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Bear hug Punjab lives on loans |
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India’s shame
Bangladesh in difficult straits
Damage control
Culture and crime Malaysian voters break ethnic mould Inside Pakistan
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Bear hug Monday’s
951-point crash in the BSE Sensex was a part of the turmoil in the global markets triggered by the collapse of America’s fifth-largest investment banking firm, Bear Stearns, which was sold to JP Morgan for less than Rs 1,000 crore, a tenth of its value. The deal was backed by the Federal Reserve, which made $30 billion available to finance the takeover of Bear’s less liquid assets. Instead of reassuring investors, the Fed action has spread fears about the severity of the crisis. Bear also sold Indian stocks worth Rs 250 crore on Monday to cover up part of the losses it has suffered in the US sub-prime crisis. Nearer home, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has tried to play down reverberations of the US sub-prime mess, saying its impact on India will be “moderate”. More significantly, he has revealed that none of the public sector banks has had any exposure to the US mortgage market. So far a private bank, ICICI, has taken a hit from its overseas investments. Though the Finance Minister still talks of 8 to 9 per cent growth rate, there seems to be no end to bad news emanating from various quarters. The IIP data for January pointed to a sharp fall in industrial growth at 5.3 per cent compared to 11.6 per cent in the same month a year ago. The rising fuel and food prices have brought in inflationary pressures and the 2008-09 budget has not come up to the industry’s expectations. Although some analysts still feel the Indian growth story is intact and talk of its “decoupling” from the US, the sentiment is spoiled by adverse global developments. Now Japan is seen as heading towards a slowdown. After Bear Stearns, other sub-prime victims like Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup are under the scanner. There is not enough transparency in corporate balance sheets. How many can the Fed save and for how long? In such uncertain times, it is better to be cautious and stay away from equity markets. Even retail investors who have routed their investments through trusted mutual funds have not escaped the market heat.
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Punjab lives on loans THE
near-empty state coffers and politics of populism have made the Punjab budget for 2008-09 a bland affair. It is wrong to assume that the election code has barred Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal from announcing sops. An exchequer running on empty cannot fund any more giveaways. Instead, the elections — both panchayati and parliamentary — have, perhaps, come in the way of slashing or dropping freebies. The subsidies have remained untouched. With no new taxes and a poor collection of the existing levies, a bloated bureaucracy and a top-heavy police force, the government is run by and for the stakeholders: public interest has been reduced to a peripheral issue. The Finance Minister has offered no plan to pull the state out of the financial mess in which it is trapped. There is no agenda to push growth, which has been and will continue to be below the national average: 5.9 per cent against the national 9 per cent in the 11th Plan period. The allocations for industry, health and education are much less than what is required. The additional allocation for power will only strengthen the existing infrastructure. There are no funds for new generation, free power subsidy and even for the purchase of power. With the government adjusting the power subsidy against loans, the Punjab State Electricity Board has been driven closer to the edge. However, there may be no case for panic. Like the government, the people dependent on it also survive on borrowings. The state’s debt will rise to Rs 57,369 crore from the present Rs 52,936 crore by the end of the next fiscal. States take loans to fund development projects, but in Punjab loans are taken to meet part of the consumption expenditure. According to the budget figures, every farm household in Punjab is in debt to the tune of Rs 41,576; this is more than three times the national average of Rs 12,585. The debt-ridden farmers ask the state government for waiving of loans taken from arhtiyas. The debt-ridden Punjab government carries the bowl further and asks the Centre for a bail-out.
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India’s shame WHEN Taslima Nasreen wrote her Lajja few would have imagined that India would have to suffer the shame of hounding her out of the country. Now that it has come about, it needs to be acknowledged — even by those who insist that this is a free country — that India might be free, but reason, liberal values and secularism are seriously endangered. This democracy is no longer a refuge for the persecuted fleeing the tyranny of intolerances that abound in the neighbourhood. On the contrary, intolerance is growing and India is no longer a safe haven not just for a refugee like Taslima but also for some of our countrymen as the exile of artist M F Husain shows. When a citizen like Husain has had to become an exile, it is not surprising that exiles, too, have to flee. Since November last the Bangladeshi writer has been living in hiding, thanks to the perverse secularist politics of the Left Front in West Bengal. The CPM caved in to fanatics who wanted her out of Kolkata, and Taslima had no choice but to move to a fortified undisclosed location in Delhi. Her health has been deteriorating and she is deprived of essential medical treatment. The CPM’s position that she can return if the Centre takes responsibility for her security was calculated to ensure that she does not continue residing in India. After all, Taslima, as she herself wailed, can live only in Kolkata; and when it was made clear that she has no place in the “City of Joy”, it was only a matter of time before she was packed off from India. This is a damning indictment of the UPA Government and exposes the hypocrisy of the entire political class. The Left is the biggest offender and the UPA is no less culpable for being dictated to by the Left. The BJP and the Sangh parivar are exploiting the situation with cynical glee. The very forces responsible for the pogrom in Gujarat and for persecuting Husain and vandalising his works are now speaking up for Taslima. With such politics at play, Taslima, like Husain, might be better off living elsewhere.
