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The birth of EAS Justice at last |
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Back to the
pavillion Sourav could have been handled with grace We, like most people, thought Sourav Ganguly should be dropped from the Indian cricket team after his unseemly scrap with the coach in Zimbabwe. And we thought it was very much in the fitness of things that he was left out of the one-day side, and that Rahul Dravid replaced him as captain.
Missing coalition
culture
Judicious imitation
Tragedy of urban
India Sexual revolution
in China Delhi
Durbar
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Justice at last A criminal getting punished for his black deeds should be a fairly routine happening. But in Gujarat, such “routine” is rather an exception, at least after the 2002 post-Godhra riots. There have been far too many acquittals for want of evidence. In such circumstances, the news about the Godhra fast track court sentencing 11 accused to life imprisonment and three to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment in the Anjanwada rape and murder case comes as a breath of fresh air. It re-establishes some faith in law and justice. While most of the focus has been on the Best Bakery carnage, many such grisly incidents had taken place in many areas of Gujarat. Anjanwada was one of them. In this small village of Panchamahals district, 11 members of a minority community, including five women and four children, were killed, their bodies cut to pieces and dumped in a pond on March 2, 2002. That was not the only bestiality. The women were earlier gangraped and tortured by the attackers. The prime accused and 10 others will now spend their life behind bars for this heinous crime. While this is a heartening development, what should not be forgotten is that 18 other accused have been acquitted for lack of evidence. Whether this acquittal is because they are innocent or because the evidence against them has been systematically diluted is anybody’s guess. The way the police and the government have been going about in various cases tells its own story. Just as the Gujarat riots have been condemned universally, the attempt to subvert justice has also come in for unequivocal criticism. Gujarat, the state of Gandhi, has earned a dubious reputation because of the communal insanity of a few. Repentance still does not seem to be in the air. It will be a mockery of fairplay if those responsible for the riots continue to elude punishment. Implementation of laws, it seems, has limits in secular India. |
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Back to the pavillion We, like most people, thought Sourav Ganguly should be dropped from the Indian cricket team after his unseemly scrap with the coach in Zimbabwe. And we thought it was very much in the fitness of things that he was left out of the one-day side, and that Rahul Dravid replaced him as captain. We sympathised with Rahul and the Indian team over the horrendous behaviour of the crowd at Eden Gardens during the ODI there against Sri Lanka, and wondered why a man of Sourav’s accomplishments needed to condone and feed off such behaviour; even if he did not actually incite it. And we raised a doubtful eyebrow at his inclusion in the Test squad. But surely, the bloke did not deserve to be dropped in quite the manner he was after the Ferozeshah Kotla test? Not only had he scored a useful, albeit scratchy, 40 and 39, we won this Test, didn’t we? If nothing else, the “let’s not mess with a winning combination” maxim could have been invoked. Sure, Sehwag is fit again, and young Gambhir, in spite of his single-digit scores, needs to be persisted with. But we are in the middle of a series, with only one test to go. Sourav could easily have been retained, and then, assuming the absence of a dramatic improvement in performance, (may be, the selectors were afraid of just that!), he could have been quietly left out of the side for the forthcoming clashes against Pakistan and England. May be, something happened in the dressing room that precluded the option. In the end, he wasn’t even allowed to enjoy the team’s victory. Even if reports to the effect that not a single senior player visited him are not true, Sourav would have been one lonely man. His animated, on-field, attempts at bonhomie and camaraderie now take on a pathetic feel. The famed “scrapper” has been dealt what may be a fatal blow. If he does manage to stage a comeback, and the West Bengal fans avoid their customary excesses, he will find that he has a few more sympathisers than the last time. |
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Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. |
