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Salvaging N-deal Serialised polls |
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Aam Aadmi
Misuse of guillotine
Direct from Dhaka
Braveheart’s Scotland No clear winners in French
election debate
Delhi Durbar
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Salvaging N-deal THE two-day talks in Washington that ended on Tuesday between Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon and Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns and other US officials have changed the atmosphere of “frustration” and despair into one of hopefulness about the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. Mr Menon is said to have had an “excellent” meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also, but Mr Burns is the key official leading the negotiations from the US side, including those for the crucial 123 Agreement. Mr Burns, who had recently commented that the “Indian government has not engaged seriously enough or quickly enough with both the United States and the IAEA”, seems to be exuding optimism now. Perhaps, that is why US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has remarked, “the discussions were positive and the US is encouraged by the extensive progress that was made on the issues” involved. Mr Menon is also “happy” with the result of his visit, though at this stage he has refused to disclose the specifics of the negotiations or the expected outcome. The country has to wait for the details till his coming meeting with Mr Burns in New Delhi later this month. Mr Menon is confident that the deal can be worked out, and there is nothing to be worried about India’s national interests. The Foreign Secretary’s comment is significant in view of the fact that New Delhi had been keeping quiet over the fate of the nuclear deal for several months, particularly after the tricky negotiations for the 123 Agreement began. It is not a small gain if the latest talks have changed the climate over what has been considered as a major foreign policy move of the Manmohan Singh government. But it will be interesting to know how the contentious issues have been sorted out and the language of the agreement “has been largely agreed upon”. India cannot afford to forego its strategic right to conduct a nuclear test if it becomes unavoidable in the future and its right to reprocess spent fuel. It also cannot ignore the question of uninterrupted fuel supply to its nuclear facilities that will come under the IAEA safeguards as a result of the deal. So far as India’s Iran policy is concerned, as a sovereign country, it would like its policy options to remain open. The next few weeks will show how far Indian diplomacy has got the best of the 123 Agreement without sacrificing strategic national objectives. |
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Serialised polls ELECTIONS to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly have so far been peaceful. The sixth and penultimate phase of election passed off peacefully on Thursday. Compared with the earlier phases, the latest was significant because the Election Commission faced a different problem. Earlier, its focus was on preventing booth capturing, large-scale rigging and bogus voting by anti-social elements. But this time it was to remove the fear of Naxalites from the villagers’ minds and get them to vote in the Naxalite affected districts where the Maoists had announced a boycott of the elections. Among the 52 Assembly segments that went to polls on Thursday, about half of them in the Assembly segments of Sonebhadra, Chandauli and Mirzapur districts are Naxalite affected. The fact that despite the Maoists’ warning to villagers not to vote, people came forward to choose their representatives shows the maturity of Indian democracy. While the Election Commission deserves to be lauded for having organised free and fair elections in UP, what cannot be endorsed is its policy on staggered elections over several weeks. The elections in the state started on April 7. The seventh and final phase is due to be held on May 8. And the counting of votes is slated for May 11. Why should the commission take almost five weeks to hold elections? Certainly, it is too long a period which could have been avoided with greater planning and coordination. The need for ensuring law and order and foolproof security arrangements is certainly important, but stretching the elections to five weeks seems odd and unconvincing. Staggered elections are costly and waste of energy of the officials, support staff, candidates, police, paramilitary forces and the people at large. Consider the amount of fuel spent on campaigning by the political parties during the seven-phase poll. The wastage of party and government resources like manpower needs to be curbed. The danger of electioneering becoming a prolonged serialised affair leads to diminishing public interest in the democratic process. The Election Commission would do well to ponder, after UP polls, how to compress electioneering into fewer days. |
