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The Chhattisgarh
escape Sting or not to sting |
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Global responsibility
New kind of leaders
Three is company
Welfare of the aged Japan’s whaling shame Delhi Durbar
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The Chhattisgarh escape THE level of governance in Naxal-infected states like Chhattisgarh seems to be going from bad to dismal. The state administration just cannot tackle the problem. It cannot arrest the Naxalites which virtually run a parallel government in several districts, and what is more, it cannot even keep the few arrested terrorists safely in its jails. The ease with which as many as 299 inmates, including 110 Naxal activists, escaped from the Dantewada jail on Sunday during daytime makes one believe that the local administration has as good as broken down. This has happened despite the fact that there were reports earlier that the Maoists had decided in the ninth congress of their jail action committees that a bid would be made to carry out jailbreaks to free their comrades. The state government talks boldly of taking adequate measures to tackle the scourge.These tall promises were fully exposed during this jailbreak, which took place in a district which is one of the worst affected by Naxalism and borders Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The jail has sanctioned staff strength of 19. Only three policemen were reportedly on duty. So much for the standards of governance in Chhattisgarh! The situation is hardly better in some other affected states. Two years ago, Naxalites stormed Jehanabad jail in Bihar and freed 137 comrades. At least that attack came from outside. In Chhattisgarh, the mischief took place right inside when a lone Naxalite commander overpowered a jail guard around 4.45 pm and snatched his weapon. The security lapse was all the more humiliating because the escaping inmates also looted a dozen SLR rifles and ammunition from the jail aromoury. But the administration has become so lax and the police force so demoralised that even such an event does not have any impact on those who are ruling a sensitive state in central India That is why the naxalites are getting bolder and bolder in their actions. Surely, this is not the kind of Su-raj that the BJP boasts of. And then the Chief Minister has not even offered to resign, admitting failure in running the jail administration!
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Sting or not to sting STING operations by television channels no longer enjoy the credibility they once had. They are themselves responsible for it. The latest instance of ethical misconduct by a channel is the telecast of two children ploughing the land that belonged to the family of a Union Minister. As it turned out, the boys were paid — Rs 20 each — for posing before the camera. Earlier, a Delhi schoolteacher was depicted as running a prostitution racket. Investigations showed that a freelance cameraman was settling a personal score with her in the garb of a sting operation. This being the situation, it is not surprising that a Bench of the Delhi High Court has thought it necessary to suggest a remedial measure. However loathsome sting operations have become, it is difficult to lap up the court’s recommendation because of its dangerous implications for the fourth estate. The court wants the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to constitute a three-member committee, headed by a retired judge and consisting of two government officials, including a police officer, to vet all sting operation reports before they are telecast. To put it in a nutshell, the remedy is worse than the disease. We had in these columns argued that certain provisions of the Broadcast Bill were not in the best interests of the media as they sought to negate the freedom of the Press. Much the same can be said about this suggestion, which amounts to censorship by other means. At the same time, sting operations cannot be the norm for the media. They should be resorted to rarely and that, too, when there is no other way to expose a wrongdoing or corruption. Entrapment, violation of privacy, secret videographing and recording of private conversations over the telephone are unacceptable. In other words, only the vital interest of the public should guide those carrying out a sting operation. Codes like the one evolved by the Editors Guild of India exist to govern sting operations. There is no harm if television channels feel the need to evolve their own code provided they follow it religiously under the direct supervision of their editors. In no case should the government meddle in media matters.
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Global responsibility THE “Bali Action Plan” that has emerged from the UN conference on climate change at Bali is not only a roadmap for the diplomatic journey for over two years, but also a clear indication of things to come; the pushing and shoving has already begun. And this is after a “breakthrough” was hailed at the end of the meeting — initially, it looked like we would get nowhere at all. The US was on the one side in lonesome glory, the EU was ranged on another, with the developing countries, especially India and China, making up the remaining side of a very uneasy triangle. At one stage, the EU was threatening a boycott of the forthcoming Major Emitters Meeting (MEM) talks in the US. To add to it all, there were sceptics questioning whether it was at all possible for human society to reverse trends. The United States’ hostility to climate change protocols is well known. It has been resisting the idea of any kind of cap or target for the reduction of emissions. The EU saw this as obstructionist. The US believes that big emitters among developing countries like China and India should also agree to such targets. India firmly resisted the imposition of targets, but agreed that it would take concrete measures to reduce its carbon footprint. In effect, we are to set our own targets rather than make external commitments. While the US at Bali avowedly “did not want to stand in the way” and agreed to the roadmap, it is already voicing second thoughts, saying that developing countries should indeed accept targets. The roadmap of negotiations envisions all countries coming up with a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The US never ratified the protocol, and while there were targets for big emitters, developing countries stayed outside the ring, pleading that their need for economic advancement could not be sacrificed. Under the Bali roadmap, the West is to provide assistance in terms of clean technologies, with subsidised costs, to help others reduce emissions. But the action has only begun, and it is a tough road ahead to 2009.
