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Dance of democracy
Right to life is sacred |
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An area of neglect
No Obama in India
Haste and hurry
No end to savagery in Afghanistan
Japan contracts
Inside Pakistan
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Dance of democracy
VOTERS in Jammu and Kashmir have proved the political and electoral pundits wrong when they came out in large numbers to exercise their franchise on Monday. With an average polling percentage of 64, they have set a record other states going to the polls would find difficult to improve upon.
Unlike voters elsewhere, those in J&K went to the polling booths under threat to their lives and limbs. The separatists had given a call to boycott the polls they describe as a sham. Not only did the voters ignore the call with the contempt it deserved, they even proved their abiding faith in democracy which alone could address their concerns of bread, cloth and shelter. The high voter turnout was not confined to any particular region as Jammu, Ladakh and the Valley seemed to compete with one another. What is most heartening is that even in constituencies like Gurez, Bandipora and Sonawari where the militants called the shots at one time, the voter response was very good. This disproves those who wanted postponement of the elections for fear that the voters would keep away from the booths. The separatists, who made a big issue of the allotment of a piece of land for the Amarnath Shrine Board, thinking that they had found a cause to revive militancy, have suffered a body blow. The violent reaction in the Jammu region to their protest showed that extremists feed on each other and the sufferers are the common people. For once they realised that the right forum to iron out political differences was the Assembly which, unfortunately, could not complete its full term because of the controversy. It is this realisation that forced the voters to brave the terrorists’ bullets and the harshness of winter to exercise their democratic choice. The elaborate arrangements made by the state authorities and the Election Commission also instilled a sense of confidence in their minds. For those fomenting violence from across the LoC, the clips of long queues of men and women in front of polling booths is a reminder that they have no supporters on this side of the LoC. Monday’s polling is one more proof that the people of J&K, as indeed of other states, are their own masters when it comes to deciding their political destiny. |
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Right to life is sacred
THE Supreme Court ruling that illegal orders of preventive detention can be quashed even at the pre-execution stage is welcome. It reinforces its role as the protector and custodian of the citizens’ fundamental rights against the executive’s arbitrary exercise of power. Indeed, the Bench consisting of Justice Altamas Kabir and Justice Markandey Katju has given a new interpretation to the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. It said that a person’s reputation is an inseparable part of his fundamental right to life and that if he is illegally detained, even if he is released later, his reputation will suffer a serious setback because of the detention.
While quashing the Bombay High Court’s detention order against a person under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act, the Bench ruled that the police should be doubly sure of the facts against an individual before putting him behind bars. It augurs well for Indian democracy that the Supreme Court has been upholding the citizens’ fundamental rights and civil liberties. Unfortunately, it supported the Indira Gandhi government’s stand that a citizen had no right to life during the Emergency which she clamped in 1975. In a ruling on habeas corpus in April 1976, by a four-to-one majority judgement, it held that the petitions against detentions were not maintainable during the Emergency. After the change of power at the Centre, Parliament passed the Constitution (45th Amendment) Bill, renumbered as the 44th Act, and removed the distortions wrought by the 42nd Amendment. It contained adequate safeguards against future subversion of the Constitution and negation of the citizens’ right to life during an Emergency. The latest ruling is of immense significance for the people because the Bench has reiterated that the right to life and personal liberty is the most precious of all rights guaranteed under the Constitution and thus no government can trample upon it unless there are compelling circumstances to do so. Why should a person against whom a preventive detention order has been passed be sent to jail if he can show to the court that the order is “clearly illegal”, the Bench asked. The ruling is expected to check the increasing trend among the police to send the accused to jail on flimsy grounds. |
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An area of neglect
PUNJABIS need to worry about their health. They are increasingly becoming easy going, getting obese and falling victim to lifestyle diseases like obesity and heart attack. Youth are turning drug addicts in numbers. Many Punjabi couples kill their unborn daughters. Grown-up, married women are subjected to spousal violence and only 52 per cent of them have a say in household decisions.