Missing coalition culture YET again the country is facing the painful paradox that while coalitions have become absolutely unavoidable, there is an absolute lack of coalition culture. To expect the necessary culture to evolve in the foreseeable future would be a classic case of the triumph of hope over experience. The record during the six years of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was dismal enough; that during the nineteen months of the United Progressive Alliance’s reign is no better, to say the least. The current shouting and screaming over the interest rates on the Employees’ Provident Fund is the latest but by no means the last example of the way coalition partners, big and small, including supporters “from outside”, try to hold the government to ransom, often enough successfully. This year, at long last, the government and the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) were able to announce a reduction by one percentage point in the 9.5 per cent rate of interest on the EPF. A vigorous onslaught by the Left Front, heavily dominated by the CPM, instantly followed. The Left parties are aggressively demanding the restoration of the 9.5 per cent interest rate for the EPF at a time when all other interest rates on savings have been slashed to 5 per cent or less. During a short few days since then the government’s attitude has changed thrice and no one yet knows what the final outcome would be. At one stage it looked that the government might backtrack on the EPF issue also, as it had earlier done on the completely harmless proposal to sell only 10 per cent of the equity of BHEL, which would still have left the “navratna” undertaking firmly under public ownership and government control. For, the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, had said that he would “discuss” the matter with the Labour Minister and “see” what could be done. But in his remarks to the media party accompanying him to Kuala Lumpur, he stated, categorically and sensibly, that the EPFO can fix whatever interest rate it wants, provided it pays out of its own resources and does not ask for budgetary support (for which read subsidy) that already amounts to nearly a crore of rupees a day. Yet there was a further twist to the tale. The Left upped the ante, especially after the Prime Minister’s remark at Kuala Lumpur that foreign direct investment in retail trade might be allowed. The Labour Minister, Mr Chandrashekhar Rao, meekly stated that he would discuss the matter again with the Prime Minister and would go by his “advice”. The Left is adamant that the 9.5 per cent rate of interest on EPF must be retained at all costs. If the exchequer cannot pay the necessary subsidy, let there be a PF cess. In other words, all taxpayers must fork out more money so that the trade unions that evidently hold the Left parties in their thrall can be pampered. Incidentally, the unionised workers total only 9 per cent of the work force. Whatever the final decision on this subject, the critically important question is whether any kind of governance is possible if the coalitions ruling the country continue to function, if that be the right word, as they have been doing so far. To go back no further than 1998 when Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee formed his first government (the 13-day wonder in May 1996 is totally irrelevant), Ms Jayalalithaa brought it down within a year because Atalji was in no position to accept her persistent demand that the Union government should withdraw the criminal cases filed against her by the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, that had preceded hers. The Vajpayee government Mark-II was more stable. But at no stage was it allowed to function unhindered by the arbitrary demands and unseemly antics of the BJP’s 23 coalition partners. Ms Mamata Banerji, even while being a Cabinet minister, forced the Vajpayee government to roll back more than half a dozen decisions. Mr George Fernandez, forced to resign as Defence Minister because of the Tehelka expose, virtually bamboozled the Prime Minister to bring him back into his old job while the judicial inquiry into the allegations against him was still on. Absolutely in clover was Mr Chandrababu Naidu, the Telugu Desam Party leader and the then Chief Minister. He could dictate to the Centre simply by punching a few buttons on his satellite mobile phone. The UPA’s — or more accurately Dr Manmohan Singh’s — troubles have come primarily from the Left Front, which really means the CPM. But, before his deserved deflation in the latest assembly elections in Bihar, the redoubtable Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav also used to throw his considerable weight around. His worst deed was to compel the good Doctor to commit an unconstitutional act by dissolving the However, Laluji’s wings are now clipped. But the constantly uneasy relationship between the Left Front and the Congress, the core of the UPA, remains a matter of deep concern. For, the tension and the tussle between the two sides hold up an uncomfortably large number of policy decisions, especially in the realm of economic reforms. The acrimony that had arisen over disinvestments in public sector undertakings in general and the sale of a fraction of the BHEL equity in particular set a precedent that enables the Left Front to force the government to “roll back” decisions that the comrades don’t like. More disturbingly, after India’s perfectly understandable vote at Vienna on Iran’s nuclear activities in September at the meeting of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Left went ballistic. It attacked the government for having “succumbed to American pressure” and threatened that it would “not tolerate” a repetition of a vote against Iran, a “friendly and nonaligned country”. As it happened, no vote on Iran was needed at the November 24 meeting of the IAEA Board. None is likely in the near future. But what happens if Iran implements its threat to start enriching uranium that it had “suspended” as a result of negotiations with the European Union? Of course, there is no danger, for the foreseeable future at least, of the Left Front bringing the UPA government down. But what good will this do if, in its determination to exact its pound of flesh on almost all major issues, the Left paralyses
the government?
