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Bloated babudom Designs in demolition |
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Pramod
Mahajan
Sad state of the Congress
Love needs no language
Beheading of Tripta Global warming unprecedented
in 20,000 years Delhi Durbar
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Bloated babudom Like their counterparts in most other states, leaders of Punjab talk about the need for administrative reforms. But someone forgot to tell them that these improvements cannot come about without rightsizing the bloated bureaucracy. Perhaps that is why, instead of paring the number, they are adding on to it. Worse, these new jobs are being created right at the top, making the administration hopelessly top-heavy. Imagine there being — hold your breath — as many as 14 officers of the rank of Chief Secretary, against just one cadre post. In other words, all IAS officers belonging to batches from 1969 to 1973 have been given the scale of Chief Secretary. Things do not stop at that. There are also 21 Principal Secretaries or Financial Commissioners against 11 cadre posts and 11 Additional Directors-General of Police against six cadre posts. Needless to add, there is also the usual paraphernalia attached with each of these worthies. Top jobs have not expanded because of increased workload. It is just that when a particular favourite officer has to be given out-of-turn promotion, all those senior to him are also kicked upstairs. Then there is also the consideration of pulls from influential lackeys and sycophants. The end result is that there are far too many posts chasing far too little work. Some officials themselves admit that they have work only to keep them engaged for two hours a day (even that may be an exaggeration in some cases). No wonder quite a few of them can be seen more often at the golf club than at their own offices. This huge army not only leads to huge financial burden, it also debilitates administration in another indirect way. The malaise starting form the top has to seep downwards. An officer who is virtually redundant himself has no moral strength to decrease staff strength lower down. As a result, the whole machinery continues to add flab. It will take very strong political leadership to take this obese elephant by the ears and make it shed weight. |
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Designs in demolition HOPEFULLY, the situation in Vadodara will soon be brought to normalcy. Even Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who never raised a finger against Gujarat pogrom in 2002, has felt compelled to visit the town and warn the miscreants against taking the law into their own hands. Unlike the NDA government earlier, the Central government, too, is forthright this time and means business when it asks the state to put down violence with a firm hand. Prey, how did things go out of control in Vadodara and who is to blame for it? The Vadodara Municipal Council has an ambitious plan to widen the roads in the city. The local court, too, wants all encroachments on the road to be removed to facilitate the widening of the road. There was one dargah of Sufi saint Syed Rashiuddin Chisti, which too was declared as an encroachment. It is a different matter how a nearly 400-year-old structure fits the description of “encroachment”. Whatever be the case, the BJP’s own minority cell chief is on record about a compromise formula that had been evolved to save at least a portion of the dargah, which would not have hindered the widening work. Unfortunately, the Mayor of Vadodara was in no mood to wait and got the dargah, which survived on Hindu munificence for centuries, demolished post-haste, something which the communalists had failed to accomplish in the past despite many attempts. This naturally antagonised a section of the minorities, whose protest was met with police bullets in which five of them were killed. It is difficult to believe that the whole episode had no political overtones. People of the Mayor’s ilk, perhaps, thought that one way of consolidating the BJP’s hold on the electorate with a view to winning the next elections due in 2007 was to provoke the Muslims. After all, it was the communal polarisation in the state following the torching of two compartments of the Sabarmati Express that helped Mr Modi win the elections last time. Even if there is an iota of truth in this perception, it does not redound to the credit of the BJP, which claims that good governance and development are enough to see the party through the next elections. In any case, it is a pity that a party, which wants to build a great future for Gujarat, sees in the demolition of a decrepit dargah a window of opportunity. |
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Pramod Mahajan General
secretary of the BJP he may have been, but Pramod Mahajan always set
forth as if he was a general launching into battle. Regardless of his
party designation, he was the organisation’s man for all seasons and
