O P I N I O N S

EDITORIALS

SC on pardon
Judicial review will check abuse of power
The Supreme Court has rightly ruled that the President or the Governor’s power of pardon, reprieve or remission of a convict’s sentence is in a way subject to judicial review. Clearly, judicial review will act as an essential constitutional safeguard against arbitrary exercise of power by the executive. Significantly, Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.H. Kapadia quashed the remission of sentence granted to a convict by Mr Sushil Kumar Shinde, the then Andhra Pradesh Governor and now the Union Power Minister.

Court to farmers’ rescue
States must make own efforts too
Farmers’ suicide has become a larger issue. Ideally, the Supreme Court should have asked the Union and state governments about the alarming number of suicides by farmers in various parts of the country. The intervention by the Punjab and Haryana High Court on this vital issue is nonetheless commendable.

• Thought for the day

ARTICLE

Land, language, progress
Infrastructure deficit triggers a debate
by B.G. Verghese
There is a furious debate raging across India. The headlines talk of and variously juxtapose SEZ, land, infrastructure, farming, modernisation, food security, dams, compensation, rural-urban, public-private, “jobs” vs “employment” (a distinction little understood), rural vs urban, agriculture vs industry, labour vs capital, mother tongue vs English.

MIDDLE

Rating Red Fort
by Parbina Rashid
IT defies logic why I have always compared the Red Fort with the Taj Mahal and found the former always more awe-inspiring than the latter. So much so that I treasured the colourful shell necklace my father had bought for me from one of the souvenir shops of the fort during my first visit much more than the miniature Taj he had bought for me at Agra.

OPED

Desai inherits literary success
For eight years she was in the shadows
by Louise Jury
She had spent the last eight years as a hermit, struggling to write The Inheritance of Loss, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut. But after the solitude of writing, Kiran Desai was flung into the spotlight of international media on Tuesday when she proved the surprise winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Thrice-Booker-nominated author Anita Desai had always advised her daughter, one of four children, not to become a writer. 

China endorses ‘harmonious society’ policy
by Maureen Fan
China’s Communist Party on Wednesday formally endorsed a political doctrine laid out by President Hu Jintao that calls for the creation of a “harmonious society,” a move that further signalled a shift from the party’s focus on unrestricted economic growth to a focus on solving worsening social tensions.

Delhi Durbar
Khurana’s pre-poll strategy
With an eye on the next assembly poll in Delhi, former Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana, who has left the BJP, is trying hard to position himself back in Delhi politics.

 

REFLECTIONS

EDITORIALS

SC on pardon
Judicial review will check abuse of power

The Supreme Court has rightly ruled that the President or the Governor’s power of pardon, reprieve or remission of a convict’s sentence is in a way subject to judicial review. Clearly, judicial review will act as an essential constitutional safeguard against arbitrary exercise of power by the executive. Significantly, Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S.H. Kapadia quashed the remission of sentence granted to a convict by Mr Sushil Kumar Shinde, the then Andhra Pradesh Governor and now the Union Power Minister. The manner in which the convict, a Congress worker, was given remission of sentence last year proved that Mr Shinde was guided by political considerations while exercising his powers under Article 161. If executive clemency is so brazenly abused by a constitutional authority like the Governor, judicial review is the only remedy to rectify the illegal action and restore the rule of law.

The court ruled that the power of pardon may be considered as a discretion. However, it is not a privilege or an act of grace and is subject to certain standards. The directive that the power of pardon should not be compromised on considerations of religion, caste or political expediency assumes significance in the context of the mercy petition filed before the President by Mohammad Afzal Guru’s family. The apex court has upheld death sentence on Afzal, accused in the Parliament attack case.

The apex court judgement also holds important lessons for both Punjab and Haryana where the Governors, on the advice of the respective governments, have misused their power of pardon for political considerations. The Punjab and Haryana High Court has issued a notice to the Punjab government for granting pardon to Bathinda-based Sandeep Singh, son of former minister Teja Singh, convicted in a double murder case. In Haryana, the Om Parkash Chautala government indiscriminately granted pardon to hardcore criminals, apparently to harass political opponents. In the present constitutional scheme of things, the President and the Governors act on the aid and advice of the council of ministers even with regard to the grant of pardon. Therefore, they ought to exercise this power with utmost circumspection, lest the court declares it as null and void as it did with what Mr Shinde’s exercise of power for political reasons.

