The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Missing daughters
Gender imbalance, a matter of grave concern

THE great Indian fixation for the male child is fed by centuries of deeply entrenched gender bias. Our daughters are disappearing even before they are born, leading to a skewed sex ratio. Haryana and Punjab have the dubious distinction of leading the race with one of the lowest sex ratios. More prevalent amongst the educated and the affluent, female foeticide bares a prejudiced pan-Indian psyche that values boys as prized possessions and (dis)regards girls as a burden that should not be borne at any cost.

The falling ratios are a telling pointer, exposing the drawbacks in the implementation of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Technique (prohibition of sex selection) Act. Only a handful of convictions have taken place under the Act, though it came into being a few years ago. Ironically, Haryana has reported two cases of conviction. While the guilty go scot-free, a report in the Lancet magazine reminds us that every year half a million female babies are killed in the womb in India.

To save the girl child, the Government of India has come up with positive measures like staggered cash incentives. Seats have been reserved for the single girl child at Panjab University. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandak Committee’s ‘Nanhi chhaan’ initiative stressing the importance of the girl child and environment came as a refreshing breather. An all-India religious meet, organised by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, stressed that killing the girl child is an abominable sin. Since our social attitudes stem primarily from religion, religious institutions can be an effective tool to offset prejudices. This needs to be coupled with exemplary endeavors of bureaucrats and stringent execution of the PNDT Act and the Dowry Prohibition Act. Female foeticide is an extreme form of violence against women and it lies in the same social continuum as dowry death and sati. It cannot be treated as just another social aberration but recognised as an evil. A multi-pronged approach involving all sections of society alone will ensure that our daughters are not killed and those who do so are both ostracised and punished.

Retired unhurt
Others can take their cue from Ganguly

FINALLY, Sourav Ganguly has decided to go — bat in hand and head unbowed. He will make his last stand in the current Test series against Australia. And, that is so apt: Ganguly, as Ricky Ponting would readily admit, is perhaps the only one to really challenge the Australians in the last eight to 10 years. That he was the first Indian to score an ODI century against Australia in Australia is just one of the many achievements of Ganguly, who is the most successful captain ever to lead India. So much so that recall of his legendary feats and milestones is hardly necessary. Suffice it to say that he was truly a ‘Dada’ at the helm. His fan following in his home state is no less than that of actor Rani Mukherji and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.

However, while greatness will remain recorded in history, glory is fleeting even for the great, as Ganguly must now realise. Though he announced his retirement, the fact is that the BCCI expected him to quit and make the decision public before the start of the series. With Ganguly going, it is only a matter of time before the BBCI feels the need to take a call on the future of other ‘seniors’, particularly Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and V V S Laxman. This can only add to the pressure on Anil Kumble. Doubtless, politics, power play and personal equations among the cricketers, selectors and bosses in the BCCI will be critical factors in deciding who goes when.

While Ganguly can now play without feeling the pressure and after the Test series engage his fans with his performance in the IPL’s Twenty20, the BCCI will have to contend with how to ease out the other seniors painlessly and rebuild Team India with new and younger talent. As it moves forward to take up these tasks, the BCCI should also try to recast itself and send packing selectors and officials, too, who have been holding on to their places for long or are “very senior”. Change, after all, should begin at the top.

Thought for the Day

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing. — Thomas Alva Edison

ARTICLE

Bleak political scene in Bengal
Leaders are left without credibility
by Punyapriya Dasgupta

LIKE in Alice’s wonderland things are getting curiouser and curiouser in West Bengal’s politics. A battered Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, with the looks of an archetypal Bengali intellectual, who reportedly loved sitting in an austere dwelling and translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez at one time, worked himself up later to a frenzied acquisition of peasants’ lands for a hoped-for magical industrial revolution in the State. He managed to forget all of the many heart-wrenching short stories, poems and novels in Bengali literature about hapless peasants’ resistance to their uprooting from their meagre lands by the forces of capitalist production and modernisation. He seemed never to have heard of what happened in Mexico (in the same Spanish-speaking world to which Marquez belongs) as recently as 2002, when the peasants fought and foiled the government’s scheme to build a new international airport on the lands of only some five hundred of them. The protesters sacrificed one life but succeeded in enlisting the overwhelming backing of an initially apathetic nation to their slogan: “land yes, airplanes no”.

