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Peace mountain Seeking bluer skies |
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Stuffing of rolls EC directive for penal action in TN timely The Election Commission has rightly directed the Electoral Registration Officers in Tamil Nadu to register cases against the office-bearers of any political party that filed bulk applications for inclusion in the electoral rolls in the 165 constituencies in the state.
Advani’s blunder
The oldest hobby
Revisiting
Emergency Is the US economy
slowing? Delhi
Durbar
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Seeking bluer skies With
the demand for pilots exceeding supply, the civil aviation sector is set to witness a turbulent period as it makes the transition to an expansionist phase marked by rapid increases in the number of carriers, fleet strengths, and flights. The issue is once again under focus with 60 Indian Airlines pilots seeking the mandatory no-objection certificate which will enable them to migrate to the ostensibly bluer skies of private carriers. It may indeed be a pressure tactic aimed at heftier pay packets, as the pilots have not submitted their resignations and may not necessarily have job offers in hand. But it is clear that all airlines, and the national carriers in particular, are vulnerable to sudden exits by their pilots — leaving them, and their passengers, stranded. Both Indian Airlines (IA) and Air India (AI) are on the threshold of clinching deals to acquire 43 Airbuses and 50 Boeings, respectively, over the next few years. A new crop of airlines, covering the spectrum from “no-frills” to “full service” have already taken wing, and many of them have ambitious fleet expansion plans. Agreements have been signed to open up the skies with the US, France, the UK and China, dramatically increasing the number of possible flights and destinations. The Civil Aviation Ministry has urged self-regulation and discipline, but has had only a limited response. Kingfisher has committed not to poach IA or AI for pilots, and has signed a no-poaching pact with Air Deccan. Sahara had to secure a court order to prevent its pilots from flying away, taking their high-cost training with them. Bonds, notice periods, and even the NOC norms have been thrown to the winds on occasion. The basic problem has to be addressed. More pilots will in any case be required. The only way to get them is to augment training infrastructure, which is currently abysmal. Defunct schools need to be revived, even as more are set up, in both the public and private sphere. Or it will become a case of putting the cart, sorry, the plane, before the horse. |
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Stuffing of rolls The
Election Commission has rightly directed the Electoral Registration Officers in Tamil Nadu to register cases against the office-bearers of any political party that filed bulk applications for inclusion in the electoral rolls in the 165 constituencies in the state. The decision follows a report submitted by a two-member team of the commission that visited the state following complaints of large-scale stuffing of names on the last date of filing of applications. The electoral roll is the most important document of any election. The rolls in Tamil Nadu are now being revised to prepare the state for next year’s Assembly elections. Discrepancies like no signature, no thumb impression or no address of the voter in the application form are serious enough because had these not been detected in time, the entire electoral process would have been reduced to a farce. Even though stuffing of names and discrepancies as mentioned are unprecedented in Tamil Nadu this time, it is a pity that this phenomenon is not confined to one state. Unfortunately, no state has ever been free from faulty electoral rolls. During the last Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, there were too many complaints of faulty rolls in states like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Delhi, mainly because of the callous and perfunctory attitude of the enumerators and other staff. The commission’s tough action in directing the Tamil Nadu officials to file FIRs against those responsible for the stuffing of names is welcome as it is expected to act as a deterrent. At the same time, there is need to make the revision of electoral rolls comprehensive and foolproof. As the exercise is carried out well in advance, it should not be difficult for the authorities to make the rolls free from discrepancies of any nature. More important, the commission should evolve a mechanism that would help cross-check the data after the first enumeration, and rectify the rolls. Clearly, cross-checking, if necessary, by an independent agency not connected with any political party should form an essential part of the electoral revision process. |
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I have lost friends, some by death ... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
— Virginia Woolf |
