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Maya Pradesh Break cartels |
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Trauma
ward
Pay commission mess
Gone
with the waves
Flirting with
regionalism Promote ‘excessive
thinness’ and face French law Delhi Durbar
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Maya Pradesh ALL five by-election results — two for Lok Sabha and three for assembly seats — in UP going in favour of Chief Minister Mayawati’s BSP shows that her new social engineering experiment is bearing fruit. The Sarvjan Hitaya, Sarvjan Sukhaya slogan seems to have increased her following considerably. If the BSP repeats its performance in the next parliamentary elections, it will be unfair to call it a party of the Dalits. Despite its primary focus remaining on the welfare of the Dalits, the BSP appears to be getting transformed into a movement for the uplift of all sections of society. The Dalits, including those belonging to the minorities, and the upper castes coming together to defeat the Muslim-Yadav combination of SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav is an interesting development in a state known for its caste-based politics. The April 12 poll outcome has falsified the claim made after the BSP’s defeat in the Balia by-election four months ago that her appeal cannot go beyond the Dalits. The BSP’s latest performance is significant in another way. Its principal rival, the SP, contested the by-elections by reaching a tacit understanding with the Congress. Yet, Mr Mulayam Singh’s party could not win even a single seat. Perhaps, Muslims are quietly distancing themselves from the former chief minister, who had once acquired the sobriquet Mulla Mulayam Singh. The results must have shattered the hopes of the Congress for making an inroad into the Dalit vote-bank. The Dalits, who once constituted a significant support base of the Congress, are not taking the party’s advocacy for their uplift seriously. This impression can be gathered from the Congress candidates losing their deposits in the Azamgarh and Khalilabad Lok Sabha constituencies and two of the three assembly constituencies where the by-elections were held. The BJP continues to be a poor performer in this politically most important state. The people remain fed up with its divisive politics. It is not surprising if the dismal record of the BJP, the SP and the Congress is contributing more to Ms Mayawati’s growing popularity than her government’s own performance. At this rate, whether the national parties will be able to come to power at the Centre or not, the BSP will play a decisive national role.
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Break cartels THE UPA government has been exploring every available option to face the Opposition onslaught on the rising prices but without much success. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s latest discovery is that the cement and steel makers have been operating as cartels. Well, what is stopping him from smashing such cartels? In December last the MRTPC had held top cement makers guilty of forming a cartel. The Supreme Court, too, refused them any relief. Accusing the states of inaction, Mr Chidambaram wants them to use the Essential Services and Maintenance Act to curb hoarding. He had earlier tried to explain that the price rise was a global phenomenon. Well, the UPA government, like the previous NDA government, cannot escape the responsibility for the neglect of agriculture. The present spurt in inflation is due to a demand-supply mismatch. The supply of food items has failed to keep pace with the rising demand. No serious effort has been made to raise farm productivity. The government has admitted before the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture that post-harvest, crops worth about Rs 55,600 crore go waste annually. This is largely due to poor processing and storage facilities. Instead of checking wastage, the government resorts to expensive imports. There is now a plan to import one million tonne of edible oils and supply these at a subsidised rate of Rs 15 a litre to the families below the poverty line. More than taking development and administrative action, the government has been focusing on fiscal and monetary measures, which have proved ineffective in controlling prices. The reduction of excise duties and removal of customs duties can have a limited impact. The RBI has kept interest rates high and may raise them further at its meeting later this month. That will further hurt growth. As a result, India is heading towards lower growth and higher inflation. Price rise hurts the poor the most. Much of their spending goes into buying food. The government should take steps keeping in view their needs. Pay more to farmers and help them tackle the shortages.
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Trauma ward AT a time when strikes in even non-essential sectors are frowned upon, PGI technicians have gone on an agitation, crippling the functioning of the premier institute. The PGI does not cater to Chandigarh alone. It is the lifeline for patients from all over the region, including Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and even Jammu and Kashmir. Thousands of patients from these states have been put to great hardship by the agitation. On paper, this disruption has taken place only in the case of OPD patients. But in reality, even emergency services are not functioning as smoothly as they should be. How can they be when more than 250 technicians manning x-ray machines, ultrasound, CT scan and MRI remain off duty? There is even a report that a Panchkula patient needing dialysis urgently could not get due medical aid and died. That is a sad reflection on the agitation path adopted by the technicians. Even the end of the three-day strike may not bring in any relief because the technicians under the banner of the Medical Technologists Association of the PGI have threatened to go on an indefinite strike if their demands are not accepted. They have even proudly boasted that they will leave no stone unturned to make the agitation as “successful” as a similar one way back in 1991. While the Union Health Ministry must do all it can to solve their long-standing problems, there is no justification for the technicians to hold the general public to ransom like this. Just because they have tremendous capacity to cause great misery to the people — that too those fighting various diseases — does not mean that they should be allowed to do so. If they get away with it, there will be no stopping others who are always keen to strike work at the drop of a hat.