Court to farmers’ rescue
States must make own efforts too

Farmers’ suicide has become a larger issue. Ideally, the Supreme Court should have asked the Union and state governments about the alarming number of suicides by farmers in various parts of the country. The intervention by the Punjab and Haryana High Court on this vital issue is nonetheless commendable. The Punjab government has been issued notice on farmers’ suicides with the obiter dicta that it is taking no remedial steps to save poor farmers. It is convenient for Punjab and other states to expect the Centre to bail them out despite agriculture being a state subject. There is talk now of putting agriculture on the Concurrent List. The court can ask the two states what exactly they themselves plan to do for farmers other than waiting endlessly for a Central package.

As for the Centre, its strategy to help farmers, as revealed by the recent Rs 3,750 crore package for certain states, is to waive interest on farmers’ loans and spread out the repayment schedule. This has led farmers’ organisations in Punjab to demand similar loan/interest waivers and the state government to work towards one-time settlement of farmers’ loans. Such steps, while benefiting a select number of well-off farmers having an access to institutional credit, can cripple banks, encourage defaulters and penalise honest borrowers. Another short-sighted step the Punjab government mooted and then abandoned was the Relief of Agricultural Indebtedness Bill, 2006.

What should be done to raise agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes is a widely debated issue. There is no dearth of ideas. However, anything done for short-term results with an eye on the coming elections may not work. The National Commission on Farming has come out with concrete proposals on how to revitalise agriculture. The states and the Centre would do well to make coordinated efforts and pool resources to invest in rural infrastructure, make quality and affordable inputs and bank loans on reasonable terms available to farmers and ensure inflation-linked support prices for agricultural produce along with developing an agri-based industry.

Many Indias
Pining, Shining, Wining, Whining

Statistics can be cited to support any claim, no matter how far removed it may be from the truth. Much the same can be said about surveys mapping societal trends. Of course, surveys are based on facts; and, facts, as is known, can be very different from the truth. One such survey to hit the headlines is that the number of wealthy Indians has gone up by more than 19 per cent in just one year. Those categorised as rich are HNWIs — high net worth individuals — with financial assets exceeding $ 1 million. In a country of one billion people where a vast majority are deprived of two square meals, shelter and water, such surveys amount to mocking reality. They feed the feel-good factor of the affluent class, which deludes itself as being the country’s wealth creator.

Doubtless, they create wealth. The issue is not the generation of wealth as much as its fair and equitable distribution, which alone can eradicate poverty. And that is something that has not happened. Truly has it been said that there are no poor countries, only poor people. What if the club of dollar millionaires in India grows by 19 or 39 per cent every year? Yet, these burgeoning millionaires are the ones who lobby and loudly protest any policies or programmes aimed at reducing poverty, such as the Employment Guarantee Scheme.

So, it is understandable that there are many Indias, Shining for some, Pining for others; and often the wining and whining classes are the same, ever dissatisfied at their wealth not growing faster because agriculture is more important than the stock market. Not surprisingly, the stock market is taken as the yardstick of progress and prosperity, though it represents a very small percentage of the total economic activity in India. Small wonder then, in The Wonder that is India, the majority are left wondering desperately why their share of the cake gets smaller even as the cake itself is getting bigger by the day.

Thought for the day

Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,/thou shalt not escape calumny. 
— William Shakespeare

ARTICLE

Land, language, progress
Infrastructure deficit triggers a debate
by B.G. Verghese

There is a furious debate raging across India. The headlines talk of and variously juxtapose SEZ, land, infrastructure, farming, modernisation, food security, dams, compensation, rural-urban, public-private, “jobs” vs “employment” (a distinction little understood), rural vs urban, agriculture vs industry, labour vs capital, mother tongue vs English.

Translated, the dialogue is essentially about tradition vs modernity, the past vs the future. What the debate is not about, as mistakenly projected, is “us” vs “them”. We are all in this together. And again, posing the question as this versus that is to proclaim a false dichotomy. The choice is not this or that but this and that, in somewhat different proportions.

The debate has been triggered by an infrastructure deficit that has clearly retarded growth, income and employment generation, India’s global competitiveness and poverty alleviation. At the same time it has exposed dead habit, revivalism, social divisions and many inequalities.

