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Closing of the backdoor Guaranteeing jobs |
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Urban sludge
Rumble in the West
The peace tree
A geologist survives flash floods Plan to Talibanise
Bangla society? Leisure ‘interests’ of public figures
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Closing of the backdoor It does not behove a government to find ways and means to defy the spirit of various rules and regulations, while pretending to stick to its letter. That is exactly what the appointment of Chief Parliamentary Secretaries and Parliamentary Secretaries was, whether in Punjab or Himachal Pradesh. Because a constitutional amendment had put a ceiling on the size of the ministries, this backdoor entry was exploited to accommodate as many MLAs as possible. Now that the Himachal Pradesh High Court has declared the appointments null and void, the government must realise that what it was doing was not only politically unethical but also bad in law. The Chief Parliamentary Secretaries and Parliamentary Secretaries in Himachal Pradesh have stopped coming to office. It is now for the Veerbhadra Singh government to accept the verdict gracefully rather than rush to the Supreme Court in appeal. The situation where Parliamentary Secretaries were groomed as ministers in the making no longer exists. They enjoy perks and facilities almost equal to those of ministers but do not discharge equivalent responsibilities. Under the circumstances, it is well nigh impossible for any government to deny that they serve only decorative purposes and are appointed just to keep most MLAs gainfully employed. Their appointment is a none-too-clever way to get over the legal restrictions placed on the ministry size. Punjab must take a cue from the verdict of the Himachal Pradesh High Court. It too has a large army of Chief Parliamentary Secretaries and Parliamentary Secretaries. Like Himachal Pradesh, its financial position too is none too rosy. It is true that the order passed by the Himachal Pradesh High Court is not applicable in Punjab, but it certainly has a lot of persuasive and supportive value, which must be respected. The Congress high command too should be conscious of the adverse fallout if Punjab does not make amends. It was given permission to appoint parliamentary secretaries after much persuasion by the Chief Minister. It must have dawned on the central leaders as well as Captain Amarinder Singh by now that it was not a wise decision. |
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Guaranteeing jobs Aimed to give a “human face” to the reforms, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill was tabled in Parliament on Thursday. Given the numbers and the support it enjoys, the Bill will have a smooth passage. The reforms are supposed to accelerate growth and jobs are created as a part of growth. The Bill, on the contrary, focusses on employment creation through community projects like “watershed development, renovation of water bodies, desilting of tanks, afforestation and wasteland restoration”. A possible rise in rural incomes may push demand for manufactured products, thus boosting industry and contributing to growth. Development programmes, as UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi noted while moving the Bill, do not always “work out the way they are planned”. Government machinery is notorious for corruption and poor results. Given the known leakages in the delivery system, implementing such a large scheme across the length and breadth of the country will, no doubt, be an arduous task. Although the Bill proposes to empower the panchayats to have the final say in implementing and monitoring projects, the vested interests often forge a nexus and siphon off the money intended for development. The Rs 9 crore fraud detected recently in the much-acclaimed Maharashtra employment guarantee scheme is the latest example of this. The second hurdle that the employment guarantee scheme may face is the availability of funds. Since the scheme is being 90 per cent financed by the Centre, it is not yet clear how funds will be raised. One possibility is the government may pool in resources by merging all existing job schemes. Ms Sonia Gandhi needs to impress upon Mr P. Chidambran and the Chief Ministers — at least of the Congress-led States — to spare some money for it. By shelving the disinvestment plan, the government has shut what could have been a good source of funds. A cess is another possibility. Two other worries are: will the states be able to contribute their 10 per cent share? Will the fiscal deficit remain within acceptable limits? Given the pitfalls, the Bill needs a thorough debate and considerable political will and support. |
