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Benazir back home HP polls on course |
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Crash and after Financial system needs transparency A lay investor may be forgiven for being foxed by the “P-note” phenomenon that shook the stock markets on Wednesday. Within minutes of its opening, the BSE Sensex fell 9 per cent — the first such drastic fall in its history — and trading had to be suspended for one hour. Thursday also witnessed great volatility and a 717-point Sensex plunge.
Reforming the UN
Unclear deal
Don’t reopen old wounds Prototype for online ‘world digital library’ Delhi Durbar
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Benazir back home At last, PPP leader Benazir Bhutto has been able to return to Pakistan, ending her eight-year-long self-imposed exile. She refused to postpone her homecoming as sought by the government in Islamabad in view of the threatened suicide attacks by extremist elements, including Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Gen Pervez Musharraf wanted her to delay her arrival in Karachi for another reason too: the National Reconciliation Ordinance, freeing Ms Bhutto of the charges framed against her, has been challenged in the Pakistan Supreme Court. The dropped corruption cases against her may be revived in the event of the ordinance getting scrapped by the court. This has been made clear by a person no less than Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. But she appears ready to bear the consequences. This shows she is confident of facing the emerging situation. Much of the uncertainty in Pakistan has been caused by the Supreme Court’s pending verdict on the petitions challenging General Musharraf’s eligibility to contest the presidential poll. Going by the massive turnout of people to welcome her in Karachi on Thursday, Ms Bhutto is almost certain to emerge as the top claimant for the post of Prime Minister if the elections are held as scheduled — in January next year. This is despite the fact that her party’s following, particularly in Sindh and Punjab, may have got eroded to some extent by her entering into a political understanding with the military dictator. The constitutional roadblock on her way may get removed, but only if the PPP performs spectacularly as expected. However, she may find herself in a tricky situation if her deal with General Musharraf comes unstuck, which is not impossible with mounting pressure on the General from the ruling PML (Q) and its allies. By shaking hands with the military dictator, she has snapped her links with the Opposition camp and a major chunk of the civil society which has been lately agitating against the General. President Musharraf and Ms Bhutto happen to belong to what has come to be known as the secular camp. Circumstantial compulsions may force them to work together despite pressures to the contrary from within the parties they represent.
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HP polls on course The Election Commission has rightly decided to stick to its decision for holding the Assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh in two phases — November 14 and December 19. In the given situation, there was no other option before the commission. The very idea behind advancing the elections in Himachal was to synchronise them with those of Gujarat. The commission’s logic of holding simultaneous elections cannot be faulted because organising elections nowadays requires a lot of planning, logistics, infrastructure, appointment of observers from outside states, security and general preparedness. Clearly, one cannot expect the commission to start the entire process afresh for Himachal after the completion of elections in Gujarat. Simultaneous elections in the two states are eminently sensible because they will save a lot of money, time and energy. Doubts over the commission’s powers to hold the elections before the expiry of the term of an Assembly are simply misplaced. Under Section 73 of the Representation of People Act, the commission can hold elections before an Assembly’s due date. Moreover, Mr Gopalaswamy said after a review meeting in Shimla on October 17 that the present Himachal Assembly can continue till its term ends on March 9, 2008. He has also said that there is no constitutional impediment for two Houses — the present Assembly and the one to be constituted after the elections — to coexist for some time. The Congress has been making a lot of noise on the weather factor. It has pleaded before the commission to defer elections on grounds of “heavy winter”. Not surprisingly, the commission has not only rejected its petition but also directed the officials not to make it an issue in the smooth conduct of the elections. Weather may be an important factor in the hill state, but the Congress overlooks the fact that the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections had been held in the winter during 1980, 1984 and 1990. The panchayat elections were also held in December 2000 and 2005. Even with regard to the examinations to be conducted by the Himachal Pradesh Board of School Education, there is no hurdle in the elections. Mr Gopalaswamy has told the state Chief Secretary that either the Board could reschedule the examinations or the Election Commission itself can advance the election dates by two weeks to help students.
