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Touching 9,000 The Lakshman Rekha |
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Pawar play
Divide and lose
Howrah’s child
News analysis Islamabad playing games? Reinventing post office
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Touching 9,000 EVERY time the Bombay Stock Exchange index crosses a milestone — as it did on Monday by touching the 9000 mark before settling at 8994.94 — the usual question asked amidst celebrations is: what next? Will it continue rising or slide? The common man may be forgiven for asking: why the hullabaloo? What’s happening? That may surprise the regular market observer. However, the fact is the economic reality on the ground has not changed that dramatically. But then stock investors also keep an eye at future growth possibilities, which, even the pessimists and the government’s critics may agree, are immense. The present upsurge in stock prices began in 2003 and has been fuelled by the continuous flow of money into the stock markets from foreign and domestic institutional investors. Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) alone have bought stocks worth $7.75 billion in India so far this year. The Indian growth story is widely believed. This is despite the Leftist barriers to FDI and less-than-rosy latest corporate results, which led to FIIs pulling out Rs 3,800 crore in October. The domestic mutual funds, sitting on piles of idle money, then vigorously entered the market and arrested any further fall of the BSE Sensex. FIIs too soon returned to join the party. India is not the only country where equities are so hotly chased. The key US and UK indices now rule at a four-year high. Japan’s Nikkei has reached the level it last touched in December, 2000. In the last one month Turkey, Russia and Japan have made more gains than India. Globally, equities are back in demand. This is partly due to the hope that the US recovery would gain momentum. There are two other major developments driving up the stock indices: the global oil prices are on the retreat following lower demand for energy in winter and the US Federal Reserve has ruled out any further hikes in the interest rates after the two expected ones in December. The global economic outlook has turned positive. |
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The Lakshman Rekha Chief Justice of India Justice Y.K. Sabharwal’s statement that the judiciary is not treading on the legislature and the executive needs to be viewed against the Union Law Minister’s statement made earlier about the supremacy of the judiciary. The CJI’s opinion that it is the Supreme Court’s duty to keep both the executive and the legislature within the constitutional limits represents a realistic portrayal of the apex court’s importance in the scheme of things envisioned in the Constitution. The judiciary’s actual position is not being exaggerated; it derives its powers from the Constitution. Through the power of judicial review, the Supreme Court can declare any law passed by Parliament or state legislatures or any order passed by the executive as null and void if it falls foul of the Constitution. There is no need for judicial intervention if the legislature and the executive function within the prescribed parameters. It is because of this extraordinary power of judicial review that the Supreme Court is regarded as the sentinel and final interpreter of the Constitution. Unfortunately, this issue has been often blown out of proportion because of the lack of appreciation of the judiciary’s role. There is also an erroneous impression that only the legislature and the executive represent the people. In a parliamentary democracy, the judiciary too represents the people. In this context, Justice Sabharwal has rightly said that when the Supreme Court declares that the legislature or the executive has transgressed its constitutional limits, the judgement is a decision on behalf of “we, the people of India”, to whom the legislature and the executive are accountable. Ideally, the legislature, the executive and the judiciary should maintain the delicate balance stipulated in the Constitution and avoid any confrontation. The Law Minister perhaps was not seeking a confrontation with the Supreme Court on the question. He could just be voicing the usual feelings of the executive branch when it experiences difficulties with the court’s constitutional interpretations. There can also be such irritating occasions in future in relationship between different institutions. The matter will always rest with the Supreme Court’s verdict, however. This is as it ought to be. |
