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Assets of judges
The Afghan poll |
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‘Honour’ killing
For India-China century
A lifetime ago
More suicides
Hang on – crisis isn’t over yet Chatterati
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Assets of judges
Karnataka
High Court Judge Justice D.V. Shylendra Kumar deserves to be commended for having stressed the need for judges to disclose their assets in national interest. Significantly, his views are at variance with those of the Chief Justice of India, Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, who had taken the position that throwing open the information to the public may lead to harassment of judges. Justifiably, Justice Shylendra Kumar has supported disclosure from the standpoint of the people’s fundamental right to know under Article 19 (i) (a) of the Constitution as also under the Right to Information Act. Interestingly, Justice Kumar dispels the CJI’s apprehensions of the judges’ “safety and security” in the event of their disclosing the assets and avers that the rule of law should operate “uniformly” — something which the Supreme Court itself had maintained in various judicial pronouncements over the years. The Tribune, too, has been commenting in these columns that judges, being constitutional functionaries, should not claim any immunity from the rule of law in the interest of transparency and accountability. Though the Centre has deferred the introduction of the Judges (Declaration of Assets and Liabilities) Bill, 2009, in the recent session of Parliament, one cannot but recall the controversial Clause VI of this Bill which required judges to declare their assets to their superiors but spared them from being made public. Had the Bill been passed, it would have served little public interest. No wonder, many members had opposed it. The need for asset disclosure has become far greater today because of the increasing cases of corruption involving the members of the judiciary. There is also a growing public perception that there is lack of accountability and transparency in the judiciary. Moreover, when most judges are known to be just and impartial, command people’s respect and have nothing to hide, they should not be reluctant to disclose their assets. Instead, they should come forward and support the cause of transparency as Justice Shylendra Kumar has done.
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The Afghan poll THE
very fact that the presidential elections in violence-torn Afghanistan could be held successfully last Thursday is an achievement in itself. Most of the country’s nearly 7,000 polling stations remained open all day despite 20 people losing their lives in 73 incidents of terrorist violence reported on the polling day alone. The Taliban threat failed to hit the electoral exercise as badly as was feared. There is nothing surprising in the low voter turnout. It is, in fact, encouraging for those engaged in establishing order in Afghanistan that a large number of people risked their lives to express their faith in democracy. All eyes are now fixed on the results, which will be known in a few days. The incumbent President, Mr Hamid Karzai, seems to have an edge over his most formidable challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, but the situation this time has been totally different from that in 2004, when democratic Afghanistan went to the polls for the first time. Then Mr Karzai had trounced his challengers by winning 55 per cent of the votes cast. Today there are fears of a second round of polling because the Karzai government has miserably failed to come up to the people’s expectations. His five-year rule has been known for rampant corruption and inefficiency at every level. The Afghanistan government’s failure to deliver has led to the resurgence of the Taliban in most parts of the country. There has not been enough development activity to prevent the Taliban from remaining a force to be reckoned with. Mr Karzai’s alliance with warlords like Abdur Rashid Dostum for winning the elections may further embolden the forces of instability. Mr Karzai may come back to power, exploiting his Pashtun background and US support, but the country will have to pay a heavy price for his desperate acts, though guided by political expediency.
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‘Honour’ killing
THE gruesome murder of Harpreet Singh who was killed by the relatives of his beloved at Amritsar recently is yet another manifestation of the medieval mindset that continues to sanction murder in the name of protecting family honour. In the prosperous states of Punjab and Haryana, young couples that dare defy tradition and parental pressure are often hounded, hacked, shot dead or strangled by enraged family members. In Haryana, khap panchayats have been making a mockery of law and have openly passed “death verdicts” against couples. Boys and girls are targeted for marrying out of caste, for belonging to the same gotra and in one case for hailing from the same village. Honour killings are taking place in Punjab and Haryana with shocking regularity. According to the All-India Democratic Women’s Association while six or seven cases are reported every month in Haryana, several go unreported. Recently, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram, who called honour killings a national shame, suggested various measures, including sensitising police officials to deal with the deplorable practice. A pilot scheme of “safe houses” — the first to be set up in Rohtak — where the newly wed will start their lives under police protection, too, is on the anvil. While all these are welcome steps, there can be no substitute to stringent enforcement of the law. Until the guilty are treated and punished like ordinary criminals, the cold-blooded murder of young innocent couples will continue. The Home Minister has rightly held that “honour killing is murder and has to be tried and dealt with as murder.” This message has to be driven home loud and clear. The answer doesn’t lie in creating a new law as demanded by some but to ensure that the present one is implemented with
rigour.