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In this world, there is always danger for those who are afraid of it. — George Bernard Shaw
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Bangladesh in difficult straits THE first anniversary of the military takeover of the constitutional government of Bangladesh under the pretext of bringing a better version of democratic governance passed off without any outrage from the international community on January 11. More than a year back national elections scheduled for January 2007 were postponed indefinitely and a state of emergency was declared by President Iajuddin Ahmed with the backing of the country’s military. Despite warnings from the world leaders that any move towards military rule would have adverse consequences for Bangladesh, the army-backed administration has tightened its grip over the country. Bangladesh is preparing for elections later this year, somewhere between October and December, but public discontent with the rule of a military-backed caretaker government that will simmer for another year or so may upset the process. And in the meantime, the caretaker government’s questionable reforms are weakening the country’s already fragile democratic foundation and unwittingly paving the way for radical Islamists to play a major role in politics. It has declared its ambition to uproot corruption and violence in electoral politics as well as to effectively tackle Islamic militancy. This has led to the arrest of several high-ranking politicians on charges of graft and the execution of a few high-profile militants. In its purported drive to root out corruption, the two most high-profile targets have been former Prime Ministers — Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Sheikh Hasina Wajed of the Awami League. The UN Special Rapporteur for human trafficking, Sigma Huda, was also arrested on charges of extortion and has been convicted and sentenced to three years of imprisonment. The government has made it clear that elections will be held only after certain reforms that will change the way both prominent political parties in Bangladesh operate. This includes changes in their organisational structure and, most important perhaps, in their leadership. Though the military-backed caretaker government claims that these reforms have the support of the people of Bangladesh, some argue that this is an assault on the institutional underpinnings of the country’s democracy. The military wants to ensure that it retains its primacy in the political landscape, and some critics contend it is doing its best to weaken the political parties. Though ordinary Bangladeshis initially welcomed the installation of the military-backed caretaker government, there is now growing resentment with its failure to better manage the economy and to re-establish democratic governance. Floods in the summer followed by Cyclone Sidr have brought the ineffective management by the government further into the forefront. There is also a danger that as the caretaker government weakens the mainstream political parties, the radical Islamist organisations could gain more salience. The Jamaat-e-Islami, for example, is emerging as a potent political force in Bangladesh’s polity where other mainstream political parties are getting discredited. The drive for corruption is also losing its legitimacy as too many arrests are being made without the due process of law. According to the Human Rights Watch, as many as 20,000 people have been jailed on corruption charges in the past few months. There is a danger of Bangladesh becoming another Pakistan where the military came to office promising a fight against corruption and went on to rule the country almost permanently. A politicised military poses a grave threat to the underpinnings of a constitutional democracy, and Pakistan’s example should be enough of a warning. The summer saw students challenging the might of the government and the government responding by imposing an indefinite curfew and closing down all the educational institutions. This was the most serious threat to army rule. Though this threat subsided after a few weeks, it revealed the tensions that continue to simmer below the surface. It is true that over the past few years, politics in Bangladesh had become overtly personalised, revolving around the personalities of its two main leaders, the BNP’s Khaleda Zia and the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina. The two were so busy criticising and trying to undermine each other that they had little time to debate serious issues of governance. The political struggle between Khaleda Zia’s right-of-centre BNP and Hasina Wajed’s left-leaning Awami League had turned into a zero-sum game in which the biggest loser was Bangladesh itself. Shunning the give and take of democratic politics, the two parties seemed to keep their country perpetually on the verge of chaos, alternating between state repression and crippling national strikes aimed at toppling the government in power. The increased polarisation between the two mainstream political parties opened up “political space” for extremist Islamic parties that have been using their new-found relevance as leverage to place their radical agenda at the forefront. The growth of radical Islam in Bangladesh owes a lot to the failure of parliamentary democracy and the weakening of civil society over the past few years. Still, by weakening the main institutions that have sustained whatever remains of democracy in Bangladesh, the present government is further minimising the chances of restoration of effective democracy. With the nation’s democratic institutions in a shambles, there is nothing to replace the military-backed regime, rendering the religious organisations the main actors. This can have serious consequences for Bangladesh as well as for the entire region. Bangladesh is under India’s radar for a host of recent terrorist acts. No action has been taken on the list of around 172 training camps that India had given to the Bangladesh government last year. Despite initial optimism, the Indian government has been disappointed with the caretaker government’s response to its concerns, and now India plans to get tougher with Bangladesh as it seems to have failed to take effective steps against terrorist groups operating from Bangladeshi territory. However, there is a much larger problem of the “Pakistanisation of Bangladesh” staring India and the international community, something that can be ignored only at great peril. The international community has a huge stake in what kind of political institutions evolve in Bangladesh in the next few years and so it is important that it effectively leverages its influence in Bangladesh so as to help in its political transition to a stable democracy. This is as important for global security as it is for the right of Bangladeshi citizens to have good
governance. The writer teaches at King’s College, London.