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Aam Aadmi AT last, the mystery has been cleared. Now we know the real meaning of that much-bandied about term, Aam Aadmi. It was a top-secret code for the ‘mango men’ who made sure that the king of fruits landed in the United States to coincide with visit of Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon. In all likelihood, the extensive progress -- in talks to iron out differences over the India-US nuclear deal - may have been made possible because of the mango. And, mind you, it was no ordinary mango, but the prized Alphonso that Indian Ambassador Ronen Sen shared with US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns. At a press conference where Mr Menon was present, Mr Sen spoke of the arrival of Indian mangoes in the American market as a “symbolic and substantive move” in bilateral relations. Perhaps, this was an understated way of intimating that the nuclear deal would also come to fruition; and the mango was both a literal and metaphorical harbinger of the fruits that would ripen for both India and the US. For those who may have missed the point, Mr Sen spelled it out saying that the mango was “emblematic” of the relationship between India and the US. The mango is a fruit for joyous occasions, and truly, it was a joyous occasion that after months of relative reticence, the Foreign Secretary sounded so upbeat about the civilian nuclear deal. It is after 18 years that ripe mangoes have been allowed to enter Washington officially. The opening up of the US market to Indian mangoes signals a push towards successful conclusion of the Doha round, and raises expectations that the US will lower, if not eliminate, other trade barriers and blocks, that are keeping out Indian goods such as textiles. It is certainly a case of ‘Dil Mango More’ when it comes to the Aam Aadmi of India-US diplomacy. |
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Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, / And hope without an object cannot live.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
Misuse of guillotine LAST Friday something terribly depressing, though by no means novel, happened in Parliament. After a lacklustre debate on the demands for grants of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Lok Sabha “guillotined” the demands of all other ministries. The stark meaning of this was that the budget allocations of all major ministries - including such heavyweights as defence, external affairs, energy, environment, commerce and, above all, agriculture that, between them, gobble up four-fifths of the total Budget -- were passed without a single second’s scrutiny. This is a curious performance, especially on the part of those who have of late been claiming “supremacy” over all other institutions established by the Constitution. Are they totally oblivious to the meaning of their action in considering the country’s major ministries not worth discussing? Should not the “representatives of the people” devote thought to the Indo-US nuclear deal, now in the delicate make-or-break stage? National defence should merit at least one major debate a year, particularly at a time of so much turmoil all around us. Immeasurably scandalous is the exclusion of agriculture from parliamentary debate because the farming sector has been the nation’s nightmare all through 2006 and the first four months of the current year. What kind of a message will this glaring omission convey to the cotton farmers of Vidarbha more of whom have committed suicide after the Prime Minister’s visit to the luckless region and his announcement of a generous relief package than before these events? Apologists and spin-doctors of the present dispensation would, of course, find glib explanations for this casual, indeed cavalier, approach of those charged with the responsibility of monitoring the government’s power of the purse. Some of them, good friends of mine, told me not to get “agitated” about something that happens “all too often, indeed during all budget sessions”. They have a point. To “guillotine” a whole lot of demands for grants, including those of crucial ministries, has become a second nature for MPs, irrespective of their political affiliations. Of the irrepressible impulse of many of them to disrupt parliamentary work on the flimsiest of pretexts, the less said the better. Come to think of it, the first budget session after the ascension to power of the United Progressive Alliance three years ago was blocked completely. Consequently, the world’s largest democracy had the dubious distinction of passing the entire budget without any discussion whatsoever because the BJP had vowed not to allow either House to function until “tainted ministers” in the Manmohan Singh government were shown the door! This year the problem of lack of time to discuss budget allocations for various ministries was aggravated by an unexpected factor. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had to go abroad for some urgent official work in the first week of May. Consequently, all formalities about the adoption of the budget had to be completed before the date of his departure. Nobody paused to ponder, however, that honourable members could have found some time to examine the working of the more important ministries by denying themselves at least one of the several holidays in succession. A seasoned parliamentary correspondent commented wryly that both Houses might have sat all night if the issue before them were the OBC quotas. This, however, is only a part of the dismal story. Something even more disturbing - and to the best of my knowledge and belief, unprecedented - took place well before the guillotine was trundled out. As many as 20 members of the Lok Sabha, each with a question for oral answer on the day’s order paper, merrily chose to absent themselves. Ministers, armed with written answers and wads of “notes for supplementaries”, waited but to no avail. There isn’t sufficient awareness in the country of the enormous effort and expense that goes into preparing the answer to a single parliamentary question. But surely MPs can’t be ignorant of this, which is what makes absenteeism among questioners on such a large scale so alarming. The collective “vanishing trick” is, in fact, dereliction of duty by each of the “missing twenty”. Having said this much about the shenanigans of members of Parliament, most of them self-righteous, it is time to turn the spotlight on the media that must accept its share of blame for the steady decline of Parliament in terms of