb Javed — whose place in the team was always uncertain, how he was able to bag a record-setting seven wickets for only 37 runs, including a hat-trick, in another desert contest against India. The consistent indifferent performance of the Indian team even made the vested interests raise the bogey of Indo-Pak matches being fixed, much before the issue was raised by Manoj Prabhakar. For a number of years Sharjah remained on the black list of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. How and why the ban was lifted is unclear, but the shameful performance of 11 Indians, who claim to play cricket for the country, on Sunday in the final against Sri Lanka is likely to reopen the debate on the need to send teams to Sharjah. In the last qualifying game Mutthiah Muralitharan obliterated Aqeeb Javed's one-day world record by sending back seven Indian players for only 30 runs. And in the final match Sanath Jayasuria led the side to breaking most records related to Sharjah, while setting some new world marks at the expense of India. Jayasuria got his first century at Sharjah, and went on to become the highest run-getter in a single innings at the same venue, and Chaminda Vaas helped himself to the first five-wicket haul of his illustrious one-day career. All the records were made at the expense of India. The records will also show that the team which registered the lowest score at Sharjah had the world's top two batsmen playing for it. From this angle India's score of 54 can also be treated as a world record.

However, finding scapegoats for the Indian debacle at Sharjah will not do. The ICC knockout tournament in Kenya had raised visions of the grand revival of Indian cricket. To be fair, the team did play exceptionally well in Nairobi to knock-out the world's two best sides, Australia and South Africa, from the competition. But it took the under-rated New Zealand team to expose the limitations of the giant-killers. The contribution of Chris Cairns with both bat and ball for the Kiwis merely helped re-emphasise the importance of allrounders in a one-day game. South Africa have several quality allrounders. Nicky Boje, known more for his spin bowling, is the latest to join the ranks with two centuries in three games in the one-day series against New Zealand. But the Indian batting ends with Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid — those who prematurely acclaimed Yuvraj Singh as another Tendulkar in the making will have to keep their assessment of the young man from Punjab on hold for the time being. And the bowling now rests on the raw shoulders of Zaheer Khan. Three batsmen, two of whom among themselves occupy the top slots in world ranking, a rookie fast bowler and a promising wicket-keeper-batsman (Vijay Dahiya) add up to only five. If Sunil Joshi, on his current form, is given a permanent place in the team and Anil Kumble recovers sufficiently from his shoulder injury, the Indian selectors still have the unpleasant job of finding seven more players for making up the quota of 14 allowed under the rules. The team for the future must also learn to look beyond the ageless and ever agile Robin Singh. The same cannot be said about another veteran, Vinod Kambli. He is clearly unfit for one-day cricket, although he may still have a future as a Test batsman. In overall terms, Kenya had raised false hopes of the revival of Indian cricket. Sharjah has merely exposed its state of poor health. The selectors' job is not an easy one. They cannot produce quality allrounders and bowlers out of thin air.

Hacking Microsoft

THE hacking of Microsoft Corporation’s development unit has underlined the concern regarding security on the Net. If hackers can break into what could be called the Fort Knox of the cyber world, they can do it anywhere. A hacker is a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and finding ways to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. This knowledge can be used to break into systems, which is the dark side of a hacker most people are familiar with. Lately, hackers have broken into various sites, including several well-protected ones. US sites, including those of the Pentagon, have long been targets of such attacks. There was the recent spate of attacks on sites like Yahoo, E-bay, and CNN. Newspapers are also targeted—in a memorable case, in 1998 hackers broke into The New York Times site and posted text and messages ridiculing John Markoff, who had written about Kevin Mitnick, a hacker.