Advani’s blunder IF L.K. Advani’s efforts to reinvent himself have misfired in view of his party’s refusal, presumably under pressure from the RSS, to accept his earlier reference to Jinnah as secular, the reason is that the BJP president was on the wrong track right from the beginning. He may or may not have been influenced by Pakistani hospitality to shower praise on the founder of Pakistan. What is more relevant, however, is the almost routine failure of the people associated with the saffron brigade to take a holistic view of either history or of historical personalities. Instead, they tend to focus on particular segments and come to erroneous conclusions. Mr Advani was a victim of this habit. In the case of the parivar’s view of history, for instance, the objective is to project the two major communities of India as antagonistic so that this distorted vision of the past will serve the parivar’s and the BJP’s political purpose. The reason for Mr Advani’s new definition of Jinnah as a person and as a politician is obviously more complex. Since there has been no indication that he has been thinking on these lines, the startling declaration came as a shock to the entire saffron camp and as something of a pleasant surprise to the so-called secularists if only because they saw in it the germs of a possible split in the Hindutva brotherhood. There have been occasions in the past when Mr Advani has referred to the possibility of a confederation of the three countries in the subcontinent. But it was interpreted as a typical parivar-like ploy to sugarcoat its view of Akhand Bharat, entailing the cultural and eventually political domination by India of the two other South Asian countries. In a way, this earlier view of a confederation ran counter to the BJP president’s latest opinion of Jinnah. After all, it is the latter who was the prime architect of the breakup of Akhand Bharat, making history of a kind which has been the source of wars and a further disintegration in 1971. Against this background, it may be tempting to come to the conclusion that Mr Advani’s remarks in Karachi were an off-the-cuff, unrehearsed articulation, provoked by the emotions of the moment. Yet, he is too experienced a politician to have expressed such a highly contentious view without realising the consequences. So, the observation may have to be ascribed either to a misreading of the Quaid-e-Azam’s politics or as a well-planned move to refashion the BJP’s line. If the latter, the step called for at least two cheers. Even now, all is not lost, for Mr Advani may have set in motion a process of rethinking in the party which will be carried on behind the scenes, not least because the NDA has openly approved of the new approach. Nothing can be more beneficial for the Indian polity if the BJP decides to dispense with its sectarianism, with which it has been associated from the days of its Jan Sangh past. The present moment is also highly propitious for such a change of course because the India-Pakistan relations are on the verge of a breakthrough. A dramatic turnaround in India-Pakistan relations will also mean an improvement in the communal atmosphere in India since it will take the sting out of the parivar’s persistent vilification of the Muslims, as reflected in its recent propaganda about the possibility of yet another partition of India, heralded by the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and the rapid increase in the population of the Indian Muslims. These positive fallouts cannot detract, however, from Mr Advani’s erroneous characterisation of Jinnah’s policies. True, in his speech before the Pakistan constituent assembly on August 11, 1947, the governor-generate-designate of the new country had said: “You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are call citizens and equal citizens of one State … in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense … but in the political sense as citizens of the State”. There can be no clearer definition of secularism. But he was jumping the gun. He had forgotten his own politics. Jinnah may have been secular in his personal life. Never a devout believer in his own faith, he had no compunctions about eating pork and drinking whiskey. But his politics was communal in the sense that it was based on setting one community against another. And so his vision about Hindus ceasing to be Hindus and Muslims ceasing to be Muslims failed. His speech became an embarrassment to the Pakistani authorities. The director of the Quaid-e-Azam Academy, Sharif-ul-Mujahid, later described it as “a serious lapse on his (Jinnah’s) part” although historian Ayesha Jalal called it Pakistan’s Magna Carta and Akbar S. Ahmed compared it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Other historians have wondered whether Jinnah envisaged Pakistan as a smaller version of India with the Muslims as majority. In his book, The Emergence of Pakistan, a former prime minister of the country, Chaudhury Mohammed Ali asked: “Could it be … that as soon as Pakistan was won, the Quaid-e-Azam