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When angry, count four; when very angry, swear. — Mark Twain
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New kind of leaders THE Narendra Modi
phenomenon, which has taken Gujarat and the country by storm, is a dramatic reminder of the evolution of India's political profile. It represents a complete break with the leadership styles of the Independence generation - of men like Jawaharlal Nehru, Hridaynath Kunzru and C. Rajagopalachari — that had
enjoyed undisputed sway. Mr Modi represents a break from even members of his own party, the BJP. Mr L.K. Advani, newly anointed Prime Minister-in waiting, made his infamous Rath Yatra to arouse base instincts, which paid the party rich dividends. But he was still the Olympian traditional leader talking down to his audience — the leader who knows best what is good for the people. In short, he is a leader in the traditional mould. Indira Gandhi had invented her own leadership style. She was no great orator but her themes were populist and she had the knack of arriving in moments of great stress or joy at just the right instant to fire popular imagination. It is a style Ms Sonia Gandhi has been striving to copy, with some success. But the pioneers of the new style of leadership of a distinct genre are Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav, Ms Mayawati and Mr Modi. This style is more than populist. It is a technique to reduce problems to atomised, stand-alone equations. It is folklorist. It is conversational. It is the antithesis of great orators of the ilk of the late Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan with their element of awe-inspiring declamation. Its essence is bonding. Nehru inspired by his transparent sincerity and the record of his sacrifices. Today's successful leaders build up an equation of familiarity. We are one of you, they seem to suggest. Let me illustrate. At an election rally of the United Progressive Alliance, there were many speakers extolling the candidate and asking the audience to vote for him. Then came Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav. He spurned high-flown rhetoric and went to the heart of the matter. He said when the electronic voting machine sang “ping”, just press the button next to the hand sign. The message went home as the audience dissolved into laughter. Ms Mayawati has displayed the same metier in driving home her message. She calls a spade a spade - as long as it suits her purpose. Having crossed the first hurdle of uniting Dalit votes by the simple expedient of highlighting their daily indignities, she realised that she would never get far by relying on the sectarian votes of one section, however widespread they are. It was a short jump to espousing the cause of all the poor and deprived. Poverty, deprivation and indignity have no caste or sub-caste, she seemed to suggest. Pithy examples, rather than flowing rhetoric, serve her tactic. Mr Modi's contribution to the new style of leadership is his mastery over the conversational mode. History has taught us that inciting base instincts through Hitler's hordes or Mussolini's storm troopers are easy roads to success. For Mr Modi, insinuating the communal divide in Gujarat in conversational matter-of-fact terms unerringly finds the bull's eye. He might occasionally relapse into excesses, but his forte is the poisoned barb, almost a secret language he shares with his audience. In the process, Mr Modi has emerged as a person above his party. The BJP, he seems to imply, is an outsider in the compact between him and his dear Gujaratis. In his lexicon, the party he is associated with is at best irrelevant, at worst an impostor. Whether the BJP's central leadership can cut him down to size remains to be seen. In immediate terms, it was concentrating on winning the state for the party. Whatever fate awaits Mr Modi and his fellow innovators in leadership style, the country's political idiom has changed. Democracy implies evolving and changing norms. The triumph of the Yadavs in northern Indian states has been a triumph of democracy inasmuch as it empowered a class that was looked down upon. The Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, who bore the brunt of the upwardly mobile Yadavs, have in turn been duly empowered, thanks to the alchemy of Ms Mayawati. This is all to the good, with the caveat that Mr Modi's brand of leadership and its message can prove subversive to the unity of the country and even to his parent party. In the first decades of Independence, India faced the threat of secession from the South, the Tamils in particular. If the Modi message of Gujarati asmita were to prevail, where will it lead the country? There is a thin line dividing populist and fascist tendencies. The danger in the new style of leadership is that it is so much easier to cross the line. India is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country and can only survive and prosper as a pluralist entity. The BJP seems oblivious to the dangers its star campaigner poses in espousing the cause of Gujarati greatness to the exclusion of most other national concerns. How the party will seek to change course after the end of the Gujarat election remains to be seen. Mr Advani cannot be too comfortable representing Gandhinagar in the Lok Sabha. Judging by the attitudes of Mr Modi's acolytes, he expects, if not inspires, total loyalty. There is no room for doubt in the service of the leader. And if arguments do not help in promoting the leader's cause, supporters raise the pitch of their voices, hoping to drown out dissenting views. It is not clear whether Mr Modi is planning to form his own Modi brigade to fight his political battles, but Gujarat's climate seems hospitable to such a project. The BJP erred on the side of caution in choosing an 80-year-old leader as its candidate for the Prime Minister's office. It seems unlikely that this decision was taken to ward off Mr Modi's possible onslaught on national leadership, contrary to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's assertion. To begin with, Mr Modi's brand does not travel, pegged as it is to advertising a state's supposed uniqueness. Besides, Mr Advani's elevation was to temper the warfare among the second rung of the party for the leadership stakes. Mr Modi has made his mark by outpacing Mr Laloo Prasad and Ms Mayawati in the art of public
discourse.