Hacking is also being used to wage cyber wars. The month-old increase in tensions in West Asia have had their echo on the Web with pro-and anti-Israel nerds waging a running battle in which computer keyboards and mouse clicks have replaced rubber bullets, tear gas and slingshots. The Israeli government has put up websites containing its perspective on the conflict. These sites had been launched a few years ago to supplement efforts in what has increasingly become a conflict in which posturing in media has become intense. The sites were jammed with fake traffic, which made them crash. According to reports, it was the Israelis who started it. They had brought down a pro-Hizbollah website in Lebanon. Retaliation came in the form of “denial of service” attacks that were similar to the ones that had brought down CNN, Yahoo and other sites. While Microsoft has termed this hacking “industrial espionage” and the FBI is investigating the crime, it is quite possible that the perpetrators would go scotfree. The attack targeted a unit that has the blueprints for the products that Microsoft is developing. On Thursday, Steve Ballmer, CEO of the company, confirmed “hackers did see the source code” of certain future products. Of course, if someone “saw” the code, there was also the possibility of someone changing it, leaving a few Trojan horses, or a few Easter eggs. Finding such mischief in lakhs of lines of code is a daunting task, to say the least. The company would now have to take measures to bolster customer confidence in its products. The damage caused by hacking is not a remote phenomenon. The global village has shrunk the world to an extent that everything seems to be interconnected, for better or for worse. There have also been attacks on Indian sites, especially those that focus on Kashmir. Other targets include the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and news sites. Cyber wars seem to be taking conflicts to yet another dimension. Would it be too much to ask for a ceasefire in cyber space? Perhaps.

Uneven Playing Field
Too little & too late for agriculture
by Joginder Singh

HUMAN memory is proverbially short. To a great extent, the national memory is no different. At the time of Independence of India, in 1947, when the population was reckoned to be 300 million, the immediate problem before the government was of feeding the teeming millions. In a flush of enthusiasm, a number of agricultural universities were set up in the country, including Punjab Agriculture University, at Ludhiana. Similarly, other states like Karnataka (at Bangalore) and Uttar Pradesh (at Pant Nagar) also established their universities. Young scientists were encouraged to devise means to maximise agricultural production. They were asked to engage themselves in the research for producing the seeds which could give a higher yield. As the land area available is always limited, the only option is the optimum use of it, with the best scientific aids.

As research is a long-term process and still the outcome cannot be certain, the only alternative was the import of foodgrains. This was to be at the cheapest rates, as the government could not afford to spend all its foreign exchange. The foreign exchange in the national kitty was not even enough to buy all the food we needed. America was the only country which came to the aid of India, by agreeing to supply foodgrains, under the PL-480 programme in Indian rupees, in the 1950s. The import started and continued for a decade and more, till the country became self-sufficient. The USA ultimately wrote of millions of dollars worth of foodgrain export to India.

America, like other developed countries, realised long back and the realisation continues that agriculture is the basis of all development. If food can be provided to the people at cheap, affordable rates, then dealing with other problems becomes easy and manageable. It even now, notwithstanding the WTO, continues to support the farming sector in a big way. It has built mountains of buffers and massive silos, where foodgrains are stored. The farmers are assured of remunerative prices, whether it is corn or wheat or rice or other produce. Foodgrains, over and above a certain limit, are disposed of by giving free food stamps to the poor living under the poverty line there. The result is that nobody talks or has heard of starvation deaths in America.

America is also the largest humanitarian aid provider. Giving aid is doubly blessed because it helps to reduce its stock of foodgrains, which otherwise would rot. It also helps humanity and keeps the helped countries under obligation. Notwithstanding the pleas of the European Union, France does not intend to dilute its support to the French farming community. It is not only a question of ego. It is primarily a question of keeping the farmers in farming. Countries like the United Kingdom adopt pragmatic policies suiting their national interests, as the UK is not self-sufficient in foodgrains. Food has been imported into that country for centuries and continues to be so, even now.

What do we do in India? When we feel that we have enough foodgrain stocks to last a season or so, the plight of the farming community is forgotten. Perhaps, very few remember the slogan given by the late Lal Bahadur Shastri, “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, who regarded the role of the farmers as important as that of the soldiers defending the country. The soldiers are forgotten after the need of the hour is over. The farmers are meeting the same fate now. When the going for the country had got tough, on the foodgrain front, the tough Punjab farmers had got going. The result is that Punjab, with less than 3 per cent area of the country, has been feeding 70 per cent of the country. It is the most developed agricultural economy in India. The pay-up time comes at the time of payment for wheat and paddy. The situation becomes worse when there are no takers for the produce in the year of a bumper crop. The government on its own introduced the mechanism of the minimum support price to encourage farmers to continue producing the wheat and rice crop. The procurement of the foodgrains by the government agencies was assured so that the surplus could be diverted to feed the food-deficit states. At present the country’s grain stock stands at 30 million tonnes.