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Urban sludge Death and disease continue to stalk the vulnerable in Mumbai, as scores of people succumb to cholera, malaria and many other ailments. As in all our urban centres, the average citizen has no choice but to put up with an incredible degree of government inertia and sheer incompetence in and out of a disaster. While the 944 mm mountain of water that slammed into Mumbai on July 26 would have made the best cities in the world gasp for breath, much of the death and suffering could clearly have been avoided but for a perverted system of governance. The immediate steps to be taken are obvious. A sustained effort is necessary to assess the degree to which the diseases have taken hold of vulnerable populations and initiate appropriate action. Surat has shown that it can be done, and done very well. But there will be no long-term solution to the widespread disease of mis-governance and a corrupt officialdom unless there is a fundamental change in our attitudes towards the urban phenomenon. For too long now, urban problems have been glibly considered those of “elites” and “corporates” forgetting that the ones who suffer most from deficient urban infrastructure are the urban poor. No “urban renewal commission” or mere talk about “infrastructure drives” can help revitalise the centres of wealth creation that are India’s cities. Understandably, any suggestion for independently governed “city-states” gets the goat of the local politicians, for whom the city is a milking cow. No economist would suggest that all of a city’s wealth belongs to the city to the exclusion of needs elsewhere in the nationscape. But top quality infrastructure is important. A city like Mumbai definitely deserves world-class transport, drainage and sanitation. There is nothing elitist about it. |
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Never tell your problems to anyone... 20 per cent don’t care and the other 80 per cent are glad you have them. — Lou Holtz
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Rumble in the West PARLIAMENT’s enthusiastic approval of the Bill on dual citizenship, the arrest of another London bombings suspect and the Irish Republican Army’s promise to lay down arms all bore out Eric Hobsbawm’s definition of the 21st century as the age of displacement. But if individuals seem more inclined to become footloose and fancy free, the nation-state is still firmly enough in place to resist displaced man’s efforts to reinvent the alien society he adopts in the image of a mythic homeland that he carries in his heart and soul. That conflict lies at the root of friction between host nations and Muslim settlers, from Singapore to France. It is fallacious to dismiss the London bombings as a manifestation of British resentment of Tony Blair’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the indigenous British felt strongly about their prime minister’s overseas involvements, they would never have expressed their disapproval through explosions that killed 56 innocent people, injured more than 700, paralysed life, shattered confidence and cost them their own lives in the bargain. Since this is how enemies attack, a native British patriot might even be justified in adapting Dean Inge’s Romanes lecture to read, “Ancient civilisations were destroyed by imported barbarians, we manufacture our own from imported seed”. Moreover, suicide as the ultimate form of protest - the high suicide rate in some high-income Scandinavian states is only a matter of personal maladjustment, unrelated to any societal cause - is also an essentially oriental phenomenon. Western heroes and heroines sacrifice their lives - like Nurse Edith Cavell in World War I - in service to the nation, not in rebellion against it. But the East bristles with protest immolations and fasts unto death, for reasons that range from language to religion to women’s right to work. The recent history of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, China and Iran provides many such instances. Sri Lanka and Palestine also provide examples of human bombs that would be unthinkable in the West. The three London bombers who were born and brought up in Britain might have spoken English with the accent of the region they grew up in, never uttered a word of Urdu and even “played good cricket” (so what, so does Sourav Ganguly!), but that did not make them British. It was not just the colour of their skin that ruled out complete assimilation, though that must have been a factor. More significantly, they carried within themselves an awareness of the self that is rooted in family, culture, lineage, everything that is bracketed under the label “genes”, bearing no relation to the sceptered isle to which their families migrated. Western consciousness of the distinction between indigene and alien was evident when an American civilian airliner was hijacked in Pakistan. The initial report that the passengers were Americans created a stir in the US. But interest waned when it transpired that most were South Asians with American passports. But politically correct contemporary Britain is embarrassingly determined