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It is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement. — Arthur Conan Doyle
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Corrections and clarifications
Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The
Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them. This column appears thrice a week — every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error. Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is
kanwar@tribunemail.com. H.K. Dua
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For India-China century THERE is no mistaking it. Despite some ifs and buts, India and China, the “giants of Asia”, are emerging the favourites of the 21st century. Like America was for the 20th century, termed as the American century; and the 19th century belonged to Europe. The swing towards Asia is becoming pronounced now, and the present vista makes the 21st century look as the Asian century, the India-China century. This is, however, conditional — and that condition is that India and China do not collide. India and China can — and should — be competitors, but they must not be adversaries. Competition and cooperation goes hand in hand, but adversarial competition is another commodity. As things stand, the good and the bad are amply visible in India-China relationship. Because of their anti-colonial legacy, strong nationalism, which sometimes manifests as narrow self-interest contradictory to the larger view, has become engrained in both China and India —” excessively in China. Thus, while pursuing their respective national goals, the two countries often find their positions colliding. Mature leadership on both sides has hitherto been able to loosen the knots and find the right half-way house. Their economic ties — the central challenge to both countries — have gone ahead in multidimensional terms, and trade has boomed - China is now India’s largest trade partner, overtaking the U.S. India-China cooperation can produce wonders for the two countries, no less for the world as a whole. But India-China collision can also prove disastrous. What is it that can pave the way for the first eventuality, and shut the door for the second? It is this: the two countries must get past the India-China boundary dispute. This is one big step that can change everything. Solution of the India-China boundary dispute appears as a distant dream. But it might astonish many — solution of the boundary dispute is within the grasp of the two countries: just a forward leap, a decisive step at the apex level by the two countries, and the border solution can be clinched and sealed. The fact is that the solution has been proposed by the Chinese side on at least two occasions at the highest level, but the Indian side has not been prepared. By a twist of events, India has now largely come to accept this solution, but the Chinese leadership is in a halting frame of mind —probably weighing the best terms it can extract from India. Let me recall the two occasions when a reasonable solution of the boundary dispute had been put forward by China’s top leaders. I have been witness to the first occasion — a solution put forward by the veteran Chou en-Lai, then China’s Prime Minister, in 1961 during his last visit to India. It was a Press conference at Rashtrapati Bhawan on the eve of his departure from India that lasted over four hours, and ended only past midnight when the BBC correspondent fervently requested an end so that “we might not lose the story”. It was a lucid and comprehensive solution that the Chinese leader then proposed. This, in substance, is what Chou en-Lai put forward as a solution to the border dispute: (a) The India-China boundary can be divided into three sectors: the middle sector where the dispute is minimal and the areas in dispute can be easily negotiated; the eastern and western sectors where the claimed areas by both sides are large and the crux of efforts to solve the dispute have to concentrate. (b) In the eastern sector, India projects the border line along what it terms the McMahon Line. While China does not recognise the McMahon Line since it was an imperialist imposition, it is willing to give up its claims on the areas India is occupying here, largely following the natural high ridges. On the western sector, China seeks India’s acceptance of the line of demarcation along what India calls Aksai-Chin. ( c ) This is a reasonable solution of overlapping claims in which historical legacy is entirely on China’s side; Indian nomenclature itself speaks out — Aksai Chin: the rock of China. In 1980, again, it was Chinese leader Deng who ushered in China’s economic reforms, proposed a solution similar to Chou en-Lai’s offer — giving the areas south of the McMahon Line to India and Aksai Chin to China. But India was not in a frame of mind to accept the Aksai Chin area as Chinese. There was a change in thinking subsequently, when intensive research by a former Defence Ministry expert, Mr John Lal, largely substantiated Chou en-Lai’s contentions in a well-researched book on Aksai Chin. While Mr Lal’s research found Chinese claims to be loose, since there had never been continuous Chinese hold on the entire territory of Aksai Chin, Indian claim on the territory had no credible base to rest upon. Mr Lal, in fact, termed the Chou en-Lai solution as the best that India had been offered hitherto. The 1962 border war changed the perspective to an