It is claimed that it is 18 million tonnes more than what is required by way of food security. It is also said that in Punjab the granaries of the government hold upto five years old paddy which may have got rotten or might do so in the future. But the fault for this does not lie with the farmers if the government has not chosen to create any more storage facilities since 1996. Even the existing storage arrangement for foodgrains has been so badly handled that it is bound to deteriorate and rot, apart from the pilferage and looting by those charged with its care and trust. It has been a free for all.

A few years back, I was invited to attend the wedding of a daughter of an inspector of the Food Corporation of India on the strength that he belonged to the same place as mine. The wedding was planned at a five-star hotel in Delhi. I did not go because of a hunch that an inspector could not afford a wedding and a reception in a five-star hotel in the Capital. It was beyond my reach, though I had married off two of my daughters. In my case, the marriages had been conducted on the payment of a very reasonable room rent, with a private caterer providing the food.

I asked this question from a friend as to how the person inviting me could afford such a wedding. He replied, which is worth quoting in full: “Even a juniormost employee in any foodgrain procuring agency is much more powerful and richer than many others. Unless the middlemen or the commission agents look after them, the grains offered by them would not be lifted or even passed. For passing the grain, that it has an acceptable moisture content, the laboratory staff have to be paid irrespective of its standard. The people engaged in weighing, packaging and transport have their cut. Railway officials have to be paid for providing wagons for inter-state movement as otherwise the wagons would either be delayed or diverted to somebody who has paid more.

The charges vary per person, per wagon, from Rs 100 to Rs 500. A cut of this goes to a fairly high level, with a negligible fraction of officers of impeccable integrity. The burden of all this is borne by the farmer or the producer, whose goods are either underweighed or undersold or short-charged.” It may or may not be fully true, but a few cases involving the officials dealing with foodgrains in the CBI have convinced me that in most cases the foodgrains are not rotten, whereas a vast majority of those who are handling it are.

The Punjab farmers, or for that matter, the farmers of the country are not asking for any charity if they want their foodgrains or sugarcane to be purchased at prices commensurate with their labour and cost. Some of them have shown their frustration by committing suicide. Must many farmers die before the government wakes up to give them what is their due? The official figure is that about 45 per cent population of the country lives below the poverty line. They cannot afford even two square meals a day. Assuming that the foodgrains are rotting, why do we not release them to the poorest of the poor, at 10 per cent to 50 per cent of the cost instead of its being consumed by rodents or sold off by the corrupt and dishonest for their private gains?

The government is also responsible for this. Why did it import Australian wheat at a cost of Rs 800 crore last year when its granaries were full? Of course, it says that it was honouring the commitment of the Gujral government. The government has to learn to prioritise and not kill the goose, which has been laying golden eggs every year, instead of wasting money on the hair brained schemes which hardly reach fruition.

The non-performing assets of banks or the loans advanced, which have no hope of any recovery, have crossed the figure of Rs 58,500 crore. This money has ostensibly been advanced for industrialisation to the well off. About 7,500 persons in the country owe this amount to the banks. But when it comes to looking after the interests of the farming community, not by giving anything free but by paying a reasonable return, the government baulks off. It is for the simple reason that farming is in the unorganised sector, and any strike or protest by them would show its effect after one year.

Food is core to development. Any retrograde step will not only harm the nation both in the long and short run but also prove very costly for the country. Politicians are crying hoarse that the import bill for petroleum products this year is going to be of the order of Rs 81,000 crore. If there is no food for the people, what will be the use of any other kind of development? In fact, no other development will be possible then. It is time we accorded the pre-eminent position to agriculture which it richly deserves. But it is too late. Let not too little be done too late.

The writer, a retired IPS officer, is a former Director of the CBI.