Eighty per cent children in the 6-35 month age group and 41.6 per cent pregnant women are anaemic. Thirty per cent of the men are obese. Despite a massive national campaign, only 75 per cent of the children below 23 months were given polio drops. These findings of the latest National Family Health Survey conducted by the International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai, are disturbing and should wake up the people as well as the authorities. As Punjab growth slows and Punjabi household incomes remain either stagnant or see a marginal rise, the soaring costs have made medical treatment prohibitive for most people. Private hospitals have mushroomed as the government health setup has failed to meet public needs. In the absence of affordable health insurance cover, Punjabis often borrow to cope with an emergency. An NCAER survey of 23 states has placed Punjab at number nine in terms of financial preparedness to face health issues. It was found that 40.9 per cent of a household income goes into health expenditure. Government hospitals lack infrastructure, medicines and adequate staff. There is no money to buy latest equipment or carry out repairs. A large number of posts are lying vacant. Doctors often do private practice. Specialists are leaving government service in large numbers to join private hospitals for better salaries. Instead of curing urgently the well-known ailments of the public health sector, the Punjab government is still trying to find out what is wrong. Unless the government significantly raises its health spending, the ground reality will not change. Health care needs to be placed high on the state’s agenda. |
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Whatever sceptic could enquire for; |
No Obama in India FOLLOWING the election of half-black Barack Obama as US President there have been a large number of discussions and debates whether India, yet another multicultural, multilingual, multi-religious democracy, can elect an Indian Obama as its chief executive. Much of the debate was focused on
Mr Obama’s colour and the son of a black Kenyan African reaching the top. But Mr Obama is not a typical black minority American like Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King. He is not the descendant of an American slave. Except that he owes his black genes to an African father visiting the US, and his short residence in Indonesia, he was brought up in a white liberal American household by a white mother and white maternal grandparents.
He had the best of Ivy College education. Therefore, while not in anyway running down his enormous achievements and his shattering the glass American racial prejudice, it has to be emphasised that the only apt comparison in the Indian situation would be the child of a Dalit father and a high caste mother brought up in the high caste household and put through the Presidency Colleges and St. Stephens. How many such people in politics can you count in India? We had
K.R. Narayanan a full Dalit as President but not Prime Minister. The answer to the question whether there can be an Indian Obama is a firm negative one. Mr Obama is the product of a presidential system while India is a parliamentary democracy. The US has a two-party system while India has scores of parties. In the last one century Mr George Bush’s first-term election was the sole exception when the candidate who became President on the basis of electoral votes did not secure popular majority. In India’s democratic history, no election has produced an absolute majority of popular votes for the party which brought to office the Prime Minister. Our system did not permit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi to secure 50 per cent popular votes. Mr Obama was able to secure 53 per cent of the popular
vote. That itself will explain why systemically there cannot be an Obama in India. Mr Obama was the product of a popular movement for change. He was a first-term Senator unlike John Kennedy who had served more than one term before he contested the presidential election. The most outstanding feature of Mr Obama’s election was that he was able to beat Senator Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and a Senator of the second-term with a much higher political profile, for party nomination. That was a more remarkable achievement than beating Senator Mr McCain in the presidential poll. Can anyone imagine in India a comparatively junior politician being allowed to beat a very influential senior leader in a free democratic inner party contest and thereafter both of them campaigning together to gain victory for the party. Mr Obama was selected as a State Senator of Illinois to deliver the keynote address of the 2004 Democratic convention when he was only 43 years old. Can you imagine our gerontacracies encouraging younger elements in a similar way? Morarji Desai fought Indira Gandhi for the leadership of the Congress parliamentary party. He lost. Though he served for a couple of years as her Deputy Prime Minister, they finally split. The Indian politicians do not accept defeat in a democratic manner and they do not extend cooperation to the victor to further the national interest. Have we ever come across a speech of such gracious acceptance of defeat and extension of cooperation to the newly elected President as Senator McCain delivered on the night of November 4 in India? Mr Barack Obama’s achievement was not merely his personal achievement. It is possible only under the US democratic system where there is inner party democracy and a culture of democracy enveloping both parties. In India, there is a great democratic deficit in spite of our six decades of democratic rule. It is evident on days when the proceedings of the two Houses of Parliament and legislatures are disrupted by the absence of democratic behaviour of the legislators. Almost all political parties in India lack inner party democracy. In a true democracy the candidates for election in a constituency will be selected by local parties.