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Crash and after A lay investor may be forgiven for being foxed by the “P-note” phenomenon that shook the stock markets on Wednesday. Within minutes of its opening, the BSE Sensex fell 9 per cent — the first such drastic fall in its history — and trading had to be suspended for one hour. Thursday also witnessed great volatility and a 717-point Sensex plunge. The relentless bull run, which had disregarded the rising global crude prices and the Leftist threat to government stability, has got deflated just by a “paper for discussion”. The stock market regulator, SEBI, had put this paper on its website on Tuesday evening, seeking comments to restrict foreign buying of Indian shares through offshore derivative instruments like the participatory notes (P-notes). Many foreign investors, especially large hedge funds, buy Indian equities through registered foreign institutional investors (FIIs) on the basis of P-notes. They avoid tax liabilities and SEBI has no clue about their identity or source of their funds. The SEBI paper aims to curb back-door buying and wants foreign investors to enter the market through the front door. Three years ago SEBI had tried to ban trading through P-notes and caused an upheaval in the stock markets. The Finance Ministry had intervened and buried the issue. Last year the Tarapore committee had recommended that P-notes should be phased out. SEBI and the Finance Minister knew this was a sensitive matter and yet they chose to revive the issue at a time when the market was on the upswing. The BJP has accused them of market manipulation and demanded an inquiry to identify beneficiaries of the crash. There are two different goals being sought to achieve with this move. SEBI’s objective is to bring about transparency, which is unquestionable. The Finance Minister, who intervened to offer clarifications and calm the market, talked of moderating capital inflows to check rupee appreciation and protect exporters. Systemic reforms should be well thought out and should not send mixed or unclear signals. Worse, they should not appear as motivated. The FM and SEBI should strengthen the financial system, not jolt it with untimely policy moves, taking the people by surprise. |
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For it is your business, when the wall next door catches fire. — Horace |
Reforming the UN
WASHINGTON: Over two years ago, when the United Nations casually bypassed the long-nourished expectations of the Security Council reform, together with India’s efforts to get a permanent seat on the Council, it was taken for granted that the matter had been deferred for at least a decade. This was entirely understandable because at New York’s Turtle Bay things move at such a glacial speed that compared with it a snail would appear to be a racehorse. Yet, fresh hopes have arisen for a relatively speedy and hopefully constructive progress towards the desired goal, and this is not wishful thinking. A lot of good work has already been done during the current session of the UN General Assembly, primarily in the wings but also on the stage. In August, shortly before the arrival of the top cast of presidents and prime ministers, all concerned were startled when no fewer than 27 developing nations jointly sponsored a resolution demanding action on this vital but long-neglected issue. Behind this impressive mobilisation lay much quiet lobbying by India. It was agreed that a full-dress debate on the subject would take place in November. Another encouraging development has been that Macedonian Foreign Minister A. Karem has taken over as the President of the GA. Unlike his predecessor, who dragged her feet over the Security Council reform all the time, he is in complete sympathy with the aspirations of nations that have been deprived of their due representation in the Security Council. India and some other sponsors of the resolution are not only determined to “push it hard” but also confident that they would secure the two-thirds majority in GA, after which the Security Council cannot block the implementation of the resolution but its power to block any of the new members sought be included would remain intact, assuming that the magic 129 votes (out of a total of 192) would indeed be polled. However, even if this happens, a very lengthy process would lie ahead before the time for choosing the additional members of the Council, especially the permanent ones (which is bound to create dissensions even among the ardent supporters of expansion). The first step would be for the GA president to appoint a number of eminent persons to advise him on the best way to proceed. The last time around, the advisers so chosen and called “friends” took an unhelpful approach and recommended a minimal and incremental methodology. What happens this time can only be speculated upon though it would be hard to resist the will of the UN’s two-thirds majority. On the other hand, the GA resolution would have to be ratified by parliaments of all 129 nations, and that would take a long time. Moreover, it would be unrealistic to be carried away by optimistic calculations. The power of the big boys — otherwise called P-5, the alphabet P standing for Permanent — to influence a crucial vote in the GA must not be underestimated. As it is, Russia has, most disappointingly, changed its stand by 180 degrees. Formerly it was in favour of expansion. On