Many tend to hug our shameful poverty in the strange belief that it exemplifies simplicity and virtue. At another level, people are afraid of change. Every established status quo gathers around it a body of vested interests that fears anything different. This is what the Luddites believed at the commencement of the industrial revolution in England.

Neo-Ludditism confronts India today. We must, of course, also heed Goldsmith’s lament: “Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey; where wealth accumulates and men decay”. The human and social decay we have permitted over the years must be corrected.

But the prospects are grim if we wilfully disregard this other truth, that India will be undermined and its prospects dimmed if it does not accumulate wealth to sustain its burgeoning numbers. We must promote equitable growth or let men decay. Landed farmers commit suicide, children remain unschooled, beggars abound and millions go to bed hungry.

The argument that more and more farmers need the land that SEZ’s divert to feed more Indians is specious. The stock of arable land is limited and increased farm production must increasingly come from greater productivity per unit of land and water. This would increase the labour intensity of agriculture and generate more employment while further investments create more gainful jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors. Indian agriculture can do with fewer farmers on uneconomic land holdings and dams are necessary as one element in water conservation and the provision of irrigation, water supply and sanitation.

Likewise, the infrastructure deficit must be made up and maintained in good order. To this end, special economic zones are being promoted to develop the necessary infrastructure and foster industrialisation, exports and concomitant urbanisation and services.

Some 181 SEZs have been approved thus far by the Commerce Ministry and the Prime Minister has forecast an investment of the order of Rs 14,50,000 crore by 2012 on this programme. A regulatory framework is planned to ensure equity, appropriate compensation and resettlement of those displaced. R&R must move away from the futility of “land for land” to re-housing and stakeholder participation for those displaced, with training for new employment opportunities created by or around the new facilities or industries being created. To say that this has not been done or well done in the past is no cause for despair or to perpetuate an unsustainable, subsidised status quo, but to ensure that a suitable and just rehabilitation package is implemented on the ground.

It has been rightly urged that good arable land, especially if irrigated, should not be acquired unless absolutely necessary and that excessive land acquisition for an SEZ or other “public purpose” should not mask land grab or profiteering in real estate. Some part of the appreciation in land values with development should be given back to those from whom it was acquired in the first instance. Innovative ideas have been mooted to achieve this objective within an enlarged concept of corporate social responsibility. Meanwhile, to decry industry, urbanisation or private enterprise as pandemics and see the Tatas, POSCO or Reliance necessarily as vectors of some dreaded disease is to betray a fevered imagination.

SEZs cannot be a panacea for all the country’s ills. But they represent a new strategy that has worked well elsewhere to stimulate growth, not at the cost of farming or the poor but as part of an integrated programme in which human resource development and poverty alleviation remain core values. Projected rural hubs and retail trading with linkages to rural supply and national marketing chains must be harnessed for gharibi hatao.

An ostrich-like attitude is similarly evident in the Karnataka move to make Kannada the sole medium of instruction in all aided schools and to abolish English teaching in them. Fortunately, better counsels have prevailed and the delirium has passed. Bangalore’s outsourcing boom rests, among other things, on its ability to provide a work force proficient in English. Gujarat and West Bengal earlier foolishly tried to promote the mother tongue at the cost of English and came to grief. Linguistic revivalism is as bad as religious fundamentalism and can only narrow the mind and divide people in a richly multicultural nation.

To live in the past is to forego the future.

MIDDLE

Rating Red Fort
by Parbina Rashid

IT defies logic why I have always compared the Red Fort with the Taj Mahal and found the former always more awe-inspiring than the latter. So much so that I treasured the colourful shell necklace my father had bought for me from one of the souvenir shops of the fort during my first visit much more than the miniature Taj he had bought for me at Agra.

So when I recently got an opportunity to play guide to a friend and his six-year-old child to show the fort, I jumped into it. I wanted to see it once again and also show off my knowledge to the two complete novices.

After going through the minor hurdles (the ticket seller, going by my chinky look and heavily accented Hindi, almost forced me into buying tickets from the counter meant for foreigners), when I joined the two eager souls, they were already admiring the imposing boundary walls of the fort.

The Tri-colour, which danced to the cool morning breeze, evoked a very patriotic feeling in my friend. After all, this was the flag hoisted by sadda Manmohan Bhajji only a month ago.

With enthusiasm I led them to the Diwan-e-Aam, the court of Emperor Shah Jahan, which he built in 1638. The tall decorative altar where the emperor sat arrested my friend’s attention.