Bhattacharya failed even to remember that his CPI(M), together with its like-minded allies, had secured and consolidated state power thanks to land reforms promising land to those who till it. This leftist chief minister could not even appreciate the fact, illustrated by the experience in many countries, that the transition from a rural economy to capitalism, though inevitable in the globalised pattern of development in the present-day world, is a painful process and calls for much patience and persuasive skill. Stalinist steamrolling of opposition turns counter-productive at some stage.

For his failures Bhattacharya paid with a humiliating retreat from Nandigram, the area where his unthinking government and allegedly Marxist party had tried to play the role of an aggressive land procurement agent for a rich Indonesian conglomerate created by the hated capitalist Sudomo, whose mansion was burnt down by angry Indonesian people after the disappearance of his protector, dictator Suharto. The knock-out in Nandigram was particularly galling to Bhattacharya and CPI(M) because the winner was Mamata Banerjee, the heroine of countless theatricals, whose resources in constitutional politics had hit a worrisome low. Mamata found in Nandigram the elixir of political life she was desperately seeking. She naturally followed up her victory there with a siege of Singur, where the Tatas had already progressed well enough to roll out their eagerly-awaited one-lakh-rupee Nano in October, as promised.

The Nano project and its potential for proving the much-needed impetus to transformation of West Bengal’s economy failed to make Mamata think. She would not stop her cry for the return of 400 acres of the acquired land. Not even after the judicial pronouncement that land once acquired for public purposes could not be returned to the previous owners. Whether her essentially ‘back to the village’ agitation fits into any model of feasible economic development today is a question that leaves the demagogue cold. So also another enquiry whether she can show any way other than industrialisation as a possible remedy for the widespread unemployment in the state. Her blinkered vision sees her capture of the Writer’s Building as the only goal. An imaginative leader, committed to the good of the people, especially at Singur immediately, would have pressed for a generous compensation package and won it from or through the West Bengal government. That would have been a victory for all.

An end to CPI (M)’s current tenure in power is an eminently desirable objective. Three decades in uninterrupted power has made this party incredibly corrupt and arrogant. Even primarily school teachers cannot be sure of getting their miserable pensions until the levies of local party goons are paid. Senior citizens may not get the plots they had fully paid for in the hope of building their own houses for life in retirement — not even after directives from the High Court — until shamelessly corrupt government officials acting through touts are satisfied. All the other three constituents of the ruling Left Front dominated by CPI(M) — RSP, Forward Bloc and CP — have become restive and are showing signs of breaking away.

CPI (M) has ceased to be an ideologically imbued organisation. Its “Marxist” tag offends Marx. As proved in Nandigram, the party has no cadre with a commitment to try to persuade the peasantry that it was time they started weighing their options of what would ultimately be good for them. Nor has it leaders with vision to realise that generous compensation is essential to back up their capacity for reasoning. Instead the party depended on the lumpen to bludgeon traditionally land-clinging peasants into submission. Bengal’s “Marxists” mocked Marxism.

Marx coined the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ to keep out vagabonds, jailbirds, pickpockets, brothel-keepers and the like from his real proletariat. He repeatedly warned against the lumpen who were the “refuse of all classes” and a “dangerous class” by themselves. “A mob that could be bought and sold for a few barrels of wine,” added Engels — a description that snugly fits the alleged CP(M) cadre deployed in Nandigram. The lumpen failed there and Buddhadeb had to promise his Indonesian investor land somewhere else. To cover the retreat from Nandigram and in a shockingly cynical effort to save the Muslim vote the CPI (M) and Bhattacharya bowed before another mysteriously-aroused gang of lumpen that rioted in the name of Islam in the streets of Kolkata and literally bundled the secular refugee Taslima Nasreen out of West Bengal. This is another story of cerebral bankruptcy.