performance, efficacy and the example it sets. Time was when the country’s print media and All India Radio gave parliamentary coverage the pride of place. Every major newspaper had a carefully written page-one sketch of the day’s proceedings in the two Houses, and several columns on inside pages were also devoted to parliamentary news. The result was that MPs, too, were careful about how they conducted themselves. Many, if not most of them, prepared their speeches with impressive skill and often the issues they raised dominated the national agenda. By a strange and sad coincidence two parallel developments have changed the situation drastically and apparently irreparably. The advent of the round-the-clock TV news channels and the print media’s plunge into crass commercialism and sensationalism on the one hand and the rise of lung-power at the cost of brain-power within Parliament, on the other, have led to a dual downward slide. Since more often than not, parliamentary proceedings are disrupted by groups of screaming MPs, rushing to the well of the House for one reason or another, most of the media - print or electronic - covers the half-an-hour of bedlam with relish and in juicy detail, and ignores everything else about Parliament, including serious debates and important legislation. It is indeed no exaggeration to say that the attention popular TV news channels and major newspapers bestow on Parliament in a whole week is usually much less than a Bollywood celebrity or a cricket icon commands in the course of one evening. To be specific, of the eight newspapers I take every day, only one had covered the wholesale “guillotining” of demands of Union ministries and the debate on the Union Home Ministry’s demands in any detail. One other paper, and it alone had taken notice of the mass absenteeism of Lok Sabha questioners. For the other six papers Parliament seemed not to exist. There are, of course, Doordarshan channels devoted to the live coverage of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, and the Lok Sabha has a dedicated channel of its own. How many people watch them is a different matter,
however.
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Direct from Dhaka THE arrest of a former Law Minister of Bangladesh, Mr Maudud Ahmed, by the interim administration there reminds me of an interesting exchange of views on corruption in Dhaka a few months back. The locale was the house of a newspaper editor. He had invited a group of visiting senior journalists from India and Pakistan to dinner. We were there to participate in a seminar organised by the South Asian Free Media Association. As the invitees got busy enjoying their drinks, except for teetotallers like this writer, an informal discussion on the situation in South Asia began. A Pakistani journalist, known for his frankness of views, mentioned that it was painful to learn that Bangladesh was among the most corrupt countries in the world. He wanted Mr Ahmed, who was among the local invitees, to shed light on the sad state of affairs. The minister, however, did not take it in the right spirit. The result was a hot exchange of views. It went something like this: Minister: But this is true in the case of most South Asian countries, including Pakistan. Journalist: The point I want to stress is that the situation is really terrible in Bangladesh. Minister: How do you know? Journalist: There is no need to make any special effort. The newspapers tell us a lot. Your name has also figured in the reports. Minister: This is a wild allegation. Journalist: What allegation? My feeling is that you might have become a minister only after making the required payment for the position. Minister: What are you talking about? Please, mind your words. You should not behave in this manner with a minister. Journalist: What could you do? Please, first control your anger. This is not the way to discuss a serious problem. And don't forget, you are talking to a senior journalist. You must accept the ugly reality (and the journalist laughed). Minister: This is not a matter to laugh it off. I know you are from Pakistan's Punjab. We hated you people like anything. We hated your arrogance. Believe me, I was a member of the Mukti Vahini and fought against the Pakistan Army. For us in Bangladesh, it was a second war of independence after the one fought against the British. Journalist: Please, don't go too far. I am sorry if I have hurt your sentiments. As a senior politician, you should be prepared to tolerate uncomfortable questions. Though the hot discussion that beautiful evening threatened to spoil the charm of the occasion, it was enough to convince anyone that the birth of Bangladesh was the natural consequence of what had been going on between the then East and West Pakistan. |
Braveheart’s Scotland KINGHORN, Scotland – It was on the low cliffs looming over the white-capped waters here that Alexander III, the last of Scotland’s Celtic kings, plunged from his horse to his death one inky night 721 years ago. England backed a successor, and ultimately invaded, touching off the wars of Scottish independence that inspired medieval verses about refusing to submit to “the bonds of slavery entwined” and opulently tragic films like Braveheart. These days, Scotland’s independence movement is still playing out on the Kinghorn uplands. Here George Kay is making his way, house by house, to a succession of doors ringed by pansy pots and “no milk today” signs. Kay is running on the Scottish National Party ticket in elections Thursday that could set Scotland on a course to break away from the United Kingdom. “I was just wonderin’ if you were considerin’ castin’ your vote for the SNP,” Kay says diffidently, and he often elicits a stern nod in the affirmative. “Give us the next three, four years to show we can run things. And