The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

The Kosi deluge
Why should dam give way?

It is not enough to declare the Bihar floods a “national calamity” and announce a Rs 1,000 crore Central package. Floods are almost an annual occurrence and the country needs a reliable disaster management mechanism. Year after year the same sequence of events is repeated. Floods cause a massive loss of human life and dislocation of a large number of villagers (more than 15 lakh displaced this year), who spend months fighting for survival and rebuilding their lives as state help proves woefully inadequate for their rehabilitation. They sink deeper in poverty.

The recurrence of flood damage contributes to Bihar being at the bottom of the development ladder. Of the nine crore population only 10 per cent live in the urban areas. Most of the 80 per cent villagers live in shoddy dwellings or huts, which crumble even during the rains and can hardly withstand the fury of a flood. The already rickety state of infrastructure worsens during the rainy season. Small wonder that Bihar is one of the worst performers in human development. People are forced to migrate to other states in search of employment. The successive governments are responsible for the dismal state of affairs.

This year’s flood havoc is not natural. It is man-made and the government is responsible. The breach in the Kosi embankment occurred in Nepal. Under a 1954 Indo-Nepalese treaty it is India’s responsibility to ensure the safety and maintenance of the river’s embankments. Some 50,000 people in Nepal too have been left homeless. Some of Nepal’s politicians and lawyers are asking their government to demand compensation from India. The Indian administration’s negligence and delayed response once again underlines the well-known fact: how casual and ineffective the state is in disaster management. How China takes up the relief and rehabilitation work when faced with a natural calamity holds lessens for us in India.

Obama breaks through
It is a historic moment for the US

The United States is poised on the cusp of a new era. For the first time ever, an African-American, Barack Obama, has been nominated for President. His winning of the Democratic Party’s nomination after a complex and colourful contest against Senator Hillary Clinton has pushed to the background the issues of race, gender and religion that were to the fore in the campaign’s early stages. That the son of a white American mother and a black father from Kenya could overcome the biggest odds in a country where race is a critical issue is a landmark in US history and politics. Regardless of whether he triumphs – as he well may — against the Republican Party’s John McCain, the less desirable aspects that haunted this campaign for the US presidency have been pushed behind. Both Mrs Clinton and husband Bill Clinton have per force endorsed his nomination. The issue of race in US presidential elections will never be the same again, and that is one assured outcome of the Obama-McCain contest.

Mr Obama represents a big break with the past. The way he broke through to win the nomination in the face of the formidable opposition of the Clintons within the Democratic Party is an extraordinary accomplishment, especially for a freshman senator. He articulates the yearning for change and meets the aspirations of a young and multiracial America that is no less dedicated to US leadership of the world. Mr Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden, a long-serving Senator seems to be a well-chosen foil for winning over those who are undecided about the Democratic nominee.

What’s good for the US may not necessarily be good for the rest of the world, particularly India. While Mr Obama is eager to be seen as India-friendly, on critical issues such as the Indo-US nuclear deal and outsourcing, his record as of now is not assuringly supportive. He might have described himself as a “desi” for wooing the South Asian votes, but in 2006 he voted against the Hyde Act – the amendment on nuclear fuel supply assurances; and he has taken a hard line against outsourcing of US business which has created many jobs in India. Mr Biden’s record, in contrast, is viewed more favourably in India. The compulsions of the emerging Indo-US strategic relationship may require Mr Obama to alter his stand on these issues. Whether that will happen has to be watched, not just in the US and India, but also the rest of the world.

Thought for the Day

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. — Paulo Freire

ARTICLE

End of democracy
It is near, if not already here
by Jagdeep S. Chhokar

The “vote of confidence” and the “cash for votes” drama that unfolded in the Lok Sabha over two days last month have attracted a lot of comment in the media. For some, it was the worst possible display that India could put up for all kinds of skeptics all over the world, and prove the likes of Winston Churchill to be correct. For the skeptics in India itself, there was nothing surprising in the entire sordid drama since that is what they had been expecting any way. However, one thing that has not attracted much comment is what did those two days, and several days preceding and following them, have told us, the People, about our political parties. Not to mention the champions such as Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal (Secular), and Ajit Singh of the Rashtriya Lok Dal who changed their stances every few hours, how did the big ones fare? While the investigations, of different types, will possibly go on for quite some, and one does not know how time many more CDs will come out, here is what can be gleaned from what has been reported.