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Pawar play Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s election as President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) would be welcomed if only for the reason that this has ended the long monopoly of Mr Jagmohan Dalmiya. Mr Dalmiya and his self-perpetuating politics had reduced the BCCI to a private estate; so much so that even when he had to step down he was confident of ruling by proxy. With that period over and the emergence of Mr Pawar at the helm, the BCCI has much to do as it looks ahead. Mr Pawar, who won handsomely – 20 votes against Ranbir Singh Mahendra’s 11 – struck the right note when he said that his immediate task will be to improve the basic infrastructure of cricket in the country. Hopefully, Mr Dalmiya will take the results sportingly and cooperate in this endeavour. This imperative has long been neglected, thanks to the cash-rich BCCI’s preoccupation with its cricket politics. One pre-requisite for Mr Pawar to carry the play forward is to eliminate politics and the politicking that had vitiated the functioning of the BCCI. He is a political leader, but he is sufficiently astute to know that politics should have no place in cricket and its development, least of all in selection matters. Cricket has national appeal and it is of utmost importance that basic infrastructure for the game is created across the country — the cities, towns and rural areas. Provision of facilities such as trainers and stadia is especially important in places that have not received adequate attention in the past. In moving towards these, the BCCI under Mr Pawar should not let up on the priority of building Team India for the World Cup in 2007. The men in blue, despite some uplifting performances, such as against Sri Lanka, still have much ground to cover before the crucial contest. India must aim for it. |
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All that we see or seem — Edger Allan Poe |
Divide and lose WHILE sections within two of India’s most ideologically driven and, as a result, sectarian parties — the BJP and the CPM — have recently woken up to the perils of their divisive politics, a third, the RJD of Mr Lalu Yadav, has been taught the same lesson by the electorate. The difference between the first two parties and the RJD is that some members of the former saw the incompatibility of dogma with good governance during their stints in power, while Mr Yadav remained blind to the link. Yet, as Mr L.K.Advani acknowledged even before praising Jinnah’s secularism, “to rule India, we have to be inclusive”. Evidently, this realisation wouldn’t have dawned on the man, who had single-handedly whipped up communal passions during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, but for his experience in office. Before becoming a minister at the Centre, he evidently believed that the BJP’s brand of politics favouring Hindus was a sure recipe for political success. Similarly, Mr Buddhadev Bhattacharjee would not have described the Marxism practised in the early years of the CPM’s reign in West Bengal as “rigid” but for the difficulties he is now facing in trying to revive the state’s economy. It was only when became the Chief Minister that he realised that provoking industrial unrest, which his party believed would lead to a proletarian revolution, was harmful for the state’s economic growth. As a result of this experience, both Mr Advani and Mr Bhattacharjee are now seeking to refashion their ideology in order to secure their grip on power. In the former’s case, the realisation may have come rather late and may not be whole-hearted. But Mr Bhattacharjee seems to have sensed the need for dumping his ideology, or at least parts of it, at the right moment, just over a year before the assembly elections in West Bengal. Mr Lalu Yadav, however, never saw the connection between good governance and his support for entrenched traditional beliefs which divided people on the basis of the accident of their birth. In his case, his ideology, if the concept of “social justice” can be dignified with that name, was unabashed casteism, the familiar hallmark and bane of Hinduism, especially in the Hindi heartland. Since Bihar’s society has long been divided on these lines, he can be said to have been reflecting the stark reality. But his failure as a leader lay in the inability and, indeed, the unwillingness to break out of the straitjacket of this particular “ideology”, as Mr Advani and Mr Bhattacharjee have done, in order to enter the modern, egalitarian world of democracy and the pursuit of “economic” happiness. Instead, Mr Lalu Yadav sought to strengthen the casteist norms, retrogressive as they are, just as Mr K.S.Sudarshan and Mr Prakash Karat, the two hawks in the saffron and communist camps, are engaged in doing in relation to Hindutva and