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New President Attack on Karzai |
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Risk to life
Suicides by farmers
Stray dogs and Zameen!
BJP’s shrinking base “Reverse missionaries” take on Denmark The making of “Bollylite”
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New President THE Presidential election, now underway, has all the ingredients of a political thriller. Neither the ruling United Progressive Alliance, nor the opposition National Democratic Alliance is in a position to bet on a candidate. This explains their reluctance to announce their nominees, though consultations among their allies have been going on for quite some time. Both groups are short of votes to have their nominees elected on their own strength. Given the fact that coalitions have come to stay, both want their own nominee elected to the highest office. Though the President is mandated to function within the four walls of the Constitution, he enjoys certain residual powers, which would prove to be crucial when neither group is in a position to form a government on its own. And to make their task more difficult there is now a Third Front, which is in a position to tilt the balance. The problem with the Congress is that its frontrunner for President, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, does not enthuse some of its allies, not to mention the Left parties. Though UP Chief Minister Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party has lent its unconditional support to the Congress nominee, there is no guarantee that he would sail through. Since a BJP candidate does not have any chance, the party would find it politically convenient to prop up Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat as an independent. A veteran of political battles, Shekhawat has proven credentials to encroach upon the UPA’s territory and get more votes than is due to him. This is what scares the Congress. As for the Third Front that consists of a motley crowd of small parties, it would be politically expedient for the group to support an independent — despite the Left’s wishes — as it is more anti-Congress than anti-BJP. The UPA can only ill afford a defeat of its candidate. What is certain is that the election this time would be fiercely contested. The chances of a consensual candidate like the late K.R. Narayanan and the incumbent President are non-existent. As the political parties firm up their plans, the people can only hope that the candidate they finally choose is one that can instil confidence among them as an upholder of the Constitution, a person of integrity, knowledge and wisdom, who can rise above political divisions when the need arises. |
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Attack on Karzai Afghanistan
President Hamid Karzai was third time lucky when he survived a Taliban attack in Andar district in Gazni province. The Taliban made unsuccessful attempts on Mr Karzai’s life in 2002 and 2004 also. This shows that the extremists, ousted from power in 2001 in the wake of 9/11, are relentlessly pursuing their target number one despite the continuing campaign by NATO and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to root out the Taliban from Afghanistan. This year alone 2,200 people have died in Taliban-related violence so far. Thus, the outfit remains as potent a threat to stability in Afghanistan as it has ever been. There is no change in the situation so far as the writ of Mr Karzai is concerned. No part of the country is under his direct control. The Western effort to tackle the Taliban has been half-hearted. The US is caught up in Iraq and is giving less attention to Afghanistan. The presence of foreign troops as a part of the ISAF has reportedly declined considerably. There are not enough troops, including those from the US, to take on the Taliban to render a decisive blow to its forces. The growing disenchantment and frustration among the Afghans because of the slow pace of economic revival help the Taliban in finding recruits to sustain their insurgency. The situation suits Pakistan to continue its subversive activities in collaboration with the Taliban. The Karzai government knows that the Taliban cadres generate funds mainly through poppy cultivation besides what they get from their foreign backers like the ISI of Pakistan. But it is not possible for the government to destroy poppy crops because this will hit the ordinary Afghans also. It is a tricky situation for President Karzai. The international community must take the situation in Afghanistan seriously in the interest of peace in the region. Immediately, there is need for generating employment on a massive scale and strengthening President Karzai’s government to prevent the growth of the Taliban. |
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Risk to life The