One-hour revolution
by Bharat Wariavwalla

IT was a “one-hour” revolution — the time the demonstrators in Belgrade took to capture the Parliament building — to bring the fall of the Milosevic regime. It was in early autumn that people began gathering spontaneously before the Parliament building, peacefully demanding Mr Slobodan Milosevic to honour the verdict of the presidential election held on September 24. The result was the victory of the 18-party coalition headed by Mr Vojislav Kostunica.

Mr Kostunica joins the ranks of JP and Acquino, who succeeded in ending the semi-constitutional dictatorship in their countries. The Emergency regime here and the Marcos’ (Ferdinand and his egregious wife, Imelda) regime in the Philippines were semi-constitutional. They did not overthrow the existing constitution but stretched it to the utmost to provide legitimacy for their authoritarian ruler. Semi-legal, semi-constitutional regimes sometimes are more difficult to resist than outright authoritarian regimes because the former is more supple and resilient than the latter. The Marcos’ regime more often corrupted and coopted its opponent than physically eliminate them. It lasted over 13 years and without excessive force. The Emergency regime here too could have lasted quite some time, but it decided to go for an election to legitimise itself. The gamble failed.

The semi-legal authoritarian regime of Mr Milosevic has lasted 13 years, assuming that his defeat in this presidential election is his final end. Mr Milosevic was a child of the Balkans, the backwaters of Europe for centuries. It has witnessed some of the most aggressive kind of nationalism since this ideology reached the Balkans from France in the mid-nineteenth century. The Milosevic brand of nationalism is associated with a gruesome phenomenon called “ethnic cleansing”: physical elimination of ethnic and religious minorities. Hitler carried out racial cleansing by asphyxiating million of Jews in the gas ovens of Auswitz, Dachhaus and Birkeneau. It’s important to remember this because the West perceived that Mr Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing was not qualitatively different from Hitler’s racial purges. As an influential opinion-maker and editor of Die Zeit, Theo Sommer, said the European Union would not tolerate the repetition of Nazi crimes in Europe.

Till the mid-eighties, when Yugoslavia was still experiencing political instability following Tito’s death, Mr Milosevic was a middle-level party apparatchiki in the League of Communists of Serbia. An apparatchiki was an unthinking and unfeeling babu in the eyes of the people on whom communism was imposed.

He rose to power — becoming Serbia’s President in May, 1989 — by giving up the communist ideology and embracing Serbian nationalism. Both creeds in Serbia and elsewhere in the communist Europe were antagonistic to each other. He resolved the antagonism by endorsing nationalism. Not only did he endorse it but also vigorously espoused it. In fact, a former communist became the symbol of Serbian nationalism.

This has happened in East Europe. Nicolai Ceauscescu, the Romanian Communist Party chief, after defying the Soviet Union in 1960, became an ardent nationalist. And after the end of communism in East Europe, epitomised by the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many former communist politicians either abandoned communism or greatly modified it. All of them accept the market economy and are now eager to join the European Union and even NATO.

But the espousal of nationalism, and that too of such a virulent one, carried immense risks, for a multi-ethnic Yogoslavia. Tito had realised that any talk of nationalism by the Serbs, the largest ethnic group in the multi-ethnic Yugoslav Federation, would spell the Federation’s dissolution. He thought that all ethnic groups, the Croats, the Slovenians, the Montenegrons, the Macedonians and the Kosovars, could be held together by the force of the communist ideology. This never worked and in reality the long communist rule under Tito witnessed persistent tensions and even clashes between various ethnic groups. True they didn’t separate and form their own states, or but this was not because of the force appeal of communism.

Under Mr Milosevic Yugoslavia began to fall apart for many reasons: the end of the Cold War, decline of the Soviet power and unity and assertiveness of Western Europe. All these factors greatly aggravated the internal ethnic strains in Yugoslavia. Mr Milosevic helplessly watched the Slovenians, who had never thought of themselves as Slavs and had always looked to Vienna and Munich as their cultural capital, opting for independence in 1990. So did Croatia.