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Damage control
IN the last three decades the findings of psychological research have impacted increasingly on the fields of school education and child development with largely meritorious effect. The most obvious effect has been on the issue of corporal punishment. Thirty years ago parents and teachers subscribed to the maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” I must confess I subscribed to it more than others. In fact, whenever two or more of my former students from the seventies or early eighties get together they embarrass me by limiting their conversation to recalling the extent and intensity of the “dhappings” they received from me. Now there is an awareness that in the changed social scenario not only is corporal punishment unacceptable but it is also counterproductive as a corrective measure. Another area where psychological advances have exercised great beneficial effect is the area of learning disabilities. There is an awareness about this and every school has a learning centre where special educators help children to cope with this problem. But often a halfbaked understanding of psychology is used to justify what can only be termed as totally irresponsible behaviour. I was teaching a section of class eight one year. There was one child who refused to submit his work. “You nitwit,” I said finally, in sheer exasperation. “I’ll put you on drill if you don’t give in your work tomorrow.” The next day the father was at my doorstep. “You’ve called my child names. He won’t eat, he won’t sleep and refuses to come to school. You have caused him tremendous psychological damage.” I was invited to dinner one evening. Laxmi, my hostess, was a simple soul, with just one obsession. She would skimp and save the whole year through and then splurge on a piece of exquisite and sinfully expensive crystal. One of the other guests, a seven-year-old girl, picked up a Lalique parrot from the coffee table and began knocking it on the stone floor. Laxmi’s face blanched but she bravely tried to ignore this peculiar behaviour. I took the crystal from the child’s hand and shook my finger at her. But a moment later the child picked up the parrot again, looked at her mother, who smiled indulgently, and began knocking it again against the floor. I took it away again from her and this time I said “If you do not leave this alone, I will punish you”. The mother sprang to her feet. “I am shocked at you,” she screamed. “You’ve caused immense psychological damage to my child by threatening her.” “That’s all very well ma’am” I said in a quiet voice. “But what about the psychological damage that your child has caused to Laxmi?” The mother clutched at her daughter’s hand and stomped out of the house. I looked at Laxmi, afraid that I had caused a social crisis for her. But she only smiled at me and said quietly “Thank you, thank you very
much.”