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A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted. — Helen Rowland
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Pay commission mess
NO previous pay commission has evoked such a loud and widespread chorus of protests and criticism as has the sixth one. Controversy over its voluminous recommendations is escalating, not abating. The Union government’s willingness to appoint a large, 21-man committee to re-examine its findings is a belated recognition of uncomfortable reality. By contrast, the powers that be did appoint hurriedly a four-member committee to look into the vigorous protests against the commission’s “injustice” to the armed forces. So great has been the resentment among the officers and men under arms that the three Service Chiefs had to make a joint representation to Defence Minister A. K. Anthony. Already worried by a substantial shortage of officers, especially in the Army, they also appealed to the men in olive green, white and light blue to stem the sudden spurt in the applications for premature retirement. There is no doubt that even in peacetime, the defence forces face hazards and hardships unknown to those occupying swivel chairs in South and North Blocks. Leave alone coping with “a million mutinies”, postings in such inhospitable spots as Siachen or deserts of Rajasthan also take a heavy toll. Yet, the real problem is a lot more complex than is made out to be. Moreover, the military leadership is as much to blame for the distortion in the structure of pay and promotions in the armed forces as the civilians, both politicians and bureaucrats. All this needs to be discussed separately, but one immediate comment is called for. As it happens, the four-man committee to look into the grievances of the armed forces consists, unsurprisingly, of the Cabinet Secretary, the Finance Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Defence Secretary, all of them IAS officers. This reinforces an underlying irony. Almost all critics of the pay commission’s report — irrespective of their manifold differences over numerous issues — are agreed on one point, and one point only: that the supremacy of the IAS is the source of the woes of every other cog in the gargantuan governmental machine. Some talk of the government being “run by the IAS for the benefit of the IAS”. Is this a manifestation of the centuries’ long chemistry between the matchless British class system and the deathless Indian caste system? One simple question the government’s top leadership must answer. Why could it not find one single general, admiral or air chief marshal - serving or retired — to join the four-man committee of the IAS Brahmins? An explanation is also due for the dismal fact that the government turned a deaf ear to the repeated requests of the Service Chiefs for the inclusion in the Sixth Pay Commission itself of at least one representative of the military. It is no exaggeration to say that some of the nettles the government is unable to either grasp or let fall today are the direct result of its own pusillanimity and opportunism at the time of implementing the fifth pay commission’s report a decade ago. That commission, while increasing government salaries and perks substantially by 1997 standards, had recommended emphatically that the vastly over-staffed bureaucracy must be put on a slimming diet, so that there could be a 30 per cent reduction in the governmental personnel, especially at the lower levels, over a ten-year period. The commission had particularly wanted a gradual disbandment of the army of peons infesting the corridors of power. All this was cynically ignored then and is brushed aside today. Consequently, the description “bloated bureaucracy” is the understatement of the century. More importantly, while recommending an increase in the age of retirement from 58 to 60, the fifth pay commission had also demanded that there must not be any extension of service thereafter. But this, too, was swept under the wall-to-wall carpet in the Cabinet Room. The extensions are now passé. The favoured retirees are “re-employed”, made chairmen of proliferating regulatory commissions or found other sinecures. Combined with this unique strain of elephantiasis is the monumental bribery and corruption, which is threatening to become a cancer without cure. A Transparency International survey has found that in the nation’s capital, nearly two-thirds of the people have to bribe officials to secure what is theirs by right. No wonder, the loudest public outcry against the pay commission’s scheme of things is that while there would be a “massive” increase in pay and perks, there isn’t an iota of a chance that this would either improve the delivery of services to the people or reduce the rampant loot. The question is: what must be done? The answer to it comes from the knights of privatisation and globalisation who say that the bane is the ironclad security of service the government servants down the line enjoy. As in the flourishing private sector, they add, so in the government, the corrupt and the inefficient must be sacked on the spot. In other words, the security of service enshrined in the Constitution, at the behest of Sardar Patel, should be abolished. Whatever the sentiment behind this suggestion, it is a classic example of the remedy being worse than the disease. Corruption is not confined to civil servants. It is possible on the present scale — it has indeed become the fastest growing industry with minimum risk — only because it is a joint venture of both the politicians in power and those civil servants that are only too willing to do the bidding of their bosses. Was it purely coincidental that in UP a former Chief Minister appointed a woman IAS officer as Chief Secretary even though she was voted as the “most corrupt” by the association of IAS officers in the state? She later had to be shifted because of the Supreme Court’s directive, and resigned only a few weeks ago. Incidentally, it was discovered way back in 2003, that the Chief Secretary whom she succeeded had allegedly amassed assets worth more Rs 100 crore. Only the other day, did the CBI register a case against him. When the agency will complete its investigations and prosecute the retired officer is anybody’s guess. Thereafter the snail-paced judiciary would take over, and decades may pass before the case reaches finality. This UP case is no aberration but representative of the goings-on in every part of the country. Just reflect, therefore, on the possible consequences if the security of government service is done away with, and the politicians given unrestricted power to hire and
fire.