Supreme Court has rightly refused to stay the Delhi High Court’s order directing the traffic police to impose a penalty of Rs 500 in addition to a fine of Rs 100 for traffic violations. In response to a petition challenging the Delhi High Court order, the vacation Bench of Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice P.P. Naolekar told the petitioner’s counsel: “You don’t have a right to commit a mistake (violating traffic rules) and claim relief for the violation.” The penalty imposed by the court is justified because of the increasing traffic violations in the Capital. The people have no respect for the rules and they blame the police if they are fined for violations like jumping the red light, not using number plates or not using seat belts. It is because of this callousness that the accident rate is increasing in Delhi and elsewhere. According to a World Bank and WHO report, around 92,000 people die in road accidents in India every year. Significantly, the Centre has decided to act tough on careless drivers. Owing to an increase in the number of road accidents, The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill, 2007, tabled in Parliament last month, proposes to raise fines and penalties while providing a high compensation package for accident victims. While speeding could cost one Rs 400-Rs 1000 (with a doubling of the fine for second-time violators), drunken driving could cause cancellation of driving licence besides fine and imprisonment. The Bill also authorises the state governments to compound the fines, if necessary. A perusal of the traffic rules of other countries would suggest that in India, the Centre and the state authorities have been too liberal with traffic violators. This is the main reason for the increasing traffic indiscipline on the roads. In Singapore, for instance, while a driver can be thrown behind bars for a minor offence, he will be let off with just a fine of Rs 100 here. The punching system, too, is not strictly enforced here. In New Zealand, a driver will be grounded if his licence is punched thrice for traffic violations. The Supreme Court ruling and the proposed Central legislation should act as a strong deterrent to those who drive on the road unmindful of risking human lives. |
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History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. |
Suicides by farmers
THERE is the understanding that making Deputy Commissioners (DCs) more accessible to farmers and ensuring their visit in the villages and hamlets at a time convenient to villagers preferably at night would end the problem of suicides. This is based on the realisation that the problem is not caused by indebtedness but by poor governance. It can, therefore, can be solved through better governance and particularly administrators need “to reach out to the cultivators in such a manner as to provide that crucial support which seems to be missing currently at the ground level” (M. Rajivlochan, May 24, 2007). This is a typical administrative approach to a much complex and multidimensional phenomenon of farmers’ suicides. This understanding is not based on a holistic approach to the problem and suggests a solution peripheral to the whole issue. It ignores the working of the socio-economic system which has undermined the viability of the vast majority (more than 80 per cent) of the farmers in India. At the national level 40 per cent and in Punjab 36.7 per cent of the farmers have expressed the desire to leave agriculture as it is not a paying proposition. The marginal farmers cultivating less than 2.5 acres of land and small farmers cultivating between 2.5 acres and 5 acres of land are in deep crisis. In Punjab, those small and marginal farmers who are unable to diversify into dairying, poultry, vegetable growing, etc, or one of their family member is not able to get employment (along with cultivation) in the public or private organised sector are unable to meet their consumption requirements. In their case the annual consumption expenditure is more than their income and are chronically deficit farmers who borrow for their consumption needs. Consequently, they are involved in a debt trap. Every year their indebtedness increases, leading to their being crowded out of cultivation. The credit market works against them and a major part of their loan is from commission agents and money-lenders who charge exorbitant interest rates. It is in this context official and concessional credit is of great significance to them. At the same time, the capitalist system of farming has created the spirit of unbridled individualism. The farmers are not willing to share costly agricultural implements such as tractors, threshers and tubewells, which if purchased by small and marginal farmers remain unutilised for the large part of the year. But individual cultivation makes ownership of such implements out of the reach of the majority of (poor) farmers. The traditional community support mechanism has collapsed and the modern social security system is not just available to them. In the situation of desperation, the poor farmers find themselves alone and helpless. The flash point comes when commission agents/money lenders