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Three is company
Madhuri’s
people came from the borderland between Nepal and India where, for generations, the hillmen had taken as their wives local women whose families hailed from the neighbouring states of U.P. and Bihar. Her father lived in the servants’ quarters next door to us and was employed as a chowkidar in the university. The remarkable thing about his family was that he had two wives living amicably under a single roof. Between the two he had fathered eight children. Madhuri’s mother was the younger wife who gave the senior wife all the respect and devotion due to an elder sister. Madhuri came to work for us when she was about 18 years of age. Her father had made no provision for her marriage because two of his daughters from his first wife were still on his hands. At first she was little more than a maid to our daughters, looking after their clothes, dusting their rooms and running errands for them. In time, under my wife’s guidance, she turned her hand to cooking, a chore for which she showed considerable keenness and aptitude. But the kitchen wasn’t the only place where Madhuri spent her time. She had been with us about two years when she began taking more than a casual interest in the darzi, a man twice her age, who sat in our verandah doing odd jobs for the family. On the pretext of supervising some sewing work for the womenfolk, Madhuri would spend hours sitting near the darzi. It was obvious to us that the girl was infatuated with the man who, we had been told, had a wife and two children in his village. “We’ve got to put a stop to this before Madhuri’s father gets to know about this,” said my wife. “He’ll kill her, or turn her out of the house.” We couldn’t get rid of Madhuri who had become a part of the family. So, reluctantly, my wife engaged another darzi, a fellow with a pockmarked face and a club foot. For several weeks Madhuri was in a sulk and would often leave her food untouched. Then, one morning, her father came to us in great distress, Madhuri had disappeared and he was sure that either she had been crushed under a bus or been kidnapped by some brothel keeper. Later in the day we were told by our neighbour’s servant that he had seen Madhuri at the inter-state bus terminus in the company of our former darzi. Her distraught father reported this to the police but it took them a fortnight to trace the missing couple. By then, Madhuri was living with her paramour as his “second wife” and her father did not wish to see her face again. Since then I have often wondered if Madhuri had fitted into the “menage a trois” as happily as her mother had
done.
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Welfare of the aged
AS the legend goes, young Ayyappa, the Lord of Sabarimala in Kerala, went to the forest to fetch tiger’s milk to save his ailing stepmother. It was nothing but pure love and devotion that prompted him to risk his life. After all, those days, there was no law making it obligatory for a child to look after his aged parents. In fact, it was only a couple of weeks ago that both Houses of Parliament passed the ‘Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Bill, 2007’, under which children failing in their duty to their elderly parents risked going to jail for three months and paying a fine of Rs 5,000. The social justice minister who piloted the Bill, Ms Meira Kumar, boastfully told the House that there was no provision for appeal in such cases. This was done, she argued, in the interest of the old parents who could not be expected to move from pillar to post in search of justice. The Central law is modeled after a similar Act in Himachal Pradesh that has been in force for a couple of years. There is not enough statistics, at least in the public domain, to suggest that the HP law was a great help in alleviating the hardship of the old. A BJP MP was so moved by the fact of the Centre having to move such a Bill in this land where the old are venerated that he shed copious tears in the House. The UPA government can, now, tom-tom that it has done its duty to the senior citizens and, therefore, seek their votes in the next elections. But will the law make any difference to the millions of people in the twilight period of their lives? The answer cannot be a definitive “yes” because the ground reality is not as the mandarins in the law ministry who drafted the law think it is. Despite the breakdown of the joint family system, children generally take care of their aged parents. Even when this does not happen, few parents complain. They would rather suffer insults, deprivation and neglect than discuss their problems with even their neighbours, let alone take up the matter in a court of law. This trait is underscored by a television advertisement that shows a retired couple discussing expense-reducing measures. At one point, the man proudly tells his wife that he will never stretch his hands to his son for help. And then he takes out with flourish two airline tickets he had bought for a Singapore sojourn. The neglected parents seldom resort to the Indian Penal Code, which has a provision making such neglect a cognisable offence. Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, in an autobiographical work narrates the case of a middle-aged son, who introduced his father to her as a destitute he had met on the road. She sent him to an old age home, personally undertaking to meet all his expenses. A few years later when the old man was about to die, he wanted his son to be called.She did a James Bond on the old man and found out that he wanted to hand over to his son a large sum of money he had been hiding all along. Ideally, the old man should have bequeathed the money to the old age home so that it could look after another person in distress but the father in him could think of only his wretched son who dumped his aged father on Sudha Murthy. This southern son is slightly better than the one in Kolkata who tried to sell his unsuspecting father’s kidney to make some money. For every one of them, there are many others who take their old parents to religious melas and dump them there. Every other widow in Vrindavan has some such story to narrate. Such children need to be sent to jail. But will this solve the problem of the old and the forlorn? Take the case of a person who has four children. If nobody takes care of him, will all of them go to jail, including the daughters, whose husbands might have taken fat dowries from the hapless man? Or, take another extreme case. A father is not looked after by his two sons, one of whom lives abroad. The law can send only the resident Indian to the jail, not the non-resident. As for the parent, he would be happier with his NRI son who gives him an air-conditioner when he visits him once in five years than the one who looks after him 365 days and even pays the electricity bills on the AC. The law also does not take into account those parents who squander away their wealth on wine and other vices and expect the children to take care of them in the evening of their life. They escape scot-free. For an old man, who is not looked after by his children, it will not bring food and medicine if his children are sent to jail for three months. Of course, the law has certain welcome provisions that allow the parents to reclaim the property they bequeathed to their children if they do not treat them well. For instance, King Lear would not have suffered at the hands of Goneril and Regan, who cheated him of his estate by professing false love. Under this law, the Shakespearean hero could have reclaimed the property and lived happily thereafter with Cordelia, whose true love he failed to recognise. It also permits the aged to mortgage such property and borrow money from banks. But these provisions concern only those who have some property. When the poor leave for urban areas in search of livelihood, they are not able to take their parents along with them. Caught as they are in their own struggle for survival, filial obligations become a casualty. They may even find the conditions in jails better than their own living conditions. Will sending them to jail bring any relief to their parents, whose conditions will remain the same? In other words, the law is meant only for a section of the people. The world over a society is judged by how it looks after its elderly. In the West, where nuclear families push the old and the infirm to “homes”, the state is the generous benefactor. A nation which records a 9 per cent economic growth rate, whose Sensex figures are surging towards the 25,000-mark and aspires to become a world power has to ensure that there is an effective social security scheme for the elderly, who have nobody to look after them. Instead of providing them with a system the needy can rely on, the government is trying to escape from its responsibility by putting the burden on the children. Over the years, we have proved good at making laws that are seldom implemented. To that long list has been added this law, which will make little difference in the lives of the elderly whose number will cross 200 million by the year 2030. What India needs is something like the Beveridge report, the implementation of which entitled Britain to be called a welfare state.
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Japan’s whaling shame THE Nisshin Maru, an 8,000-ton whaling factory ship, has been sailing southward from Japan for about two weeks headed for its hunting grounds -- the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary off the coast of Antarctica. The Japanese have been hunting whales in spite of a moratorium on commercial whaling enacted by the International Whaling Commission in 1986. And this year, for the first time in decades, they will target threatened humpbacks and endangered fin whales. Since the moratorium began, Japan has exploited a loophole that allows member states to kill whales for scientific research. In 1987, the Japanese established the nonprofit Institute of Cetacean Research, under the supervision of the national Fisheries Agency, to conduct its research. To most observers this was a program designed to keep the whaling fleet afloat until the moratorium could be overturned. Japan has been “researching” minke whales, sei whales, Byrd’s whales and sperm whales in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific with great effectiveness, killing more than 25,000 whales in the process. The Japanese say they are studying stock structure, feeding behavior, etc. The meat is sold commercially. The International Whaling Commission’s scientific committee has objected no fewer than 20 times, saying that Japan’s research program lacks scientific rigor and would not hold up under peer review. The Japanese will attempt to take 50 fin whales, which (like the sei and sperm whales) are listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union and by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They also plan to hunt 50 humpback whales, the social and charismatic species that is a favorite of the billion-dollar worldwide whale-watching industry. They’re known for “songs” that can last as long as 24 hours, and they travel across thousands of miles. A recent study by geneticists published in the journal Science estimates their pre-whaling population at 1.5 million. Today, humpbacks may number fewer than 30,000. The killing of a