not to notice differences of race and colour which probably flatters visiting Indians and Pakistanis and consoles perpetually nervous first generation immigrants. But the sheer artificiality must grate on sturdy young men who have grown up in a British milieu and want not assimilation but to transform the host country as the Taliban did Afghanistan. Nirad Chaudhuri warned long before Samuel Huntington came along of “an irreconcilable antagonism between the non-European peoples who were formerly subject to European rule, and their one-time rulers, especially the British.” It is a historical fact, too, that life in Britain does not always make the Asian look with favour on the British, a fruit of residence and familiarity that India’s British-trained swarajists proved and Max Muller deplored. Osama bin Laden’s twist to the faith adds the burden of a demanding religion to the traditional burden of politics. Put together, it would seem that the bombers, Pakistani in being and British only in the eyes of the law, were convinced that in killing themselves they were punishing Blair’s Britain for perceived crimes against Islam. Iraq and Afghanistan may have been the catalysts but, as true jihadis, they would have regarded Britain and the British as legitimate targets even without these provocations, just like the hijackers who attacked New York’s Twin Towers. It says much for British forbearance and discipline that in spite of warnings and jeremiads the outrages did not provoke more of a white backlash. It would have been perfectly human to expect a furore against immigrants and far stronger calls for deportation amidst thundering declamations that Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic vision of “rivers of blood” had at last come to pass. Compared to the provocation, British nationalists have uttered not a squeak. Perhaps the liberal conscience of Britain does now accept that South Asians born and bred there are part of the natural scene, and that their sins are the sins of society as a whole. But do they, one wonders, begin to understand even now the full measure of the challenge in their midst? Many of the Midlands areas inhabited by some 800,000 people of Pakistani origin are as different from what Britain was and should be as are the Bangladeshi and Indian ghettoes of Brick Lane and Southall in London. An added complication is that while exiled Bangladeshis and Indians have clearly defined national identities, Pakistanis have only their religion to fall back on. Beards, skullcaps and veils proclaim a different civilisation. This is where the linkage with non-resident Indians scattered about the globe comes in. The IRA connection is only incidental: it has been fighting for what it regards as home rule on home ground but the London bombings have driven it to peace initiatives lest it be branded with the same terrorist brush as the jihadis. Yet, in its own way, the IRA, too, is both cause and effect of one of the world’s biggest displacements, accounting for a large proportion of Americans and for Australia’s second biggest immigrant group. But differing in one significant way from the other two communities, the Irish can even be called a peaceful force for the status quo. Except for demands concerning the six British-held counties of Ulster, they blend with the landscape wherever they settle, making no special demands on host governments. Not so NRIs who have now succeeded by force of money in one battle to eat the cake of citizenship and have it too, and are girding for other battles in Britain. Some Hindus there want the right to pollute country rivers with cremated ash; others are seeking a waiver of the English language test for priests for their ostentatious new temples. Predictably, Islamists have many more demands and press them with far greater vigour, recalling Winston Churchill’s warning, “While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Moslem sharpens his sword.” There are righteous demands in Britain for Friday closing and to purge school texts and canteen menus of anything that might be considered haram. That lovely old fable, The Three Little Pigs, for instance, is a target for extinction. Who knows but one day Britain’s defining Protestantism, with the monarch as supreme governor of the Church of England, will also be denounced as discriminatory by Her Majesty’s loyal Muslim subjects. For displacement makes the world the migrant’s oyster; if a Muslim, he expects his land of adoption to conform to all his beliefs. The July 7 bombings may have been a first, if deadly blast, of the trumpet announcing Islam’s refusal to accept Aristotle’s view that “the citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives”. On the contrary, it’s the government that must now be moulded to suit the Muslim citizen. That could be the rough edge of the globalisation that threatens established nation states, Christian, Buddhist or non-denominationally secular, in this age of
displacement.
