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A crash a month Risks of exit polls |
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Presidential
stakes
The dharma of coalitions
What’s in a name...
DATELINE WASHINGTON DELHI DURBAR
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A crash a month STATISTICS can be cold like the icy peaks of Sonamarg in Jammu and Kashmir where two Jaguars crashed last week, killing both pilots and they tell a ghastly tale of exceptionally high rate of IAF plane crashes. But it will be no consolation to the grieving family members of Flt-Lt Gagan Oberoi and Flt-Lt Mayank Mayur that "only" a dozen planes had come down during the past 12 months as compared to some 14 in the previous year. A plane a month is an unbearably heavy loss for any air force. While a pilot is invaluable, fighter aircraft too do not come cheap. Yet, accidents take place with chilling regularity. MiGs are the culprit mostly, getting the sobriquet "flying coffins" in the process. Several Jaguars too have gone down, resulting in considerable loss of life and property. Many theories are doing the rounds about the latest accident. One says that the deep-penetration fighter aircraft collided in mid-air due to bad weather. Another says that the planes crashed into the peaks because of poor visibility. At the same time, there are also allegations that the accident took place because of poor spares. Though the IAF authorities have denied this, doubts remain unallayed. Perhaps several factors are at play. One of the identified ones is lack of adequate training in the absence of a suitable advance jet trainer. Now that a deal has been struck for the import of the British Hawk, it will take three years before an AJT lands in India. Certain other gray areas remain. IAF officials speak in derisive tones about the quality of spares and maintenance. This is the field where a hard, long look is needed. The Jaguar fleet is currently undergoing major upgradation at Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. Cutting-edge technology requires matching upkeep. Even the slightest glitch can prove suicidal. Unfortunately, some of the worst nightmares have been turning into tragedy. |
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Risks of exit polls RESULTS of exit polls are supposed to be the closest to the actual results because the views of the voters are sought as they come out of the polling booths. They are presumed to be truthful as they have already cast their vote. Hence exit polls are, by and large, considered reliable. It is this reliability factor that has made exit polls questionable in the Indian context. In elections where the voting is on a single day, there is no likelihood of the exit poll results influencing the voting trend. But that is not the case with the coming Lok Sabha elections, which will be held on different dates in different regions. The possibility of the exit poll results after, say, the first round of polling affecting the voting pattern in the second round is too real to be scoffed at. Psephologists know only too well that a sizeable percentage of voters would like to cast their votes for the winning candidate in the mistaken belief that otherwise their votes would be "wasted". They are the ones most likely to be influenced by the exit polls. This being the case, it would not be surprising if political parties orchestrate exit polls to influence such voters. Since there are no agencies like the Election Commission to monitor the way in which exit polls are conducted, it would be quite easy for a party bent upon having an exit poll verdict of its choice to obtain the same at a small cost. Needless to say, a made-to-order exit poll can only vitiate the atmosphere and bring into question the fairness of the whole election process. Already, political parties have been selectively leaking information about the opinion poll surveys they had themselves conducted with a view to influencing the voters. It was against this backdrop that the Election Commission had imposed a ban on publishing the results of exit polls till the last round of polling was over. It is true that in the past some newspapers did not pay heed to such restrictions and published the results in total defiance of the ban. Ideally, there should be no ban on newspapers and television companies organising exit polls. The ban should be only on publishing the results till the last round of voting is over. This way, the nascent science of psephology will not suffer and the people will get an opportunity to compare the results of exit polls with the actual results. Publication of exit polls between the rounds in a staggered poll cannot ensure a fair exercise of franchise. |
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Presidential stakes AS the going has got tougher for the two main contenders for the next President of the United States of America, it has also got murkier. Recent opinion polls suggest that President George W. Bush's lead over the Democratic contender, Senator John Kerry, is narrowing. Haunting the Bush administration is the fact that President George Bush Sr won the war in Iraq but he lost the election that followed. While his son, President Bush Jr, is banking on his success in the “war against terrorism,” Senator Kerry is a war-hero-turned-anti-war activist. The man who won the Purple Heart thrice also headed the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. As the gap has narrowed, the quality of discourse has declined. Occupying a prominent place in the electoral issues is Iraq and the handling of terrorism that is being examined by a Federal commission in Washington. Republican advertisements have laid stress on President Bush's handling of the crisis after the 9/11 attacks. However, the recent testimony of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke and his book have severely criticised President Bush's team's handling of intelligence information about Al-Qaeda. The presidential team's counter-attack is headed by Mr Clarke's former boss, Ms Condoleezza Rice, who has questioned Mr Clarke's credibility. On another front, President Bush is projecting a “compassionate conservative” image, in which he is stressing on tax cuts, healthcare and home ownership. Senator Kerry has been a supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which is a set of federal initiatives for certified teachers in every US classroom. It holds schools accountable for student progress. He has proposed a new fund for school education, and a “College Opportunity Tax Credit” for economically vulnerable students. Senator Kerry is known in India for his opposition to outsourcing, which President Bush has been defending. What will eventually determine the winner when America goes to polls will, however, probably not be social priorities on the two frontrunners, but the response of the Americans to the revelations about the Administration's plans to attack Iraq and the mounting cost of American occupation of Iraq. For once, foreign issues, not domestic concerns, are dominating the US presidential elections. President George W Bush has to keep his fingers crossed till the polling day in November to know whether he can be President again.