abandoned the two-nation theory and invited all its citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to work together for the state on the basis of territorial nationalism ? What was then its raison d’etre and what would be its distinguishing characteristics ? Had the two-nation theory merely been the scaffolding that was to be discarded once the structure was built ?” Just as Advani is wrong about Jinnah’s secularism, he is wrong about the Quaid-e-Azam as a maker of history. A historical event has to be judged from its positive aspects, not simply because it occurred. The Mauryans in the pre-Christian period, the Guptas in the middle ages and the Mughals were makers of history because they reinforced the concept of Indian unity and left behind a legacy of their moral (the Asokan inscriptions), cultural (the works of Kalidasa and other artistes) and secular achievements. For all its faults, British rule, too, underlined Indian unity and left behind a parliamentary and administrative structure. By his own admission, Jinnah secured a “moth-eaten Pakistan” which has since degenerated into a dysfunctional, failed state which has been rightly described by India as an epicentre of terrorism, a view accepted by the rest of the world. As noted before, even the “scaffolding” of the two-nation theory fell apart within a quarter of a century of Pakistan’s creation with the breaking away of Bangladesh. Jinnah’s legacy, therefore, is a saga of failure and of disservice to his own community, who became divided into three, was tainted with the accusation of terrorism and backwardness in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and had to battle against enormous odds to survive with dignity in India. And all because this former “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”, in Sarojini Naidu’s words, was embittered by the rise of Gandhi and Nehru in the Congress, with the result that his own ambition of being Numero Uno in national politics was thwarted. The final blow for him was the Muslim League’s defeat in the 1937 elections, which convinced him that without taking recourse to communal mobilisation, with the battle cry of “Islam in danger”, there was no hope for him and his party. Thus, the “secular” Jinnah turned communal and made history of the most destructive
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The oldest hobby If there were to be a competition to determine the oldest hobby in the world, gambling would probably end up right at the top or at any rate in a tie — giving its rival (or rivals) a good run for their money. The sight of some stray cases of meteoric rise from rags to riches is irresistible and you become certain the next turn will be yours. A modicum of a benighted religious belief also helps a little: if you do not gamble in this present life your coming re-incarnation will give you a particularly unpleasant animal form. And unfortunately, for a change, the interest of the government happens to coincide completely with that of the individual (as mistakenly perceived by him). If the administration decides to impose a tax or levy of any kind, it is certain to have an agitation on its hands. But in the case of a lottery people are only too happy to shower money into the lap of the government time after time. So the government readily put on the back-burner whatever reservations it might have about gambling on moral ground and goes out to use its vast resources of publicity and propaganda to obtain the maximum possible funds from lotteries. (It does so in the matter of sales of liquor also, lip-service to the ideal of prohibition notwithstanding). The result is that a lottery-minded individual does not have much of a chance and soon becomes an absolute addict. He has no do-addiction centre to help him either. The level to which this addiction can reduce a person is indicated by a recent report in a paper that a father in China actually sold his new-born son for buying lottery tickets. As it happened, his dream to become rich overnight turned sour and ended in a 10-year sentence of imprisonment for him:
nevertheless the fact remains that the atrocity that the sale was, had taken place. That these things work by sheer chance would stand confirmed, if confirmation were needed, by another story. There was a young lady who was possibly a blonde though history is silent on that point. She somehow came to consider that arithmetic was something like a stranger who must be kept at arm’s length by her. She had won the jackpot in a lottery and was explaining to a few friends how she had done the trick. “I had very carefully chosen the lottery ticket with a number ending with the numerals ‘51’. I did so because seven nights running I had dreamt of number ‘7’, and ‘7’x‘7’ is ‘51’, isn’t it?” Tailpiece — Two students were considering how to spend the next Sunday and decided to leave the matter to the toss. “If it is heads” they said, “we shall call on the girls. If it is tails, we shall go to the movies. If the coin stands on its edge, we shall
study”.