extent. But during the Rajiv Gandhi visit to China, negotiations on the border solution were set on the right lines, and later Narasimha Rao’s Beijing visit resulted in a framework — the principles on which the solution must rest. Substantial work has been done by both sides to solve the India-China border issues. Even after the broad principles were accepted, differences on comparatively small areas are sizeable and intricate. At times the Chinese side has been seized with the thinking that a stable and strong government in India had to negotiate the settlement as a single package deal. Till such time, the Chinese side preferred to keep their original claims on Arunachal intact. Lately, misgivings have increased on the Indian side because of repeated assertions from Beijing on their claim on Arunachal, and border intrusions have increased. It has become clear that only a package deal — not only pertaining to the broad acceptance of the McMahon Line “highest ridge” and Aksai Chin as the eastern and western sector borders but also several small territorial pockets — has to be negotiated as one whole. And this can be done only at the highest level. The ground work has nevertheless to be done by the two sides, and the ball has been set rolling at the 13th round of border talks between the two designated strategic representatives. It is clear, however, that the final solution has to be clinched only by the political leadership. The Indian side is better prepared now for the settlement but there is haziness on the finality. It is essential that there should be consensus in India on the final specific terms. The Chinese side, too, has to forego small territorial claims, such as the recent stipulation on Tawang, which goes against the accepted principle of not disturbing the populated areas. A liberal frame of mind will pay both countries since concessions given on small outlandish patches of land in the high mountains to clinch a solution of the border issue will unleash far greater bonanza for both countries — goodwill, prosperity, etc. Since the Chinese side has larger options, it also has greater obligations, which if put into operation will produce many-fold greater boons to that
country.
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A lifetime ago DELHI University Enclave to Connaught Place, alias Rajiv Chowk, in 25 minutes? Sounds incredible, but I used to do it six times a week in the 30s. Nothing remarkable about this. There were no taxis, no three-wheelers, no DTC buses taking up more than half the road, with no road sense whatever. There were tongas and bicycles, the latter equipped with lights that worked. If, after “Lighting Up Time”, displayed all over the city, changing winter and summer, you were caught riding a bike without a light you walked home with deflated tyres. More commonly, you slipped a rupee coin into the cops hand who accepted it gratefully being a man on a salary of Rs 125 per month. As a matter of interest, petrol was 12 annas a gallon (4.5 litres). A new tyre cost Rs 50. The old Bela Road by the river stopped at the road-cum-rail bridge, constructed in the 1880s, and still going strong, like Johnnie Walker! The convenience of the Ring Road not being available, motorists from North Delhi had to go through the walled city, not an unpleasant experience at the time. They entered it at Kashmere Gate and emerged at Delhi Gate, where New Delhi began. The stretch of road from Delhi Gate to Hardinge Bridge (now Tilak Bridge) had only one building of note on it, the Central Jail, a habitat not unfamiliar to our freedom fighters of the time. The Express Building (and “Fleet Street”!) had not been dreamt of. Hardinge Bridge to C.P (less than 10 years old) was a three-minute drive. Here, in a gleaming, white building, I spent my 9 to 5 day with an hour’s break for lunch, usually taken at Davico’s restaurant in the same building. Cost? a rupee and eight annas for a three-course lunch. Another 15 annas for a bottle of imported beer, if you felt so inclined. Sometime in the late ’30s, there appeared on the city’s roads a fleet of small, blue buses belonging to the Gwalior & Northern India Transport Co (GNITS). Its General Manager, Anthony d’Mello was one of the two Indians I have known who were members of the M.C.C, the other being Prem Bhatia. In accordance with d’Mello’s wishes he was buried wearing the M.C.C. blazer. In the early days of my retirement, 44 years ago, I often played with the idea of re-visiting all the places on the map where I had been posted for varying periods of time. But what with the cost of such a venture and Anno Domini, I can only visit them by delving into my storehouse of memories. Nowadays when I read of the dire happenings all round us there comes into my mind a picture of peace and plenty, which lessens, to some extent, the sorrow and disappointment brought to our country by scheming and self-seeking politicians and religious extremists. I see myself in a car, winding my way up from Murree to Baramulla from where I can look down at the Valley, with the Wullar Lake shimmering in the noonday sun. An hour for lunch at the lakeside, and on to Srinagar to stay at Nedou’s Hotel for Rs 7 per day “all-in”. I wander in the Valley, Pahalgam one day, Gulmarg the next. Or just the two Mughal Gardens outside the city, whose beauty inspired an Irish poet to write “Lalla Rukh”. I can say with some truth that I have seen the best of both worlds — and the
worst.