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Judicious imitation Whenever
I have to attach a certificate of originality to my piece of writing sent to newspapers and magazines, I remember the great critic-poet T.S. Eliot’s words: “A bad writer borrows, a good writer steals.” And were we to take the words too literally, we would be plodding and tumbling through the world literature unendingly, trying to sift the bad writers from the good ones. Eventually, we would emerge with the conviction that the blessed thing called “originality” is nowhere in sight. Where is originality, indeed!! Take Shakespeare, for example. Peeping critics and erudite researchers have pried deep enough to declare that most of his plays are derivative, except perhaps The Merry Wives of Windsor. And this one they allege is the weakest. The rest of the themes are borrowed from all possible sources — Plutarch’s Lives, folklore, and history. O, what price originality? Who is for that matter original? Kalidas? Well, but his Shakuntalam is based on the mythological story of King Dushyant and Shakuntala. V.S. Khandekar’s Yayati, the Jnanpeeth award-winning novel in Marathi, has the Pauranic story of Yayati and Devyani. This can be said of a host of other works. In the post-modernist era, however, this is called “return to roots” and is a valid method to tell and re-tell a story. We often trace the origin of the title of Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, to John Donne’s lines: “No man is an island entire of itself,” and Scott F. Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night to a poem “Already with thee tender is the night.” We can find the echo of Byron’s “As soon, seek roses in December, ice in June” in Roses in December, the title of the autobiography of M.C. Chagla. Some time back there raged a controversy over. T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland that it was a copy of Robert Ian Scott’s poem Waste Land published in the September 1914 issue of Poetry, a Chicago magazine. A similar debate was associated with Dr Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the Lincoln Monument, “I have a dream”. Another writer often charged of “appropriating ideas” is William Golding. His famous novel Lord of the Flies is an adaptation of Coral Island and his Pincher Martin is based on a true account of a sailor’s diary. Interestingly, Beethovan once cribbed from his own compositions and sent the work to his flabbergasted publisher who probably took it as a big joke. In India we have a theory that absolves us of all kind of plagiarism; we believe that no human whim, passion, emotion is virgin or untouched because Ved Vyas, the great sage-composer has handled all aspects of human behaviour. This leaves a big question mark on the very concept of originality. And so, to my editors who want a certificate of originality, I readily give it, asserting, “my article is original”, though it be, as Voltaire would have said just “judicious
imitation”. |
Tragedy of urban India Unfortunately, a culture of apathy has penetrated so deeply into our society that citizens have virtually lost all sensitivities and become oblivious of their civic obligations and also of their responsibility to the future generations. That is why the vested interests are able to have their way. They can secure the removal of inconvenient officers and even of ministers. Circumvention of the orders passed by the highest court of the land is also not beyond their capacity. They know that a few voices would be raised here and there for a couple of days and then everything would be forgotten. The case of the Vishwas Nagar colony, where 12 persons were burnt alive on December 7 in a fire in an illegally run factory, typifies the state of affairs that obtains in the Capital. This colony is one of the 16 residential colonies in which all sorts of illegalities, rooted in political and bureaucratic corruption, were sought to be regularised by changing the land use from residential to industrial on the ground that 70 per cent of the units were being used as factories. The percentage of 70 was worked out in a perceptional survey by three junior officers of the Industries Department of the Delhi Government. An obliging DDA also passed a resolution favouring the proposal. Nothing could be more agonising than this. An Authority that had been created to secure planned development of Delhi was willing to abandon its raison d’ etre to please the political elements for whom power, through fair or foul means, had become an end itself. I strongly opposed the move. I also filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court before which this case came up as an offshoot of another case,
M. C. Mehta vs. Union of India. Quoting from my affirmations, the Supreme Court, in its