or bank officials come to recover their loan and threaten the poor farmers to take possession of land, milch animals or agricultural implements and other costly household articles. The insult in full public view and threat of joining ranks of agricultural labourers who belong to the SCs and the STs lead to this unfortunate phenomenon. The solution to their problems is not that the administrators become accessible to them, but something solid needs to be done to stabilise their economy. Immediately, the poor among the farmers need debt relief to bring them out of the debt trap. They will immediately relapse into this trap again if efforts are not made to raise their income in the long run. This could be done by providing one of their family members a job in the organised sector, or diversification into allied agricultural activities, massive raise in farm productivity through large investment in agricultural R&D and activation of extension services. Ultimately, in the long run a section of farmers has to be shifted through the pull factors in the non-agricultural secondary and tertiary sectors. There can be several alternative models of transformation of the economy. These alternatives have to be put forward by experts (intellectuals) and accepted by ruling political parties for implementation. It is at the implementation level that the sensitisation of the bureaucracy and Deputy Commissioners is important. But the experience of the last six decades of the post-Independence period brings out that there has been a continuous decline in the functioning of the bureaucracy. Rajiv Gandhi had rightly pointed out that out of one rupee spent for rural development hardly 15 paise reached the rural areas. It is the bureaucracy, its inefficiency and corruption which have become the greatest stumbling bloc in rural development. This is the reason that in 1992 through the 73rd amendment of the Constitution, an attempt had been made to empower the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) by the transfer of power, responsibility and accountability from the bureaucracy to the elected representatives of people at the grassroots level. In case of Punjab, the problem is more serious. The ruling political elite is highly dependent on the bureaucracy in thinking and day-to-day functioning. The political elite does not believe in decentralisation. When the state government under pressure from the Union Government attempts to transfer some departments to the PRIs, it is not done with the intention of empowering them. It is done with to transfer responsibility without the transfer of adequate financial resources and control over decision making. Under the circumstances, the PRIs are paralysed, the cooperative movement in the state is under the iron thumb of the bureaucracy and inflicted by financial scandals and inefficiency. In the present situation, the bureaucracy cannot be seen as an agent for change and liberation of the crisis-ridden peasantry. Rather it is a factor in the crisis which has ruined R&D and extension in agriculture in the name of privatisation and promotion of contract farming. It is not only anti-farmer but also corrupt which connive with the forces pitted against farmers. In the light of the experience of working of the bureaucracy in Punjab and in other states of India, rural development and agriculture have to be saved from them. They misguided the political leadership in the state on the issue of farmers’ suicides when the package for agriculture was being worked out two years back at the national level. The state bureaucracy had been writing notes and submitting to the Union Ministry of Agriculture denying this phenomenon in the state. If the present government in Punjab has given the responsibility to the Deputy Commissioners for a survey of suicides by farmers in the state, it has also fallen again in the trap of the bureaucracy. The DCs, depending on the CMOs record, have reported 132 suicides due to indebtedness where as IDC study (2006) conducted on behalf of the Punjab Farmers Commission gives the average number of such suicides per year as 2000. In fact, in the official records, no farmer has committed suicide in the state. The process of recording leads to the harassment of the victim families by the police. In the official records, these are cases of accidents or natural disease-born deaths. The bureaucracy is incapable of identifying the problem of poor farmers, what to talk of finding solutions. The remedy lies in the identification of the problem by independent experts, acceptance of the solution in consultation with farmers’ organisations and implementation of an income-raising solution through a decentralised democratic process. The people and the political elite need to beware of the bureaucracy and advocates of the bureaucracy in meeting the challenge posed by the crisis of farming and farmers’
suicides. The writer is a professor of economics, Punjabi University, Patiala
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Stray dogs and Zameen!
