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Gowda’s games Targeting terror |
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Sugar turns bitter Punjab’s entry tax is counter-productive THE Punjab government’s decision to impose a 4 per cent entry tax on sugar and a few other products is retrograde. The national policy is to remove inter-state barriers and make the country a single market. It was with this aim that the value added tax was introduced.
Stalled nuclear
deal
Business of giving
Raj Dharma fails in
Gujarat Mayawati aims for
Delhi Delhi
Durbar
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Targeting terror TWENTYONE men have been found guilty by a Spanish court of carrying out the worst-ever terror attack in Europe — the March 2004 Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and injured 1800. It has taken the Spanish criminal investigation and judicial system just a little over three years to hunt down and prosecute the perpetrators. That casts in poor light the corresponding efforts in India, where citizens endlessly await even a shred of real progress in several cases of terrorist attacks — across New Delhi, Mumbai, Varanasi, and lately, Ludhiana, to name just a few. Even in the case of the London bombings, it did not take long for the police to put out sketches of suspects and find out minute details of their activities. Here, the most the police can muster is to mention a few mythical-sounding characters along with the names of various terrorist organisations. True, Britain is so full of cameras that the the British themselves worry about living in a surveillance society. Jehadi organisations and their activities stick out more easily in Europe than in the subcontinent. But that is no excuse, as the primary reason for failure here is inadequate policing and investigative mechanisms, not to mention a weak-willed state. The Spanish court’s judgement was no angry lashing out at any community, but the result of following due process of law. In fact, there have been furious and emotional reactions to the acquittal of several accused, including one of the alleged masterminds, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, alias “Mohamed the Egyptian.” He is currently serving a jail term in Italy for belonging to a terrorist organisation. Seven others, also suspected of being among the organisers, blew themselves up in a police ambush weeks after the train attacks. Society cannot afford fatal inadequacies in dealing with terrorists, who will only exploit them to further their goals of mass carnage. India cannot afford to wait for the next major attack to agonise over the same issues, only to let it all slip back into old ways of doing things. The time to change is now. |
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Sugar turns bitter THE Punjab government’s decision to impose a 4 per cent entry tax on sugar and a few other products is retrograde. The national policy is to remove inter-state barriers and make the country a single market. It was with this aim that the value added tax was introduced. The purpose was to have a uniform tax structure and scrap all the other taxes. Yet, some states continue to levy entry or local area development taxes. States raise tax barriers to discourage products from other parts of the country and protect their own units which, being inefficient, are unable to face competition. Consequently, the consumer is forced to pay a higher price for local goods. Sugar consumers in Punjab will have to pay Rs 4-5 a kg more because of the tax. Instead of discouraging the entry of cheaper sugar from mills in Uttar Pradesh, the Punjab government should look into reasons why the sugar mills in the state are not competitive. The Centre has given fresh incentives to the sugar industry. The decision to blend 5 per cent ethanol with petrol will also benefit the sugar mills. The percentage of ethanol in petrol is going to be steadily increased. It would 10 per cent from the next
year. This will mean huge profits, but only for those sugar mills which expand and install the necessary production facilities in time. Faced with a fund crunch, the Punjab government cannot modernise its sugar mills. Instead of privatising the loss-making mills as had been decided by the previous Congress government, the Badal government has decided to lease them out to private parties. They will not make any long-term investment if the ownership is not passed on to them. Besides, by raising the tax wall to protect the sugar industry from competition, the government has ensured that they remain inefficient and unviable. The policy of appeasement is not in the interest of the sugar industry.