“This is where Bhaisahab sat?” he asked me. My gulp was almost audible. “Yes, this is where the King sat,” I managed to keep a straight face but still had difficulty in thinking Shah Jahan as a Bhaisahab.

“Where is the King now?” This came from his son. “He died a long time ago, dear son,” was my reply. “Then they can at least keep a statue of the King at this place,” he was logical for his age.

I stopped myself in the mid-sentence that in Islam it is forbidden to build a statue or paint a living being. He was too young to understand the intricacies of different faiths.

As I led them to the Diwan-e-Khas, the living quarters of the King, I could see my friend’s attention was hooked, specially when I told them how the carved flowers and motifs were filled with gold and precious stones, before the British laid their hands on it.

I was speaking from my memory what our guide had told us during my first visit to the fort. Finally when we concluded our trip, my friend had a last look at it. “It must be worth billions of rupees, yes?”

This time I was too numb to react. I do not know what this building would be worth in a property dealer’s eye, but I know I had just witnessed the meaning of “materialism” taking a gigantic leap.

OPED

Desai inherits literary success
For eight years she was in the shadows
by Louise Jury

She had spent the last eight years as a hermit, struggling to write The Inheritance of Loss, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut. But after the solitude of writing, Kiran Desai was flung into the spotlight of international media on Tuesday when she proved the surprise winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

Thrice-Booker-nominated author Anita Desai had always advised her daughter, one of four children, not to become a writer. “My mother told me, ‘Never be a writer, it’s such a difficult profession. It’s so hard,’ said Kiran. But always an inveterate reader, the daughter eventually tried her hand at a few stories and was hooked. Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, her first novel, was published in 1998 to acclaim and she continued her writing at Columbia University’s creative writing course in New York.

She knew she needed to capitalise on her initial success, but found it difficult. “I was writing full-time [but] I lived a very strange life. I’m sure I grew quite odd. My family, everyone told me I did. I was scared of people, scared of the phone, and I grew poorer. I wasn’t a pretty sight by the end of seven years.”

Eventually her mother became the first person to read her efforts. “Certainly in terms of what it is about, she was the only person who could understand it and understand what I was trying to say,” she said. For her mother remains a literary as well as a personal sounding board. Hermione Lee, chair of this year’s Man Booker judges, said it was clear that Kiran Desai had read not only VS Naipaul, RK Narayan and her friend Salman Rushdie — the cream of the Indian diaspora — but her own mother, too.

Anita Desai has long lived in America, but she was born in a hill station north of Delhi in 1937, the daughter of a Bengali businessman and a German mother. They spoke German at home and Hindi to their friends.

Anita’s work examines themes of foreignness and division which some commentators believe stems from observing the anxiety her own mother experienced about the situation in wartime Germany, a country to which she never returned.

They are themes Kiran has, arguably, inherited. The plot of The Inheritance of Loss tells the parallel stories of a family in the foothills of the Himalayas and of illegal immigrant workers in New York. And she has described her own sense of alienation from America even though it is her main home. (She also lives in New Delhi.) “I think it has been a very difficult time in America to be an immigrant and a foreigner, to be part of the non-Western world,” she said on Tuesday night.

With that sense of alienation apparently came a sense of responsibility to address larger questions such as globalisation.

“Given what the political climate has been in the States, I feel more and more Indian in so many ways. It’s certainly not something I would subtract from myself,” she added.

She jokingly referred to her Indian heritage on Tuesday night as she embarked on warm tributes to her parents for their help and support.

Yet, ironically, though mother and daughter normally speak every day, hours after a Desai had finally triumphed at the Booker, Anita remained blissfully unaware.

With a pragmatism perhaps prompted by long-practised disappointment, Desai senior was out of telephone and television range in a Tibetan refugee settlement with her brother while her daughter was making her witty and articulate acceptance speech.

By arrangement with The Independent.

China endorses ‘harmonious society’ policy
by Maureen Fan

China’s Communist Party on Wednesday formally endorsed a political doctrine laid out by President Hu Jintao that calls for the creation of a “harmonious society,” a move that further signalled a shift from the party’s focus on unrestricted economic growth to a focus on solving worsening social tensions.

The endorsement—made at a closed-door plenary session held by the party’s Central Committee—underlined Hu’s increasing power. It effectively enshrined his doctrine in the same pantheon as those of Mao Tse-tung and other predecessors.