Thought for the day Peace in indivisible.
— Maxim Litvinov
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The dharma of coalitions IF examples like America had not existed at the time, India would have had to invent federalism as it approached Independence. This is because Indian leaders of the day had the wisdom to foresee that no other form of government would be more suitable for the Indian polity. They had four reasons for thinking so, and in later years these reasons combined with India’s experience of electoral politics to make coalitions a prominent part of the Indian polity, not only for now but also for as far ahead as one can see. First, a very large country cannot be effectively governed from a single and all-powerful centre, as Britain for example is governed from London. A centralised authority may appear to be more effective. But in a country of the size of India its reach can be defeated by the distances unless it is carried farther by a partnership in power between the central and more dispersed authorities. Second, this partnership cannot endure if either partner is left free to dissolve it whenever it may wish to. Therefore, third, it must be written into and protected by a mutually enforceable partnership based on terms which both sides have agreed upon. A fourth reason followed : that such an agreement, equally binding on both sides, is possible only under a federal constitution. Therefore, the Constituent Assembly decided very early on its work that a federation is what India had to be. It also decided that the federation must be fully democratic, not only because commitment to democracy was the highest common denominator among the political convictions of the members of the Constituent Assembly, but also because that would best certify that in getting federated together all partners in the federation had the consent of their respective people. And, for reasons which showed a high level of political sophistication, the Constituent Assembly also decided that the federation must be of the parliamentary and not the presidential variety. The political apex of a presidential federation often gets identified with the image of one person, the president, and is also suspected of a tilt in favour of the president’s region or community. An apex consisting of a parliament with a few hundred members holds a truer mirror to the whole country and all its people. That is what made India possible. From that point began many lines of the political evolution of India, but the line most relevant here is the one that led India out of the single-party dominance it had known through most of the first three decades of Independence, and firmly into the present-day coalitional politics based upon competition between many parties. The change came by stages. Democracy did what democracy does best. It gave tongue to the many diverse entities - linguistic, religious, societal, geographical and other - which constitute India. For a time they co-existed peacefully within the folds of the same party, the Congress, getting incremental space according to their political size and voice. But they began to move out because they felt increasingly suffocated by denial of space to them by the increasingly authoritarian new managers of the party. As they moved out, each of them also took many of their kindred groups and communities with them, which in turn formed the nuclei of new parties. For a time it looked as though this sudden emergence of new parties would so fragment the polity that there would be no basis left for a workable democratic system. No political party appeared to be available which would be large enough to form a majority government, and no combination of parties appeared to be stable enough to form a government which would last its term. This was very much the case for a few years in the late 1960s, and again during the late 1970s, and yet again in the early and late 1980s. Each time the need arose the polity did respond with a coalition of sorts, but except in a few states no coalition could perform with more than transitory combinations of size and stability. As one state-level party burst upon the electoral stage after another, and many of them showed scant regard for nation-wide considerations, the scene became cluttered with shot-gun and short-term marriages and stinking divorces while external threats roamed around India like vultures. The situation made some authoritarian parties of the past look like better alternatives. But Indian “politics” and “politicians”, the two institutions in our public life which are most berated these days ( berated by whom and why is a separate story which also needs to be told some day), did not respond with despair. Instead, they put forward two of their finest performances since the elections in 1977. The Congress did so on one side of the national political spectrum, the BJP on the other. Between them they inaugurated an era of successful coalitions, the Congress becoming, more than ever before, an informal coalition of many groups, the BJP leading an open coalition between many parties. Between them they sowed the seeds of what Mr Vajpayee was later to call the dharma of coalitions and political science would call more genuine federalisation of a uniquely diverse society and country. That is how a stable-looking partnership began between a vigorously multi-party democracy and parliamentary federalism . It created horizontal coalitions between parties within the same state, and vertical coalitions between national and state-level parties in New Delhi and some of the states. And they worked. In the first half of the 1990s Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, who made up with substance all that he lacked in style, carried India through four crucial transitions, all rolled into one : from the world of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union to the world of a duopoly between the same