whale by the most modern methods is cruel. An exploding harpoon, meant to kill quickly, rarely does more than rupture the whale’s organs. The animal is winched to the side of the kill ship, a probe is jabbed into it and thousands of volts of electricity are run through it in an attempt to kill it faster, though it often takes 15 or 20 minutes for the whale to drown. Why are the Japanese targeting these fragile species? Why are they whaling at all? Surveys by the British polling outfit MORI show that only 1 percent of Japanese regularly eat whale meat. Only 11 percent support whaling at all. More than 4,800 tons of surplus whale meat is being stockpiled in freezers. Last year, the five large seafood companies that owned the whaling fleet and operated it for the Institute of Cetacean Research divested and got out of whaling, citing poor consumer demand. They also stopped processing and selling the meat, leaving that to the government. Japanese officials often decry the cultural imperialism of Western nations that hunt deer and slaughter cows and yet condemn Japanese whaling. They point to a long tradition of whaling in Japan and say they limit the hunt to a sustainable level -- about 1,400 whales this year. I asked noted marine biologist Sylvia Earle what she thought of sustainable whaling. She responded: “Whales are long-lived, slow-growing wildlife, unlike domesticated animals that convert sunlight via plants to protein in less than a year. It defies logic to think that mobilising large ships consuming large amounts of fuel with large crews traveling large distances to satisfy the tastes of a small number of consumers qualifies as a reasonable use of resources, let alone as a ‘sustainable’ enterprise.” But perhaps the real reasons the Japanese continue to whale have less to do with culture and more to do with fears about the imminent collapse of a major food source. Today’s oceans are in great peril. We have lost 90 percent of the pelagic predator fish stocks – marlin, tuna, swordfish, great sharks – that existed in 1950. Half the world’s reefs are dead or dying. A report published a year ago in Science warned that if the current trends of overfishing continue, every fishery will collapse by 2048. The situation puts Japan in a desperate position. The Japanese depend on seafood for 40 percent of their protein. If they accept international regulation on whaling, strict controls on fisheries may follow. Joji Morishita, director for international negotiations for the Japanese government’s Fisheries Agency, told the Los Angeles Times last week, “For many developing countries, whaling has become a symbol of who will dictate resource management.” Like fish, marine mammals the world over are struggling for survival. Resource management policies based on cultural traditions or national pride need to become a thing of the past. The oceans face a tenuous future. Right now is a good time for all of us to rethink how we use them. By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Delhi Durbar Former
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digivijay Singh is clearly back in favour with the Congress leadership. This explains the important role he played in the party’s recently-concluded campaign for the Gujarat assembly elections. This was a sharp contrast to the last 2002 poll when the outspoken Thakur leader was specifically asked to keep away from the state. Congress strategists, headed by his bete noire Kamal Nath, who were playing the soft Hindutva card, were apparently nervous that Digivijay Singh would queer the pitch for the party by taking on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for his role in the post-Godhra carnage. As an after thought, they did eventually invite Digivijay Singh to address a public rally along with yesteryear actress Reena Roy towards the very end of the campaign. Singh refused the invitation, though he says he might have reconsidered it if he had been asked to share the platform with Madhduri Dixit instead!
Savvy negotiators for the nation Union ministers Kamal Nath and Kapil Sibal are both perceived to be pro-America and yet the two have defended the country admirably in multi-lateral fora by taking on the US. Nath has consistently refused to accede ground to the US at the WTO talks and it was Sibal’s turn to do the same at the international conference on climate change, which concluded in the island resort of Bali last week. As science and technology minister, Sibal is a passionate advocate of the Indo-US nuke deal. Sibal, who was heading the Indian delegation, played a key role in reading the fine print during the deliberations which resulted in isolating the US and eventually paved the way for the compromise proposal on future negotiations for a new global warming pact.
In search of
PM’s chair When the BJP declared with great fanfare that leader of opposition L.K.Advani would be its Prime Ministerial candidate, it was received with a great deal of amusement as nobody was able to figure out the provocation for this sudden announcement given that the next general election is more than a year away. But the BJP in general and Advani, in particular, were dead serious about this development. While sweets were distributed liberally at the party office on the occasion, BJP’s shadow Prime Minister gave a series of interviews about the great responsibility which had been thrust on him which made it appear as if Advani had actually been appointed PM. This prompted a wag to comment that Advani was heading for Rashtrapati Bhavan when his entourage left the party office that fateful night. Contributed by Anita Katyal, Rajeev Sharma and Satish Misra
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