Marxism. The RJD leader evidently believed that the primordial loyalties of caste gave him a firm grip on power and that development was a non-starter. His only innovation was to bring the Muslims into the casteist equation to broaden his appeal through the idea of the MY (Muslim-Yadav) vote bank. But that was a ruse, a temporary expedient. Essentially, his politics was based on pampering only the backward castes, especially the Yadavs, the most dominant group within this section in Bihar. He wasn’t concerned that segmented policies of this nature inevitably set the backwards against the forwards and even against the other backward castes, with the result that development suffered in a social scene marked by unrelenting tension and caste animosity. He may have also come to believe in the correctness of these divisive tactics from the immediate political dividends which they yielded, just as the Ramajanmabhoomi agitation of the BJP, and the supposedly pro-poor policies of the CPM, made these parties enjoy the fruits of political success in the 1990s and from the mid-1970s onwards, respectively. In Bihar and West Bengal, the result of banking on the kind of politics which paid little attention to economic development, was impoverishment, but it didn’t seem to matter because the ruling parties seemed virtually unassailable. It is difficult nevertheless to understand, let alone explain, why Mr Lalu Yadav — and the CPM in West Bengal before Mr Bhattacharjee became Chief Minister — consciously neglected development. But a hint of this curious, and even perverse, mindset can be discerned in the disdain for English education at the primary stage shown by Marxist economist Ashok Mitra, although he must have known that he wouldn’t have attained his own stature but for the knowledge of the “alien” language. It is possible that these parties saw in backwardness a rebuff to upper caste elitism and an assertion of their own customary lifestyle to which they had been used for centuries. Rusticity became an end in itself, an emblem of genuineness, an attitude which was reflected in Mr Mitra’s celebrated boast when he was a minister in West Bengal that he was a communist, not a gentleman. In Bihar, since only the “gentlemen” of the upper castes had earlier enjoyed the privilege of schools, hospitals, etc, while the poor had merely looked on from outside and suffered in silence, the deterioration of these facilities was not something which was to be lamented in Mr Lalu Yadav’s view. Backwardness apparently became a cherished objective rather than something to be derided. The BJP’s case is slightly different. It doesn’t extol backwardness. As Gujarat has shown, it is for prosperity, although the party can be said to be only carrying on a familiar trait of the people of the state. The focus of its hardliners, however, is only on the betterment of the majority. As the attacks on the business establishments of Muslims during the 2002 riots showed, the party would like to cripple the minorities economically. The essence of democracy, however, militates against such policies. Backwardness affects all, just as progress does. Despite the infusion of communal poison into Gujarati society by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, the moderates in the BJP know that a recurrence of riots will scare away investors. Hence, the prompt intervention by Mr Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee when the Akshardham temple was attacked. In Bihar, however, Mr Lalu Yadav’s indifference towards development meant that he didn’t care how backwardness was a burden for all. He didn’t appreciate the fact that upward mobility has its own momentum. The backwards may now face the forwards on equal terms because of the social dignity acquired by them under the RJD’s Yadav raj, and the Muslims feel more secure than before, but they also wanted bijli-sadak-pani — as well as television and mobile phones. The certitudes of the old divide-and-rule policies are, therefore, disappearing. It is no longer politically profitable to set the lower castes against their previous tormentors, or the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, or the majority against the minorities, to buttress a party’s position. If sectarianism can only take a party up to a point and no further, the reason is not only that the voters soon become wise to the political cynicism which marks the game, but also because divisive policies vitiate the atmosphere by engendering tension between the castes, the classes and the communities. And tension is fatal for development. Backwardness, therefore, is the inevitable end result of sectarian politics. So, the lesson from Bihar is not only for Mr Lalu Yadav, but also for Mr Sudarshan and Mr
Karat.