In the UK the constituency parties select the candidates. In US the parties hold primaries to determine who is to be fielded for the election. In India the candidacy is determined by the high commands of parties and not by party members in constituencies. That ensures that no person from the grassroots like Mr Obama can offer himself as a candidate against the domination of the party machinery. There are, no doubt, dissidents who fight against the party machinery and sometimes win elections. But they are not many and usually they are brought over with the offer of ministership. They never become great national leaders. Provincial chief ministership or a Central Cabinet berth is the limit they can aspire to reach. The poverty of democracy in our system is demonstrated by newly elected legislature parties in most cases requesting the topmost leadership to nominate the leader of the state legislature parties. The legislators abdicate their responsibilities to elect their own leaders. It also absolves them of all loyalty to the leadership and, therefore, they feel free to start conspiring against the leader in the immediate wake of the election. While in the US the quality of democracy has steadily been improving, resulting in the emergence of an Obama, in India the standard of democracy has been steadily declining as seen in the fall in the number of days Parliament and legislatures function without disruption. There was a time in 1946 when the Madras Congress Legislature Party could reject Rajaji, the candidate for chief ministership supported by Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru, and elect its own leader. It was not considered defiance. In 1954, C. Subramaniam contested the Congress Legislature Party leadership election against Kamaraj and got defeated. He became thereafter number two in Kamaraj’s Cabinet and virtually ran the state administration with total loyalty to Kamaraj. Can we expect similar behaviour by partymen these days? The inherent authoritarianism among our political leaders and parties, pursuit of politics for personal, dynastic and parochial gains and lack of basic democratic norms among the majority of our politicians cannot permit an Obama to emerge in India. There is no doubt that as of today the US is a truer and greater democracy than
India. |
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Haste and hurry
ALL of us come across various persons in our life whom we mark as special personalities depending upon their mental attitude. You may find angry and irritable personalities and yet there are persons who are very balanced and poised. Somehow I have studied a few persons who are always restless and anxious and it is always interesting to watch their behavior.
The most characteristic feature of a restless personality is his hasty temperament.
Many times in my clinic I notice persons who shall not sit and wait despite requested to do so. They will continue to stand and pose as if they are very busy and need an urgent appointment. Jumping the queue and gate crashing is very common to these people.
Some more perennially hasty patients phone the doctors to prepare their medicine without even getting them properly examined. I marvel their style of coming and collecting the medicine and giving our clinics the impression of a drive-in fast food joint. The hasty personalities are the biggest reason of road mishaps. Overtaking wrongly, not stopping at traffic signals and driving and pushing their vehicles in such a manner so that no traffic from either side should move on the road are some of the commonest feats performed by them. A few of them while overtaking another vehicle appear to be enjoying a sense of bravado. The haste and hurry syndrome seems to afflict many persons in their speech also. Speaking very fast they will miss many words and their normal talk gives the impression as if their house is on fire. Many times you have to request them to relax and repeat what they have said. They end up by spending more time on repeating but shall again adopt the same manner of haste elsewhere. I know many persons who reach the railway station or the bus stand much before the time of the departure of their journey. My late father never used to allow us to have a proper sleep the night before he had to travel. Despite getting his seat reserved he used to arrive at the station at least two hours before the arrival of the train reprimanding us that trains don’t wait for passengers and it is the passengers who have to wait for the train. The human mind is a fascinating thing. While remaining invisible, it controls our behaviour and makes and determines our personality. Though studying and treating other persons is my profession; my wife often reminds me to get time to watch myself. If I ask for a thing twice at a short interval she roars at me saying that I am also becoming “kahla” (hasty and impatient). Worried of being accused of inheriting the haste and hurry syndrome of my father, nowadays I prefer to keep mum while in home and wait for the normal course of time to let things
happen. |
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No end to savagery in Afghanistan