The Congress, as the head of the UPA and the mover of the motion of confidence, has been variously blamed from several quarters for initiating and orchestrating the entire “buying the MPs” operation with the help of some new-found friends. A political leader of long standing and of solid reputation even quoted a figure as the price for an MP, prompting several others to wonder loudly as to how did a person with such unimpeachable integrity come to know of such a precise figure.

The BJP, as the head of the NDA and the leading opposition party, is trying to take the moral high ground, originally playing the wronged one whose “innocent” MPs were “being offered” inducements of various kinds, some being offers that they could not refuse. Perhaps that is why they decided to organise a whistleblower’s “sting” in collaboration with a willing TV channel. It is still not clear, and may never be, who ditched or double-crossed whom but the former collaborators seem to have now turned foes with at least the BJP openly and, at times viciously, accusing the TV channel of not keeping its part of the bargain.

It is not known to non-insiders whether the BJP kept its part of the bargain or not, particularly when information is being released by the BJP in bits and pieces, possibly as part of some grand design or in response to the situation as it evolves. Regardless of the various explanations and justifications given by its many leaders, the fact of having “allowed”, and also possibly abetted, taking bundles of currency notes which, by their own admission, were physical evidence of a criminal act done or at least purported to have been done, outside Parliament, into the sanctum sanctorum of democracy in the country, does not anoint the “party with a difference” with glory.

Last but not the least are the Leftists, whose insistence at withdrawing support from the UPA combine actually caused the whole episode. While their opposition to the nuclear deal could be considered as a principled stance regardless of the merits of the case, it is their behaviour with one of their own, that raises concern. Whether expelling Somnath Chatterjee was their “third historic blunder” (as some people have called it, after denying the Prime Ministership to Jyoti Basu in 1996, and not joining the UPA government in 2004 despite Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet’s advice) or not, it does raise serious doubts about their willingness and ability to exist within the framework of a liberal democracy, as has been envisioned by the Constitution makers and adopted by “We, the People” in India. Only a couple of events that raise these doubts are mentioned below.

The General Secretary of the CPM was reported to have said that while Somnath Chatterjee acted according to the Constitution of India, the CPM had to act by its own constitution. This raises two fairly simple questions: One, are there major and in principle differences between the constitution of the CPM and the Constitution of India; and two, in case there are conflicts between the two constitutions, which one should prevail or override the other? To take up the second question first, so long as the Constitution of India exists, one assumes that it remains the supreme law of the land and would therefore prevail over any other that conflicts with it. A reasonable and logical response to the first question seems to be that if a party constitution goes against something in the Constitution of the country, the party constitution is simply unconstitutional and needs amendment.

In their anxiety to get him to tow the party line and to demonstrate to all as to who was “the boss”, the CPM seemed to lose faith in a member of their party of long standing. It was possibly this anxiety to assert their authority that made the CPM leadership completely blind to a distinct possibility which always existed and about which we can now only speculate. And that would have been the case of the vote on the motion of confidence being a tie. In that case the Speaker would have to cast his vote. Since he had not let his views be known, it was not known which way he would have voted. And since he has not clarified it in his statement issued on August 1, we will now never know. But still, his voting against the motion of confidence cannot be ruled out and could not be ruled out. But it seems the impatience of the leadership of the Left did it in.

