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Failure of whip Hysterical blunder |
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Positive change
Winning the big vote
Aloneness
News analysis ‘Infovores’: Humans ever hungry for information Delhi Durbar
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Failure of whip THE Bharatiya Janata Party can conveniently blame bribery for the indiscipline of as many as eight of its Lok Sabha members who either voted for the UPA government or abstained from the voting to facilitate the government’s victory. The party has not only expelled them but has also sought their disqualification under the anti-defection law. If a member fails to act according to the whip issued by his party, he is liable to face disqualification. While these are legal issues, the fact that a supposedly disciplined organisation like the BJP could not control its members shows the party in a poor light. It is also a reflection of the failure of the party leadership to keep its flock together. The cross-voting gives a lie to the BJP propaganda that the only thing that separates the party from forming the next government is the elections. If the BJP MPs, too, had believed that this was indeed the case, they would not have gone with the UPA. Significantly, the propaganda and persuasion failed to induce any UPA MP to vote against the government. Even the Haryana MP, who threatened to cross over to the BSP, finally voted for the confidence motion. It is true that some of the MPs concerned do not have much stake in the party as the BJP has either made it clear to them that they would not be re-nominated or their constituencies have disappeared or have been reserved for Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. But these reasons are common to other parties also and not good enough for such a gross breach of party discipline as voting for the UPA. If anything, it is proof that there is a disconnect between the BJP MPs and the party leadership. As we had pointed out in these columns, many in the party did not approve of its doubletalk on the nuclear deal and its joining of hands with the Communists or Ms Mayawati. They consider the nuclear deal as favourable to the country as underscored by a BJP MP who claimed that he could not attend the session that day as his blood sugar had suddenly fallen. What is significant is his statement that he would have voted for the government if he were able to attend. Seen against this backdrop, one wonders how the BJP MPs would have voted if there was no whip at all.
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Hysterical blunder With
a party like the CPM on the scene, Communist-bashing is unnecessary. These Marxists can be trusted to hammer the nail on their own foot and hobble. The expulsion of the venerable Somnath Chatterjee, an exceptional parliamentarian who commands respect across the political spectrum, once again highlights the way the CPM deals with some of its tallest leaders in the name of “discipline” and “supremacy of the party”. Long before Mr Chatterjee fell to the wrath of Marxist comrades, many a veteran – from former Tripura Chief Minister Nripen Chakraborty to Mrs K R Gowri in Kerala – was sent unceremoniously packing, and all of them for the wrong reasons. Their public stature matters little when the party decides to sack them. Mrs Gowri’s legendary contribution to the Marxist cause proved to be of no consequence when, 14 years ago, she was thrown out for “indiscipline”. Some years before that the CPM in Kerala had expelled Mr M V Raghavan, who was seen as a rising star with a mass base. The fate of M. Omkar in Andhra Pradesh, who had toiled for the party and angered feudal and extremist elements in the state was no different from that of Mr Raghavan. Around the time of Mr Raghavan’s expulsion, the party also sent out a lawyer-activist in Tamil Nadu, Mr K Chandru, for questioning the CPM’s indifference to the rights and aspirations of Sri Lankan Tamils. In the more than four decades of the party’s existence, expulsions and desertions were the worst in the immediate aftermath of Naxalbari, which gave rise to the Maoist movement in India. In the decades since then, the CPM does not appear to have learnt to accommodate dissent, even within the bounds of its ideology. The high-handed intolerance coupled with rank opportunism has given rise to problems within the party, which are more perceptible in West Bengal and Kerala. Such a development bodes ill for the CPM’s credibility and growth at a time when progressive causes are threatened by extremist and fascist forces of various hues. The personal integrity and intellectual calibre of individual leaders have widened the inner-party space for democratic debate and dissent. To the contrary, the party has become more illiberal and inflexible as manifest in the dogmatism and righteousness of the leadership. As a result, there is no place for men and women of stature who have dedicated themselves to the party’s cause for decades before the present generation assumed power. To persist on this path is the surest way to hasten the decline of the CPM, which enjoys a national influence out of all proportion to its popular base or numerical strength in Parliament.