China’s leaders have in recent years become concerned about problems tied to the country’s blistering economic growth. Anger over a growing gap between rich and poor and an inadequate social security system is feared to threaten the party’s stability. Retirees increasingly cannot live on their pensions, crime and divorce rates have escalated, and clashes have broken out between security forces and farmers whose fields and villages have been swallowed by development.

The four-day plenary session, which ended on Wednesday, was the first in 25 years to focus on social issues rather than on economic or political development.

A statement released after the plenary said: “China is a harmonious society in general, but there are many conflicts and problems affecting social harmony. We must always remain clear-headed and be vigilant even in tranquil times.’’

The document was also aimed at setting the agenda for next year’s party congress, a meeting at which Hu is likely to indicate who will succeed him. The 17th Party Congress will meet in Beijing in late 2007.

In recent months, authorities have responded to social unrest by tightening controls, drafting laws that clamp down on the news media and launching a high-profile campaign against corruption.

Last month, the Communist Party chief of Shanghai was fired for allegedly helping loot the city’s pension fund of hundreds of millions of dollars. Chen Liangyu, a protege of Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, was the first member of the 24-member Politburo to lose his job since 1995.

Analysts have speculated that Chen was targeted because he and other proteges of Jiang advocated unfettered economic growth.

Experts said that this year’s plenary session was especially significant because new initiatives in areas such as health, education and social welfare were more dramatic and comprehensive than usual. The session also focused on the rural unrest and the environment.

Hu’s plan calls for significant progress by 2020 in narrowing the wealth gap, increasing employment, improving public service and protecting the environment.

Chinese scholars often worry that the country suffers from an eroding system of beliefs and a lack of common aspirations and values. To help build a new values system, the party’s objective “is to try to perfect the socialist democratic legal system,” one in which “the rule of law is to be carried out completely, and people’s interests and rights are to be respected and guaranteed,” the plenary statement said.

Critics said that the statement was meaningless. “It’s propaganda. It’s nothing. ... We Chinese don’t believe in these slogans anymore.”

By arrangement with LA-Times–Washington Post.

Delhi Durbar
Khurana’s pre-poll strategy

With an eye on the next assembly poll in Delhi, former Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana, who has left the BJP, is trying hard to position himself back in Delhi politics.

In that process he has been seen in the past few months targeting top BJP leaders, including L.K. Advani, and has not been so vocal against the Congress, which has been in power for the second successive term in the national Capital.

However, BJP leaders are unfazed by Khurana’s public outcry. One of the BJP leaders dubbed Khurana a “failed blackmailer” necessitating his bidding adieu to the saffron party.

“Leaving a party is so easy, but building a party is an arduous task...and without the party organisation it would be impossible for Khuranaji to attain the pre-1998 status (Chief Ministership),” the leader observed.

Poetry for thinkers

A poetry session at the Observer Research Foundation, a prominent think tank undertaking serious work for suggesting policy options and new avenues for critical areas of national and international concern, surprised many.

Over a dozen prominent Hindi and Urdu poets regaled a select gathering of researchers, thinkers and academicians recently. A majority of those present agreed with ORF Chairman R.K. Mishra that such sessions prove to be an interaction with other aspects of the Indian society.

Agarwal is now approaching transporters, vendors and corporate houses to donate generously for the corpus fund to provide financial and medical support to the affected truck operators and their families.

He believes only the present Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit will have to pay a heavy political price. The other day scribes were complaining no end that Maken had made himself unable to scribes for interviews over the last three months.

The minister remarked: “You know, how angry the Supreme Court is with us and I do not want to appear on TV to say anything controversial regarding the demolitions.”

He said scribes were free to meet him anytime and quiz him on any issue other than the demolitions in the Capital.

Dengue and 10 Janpath

Hilarious comments are doing the rounds in political circles after reports that even the PM’s family has not been spared by the deadly dengue fever.

One of the politicians asked what would have happened if dengue had hit any of the members of 10 Janpath?

He hastened to answer himself: “Simple. Ramadoss would have been removed as Health Minister.”

Another politician, who belonged to the BJP, said dengue will never hit 10 Janpath as the dengue mosquito does not like “foreign blood”.

Contributed by S. Satyanarayanan, Manoj Kumar and Satish Misra.

REFLECTIONS

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

— Mahatma Gandhi