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The peace tree
IT stands there firmly rooted in its own ground of convictions, unaffected by the outcomes of the Shimla agreement, Kargil war, bus diplomacy, Agra summit or the similar numerous examples of inconsistencies in human thought process. The lone banyan tree which stands on the border of Sialkot and Jammu defies all the notions of divide and conflict between the two countries as half of it occupies the Pakistan ground and the other half, the Indian territory. The vehemence of the tree against the partition is so strong that it has engulfed the border post pillar, marking the divide, within its trunk. It understands that it may not survive without the nourishing soils of both the sides. It is also the meeting point for the birds of both the nations sharing the love nests with each other. How many of us wish that we could share the fate of this peace tree! I stood there thinking about my father who still dreams regularly about his native village, Dhanawali, of Sialkot district in Pakistan, which he left behind when he was a 15-year-old boy. Myself, the child of freedom, born after 26 years of the birth of divided India, found it strange to find my eyes moist after touching the unknown land on the other side. It was strange to get that feeling of homecoming and finding my lost roots. I, from my childhood was fed on so many stories about the area that, to the sheer surprise of the BSF officer there, I knew the detailed topography of the area on the other side. My happiness knew no bounds when after a casual mention of the Palkhu nullah which was the most prominent romantic symbol of all those fatherly stories, I was told that quiet flows this nullah at about a hundred metres from where I stood, still nourishing the bodies and the minds of the people on both the sides impartially. Even the mesmerising sight of the river Siene in Paris could not give me the joy that I got, after looking at the small muddy Palkhu, with buffaloes enjoying their routine bath in it. Can I also flow uninterrupted from this side to the other? There existed the golden land, the cradle of my ancestors and whose one part I still carry in my body and my soul, less than 20 km away. How I wished to run to it and embrace it once! Suddenly the hard reality struck me. It might take months or even years before I could complete the formalities to allow me to cover that 20 minutes’ distance. I returned enriched with a pocketfull of the soil of my beloved “enemy” land and a mind full of hopes. I patted the peace tree to express my solidarity with its firm belief that some day it will bear the fruits of fraternity, friendship and faith which all of us would be able to enjoy
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A geologist survives flash floods
Little knowledge is dangerous. Incorrect or mixed-up knowledge can be potentially disastrous, especially when it is about the flash floods which affected the entire Sutlej valley in the summers of 2000 and 2005. It is taken for granted by one and all that the Pareechu lake, which caused flash floods from the Sumdo army camp downwards on June 26 this year, had also burst in the summer of 2000, causing midnight flash floods. In fact, the entire Spiti valley from its confluence with the Pareechu at Sumdo up to the Spiti confluence with the Satluj at Khab in Kinnaur, did not have flash floods in the summer of 2000. Obviously, the 2000 summer flash floods originated in the catchments of the Satluj and not Spiti upstream of Khab or in Tibetan territory of Pareechu. A former student of Panjab University, Sanjay Kumbkarni (Geologist Senior, Geological Survey of India), was doing fieldwork at Leo on the Spiti bank on the fateful 26th June when floods came. He first thought of driving fast across the bridge as he camped at Leo. But soon realised it’d be a folly. He took quick pictures of the flash flood smashing the Leo bridge and Leo village. Sanjay describes it as a 20-foot high wave laden with debris crashing down the river like an anaconda gone berserk”. Within minutes, he saw the Leo suspension bridge swallowed by the river and soon the debris slopes having the approach roads to the bridge along almond and apple orchards, all consumed by nature’s grandeur. Sanjay recalls that before the flood the roar of the river had increased and a billowing cloud of dust was surging down with great speed. Now he was across the bridge about 30 km far from his tent, woollens, ration, cash, maps and jeep trailor. Up he came at Yangthang and, after many efforts, he was offered a lift on a chopper. Unwilling to leave his two staff members to fend for themselves, this PU-GSI gutsy hero walked all the way to Recong Peo and was finally, after travails and tribulations, dropped in a chopper at Rampur from where he got a bus to Chandigarh. He has to go back when he can to get his jeep left in the custody of the police check post at Nako and all his official and personal belongings when a bridge let a jeep be driven or at least when a rope bridge (jhoola) is in place to let him reach Leo village. Sanjay Kumbkarni has a marvellous thrill to share with all geology students and professionals and possibly also some poetry or novel to pen down. This was his second encounter with a flash flood. Earlier, he had a narrow touch and go while camping in the Pin valley. Chandigarhians are familiar with the photographic genius of Sanjay, having seen his five exhibitions at the Panjab Kala Academy. Sanjay’s real ordeal begins now. He is responsible for recovering all office equipment and documents from Leo village (bridges or no bridges!) and the GSI jeep now at Nako village (a popular tourist resort because of the Nako lake at a height of 13,000 feet). How he manages all these herculean duties would once again be worth watching once news comes of any bridge getting in place in the Spiti and Satluj valleys. Often a geologist in field is a one-man army left to live, work and do or die all by himself. Rarely do these science warriors get any recognition. No nation does to its geologists what a free India does. Today a geologist has all the thrills and opportunities of field work, but his fate is sealed at the level of Deputy Director General. The Government of India is too busy fire-fighting on too many fronts to care for managing a nodal agency responsible for managing all environmental and disaster issues as well as exploration of mineral wealth within India’s main land, off shore as well as Antarctica.
