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Growth without pain Bangladesh on edge |
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At home from abroad
Minorities in legislatures
Uncommon cold
Post Saddam, sectarian rift deepens Protector turns abuser: UN soldiers’ crimes Shun models that create inequality
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Growth without pain IT has been given out repeatedly that rapid industrialisation is the panacea for India’s numerous ills. Ironically, this “progress” has displaced and dehumanised thousands of persons. Instead of eagerly awaiting development, many who are not direct beneficiaries of it, dread it. First, they were made to sacrifice their hearths and homes to make way for spanking cities, highways and dams. As if that was not enough, they had to sacrifice their all yet again for setting up special economic zones, which are not unwelcome, per se. They were shortchanged in this endeavour all the way. In this grim scenario, the Prime Minister’s assertion that a progressive, humane and conducive rehabilitation policy will be in place in three months is heartening. The policy must ensure that industrialisation does not take place at the cost of agriculture. Various states had been following different yardsticks in this matter and a Central intervention is the crying need of the hour. One wants to believe that this policy will be operational immediately instead of remaining endlessly confined to files like many other government schemes. No doubt, the displaced persons are offered compensation, but it is only a fraction of the market rates. In private deals, if one person contributes the land and the other takes care of all the other expenses of setting up a new industry, there is a 50:50 partnership. Strangely, when the government acquires land, either for itself or for various property developers and moneybags that it wants to favour, it gives the land owners peanuts. Government functionaries thus often become unscrupulous property dealers in off duty hours. The sufferers have to contend with rampant corruption in various departments, due to which they have to grease many palms to get their rightful dues. That is why the oustees are up in arms, whether it is in the vicinity of Narmada Dam or Singur where implementation of well-meant projects have led to heightened passions. Nor does the handing over of some money negate the pain of displacement. Most of the small farmers whose land is acquired do not know what to do with the lumpsum that comes their way. The government must float various schemes which can assure a steady and long-term income for them where their rightful bulk money does not get frittered away in lavish spending in marriages. |
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Bangladesh on edge THE violent confrontation between Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League-led alliance and Begum Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), degenerating into violence, has heightened concerns over whether the elections scheduled for January 22 can, and will, be held. If the three-day blockade by the Hasina alliance was to impress that the elections would be not only boycotted but also thwarted, the BNP-led forces are out to show that they will not allow their version of the electoral process to be derailed. Sheikh Hasina, who mobilised thousands of protestors for the three-day blockade of Dhaka wants the elections to be put off till conditions are created for free and fair polling. Her contention is that the election machinery, under the caretaker dispensation of President Iajuddin Ahmed, is tilted heavily in favour of Begum Zia who completed five years as Prime Minister in October last. She has also charged the administration and election authorities with turning a blind eye to their fabricated voter lists. As the crisis gathers amidst spreading violence, there are doubts over whether President Ahmed would be able to defuse the situation. He has said that the election schedule cannot be changed – because it has to be held within 90 days after the last government ended its term. But, the elections, even if held, would be neither credible nor democratic when the President stands accused of partisanship. The opposition has demanded his resignation, rescheduling of the polls and a revised list of voters. With the election process being seen as one-sided and a majority of the parties keeping out of it, there appears to be no prospect of a peaceful, free and fair poll. Should President Ahmed be earnest about lowering tensions and ending the violence, then he must take immediate steps to convince that it is not a “blueprint election” that would be held. The least that needs to be done is an overhaul of the electoral rolls, in the absence of which the Awami League-led forces would be driven to vent their frustration in ways that could become unmanageable. |
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At home from abroad PRAVASI Bharatiya Divas may become an annual ritual resulting in wastage of time and money unless the government as well as the participants from abroad decide to use the platform to evolve concrete action plans for meeting challenges the Indian society faces today. Happily, this year the focus goes beyond investment promotion. Efforts have been made to engage the diaspora in the fields of education, health, development of skills, empowerment of women and rural development. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took the initiative by inviting non-resident Indians to invest in the country of their origin “not just financially, but intellectually, socially, culturally and, above all, emotionally”. There is no denying the fact that Indians settled abroad can play a positive role in the development of this country. The Prime Minister did not forget to appreciate the Indian-Americans for their cooperation in getting though the nuclear power deal with the US. There are, however, limited reliable channels for cashing in on the ideas and expertise of the diaspora in India. NRIs often complain of the red tape and corruption in the Indian system keeping them away from doing something for countrymen. Although India gets large amounts of remittances from abroad, investment projects often fail to materialise. The Centre has under consideration proposals to set up a university exclusively for persons of Indian origin, an overseas investment facilitation centre and a council for the promotion of overseas employment. These are all commendable steps. On its part, the diaspora too should come out with specific proposals for social and economic development of this country. At least they should do some introspection on how to check growing illegal activities of some of the NRIs abroad. Judging from complaints, some 30,000 women, mostly belonging to Punjab, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, have been deserted after marriage or cheated by the groom’s family. They must help in putting an end to this “holiday wife” syndrome. India expects a dignified conduct from its people settled abroad. |