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Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
— Alexander Pope |
Stalled nuclear deal THERE is a clear and wide gap between America's official and private reaction to the stalling of the Indo-US nuclear deal primarily because of domestic political discord in India and the reluctance of the Congress-led ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, to face an early general election. In the US capital, as in New Delhi, the official line is that unfortunate though the setback is, all is not lost and the deal might yet be "salvaged". Privately, however, the same sources do not hide their deep disappointment over the deal having been put in the "deep freeze". Some even assert that it might not be dead but is surely on the "life-support system". However, all this is said usually off the record though there are authoritative sources that speak out openly. For instance, Teresita Schaffer — a former diplomat with long experience of the subcontinent who now runs the South Asia division of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies — has raised several pertinent questions, most notably, whether the present "pause" is a harbinger of a "crash or course correction". She thinks that course correction might not be as easy as it is being out to be. Several other sources agree with her. On the other hand, Karl Inderfurth, who served as assistant secretary for South Asia during President Bill Clinton's second term, and Bruce Riedel, Clinton's key adviser on South Asian security, go along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's view that even the collapse of the deal would not be the "end of the world". But they are in a minority. The American most disappointed is, of course, President George W Bush, who pushed the deal through despite determined resistance by the battalions of America's ayatollahs of nonproliferation. He is silent but not his officials who, like their Indian counterparts, had worked extraordinarily hard to negotiate the agreement. Most Americans also say that India does not seem to realise how much they have changed American laws for its sake. On one point there is unanimity among all American experts on South Asia, regardless of the differing nuances of their assessments: if the deal is to be revived, the time is of the essence, and there isn't much time. The "pointless" November 16 meeting with the Left Front would "delay matters further". New Delhi has yet to negotiate an India-specific safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and then go to the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers' Group to get it to make the necessary changes in its guidelines. Only then can the 123 Agreement be sent to the US Congress for final voting. The bottom line, according to all Washington sources, is that if this does not happen by January, the whole issue would have to be taken up afresh by the next Congress and next government to be inaugurated on January 20, 2009. The new US government, the sources add, would be preoccupied with more pressing problems, such as Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda and so on. According to Teresita Schaffer, unless there is a "change of heart" on the part of American opponents of the deal, the next governments in both countries would be "cautious about re-launching it". Some other analysts, who did not want to be identified, put it more bluntly: the credibility of the Indian government has been "eroded" and its repercussions won't be confined to the US. As far as can be ascertained this message has been conveyed to South Block in New Delhi. American corporate sector has made this point more sharply. This is emphatically endorsed by activists among Indian Americans who are most dismayed by what has happened. They had worked night and day to persuade, cajole or pester their Congressmen and Senators to see the deal through on Indian terms. They think New Delhi has let them down. Several of them have pointed out to me what they call "facts of life" in the US. None of the three leading Republican contenders for the presidency, they say, knows much about India. Nor would any of them, on becoming president, have the time to learn from scratch. On the Democratic side, the argument runs, Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate, knows India well enough. But she has seldom been sympathetic to it. On the nuclear deal she eventually voted for the Hyde Act, but before that she had voted for five "killer amendments". It is also widely known that her priority in Asia is China, not India. As for the likely consequences of the current developments, there is no doubt that America's stakes in rising India, especially the strategic ones, are too great to allow the wider relationship to be disrupted even if the nuclear deal finally collapses. But to expect that everything would continue to be hunky-dory is entirely unrealistic. In fact, there is every danger that Iran might become a major source of discord between the two strategic partners. The Hyde Act's extravagant demands about Indian policy on Iran may be non-binding on India but they are binding on the US administration, which is, in any case, seen as moving towards military action against the Islamic Republic. During the recent visit to India of the US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, the question of the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline inevitably came up. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's reply that India was committed to the project hasn't gone down well here. Why the Americans don't just ask their "key ally", Pakistan, to abandon the pipeline idea is incomprehensible. Most American friends have been hurling two questions about what they think was New Delhi's "clumsy handling" of the "beneficial deal". First, why the BJP — which initiated the policy of becoming America's strategic partner, and would "almost certainly" have accepted the nuclear deal, were it still in power — has made common cause with the Communists to reject civilian nuclear cooperation? Secondly, why is the Congress — assured of victory in early elections, according to all opinion polls — reluctant to hold mid-term polls? My answer to the first question is: implacable mutual hatred between the saffron party and the Congress that is as great, if not greater, than the hate between the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. To the second question, I have replied that Congress MPs lost the faculty of thinking of their party's collective interest ages ago. Each of them is self-seeking and does not wish to risk a single day of his or her five-year term in
Parliament.