BACK in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave. The torture and killing of prisoners in this pitiful place – the American variety in Bagram and the Taliban variety in Helmand – is a kind of routine of history. Even execution has to be made more painful. A knife is more terrible than a bullet. The cult of the suicide bomber in the Middle East began its life in Lebanon, moved to “Palestine”, arrived in Iraq, leached over the border here to Afghanistan and passed effortlessly through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. And New York. And Washington. And London... Are human beings at war – any kind of war – by definition bound to commit atrocities? The International Committee of the Red Cross tried to answer this question in a report four years ago. Were combatants unaware of international humanitarian law? Unlikely, I would think. They just don’t care. The Red Cross enquiry interviewed hundreds of fighters in Colombia, Bosnia, Georgia – a bit of real prescience, there, on the part of the ICRC – and the Congo, and suggested that those who commit reprehensible acts see themselves as victims, that this then gives them the right to act savagely against their opponents. Certainly, this might apply to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, very definitely to the Serbs of Bosnia – I’m not so sure about Georgia – and quite definitely to the Taliban (not least when we’ve been bombing more wedding parties). Such cruelty is abetted with a bodyguard of clichés – “police operations”, “clean up”, “mop up”, “surgical strikes” – where you can kill by remote control, “especially when the media are not present to show the realities of a conflict”. This is most certainly the case today, for what journalist will now dare to wander the village streets of Helmand or the city of Baquba in Iraq or, for that matter, the border towns of Pakistan? War has never, it seems, been so underreported. And both the good guys and the bad guys like it that way; they prefer to indulge in savagery unseen. There is nothing new in all this. At the Battle of Omdurman – where the British executed all the Arab wounded – the young Winston Churchill wrote of a sight which is familiar today in a land which was then called Mesopotamia and in another which was already called Afghanistan. He described “grisly apparitions”, of “horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring...”. To the men can now – this very week – be added the suicide-bombed schoolgirls of Baghdad. In his earlier military campaign on the North West Frontier, Churchill saw how some of the Taliban’s ancestors dealt with a wounded British officer: the leader of “half a dozen Pathan swordsmen ... rushed upon the prostrate figure and slashed it three or four times with his sword. I forgot everything else at this moment except a desire to kill this man. I wore my long cavalry sword well sharpened... The savage saw me coming...”. Well there’s something for the ICRC to think about. Yet it pays to remember that Afghan wars have always been dreadful. Sir Mortimer Durand – he who created the Durand line which masquerades as
Afghan-Pakistani border, crossed with such impunity today by Americans and Taliban warriors in order to kill each other – witnessed the cruelty of the Afghan war at first hand. “During the action in the Chardeh valley on the 12th of Dec 1879,” he wrote, “two squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives... I saw it all...” Of course, it did Roberts no harm at all. In the age of “shock and awe” – when a Canadian general can call his Taliban opponents “scumbags” – it still doesn’t seem to worry Nato officers. They should know better. Montgomery never cursed Rommel; he kept a photograph of the Afrika Korps commander in his caravan to remind him of the man he was fighting. Indeed, the very Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 were supposed to end the mass destruction of human life. And President Bush has torn them up. I know it’s easy to ridicule the Red Cross. There’s something very preachy about the post-war conventions. But apart from the precedents of international law, it’s all we’ve got. Maybe a million Pushtu-language editions should be handed out to the Taliban and their followers as well as to the Nato combatants whom Barack Obama absurdly believes will win the Afghan war. But I doubt it would do much good. Victimhood sits easily on all our shoulders. If Osama bin Laden had a conscience, it would be quickly eased by the destruction of the last Caliphate, the colonial occupation of the Muslim world, the deaths of millions of Arabs. And if we have a conscience, what do we say? Remember 9/11. And so on we go. — By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Japan contracts
JAPAN is the latest country to succumb to the disintegrating global markets and fall into recession, its first since the technology bubble burst seven years ago.
This follows less than a week after the entire eurozone officially slipped into its first recession and after a weekend of intense talks at the G20 conference as the world’s biggest economies tried to stave off further disintegration. Japan, the second biggest global economy, issued third-quarter growth data that confirmed the country had fallen into recession, ending its longest run of growth since the Second World War. The government of Prime Minister Taro Aso announced that the economy had shrunk for the second consecutive quarter – the technical definition of a recession. Gross domestic product contracted 0.1 per cent in the third quarter, after a 0.9 per cent fall in the second. The announcement sent the Nikkei down almost 3 per cent. Kaoru Yosano, Japan’s economy minister, said that worse could follow. “We need to bear in mind that our economic conditions could worsen further as the US and European financial crisis deepens, worries of economic downturn heighten and stock and foreign exchange markets make big swings.” Peter Dixon, an economic analyst at Commerzbank, predicted two more quarters of contraction. “The whole situation in Japan looks pretty grim.”
The IMF believes the Japanese economy will fall 0.2 per cent next year. The government was last month forced to slash interest rates for the first time since the last recession ended in 2001. There was little room for manoeuvre, given the historically low rates, but the government reduced levels from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent. It also announced an economic stimulus package, that included a plan to boost the domestic economy by handing every adult at least Y12,000 (£82) as part of an emergency Y5,000bn handout. While Japan doesn’t have a severe exposure to the toxic debt that has brought financial institutions to their knees and forced countries into recession, it is highly dependent on exports, which rose 0.7 per cent in the third quarter – less than expected.