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If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
— Albert Einstein |
Minorities in legislatures
A
lot has been written in the media in recent days about a disparity between the share of Muslims in the population of India and their share in government services, and the latter has been shown to be far smaller than the former. The media have now turned their attention to a very seminal aspect of this problem, namely the deficiency in the number of Muslims who are elected to legislatures compared with the share of Muslims in the electorate. The issue is seminal because such complaints are better raised in legislatures than in the street, but they cannot be adequately raised even in legislatures if the complainant is under-represented there. Therefore, it is important to understand how and to what extent any section of the electorate, in this case the Muslims, are under-represented but can secure their due share through better electoral tactics. Their present share is deficient according to an official status paper presented at a recent international conference in Delhi on the welfare of Dalits and other minorities. As reported in the press, probably correctly, the status paper says, and again probably correctly, that the Muslims, who form more than 10 per cent of the electorate, have never had even 10 per cent of the seats in Lok Sabha. This is correct arithmetically. But the political dimensions of this estimate and the remedies for it are more complex, particularly the causes and cure of this “under-representation”, if the that is a proper description of the problem. The principle remedy for it, from a Muslim ( or any other) complainant’s point of view, might lie in changing from our present single electorate system to separate electorates, preferably with the present first-past-the-post system also being replaced by any of the many forms of proportional representation. That would give any large segment of the electorate about as many seats as its share in the electorate may warrant. But this would require some major changes in our electoral laws, and that in turn would require a consensus among at least half the MPs and at least half the legislatures in at least half the states. These are the conditions which the Constitution has laid down for making any change in it. A party which desires these changes needs to ask itself whether its existing politics and practices will allow it to construct such a consensus. If it finds it cannot, then it must think of changes in its present electoral tactics which would enable it to generate the changes within the present electoral system. The most useful change from its own point of view would be one which prevents any wastage of the votes of its political constituency, in this case the Muslim voter, and ensures that each of its votes contributes as much as it can to the collective electoral punch of its constituency. A “wasted vote” means a vote which suffers a triple disability : first, it is too meagre to elect a Muslim candidate on its own; second, it can contribute little to the election of whoever may be the least unacceptable of the opposing candidates; and third, it is unable to join hands with like-minded parties to block the election of the most unacceptable. On these considerations the vote which is “wasted” the most is the one which is not cast at all, except if even abstention by a Muslim voter can signal support for a Muslim cause or can help in nullifying an election, as it can under certain electoral systems which bar the election of any candidate who has polled fewer votes than what is prescribed as the minimum share of the total vote of the electoral constituency which may be required for his election to be valid. Thus a party can be effective in electoral terms only if it has sufficient votes either to determine the outcome on its own or to influence the outcome through what various Muslim parties practiced in some recent elections, that is “tactical voting”, meaning extending support in one constituency to an acceptable rival in return for the rival’s support in another constituency. The extent to which such tactics can be practiced depends upon how many rival parties are treated by the “tactical” player as acceptable and how many as untouchable. That can have some far-reaching implications, not only in narrowly electoral terms but also in broader political terms as well. A party which needs to and is willing to choose allies from among a wider range of parties is obviously better able to lend support to and get support from other parties, with each party to the alliance thus being able to make better use of what would otherwise become, as described above, its “wasted votes”. This can be a powerful electoral incentive for parties to move away from polices and practices which are too narrowly focused on relatively small segments of the electorate, and to move towards broader and more inclusive streams. Otherwise they would reduce themselves to the position of mere lobbyists for special interests and fail to become platforms for mainstream national causes. These considerations have special relevance for a party which may have a wide but scattered support base in the country, able to influence elections in may electoral constituencies in alliance with other parties with whom it can play give-and-take politics, but strong enough only in a few to determine the outcome all on its own. The best example of such a party is the BSP, which largely depends upon Dalit vote. The next near example are parties which aim particularly at Muslim support. They may go by different names in different places but wear the same communal livery everywhere, which then constricts their politics everywhere. But the practices of the BSP and the Muslim-base parties are a study in contrasts. The BSP used to tar all other parties with the same brush of Manuvad, or upper-casteism, and used the most vituperative language it could find for them. But after some time it began to discover the limitations of a single plank platform because although the scheduled castes have a significant presence in almost all parts of the country they are not in seat winning numbers in many constituencies. After that the BSP began to reach out to higher caste candidates as well, offering them the bait of its Scheduled Caste vote, which it proved it could deliver to them. In rerun it earned a wider platform. The tendency has been rather different among parties which have based their appeal mostly upon their Islamic identity. Whether because of the power of their convictions or political miscalculations or in response to some notable global events, they have tended to etch their identities rather more than less sharply, with results which might not be profitable in electoral terms, particularly in terms of protecting their votes against from wastage. Even if they broaden their electoral tactics for what their opponents may describe as petty electorate gains, it will add force to their voice in the parliamentary process and on the final platform for deciding national policies and issues. The result would be a broader outlook and a broader role for
them.