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Plan to Talibanise Bangla society? The dramatic country-wide blasts that ripped across Bangladesh has put the spotlight on the resurgence of Islamic militancy in the country and the nature of the threat it represents to India’s security interests in the region. The scale of the 400 explosions that occurred simultaneously within half an hour of the first blast in 63 out of Bangladesh’s 64 districts on Wednesday morning left no one in doubt that it was a meticulously-staged operation calculated to terrify the political establishment. The fact that the blasts were synchronised so astutely have aggravated the suspicion about the involvement of Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) in the operation. “It has all the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation,” said diplomatic sources, pointing out to its precise planning and execution. The target of the attacks — most of the blasts occurred near government buildings and courts — showed that the militants wanted to send a political message to the ruling class to move further in the direction of the Islamisation of Bangladeshi politics and society. Although no one has officially claimed responsibility for the explosions, but leaflets found at the bomb-sites publicised the message by a banned Islamic group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, advocating the imposition of Islamic rule on Bangladesh. “These are symbolic blasts calculated to send a larger message across to the government and the political establishment to radicalise Bangladeshi society further,” Sreeradha Datta, senior fellow with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), told IANS. “These militants want Bangladeshi society and politics to move in the direction of a more aggressive rightwing agenda,” she added. Says Sanjay Bharadwaj, an expert on Bangladesh at JNU: “The revival of fundamentalism is a matter of concern for the Hindu community in Bangladesh and for secular countries like India whose security interests are directly affected by such disturbing developments in the region.” India has expressed its anxiety about the evolving situation in its neighbourhood and is keeping a close watch on the developments in Bangladesh. The Cabinet Committee on Security is likely to take up the issue at its next meeting. “The scale and coordination of these explosions countrywide raises a number of questions,” said the Indian External Affairs Ministry in a statement. Bharadwaj sees in this renewed spurt of violence a larger design of the Islamic militants to “Talibanise” Bangladeshi society. “Post 9/11 and the US-led operation in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and remnants of the Taliban have migrated to Bangladesh and are prospering there with active patronage from a section of the political establishment.” “The blasts show Islamic elements in their element. If Islamic elements are sharing power in the current ruling coalition, their morale is bound to be high,” he adds. Some experts see the militancy as a direct result of rising unemployment (over 30 per cent of Bangladeshi youth are unemployed) and an increasingly corrupt political system. These fundamentalists find it easy to prey on unemployed youth and use them to fulfil their own sectarian agenda. Besides, politicians are cynically using Islam and Islamic forces to stay in power. Sources in the government say that Bangladeshi radical outfit Jumait-ul-Mujahideen, banned in 2003 after a series of blasts in Dinajpur, northern Bangladesh, is behind the blasts. |
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Leisure ‘interests’ of public figures Rather as medieval peasants believed that touching the hem of the king’s robe would cure them of disease or bring them good luck, we are pathetically grateful for any scrap of information that reveals the true character of our rulers. In theory, we should be looking for the things that make them special: magic and mystery among the Royal Family, wisdom and foresight among presidents and prime ministers. In fact, we want to feel that, underneath, they are just like us. We expect the heroes of popular culture to be extraordinary people with extraordinary tastes, perhaps staying in bed all day, as John Lennon did, to promote world peace. But in our democratic age, we want a president, a prime minister or even a monarch to be what the Americans call a regular guy. So we were thrilled to learn that the Queen can make tea, that Bill Clinton went on camping holidays, and that the teenage Tony Blair wanted to be a rock singer. Since the advent of mass democracy, all politicians have cultivated a public image. All that is new is the sophistication and thought that goes into the marketing. The aim is usually to make a political leader seem like the rest of us, but a bit more serious, conscientious and thoughtful: people should see him as the sort who might chair the school PTA or look after the cricket club finances. Excessively