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More suicides Twenty-four suicides in 40 days in Andhra Pradesh alone are shocking enough, reflecting the level of desperation the farming community is faced with. There is no coordinated effort countrywide to assess or prevent farmers’ distress before they are driven to the edge. Farmers’ plight is revealed in the number of suicides the media reports. The government response comes in packages. Andhra farmers are killing themselves despite the state government giving them free power, waiving and subsidising their loans and offering a rehabilitation package on the recommendations of a commission that studied the state’s agrarian crisis during 1997-2004. To help them cope with the drought, the state government has given farmers subsidised seeds to sow paddy-alternative crops like maize, groundnut and soyabean, provided fodder for cattle and drinking water wherever required apart from rescheduling loans. Such preparedness is missing in other states. Punjab has no plan or money to help farmers, whose production costs have spiralled due to deficient rains. Political leaders here do not think beyond clamouring for Central aid and a higher MSP for paddy. Mercifully, the situation here is not that critical. Farming is a labour-intensive, slow-growing, whole-time engagement, offering hand-to-mouth living to some 60 percent of the 1.1 billion Indians. Despite huge state subsidies, agriculture is unrewarding even when the monsoon is normal. But deficient rains exacerbate the pain. About 1,50,000 farmers have reportedly killed themselves since 1997. Most suicides have occurred in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Punjab. The media has highlighted the issue. Academics have debated it. The government has reacted. But the problem has defied a solution. Why farmers in relatively better-off states like Andhra Pradesh and Punjab end their lives unlike their counterparts in the poorer states of Bihar, Orissa and UP needs to be studied. Widening economic disparities might be contributing to growing despair. Funding ostentatious lifestyle, expensive social ceremonies, rising costs of healthcare and education, buying expensive farming inputs and tractors are also often blamed for the farmers’ deteriorating plight. In the absence of ready cash flow and cumbersome banking procedures, farmers turn to private moneylenders in case of an emergency and thus expose themselves to exploitation. To address some of these issues, the UPA government first announced a Rs 25,000-crore package for the families of indebted farmers who had killed themselves and then a Rs 65,000-crore debt waiver. But reports indicate such state help has not stopped farmers’ suicides. That is partly because real causes of slow agricultural growth are not addressed. How can anyone dependent on agriculture hope to grow faster when the farm sector itself is growing at not more than 2 per cent annually? The share of agriculture in the GDP has declined, but is still high. According to a study by Morgan Stanley, agriculture accounts for 17.5 percent of the economy, down from 30 percent in the 1990s. In China agriculture forms 10.6 percent of the economy and in Indonesia its share stands at 13.5 percent. Too many people in India depend on farming, which is unsustainable. Small, fragmented land-holdings make the use of latest inputs and farm machinery unviable. If small land-owners find it hard to survive, imagine the plight of the landless and farm workers! There is need to wean surplus labour and farmers from land, equip them with skills in demand and retrain them for fast-growing sectors of the economy. Second, India’s next Green Revolution can happen if the focus is shifted to dry land farming, which the panel under M.S. Swaminathan has studied in detail, but his recommendations are gathering dust in official cupboards. Sixty percent of India’s cropped area is without irrigation. Exhausted by intensive farming, Punjab, Haryana and western UP, perhaps, need a break from fertilizers and pesticides to recoup soil nutrients. Third, paddy has played havoc with the water resources of Punjab and Haryana. Farmers in the two states are over-exploiting groundwater, for which the coming generations may have to pay a heavy price. Traditional ponds have dried up and the rivers and canals carry much less water than before. Rainwater goes waste. Instead of encouraging a shift from paddy to low water-consuming crops, political leaders ask for higher minimum support prices for paddy and supply free power and subsidized diesel to farmers to encourage more and more pumping out of groundwater. Fourth, there is a wide gap between the prices that farmers get and what consumers pay for fruits, vegetables and other farm produce. According to a Reuters report, India has 120 million