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Uncommon cold
MY Great Annual Winter Cold has defiantly entered its third free-flowing week. As very few Hindi movies last that long in theatres these days, I have to acknowledge that my nose-throat co-production is running successfully. Like every year, I have tried many a “pathy” to get rid of it — allopathy, homoeopathy, naturopathy, “rum-pathy” and what not — but to no avail. A colleague tells me that the only cure is apathy — don’t give the ailment any importance, behave as if it doesn’t exist, and it will get bored of you pretty soon. Now it’s virtually impossible for me to ignore my uncommon cold, for the simple reason that it visits me every winter without fail like a migratory bird. I do occasionally catch it during other seasons as well, but the protracted “yearender” has become a veritable certainty. Every time winter sets in, I take various so-called preventive measures — covering myself with layer upon layer of clothing, drinking warm water, popping SevenSeas capsules, and consuming Chyawanprash prepared by my mother (she claims it’s more nutritious and cold-resistant than the ones endorsed by Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Sunny Deol). Nevertheless, everything comes to nought — thanks usually to those irresistible golgappas or chilled drinks — and the cold grips me in December itself, or just to delay the inevitable, in January. It starts with the beguilingly innocuous irritation in the throat — gale mein kharsh, as the Vicks folks call it. This sets the alarm bells ringing, and I attempt to nip the “evil” in the bud. However, it gets stronger and stronger day by day as if it has some personal enmity towards me, ultimately snowballing into its full-blown, mucus-galore form. Strange though it may sound, I feel sort of relieved when the cold actually strikes. I guess it’s psychologically better to be laid low by something rather than feel it hanging over you day and night like the sword of Damocles. Once it happens, you can relax in a way, and let the ailment take its course. The future doesn’t hold much hope of a sure-fire remedy, if a character in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller Minority Report is to be believed. Bothered by a runny nose, a prominent resident of Washington DC circa 2054 remarks — with oodles of irony — that despite all the marvellous scientific advancements, mankind has failed to find a cure for the common cold. Well, what can’t be cured must be — ahchoo! — endured, even if it goes on and on like JP Dutta’s Umrao Yawn, sorry
Jaan.
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Post Saddam, sectarian rift deepens BEIRUT, Lebanon - Across the Arab world, Sunnis have been calling and sending text messages to one another to offer condolences for the death of Saddam Hussein. While many Sunnis were not necessarily fond of the deposed Iraqi dictator, they felt compelled to express their outrage at the way he was executed. At a particularly low point in relations between them and the Shias, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government made a series of miscalculations that gave Sunnis not just in Iraq, but all over the Muslim world, something concrete over which to hold a new grudge against Shias. To Sunnis, the grainy, unofficial video of the execution shows that Saddam was killed by an angry, lawless mob of Shias. The impact of the images and sounds of witnesses taunting Saddam in his final moments cannot be underestimated: The execution could become a pivotal new schism in Sunni-Shia relations. Saddam’s calm, defiant response made him seem like the embodiment of law and order at a time when Iraq desperately needs a way out of chaos. “The vengeful and sectarian way in which Saddam was killed may be the tipping point for a sustained sectarian war - Sunni rage against the Shia, followed by Shia reprisals - both inside and outside Iraq,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that focuses on conflict resolution. “If there wasn’t a deep-rooted Sunni-Shia rift in the region before Saddam’s hanging, there is certainly one now.” Saddam was executed at the start of Eid Al-Adha, the holiest of Muslim holidays, infuriating the Sunni minority that formed the core of his regime and now drives Iraq’s insurgency. More broadly, by executing Saddam, Sunnis view the United States and the Shia-dominated Iraqi government as killing off the last vestiges of Arab nationalism. Saddam was among the few Arab leaders who defied the West. In the Sunni view, America and its allies eradicated the idea of a glorious Arab past without offering a replacement, other than sectarianism. In a region ruled by U.S.