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Gone with the waves
It
was the smell of fresh rain as much as the Scarlette Keeling murder that jogged my memory of my childhood days spent in Goa nearly two decades ago. It would pour incessantly for weeks making everything wet and muggy. My father was in the Indian Navy. Those were truly idyllic days, spent lazily in beaches across Goa. As our house was located near Dabolim Airport, it was to Bogmalo beach that we trudged every Sunday, for a swim and picnic. Fenny and beer flowed as easily as the soapy waves, but I don’t recall even a single brawl or fist-fight. The only shouting we would hear would be the occasional fisherman warning us not to go too far into the water as the tide was coming in. Even as I read all those gory reports, I tried to recall any incidence of crime at all in peace-loving Goa. There was one “nasty” clash between some Konkani and Marathi speaking people which led to the murder of one person. In a show of anguish, shops all over Goa declared that Christmas a “Black Christmas”, saying that one incident had tarnished the image of a peaceable people and a fun-loving state. Could things really change that much? Apart from my envy of their merry-making, I recall most Goans as being extremely helpful and friendly. Those days, even as bridges were being built across the major rivers, including the Mandovi, most vehicles used to be ferried across rivers. My father loved to recount how people always came forward to hoist his heavy Bajaj Chetak on to the ferry. On one particularly rainy day, his scooter broke down and he had to enter a typical Goan villa to ask the owners for assistance with a mechanic. The owner asked him to leave his scooter in his house and take his instead as he would not be able to find a mechanic in that kind of rain. Yes, I recall a theft - of a “VCR” from the Naval mess. The VCR was returned three days later, deposited in front of our doorstep. Then there was the one rupee stamp a little Goan boy “bought” from my brother. Every morning he would knock, and hand over a five paise coin, till this onerous debt was repaid. Anjuna beach, the focus of so much media attention, did raise the curiosity of an eight-year-old. Of course it was the hippies who got stared at, doing yoga or sun bathing. And yes, the nude bathers were there too. As kids, we didn’t see any night life of course, but there were no reports of murders, rapes, drug cartels.... Still, I would like to take my child once to Goa. I would like to show her where I stood for hours along with millions of others waiting for Pope John Paul IV to arrive in a glass cased vehicle, where I reached out to touch Mother Teresa’s hand along with several religious Goans, where Rajiv Gandhi drove past without fanfare and stopped on a lonely road to shake hands with my brother. I would like to show her the pristine forests at Molem, the awe-inspiring Therakol fort lapped by the sea, the palm strung Bogmalo beach, the breathtaking mangroves .....where children once tread without fear, though not
anymore.