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Howrah’s child
IT was raining heavily. The night was young. The lights at the Howrah station were on, gaping at me like inflamed sores. I was waiting for the Puri Express.The sweltering heat, the continuous drone of human voices, and the harsh rumblings of engines were beginning to get on my nerves. After hovering around for a while I found a nook for myself and leant against a pillar with a creaking fan drooping overhead. As I took out my handkerchief to mop the brow, I saw her. She stood hardly two feet above the ground, her distended belly totally out of proportion with her exceptionally small body. Her frock, brown with dust, was in tatters. She moved about clumsily exploring every nook and corner with her dirty fingers. I saw her standing near the ticket counter with her back towards me. She had her fingers inserted into the wire net at the base and was fingering the dusty shoes of the counter clerk hesitantly. That occupied her for sometime. An empty paper packet engaged her attention next. She sat on her hunches and inspected the inside for any possible food-crumbs. Perhaps there was none. She threw it away and went near the Wheeler’s. Books and magazines could not hold for long. She went near the café and someone offered her half a biscuit that she accepted gladly. Munching it with great relish, she doddered away, a tiny, indistinct speck in the sprawling station. Dull, glassy eyes popped out of her cadaverous face making her look particularly ghastly. As she pottered about oblivious of the great crowd surging around her, she was running the risk of getting trampled under those stampeding feet. I was getting worried. I looked around for her mother. How could any mother leave her child alone in such a danger, I wondered. Or was she an orphan? However, there has to be some elder with whom she has come, I thought. How could people be so irresponsible and thought of my little son who is watched over and chaperoned wherever he goes! Just then, the kid came back running. She was so unsteady that I was afraid she would fall down and be stamped out by the great swarm of feet. I bristled with anger against her mother. These people seem to think that their responsibility ends with delivering the babies, I fumed inwardly. Presently the kid flung herself on a squatting figure and prattled on agitatedly. It was a beggar-woman, one of those permanent features at railway stations. The child played with her and was slobbered with kisses. She jumped into the woman’s arms and was dangled for a while. Her mother! Then suddenly a whim seized her and the child tried to snatch a mug from her mother. It was a discolored, misshapen one that the woman was knocking on the ground while begging the crowd to give her some money. Therefore, she was not willing to part with it. The metallic clang of an approaching train caused a heavy rush of feet and for a jiffy, the child lost her interest in the mug. Soon she regained it. The child was persistent, so was the mother. In the tug-of-war that ensued the woman turned around and I understood why she had left the child alone in that crowd. Two dark stumps jutted out from under her grimy garb. She had no
legs.
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News analysis SHIV Sena supremo Bal Thackeray is not known to be at a loss for words and neither do tears of despair roll down the cheeks of this leader who sits on a gilded throne during public appearances. But after bodyguard-turned rebel Narayan Rane bloodied the Shiv Sena’s nose in this month’s byelection at Malvan, a stunned Thackeray was reduced to tears. “Balasaheb couldn’t believe that his own people had rejected the Shiv Sena in his lifetime,” a leader close to the Thackerays told journalists. It was obvious to the 79-year-old leader that his attempt to install his son and heir Uddhav Thackeray as head of the Shiv Sena came apart at Malvan. The younger Thackeray camped in this verdant constituency bordering Goa for more than a week knocking the villagers’ doors, seeking votes for party candidate Parshuram Uparkar. Bal Thackeray himself addressed a public meeting there, a first at any byelection. In the end, Narayan Rane, who had spent the past 15 years cultivating Malvan, prevailed, bagging 78,616 votes while the Sena candidate lost his deposit with just 15,244 votes in his kitty. As it is becoming increasingly clear that the soft-spoken, cerebral Uddhav Thackeray is no chip off the old block to take over the rabble-rousing Shiv Sena, die-hard Shiv Sainiks are looking elsewhere for leadership. Hours after the debacle at Malvan, boards appeared in Mumbai’s street corners asking for a leadership change in the Shiv Sena. The hurriedly masked Shiv Sena logos on the boards indicated that it was the handiwork of the party’s rank and file clamouring for Uddhav to be replaced by his charismatic cousin, Raj Thackeray. The simmering feud between the two cousins is reaching boiling point as Raj Thackeray steps out of his self-imposed hibernation to shake up the Shiv Sena. Last weekend Raj Thackeray wrote a strongly worded letter to uncle Bal Thackeray calling for corrective action following the Malvan debacle. Sources in the Shiv Sena insist that Raj had bluntly asked for the removal of Uddhav as the party’s executive president and had even offered his resignation as head of the Bhartiya Vidyarthi Sena, the party’s student wing. Raj Thackeray followed it up by