his last visit to New Delhi, President Vladimir Putin had publicly declared that he wanted India to be a permanent member of the Security Council and have the right to veto from day one. Now Russia wants the issue to be put on the back burner. Russia and China are acting in concert, and Beijing may well have influenced Moscow’s thinking. China does not want a permanent seat on the famous horseshoe table given to either Japan or India, voicing its opposition to Japan from the housetops and confusing the issue in India’s case. Responding to the strong views expressed in August, the Russian delegate stated that Moscow might change its stance if there was an “overwhelming consensus”, which could mean different things to different people. China, with its penchant for sticking to its original formulations, simply repeated that developing countries “must play a more important role in international affairs, including at the UN”. Though America does not want Germany in but is keen to see Japan as a permanent member, President George W. Bush, in his speech to the GA, supported the idea of increasing both the permanent and non-permanent membership of the Security Council. The rich and the powerful are not the only opponents of the Security Council reform; so are a few developing countries. Since a permanent seat for India would become a very strong possibility in case the reform goes through, Pakistan is predictably campaigning for stopping the entire process. In this venture, it enjoys full support of Egypt whose stance is shaped by several considerations, most notably the fact that South Africa has become a strong contender for Africa’s permanent seat if the Council is expanded. It is, in fact, remarkable that the drive to reform and expand the Council has made greater headway now that it is being led by IBSA — India, Brazil and South Africa — than when India, Japan, Germany and Brazil worked together to seek permanent seats, thus offending many nations. This does not mean that the idea of co-opting Japan and Germany has been given up. It is, however, being played in a low key. Interestingly, Italy is supporting the move to postpone the issue indefinitely for its special reason - its abhorrence of the idea of Germany being a permanent member and it being left out. “We also lost the war”, argue Italian diplomats. Finally, in all fairness and with due respect, it must be added that the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, is no great supporter of the Security Council reforms, and could indeed be a hindrance to it. South Korea is among the “coffee-club countries” that banded together to defeat the idea. As his country’s Foreign Minister, Mr Ban took a leading part in this exercise. To make matters worse, he is running the world body through an all-Korean coterie of his confidants from the days when he was first the national security adviser to the South Korean president and then foreign minister. He and his cohorts nonchalantly bypass the established UN channels. Nothing like this has been seen since the days of Kurt Waldheim. His Austrian coterie plotted in German that some “outsiders” could comprehend. The Koreans ruling the roost at present converse in Korean that practically no one else understands, except perhaps an interpreter of two. This is causing dismay.n
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Unclear deal
Surprises never cease. Just when one thought all this brouhaha over the nuclear deal was behind us, and we could apply our heads to figuring out what participatory notes are all about, comes a bombshell: that the N-deal is still very much in the offing. And, that it is not off, nor has it been offed, as Americans would say. Congress sources, presumably close to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, have let it be known that the N-deal is not in “cold storage”. That should be understood to mean that it has not been dunked in the freezer; and would not have to be defrosted and microwaved when pulled out afresh for public consumption. Does that mean it is in the refrigerator? Chilled and ready to serve as soon as the Left-UPA mechanism, which is labouring over the deal, decides when it should be handed out? Or is it simply on the shelf, kept like a trophy for what could be and could have been but is not because owner’s pride is ally’s envy? In that case there ought to be a sell-by date. Quite apart from issues of temperature — which varies between the freezer and the fridge — there are linguistic and numerical nuances to the nuclear deal that are far from clear. When the India-US civil nuclear deal first came to public notice it was known as the 123 Agreement. A simple and straight sequence of one, two and three steps was all that it would take to be clinched, or so everyone believed. Then Left went at it hammer and sickle. This turned a question of simple arithmetic into complex calculus for the entire coalition. Yet, the optimists assumed that 123, at worst, would be followed by a four-member committee that would sit over five days, come to an agreement on the sixth day and let the country rest on the seventh day. No such luck. Instead, a mathematical proposition turned into a word play. The red light flashed by the Left was interpreted to mean: “stop” the deal. Not at all, we were told with the clarification that the Left only wanted the government to hit the “pause” and not the “delete” button. By this time anyone trying to understand the deal was already in a tizzy. You had 123, a Left-UPA mechanism, the Hyde Act, operationalisation and whatever else anyone could think of throwing in. And, so it went on for weeks. Finally, when everybody was thoroughly fed up, the good doctor, Manmohan Singh said that his was not a one-issue government and that he could live without the deal. There were sighs of relief all around. With the N-deal issue no longer threatening to light a fire under his chair, the PM could even take a break and go to Nigeria and South Africa. Life was on course again. Now comes this bolt from the blue: that the government is all for the deal. Whoever said it was on hold? Apparently the genie cannot be pushed back into the bottle. Nuclear or not, the deal, certainly, is most unclear.n |