Civil
maintenance of a few colonies had been placed under my charge. Houses were old, built in the sixties when even double beds were not prevalent; leave aside the TVs and refrigerators. Rooms were small-sized even for senior categories though front and back space was large enough. Same old-styled brickwork, narrow doorways and windows having no room to accommodate the ACs. Complaints galore, my team was trying hard to come up to people’s expectations. There was no respite however. My phone would start ringing in the morning and an equal number of calls by me to deliver instructions. ‘Maintenance is a thankless job,’ a friend advised. ‘Better is to get yourself transferred before you invite people’s wrath!’ But I had accepted the challenge. We were making plans to categorise the complaints and handle them systematically when a few incidents of dog-biting came to my notice. Alarmed, I had a round of the area. There was a sudden rise in the number of stray dogs. Anyone having a stroll could end up in hospital. I had a discussion with the executive engineers. ‘We are paying lakhs of rupees to the MC,’ they informed, ‘and getting nothing in return, not even street lights. We should approach them.’ So that was decided. I directed them to see MC health officer next day and request him to get the stray dogs trapped and take them away. Next day, they returned disappointed. ‘He has plainly refused. MC has no arrangement, he says,’ I was told. The issue remained unresolved. Two days later, an employee’s wife was bitten by a dog. ‘It is not our duty to catch these animals,’ the Xen replied when people requested him to do something. A few days later, a seven-year-old child was bitten. I lost my patience. ‘Get them killed and dispose them of,’ I told the Xens. ‘I can’t sit silent. It is our moral responsibility to provide a safe colony to the residents.’ So a plan was drawn to kill them next Sunday. Relieved, I was sitting in my bedroom watching a movie, Zameen, on the TV. It was an engrossing movie. An Indian plane is hijacked by Pakistani terrorists and they negotiate with the Indian government for the release of a hardcore terrorist in exchange for passengers’ lives. The Indian army has a plan to take the terrorist to the border and then ambush the hijackers. In the movie, as Ajay Devgan, playing an Army Major, escorts the terrorist, they have a verbal duel followed by a bitter fight. At last, the Major overpowers the terrorist and says,’ Tujhe yahin khatam kar deta par meri Zameen per kutton ko maarne ki izazat nahin hai!’ It took a moment to sink in. Next moment, my hand was on my mobile to tell the Xens not to kill the
dogs! |
BJP’s shrinking base In
May and June 2007 the Bharatiya Janata Party contested the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Goa, states with a totally different political environment and ethos, and the BJP came a cropper in both the states. In fact, it received its worst drubbing in Uttar Pradesh, a state considered to be its citadel for the past four decades. It could win only 51 seats in the state assembly with a total strength of 403 seats, the lowest since 1985. Even these statistics hide the true picture of its rout in the state, that indicates its steadily shrinking vote base. BJP candidates were number one or two in only 120 constituencies. In the remaining 283 assembly segments, its candidates were relegated to fourth or eleventh positions. Its candidates were either in the number one or number two positions in 297 segments even in the 2002 assembly elections, when it had gained only 88 seats. BJP advocates may argue that the party had achieved a victory in the Punjab assembly polls only a month earlier and had also defeated the Congress in Uttarakhand. However, they would naturally tend to overlook the fact that both the assembly elections were a defeat of the Congress only because the High Command of the Congress Party could not resolve the factional feuds in the state units of the party. Instead, it had formalised the factions with its attempt to accommodate them all in the leadership structure and distributed tickets in proportional shares to each group. The end result was that the factions worked overtime to defeat each other rather than take on the common political enemy. In both the states, it was clearly a verdict of anti-incumbency, delivered by an electorate that felt let down. The political environment and ethos of the two states are completely different. Uttar Pradesh is the cradle of Hindutva where the BJP could reap a rich harvest on the basis of its ideology. Goa is miles away from the Hindutva philosophy. The BJP lost both the elections as it did not understand the transformation that the young Indian electorate has undergone, ever since the winds of globalisation swept away many traditional beliefs and values in India, as it had done in many other countries. The BJP had fought the Lok Sabha electoral battle in May 2004 on its unremitting slogan of “Shining India.” If the BJP had really believed that India was shining because of its six-year rule, it ought to have understood the inherent stipulation that the Indian mind had also been changing and the traditional approach and agenda would not work. Young minds in India have changed their aspirations, ambitions, their idioms