then people may have the confidence to go forward with independence.” This week, Scotland and England celebrate the 300th anniversary of their union under the treaty that ultimately created the United Kingdom. But the SNP, capitalising on widespread dissatisfaction with the 10-year-old Labor government in London and overwhelming opposition to the war in Iraq, is vowing to try to end the union if it wins, pledging to seek a referendum on independence by 2010. Party leaders are waving the prospect of seizing billions of dollars of North Sea oil revenues and turning this hilly country of 5 million into a prosperous and independent northern European state, like Norway and Finland, with England as a fellow neighbor within the European Union. Enough Scots are buying it – the recent polls show the SNP ahead – that both Labor and Conservative Party leaders are pulling out the stops and combing Scotland to convince voters that they are citizens of Britain first. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has called the election “a defining moment for Scotland,” just made his fifth trip to the north during the campaign. (The Scotsman newspaper said the prime minister “sounded like an ailing emperor paying a last visit to one of his satrapies.”) Blair’s likely successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who grew up a few miles from here, has been warning fellow Scots of dire economic consequences if they listen to the siren songs of the SNP, hailing his own Britishness, and cheering for the English football team. Unionists argue that the 300-year-old marriage has been a resounding success not just for Britain, but for Scotland. The country’s employment rate and wage earnings have been above the British average for most of the past four years; it has a booming financial services industry, joined at the hip with England. SNP leaders say it’s time for a divorce. “I say to my students, think of it as a marriage of convenience,” said David McCrone, a professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh. “In 1707, Scotland entered this marriage and got a lot out of it. It got access to the empire .... But of course, by the middle of the 20th century, there was no empire. The bargain disappeared.” Alex Salmond, the urbane, combative SNP leader whose leadership team bears no resemblance to the kilts-and-whiskey set of the nationalist past, argues that Labor is defending a union on terms that are no longer relevant at a time when countries such as Latvia and Bulgaria are entering the European Union. At party headquarters last week, a buzzing warren of offices on a side street in Edinburgh, SNP leaders were soothing worried voters with the message that an independence referendum is years down the road; even a positive vote for independence would merely open the door to years of negotiations, and possibly arbitration, SNP officials acknowledge. Now, they said, is the time for ousting the Labor-led government in Edinburgh, elected as part of the limited autonomy given Scotland under its “devolved” government since 1999. Scotland’s proportional election laws make it nearly impossible for any party to grab a strong majority. More likely, the winning party will have to govern in coalition with another. The SNP promises that it will, if given the chance, seek more control over taxes and services for the Scottish parliament, and will ask for a review of the billions of dollars in North Sea oil revenues that flow out of Scotland into the British treasury. “The problem in Scotland is not how bad things are. It’s how much better they should be,” said Kenny MacAskill, the SNP’s justice spokesman. “We want to be represented ourselves in the U.N. Fundamentally, we want to decide if our young men will die in a war.” Salmond likes to remind the English that they will be gaining a “good neighbor” if Scotland departs, even as they lose “a surly lodger.” Many of the English, it seems, are ready to be persuaded, fed up with perceived subsidies pouring from the Westminster treasury into Scotland and increasingly suspicious of the substantial number of Scots in the cabinet, including Blair and Brown. Londoners periodically grumble that they don’t want to be “ruled by Scots.” Indeed, in some polls, England is more enthusiastic about Scottish independence than Scotland. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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No clear winners in French
election debate
THE French presidential contestants sparred live on television earlier this week exchanging verbal blows without landing any knock-out punches. In a studio designed to resemble a boxing ring, the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, made a pugnacious start to a televised debate watched by a record audience. Mme Royal, who needed a good performance to have any chance of winning on Sunday, immediately accused the centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, of being “part of a government which is responsible for the disastrous state of France”. She listed record debt, a low standard of living and high unemployment, but also – straying on to M. Sarkozy’s favourite ground – a rise in violence. “In 2002 you promised zero tolerance for violence, M. Sarkozy. In five years, violent incidents in schools have gone up by 26 per cent,” she said. In reply, Mr Sarkozy said that the blame should be placed on the “catastrophic” security record of the previous Socialist government. If elected, he said, he would be a president of “actions” not “words or promises”. Although M. Sarkozy and Mme Royal have dominated the French electoral landscape for months, this was their first face-to-face encounter for 12 years. The stakes were especially high for Mme Royal. The latest opinion polls placed her four to seven points behind M. Sarkozy with