nerdish or highbrow tastes — for science fiction, say, or French philosophy — should be avoided, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least. Between the world wars, Stanley Baldwin let it be known that, as he began a radio broadcast, he lit his pipe. Harold Macmillan was famed for reading Trollope’s novels, confirming his image — in contrast to his predecessor, Anthony Eden, who had repeatedly lost his temper during the Suez crisis — as an unflappable, contemplative type. Harold Wilson’s predecessor was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a scion of the aristocracy. So Wilson, originally an economics don, wanted us to know he put HP sauce on his food. Margaret Thatcher insisted, against all credulity, that she cooked breakfast for her family. President John F Kennedy was presented as a devoted family man with a taste for the arts. We know now that all he was really interested in was getting movie actresses into bed. Often, the spin doctors’ idea is to make that kind of correction to reality, or at least to popular beliefs about reality. That, presumably, is the point of publicising George Bush’s reading list. Ronald Reagan could get away with a reputation for laziness in the 1980s. (“They say hard work never killed anybody. But I say: why take the chance?”) But Americans are none too sure that, with the US economy and the war on terror in trouble, their president ought to be taking such extended holidays. Long, self-improving tomes about salt, flu and Alexander the Great are the sort of things a leader should read on vacation, they will feel: factual, down-to-earth and manly. Sometimes, despite the spin doctors and marketing experts, an image goes badly wrong. John Major’s revelations of visits to Little Chef restaurants confirmed what everybody suspected: that he was a bank clerk at heart. William Hague’s baseball cap and 14 pints a night seemed contrived: everybody remembered him making a deeply serious speech to the Tory party conference in his teens. The Prince of Wales - talking to plants and meditating on the wisdom of Sir Laurens van der Post - is a disaster. Mr Blair, however, has mostly got his image right. Enthusiasm for football and pop music and a touch of youthful rebellion go down well with the post-1945 baby boomers who form the backbone of his vote. Even the freebie holidays don’t do much damage, because getting holiday bargains is a national preoccupation. The Prime Minister is not much of a reader, we are led to understand, and the late Roy Jenkins did him a great service by describing his brain as second class. But he listens occasionally to a variety of modish thinkers, such as Anthony Giddens (the “third way” guru) and Amitai Etzioni (the American prophet of “communitarianism”). His wife, Cherie, with her New Age enthusiasms, is a bit of an embarrassment but a slightly eccentric, even naughty, spouse gives a prime minister the touch of colour that can’t be permitted in his own image. Clement Attlee’s wife was repeatedly convicted of motoring offences, Mary Wilson wrote poetry, and Denis Thatcher had notoriously right-wing opinions, bordering on racism. Most of what we learn about our leaders contains a grain of truth, and probably much more. But it still gives a false picture. If you reach the top in politics, you aren’t like other people. Your overriding preoccupation is with power — for that, you will sacrifice friends, family and principle - and the more of it you have, the less ordinary you become. — The Independent
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December 7, 1901 INDIANS ABROAD Along the whole eastern coast of Africa there is scarcely an important place where Indian traders and Indian labourers may not be found. They have pushed their way into Madagascar, as French administration reports show. In the Indo-Chinese peninsula, and in the open ports on the China Sea, natives of India have log been settled as soldiers or businessmen. In Australia the large-hearted colonials will give anything to be rid of the Indian peddlers, camelmen artisans and coolies who have invaded their preserve. In all central markets in Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Arabia, Indians can be seen turning an honest penny, against innumerable difficulties. In Bokhara, Samarkand, and other large cities in Russian Central Asia Indians, few though they are, have made their influence felt on the money market. At the great annual fairs held in Russian towns thousands of miles apart, such as Kiakhta and Nijni Novogorod, English travellers have come across Indian merchants doing good business. |
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The setting sun gathers all its energy into itself. So does the Spirit when the body sleeps. O believers! Do not consume your wealth among yourselves in vain. But may there be trade out of mutual consent among you. And do not kill yourselves; for truly God has been merciful to you.
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