But he fiercely resisted the separatist demands of the Bosnian Moslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early nineties. No doubt, he had the support of a majority of his countrymen because in Bosnia there was a sizeable population of Serbs. In Bosnia the Serbs, Croats and Muslims clashed with a ferocity reminiscent of religious wars. Ultimately the West, led by the USA, imposed a peace settlement on the warring ethnic factions at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

Will Kosovo going the way Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia went? It need not. Mr Vojislav Kostunica, a former law professor, is a liberal and enjoys for the moment great respect and sympathy in Europe and America. The West is happy to see Mr Milosevic rejected in an election by his own people.

Mr Kostunica is as much opposed to Kosovo independence as Mr Milosevic was, but the former may be better placed than Milosevic to press for his point of view. The West will decisively affect the outcome of the Kosovo conflict. At present the USA and the European Union, which bombed Serbia in April, 1999, are not yet committed to the independence of Kosovo. They are for its autonomy as promised to it by Tito in the late seventies but which he never honoured.

Mr Kostunica and Mr Milosevic are nationalist in the sense that they want to preserve the territorial unity of Serbia. But Mr Milosevic only knows the language of force while Mr Kostunica knows that force won’t pay. Serbia cannot behave any more as a bullyboy in the Balkans. Mr Kostunica is a liberal and, therefore, wants the Serbian unity to be preserved by granting the ethnic and religious minorities their rights and, above all, their respect. Any multi-ethnic state today is faced with contending ethnic movements and it is no more possible to suppress them by force. Had Mr Milosevic continued in power in Belgrade he would have brought about the dissolution of Serbia. With Mr Kostunica coming to power, there is hope that it will stay in one piece.

The book “pest”
by G. S. Aujla

“NEITHER a lender nor a borrower be/for money loses both itself and a friend” — said the Bard of Avon, or something to this effect. Whether it is true in money matters or not it is certainly true in the intellectual world where lending books is considered a matter of established courtesy. In usually bookish discussions it is construed to be fashionable to start talking of one’s latest acquisitions by way of books: “Have you read so & so’s —?”.

The intellectual protagonist on the other side would hide ignorance about the book if not the author as if it was a sin not to have read the book referred to. With a subtle sophistry the clever conversationalist would subterfuge by saying “I lately came across an extremely interesting book by so and so. Have you read it? It makes the most fantastic reading.” By saying so he shall have won the first round of one-up-manship by turning the tables on the adversary.

One has to come to terms with the idea that the world of books is as diverse as the readers’ tastes. Some prefer to live in the phantasmagorial world of fiction, some would like to read only fact — they find fiction too ethereal & unreal: “Life is already full of fiction; let’s stick to the fact”. The fiction-lover finds the world of fact too boring and does not want to know it.

Connected closely to realm of reading is the ego of displaying books — a sort of bank balance. Groaning shelves of books are a status symbol which few would not like to display. Barring our friends in the legal profession who display law books to enhance professional credibility, we have a class of noveau riche book-lovers who would spend anything to project multiple rows of published wisdom to drive home the idea that they know all that is written inside those volumes. Majority of them would like to pick up books as if at a clearance sale. Some of these patrons of books would display a smattering of classics right in the drawingroom just in case you may miss seeing them elsewhere.

Talking of books one is struck by the spectacle of the ubiquitous book “pest” — a parasite who is all the time on the lookout to “borrow” your books, howsoever uncomfortable the request may seem. He is the one to be avoided like the plague. Some of my finest books have fallen a prey to this class of dishonest book borrowers. Sometime back I had picked up three volumes of Leishman’s “Rationale of the Dirty Joke” and I was relishing every line that I read. Like all fallible mortals I extolled the contents of this collection to this “pest” friend. Under the promise of returning these volumes in two days, I let go these books out of sight never to see them again. I am told that they are doing the rounds among his friends who in turn brush up their knowledge of the dirty jokes before attending a party. Much the same has happened to my book on limericks.

Some of the finest libraries have been afflicted with valuable pages being stolen by these pests. While we were doing our Masters’ in Panjab University, its best endowed library was afflicted with the pestilence of missing pages. This type of paralysis hit the academic world so badly that going to the library become a waste of time. In London I saw a system of frisking outgoing readers in the British Library where all readers leaving the library have to get their bags politely frisked. It is a bit humiliating experience for the honest reader but a well-deserved counter-measure against the book “pest”. He deserves it.