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Business of giving We
make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give. A booming economy and a galloping sensex have made many join the billionaires’ club. Even as there is a depraved craze about this new-found hunger for riches and the rich whom the Generation Next would worship as their role models, we have missed out on the core purpose of business. Doyens of Harvard Business School where our youngsters aspire to study opine that businesses which gave back to society often performed better, thanks to greater consumer empathy and engagement. They espouse the values of companies that nurture and nourish the community they exist with. Despite Mukesh Ambani becoming the world’s richest man, companies like Microsoft and Citibank are doing much more for India than most of our swadeshi corporates. More important than cheque book charity, which is aimed, more often than not, at claiming income tax rebates, is the need for the rich to engage in actually setting up systems and processes which will actually empower those living in not just 21st century but 21 different centuries. While launching a project called “Grand challenges in global health” in 2003, Bill Gates said: “Let’s collaborate horizontally on defining both the problems and the solutions — let’s create value that way — and then the Gates Foundation will invest our money in the solutions we both define”. Advertisements were placed on the Web and elsewhere across the developing and the developed worlds asking scientists to respond to one big question, “What are the biggest problems that, if science attended to them and solved them, could most dramatically change the fate of several billion people trapped in the vicious cycle of infant mortality, low life expectancy and disease?” The Foundation got about 18000 pages of ideas from the best and the brightest of the world, including the Nobel laureates and short-listed 14 Grand challenges which included: how to create effective single dose vaccines that can be used soon after birth but do not require refrigeration, how to develop needle-free delivery systems for vaccines, how to better understand which immunological responses provide protective immunity; how to better control insects that transmit agents of disease, how to genetically or chemically incapacitate such insects; how to create immunological methods that can cure chronic infections etc. The Foundation is now in the process of funding the best of 1600 proposals received within a year, with $ 250 million cash, knowing full well that pharmaceutical companies would seldom venture in these areas because they are not rich men’s diseases and hence not as profitable as developing an anti-cancer drug. Given the dilapidated health care systems in poverty stricken areas of the world, the Gates Foundation is trying to stimulate the development of drugs and delivery systems that can be safely administered by ordinary people. Having acknowledged that the most important health care system in the world is a mother, the foundation is mulling over how to get things in her hands that she understands and can afford and use! Are our corporates listening
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Raj Dharma fails in Gujarat
I HAVE reasons to believe that Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when he was Prime Minister, wanted to dismiss Nahrendra Modi and had planned to do so after his visit to Ahmedabad. But there was so much pressure on him from his colleagues and the RSS that he changed his mind. He should have gone ahead with his plan because Modi’s hand was too visible behind the pogrom to be missed. Modi’s doings have once again come out in the open after a weekly’s sting operation that has shown on TV screens Modi’s foot soldiers boasting about carrying out the killings with state support. “Execution squads were formed, composed of the dedicated cadre of Hindu organisations – the Vishwa Hindu Parisahad, the Rashtriaya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Bajrang Dal, the Kisan Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party.” Modi was so nervous over the disclosure that he had the TV channels relaying the confessions of his men banned. The Editors’ Guild has rightly chastised Modi for violating press freedom. There is little that the central government can do because the process of state assembly elections has begun. Yet the Manmohan Singh government will fail in its duty if Modi is left alone. I seldom agree with Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. But he is justified in calling for Modi’s arrest. Indeed, it is a challenging task which timid rulers at Delhi cannot undertake. In fact, the ball is now in the court of the people of Gujarat. They are on test. They should not allow Modi to convert his communal approach into an issue of self-respect for the Gujaratis. Those killed were also Gujaratis. When he is accused of planning and executing all that happened in the wake of the Godhra train burning, he plays on the sentiment that the Gujaratis are run down. Thus he has got away with murders. The whole of India has only admiration for the Gujaratis for the rapid economic development and for the 24 per cent growth rate. But for them the country would not have won laurels in the world as it has done. They are hardworking, determined and innovative. They do not deserve a chief minister who manipulates his reputation at their cost and polarises the society. Modi even makes a mockery of Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals of pluralism. Modi’s style of functioning is authoritarian and parochial. So much so that a revered state leader like Keshubhai Patel