farmers and their produce is sold at 7,500 regulated markets by five million middlemen. While buyers usually pay 20 percent more price for a farm commodity, growers get as little as 25 percent of the final price of their raw produce against 40-60 percent in the US and Britain. In India middlemen and taxes add to the high cost as also lack of storage space and pilferage during transportation. Fruits and vegetables worth Rs 65,000 crore go waste annually in India. The Punjab government is still drafting a Bill – started in 2006 – to save indebted farmers from the clutches of private moneylenders. After much dithering, the government has ordered direct payments to farmers instead of routing these through arhtiyas. Political leaders make announcements more for headlines than for helping the needy. Without counting the dead or probing reasons for suicides, the Punjab government announced Rs 2 lakh relief for the family of every farmer who had committed suicide between 2000 and 2008. Then it backtracked and quietly decided that only the suicides committed between 2006 and 2008 would be compensated in the initial phase. The Punjab government has just asked three state universities to count farm suicides in the state, obviously to claim Central aid, which was denied in the last package as the state leadership could not offer credible proof of indebted farmers killing themselves. Instead of taking preventive steps to stop suicides and making proactive plans to build rural infrastructure and boost villagers’ incomes, the government focusses on post-operation care when the patient is already dead. Politics is played even with lost
lives.
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Hang on – crisis isn’t over yet You’ve
probably heard that the nation’s financial system is out of the intensive care unit but still requires enough support that it’s not ready to be released from the hospital. A big reason: the fear of a relapse caused by the collapse of the commercial real estate market. To understand the problem, think back to the height of the credit bubble in 2007, when $230 billion worth of office buildings, hotels and shopping centers were financed through the magic of securitization — that process in which loans were assembled into packages and sold off in pieces to investors. The credit bubble has burst. Commercial property values have fallen an average of 35 percent, with further declines expected as the recession drives more tenants out of business or puts them behind in their rent payments. The process of securitizing new loans has ground to a complete halt, and the limited financing that’s available now comes from banks and insurance companies on much tougher terms. Loans now are typically for no more than 60 percent of a property’s current value, with an interest rate four percentage points above the Treasury rate. Borrowers must also repay principal, which is like adding another two percentage points to an interest-only loan. All of this has been wrenching for the industry — particularly for some of the biggest names, such as General Growth Properties, Maguire Properties and Tishman Speyer, which bought at the top of the market. Not only has their equity been pretty much wiped out, but those who financed their bubble purchases have lost anywhere from 35 cents to 100 cents on every dollar lent. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a tragedy for rich developers, bankers and investors. It’s also a problem for the rest of us. For starters, local and regional banks have so many souring commercial real estate loans that they have begun to fail at a rate not seen since ... well, you know. The latest was Colonial Bank of Alabama, which was rescued last week at a cost to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. of about $2.8 billion, the sixth-largest bank failure in history. And over the coming year, it will be a rare Friday afternoon that the FDIC doesn’t announce the takeover of some bank that lent too much to local builders and commercial real estate developers despite abundant evidence that a bubble had developed. It’s a good bet the agency will have to replenish its coffers by drawing on its line of credit from the U.S. Treasury. Then there’s the matter of half a trillion dollars in securitized loans that were made during the bubble and will be coming due over the next few years. These will need to be refinanced. Unless the securitization machine can be cranked up again, there’s simply not enough lending capacity at the banks and insurance companies to fill the gap. Moreover, there can be no refinancing until the current owners of the buildings come up with billions of dollars in fresh equity to make up for what has already been lost. So how does all this get resolved? In the case of buildings that still generate rents sufficient