and their way of thinking about life and the future. The modern mind is not taken in by the BJP’s now already stale mantra of minorityism, pseudo-secularism and the national security state. The global economic movement has demolished the state boundaries into an unrecognisable shambles, that has in turn affected the definitions and understanding of patriotic fervours on which the Sangh Parivar has built its entire edifice of the Hindu Rashtra. Every young man and woman, regardless of his or her faith and belief, knows that the mere construction of a temple or a masjid would not result in a flow of wealth, milk and honey, or a costless fuel product to run their vehicles. It can come only from better education and hard work. But the BJP leadership could not decide its agenda for the UP assembly elections, as the national executive meeting at Lucknow in December 2006 clearly indicated. The mention of the Ram Janambhoomi temple was missing in the resolutions adopted but the party chief delivered a thundering speech to declare the party’s commitment to construction of the temple at the controversial site. The inability of the BJP to win a clear majority or at least come closer to a majority in the 2002 elections was attributed partly to the division in its ranks, as Kalyan Singh contested the assembly polls in a separate set up away from the BJP. However, Kalyan Singh was projected as the party candidate for the chief minister’s post in this election and yet it could not provide a credible performance in more than 120 segments. More than 75 per cent seats were grabbed by two parties that were publicly opposed to the BJP campaign for a temple at the controversial site in Ayodhya. The same two parties had also won 240 seats in the 2002 elections. Hence, the response to the BJP campaign based on the Ram temple and Hindutva by the state electorate has remained unchanged. The message that the electorate delivered in both the assembly polls in 2002 and the Lok Sabha polls in May 2004 was loud and clear, but it fell on closed minds in the BJP. The leadership could not see, or did not want to see, or the Sangh Parivar would not allow it to see, the reality, and fine tune its agenda, so as to capture the young votes. National parties are toying and tinkering with different formulae of social engineering. In other words, they are throwing crumbs at different social groups. The BJP has gained no new social support group, but it has lost its traditional social support base. It took four decades for the Congress to suffer shrinkage of its vote base. The BJP achieved it in less than a decade. |
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“Reverse missionaries”
take on Denmark COPENHAGEN – The “Amens!” flew like popcorn in hot oil as 120 Christian worshipers clapped and danced. In a country where about 2 percent of the population attend church regularly and many churches can barely fill a single pew, the Sunday morning service at this old mission hall was one rocking celebration. Amid all the keyboards, drums and hallelujahs, Stendor Johansen, a blond Danish sea captain built like a 180-pound ice cube, sang and danced, as he said, like a Dane – without moving. “The Danish church is boring,” said Johansen, 45, who left the state-run Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church three years ago and joined this high-octane interdenominational church run by a missionary pastor from Singapore. “I feel energized when I leave one of these services.” The International Christian Community (ICC) is one of about 150 churches in Denmark that are run by foreigners, many from Africa, Asia and Latin America, part of a growing trend of preachers from developing nations coming to Western Europe to set up new churches or to try to reinvigorate old ones. For centuries, when Europe was the global center of Christianity, millions of European missionaries traveled to other continents to spread their faith by establishing schools and churches. Now, with European church attendance at all-time lows and a dearth of preachers in the pulpits, thousands of “reverse missionaries” are flocking back, migrating from poor countries to rich ones to preach the Gospel where it has fallen out of fashion. The phenomenon signals a fundamental shift in the power, style and geography of the world’s largest religion. Most of Christianity’s more than 2 billion adherents now live in the developing world. And as vast numbers of them migrate to Europe, they are filling pews and changing worship styles. Thousands of missionaries from countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, South Korea and the Philippines have come to Europe to set up churches in homes, office buildings and storefronts. Officials from the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church based in Nigeria, said they have 250 churches in Britain now and plan to create 100 more this year. Britain’s largest church, run by a Nigerian pastor in London, attracts up to 12,000 people over three services every Sunday. The trend is vivid in Denmark, where charismatic preachers from Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Iran and Latin America have set up vibrant Protestant and Catholic churches. “When we became Christians in the East, we read the Bible and it said, ‘Go