reasons. Sharp, resourceful and aggressive, he packed equal punch both as a doer and a speaker. As a doer, he stopped at nothing on the way to the goal, which was a mix of personal ambition and party objectives. He saw himself as a future Prime Minister, more so after Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee had anointed him as Lakshman of the Ram party. Unfortunately, that can never be after his brother pulled the trigger on him, leading to a tragedy that has wounded deeply the family, party and his large following. Mahajan excelled as an organiser and fund-raiser. Although the “Shining India” campaign, which he had conceived and implemented, was a cop-out for the BJP in the last Lok Sabha elections, he had several other electoral successes to his credit. He revelled in mobilising both the masses and the moneyed class. For a lad, who rose from a village school, he quickly learnt the ropes for dealing with the rich and powerful of India Inc. It was he who sold the BJP to India’s corporate czars and made them stakeholders in the party’s political fortunes. As a fund-raiser, he was in the tradition of Congress leaders S.K. Patil and Rajni Patel, except that the capital required to marry today’s economy to politics is vastly more than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the most visible and effective of the BJP’s Gen Next leaders with excellent trans-party relations. In his lifestyle, which he brought to the party too, Mahajan personified the anti-thesis of all that the Sangh parivar projected with its righteous and moralistic posturing. Brash, flamboyant, big-spending, he was never a favourite of the RSS. For all his reckless disregard of the parivar ideology, the RSS realised that he was the party’s biggest asset, in many senses of the term. His demise will leave the BJP deeply deprived as well as disheartened at a time when it is in a sea of troubles. |
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You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. — Irish proverb |
Sad state of the Congress CONGRESS is in disarray”. The words are not mine or of any other outsider. These have come from the veteran Congress leader and Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Mr Arjun Singh, who has taken care to add that this was how “others” saw the once grand old party. The time and place of his observation make it all the more intriguing. Against the backdrop of the ongoing controversy and agitation over the proposed reservation of 27 per cent seats for the OBCs in institutions of higher learning, he had called a formal press conference on Sunday, arousing expectations that he had something of great importance to announce. In the event, it turned to be an anti-climax. The sole subject of his written statement was a defamation case that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had filed against him nearly three years ago in a subordinate court in the Jagadhari town of Haryana. The RSS is aggrieved that he allegedly accused it of “murdering the Mahatma”. Mr Arjun Singh’s legitimate complaint is that the case has dragged on, like a bad Bollywood film, and ought to be expedited. However, if the objective were to seek speedier justice, not political posturing, a suitable petition to a higher judicial authority would have sufficed. Yet, Mr Singh used the occasion to project himself as the Congress leader most determined to “oppose and expose” the RSS. Significantly, those covering the press conference downplayed the RSS issue and played up his evidently bitter complaint against the Science and Technology Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, accusing him of “talking out of turn” on a subject that was not within his domain and of lack of “decorum” expected of a Cabinet minister. Because of “decorum”, Mr Singh did not disclose what exactly he had said to the Prime Minister but made it clear that he expected Dr Manmohan Singh to take “necessary action”. A fairly large number of Congress party members have made no secret of their surprise that Mr Sibal’s statement — that nothing should be done that might “erode” India’s ability to be competitive globally — should have been interpreted as opposition to OBC reservations in IITs and IIMs. In any case, the Technology Minister had already clarified the matter. A question widely asked, therefore, is that if the Human Resource Minister thought nothing of starting a controversy by making an announcement on a subject yet to be considered by the Union Cabinet, why should he deny others the right to have their say. Remarkably, Mr Singh refused to comment on Mr Rahul Gandhi’s view that both the advocates and opponents of OBC reservations have “valid reasons”. Since then the young man, in an interview with the Sunday Times of London, has spoken out more strongly against caste, clubbing it with poverty as the two ills “holding back India”. This does not mean that the heated debate over caste-based reservations would immediately cease within the Congress party at least. All OBC Congress MPs are planning to meet both the Prime Minister and the Congress president to press home their demand for “no compromise” on the issue of 27 per cent reserved seats for the backward castes at IITs and IIMs. At least two Cabinet ministers, Mr P. Chidambaram and Mr Vyalar Ravi, have also supported these reservations though the former has entered the caveat that seats in institutions of higher learning must also be increased. In a true reflection of this country’s bizarre politics, Mr Sharad Yadav, the newly elected president of the Janata Dal (United) has demanded Mr Sibal’s immediate dismissal from the Cabinet! So far the Prime Minister has maintained a discreet silence on the subject. But this does not mean that he is unaware of the damage that is being done to the Congress by the bickering among Cabinet colleagues and irresponsibly divisive statements flying around. This is particularly so because, on top of everything else, the former External Affairs Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, has chosen comprehensively to attack the government of which he was a member until some months ago. After his initial protestations over his ouster due to the Volcker report, he had maintained dignified silence. What prompted him to abandon it is not known. A protest by him against the slow pace of Justice R.S. Pathak’s inquiry — the commission has been given a three-month extension — might have been understandable. But not his outright condemnation of the government’s policy on the Nepal crisis or his distancing himself from the Indian vote at Vienna in September last or the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. To both he was a party as Foreign Minister at the time. Altogether it is quite clear that tensions and divisions that were largely latent so far have now burst into the open and look like escalating because they are unchecked. It is no secret that an increasing number of party members are extremely unhappy over the situation. They say that what is happening is reminiscent of the endgame during