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Flirting with regionalism During
one of his television interviews to promote his autobiography, BJP leader L.K. Advani recounted a chance meeting with Rahul Gandhi in the wake of the last Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The would-be AICC general secretary asked the ‘Prime Minister-in-waiting’ for his views on the political situation. The veteran pointed to the strange ways of electoral politics, with a “regionalist” and a “caste-based party” (like Mayawati’s BSP) achieving power because of the antagonism between the two “national” parties. The former Deputy Prime Minister may have a fuzzy memory about men like Punjab’s Communist patriarch Satyapal Dang and matters like the Kandahar episode, but he remembered the rest of this conversation very well. The political novice wondered “what can be done” in such a situation. Advani’s sage counsel was that the BJP and the Congress should treat each other like “political opponents” and not as “enemies”. The corollary was clear: the two “national parties” should consider only the “regionalist” and “caste-based” outfits as “enemies”. Restricting ourselves to the BJP and regionalism for the moment, the anecdote strikes an obvious note of irony. Advani was reiterating the point he made to Rahul Gandhi at a time when the BJP had won a major Assembly election itself on regionalist grounds and was attempting to repeat the achievement on the same plank in yet another Assembly poll. The reasons for the resounding victory of the BJP and Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat Assembly election have been debated heavily. Few would disagree, however, that regionalism was a major factor behind the famous victory. Modi successfully made his re-election as the State’s Chief Minister appear a matter of Gujarati “asmita (pride)”. He made attacks on his role in the grisly pogrom of 2002 sound to the voters like a vilification of Gujarat. As perceptive analysts have pointed out, he played skillfully on a widely shared Gujarati resentment at a once politically leading State being left for long out of representation in Central power and, indeed, even in the highest forums of national parties. And the party is trying to score a historic first and march to power in a Southern State, not through the highway of “national” politics, but by resorting to the short-cut of rank regionalism. The BJP in Karnataka was, until the other day, expected to make its “betrayal” by former Prime Minister Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (S) – he had refused to honour a power-sharing pact envisaging equal terms as chief ministers for Gowda scion H. D. Kumaraswamy and BJP’s B. S. Yeddyurappa – its main election issue. The party now pins most of its hopes on the highly emotive issue of the Hogenekkal water dispute with Tamil Nadu. In the cases of both Gujarat and Karnataka, of course, the BJP’s core issue of communalism has not been given up at all, but has been given a regionalist wrapping. In Modi’s state, campaigns by “outsiders” for justice to surviving victims of anti-minority crimes have been projected as cruel affronts to the State’s sensibilities. In Karnataka, where the BJP was built on a movement to hoist the tricolour atop the Idgah mosque, the party’s foray into regionalism began with an official drive to remove Tipu Sultan from schooltextbooks as a patron of Persian and Urdu and not Kannada. All these developments show the distance the BJP has travelled from the days of Jana Sangh, its parent. The Sangh was known all over the country, and especially in States where it lacked a significant presence, as the party of Akhand Bharat (India Undivided). The party’s pet phrase was supposed to articulate its continuing reluctance to accept Partition and its commitment to the idea of “reunifying” India. The slogan, however, soon became one against “separatism” as the Sangh often saw even regionalism in many parts of the country. “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan” replaced Akhand Bharat as the phrase that represented the Sangh, and later the BJP, particularly in non-Hindi-speaking States. The words may still evoke misty-eyed nostalgia in party old-timers, but have no place today in the vocabulary of the BJP, however “national” it may be. It is not, however, as if the BJP did not find “regionalism” a reprehensible variety of politics anywhere any more. Only the other day, party president Rajnath Singh made a thundering declaration about its resolve to fight “regionalism”. The Shiv Sena and its splinter Maharashtra Navnirman Sena had provided the provocation. After the musclemen of the MNS sent North Indians back home from Nasik and other places, the “national” party had to come up with at least a promise of resistance to regionalism. But there are severe limits, to which this sacred resolve can be kept. The BJP, after all, had to acquiesce in the Shiv Sena’s attacks on job-seeking Biharis before. Even while boasting of Advani and an all-India outlook, the BJP is ready to accept the second place in a regionalist-led alliance. The first rule in the game of regionalist politics, after all, is that no party can play it successfully in several states, particularly neighbouring ones. Regionalism thrives on problems with other regions, especially adjacent claimants to shared and often scarce resources. If the water dispute works a wonder and puts the BJP in power in Bengaluru, for example, it won’t be welcome news at all to the party in Tamil Nadu. The BJP may still find it hard to fight the lure of the regionalist formula. If Yeddyurappa proves as successful as Modi, however, the slogan of “repeating Gujarat and Karnataka” may prove harder to resist. The formula can help the BJP win a few states. But it can also initiate a process of the party’s transformation, especially in areas that do not represent its traditional terrain, into a conglomerate of competing regionalisms. This can hardly be a comforting prospect for a Prime Minister-in-waiting to contemplate.