As lobbyists take over Delhi
by P. Raman

DISMANTLING of the licence-permit-quota raj, we were repeatedly assured, would automatically wipe out corruption and favouritism. Along with this, the whole institution of lobbyists, liaisonists and law-benders would vanish and the polity will be free of sleaze, slush money and smuggling. Sadly, none of this has happened. Instead, nearly a decade after the collapse of the old regime, things have taken a turn for the worse.

Lobbyists and power peddlers have taken over Delhi. They are invisible but omnipresent and invincible once they get things together. In the USA lobbying is officially recognised but with reasonable curbs. Here we do not allow lobby firms. No one would like to be called a lobbyist. Yet they are everywhere. Some time back a leading MP had taken objection to the domineering presence of influence peddlers of a prominent industrial house in the of Parliament premises. Recently, reports appeared about Cabinet papers reaching corporate offices within hours. Investment or disinvestment, when proposals favouring preferred groups come up before the Cabinet they get instant approval. Everyone knew who the beneficiaries and has a commitment to help.

The old licence raj had certain strict areas beyond which lobbying could not go. They were mostly confined to wresting licences and quotas and sale or supply contracts for government units. Grabbing of the state’s assets at throwaway prices was unthinkable. But if you have to get rid of an old junk of a mill, you could work at the trade union levels and through them force its takeover by the government. All this could be managed by what was then called liaison men. Those smartly dressed guys went round the government bhavans and worked mostly at the middle levels.

This breed is now extinct. In this liberalised millennium strings have to be pulled at much higher levels. Stakes are bigger and small men of yesteryear cannot access top-level decision makers and politicians. If a Modern Foods worth Rs 2,000 crore has to be bought for just Rs 80 crore, it certainly calls for a massive network at the highest level. Starting with a timely media publicity about the futility of keeping such a firm and the need for a “strategic” buyer, the deal should come unobstrusively. The term “strategic” provides enough room for sly deals.

It is certainly a paradoxical situation. The more the liberalisation and more free the economy, the more the manipulation for government favours. If the state is “withdrawing”, it is only from its commitment to the poorer sections. Otherwise the state’s role has become more overbearing and intrusive than even during the licence raj. Lobbying is not confined to privatisation. Take the role of such institutions as the RBI. From the annual “busy” and “trough” seasons, it is now guided by the exigencies of industry’s demands. A few months back the RBI had announced a cut in the bank rates, admittedly to provide cheaper credit for the industrialists and thus give a boost to investment.

Suddenly it reversed the decision to protect the rupee. Now the industries lobby is putting intense pressure to revert to the low interest regime. It is a matter of time that the apex bank will have to yield. Until about two months back, it has been routine for the business lobby and economic writers to blame the rising government expenditure for all our fiscal problems. Now the same lobby is clamouring for greater government expenditure to stimulate sagging sales and thus boost industrial production. When prices soar, people could not curtail expenditure on essential items like food. The cut thus falls on sparable industrial products. This is the argument being put forth by the industrial lobby for higher state intervention to help them survive the crisis.

Early this year, the Finance Ministry buckled under the pressure from a few foreign stocks operators who had sought tax exemption on the plea that they were Mauritius firms. India had a 15-year-old accord with that country to avoid double taxation for their genuine indigenous firms. Now all that the FIIs do is to open a postal address in Mauritius and claim the tax exemption. The FIIs wrecked the market when the IT department served tax notices on them. Not only the minister’s daughter-in-law but the whole globalisation lobby seemed to back the FIIs. This was four months back. Now a powerful rival lobby has become active to either to scrap the Minister’s decision favouring a few FIIs or provide a “level playing ground” to every one. Apparently, the outcome will depend on the ability of the respective lobby to put more pressures.

At the time of writing this, the once prestigious Air-India is being torn apart by a bitter lobby war. So many foreign and domestic parties have greedy eyes on the national carrier. While secret talks were in progress for its sale, suddenly some lobbyists managed to lease out some of IA’s most profitable routes. Even the senior Ministers remain sharply divided. A counter lobby now exerts more virulent pressures to block the Minister’s decision and transfer the whole goose that lays the golden eggs to the favoured ones. The opening up of the insurance sector too has activated new favour peddlars. Foreign equity cap has been a major issue at the time of passing the Bill. Now renewed pressures are being mounted to remove the 26 per cent cap and no one knows how many months the government can resist it.