to pay the monthly interest charges, the lenders — that is the holders of the mortgage-backed securities — will probably agree to extend the loan for a few years in the hope that property values quickly rebound and the market for securitized loans revives. “Amend, extend and pretend,” as my friend Arthur, the real estate maven, put it. In the case of projects with rising vacancies and falling rents, however, the more likely scenario is that the lenders would foreclose on the property and sell it for whatever they can get. The problem is that if too many buildings are dumped on the market at the same time, it would trigger a self-reinforcing downward cycle that could depress property values even further, leading to more foreclosures and causing even more banks to fail. That’s what happened back in the savings and loan crisis. This is why commercial real estate is now a top priority for policymakers in Washington. Earlier last week, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve quietly extended until next June their program to offer low-cost loans to banks, hedge funds and other investors willing to purchase mortgage-backed securities. While $3 billion has now been lent for the purchase of securities issued before the crisis, there’s been no lending for newly issued securities, because no new securities have been issued. Government and industry officials say this reflects a continuing distrust of the securitization process and widespread concern among investors that property values still have further to fall. They also cite the difficulty in finding the additional equity capital necessary to make refinancing possible. Hang on — this financial crisis isn’t over just
yet. — By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Chatterati Shahrukh Khan’s
detention for two hours by American immigration officials has been blown out of proportion. It gives the feel of a scene right out of his new film “My Name is Khan”. What’s the big deal? If former US Vice-President and Noble Prize winner AL Gore can be frisked and detained at a US airport, why can’t an Indian star? Gore was, in fact, pleased and commented, “Good, now things are improving here.” The world’s lone superpower has the inalienable right to secure itself against any threat. If religious or racial profiling is one of the methods, we really cannot change or challenge that, can we? However, Americans are not fanatics or zealots. I do agree with the tit-for-tat policy though. We also have the right to secure ourselves by all means. But we insist on bending rules for our politicians, celebrities and other public figures. The wait for Shahrukh was because of his baggage being delayed. Many of our leaders, including President Abdul Kalam, have over the years been frisked by the US authorities, but never such ruckus was created. So was this incident used to promote Khan’s new film? After all Karan Johar and Shahrukh are both great marketers.
Maya Memsaab gets Birkin bags There is no end to Mayawati and her whims. At a huge cost to the exchequer, Mayawati’s statues all over Uttar Pradesh is a story in itself. We all know that Mayawati has developed a fetish for designer bags. After somebody commented on how in one of her statues the bag in her hand looked a plastic imitation of Hermes’s Birkin bag, she learnt all about the bag in question. Then, of course, the leader was very offended. So with the help of her latest columnist best friend, Mayawati is said to have ordered directly from Paris a Birkin bag in every colour. The only other lady in the world who is known to have the famous Birkin bag in every colour is super model Victoria Beckham, wife of David Beckham, the world’s number one football player. Each bag has a waiting for months before delivery and costs Rs 3 lakh onwards, depending on the colour and size. But, of course nothing is either too expensive or too difficult to get for our Maya Memsaab. She is, once again, having a makeover. She has lost weight, got a new haircut and a new wardrobe. After all, Bhenjis do turn modern, we all know.
Pramod Mahajan’s ‘secrets’ out Written and published in 10 days, a 102-page Marathi book, priced at Rs 120, is the new best seller. It is a book written by Pravin Mahajan, brother of the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, from inside the jail. “Maja Album”, published by his wife Sarangi, has been a best seller even without a single review. The author has made some stunning “revelations” about his successful brother, which will, no doubt, embarrass both the family and the BJP. Pravin’s many secrets have led to this book becoming a best seller. It is going to be published in English soon. The Sangh Parivar and the BJP clearly are very upset about how controversies keep springing up these
days.
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