As demand from Japan’s trading partners in China, its biggest customer, and in the US has declined, the economy has come under more pressure. This has smashed domestic businesses, highlighted by Toyota at the start of the month, which predicted that profits would fall 70 per cent this year. Toyota is heavily dependent on exports. Japan’s market peaked in 1989 when the Nikkei hit 38,916 points but the economy went into freefall shortly after that point as the country’s debt and real estate bubble burst. The government was criticised for reacting slowly to the problem, waiting well over a year to cut rates and not attempting to kick start the economy until the end of the 1990s.
The period of recession and deflation became known as the Lost Decade. The last official recession in Japan was when the technology bubble burst in the United States in 2001. “Japan has never really got over the problems cause by the bubble bursting in the 1990s,” Mr Dixon said. “Recent growth has not been as impressive as other Asian economies.” — By arrangement with
The Independent |
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Inside Pakistan
IF
you are planning to visit Pakistan, think twice about including Peshawar in
your itinerary. There is the risk of getting kidnapped by criminals roaming in
the capital of the NWFP. According to The News, 78 people have been kidnapped
in Peshawar during the past 10 months and 18 of them are still missing. This is not the actual number because “many families prefer to quietly strike a deal with the kidnappers”.
Peshawar earned the description of a “no go” zone after the recent kidnapping of an Iranian diplomat and Afghanistan’s Ambassador-designate to Pakistan. Besides diplomats, journalists are another group of visitors who are targeted by these ransom-seekers. Last Friday an unsuccessful attempt was made to kidnap two journalists, one from Afghanistan and another from Japan as they were on their way to meet some people in a prestigious locality in Peshawar. Journalists have been targeted earlier too. Seven journalists were killed in Peshawar till November 8 this year. “It seems Peshawar is becoming a no-go area for foreign journalists. Threats to journalists have increased with the increase in military operations in the tribal areas,” Rahimullah Yousafzai, a Peshawar-based newsman was quoted by The Daily Times as saying. According to Yousafzai, “The situation will deteriorate in the coming days,” as A report in The Frontier Post quoted NWFP Minister for Information and Public Relations Iftikhar Hussain as explaining that “terrorists are employing such negative tactics to communicate to the world that the present political dispensation is incapable of dealing with the situation”. He promised to take stern action against such elements. But who will take his words seriously under the circumstances?
Meeting fund shortage The Pakistan government these days is busy defending its decision to go in for a loan of $7.6 billion from the IMF to resolve the acute balance of payments crisis it has been faced with for some time. It had to approach the IMF after the group of countries called the Friends of Pakistan made it clear after their Dubai meeting that “There are no plans for cash assistance from the Friends”. Business Recorder says, “Giving the background which necessitated recourse to the Fund programme, (Financial Adviser to the Prime Minister) Shaukat Tarin highlighted the fact that Pakistan was facing challenging economic conditions brought about by a combination of global shocks, inaction of the previous government in certain key areas and the ongoing financial crisis hitting every part of the world. “The ultimate reflection of what has happened to Pakistan’s economy is seen in the massive loss of exchange reserves from $16.4 billion in October 2007 to less than $7 billion at present.”
The PML (N) and other opposition parties are, however, unhappy with the government taking the help of the IMF because of the experience in the past. But their opposition appears to be mainly aimed at making political capital out of the situation. The Daily Times’ comment on the subject is interesting: “The IMF has become unpopular in the Third World because of its conditionalities. Critics within and without the IMF have frequently questioned the wisdom of applying the ‘Washington Consensus’ to a world that has found it too painful and has virtually abandoned it.”
No end to atta shortage The shortage of wheat flour continues to be a major problem in various parts of Pakistan. The poor are the worst sufferers as is obvious in such situations. At certain places people have to stand in a queue for hours together to buy atta, according to The Nation. The problem is getting worse day by day. Commenting on the plight of the ordinary people, particularly those in areas like Karachi’s slums, the paper says that if those whose monthly income ranges between Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,000 have to “spend all their salary on buying flour for their families, what are they going to do about other expenses?”
The “tandoori roti” is today selling for Rs 5 per piece in Karachi. The wheat flour price has nearly doubled. “Why isn’t the government doing anything?” The Nation asks. |
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