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Promote ‘excessive thinness’ and face French law PARIS – “Too thin” soon might be defined in France by judges who would be asked to enforce new legislation aimed at Web sites, blogs and fashion advertising that encourage eating disorders among girls. The fate of the legislation will be decided in coming weeks by the French Senate after it was passed Tuesday by the National Assembly. The measure is backed by President Nicholas Sarkozy’s government. Fines of up to $47,000 and a two-year jail term would be imposed on people who compromise a person’s health by encouraging him or her through advertisements, products or methods of losing weight to aspire to “excessive thinness.” It would be left to judges to evaluate what that means in each case. The fines and sentencing would be stiffer if a person ends up at risk of death or dies after following a restrictive eating regime. In this epicentre of haute couture, fashion editors and designers were reacting with care to legislation that has been broadly directed at them. “Maybe a law, as a cautionary warning, can help with change if blogs about anorexia incite young women to be dangerously skinny and if models look too scary on the runway,” said Michelle Fitoussi, a columnist for the magazine French Elle. “We have to be vigilant about that.” But she had a hard time imagining French authorities busting into dressing rooms before Paris fashion shows and handcuffing stylists and designers as they tuck scrawny models into their clothes. “We have to be aware in all parts of society, not just in fashion, to stop girls from being on a very hard diet,” she said. “Anorexia is very real and complicated disease. Even the experts don’t completely understand it.” French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier was quoted in the newspaper Liberation last week similarly questioning how the law would get at the complex issues behind extreme dieting and thinness. “You don’t solve that kind of problem with laws but with understanding,” he said. But lawmakers and government officials have said explicitly that they want the trendsetters, fashion media and advertisers involved in this battle against a distorted view of health and beauty. Last week leaders in the French fashion industry signed a voluntary agreement to promote “healthy body images” and fight anorexia. Health Minister Roselyn Bachelot opened the debate Tuesday on the floor of the National Assembly by describing the growing problem of even detecting eating disorders, never mind preventing them. She said the media had to take some responsibility for a culture that encourages them. “Anorexia is an illness that is not always recognised as such because the impulse for life is overcome by the impulse for death,” she said. She specifically blamed Web sites that promote what is referred to as the “pro-ana” movement that elevates anorexia to a “lifestyle” choice rather than characterising it as a disease. It is estimated that as many as 40,000 people in France have anorexia. Two years ago the international fashion world was shaken by the deaths of two Brazilian models. They had each literally starved themselves to death, one by living on a diet of lettuce and soda and the other by eating only apples and tomatoes for three months. Stick-thin models were banned that year from Madrid, Spain’s week of designer runway shows. The French fashion world did not enforce a similar ban. But last year France stopped a clothing advertisement from running on billboards and in publications because it featured an ultra-thin model who had written a book on her battle with eating disorders. Authorities also have been concerned about popular websites such as “Ma Bimbo,” based in France, that attract tweens and has them play a virtual game that promotes plastic surgery, aggressive dieting and use of diet pills. The English-language version of the site posted a note Wednesday saying that after “the rather surprising media attention we have decided to remove the option of purchasing diet pills from the game.” Still other sites encourage outright starvation and ask young girls and women to post photos of their frail bodies as a “thinspiration.” While these sites and eating disorders are also ubiquitous in the United States, the proposed French law would not work in the US. because of the constitutional protection of free speech according to experts. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Delhi Durbar When the Congress fared poorly in all the bypolls in the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, the grand old party was quick to overlook these defeats and draw solace from its victories in West Bengal and Orissa. “Don’t forget, the sun rises in the East and our Prime Minister also advocates a Look East policy”, quipped a senior Congress minister, suggesting very hopefully that the party’s fortunes in Uttar Pradesh will soon change in their favour. A rival, however, was equally quick to respond. “No wonder we are witnessing a sun (read son) rise in the Congress,” he remarked, which left the Congress leader speechless.
Point men It is sheer coincidence that like his predecessor Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, the new Parliamentary affairs minister Vayalar Ravi also has to sweet talk the Left parties in Delhi, to ensure smooth floor coordination in Parliament, even while waging a battle against the Marxists in his home state Kerala. The two ministers have much more in common. They have been buddies since their early days in politics and it was Ravi who proposed Dasmunsi’s name for the post of Youth Congress president. They are both “anti-reform, anti-Left and anti-US” and have teamed up together on many occasions in the past, in airing these views at party meetings. So it is not surprising that Dasmunsi is pitching in to help his old friend settle down in his new ministry, while Ravi has kindly offered the use of his office in Parliament to Dasmunsi. The room allotted to the information and broadcasting minister is not in the main building, but in the Parliament annexe.
Disruption debate BJP leaders were really chafing when the Samajwadi Party stole the limelight on the opening day of the Parliament session by forcing an adjournment of the two Houses on the issue of price rise. Keen to send out a message to its electorate that it is equally agitated about rising inflation, the main opposition party was keen on disrupting proceedings the next day. The BJP senior leaders were, however, dissuaded from going through with their plan when it was pointed out that the matter had been listed on the agenda for a discussion in both Houses and it would appear as if they are shying away from a debate. As a result, Parliament got off to a smooth start after only a day’s disruption.
Mani rebuffed The saga of panchayati raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar’s search for a room continues. After having been relieved of the sports and youth affairs portfolio, he put in a request for a room with agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, as he has two offices in Krishi Bhavan. Pawar doubles up as consumer affairs minister as well. Pawar, however, declined politely on the ground that he uses both the offices on alternate days. Contributed by Anita Katyal, Tripti Nath and Vibha Sharma
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