This leads on to the third concern, and that is intolerance for dissent. One of the banes of democracy in India has been and continues to be that the strongest, so-called defenders and upholders of democracy in the country — the political parties — are not democratic in their internal functioning. And this applies to almost all parties across the political spectrum. The Left parties were perhaps the closest to the democratic end of the continuum. One of the underlying factors in a liberal democracy is the tolerance of dissent because if there is only one opinion or view, what do voters choose from? The events around July 21-22 seem to have proved that the CPM is being fully guided by what Trosky is reported to have said that “one ought not be right against the party” and “one can be right only with the party and through the party because history has not created any other way for the realisation of one’s rightness.”n

The writer is a retired professor of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and one of the founding members of the Association for Democratic Reforms.

MIDDLE

Faraz, a poet-warrior
by Mukul Bansal

"Karo kaj jabeen pe sare kafan, mere dushmanon ko guman na ho, ke garoore ishq ka baankpan pase marg hamne bhula diya (Give a slant to the edge of the shroud on my forehead, lest my enemies should’ve any doubt that I abandoned the pride I took in my love after my death).

I HAve quoted Faiz Ahmad Faiz to pay tribute to the revolutionary Pakistani poet Ahmad Faraz as I was reminded of what Kulbhushan Parvaz, an Urdu poet, told me of his meeting with Faiz at the Ambala railway station in 1978. When Parvaz asked Faiz as to who was the greatest living Urdu poet, after him, in Pakistan, Faiz’s spontaneous reply was, "Faraz is writing good poetry, but he has run into trouble with the military rulers in Pakistan."

Few know that Faraz, who enriched modern Urdu poetry like few have, didn’t know how to speak Urdu till he was 19 (Faraz’s first collection of Urdu poetry, "Tanha Tanha" was published when he was 21). his mother tongue was Pushto. The poet whose ghazals— "Shola tha jal boojha hoon", "Ranjish hi sahi", "Abke hum bichhde" —took the world of Urdu poetry by storm first gained recognition as a writer of nazms.

The nazm that first brought him fame was "Lakhtai (Dancing Boy)". I had the privilege of Faraz reciting this nazm to me in New Delhi in the late eighties: "Sardo-bejaan se chehre pe thirakti aankhen, jaise marghat mein chiragon ki lavein kaampti hain (Dancing eyes on a lifeless, insensitive face, like wavering candle flames in a graveyard)".

I first met Faraz in the early eighties in ambala. He had come there from Canada, where he had been living in self-imposed exile. I was brimming over with excitement at the prospect of meeting him. So minutes after I met Faraz, I couldn’t help reciting one of my favourite couplets written by him: "Tum taqaluf ko bhi ikhlaas samajhtey ho Faraz, dost hota nahin har haath milaney wala (O Faraz, you take formality as sincerity. Every one who shakes hands with you is not surely your friend)". He corrected me as I had said "dost nahin hota..."

Faraz began his career by writing dramas, talks and musical features for the radio in Karachi. A bit later when he was promoted as the director-general of the education department, his friends and admirers congratulated him profusely. Faraz’s spontaneous reply was: "Taraqui pe mubarakbaad mat do, rafiqo mein akela rah gaya hoon (Don’t congratulate me on my promotion, I’ve been rendered alone O my friends!)".

Faraz spiritedly opposed the military rulers in Pakistan and spoke out against repression. He wrote a nazm "Shayar" in which he outlined his manifesto as a poet: " Ab dil pe jo guzregi bakhauf kahoonga, ab mere kalam mein koi zanjeer nahin ( I’ll say fearlessly whatever I undergo, my pen is no longer in fetters)".

Faraz’s death at 77 is indeed an irreparable loss to the world of Urdu poetry.

OPED

Social injustice
Politicians blamed for health inequalities
by James Macintyre

People are dying “on a grand scale” around the world because of social injustice brought about by a “toxic” combination of bad policies, politics and economics, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.

Avoidable health problems caused by social factors – as opposed to biology and genetics – are causing large-scale health inequalities in the UK, the WHO’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health has found after a three-year study.

Evidence showed that a boy born in the relatively deprived Calton area of Glasgow was likely to live on average 28 years fewer than one born a few miles away in Lenzie, a village by the Glasgow-Edinburgh railway.