Don’t reopen old wounds India has in the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) a man-made disaster. It chops and changes textbooks to suit ideological considerations of ruling political parties. Education ministers seldom give it any instructions. But it is expected to read their mind and it thinks it does so, sometime to the embarrassment of ministers. Yet, it has never been punished for its acts of omission or commission because it is seldom out of line with the overall thinking of the ruling political party. The latest by the NCERT is on partition. The class XII history book has been rewritten for the first time since independence to argue that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was to ‘blame for India’s division’ since he sowed the seeds of ‘antagonism’. Not many, not even in India, will agree with the inference. The Cabinet Mission proposal envisaged a common centre with three subjects: Defence, Foreign Affairs and Communications. Jawaharlal Nehru sabotaged the cabinet mission plan when he said that the Congress did not think that the grouping of provinces in separate zones was sacrosanct. But this was an integral part of the proposal. Congress President Maulana Azad said so. Subsequently, when Nehru accepted the interpretation and corrected his mistake, Jinnah rejected the proposal. He was back to the demand for Pakistan. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, was not able to change Jinnah’s mind. He told him: ‘I do not trust them’. The NCERT should have stayed away from the topic which may raise a controversy and reopen old wounds. People on both sides want to put partition and its aftermath behind them and come closer to one another. It is only a question of time when there will be no visa to travel from one country to the other. There will be the permit system as is the practice between US and Canada. Jinnah himself envisaged such a relationship between Pakistan and India. We have come a long way from the days of hostility and tension. We should not go back to square one. The NCERT and such other organisations can do a lot of harm. Presuming what the NCERT says is correct; the question to ask is why did Jinnah change? Congress top leader Sarojini Naidu had hailed him as ‘an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’. He refused to mix religion with politics. Disgusted by the Congress-dominated scene, he went to London to practice law. Why did he return to take up the cause of Muslims in the subcontinent The answer to these questions is important to find out what changed Jinnah? Even otherwise, Jinnah blamed Nehru for partition. Jinnah told Louis Heren, the Times correspondent at Delhi when India won independence that “Nehru was responsible for partition. Had he agreed to the Muslim League joining the UP Congress government in 1937, there would have been no Pakistan”. Subsequently Heren wrote me a letter to pen down what Jinnah had said: “I recall that we (Jinnah and Heren) were together one evening when, while acknowledging the creation of Pakistan and the political necessity for it, I regretted the partition of the Indian subcontinent. I can recall referring to the tragedy – for anybody who knew it in the past – of the division of the old Indian Army and the ICS. Strangely he (Jinnah) acknowledged all this and went on to blame Nehru for partition”. What Jinnah was referring to was Nehru’s refusal to give two seats to the Muslim League in the UP cabinet. Maybe, this is an oversimplification of the situation. In the general elections in 1937, held on the basis of communal electorates - Muslims voting for Muslims and Hindus for Hindus - the League was defeated all over India except in UP where it won 29 out of the 36 reserved Muslim seats in a House of 144. It was an open secret that the Congress and the League had some prior understanding in the State. Therefore, it was expected that the two would join hands in the governance. The Congress leaders wanted to use the opportunity to absorb the UP Muslim League in their party. But the State League leaders, though they accepted the Congress programme in writing, insisted on keeping their party as a separate entity, even after joining the government. Nehru – staunchly opposed to any communal ideology – ridiculed the idea of Muslims having a separate organisation based on religion within the legislature. He did, however, agree to give the League one cabinet seat but his main demand was that it “shall cease to function as a separate group”. However, nothing could be more futile now than an argument about who was responsible for the partition of the subcontinent. With the