-backed despots, many Arabs admired Saddam because he challenged the United States and Israel. A reporter on the Al-Jazeera satellite channel noted that Saddam’s hanging on Dec. 30 marked “the execution of the first modern Arab president to attack Israel” - a reference to the Iraqi leader’s “Scud” missile attacks on Israeli cities during the 1991 Gulf War. “Saddam’s hanging has become part of the anti-American - and anti-Shia - narrative in the region,” said Hazem Amin, an editor at the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat. “It’s one more in a long list of grievances that fuel anti-American sentiments.” After Saddam’s death, Sunnis are glossing over his bloody reign as a leader who ruthlessly suppressed all opposition, dragged his country into two consecutive wars with its neighbors, used chemical weapons on his own people and executed, tortured or disappeared hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Throughout the Sunni-dominated Middle East, relations between Sunnis and Shias are badly strained by the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq. Sunnis also are worried about the regional ascendancy of Shia-led Iran, its growing influence on the Iraqi leadership and its involvement in other countries with large Shia communities, especially Lebanon. Aside from the Iraqi government, Iran might be the biggest loser from the way Saddam’s execution was handled. “Iran’s leadership aspires to be the vanguard of the entire Islamic world, not just the Shia world,” Sadjadpour said. “The last thing Iran wants is a divided Muslim community and rising Sunni enmity towards Shia and Persians.” In several Arab capitals where Sunnis have protested the execution, demonstrators railed against the United States, Israel and “Persians” - a code word for Shias. In Saudi Arabia, newspapers published poems eulogizing Saddam, and one even vowed revenge against Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who signed the death warrant. “Oh believers, prepare the gun that will avenge Saddam,” said the unsigned poem. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.” Most Sunnis had heard about rampant sectarian killings in Iraq, but few had actually seen a tangible example of the underlying politics at play - until the execution video was broadcast on Arab TV and posted on the Internet. In contrast to the official video aired on Iraqi state TV without sound, the footage taken by a cell phone showed Saddam being taunted with shouts damning him to hell and chants of “Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada” - a reference to the renegade Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He commands one of the most feared militias in Iraq today and has emerged as the country’s Shia strongman. The execution video’s real impact might not be felt for weeks or even months, but Sunni-Shia tensions will continue to percolate across the region. Then, something perhaps unrelated and seemingly minor could light the fuse. “There have been many low points to choose from in Iraq over the last few years,” Sadjadpour said. “But Saddam’s execution was rock-bottom in terms of the negative repercussions it’s going to have throughout the region.” By arrangement with
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Protector turns abuser: UN soldiers’ crimes THE shocking facts of alleged abuse by United Nations soldiers in Sudan were made public by a newspaper investigation, which turned up a number of children claiming to have been abused. In fact, the practice of sexual abuse by UN soldiers has been well-known within the organisation for some time. In 2004, a UN report found that a “shockingly large number” of peacekeepers in the Congo had paid children for sex, sometimes with two eggs or $5. The victims included abandoned orphans, often illiterate. Three hundred and nineteen staff were quietly investigated, resulting in the summary dismissal of 18 civilians and the repatriation, on disciplinary grounds, of 17 police and 144 military personnel. The Assistant Secretary General, Jane Holl Lute, tried to pass off the allegations as old stories, saying the most recent cases in Sudan were based on those described in a 2005-2006 report by Unicef. There is clearly an enormous problem with accountability and transparency here. Jane Holl Lute has said there is a general failure with the UN’s own systems, a “structural problem”. These internal reports led to internal action which has only now been made public. The United Nations was in a very delicate situation; the regional situation in southern Sudan had been very bad for years, and the last thing anyone could have wanted was for the behaviour of UN troops to be called into question. Nevertheless, the practice of keeping these allegations quiet, dealing with them in internal reports, seems less a matter of judgement than of the customary practice of the UN on most affairs. Any question of delicacy seems to be withheld from the public gaze, and the action of scrutiny very difficult to exercise. In this situation, it is hard to avoid the idea that the UN only acts decisively against its own failings when those failings become public - usually not through its own machinery. It would be interesting to know what serious action was taken by the UN before these allegations were published in newspapers. Such appalling allegations were, it must be said, inevitably going to arise. Although the United Nations carefully recruits and scrutinises its civilian officials, and has a proper disciplinary procedure when they step out of line, there seems very little comparable scrutiny of its military personnel and police. Recruitment and disciplinary procedures of military personnel and police are mostly left up to the contributing countries, and not generally exercised by the United Nations. If a UN soldier has been committing the grossest crimes, all the UN can do is to dismiss him and repatriate him. These military personnel are more or less volunteered for the job en bloc by contributing countries, and the suitability or otherwise of individual soldiers or policemen goes without