resigning from all party posts on Sunday. Hitting out at the “coterie of clerks” surrounding the party supremo, Raj accused them of humiliating him for nearly 10 years. Raj’s revolt comes amidst speculation that Uddhav Thackeray was being advised to clip his cousin’s wings by dissolving the BVS. Raj is accused of not pulling his weight in Malvan. After putting in a token appearance, Raj Thackeray stayed away from Malvan, citing health grounds. Bal Thackeray himself is said to be sore at Raj and did not invite him for a strategy planning session with senior leaders last week. Narayan Rane himself is doing his best to deepen suspicions between the two cousins. Rane told reporters in Mumbai that Raj Thackeray was in touch with him through the election campaign at Malvan. The renewal of hostilities between the Thackeray cousins comes just a few months after former Maharashtra Chief Minister and Bal Thackeray confidant Manohar Joshi brokered peace between them. Joshi, known for his close ties with Uddhav, even rewarded Raj by partnering with him to bid Rs 421 crore in the Kohinoor mills land deal. Joshi is believed to have offered Raj his share on a platter as part of efforts to make peace in the Thackeray household, but the Supreme Court order staying the sale of mill lands has freed Raj of his obligations, observers feel. The turmoil in the Shiv Sena hasn’t left even its elected members unaffected. Three of its MLAs in the Maharashtra assembly have already quit and several others are waiting to follow suit. Rane’s statement that at least six of the Sena’s 13 members of Parliament would join the Congress has only added to Raj Thackeray’s urgency to make a bid for his own political future, observers feel. Maharashtra’s political situation will depend on the decisions Raj Thackeray takes in the coming weeks. The Shiv Sena’s alliance partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party are both examining their options as Bal Thackeray’s tiger waits in the corner licking its wounds. |
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Islamabad playing games? HATS off to Pakistan’s external publicity machine for churning out wierd information. One wonders how it was not in conformity with the Islamic nation’s the military establishment’s media department. At the time when Islamabad is in the utter need of funds from the international community for quake relief, it seems the foreign ministry’s media mandarins tried to invent a ludicrous news story. They had the temerity to inform the world that the Pakistani army has recently missed Osama bin Laden by whiskers. The troops missed capturing the Al Qaeda chief by just half an hour. Surprisingly, the free world seemed to be believing the make-believe man bites the dog piece. Of course, there could have been no better place than London to project the image of a sincere ally of the Western world now deeply involved in getting rid of global terrorism, not threatening it with occasional bomb blasts but also actually carrying out the threats. That perhaps explains why this startling piece of news appeared in a British newspaper, News of the World. According to the November 13 issue of the publication, the Pakistan High Commission claimed. “We think we missed him (Bin Laden) by 30 minutes. It was the closest we have been since 2001.” Was not it something like beating about the bush? The outright lie has been nailed as there seems to be a yawning gap in coordination between the external publicity on the one hand and the Inter Services Public Relations on the other. When the newspaper Dawn contacted the Director General ISPR, Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan, subsequently on the phone, it was told that the incident had happened not this year but last year. The wicked right hand obviously did not know what the left one was up to. Can one believe that the Pakistani army, equipped with latest weapons, tanks, helicopters, communication equipment and backed by an efficient air force capable of challenging India’s armed might, is incapable of capturing the world’s most wanted terror fugitive freely roaming within its territory? The ISI is so well entrenched in the mountainous region of the country’s North-West frontier province that it is impossible for a fly to escape. It remains a mystery how Osama bin Laden, who moves with his entourage, escaped the net. Islamabad keeps getting American dollars and military assistance in the expectation that Pakistan would help the US in capturing Bin Laden and his criminal gang. The Pakistani military and the foreign ministry issue pre-planned handouts informing the world that sincere efforts are on to nab the prized terrorist hiding in the difficult terrain. Once the soldiers rounded up many poor Arabs living in Pakistan who had become a social pest. It is understood that only four Al Qaeda leaders of real consequence have been caught and handed over to the US. And that too, only after the US intelligence came to know of their sanctuaries in Pakistan and its army had no other option but to arrest them. In March, 2005, also President Pervez Musharraf, according to the BBC, had revealed that the Pakistani troops had their best chance of capturing Bin Laden from May-July 2004, after the army launched an offensive along the border with Afghanistan. It is also possible that Bin Laden is dead but his ghost is still being kept alive by wily Musharraf for the sake of getting continued US assistance. |