sequence of events stretching back for more than six decades, such an exercise can only be an academic distraction. But it is clear that the difference between Hindus and Muslims had become so acute by the beginning of the forties that something like partition had become inevitable. Talking about differences, New Delhi messed up the visit of a British team to India early this month. When the team members applied for visas, our High Commission at London should have made sure of their purpose. Visiting the graves of the British who died during the 1857 uprising was not objectionable so long as the team did not want to glorify them. I find that the purpose was to visit them, not to honour them. A democratic and pluralistic society like ours should not get panicky if the British come to visit graves which are in thousands. By and large we have kept the graves in tact. This is a point in our favour. But the manner in which the BJP crowd staged a protest even before the team’s arrival has dented the credit for our spirit of tolerance and sense of accommodation. There was nothing objectionable in the press release the team issued. It said that they were in India to see some of its great heritage sights. They would visit cemeteries where relatives of some members of the group who lost their lives in the ‘tragic conflict’ were buried. This did not suggest that they wanted to glorify the dead. India has earned a bad name because the team has returned without visiting cemeteries. The British, when ruling India, committed a lot of wrongs. We should treat their rule as a period in our long history, as we have done in the case of the Mughals and other dynasties. Maybe we are too near the British period to be objective. It is a pity. |
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Prototype for online ‘world digital library’ PARIS — As ideas go, they don’t come much bigger: Digitise the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages. The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a year away from being realised, according to a group of international librarians, computer technicians and UN officials who unveiled a prototype for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday. Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from any era or place. The WDL Web site (www.worlddigitallibrary.org) will provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts, musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary resources through a variety of search methods. “The capacity to search in the various ways that will be possible in the World Digital Library will promote all kinds of cross-cultural perspectives and understanding,” said James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who proposed the project two years ago. The ability to cross-reference information pulled from “the deep memories” of cultures is “an exciting frontier possibility for the world,” he said in an interview. “In essence, what they are doing is building an intellectual cathedral, and it may never get finished,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley technology forecaster. “But this is a good effort even if it fails, because it is going to inspire a lot of other efforts, and if it succeeds, it will be a wonderful resource.” “The challenges here aren’t technological,” Saffo said. Financial hurdles might be considerable, and the project could be criticised as too grandiose, or its model might be considered too closed. But all those problems will probably be resolved, he said. “For me, the issue is the will to make it happen. The people involved in this — will they really see this through?” With entrenched interests starting to gain control of the Internet, he added, “it seems like the right thing at the right time, and the most important thing is that we try to do it.” The prototype introduced Wednesday allowed searches by time, geographical location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting them to books, photographs, movies or recordings. For written materials, the same content was simultaneously available in seven languages, and expert analysis by site “curators” was either translated or available in subtitles. “If you really, truly want to understand and respect other cultures, you have to be able to access their materials in their own languages,” said Ismail Serageldin, head of Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina, one of the partners in the project. A key goal of the WDL is to make the site user-friendly and widely available, he said, to help break down the digital divide between rich and poor countries. The different search techniques permit a user to retrieve information for certain years and countries, so that in addition to being able to browse the collected knowledge of the world in the 1400s, for instance, a user could also limit a search to a topic such as art in Egypt and China in the 3rd century B.C. Similarly, a user could specify a medium – for example, only photographs from New York and Paris in the 1920s. “The memory of different cultures is preserved in different ways,” Billington explained. “This is an attempt to take the defining primary documents of a culture” and make them interactive with other cultures, he said. The site “has an enormous educational potential,” Billington said, noting that its content is being designed particularly with children in mind. “It has the capacity both to inspire respect