has felt so humiliated that he has kept distance from the BJP, the party he has served for decades, because it has put up Modi as the next chief minister. Keshubhai’s disgust is an example before the Gujaratis. He is still with the BJP and has never entertained the idea of going near the Congress. But he is determined to defeat Modi. Keshubhai is a true Gujarati. He has said many a time that his conviction is that the state will be doomed if Modi becomes its chief minister once again. Modi’s return will be considered an endorsement by the Gujaratis of the part he played in killing Gujaratis and in converting the well-spread out BJP organisation into a Modi coterie, forcing old members to quit or stay distant. That is the reason why even the RSS, the BJP’s mentor, has washed its hands off Gujarat. Had the Nanavati Shah Commission which was set up to ascertain the truth submitted its report by this time Modi’s role would have probably been exposed. An authentic account of Modi’s role would have been available. But the inquiry committee is going on and on for the last five years. Are the judges lengthening their tenure? This is turning out to be just another Liberhan Inquiry Committee which was set up in the wake of the Babri masjid demolition in 1992. The committee had scores of extensions and it has not submitted even an interim report in the last 15 years. I think that the Chief Justice of India should look into the working of such inquiry committees because they bring a bad name to the judiciary. There should be a time frame and no inquiry committee should last beyond three years. Modi’s defence by the BJP spokesman does not surprise me. The party, because of L.K. Advani’s increasing influence and Vajpayee’s waning power due to ill-health, is most vociferously communal in projecting Modi. The BJP’s thinking is that if it loses the assembly election in Gujarat, it would lose in the general election. It might even otherwise do so if it continues to back Modi. But whatever the party’s consideration, should it abuse Prime Minister Manmohan Singh? He is not my hero but he has led the country in the last three and a half years fairly well, resisting the pressure of his coalition partners on the one hand and the dictation of party president Sonia Gandhi on the other. The BJP has no business to call Manmohan Singh a “sad” or “weak” prime minister for his failure at being a political animal. Vajapyee, trained in politics for decades, kept his allies in good humour. His coalition partners also went up to a point. They never threatened his government as the Left does every third day. Vajpayee’s coalition partners also enjoyed power and did not want to lose it. The Left, particularly the CPI (M), also has the vicarious satisfaction of ruling but feeds itself on the cheap popularity which it earns by giving threats to the government. It does not come as a surprise that when it is the question of exploiting its position, there is little difference between the BJP and the Left. Ideologically, they are different but in working none of them tolerates dissent. Running down Manmohan Singh does not make news because he has himself stopped asserting or articulating his point of view. Once in a while Manmohan says something which gives the impression that he is his own master. But he dutifully carries out what emanates from the Sonia Gandhi quarters. He did not have to say that Rahul Gandhi, Sonia’s son, was India’s future. What Sonia Gandhi is doing to sell his son, first to America and then to China, is more than enough. What happens to India is another matter. I am worried over the forthcoming discussion in Parliament on the nuclear deal. Both the BJP and the Left would be making more or less the same points while opposing the deal. I hope that in the process a situation does not develop where the Manmohan Singh government falls. It would be a tragicomedy. |
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Mayawati aims for Delhi The
metamorphosis of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), hitherto dubbed as the ‘anti- upper caste’ party, is complete. In fact, the outfit, which raised
sabre-rattling slogans, including ‘tilak, tarazu and talwar, inko maro jute char’(denounce the Brahmins, Banias and martial communities like the
Rajputs), has come a long way. The BSP supremo and UP chief minister took a U-turn declaring at Chandigarh the other day that this was never the BSP slogan. Though Mayawati’s statement created quite a stir in political circles yet it was expected from an astute politician, who rode piggyback on the forward castes to capture power in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the country. With mid-term poll clouds hovering over the country in the wake of the stand-off between the Congress and the Left over the nuclear deal, Mayawati timed her strategy to woo the upper castes well. In fact, her two-day Chandigarh visit was a clear move to replicate the success of the social engineering formula of UP in the northern states and woo the upper castes, particularly in Himachal Pradesh, where the assembly elections were round the corner. With substantial Dalit votes in her kitty, Mayawati chose to address the bread and butter concerns of the poor among the upper castes and religious minorities, arguably the most-dominant political class in the country. Saying that poverty had neither caste and religion, she outlined a two-pronged strategy to have a go at power at the Centre whether after the mid-term poll or the general elections in 2009. One, she promised quotas to the upper caste poor in the government and private sector saying that this was the most important tool to uplift the upper caste poor and the religious minorities. Two, she came down heavily on the mainstream political parties – Congress, BJP and the Left – for failing the people of the country over the past 60 years and sacrificing their interests at the altar of the big capitalists and the industrialists. “The existing exploitative system has to give way to the new system presided over by the BSP for a classless society,” Maywati exhorted the charged-up cadre. The existing political parties have failed to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots, says Satish Chander Mishra, in charge of the forward classes cell of the BSP, who is considered No 2 in the UP cabinet. In fact, Mishra talks at length how he was ‘won over’ by the ‘socialist’ ideology of the BSP under the leadership of