being questioned. The UN, too, does not as a matter of policy consider the human rights records or practice of the countries which contribute military personnel to the missions. Some of the soldiers in the missions come from countries with a long-standing, structural commitment to good human rights practices; most do not. The cursory training in human rights practice - I believe, in Sudan, it constitutes a 45-minute lecture, in a language possibly not well understood - hardly scratches the surface of some soldiers’ ongoing commitment to buying the sexual favours of eight-year-olds. The UN cannot punish its own wrong-doers itself, nor does it seem to have any effective mechanism for ensuring that the worst wrong-doers, once sacked and repatriated, meet with any kind of national punishment. The solution seems extreme, but more or less unavoidable. If the UN wants to have proper control over the behaviour of the troops acting in its name, it is going to have to have its own deployment force. In its civilian branches, the staff don’t represent their national governments; it seems obvious that there is no good argument for the national badge on the sleeve of UN troops. Jane Holl Lute told us that 17 police and 144 military personnel were repatriated after the cases in the Congo. Could she tell us what, subsequently, happened to those 161 people? I very much doubt she actually knows. Could she tell us how many people were repatriated after these current allegations in the Sudan, and whether any repatriations occurred before the allegations were made public? Perhaps cynically, I don’t think the numbers are anywhere near as high. What needs to happen, above all, is a much greater spirit of openness within the United Nations. It seems to conduct itself as an entirely enclosed bureaucracy, hardly open to democratic scrutiny. By arrangement with
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Shun models that create inequality TWO significant developments on the economic front have taken place in Himachal Pradesh in the last one decade. One is the development of Baddi as an industrial hub, a fact well known. The other, which has not received much attention, is the emergence of the Theog-Guma Belt in Shimla district, as the grower of off-season vegetables, which are sent to different parts of the country and are also exported. Both these developments have brought prosperity to their respective regions, but there is one significant difference. While the prosperity in the Theog belt is even and equal, the prosperity in Baddi is unequal and uneven. One has to visit Theog to see how prosperity has changed every house hold in terms of buying power, disposable income, literacy, sanitation, access to drinking water, health care and a general uplift in the lifestyle of the people of the area. The same holds true for the large belt of apple growers in the state. In contrast, even thousands of crores of investment in industry has failed to change the living conditions of the people of Baddi. No doubt industry honchos are making huge profits, taking salaries in millions, but the worker makes hardly Rs 70 to Rs 80 per day. Living conditions are poor, sometimes with five to six persons sharing one room, and sanitation facilities and drinking water supply are inadequate. If only five in a hundred prosper, such prosperity has no meaning. It can do more harm in the long run. The time has come for our political leadership to shift their planning paradigms from GDP to human development and focus on a type of growth which repels inequality. It can be best achieved in a populous country like India, where agriculture has always been the main occupation, by attaching top most priority to agriculture. In the past also, whenever agriculture was given importance, prosperity has reached the common masses - the Green revolution of the sixties in Punjab benefited almost the entire peasantry and the major chunk of the population. Therefore, the immediate task before the country should be to increase the cultivated area, which is abysmally low at present. As one travels across the country, one can see large chunks of land lying uncultivated. Conversion of this land is not possible without government assistance, and it can’t be left to the private sector which looks for immediate returns. There will not be many who will come forward to set up gigantic enterprises as green field projects owing to the long gestation periods involved. If Israel and Brazil can achieve revolutionary growth in agriculture, we can do so too. It is a question of shifting our priorities. Agricultural growth, even when subsidised by the government, is any day a better option for our country than these new SEZ’s which will generate unequal prosperity and provoke unrest. If we continue with the present policies, one shouldn’t be surprised if by 2020, ninety percent of the country’s assets are with ten percent of the people.
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Do not run madly and blindly on the course of your life. Do not give in to pressures as they arise from moment to moment. Take time to reflect and contemplate on what you are doing. This will lead you steadily to success. — The Bhagvad Gita God is the originator of the heavens and the earth; and whenever God decrees anything, God says to it, “Be!” and it is. — The Koran |
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