two powers; from a controlled economy operated by the bureaucracy, to a rapidly freed economy energized by a new breed of entrepreneurs; from a polity dominated by a single party and a single person to the emergence of diverse power centres and personalities; from highly centralized rule by New Delhi to the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution for decentralisation right down to the village level. In the second half of the same decade the BJP laid the foundations of what was soon to become the most successful coalition India has seen so far, proving the practicability of the dharma of coalitions which Mr Vajpayee had talked about, and demonstrating the political technology needed for it. Between them these two leaders, both of them “politicians” to the core, have also proved the flexibility as well as continuity of Indian policies in the midst of an intense flux in “politics”. |
What’s in a name... FOR a long time one had wondered why the Red Sea carried that name. There was not even a tinge of the red colour in the water there, and the sea was not known to have ever exhibited any communist leanings even during the era of the Soviet Union. Then the mystery became clear. The oriental name of the ‘Red Sea’ is ‘Bahr-i-Qulzam’ in the Arabic language, ‘Qulzam’ meaning the ‘West”. ‘Qulzam’, however, also means red. Ages ago when Western scholars undertook the work of translation they mistakenly thought the intended meaning was ‘red’, and called the sea the ‘Red Sea’! The mistake has turned into history. Another word has a different story. In the British days ‘Bahadur’ was as a matter of routine appended to the designation of senior officials eg. the Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police. The titles conferred on private citizens also were ‘Rai Bahadur’, ‘Khan Bahadur’, etc. In fact, the use of the word as a title was inherited by the British from the Moghal emperors who made it their standard practice. Its meaning in Persian is “Valuable Pearl”: ‘baha’-valuable; and ‘dur’-‘pearl’, it was, of course, intended to be only a formal courtesy title and was no recognition of any bravery of the recipients. In fact, in colonial times some of them were known more for their subservience than for any form of valour. ‘Id-ul-Azha’, is a festival of first importance in the country but the spelling of the name has become a little controversial. It is very commonly spelt as ‘Id-ul-Zuha’ or ‘Id-uz-Zuha’ but those variants do not appear in any dictionary and actually do not have much meaning. ‘Azha’ in Arabic means ‘sacrifice(s)’ and thus ‘Id-ul-Azha’ is the only correct version although usage has almost completely ousted it in favour of the ‘pretenders’. Finally, there is the notorious ‘guillotine’. As a rule any element of kindness or altruism is the last thing one would associate with that device which came to be used in France to behead convicts sentenced to death. It was, however, invented by Dr Guillotin only as a measure of compassion. In earlier times the practice was that the convict would have every bone in his body broken and then would be left by the road-side for days to die a lingering and most painful death. The guillotine was intended to ensure a speedy death at one stroke so that the convict would be spared the excruciating agony he would otherwise
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DATELINE WASHINGTON
JAMES W. Laine has learnt the hard way that jokes, especially those about revered heroes, are not always funny. The American professor stirred up a hornet’s nest with his book “Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India”. And now he says he regrets having included references to “naughty jokes” speculating on the Maratha idol’s parentage. Dr Laine says he heard these controversial yarns while researching his book in India. “I was trying to make a point by mentioning it (the joke) — it wasn’t a frivolous point. People tell jokes for important reasons,” said Dr Laine in a phone interview from Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, where he chairs the Religious Studies Department. “I don’t think it was a crazy thing for me to put it in, but now I feel I shouldn’t have. Perhaps people would have then thought more about the substantive story.” In the section that has generated this controversy, Dr Laine writes: “The repressed awareness that Shivaji had an absentee father is also revealed by the fact that Maharashtrians tell jokes naughtily suggesting that his guardian Dadaji Konddev was his biological father.” Dr Laine says he doesn’t believe there has ever been any serious speculation about Shivaji’s parentage. “That was a joke and it was really meant to be taken as a joke. I don’t think his father was not his biological father. I don’t think there is any evidence to support that.” Nevertheless, criticism has been pouring in fast and furious. He has been inundated by “hundreds” of e-mails and phone calls. Not all of them are critical. “Some people have been quite supportive. A large number are saddened that there has been this kind of controversy.” The negative attention has taken its toll on the author. “Personally, this has been a time of turmoil. I am hurt by the fact that my book is being read in this way.” In India, the debate has taken on political overtones. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee recently remarked that the controversy surrounding Dr Laine’s book should serve as a “warning to all foreign authors that they must not play with our national pride.” Maharashtra Home Minister R.R. Patil has said that the state government will seek the Central Bureau of Investigation’s assistance in arresting Dr Laine through Interpol. Pune Police Commissioner D.N. Jadhav says he plans to summon the author to India for questioning. “It is obvious that the politicians who are behind this are doing it to make political capital,” said Dr Laine. “I am saddened that this story has been politicised in this manner. There was never any agenda behind writing this book.” While he has been following the controversy closely, Dr Laine says he has not heard from anyone about an arrest warrant or interrogation. “I am working with my legal counsel,” he said, but declined to elaborate on the steps he might be considering. The Indian edition of the book, published last summer, inflamed Hindu fanatics. This culminated in the January ransacking of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, where Dr Laine did his research. The book was subsequently banned in Maharashtra and its Indian publishers pulled it off shelves across the country. Dr Laine admits to being “quite shocked” by the controversy. “One writes a scholarly book and you don’t expect it to have that big an impact — or for that matter, for so many people to have read it.” He points out that when the book was released in India, it was widely reviewed but there was no hint of controversy. “There were a couple of passages which were interpreted to mean that I had challenged the fact that Shahji was not Shivaji’s biological father, but that was a misreading. I did state that I thought that it was interesting that Shahji and Shivaji’s mother lived apart for 30 years, and that people avoided thinking about that fact.” Dr Laine insists his book is not a negative portrayal of Shivaji. “If one goes in to reading this book with the mindset that it is either unmitigated praise or blasphemy, people will be upset and think historical scholarship should be in praise of historical figures.” “My goal was not to establish my version of the true history of Shivaji, but to examine the forces that shaped the commonly held views,” he said. While travelling in Maharashtra, Dr Laine said he was quite aware of the reverence with which Shivaji’s memory is treated. “Since the days of India’s Independence, there has been a successful attempt to read his story as the first of a two-chapter story of the freedom struggle.” Dr Laine has been travelling to India since 1977. For now, however, he has no plans to return. “No, I don’t plan to go and certainly not to Maharashtra.” |
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DELHI DURBAR FORMER Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Ajit Jogi has been given the party ticket to
challenge former Union Minister V.C. Shukla from Mahasamund. Vidya Charan Shukla had left the Congress party for the second time on the eve of the Assembly elections last year and had become the chief of the Nationalist Congress Party in Chhattisgarh. Shukla, who left the Congress in 1987 in the wake of the Bofors scandal, came back to become a Union Minister in Narasimha Rao’s cabinet. He was feeling restless after Jogi took over as the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh. He joined the NCP to play spoilsport for the Congress. Now, Shukla has to settle old scores with Jogi. This does not appear to be a David versus Goliath type of a contest but quite an even one. Who is BJP’s
boss? The BJP has ordered a fresh print-run of its “Vision Document” with just one photograph of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the front cover and a group photograph of top leaders of the party on the back cover. A passport-size photograph of party President M. Venkiah Naidu finds its place in the document with a message from him. The BJP thought it prudent to publish the “Vision Document” afresh after Vajpayee made known his displeasure. When Naidu and other senior leaders of the party had presented a copy of the document to Vajpayee, the Prime Minister had conveyed his unhappiness over an “overkill” of his photographs in the document. It carried 54 pictures of Vajpayee. This observation of Vajpayee was enough for the party leaders to do a “roll back” in the Vision Document. This clearly demonstrates once again who is the boss in BJP. Main Bharat
Hoon cassettes Remember the famous three-word opening dialogue of B.R. Chopra superhit TV serial “Mahabharat”: Main samay hoon (I am Time)? The start-struck BJP is now trying to catch people’s attention in a similar manner. The “Samay” of “Mahabharat”, Harish Bhimani, has been roped in by the BJP which is preparing audio/video cassettes, titled “Mahasangram”. The party plans to play these cassettes in every nook and corner of the country in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections. Rocking the
peace boat Trust Prime Minister Vajpayee’s most trusted man, Brajesh Mishra, to ignore a hawkish statement from the Pakistani leadership. Impossible, insiders say. But this is what happened in the last few days. India has obviously downplayed Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s statement on March 30, imposing a deadline on the ongoing Indo-Pak peace process. Apparently, the government has accepted the clarifications issued by the Pakistani officials and wants the matter to rest there. Incidentally, three key persons in the Ministry of External Affairs — External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, Foreign Secretary Shashank and Joint Secretary (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran) Arun Kumar Singh — were away since the controversy erupted. The buzz word is that the Vajpayee government did not want to let the peace process be sacrificed at the altar of “statementship”. Contributed by Satish Misra, S. Satyanarayanan and Rajeev Sharma |
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. — Saint Matthew The word knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things, viz., truth, proof, and conviction. — Carlyle The divine mystery is revealed not through reading, but through understanding. — Guru Nanak Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal. — Moore Breed is stronger than pasture. — George Eliot Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world alters the world. — Emerson |
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