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Culture and crime The Scarlett Keeling murder case has transfixed India’s large and busy media with a glimpse of a way of life which few Indians can quite believe. A mother with nine children from four – or was it five – fathers. The children, whose schooling seems decidedly patchy, are taken to live on a beach in Goa for months on end in the name of some kind of nebulous larger “education”. One of them, merely 15, is left to look after herself while the rest take off to Karnataka. On her own, she takes drugs, drinks a good deal of vodka, has sex with men she has just met – none of which seems to be unusual to her – and is quite quickly murdered. Rarely can the expression “it will all end in tears” be so grimly literal, and I don’t particularly want to add to the terrible burden of grief and guilt which Scarlett’s mother, Fiona MacKeown, must have to shoulder from now on. There are thousands of English teenagers exactly like Scarlett Keeling and not much about her life is unusual, apart from its grisly end. I dare say she was nice-natured and well-mannered; she drank and took drugs recklessly, as many teenagers do; she probably had the air of a streetwise girl, able to cope with situations. Only on reading her diary does it become apparent that she was virtually illiterate, extremely ignorant and as naive as 15-year-olds have always been. We all know teenagers exactly like that. I very much doubt, however, whether Indians do. Even now, a family resembling Ms MacKeown’s is impossible to envisage in an Indian context; no Indian mother, no Indian child would ever behave as either of them seem to have. What on earth persuaded them, and the two million Europeans who go to Goa every year to dance and drink and, often, take drugs, that this largely Roman Catholic enclave of India is the right place to indulge in their reckless hedonism? What on earth made them think that a family so brutally ignorant and illiterate would add anything to that culture of education and dogged self-improvement? What on earth persuaded them that to holiday in such style could be regarded as “authentic”, rather than cultural imperialism of the most brutal variety? Very few Europeans, on holiday in hot parts of the world, seem to consider that they are anywhere in particular; a place with a history and a culture and a view of public propriety. It is quite incredible to see how Europeans dress and behave once off the plane, and it is not surprising at all that their hosts take their behaviour as a direct insult. In much of respectable Indian society, you would not light a cigarette in front of an older person. The idea of kissing in public or holding hands seems not far from inconceivable outside the most sophisticated urban circles. I once saw a notice in a Bombay nightclub with the lovely imprecation, “No hanky-panky”. Goa is an extreme case, but every society which has been brutally colonised by European holidaymakers has had to bite the bullet and overlook what must seem like direct insults. I once saw a woman walking the streets of the medieval bazaar in Cairo in a bikini, which must have taken quite a high degree of ignorance or sheer nerve. In our own culture, we have learnt that people can determine their own boundaries and take their own moral decisions. For instance, we have effectively taken the view that 15-year-olds are going to get drunk and take drugs and have sex, and their parents don’t have a lot of control, realistically, over any of that. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean, we think, that they are bad people or that they cannot say no to a sexual invitation if they don’t feel like it at that moment. Most of the rest of the world hasn’t quite grasped that. When Indians see or read about Europeans living for six months in Goa exactly as they live in Camden Town or some field in Devon, but with many fewer clothes on, they think two things. First, they cannot see where the moral boundaries are here at all; secondly, they feel humiliated and embarrassed and a little bit angry that it is happening where they live, rather than in a field in Devon. I dare say they will come to learn to think and feel differently. I don’t suppose it will be much of an improvement if they do. By arrangement with
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Malaysian voters break ethnic mould Kuala Lumpur –
The recent elections here in Malaysia were the most bitterly fought since 1969. The skeptics outnumbered those who dared to imagine that the ruling Barisan Nasional, a grouping based on race, could at least suffer an erosion of its intimidating majority of 90 per cent of seats in the Malaysian parliament. There was an all pervasive fear among the people of Chinese and Indian origin, and also among the democratic sections of Malays, that race riots would erupt the moment the dominant grouping, ruling the country since independence in 1957, lost. This could be a repeat of 1969 when hundreds of innocent people were massacred. However Malaysia's voters have demonstrated that they no longer accept dictatorships, even through the ballot box. Barisan Nasional (BN) now has a bare majority of 140 in a house of 222, reduced from 190 in a house of 212. The opposition has 82 seats. The BN polled just 51.2 per cent of the votes. It has lost control of four of the prosperous, large-size states, out of a total of 13. The states enjoy real powers under a federal structure. BN can no longer amend the constitution as it wishes and play with the limited liberties which the people enjoy. It has amended the constitution 40 times in 50 years to establish an autocratic rule in the guise of helping the ethnic Malays. People began to think that the BN was not serving the interests of the people, be they Malays or non-Malays. The issue of rising prices was very serious but the BN government pretended they did not know about it and kept on saying that this was a global trend. People of Indian and Chinese origin had much to worry about. The country's ethnic Indians, who make up less than 10 percent of the population, were especially angry at Prime Minister Abdullah over the jailing of five Indian activists, after an extraordinary street protest was broken up by the riot police in November and later in February. One of the five activists of the Hindu Rights Action Force, M. Manoharan, now held without trial under a colonial-era security law, was elected. And, S. Samy Vellu who has lead the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) for the past 29 years, winning seven times, had to bite the dust. Except for Dr S. Subramanian, S. Saravanan and K. Devamani, other MIC candidates were all wiped out in an unprecedented wave of anger, perhaps opening up a new era in politics for Indians there. Indian voters form significant numbers in at least 67 parliamentary and 141 state assembly seats, where they comprise between 9 per cent and 46 percent of the electorate. They were the deciding factor in constituencies where Malay and Chinese votes were divided. Indians, traditional backers of the Government, made their small numbers count. The Democratic Action Party (DAP) had seven Indians for Parliament and 17 for state, while PKR fielded 19 Indians. In Parliament and the state assemblies, there will be about 20 Indians from the DAP and PKR, and all will be sitting on the opposition benches. Previously, in the entire country, there were only two Indian MPs – Karpal Singh and M. Kulasegaran. In fact, Karpal Singh, a feisty lawyer, a Malay of Punjabi origin, had sweet revenge by getting his barrister son Gobind Singh Deo elected to parliament, and another Jagdip Singh, to Penang state assembly. His home state of Penang is now ruled by DAP and shares power in three other states.