judgment of May 2004, said: “The affidavit states that in case of a large number of residential colonies, with so-called 70% concentration of industries of which the entire land use is sought to be changed from residential to industrial, should the master plan be amended to destroy its very soul and structure or subvert the basic norms of health, habitation and environment or reward the illegal establisher of industries and in the process penalise the law-abiding residents and condemn them to stay forever in industrial areas or force them to abandon their houses built with hard-earned income?” Soon after the filing of above affidavit, I was moved to another ministry. Thereafter, the Ministry of Urban Development changed the stand taken by me and filed another affidavit referring vaguely to “broad guidelines for Master Plan for Delhi 2021”. The Supreme Court saw through the game that was being played in partnership with the Delhi government and the DDA. Criticising the role of the DDA and the Delhi government, the court observed: “The facts demonstrate that the state government and the Delhi Development Authority have been wholly remiss in all their functions, duties and obligations”. The Court also termed the revised stand of the ministry as implausible and contrasted it with the principled stand taken by me earlier. It ordered that all illegal factories operating in the residential areas should be closed down within a time-frame indicated for different categories. The time-limit is over in all cases. And yet the illegal industries are functioning as is evident from the fire-tragedy of Vishwas Nagar. What is worse and what shows both the power of the vested interests and the little respect which our political and bureaucratic leadership shows to the principles of fairness and justice, the proposals to amend the Master Plan and convert 16 residential colonies into industrial ones have been proceeded with and decisions to make the changes taken. All the unassailable arguments given and principles and propositions laid down by the Supreme Court in one of its greatest judgements have been virtually ignored. An unholy alliance of unsavoury elements in our civic and national set-up is tearing apart the physical and moral fabric of urban India. In fact, in one form or the other, the tragedy of the type that happened in Vishwas Nagar on December 7 is happening all the time in our cities. According to a study conducted by the World Bank, about 30,000 pre-mature deaths, 17 million respiratory hospital admissions and 1.2 billion restricted activity days are occurring annually in Indian cities due to a poor quality of environment caused by large-scale violations of civic and planning laws. The fundamental question that faces us today is: will some elevated souls emerge from amongst us and give a fight to the predatory forces that have taken hold of our cities; or will we persist with our casualness and indifference and leave nothing but a hell hole of urban blight as our legacy? The writer is a former Union Minister of Urban Development |
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Sexual revolution in China When
logging online became possible in China in 1995, the authorities cannot have imagined that a decade later millions of people would crash an internet provider in their efforts to access a website where they could listen to a 27-year-old female blogger having sex. But that is what happened when the publicity-hungry Muzi Mei released a 25-minute recording of an encounter with her latest lover. The former sex columnist, who shot to fame in 2003 after she started publishing graphic accounts of her many one-night stands on her blog, symbolises the sexual revolution in China. Political freedom may be unattainable, but the bedroom is the one place the government cannot monitor and young people are taking advantage. Not only are they having more sex than their parents ever did, they are doing it far earlier. A survey by Li Yinhe, China’s only female sexologist, shows that 70 per cent of Beijingers have had pre-marital sex, compared with 15.5 per cent in 1989. In the major cities, the average age at which people in the 14-to-20 age group first have sex is 17, as opposed to 24 for those aged between 31 and 40. The new permissiveness means that being faithful to one’s partner is no longer obligatory; a March 2005 survey revealed that a third of young people in urban areas believe extra-marital affairs should be tolerated. Professor Li, who teaches at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has spent 10 years researching the sex lives of the Chinese, and she believes China will “catch up” with the West in terms of sexual practices within 20 years. But judging by the 50,000 people who flocked to last month’s Sex and Culture festival in Guangzhou city in southern Guangdong Province to browse the latest in sex toys - 70 per cent of the world’s total are made in the province - it may be sooner than that. It is a far cry from the days of the Cultural Revolution, when sex was branded as “decadent”. Then, women were banned from wearing skirts and dresses, and the authorities were far more concerned about controlling what people