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Positive change Some
hopeful signs have emerged on the economic scene. The BSE Sensex rallied 6 per cent on Wednesday after the UPA won the vote of confidence. The relief from political uncertainty coincided with the declining global oil prices, which edged down to $124.41 a barrel on Thursday. Stock markets worldwide have been celebrating the retreating oil prices in the past couple of days. While the US is still wrestling with its housing credit crisis and other countries recovering from the after-effects, India has aroused fresh hope among investors. With the communists off the government’s back, it is widely believed the UPA government will push some of the hitherto held-up reforms. Such confidence in the government led foreign institutional investors (FIIs) to buy shares worth Rs 1,300 crore in a single day. The crucial question now being debated is: will the rally sustain? On Thursday it suffered a setback as the Sensex shed 165 points. In the weeks to come the oil prices and inflation will decide the direction of the Sensex. The Iran-Israel-US relations are still tense and any Israeli strike on Iran could make oil zoom possibly to $200 a barrel. The oil prices have eased lately due to reports of falling demand in the US, but fluctuations can continue uncertainly before markets really firm up. Secondly, inflation will remain a priority for the government in the run-up to the elections. It is expected to stay in double digit until December. The RBI is meeting on July 29 to review its monetary policy and is likely to further tighten liquidity. A benign monsoon so far has given rise to hopes of a bumper kharif crop, which would, at least, cool foodgrain prices. Thirdly, experts are pinning their hopes on reforms. The government is expected to dilute its stake in profit-making PSUs, ease foreign investment in banks and insurance companies and allow pensions funds to invest in stocks under private, professional managements. The government, however, may not like to implement controversial bits of reforms. Winning elections will be the overriding consideration determining the UPA’s economic policy.
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If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it just may be a duck. — Walter Reuther
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Winning the big vote
ALMOST everyone had expected the July 22 big vote in the Lok Sabha to be — as Wellington had said of Waterloo — “a damned close-run thing”. In the event, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, headed by Dr Manmohan Singh, has won by a comfortable majority of 275 to 256. Compared with the single vote that brought down the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government a decade ago, this is a significant margin. No wonder, the government is now determined to push hard the India-United States civilian nuclear cooperation deal that caused the parting of the ways between the UPA and the Left Front, and remained the focus of the highly acrimonious debate. It is also confident that it can now carry through the economic reforms that were being held up hitherto by the Left Front. In unusually strong words, the Prime Minister declared, in the speech he was unable to deliver in the House because of rumbustious scenes, that the Leftists wanted him to be their “bonded slave”. The government would also like to delay the parliamentary poll until April-May when it is due. There is a section within the Congress party that thinks it might be a good idea to synchronise the Lok Sabha poll with the state assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Mizoram in December. But the majority sentiment within the Congress, and even more among its UPA allies, is that the Lok Sabha election should not be held even a day earlier than absolutely necessary. The extremely depressing flip side of the special two-day session was that democratic and parliamentary norms that have been eroded wilfully and systematically over the years reached their nadir this time around. Never before, even during its worst bedlams, has Parliament witnessed the kind of scenes that followed the display of bundles of thousand-rupee notes that three BJP MPs alleged had been given to them, as a first installment of a huge bribe to abstain from voting. What followed was reminiscent of some of the wildly melodramatic Bollywood movies. Those at whom the finger of accusation was pointed have emphatically denied the charge, of course. The matter, together with the tapes filmed by a TV news-channel that it never telecast, is under investigation on Speaker Somnath Chatterjee’s orders. It would be fair, therefore, not to prejudge the issue. However, a few pertinent points need to be made. First, long before the unprecedented episode, too many Opposition leaders, including the CPM general secretary, Mr Prakash Karat, were publicly accusing the ruling establishment of “horse-trading” by offering Rs 25 crore or even more per MP. (It is far from clear why a fine animal is dragged into what is actually buying and selling of loyalties by unspeakably crass politicians.) Secondly, and this is no less worrying, shortly before the currency bundles stole the show, Bahujan Samaj Party MPs, after disrupting the proceedings for a while, had placed before the Speaker some documents purporting to show that the CBI was harassing them and really targeting the party’s supreme leader and UP Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati. This, too, is under investigation. Later, the Telugu Desam leader, Mr Yerran Naidu, complained that a CBI officer had visited the house of his colleague earlier in the day. In fairness, such laments have been heard under every government. Thirdly, although some fine speeches were made, and even heard up to a