only four days before the second round of voting. To have any chance, Mme Royal needed to put on a performance competent enough, and attractive enough, to attract hundreds of thousands of “undecided” centrist voters. Many of these voters, especially the younger ones, say they have already rejected all possibility of voting for M. Sarkozy. They regard him as too divisive and too far to the right. They say they have not yet been convinced by Mme Royal but are open to persuasion. Before deciding whether to abstain, or cast a blank ballot, they were awaiting last night’s debate to give her one more chance. She would need to convert them en masse to have a chance of confounding the polls on Sunday. In the final days of the campaign, M. Sarkozy has spoken of his mission to “unite” France, but has continued to adopt a confrontational tone, designed mostly to appeal to the right. He has attacked the May 1968 left-wing student rebellion as the origin of France’s “moral” and economic decline. He has called for modest economic reforms but placed much of his emotional energy into stirring up white, middle-class fears of crime and violence in the poor multi-racial suburbs. Mme Royal has tried to present herself as the “humanist” candidate, who will be able to heal divisions. “There is a sort of French miracle,” she said at her last big Paris rally. “Let us go forward. Let us come together. Let us love one another.” Many voters would like to like Mme Royal but find themselves unmoved by this kind of soft rhetoric. They want her to be more precise in her positions. The Sarkozy and Royal camps finally agreed yesterday morning that the debate should cover seven “themes” or subject areas. It began with questions on reform of parliament and other institutions, and went on to discuss the economy, education, family issues, the environment, Europe and foreign affairs. Each candidate then had three minutes to make a final appeal. The candidates sat either side of a two-metre square table. A special studio had been built, designed to resemble a boxing ring. Can televised debates really make a difference? The former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, said yesterday that he believed he won the 1974 election because he defeated Francois Mitterrand in the television debate. He even said he could have won in 1981 if he had debated better. By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Delhi Durbar RAILWAY Board Chairman R.K. Batra, who is the first non-European Chairman of the Paris based International Union of Railways (UIC), is a Francophile who opted for French in college in the mid-sixties. Although Batra studied French as an optional subject while pursuing pre-engineering from the Punjab University-affiliated S.D. College, Shimla, he just about managed to scrape through his French paper. The Chairman says that he has visited France thrice this year but has not been able to pick up any French as the UIC agenda keeps him totally occupied. He says that barring the UIC Secretary General, the UIC staff is fluent in English and his interaction with the French Secretary General is taken care of by the interpreters. Kashmiri parleys Though the intra-J&K, heart-to-heart talks ended on a positive note with all the participants calling for greater people-to-people contacts, it was not clear when and where the next round of these talks will be held. Delhi has hosted two rounds of talks so far, with Panthers Party chief Bhim Singh doing a lot of spadework, but it was not announced if the next process of dialogue will be held in Muzaffarabad or some other city of PoK. Bhim Singh supported the idea of having a committee of mediapersons from the two sides of the state but it apparently did not find favour with former PoK Prime Minister and President Mohammad Abdul Qayyum. Leaders of the Muslim Conference, headed by Qayyum, privately said that their experience of having Indian journalists in the past had not always been positive. Qayyum, some of whose remarks were reportedly questioned by the United Jehad Council, blamed a section of the media for misquoting him. Studying industry Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has heaped praise on former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar whom he had served as economic advisor between December 1990 and March 1991. He singled out the ailing leader for setting up a rare institute to focus on the problems of industrialisation, noting that there were many centres of research in agriculture in the country but few that study industry intensively. An eight-time MP, Chandra Shekhar thought it prudent to seek the return of Manmohan from the South Commission where he was serving as its Secretary General and Commissioner. The PM observed “his claim to fame is that he has been a young turk and an angry young man who wanted to see change quickly.” Drawing pointed attention to the fact that Chandra Shekhar was arrested during the infamous Emergency in the country, he said not every one may agree with the ideas that the ageing leader throws up. Like a true liberal, Chandra Shekhar always respected those who differed with him and willingly engaged his political opponents in a meaningful dialogue. Contributed by Tripti Nath, Prashant Sood and S. Satyanarayanan |
If you enter the world without first cultivating love for God.. You will be overwhelmed with its danger, its grief and its sorrows. —Shri Ramakrishna If it please God, He exalts one to the throne, as another renounces the world and goes abegging. If it please him, the sea may flow over the desert and
the lotus may bloom in the sky. —Guru Nanak Pour butter into the fire in two spots; Then place the offering between these two. These oblations will take the worshipper. —The Mandukya Upanishad |
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