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Revisiting Emergency Here, however, a few words need to be said about Sanjay Gandhi who is a much misunderstood figure of Indian history. He had his faults — quite a number of them. But he was certainly not the devil he has been usually painted as. He has, in fact, been far more sinned against than sinning. He did not know the art, in which our politicians are generally adept, to hide his feelings. He was impatient and quick to call a spade a spade and that too, rather loudly. He, however, learnt his lessons fast, particularly in adversity. The Sanjay of January 1980 was very different from the Sanjay of 1975. In India, coining of allegations, or levelling false charges, or making hearsay evidence seem genuine is a flourishing industry, the poisonous fallouts from which have damaged many a reputation. Sanjay Gandhi was, perhaps, one of the worst victims of this contaminating industry. A number of false stories were woven around his name. The notorious Turkman Gate Ranjit Hotel story, which received very wide publicity, was one of them. The story was a complete fabrication. A Metropolitan Criminal Court in Delhi held it to be so. The court was so incensed by the outrageous fabrication that it awarded three months’ imprisonment to the reporter of the national daily who first wrote the story. The worst part of fabrication was, however, not that the reporter was trapped into writing it by the vested interests but that many ‘eminent’ journalists and ‘noted’ columnists wrote the same story in their books on the Emergency, with a slightly different wording, as if they were themselves eye-witnesses to it.... After being subjected to calumny for centuries, Oliver Cromwell had a biographer in the person of John Buchan who culled out the truth from underneath the mountain-heaps of lies and half-truths. Though on a much smaller scale, Sanjay Gandhi requires an objective and insightful biographer to draw a true portrait of his personality with all his black and bright spots clearly etched out. This is necessary to restore the historical balance. Was it Mrs Indira Gandhi or her son, Sanjay Gandhi or her few advisors who alone were responsible for the imposition of Emergency and what happened during it? What about the judges who despite their high status, not only held that the declaration of Emergency was valid but also refused to safeguard even elementary liberties, the denial of which reduce the individual citizen to a ‘state of utter rightlessness’? What about the pressmen who, as L.K. Advani put it, started crawling when they were asked only to bend? What about both the Houses of Parliament which endorsed the Emergency by an overwhelming majority — 336 to 39 in Lok Sabha and 136 to 33 in Rajya Sabha? What about those who adopted an excessively agitational approach to attain Jayaprakash Narayan’s nobly conceived ideal of Total Revolution but started wrecking, as Chaudhry Charan Singh did, the new government from inside to realise personal ambitions? And what about the people themselves, who just ‘melted away’ as soon as the Emergency was declared? Noting the absence of the ‘angry voices’, the ‘Guardian’, London observed: “India’s State of Emergency is almost three months old now, and rapidly becoming the Mystery of the Missing Opposition.” Clearly, there was something basically wrong with the moral fibre of the nation. It had too many irons in its soul and too much infection in its blood stream. The maladies which these ‘irons’ and these ‘infections’ caused were common to all the categories and classes of persons and the institutions of the State and Society, be it Executive, Parliament Judiciary or Press. Excerpted from the writer’s forthcoming book “Soul and Structure of Governance in India”, Allied Publishers, Pages 516, Rs 475 |
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Is the US economy slowing? Very little is ever obvious in commentary by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and that’s by design: He likes to keep his options open. But there were two pretty solid take-aways from speeches Greenspan gave last week. One is that the Fed isn’t worried that the economy is on a precipice. And the other, which follows from the first, is that the central bank isn’t nearly finished raising short-term interest rates. Addressing a financial conference in China via satellite and, later in the week, members of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, Greenspan was asked in both venues whether he was worried that long-term interest rates have fallen over the last year even as the Fed has raised its key short-term rate eight times, to 3 percent from 1 percent. Why should he be concerned? Because historically, declining long-term rates in the face of rising short-term rates have meant that investors expected the economy to slow markedly. If the economy isn’t slowing, why are people so eager to lock in long-term bond yields — not just in the United States but across much of the globe? Greenspan wasn’t embarrassed to say he didn’t know. He said he wasn’t satisfied with any of the explanations that have been well-discussed on Wall Street in the last year, including that aging populations in the United States, Europe and Japan are gravitating toward more conservative securities such as bonds; that Asian foreign central banks are recycling their trade-surplus dollars into bonds; and that a general glut in savings worldwide means a lot of money is looking for a home. Could it be, someone at the congressional hearing asked him, that bond investors are showing they believe that the Fed already has vanquished inflation with one year of credit-tightening? Some economists believe Greenspan and his peers at the Fed know exactly what they have to do, which is to keep raising their benchmark short-term rate to 4 percent, maybe even 5 percent, by early in 2006. The chairman’s comments last week ‘’make clear that the tightening process isn’t yet close to over,`` said Bill Dudley, economist at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York. The Fed already stands accused of creating a housing bubble; who knows how low mortgage rates could drop if the Fed stopped raising short-term rates at this point, giving bond speculators more reason to pile on? Indeed, Greenspan’s comments on the yield curve could be viewed as providing cover for more rate increases. If the economy will be fine even if short-term rates are above long-term rates, what’s the harm if the Fed keeps going? A simple, fundamental reason the Fed should keep tightening credit is that inflation pressures are building, the bond market’s apparently sanguine view notwithstanding. If the Fed’s primary job is to maintain vigilance against rising inflation, what do those numbers say? Ian Sheperdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y., believes the inflation trends leave Greenspan with ‘’very little room for
maneuver" — meaning, the credit-tightening process must go on. —
LA Times-Washington Post |
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Delhi Durbar BJP leaders may term the withdrawal of resignation by party president L.K. Advani after four days as a “happy ending”, but it is debatable whether Mr Advani has emerged stronger after this episode. While some feel that he has emerged stronger, others feel that this episode has weakened him and has also had a dent on his stature and image. A BJP leader known for sarcasm remarked: “It will now be a weak Prime Minister versus a weak Leader of Opposition.” Mr Advani had often described Dr Manmohan Singh as a “weak Prime Minister”.