point, constant heckling and barracking vitiated the atmosphere most of the time, constraining the Speaker to remark: “This house has descended to a very low level”. He also warned that he might end the debate and right away take the vote. The Prime Minister had to place on the table of the House, put on the PMO’s website and release through the Press Information Bureau his reply to the debate he was not allowed to deliver in the House. Besides the sordid happenings on the stage that is the floor of the House, a lot appears to have gone on in the wings. Of this, not everything is known but there are some revealing clues to the fact that winning a numerical victory is one thing and doing so ethically quite another. The change in the fortunes of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader Shibu Soren is a case in point. He has been a minister in the Manmohan Singh Cabinet twice before. The second time he had to resign because of a murder charge. Since his acquittal quite some time ago his demand for a return to the Coal Ministry had been ignored. Things changed when the five Lok Sabha votes he commands became valuable in the parliamentary struggle. It was unrealistic to expect him to oblige without demanding his price. If, as generally expected, he is brought back as Coal Minister - together with the appointment of an acolyte of him as a Minister of State and of another as Deputy Chief Minister of Jharkhand — it would not be an ennobling experience. Ironically, Mr Shibu Soren was the key figure also in the terrible scandal when Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao saved his government from falling by offering Mr Soren a bribe of Rs 3 crore in 1993, thus bringing to the national capital what until then was confined to states. The renaming of Lucknow’s Amousi airport after Chaudhry Charan Singh, the only Indian Prime Minister never to have faced Parliament, is laughable. It did not achieve the desired purpose of gaining the support of the late leader’s son, Ajit Singh. It goes without saying that the outcome of the confidence vote has strengthened the prestige and authority of the good doctor. He was generally considered an “accidental politician” and an “appointed Prime Minister”. Many remarked cynically that he was only the “managing director” of the company, not its chairman. He has shaken his critics and surprised even his admirers by showing himself to be politically more savvy than he appeared. By taking a firm position that his party should either support him and his decision to pursue the nuclear deal or find a new Prime Minister — a stand he could have taken last September — he has changed the dynamics of politics at the Centre. But a lot more still needs to be done. To begin with, he has to enforce greater discipline and efficiency on his own government. Allied parties cannot be allowed to go on running their ministries as fiefdoms. Nor can his Congress colleagues be permitted to undermine his position any
longer.
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Aloneness
It was the third day of our trip to Spiti and while we were preparing to go to bed, Ajay, my colleague and roommate, asked: “Sir, I often wonder how you manage to live alone all the time.” I smiled and said: “One gets used to it.” But later, when the lights had been switched off, my mind went back to his question. He had made the same mistake that most people make: they treat aloneness and loneliness as synonyms. Aloneness is a neutral state. It can become loneliness, which carries with it unhappiness at not being with other people, or it can become solitude, where the absence of other people is used to employ oneself gainfully. Living alone, one has the choice between the two states of mind. For solitude, we find substitutes for people. We can do this by turning to prayers and meditation, charity and social work or becoming passionate about a hobby. In other people’s perception gardening or bird watching may seem mundane but there are people who find as much joy in pursuing these hobbies as others do in going to parties and discotheques and socialising. Other people find a substitute in collecting things. On a visit to the Salar Jang Museum a friend remarked: “People turn to things when they have failed with people. Salar Jang must have been one of the loneliest persons in the world.” I could not disagree more. The collection spoke, quite clearly, not of the loneliness of the collector, but of the happiness and joy he had experienced in the collecting. I find my solitude in my writing, specially the two middles that I write every month and through which I establish contact with numerous readers. A phone call from a total stranger, telling me how much he has enjoyed reading my middle that morning, brings me more happiness and joy than attending a dozen social gatherings. But the effort to deal with aloneness can often produce bizarre results. A friend driving on the expressway from Bombay to Pune was flagged down by an elderly gentleman. “Can you spare 15 minutes?” “Yes” my acquaintance said, not sure where the conversation was leading. The gentleman got into the car besides him. “I live alone and need someone to talk to.” My friend swears that for the next 15 minutes he participated in the most brilliant and scintillating conversation of his life. At the end of the 15 minutes, the stranger looked at his watch and said simply. “Thank you.” As he closed the door he stuck his head through the window and said: “Will there be any charge?” My friend shook his head: “I don’t know when I last enjoyed a conversation so much. Give me your card, I’d like to keep in touch.” It was the stranger’s turn to smile and shake his head. “I know better than to push my luck. Goodbye.” And he was gone. All I can say is: Thank God for my middles, and thank God for my indulgent
readers.