Life expectancy at birth for men in the fashionable north London suburb of Hampstead was found on average to be 11 years longer than for men born in the vicinity of nearby St Pancras station. Adult death rates were generally 2.5 times higher in the most deprived parts of the UK than in the wealthiest areas.

Internationally, the report concludes: “The toxic combination of bad policies, economics and politics is ... responsible for the fact that a majority of people do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible. Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale.”

A girl born in Lesotho, southern Africa, was likely to die 42 years younger than one born in Japan. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, one in eight women dies in childbirth, compared to one in 17,400 in Sweden.

Considerable racial inequalities are also highlighted in the report. It says 886,202 deaths would have been avoided between 1991 and 2000 if mortality rates had been equal between white and black Americans.

The report, which lays the blame for international social inequality squarely at the door of political and economic leaders instead of unavoidable factors, stressed that the reason for inequalities was not biology but social environment.

Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health was drawn up by hundreds of researchers from universities, institutions, ministries and non-government organisations.

Life expectancy at birth

Japan

83

Australia

82

Sweden

81

Canada

81

Italy

81

UK

79

Finland

79

US

78

Chile

78

China

73

Iran

71

Egypt

68

India

63

Senegal

59

Tanzania

50

Mozambique

50

Lesotho

42

Sir Michael Marmot, the commission’s chairman, told Radio 4’s Today programme: “The key message of our report is that the circumstances in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age are the fundamental drivers of health and health inequity. We rely too much on medical interventions as a way of increasing life expectancy.

“A more effective way of increasing life expectancy and improving health would be for every government policy and programme to be assessed for its impact on health and health equity; to make health and health equity a marker for government performance.”

Ann Keen, Health minister for England, said: “The UK is at the forefront of tackling health inequalities but reducing the gap in life expectancy is still an issue.”

Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, welcomed the report. “We very much support this process,” he said, pointing out that the its author, Sir Michael, was “a Brit”. The Secretary of State championed Labour’s record, citing Sure Start work schemes, the minimum wage and the driving down of child poverty.

“In the UK we’ve come an awful long way in the last 10 years to tackle health inequality,” Mr Johnson said. But he added that “people’s environment and the information they receive”, including food labelling, were key to future improvements.

By arrangement with The Independent

A more combative Obama emerges
by Doyle McManus

For a month or more, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has seemed stuck in neutral, losing momentum — and voters — to the hard-punching Republican campaign of John McCain.

Obama was nothing but a “celebrity,” McCain’s spokesmen charged, an airy elitist out of touch with ordinary Americans. Polls showed Obama losing ground among blue-collar men, married women, even longtime Democrats.

So for Obama, this week’s Democratic National Convention was more than merely a chance to win a transient “bump” in the polls; it was a desperately needed opportunity to relaunch his campaign and redefine his image.

The new Obama, unveiled before about 84,000 cheering supporters in a football stadium, is more combative than the old Obama — and more sharply focused on the economic problems of the nation’s working class.

The Barack Obama who launched his presidential campaign 18 months ago appealed for voters to rise above partisan division, embrace a politics of hope and, above all, end the war in Iraq.

The Obama who appeared Thursday as the Democrats’ presidential nominee renewed all those appeals, of course. But the centerpiece of his acceptance speech was a sharp-edged, almost populist economic message, aimed directly at the middle-income voters who have been reluctant to sign up for his crusade.

“We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid,” Obama said.

“Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less,” he said. “The (government’s) failure to respond is a direct result of a broken politics in Washington and the failed policies of George W. Bush.”

And Republican nominee McCain, he added, has agreed with Bush “90 percent of the time.”

“Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment,” Obama said, “but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time?”

There, in a few sentences, was a distillation of Obama’s new message: Ordinary people are hurting economically, the Bush administration has failed to respond, and a McCain presidency would represent nothing but “more of the same.”

“Now, I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know,” Obama said, then mocked a recent McCain comment: “Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under 5 million dollars a year?”