got up to in their spare time. “There used to be a whole layer of government involved in snooping into people’s lives,” Professor Li said. “People were fired for having affairs and punished for living with their boyfriends or girlfriends.” Some sociologists believe the policy introduced in 1979 restricting urban couples to having just one child was the spark for the sexual permissiveness. Professor Pan Suiming, of the Renmin University of China, said: “The one-child policy shattered the Confucian belief that reproduction is the only purpose of sex.” But the internet has really fuelled the sexual revolution in China. With more than 100 million internet users and sex education in its infancy, young people turn to the internet for everything from information about sex to pornography, which is illegal in China. In the absence of a pub culture, they also use it to meet partners. Some surveys claim 30 per cent of all one-night stands in China are arranged on the web. Unsurprisingly, this new-found sexual freedom has a negative side. The number of young single women having abortions has soared: 65 per cent of women terminating pregnancies in 2004 were single, compared to 25 per cent in 1999. |
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Delhi Durbar The
pride of parliamentarians has taken a beating after the cash-for-question scandal was captured on camera through a sting operation. There is hushed talk about what needs to be done. To raise the hackles, a Left MP remarked that “it is only the nondescript MPs who have been caught so far. The big fish who do this regularly cannot be touched.” The Left MPs are walking with a spring in their steps. The reason: none of them is involved thus far. Of the 11 tainted MPs, the largest number of six belong to the BJP, three to the Bahujan Samaj Party and one each to the Congress and the RJD. Lalu sore with Jayaprada After the defeat of the RJD in Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav has gone into a shell He nurses a grouse against Samajwadi Party MP and cine star Jayaprada for having campaigned against the RJD. He feels Jayaprada’s presence in Bihar might have cut into his vote bank of Yadavs and Muslims. A wag observed that politics is quite a leveller. No leader, however charismatic, can take the electorate for granted. Sharmila Tagore and AIDS Noted film actress Sharmila Tagore is the new UNICEF goodwill ambassador to fight AIDS. An estimated 220,000 children are HIV/affected in this country. Ms Tagore emphasises that children need to be assured that “we stand between them and death.” When Sharmila Tagore was urged to kiss the HIV-hit children for a photograph, she obliged demurely, acceding to the second request only. Kashmiri food in Lahore Plans are afoot to hold a Kashmiri food festival in Lahore in March next year. The idea of showcasing Kashmiri food in Pakistan appears to have appealed to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. The J and K Tourism Corporation is expected to host the event during the Basant or the festival of kites in Lahore in the first quarter of 2006. Politics in education Despite the hue and cry about increasing politicisation of educational institutions, political parties do not keep away even from academic functions. The function to lay the foundation stone of a distance education centre of Himachal Pradesh University last week was attended by some AICC leaders. One of them shared the dais with Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh and addressed the gathering. The university community was present in large numbers but most of the teachers were from the “Congress cell” of the
university. |
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From the pages of Is Mrs Besant a foreigner?
That Mrs Besant is by birth a foreigner to India, no man who has anything better to do would care to affirm. But in everything except as regards the place of her birth, Mrs Besant is as much as Indian as any son or daughter of the Motherland and is far more an Indian than the majority of Indians. For years India has been her adopted motherland, and the energy, devotion and single-mindedness with which she has served her could not have been excelled if she had been her real motherland. Only the crown of martyrdom was wanting and it was supplied last year by an obliging Government. It was in recognition of this fact, and not for any extraneous advantage which her presidency would confer upon the people of India, that the vast majority of members of the Provincial Congress Committee elected her to the Presidential chair of the Congress last year and the whole country acclaimed the choice. |
Sport and play are the mind’s amusement. — Guru Nanak One whose guest lives without food and drink loses all goodwill. —
The Upanishads Why are you trampling on me now? “The day’s not far when I will trample upon you.” — Kabir When the veil of falsehood is dropped, Truth is self evident. — Islam |
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