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News analysis The
two-day debate and the dramatic developments surrounding the Confidence Motion in Parliament have once again categorically reaffirmed Uttar Pradesh’s identity as the political heartland of the country. Actors from the state’s two major political parties – Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party – Mayawati and Amar Singh, not only called the shots from their respective camps but also influenced the country’s new political realignment largely from their state-level political perspectives. In the process the main protagonists may have added a few inches to their political stature at the national level but they would also have to take the blame for carrying their bitter state-level hostility to the national stage. Many months before the UPA’s ice-breaking fourth anniversary dinner, which paved the way for the Samajwadi party joining the UPA, there was speculation that the SP coming closer to the Congress was only a matter of time. For Mulayam Singh Yadav it had become a question of political survival, given the aggressive manner in which she was pursuing the political path that she had drawn up for party at the state and national level. The increasing irrelevance of national parties like the Congress and the BJP in Uttar Pradesh – especially after last year’s assembly election – had firmly established the fact that the state would have to contend with a sort of two-party system for some time in the foreseeable future. However, what was difficult to predict at that time was that a year later, this sharp, state-level polarisation would spill onto the national stage during a Confidence Motion in Parliament. This reinforces the old-age image of the state as the ‘heartland’ of the nation, buttressed by a solid bloc of 80 MPs that it sends to the 524-strong national Parliament. Correspondingly, the fallout of the verdict would also be visible in Uttar Pradesh like nowhere else. The contour of the emerging political scenario in Lucknow has perhaps never before been so closely interlinked to the changing equation in New Delhi as it is today. The first likely hurdle that is to be watched is the July 28 hearing in the disproportionate assets case against BSP national president and Chief Minister Mayawati. On that day the CBI has sought the permission of the Supreme Court to file a charge sheet against Mayawati. A go-ahead by the Supreme Court can prove to be a spanner in the UNPA’s future plans. The unsavory incident during the Parliamentary debate in which the BSP MPs alleged of a threat from a CBI officer one again raises questions regarding the agency’s autonomy. A retired Uttar Pradesh cadre IPS officer who had been with the central agency for 11 long years admitted that all crucial decisions are taken by the Law Ministry and its director does not even have the autonomy to chose a lawyer, or go for an appeal. Even if Mayawati gets a respite from the Supreme Court as she did get in the Ambedkar Memorial case recently, the hanging sword of the disproportionate assets case would dominate her politics in the coming days. The Samajwadi party on the other hand has finally come out from its deep political slumber. Since its defeat in May 2007, it had almost gone into political hibernation. Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Man Friday and national general secretary Amar Singh has been described by SP MP Virendra Bhatia as the ‘Man of the Match’ for winning the trust motion for the
UPA. Whether the Samajwadi Party formally joins the government or opts to gain political clout without accountability, what is certain is that its demoralised cadre in the villages and towns of Uttar Pradesh would be sufficiently energised by the turn of events, to face a major electoral battle a few months down the lane. It remains to be seen what would be the worth, if any, of Mayawati’s new allies like Ajit Singh’s
RLD, CPI and CPM in the context of UP. Some months ago Mayawati had stunned the powerful Jats of Western UP when she forced a hardened Mahendra Singh Tikait to retract his
anti-Dalit statement against her and declare her to be like a daughter. It remains to be seen if the other Jat leader of the region, Ajit Singh, would manage to assuage the trampled Jat ego or if the traditional Jat-Jatav animosity in Western UP would prove insurmountable even for him. This alliance could also prove crucial for a possible Harit
Pradesh. Both the Left parties today do not have a single representative in the state Assembly. Still, they do have a political presence in the state. For them, it would be a tightrope walk to the general election. Supporting Mayawati at the national level would obviously make the task of challenging her policies at the state level difficult. How they propose to carry forward their opposition to her policies, including the non-implementation of
NREGA, privatisation of health and other infrastructure, and displacement of farmers for the Ganga Expressway and other projects, remains to be seen in the coming days. While it is still too early to say how events will finally unfold, what can safely be asserted is that in the coming days, happenings in Lucknow and New Delhi would impact each other like never before.