‘Behanji’. Mishra takes pains to explain how a forward class leader like him was handpicked by Mayawati to be advocate-general and later leader of the BSP in Rajya Sabha. Convener of the Chandigarh unit and former union minister Harmohan Dhawan goes a step further. “Politicians usually divide. However, by uniting the upper and the lower castes in UP, Mayawati had accomplished a historic task which other political leaders could not accomplish in the last 60 years,” said the leader, who has been declared as the next Lok Sabha candidate from Chandigarh by the BSP supremo. Party leaders feel that backward classes, upper caste poor and religious minorities could be a lethal political combination in the next Lok Sabha elections. In fact, Uttar Pradesh, which has produced several prime ministers, including Jawahalal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar and Rajiv Gandhi, could well provide another premier in Mayawati if the BSP’s social engineering formula succeeded at the central level, Dhawan asserts. “UP to hamari hai, ab Dili ki bari hai’(Uttar Pradesh is ours, now it’s the turn of New Delhi) – with those slogans on the lips the party cadre are already dreaming of 7, Race Course for the ‘Dalit ki
beti’, who wore the UP crown for the fourth time earlier this year. Taking such adjectives as iron lady and the future prime minister in her stride, Mayawati remains focused and advises her supporters to ‘win’ over the forward classes to the BSP ideology. Winning over the upper castes may be difficult initially but the UP experiment has shown that it is possible. The propaganda by other parties that the BSP was an ‘anti-upper caste’ outfit has to be nipped in the bud, she exhorts the party cadre. ‘We will have a go at Delhi when the party cadres are prepared for it,’ she smiles, underlining her prime ministerial ambitions. |
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Delhi Durbar Former
Himachal Pradesh Transport Minister G.S. Bali has the uncanny ability to stay in the news. A colourful personality, Bali has guarded his interests against the odds. Having been in a different camp during the last assembly elections, Bali owed his induction in the state cabinet to his sound equation with the AICC leaders. As a minister, he built his bridges with the Chief Minister and enjoyed considerable functional independence. His carefree attitude has landed him in problems but he has displayed both will and tact to extricate himself from seemingly grave situations. With reports of his having got a clean chit from the inquiry panel probing the sting operation about his participation in a controversial birthday bash, Bali succeeded in convincing the high command to start the election campaign for the assembly polls from his constituency. Building consensus Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remains hopeful of the government succeeding in taking the required steps to operationalise the Indo-US nuclear deal,
Congress leaders in the states have started making efforts to convince the people of the benefits of the agreement. In Punjab, party MLA Sukhpal Singh Khera has sought to build a consensus on the agreement among various political parties on behalf of the PCC. He says that the deal will not only help in meeting power requirements in the long run, it will end India’s nuclear isolation. Noting that the Shiromani Akali Dal had expressed support for the deal, he says that the SAD should convince its ally the BJP of the agreement’s merits. In the national capital, Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit has been talking to select groups in his constituency on the benefits of the deal. The AICC has brought out a booklet to answer queries on the deal with the hope that party workers will be able to effectively counter at the grassroots level any tirade by the opposition and the Left against the deal. Friendly mood The prospects of a snap poll are fast receding with the Left softening its stand and the Congress-led UPA appearing to be accommodative on the Indo-US nuclear deal. The main opposition party, the BJP has decided to go slow on its campaign against the Manmohan Singh-led government. The saffron party had earlier decided to go all out and organise several public meetings and rallies against the Congress-led government anticipating a snap general election. However, party insiders now say that they would go slow on that but continue to target the Congress-led government. Though the party has decided to scale own the number of public meetings for now and restrict the rallies to the election bound states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, the BJP leadership has asked its various cells like the Farmers, the SC/ST cell, the Minority cell, the Investor cell and the Intellectual cells to prepare its cadre and also raise people friendly issues at various
fora. Contributed by S. Satyanarayanan and Prashant Sood |
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