for other cultures and their histories and stories, but at the same time to establish critical thinking.” The WDL is being developed by the Library of Congress in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), an arrangement officials said would broaden the program’s reach and appeal. The general model for the WDL is the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program, which was launched in the mid-1990s. That program’s flagship is the American Memory Web site (www.memory.loc.gov), which offers 11 million digital files culled from US historical records — from the Declaration of Independence and Civil War photographs to early Thomas Edison movies and recordings of interviews with former slaves. Billington said the United States was offering its experiences in creating American Memory as a guide to help the 190 other member states of UNESCO explore and digitally archive their own national and cultural memories for the WDL. The site will be accessible in the six official languages of the United Nations (English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic), plus Portuguese. The WDL will begin offering content on its site in late 2008 or early 2009, Billington said, with the ability to “rapidly ramp up” as countries digitise their archives and make them available. The site will have a few hundred thousand items to begin with, officials said. The Library of Congress holdings, which include millions of items from around the world, will form the backbone of the initial WDL collection, with other digital content provided by six other libraries, including the national libraries of Egypt, Brazil and Russia. The start-up cost of American Memory was $60 million, about $45 million of which came from private sponsors. WDL officials could not estimate how much it would cost to fully fund the creation of their site, but they said they hoped much of the money would come from private sources. Google gave $3 million to launch the project and develop the prototype displayed Wednesday. The United States has often been criticised, particularly here in France and in the developing world, for its dominance of the Internet and for the global spread of its culture. But WDL officials called the project an example of how the United States could use its vast resources and know-how to bridge those differences. By arrangement with
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Delhi Durbar As both the BJP and Congress prepare for the battle of words during the assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh, former state Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal sought to be one up on the leaders of the ruling party in the state during their chance meeting at the Election Commission office. As it happened, BJP leaders were coming out after meeting the EC members when the Congress delegation comprising Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, senior party leader R K Dhawan and some ministers were going in. Dhumal came up with a metaphor that caused some frowns in the Congress camp. “Hum aa rahe hain, aap ja rahe ho (we are coming and you are going), he quipped as the two sides passed each other.
Land for land Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) institutions in Hyderabad are unhappy with the demands made by the authorities to provide some land out of their campuses for road widening work. But Earth Sciences Minister Kapil Sibal has got Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy to promptly promise additional land in the city for the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, in order to set up more facilities. The demand for additional land was put to Reddy after he arrived at the inaugural function of the tsunami warning centre. As Reddy indicated his willingess to accept the demand, Sibal pitched in to get the commitment reinforced. He told the assemblage that Reddy had already taken a decision to provide additional land within minutes and that was leadership of a high order.
Mayawati explains Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati provided a laboured explanation through a press release issued in the capital on what compelled her to skip the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit last week. She stressed that the organisers had at the last minute changed the topic of her speech as well as the format of the scheduled programme. She observed that the organisers had earlier scheduled her speech on the theme “India that can be” and the subsequent discussion was to be on “Nation building: The regional way forward.” However, when the printed programme was received on October 11 on the eve of the HT Summit, she claimed the topic of her speech had been changed to “Are Northern States Dragging India Behind?” The format of her presentation was also changed to the interview type. She said she had to regretably call off her participation as she felt that it was not appropriate on the part of the organisers to have first changed the topic of the speech without properly informing her and second, changing the format of the programme without consulting her. And more importantly, Mayawati felt it odd that a national leader who is also the Chief Minister of the largest state in Northern India should be expected to speak on a topic which denigrated the region as a whole.
Contributed by Prashant Sood and
R. Suryamurthy |
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