This Chief Minister should have left the Writer’s Building to someone else and gone back to his literary pursuits. Instead, he tried running with the hare and hunting with the hounds and ended up earning contempt from both. He thrust his chest out before industrialists and bragged that although he belonged to a political party he would henceforth speak out against bandhs and gheraos. When his party rapped him on the knuckles for such blasphemous utterances, he slunk away. What is left of his credibility? Or is left of Mamata Banerjee’s now that the Tata Nano plant has shifted away from Bengal? Mamata Banerjee’s nay-saying began with her debut in politics with a dance on the bonnet of Jaya Prakash Narayan’s car in the hope of scaring him away. She has hardly ever in three decades shown any convincing concern for public weal. She is obsessed with her dream of being hailed as the first ever regnant Queen of Bengal.

MIDDLE

Gyanji
by Harish Dhillon

He was the Headmaster’s PA and throughout my first stint as a teacher, I had no interaction with him. I knew of him but did not know him — he remained a vague and shadowy figure. Then, years later, I returned as the Headmaster and he was my PA.

All through that first year I remained intimidated by him. I was intimidated by his awesome efficiency, by his resolute determination to keep our relationship on a strictly professional level and not do or say anything that could suggest either friendliness or familiarity, and most of all I was intimidated by his absolute discretion. My experience of his extraordinary discretion came when, as part of the sesqui centenary celebrations, the Board sanctioned a month’s salary as bonus for all the staff.

I swore Gyanji to secrecy.

“I don’t know how you will manage it — but the staff must only know when they receive their pay slips for the month.” He worked late at night and made the bank statements and the salary slips all by himself. To suspicious enquiries he made answer that he was working late, typing out the manuscript of the Headmaster’s new book, to enable him to keep a deadline. Amazingly, not a soul on the campus knew of the bonus till the salary slips were pigeon-holed.

In the 10 years since I had come away, I had often thought of him and wondered how he was doing. But I did not make the effort to go and see him. I justified this on the grounds that in carefully keeping his distance, he had not allowed me to know him well. But the truth was that during the three years of our association he had come to know me the way no one else had, and I was afraid that in meeting him now I would see in his eyes that I was not as nice a man as I liked to believe I was.

Last week when, I heard of his death, I felt an emptiness within me and rushed to his funeral — a last farewell gesture, acknowledging all that this remarkable man had done for me.

When, after the ceremony was over, I went to say goodbye to his son, he said: “I knew that you would come. He spoke so often about you, about how much he had enjoyed working with you. He said you were a good man.”

I knew that the boy was merely being kind — in wanting to thank me for coming, he was, perhaps, assigning words to Gyanji that he had never used. But being human, I could not help but feel reassured by what he had said.

In spite of this, however, the emptiness remained. I had given so much of myself to him and he had taken it all with him to the grave: a part of me had died with him. But he had given me so little of himself in return that it could not fill this terrible, aching void.

OPED

Ineffective policing
‘Special laws’ will not stop blasts
by Maja Daruwala

Frequent large-scale violence is coming from all corners: bomb blasts by religious fanatics of every creed, slaughter of innocents by political ideologues of the Left and the right, mob violence from party goons proving they have muscle by meting out death for such sins as making movies and painting pictures; everyone is taking to murder and mayhem because it is so easy to get away with.

The unforgivable bomb blasts in Delhi predictably have the public baying for more blood. They want action and don’t care what form that takes. The hardliners and hawks in the security establishment are screaming for more power, less liberty for citizens and even less openness and accountability about how security agencies, the police especially, go about their business.

Instead of a thoughtful bipartisan response at stemming an ongoing problem, the Opposition has preferred to stick with sterile hackneyed calls for resignation and revenge: entirely forgetting that some of the worst bloodletting in the history of India was under its rule.

The pressure on the beleaguered Home Minister to pass ever more anti-terror laws and accede to ever more “special laws” — the Gujarat Control of Organised Crime Act being the latest — has been intense.