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‘Infovores’: Humans ever hungry for information Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information? Human-motivation studies traditionally stress well-established needs: food, water, sex, avoidance of pain. In a culture like ours, most of these needs can be satisfied easily. Just open the refrigerator door, or blow on that spoonful of hot soup. (Satisfying the need for sex may require a bit more doing.) What’s been missing from this scientific research is humans’ nonstop need for more information. We are “infovores.” The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us – posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets. Confined to a featureless physician’s examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink. Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption – the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista. Cognitive neuroscience – the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain – is beginning to unravel how this all works. At the University of Southern California (USC), my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon. The explanation involves opioids, one of many neurotransmitters – which are molecules that the neurons in our brain release to activate or inhibit other neighboring neurons. The effect of opioids is pleasurable. The same neural receptors are involved in the high we get from opiate drugs, such as heroin or morphine. In the past, these opioids were believed to exist primarily in the spinal cord and lower brain centers, where they reduced the sensation of pain. But more recently, a gradient of opioid receptors was discovered in a region of the cerebral cortex, humans’ enormous outer brain layer that is largely responsible for perception and cognition. In the areas of the cortex that initially receive visual or auditory information, opioids are sparse. But in “association areas,” where the sensory information triggers memory and taps into previous knowledge, there is a high density of opioid receptors. So the more a new piece of information tickles that part of your brain where you interpret the scene or conversation, the bigger the opioid hit. Staring at a blank wall will produce few, if any, mental associations, and thus standing in a corner is punishment. Looking at a random mass of objects will produce strong activation only in the initial stages, where there is little opioid activity to be had. Gaze at something that leads to a novel interpretation, however, and that will spur higher levels of associative activity in opioid-dense areas. We are thus thrilled when new insights tap into what we have previously learned. We seek ways to feed our opioid desires; we are willing to endure the line at the movie theater in anticipation of the pleasure within. We pay more for a room with a view or a cup of coffee at a Parisian sidewalk cafe. But if we get more opioids from making connections to our memories and knowledge, why do we then prefer the new? The first time our brains take in a new perception – a scene, a movie, a literary passage – there’s a high level of activity in which a few neurons are strongly activated but the vast majority are only moderately or weakly activated. The strongly activated neurons inhibit the weak – so there’s a net reduction of activity and less opioid pleasure when our brain is exposed to the same information again. (Don’t feel sorry for the inhibited neurons, the losers in this instance of neural Darwinism. They are now freed up to code other experiences.) No wonder we can’t resist carrying a BlackBerry 24/7. Who knows what goodies it will deliver? A breaking news item. A piece of gossip. An e-mail from a long-ago girlfriend. Another wirelessly and instantaneously delivered opioid hit. I hope you got a few opioid hits, too, in learning about your inner infovore. As for me, I’m starting to feel separation anxiety. Where’s my
BlackBerry? The writer is a professor in the departments of psychology and computer science and the neuroscience program at USC. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
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Delhi Durbar The
Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) has always projected itself as a party with a difference. When three of its Members of Parliament, former minister Faggan Singh Kulaste, Mahavir Bhagora and Ashok Argal, walked into the well of the Lok Sabha with wads of currency notes during the confidence vote debate earlier this week, BJP leaders adopted a “I told you so” posture about horse trading. Ironically, BJP lawmakers have been in the forefront of recent cases of corruption involving MPs. Two such instances are still vivid in people’s memory: the cash-for-query scandal and the misuse of the MPLADS scheme. This had led to expulsion or suspension of several MPs, including those belonging to the BJP. In fact, one of the dramatis persona of the Tuesday episode, Faggan Singh Kulaste, a former minister in the NDA government, was suspended by the BJP in 2005 after his involvement in the MPLADS scam came to light. Nobody is sure if the party had revoked his suspension. Why involve a tainted MP in a fresh controversy which the opposition has described as a “drama.”? It only undermines the credibility of the BJP’s version of the facts. Following history Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh had an interesting nugget about Ashok Argal, BJP MP from Morena, who was among the three MPs who alleged that he had been bribed by the Samajwadi Party to abstain in the trust vote in the Lok Sabha. Singh recalls that his father, Chabiram Argal, who was also an MP from Morena when the Janata Party was in power in 1977, had made a similar allegation in Parliament. He had charged the then Prime Minister Charan Singh of attempting to bribe him through emissaries to vote for him in the Lok Sabha. Talk about history repeating itself. UPA cynosure On the day of the crucial trust vote debate in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi may have “spoken like an Indian” and not a political party member, but the obsequious attention which the UPA members showered on the young MP ensured that his claim sounded a bit empty. Rahul appeared no less than the UPA’s guest of honour, with MPs young and old taking turns to boost Rahul’s morale just before it was his turn to speak. Even senior leaders like Shivraj Patil were seen giving pearls of wisdom to Rahul while a tense Sonia Gandhi watched from a distance. Not just that, but Congress leaders, lead by Pranab Mukherjee, displayed ultimate loyalty to their future leader by personally going up to the opposition benches to ensure calm as Rahul spoke. Their repeated attempts to help their leader, naturally, bore no fruit, and the house had to be adjourned. Contributed by Faraz Ahmad, Anita Katyal and Aditi Tandon
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