P. V. Narasimha Rao’s prime ministership and yet there is no sign of anyone doing anything to enforce even a modicum of discipline. The only answer that they get, in whispers, is that they must wait until the elections to the assemblies in five states are over. But what if the general anticipation that the Congress would definitely lose in West Bengal and Kerala and probably also in Tamil Nadu turns out to be true? Wouldn’t the Congress morale be lowered further? In the words of seasoned observers, the real difficulty is that the collective interest of the party seems to be nobody’s business, and that everybody pursues only personal or parochial ends. On the other hand, some Congress spin-doctors are offering the anodyne that the kind of factionalism and bickering now tormenting the party is nothing new and has always been there. They also add smugly that the BJP, the only potential rival as an all-India party, is in a much worse plight. What these Smart Alecs forget is that what was all right when their party had two-thirds or even four-fifths majority in Parliament is no longer viable when their strength has plummeted to 145. As for the BJP’s worse plight, don’t they remember the time when the overconfident saffron party, disdainful of the Congress, was celebrating “India Shining” in the firm belief that it was returning to power for another five
years?
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Love needs no language
During a recent visit to Kerala, I hired a cab to reach Kayamkulam and knocked at the door of my destination. A benign face wearing the natural ornament of wrinkles came out. The face wore an infectious smile. She hugged me and voiced a pleasantry in Malyalam. “I have come from Chandigarh. I have got some articles for you sent by your son”, I said. I was visiting the mother of an acquaintance during the course of an assignment. She was speaking very gently showing the power of maternal feelings which did not need me to understand the dialect she
used. We shared a dialogue of knowing each other’s wellbeing. We sat for nearly an hour when my driver came and said we should be moving to catch my flight. On the flight back home, my thoughts floated back to my childhood in the outskirts of Imphal in Manipur. My parents had to rush back to our village in Punjab because of certain emergency. I was left under the care of a father’s colleague, a bachelor, in the CRPF. One day I was running high fever and moaning on the bed. A neighbour we
called “Iye” came to my room. She touched my forehead and reacted strongly with an alarm in her tone. She picked me and took me to her house. She fondled me to sleep. When my uncle came to fetch me, Iye said something in Manipuri. He left me there. I lay in her house for nearly a week. I did not know Manipuri and she did not know Hindi but we very often had very long sessions of innocent talks. Once during my college days in 1992, I went to Goa during our summer vacation in July. We hired a shack on Covalam beach. The old man at the motel reception told us about the local tours and cautioned us against going to the sea. We were always smiling back at each other. It was four days now. I told my friends: “Goa is famous only for beaches and we have not entered any waters till now”. Soon we were freaking out in the sea. It was turning dark when suddenly I felt someone jolting me violently. It was Aye Bappa. He fired verbal ammunition in Konkani. I went straight to the cab next morning. A young lad tapped on my back and gave me an envelope “Aye Bappa asked me to write for you”. I opened it in the train. It read “The radio had just announced that a storm was coming and the tide was also high. I had lost my younger son about 20 years back in the rising waters. He was just about your
age”. |
Beheading of Tripta The brutal murder of 14-year-old Tripta (name changed) from Jharkhand, in a non- descript village of Jind, hit the national headlines recently. Her “owner” beheaded her when she refused to bow before his lustful desires. Last year, the girl had been sold by her poverty-stricken mother in Ranchi, to Ajmer Singh of Dahola village in Jind for Rs 13,000. The latter had then claimed that he was ‘buying’ her as a bride for his brother. After having been kept captive in shanties in Noida and Delhi, she was brought to Dahola and kept locked in Ajmer’s farmhouse. Braving threats and starvation, she spurned Ajmer’s advances, till one day this February, Ajmer decided it was enough and in a single stroke, beheaded the girl. He has been arrested and is presently under judicial custody. Surprisingly, despite the national outrage and demands by various human rights groups and NGOs, he has been booked only on charges of murder and not for human trafficking. This is not just the story of Tripta. The declining sex ratio in the states of Punjab and Haryana, has led to increased trafficking of girls from Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, Assam and West Bengal as “made-to-order-brides”, or for sexual exploitation to get a male child, before being deserted. Sexual and economic exploitation (they are often not given enough money and food) of girls and boys being brought as domestic helps in affluent homes of Punjab and Haryana, could mean many more Triptas in the making. And not just in the two above mentioned states — trafficking of women, children and boys is an offence being committed all over the country. In fact, after the trade in arms and drugs, human trafficking is the third largest organised crime in the world. It is estimated that over two million women and children are trafficked across the world each year. Of these, 25 per cent are children. In 2002, the UN reported that seven lakh women and children were being trafficked in Asia each year. Of these, one lakh were in India. Human trafficking has been a part of our history. The socio-economic divide enshrined in our culture has made the deprived sections of society vulnerable to trafficking. However, over the last few years, the increased cases of human trafficking and the myriad forms it has taken, call for much attention. Girls are being trafficked and pushed into prostitution in Delhi and Mumbai. Boys from the country are sent as camel jockeys (they are tied on the legs of the camel and the louder the child cries, the faster the camel runs) for camel races in West Asia or to serve paedophiles on prowl, at the exotic beaches of Goa and other tourist destinations. Trafficked boys and girls are also used as drug peddlers or beggars or even as actors in the porn industry. Instances of children being used in pornographic movies, especially related to catasexuality (having sex with animals) and in gray films (sex with dead bodies), have also been reported. “It’s a harsh reality that as a nation we have failed to protect the basic human rights of the most vulnerable sections in our society — women and children,” says Dr Sunitha Krishnan of Prajwala, an NGO involved in rescuing girls trafficked from Andhra Pradesh. “India may be a booming economy, but failure of successive governments to secure the basic human rights of its women and children puts a big question mark on the holistic development of the country,” she said. “India is slowly emerging as a major hub for trafficking. This organised trade operates across borders. Not just are the women and children being trafficked from the poor states to the affluent states within the country and abroad, but a large number of trafficking from neighbouring countries of Nepal and Bangladesh is being routed through India,” says Ms Archana Tamang of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). With the Central and state governments yet to formulate an action plan to deal with the problem, members of the media, NGOs, women’s groups, aided by government agencies, have now decided to act by building effective partnerships. At a seminar organised by UNIFEM and Shakti Vahini (an NGO working against trafficking) at Goa very recently, members from these groups declared a “war” against trafficking and gender violence. It has been decided to end the era of working in isolation, and bring about a multi-partner national coalition to monitor and highlight issues related to trafficking and violence with a gender sensitive and rights based perspective. It remains to be seen to what extent this coalition will succeed in tackling the problem. What is important is that a beginning has finally been made to stir the consciousness of the nation against this crime, to sit up and take action. |
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Global warming
unprecedented in 20,000 years Global warming is made worse by man-made pollution and the scale of the problem is unprecedented in at least 20,000 years, according to a draft report by the world’s leading climate scientists. The leaked assessment by the group of international experts says there is now overwhelming evidence to show that the Earth’s climate is undergoing dramatic transformation because of human activity. A draft copy of the report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are at the highest for at least 6,50,000 years. It predicts that global average temperatures this century will rise by between 2C and 4.5C as a result of the doubling of carbon dioxide levels caused by man-made emissions. These temperatures could increase by a further 1.5C as a result of “positive feedbacks” in the climate resulting from the melting of sea ice, thawing permafrost and the acidification of the oceans. The draft report will become the fourth assessment by the IPCC since it was established in 1988 and was meant to be confidential until the final version is ready for publication next year. However, a copy of the report has been made available by a US government committee and can be found on the Internet by anyone who makes an e-mail request for a password to access the area on its website. The US Climate Change Science Programme, which released its own report saying climate change was being affected by man-made pollution, said it wanted as many experts and stakeholders as possible to comment on the draft IPCC report. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, however, did not learn of the decision to, in effect, publish the report until it was posted online, according to the journal Nature. The IPCC assessment is written by scores of scientists — who can draw on the expertise of hundreds more researchers — to produce the most definitive and authoritative assessment of climate change and its impacts. Global warming sceptics will get little comfort from the confident language in the draft report, which dismisses suggestions that climate change is an entirely natural rather than man-made phenomenon. “There is widespread evidence of anthropogenic warming of the climate system in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the free atmosphere and in the oceans,” it says. “It is very likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the past 50 years. And it is likely that greenhouse gases alone would have caused more warming than has been observed during this period, with some warming offset by cooling from natural and other anthropogenic factors.” Since its last report in 2001, the IPCC’s working group says it has amassed convincing evidence showing that climate change is already happening. It also finds that climate change is set to continue for decades and perhaps centuries to come even if man-made emissions can be curbed. — By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Delhi Durbar Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was scheduled to campaign in West Bengal early this week, but he called off his trip at the last moment. Although nobody is saying so officially, Dr Singh apparently decided to drop his travel plans as he did not want to criticise West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, which would have been difficult as the Congress is pitted against the Left parties in this state. It is well known that the Prime Minister has a personal rapport with Bhattacharya, whom he has often described as a “model Chief Minister”. Even when he campaigned in Kerala, Dr Singh had refrained from criticising the Left parties and had referred to them as “our valued allies.” This had embarrassed the state Congress unit since it is engaged in a do-or-die battle with the Marxists. However, party president Sonia Gandhi compensated by lambasting the Left parties while campaigning in Kerala and West Bengal.
NAC’s future after Sonia The political class here is busy debating the future of the National Advisory Council (NAC) after Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s exit as its chairperson. While the BJP wants its abolition on the ground that its tasks can be handled by the PMO, UPA leaders feel that NAC is meaningless without Sonia Gandhi as its head. They maintain that NAC enjoyed a high profile only because it was headed by Mrs Gandhi but without her, it will be just another government organisation. A Union Minister, whose party is an important ally of the Congress, has said that he would suggest to the Congress president not to rejoin this post, because of which she had been given the status of a Cabinet Minister.
The problem of two BJPs The BJP has more than one reason to be worried after its expelled firebrand leader Uma Bharati floated her new party. For one, the BJP does not have a leader who can match her mass appeal and oratorial skills. On top of all this, she has made things more difficult by naming her party as the Bharatiya Janshakti Party whose abbreviation is also BJP. While the main Opposition party is still smarting, the Congress has seized this opportunity to take potshots at the BJP. Describing the BJP as the Bharatiya Janjhat Party, Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi could not resist likening this development to the “buy one, get one free” sales offers currently in vogue.
MEA to be split The high-profile publicity division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is in the process of getting a complete make-over as it is being split into two departments. While one will deal with the media, the new one called the department of public diplomacy will have a wider mandate, covering all the publicity films and books sanctioned by the ministry to showcase India and put across the country’s viewpoint. Three key officers — Director Dinesh Bhatia, OSD (PR) Shambhu Kumaran and Under Secretary Vipul are all set to take on their new assignments. However, MEA spokesperson Navtej Sarna appears to be firmly entrenched, having successfully survived this latest round of changes. —
Contributed by Rajeev Sharma, Prashant Sood and Anita Katyal |
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From the pages of Subhash Chandra Bose
The reported death of Babu Subhash Chandra Bose in a Japanese hospital from injuries received in an air crash removes one of the topmost and most striking figures from India’s contemporary public life. For four years Mr Bose had been engaged in activities with which political India had no sympathy and which the overwhelming majority of the countrymen, irrespective of their party affiliations, thoroughly condemned, even though they fully shared the view of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru that his major motive was the same as theirs, the attainment of his country’s freedom. He certainly laboured under a grave delusion, almost incredible in a person of his great intelligence and clearheadedness, which he persuaded himself to believe that the freedom of his country could ever be won with the help of a foreign country, and a country which had in the past forcibly deprived so many countries of their freedom and which in the present war itself was undoubtedly striving to put down both freedom and democracy in the world.
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The believers should not take up a hostile attitude so long as no material injury is caused to them. The guiding principle of peace is that one should not be offended at the slightest opposition to one’s feelings. — The Koran He sleeps soundly who is undisturbed by the conflict of his emotions and desires. — The Upanishadas Begging is like perishing... no one should implore. It is better to die than beg. — Kabir 
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