Despite the considerable attack he is right to steadfastly refuse to agree to fall in with the notion that more and more “special laws” will make conflict and killing go away. Even more new federal agencies designed along the same faulty lines as the present inefficient and unaccountable ones will not make that happen.

Justified as being the only answer to crime and terrorism, special laws, like the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act and the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act have proved to be less than useless despite having been on the books for years along with the National Security Act, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA).

There is no serious research that can show they work well to stop evil doing or increase conviction rates. But there is a lot of evidence to show that they do manage to fill our jails with innocents, vulnerables, minorities and the poor and defenceless, who can then be held for long periods on flimsy accusations that go unresolved for years.

“Special laws” are so called because they take away a great many of the protections that the ordinary law gives each one of us. It means that anyone can more easily be suspected, more easily arrested on vague grounds of suspicion; once the unproved label “terrorist” is applied chances of bail become almost zero; confessions become admissible and anyone can rot in jail while waiting to prove his innocence or get in appeals through our creaking dilatory court system.

In fact “special laws” are simply a knee-jerk reaction of inefficient governments, who have nothing else to offer in the face of public outcry and are very poor substitutes for revamping the existing police, paramilitaries and intelligence-gathering and investigative machineries.

These are the real impediments to better security for all. In fact, more and more short-cut irresponsible “special laws” just put off that joyous day when police officers will have the organisational capability to better prevent and investigate crimes of all kinds .

Well aware of all this, two years ago the Supreme Court ordered all the states and the Centre to repair policing in all its aspects and create mechanisms that would free the police from illegitimate political control.

At the same time the court’s directions ensured operational responsibility coupled with increased accountability. But neither the Centre nor any state has fully obeyed these directions. Instead, all energies are working to dilute the spirit of the court’s excellent directions or avoiding addressing the issue altogether.

As our lawmakers turn a blind eye to the policeman’s plight and the public’s fears, the police is driven further into a defensive ghettoised organisation that cannot even keep the loyalty of its rank and file, but must nevertheless keep a lid on crime.

So they will turn to more illegality and violence against all, while our people remain unable to influence change for the better. Rather than deal with straightening out politicised and ineffective policing by actually loosening their grip on its functioning, governments are happy to give an already abusive police more power while eroding the citizen’s civil liberties through ever more dicey laws.

In these circumstances crime must increase, terrorism will prosper and our people will never become citizens but remain subjects of whatever regime is in power and policemen are their obedient servants.

The writer is the Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative

Of debt and disaster
by Tom Petruno

IF you’re at the point where you aren’t sure if you can take anymore of this, you have plenty of company. Worldwide.

One year into this market slide, we’ve reached a new level of despair. Many investors have lost about a third of their stock portfolios’ value in the decline fueled by the implosion of home prices and credit markets.

“Why don’t you be truthful with the poor people who have their money in this market,” a reader wrote in an e-mail over the weekend.

“You and I both know the market is not going up,” she said. “How can it. Our government has destroyed our economy by shifting good jobs to Third World countries. Giving expensive houses to poor people and hoping they would make the payments.”

And that plan for the Treasury to borrow $700 billion to buy up garbage mortgage loans? “Debt is what got us here and more debt is going to make things worse,” the reader, Joyce, wrote.

Having no hope, she signed herself: “A former investor.”

If you’re 30 years old, a 33 percent drop in your portfolio might not be a big deal. You know you’ve got time to make it up.

But if you’re 60, this is a disaster. And instinctively, you want to protect what you have left.

So the client calls are pouring in to money management companies like Silvercrest Asset Management in New York, which oversees about $9.6 billion for investors.

“They’re asking what to do,” said Stanley Nabi, vice chairman of Silvercrest. And like most market professionals, Nabi gives the standard answer: “I’m telling them to hold tight,” he says.

There is, of course, a large element of self-preservation in that advice. The companies don’t want investors pulling their funds and heading for the bank — or the mattress.

But it’s also true that history mostly is on the side of that counsel. Bear markets don’t go on forever. And they usually end just when investors are feeling that there is no hope of a recovery.