Outspoken Lalu supporter Few leaders in the Rashtriya Janata Dal have the gumption to say in public their views on controversial decisions of party supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav. Senior party leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh did not hesitate from making known his views known when the RJD chief attacked two Election Commissioners on the basis of allegations by a senior official. Lalu, who took notice of Raghuvansh’s remarks in the media, however, was not offended.
CMs’ visits abroad Mid-summer visits by Chief Ministers to cities in the West are viewed with a bit of cynicism, but the CMs seem convinced it is the best time to woo investors. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, who recently returned from a visit to the US and Canada, had several MoUs to show for his efforts. The CM signed MoUs involving Rs 5,550 crore during his visit. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who visited Canada almost the same time, did not specify the amount of investment attracted by his state, but said it was substantial. Chhattisgarh, which faces Naxalite violence, has in a few years of its creation emerged as a top investment destination. The state last year attracted investment inflow of Rs 7,300 crore, the highest in the country.
Problem of language To be in charge of an election-bound state itself is a big challenge for any leader, but it becomes even more challenging if one does not know the local language. BJP General Secretary Rajnath Singh has been pushed to such a situation by the party, which has made him in charge of the coming assembly poll in West Bengal. Though Singh is a good organiser and a capable leader and has already proved himself by helping the party triumph in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, he may find it a challenge to have an instant rapport with party workers as he does not know Bengali. Party insiders are confident that the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who is called a “silent killer”, would find a way to overcome this handicap and device a strategy which would ensure some visibility to the BJP in the Left-dominated State. Contributed by S. Satyanarayanan, Girja Shankar Kaura, Prashant Sood and Satish Misra |
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From the pages of CRAZE FOR “NAUKRI”
We
would draw the attention of our educated men and intelligent capitalists to the fact that wood work is an industry capable of indefinite extension and affords a large and profitable field. Why do not our workmen, in spite of their being industrious, sober and ingenious, make much progress...? If our educated young men, sons of sahukars and landholders, instead of wandering “maramara” in search of “naukari”, take these “tarkhans” in hand, help them with capital, guide them, get for them models to follow and start companies, they would do infinitely better than they ever could have done in “naukari”. Even sons of wealthy men do not feel happy until they get a “naukari”, no matter how low. It is really strange that young men who could easily earn 2 or 3 rupees a day if they followed their ancestral trade, prefer a “naukari” of Rs 15 a month. People seem to be ashamed of any other work but that of the desk. This yearning after “babuship” is fatal to the material prosperity of the country. |
Since society is one composite unit among many of its kind, and since its first relations with the others are always potentially hostile, a political character is — Sri Aurobindo Fulfill though the perfection of truth. Though the thunderbolt descend upon thy head, yield thou never to the allurements that beguile men from the path of truth. — The Buddha Nirvana is gained when the fire of lust is gone out, when the fires of hatred and delusion go our, when the troubles of mind, arising from blind credulity, and all other evils have ceased. — The Buddha Mere knowledge is comparatively worthless unless digested into practical wisdom and common sense as applied to the affairs of life. — Tryon Edwards Ramakrishna came for the good of the world. Call him a man, or God, or an Incarnation, just as you please. Accept him each in your own light. — Swami
Vivekananda  |
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