Every PSU sale is marked by backroom lobbying. Just three weeks back, the disinvestment Minister triumphantly announced the sale of 33.59 government equity of the high profit making oil blue chip IBP. With a strong brand name, it has a network of 1,500 retail outlets and a turnover of Rs 6,500 crore. The whole move is programmed to hand over IBP to India’s hyper influential business house at a throwaway price. Though petroleum minister Ram Naik had strongly opposed the sale, the powerful lobbies were able to silence him. A week back Enron suddenly announced its withdrawal from oil and gas production operations in India and joint ventures in Panna, Mukta and Tapti fields. While the reason was not given, those in the know of things are not unaware of the intended pressure.

By far, the automobile lobby is the most powerful. They could get anything done or undone. Liberalisation regime allows free import of used vehicles and the Minister had to allow it. Last week the lobby seems to have succeeded in extracting an assurance to stop the imports to protect the automobile firms and thus spoil the free market consumers’ right for competitive terms. Much has come out about the telecom giants’ ability to bend decisions to extract favours. The latest is a move to get the licence fee of the basic telecom firms — which they themselves had accepted at the time of the bidding — waived for four years. As the lobbying reached high pitch last week, one could witness the signs of crumbling of the last resistance.

Power brokers are now bolder even in top appointments. In the case of the LIC chairmanship, the committee of secretaries and Yashwant Sinha are at the loggerheads. Each has its own nominee backed by strong lobbies. The issue has now reached the PMO. Doordarshan is a veritable field for lobbyists. The NDA Government has been dilly-dallying with Star, Zee etc over their contractual dues to the exchequer in exchange of their media support to it. Lobbyists are now active on behalf of the FM bands to broker similar deals.

As for political lobbying, the Vajpayee government has the distinction of being the most vulnerable. An angry Jaya Jaitley could easily punish all those who had played some role in booking the cricket racketeers just because one of them was dear to the former’s daughter. Vajpayee was forced to shunt Minister Dhananjaya Kumar and Sports Minister S. Hussain who Jaya had named. The man who ordered the raid was kicked up to another post to pacify the lady. Later, the CBI has found voluminous evidence but pressures are mounting to dilute the case to please the lady and George Fernandes.

Much has been reported about Vajpayee’s surrender to Mamatadi’s threats, Chandrababu Naidu’s demands and Shiv Sena’s roars. But the massive concessions — ‘populism’ in reform language — for the Punjab, Haryana and UP rice growers marked a clash between the code of the economic Manusmriti and Vajpayee Government’s survival. It cost about Rs 500 crore.

The post-reform lobbying is a highly expensive business which unorganised and resourceless sections can never afford. While truckers, petrol dealers and cable operators can hoodwink the government, the disorganised sugar, cotton, oilseeds and coconut farmers suffer in silence. Even planters associations have not been able to mount sufficient lobbying in Delhi. In all such hightech lobbying, one can never be sure as to who are really behind the moves and what is the actual motive. One realises the game only at the fag end. Often they resort to plain ruse. Invisible forces works behind the scene to wreck and malign the targeted PSU so that it could be grabbed at the cheapest rate.

It is all so simple if you have so many willing accomplices at the highest echelons. A most common instrument to do things under the new regime has been “group of ministers” whose recommendations are considered sacred. But the GOM is nothing but an internal arrangement. Yet every thing has a price and frequently one will have to please the different persons at the decision making levels. If a Minister signals his disagreement, an army of sophisticated touts rush to please and pamper him or her. At the peak of power few realises the extent of scandal traps they are in. This had occurred not only in the case of a Narasimha Rao but those controlled powers in Japan, Indonesia, EU countries, etc. Skeletons come out much later.

SPIRITUAL NUGGETS

Judge your success by the degree that you are enjoying peace, health and love.

—H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Life's Little Instruction Book