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Inside Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, who continues to occupy the Army House in Rawalpindi, is busy devising a strategy to wreak the PPP-PML(N)-ANP-JUI(F) coalition from within. His political engineering is basically aimed at exploiting the weaknesses of the coalition partners to remain afloat as President of Pakistan. He was happy to find consensus emerging on the PPP’s Makhdoom Amin Faheem for the post of Prime Minister, as both had got “wired” following their interactions when the PPP leader would call on President Musharraf as an emissary of the late Benazir Bhutto with regard to the deal the two had been trying to enter into. But Mr Nawaz Sharif’s opposition to Mr Fahim’s candidature has changed the situation altogether. Mr Faheem is, however, being urged by the media and others not to do anything that may amount to rocking the boat of democracy. The News reminded him on March 16, “None of the half a dozen or so ‘breakaway’ factions carved out from within the PPP over the past years have enjoyed any notable success.” How far the rift between Mr Asif Zardari and Mr Fahim and the latter’s strained relations with Mr Nawaz Sharif harm the interests of the coalition remains to be seen. But the emerging scenario is encouraging for the Musharraf camp. Mr Faheem, who is highly respected in the rank and file of his party, may accept as a fait accompli the denial of what is considered as his due only if Mr Zardari himself becomes the Prime Minister as quickly as possible. But that is not easy. According to Business Recorder (March 15), Mr Zardari is “said to be a diploma holder from the UK. If the Election Commission of Pakistan treats that diploma equal to a degree, the matter would end there.” But that appears to be a remote possibility. Only a constitutional amendment can clear the way for his elevation as Prime Minister. This will require President Musharraf’s approval, which may not come without a price. Mush wants to leave a legacy Despite all that President Musharraf is doing to continue in the office he occupies, it seems he is not sure of success. The very parties he tried to destroy by discrediting their leaders during his rule have emerged stronger after the February 18 elections. The brave face he has been putting up after the rout of his PML (Q) appears to be only for hiding his desperation. It is not for nothing that he has told the Geo TV network in the course of an interview that “I shall be remembered by the people as a person who has cared for the country, for the people and worked honestly and diligently for them.” Interestingly, President Musharaf has discontinued the most-talked-about PTV programme, Aiwan-e-Sadr se, telecast every Thursday. He used the programme to narrate his side of the story about development activities, as a letter writer, Mohammad Azhar Khwaja of Lahore, pointed out in The Nation on March 17. All politics, no economics “The future of the National Assembly will depend in no small measure on how successfully the new government is able to fulfil the promises it has made and cope with the grave challenges it faces. The common man continues to be under pressure on account of the rising prices and unending shortages. With the international prices of fuel and wheat on the increase, there are no easy solutions to these problems.” The Nation, which carried an editorial on the opening session of the Pakistan National Assembly with these concluding lines, was not alone in reminding the politicians that if they concentrate more on politics and less on economics, as they have been doing so far, they may end up achieving little. Shahid Javed Burqi argued in an article in Dawn, “There are three areas in which policy-makers in Pakistan can derive some useful lessons from the Indian experience. In two of them, India is a couple of steps ahead of Pakistan and in the third it is a step or two behind. The first area where India has done better than its neighbour is to marshal domestic resources for investment, to reduce the reliance on external capital flows to produce high levels of GDP growth. The Indian savings rate is higher than that of Pakistan as is the tax-to-GDP ratio. “The second area where India has made much greater progress than Pakistan is in devolving greater development authority to its states…. The only area where Pakistan has done better than India is in reducing the power of the bureaucracy.”
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