“It’s not because John McCain doesn’t care. It’s because John McCain doesn’t get it,” he said in his sharpest jab at his opponent.

Obama devoted 16 minutes of his 44-minute speech to the economy, only four minutes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As his aides had promised, he offered a newly concrete summary of what he proposes to do for the struggling middle class: a broad-based tax cut that would cover 95 percent of wage earners, elimination of the capital gains tax on small businesses, and an energy program focused on investment in renewable sources.

“This was not a classic Barack Obama speech,” said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who has studied conventions since 1952. “It was not an elegant speech. But that may have been on purpose.”

Republican pollster David Winston warned that Obama ran the risk of damaging his unifier image by launching bare-knuckled thrusts at his opponent.

Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said the candidate does not believe he is moving away from his original call for a unifying, “post-partisan” brand of politics.

The speech, Axelrod said, was a key part of the Democrat’s strategy for winning the election: Prevail in the debate over the economy, energize traditional Democrats, and enlarge the electorate by turning out record numbers of black, Hispanic and young voters.

“It’s really very simple,” Axelrod told reporters at a breakfast Thursday. “It’s not going well for white working-class or any working-class people in this country. ... People have actually lost ground during the last eight years, years that McCain suggests were years of great economic progress.”

Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe said that despite nationwide polls showing a tight race, they are confident that Obama can pile up a majority of electoral votes.

Plouffe said Obama still enjoys what he called a “pretty significant and meaningful gap in intensity” of his supporters over McCain voters, meaning more Democratic voters, proportionately, are likely to turn out.

“If all John McCain does is match George Bush’s turnout in 2004, he will lose this election,” he added.

By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Japanese women shy from playing mom
by Blaine Harden

I have never met a Japanese man who did not want me to be his mommy.” That is the reason, Takako Katayama says, that she has not married. At 37, she has carved out a comfortable life in Tokyo, with her own apartment, a good job at a cable television network, and a network of family and friends.

She has not closed the door on marriage and children. When she meets girlfriends for dinner, they ask each other, “Where are the good guys?” But she refuses to settle for a man who works long hours, declines to share in child-rearing and sees marriage mainly as a way to acquire lifetime live-in help.

“I want a mature, equal-partner kind of marriage,” she said. “Anyway, there are complete lives without a baby.”

Therein lies a dismal prognosis for Japan and for many of the other prosperous nations of East Asia. In numbers that alarm their governments, Asian women are delaying marriage and postponing childbirth.

In Japan, the percentage of women who remain single into their 30s has more than doubled since 1980. The trend is similar in Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and the booming Chinese cities of Shanghai and Beijing.

Feminine foot-dragging on the way to the altar has been identified by demographers as perhaps the primary reason for the region’s plunging birthrates. Of the 10 countries or territories at the bottom of a 2008 CIA ranking of global fertility rates, six, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, are in the Asia-Pacific region. South Korea also ranks near the bottom.

Regional leaders are waking up to the growing reluctance of working women to complicate their lives with children — and with husbands who refuse to help raise them. A very high percentage of Japanese women eventually do marry, but by postponing it they narrow the window for bearing children.

Like many other East Asian economies with a shrinking workforce, Japan desperately needs women to marry and have children while also continuing to work. But only about a third of women in Japan remain in the workforce after having a child, compared with about two-thirds of women in the United States.

Corporate discrimination against women, especially if they have children, remains rampant, despite laws that forbid it. Last year Japan ranked 91st in gender equality among 128 countries surveyed by the World Economic Forum.

Meanwhile, many Japanese men in their 30s continue to be consumed by their jobs. About one in four still works more than 60 hours a week. Just 0.5 percent of men take government-guaranteed parental leave. In Sweden, 17 percent do.

Most working women in Japan face a stark choice: the career track, in which they will acquire financial independence while remaining single and childless, or the family track, which makes them full-time mothers until they are in their mid- to late 40s.

Social pressure on women to marry has clearly eased in Japan. But being an independent single woman still carries a stigma, even in Tokyo.

By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post