After Congress on Friday approved the financial-system rescue plan, many investors were expecting the stock market to rally. Or, at worst, to tread water.

Instead, after a devastating sell-off overnight in Europe, which has imported a banking crisis from the United States, Wall Street on Monday suffered one of its most harrowing days ever.

Yet in market parlance the first part of the day had overtones of “capitulation” — a final, mad rush to get out, regardless of price.

“The selling sure seemed as if it was completely indiscriminate,” said Andy Brooks, veteran trader at T. Rowe Price Group in Baltimore. “We’ve reached the point where stocks are cheap but people don’t care.”

Those often are classic signs of capitulation.

Another sign is when market pundits who usually are associated with an optimistic view of the market suddenly throw in the towel.

Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” show and someone generally regarded as a market cheerleader, helped stoke talk of capitulation with his extremely bearish comments on NBC’s “Today” show Monday morning.

Warning that the global credit crunch could drive the market down a further 20 percent, Cramer advised: “Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market. Right now. This week. I do not believe that you should risk those assets in the stock market.”

Six years ago this week, many investors also had a deep sense of foreboding about the stock market. The bear market that began in 2000 was in its 31st month, driven by the collapse of many once high-flying technology stocks.

That made it the most devastating bear market for blue-chip stocks since the latter years of the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, many investors had given up hope. Yet that day finally marked the end of the long slide, for reasons known only to the market gods.

The current bear market, painful as it has been, hasn’t lasted as long or been as deep as the last one.

The question is, if we’ve never seen a credit catastrophe on this scale in the modern global economy, how can the stock market know how much discounting it needs to do?

The government’s bailout plan is supposed to end the credit crisis, in time, by taking bad loans off banks’ books. But investors obviously aren’t yet persuaded that it will work.

So hope is in short supply. And investors who want bullet-proof advice find that there is none.

The individual investor is advised to pick a time horizon and make a decision: Between now and however long it takes to resolve the credit mess and the hit it delivers to the economy, how much more pain can you handle?

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post

Warning on cold medicines for kids
by Ceci Connolly

THE makers of cold and cough medicines in the US announced on Tuesday they are voluntarily warning parents not to give their products to children under the age of 4, a move negotiated in private with federal drug regulators over the past six months.

Medications with the new warning labels will appear in stores and pharmacies immediately, though experts continue to debate at what age the over-the-counter remedies may be safe and effective. The new labels also advise against using antihistamines to sedate youngsters.

Last winter, the companies tried to discourage the use of the products in children under age 2.

Each year, drug companies sell 95 million packs of paediatric cold medicine, generating about $300 million in revenue. More than 7,000 children are rushed to hospitals annually because of adverse reactions, primarily due to accidental overdoses. The most common complications include hives, dizziness and difficulty breathing.

Industry representatives, who face the prospect of an outright ban on marketing cold remedies for young children by the Food and Drug Administration, said they took action because the majority of problems occur in 2- and 3-year-olds.

“We did this because we think it’s the right thing to do for parents,” said Linda Suydam, president of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. She could not provide estimates on the financial impact of the decision.

Doctors who petitioned the FDA for broader restrictions applauded the new warnings but said they do not go far enough. The products “should not be available over-the-counter at least up to age 12,” said Wayne Snodgrass, a pediatrician and clinical pharmacologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

A year ago, an FDA advisory panel voted to remove from the market all pediatric cold products for children under 6.

“I am disappointed that the FDA has not followed the recommendations of its own advisory panel,” Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said in a letter to Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach. “Another cold and flu season is right around the corner, yet commonly available medical products continue to be marketed and sold to the parents of young children even though they have not been shown to be effective and experts have raised serious questions about their safety.”

Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the agency is collecting more scientific information before making a decision.

Joshua Sharfstein, the Baltimore public health commissioner who has led a coalition of pediatricians advocating tighter restrictions, said both the industry and the FDA have a responsibility to educate the public on the new recommendations.

“It’s important that this is not just an announcement but that the shelves reflect this policy as well,” he said in an interview.

— By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post