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Reinventing post office AN attempt has been made during the last few years to
market new products and services by the post office and use the network for money transfer, mutual funds, sale of non-judicial stamps and stamp papers, distribution of social security benefits to widows, the aged and orphans as in J and K, retailing of pre-paid cards on behalf of telecom companies and retailing insurance policies after a tie-up with Oriental Insurance Ltd. While the tie-up with Western Union Money Transfer has been a great success with 70,000 transactions taking place every month through post offices, with an average commission of Rs 500 on each transaction, some of the other tie-ups and in particular the retailing of mutual funds have not succeeded. Some of the services like logistic post and direct mail have not taken off because the pricing of these products and other parameters are without reference to market realities. The costing and pricing systems have to be reviewed to meet market conditions. For example, the competition postcard has been priced out of the market because the price was not determined with reference to market realities and technological advances such as SMS and e-mail. An increasingly large proportion of post office activities is exposed to competition. As a result, the post office has to work under the same conditions as its competitors and put its ambition of being a business-oriented enterprise before that being a government authority. In order to develop business orientation, it is necessary to define more explicitly what the post office stands for and what it can be good at in markets where it wishes to operate. It is quite remarkable that its basic products — letters, printed matter, parcels, financial services etc — have lasted so long. The chief resource of the post office is its nationwide network. We have post offices and a delivery system which comes in contact with every household every day. Our primary objective should, therefore, be to utilise the network optimally to create and provide new services either independently or in partnership with other organisations, in spheres, which are in tune with the basic activities of the post office. It has to be a well-managed diversification. The attempt should be to make the post office a single stop for all kinds of citizens’ services — be it deposit of municipal dues, income tax, school or college fees, disbursement of pensions, forms for admission to educational institutions etc. This will make the rural network viable. One thing that the post office urgently requires is the freedom to work under such conditions that it can react quickly to the demands and opportunities of the market. If this is not possible with the existing organisation, change may be urgently required. As competition increases so will pressure on the post office to become leaner and fitter. As broadband Internet and mobile phones become even more ubiquitous, as electronic substitution grows, and as demand increases for flexible deliveries and differential pricing, the justification for maintaining the universal service obligation and the monopoly that accompanies it will be increasingly seen as an expensive anachronism. But with so much employment and other interests at stake, this may happen slowly. The future is likely to favour the post office if it can mobilise resources and technology to create new products and processes, use its network for a variety of services and improve the way existing services are delivered. By doing so it would have also defeated the dire predictions that email would make physical mail obsolete. |
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From the pages of Satta gambling in Amritsar THE evil of Satta gambling in Amritsar came in for discussion at the Punjab Legislative Council last year, and a feeling appeal was made to His Honour, the Lieutenant-Governor, asking for legislative action in case executive measures were found inadequate to cope with the growing evil. His Honour expressed his fullest sympathy with the people in suffering entailed upon them, and promised his help. It was announced shortly after that the Punjab Government had issued instructions to District Magistrates to move under the existing law, which was sufficient to cope with the evil. The effect of Government’s decision was immediate. Mr C.K. King, Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, with his usual energy, threw himself into the task of suppressing these shops and in a single day Amritsar was rid of the pest. |
And among the signs of God is that sky and earth stand by divine decree. Then when God calls you with a call from earth, you will all come forth. —Islam Let each man follow his own path (religion). If he sincerely and ardently wishes to know God...He will surely realise him. —Ramakrishna All is not lost if you have sinned. It is never too late to start on God’s path. All you need is true repentance and the determination not to sin again. —The Buddha If you know you are alive, find the essence of life. Life is the sort of guest you don’t meet twice. —Kabir Countless are those who rule with tyranny. Countless are those who murder the innocent. They commit crimes all their lives and leave behind a record of sins and crimes. —Guru Nanak To God belongs everyone in the heavens and the earth: all are obedient to God. —Islam
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