out into the world and spread the Gospel,’ “ Pastor Ravi Chandran told the congregation at the ICC’s hall here one recent Sunday. “And guess what? We came back to the West!” Chandran, a youthful 42, grinned broadly as he looked out at the rainbow of worshipers. “Can you say ‘Amen’ to that?” he asked, and Johansen, his wife and children joined the rest of the congregation in a thunderous “Amen!” Denmark’s ambivalence on matters of faith spurred a national debate in 2003 after a Danish Lutheran priest admitted publicly that he didn’t believe in God. Church officials suspended him for a month, but hundreds of sympathetic parishioners rallied to his defense, saying that a priest didn’t have to believe in God to promote Christian values. Denmark, a wealthy nation of 5.5 million people, always scores near the top of surveys of the world’s happiest nations. “We’re just too well-off in Europe,” says Johansen, who earns a good salary skippering high-powered tugboats for the Danish shipping giant Maersk. U.S. Ambassador James Cain said that shortly after he and his family arrived in Denmark in 2005, they went to a scheduled Sunday service at a Danish Lutheran church and they found the door padlocked. The next week they tried a different Lutheran church, where the entire attendance at the service was nine people, he said: his family and bodyguards, plus two Danes. Cain said Denmark’s lack of religious culture was partly to blame for last year’s Muhammad cartoons controversy, in which a Danish paper published unflattering caricatures of Islam’s most revered prophet, touching off Muslim fury worldwide. “That, for the first time in a generation, caused the Danes to realize that their loss of faith and their increasing secularism made it very difficult for them to understand, or even feel empathy for, people who felt offended by caricatures of religious images,” Cain said. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post |
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The making of “Bollylite” I recently had the pleasure of watching Shahrukh Khan do an outdoor shoot in New York. Khan looked fighting trim, Bollywood beautiful, and a touch more gray than I remember from when he and I shared bus rides to Delhi University campus in the early 1980s. Today he smiles and glides his way through the shimmer and gleam of being a superstar. He signs an autograph and flashes a smile to the besotted women who walk past. I realise in that moment what Priya Joshi, Professor of English at Temple University, US, calls “Bollylite.” I was struck by the term Bollylite when I first read it in an academic article by Joshi, where she described Bollylite as a cinema which “heavily pillages formal characteristics from Bollywood while shearing much of that cinema’s fabled social substance and political edge.” And SRK is the visual champion of Bollylite. Bollylite movies are a gas, lighter than air, prettier than life, a romp, a goof, stories that move fast and make you laugh, partly because the plots often make no seeming sense. Smoothly, sleekly and low to the ground, without obvious effort and, most importantly, without ugliness, they embrace Armani suits, designer saris, and gaudy gemstones. Bollylite is the long list of sugar coated Chopra/Johar flicks with their essential characteristics: easy on the eyes, easier to forget, and a style that is its content. This is different from the idealist aesthetics of Hindi cinema which had never been not about what Indian society was but what it should be. This idealist thread was tinged by a commitment to critique whether an unjust economic system, political corruption, or social evils. What Raj (Raj Kapoor) in Awara, Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) in Sholay, and Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan) in Amar, Akbar, Anthony had in common was an innate belief in social decency and social good. So, what does Bollylite lack? Everything, according to Joshi, that made Hindi cinema (not Bollywood) a class apart. Bollylite might borrow the skeletal remains of a genre perfected by greats as K.A. Abbas, Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, and Guru Dutt, but Bollylite films are never about representing social worth; they are celebrations of pure – and exclusively – economic and material successes. One can argue that Bollylite movies bewitch precisely because they exist outside the prison house of realism that Indian ‘art’ or ‘alternative’ cinema had been overly anxious to lock themselves – and their audiences – into. But Bollywood’s way of verifying ‘the popular’ has been misguided, resting solely on box office success or work that somehow arises from people and hence the voice of disenfranchised. What it has failed to acknowledge is cinematic work that lacks glitter but provides glimpses of subaltern life away from beaches, mansions, and limousines. As SRK practices his dance moves in a body-hugging Gap T-shirt, Calvin Kline baseball hat, and the Brooklyn Bridge as the backdrop, handsome and at our disposable pleasure, I look at a quintessential Bollylite hero: an Indian who evades all social and moral ambiguities, succumbing to the pleasures of material wealth in the climate of economic
liberalisation. |
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