The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Now it’s Shourie
BJP adrift; faces uncertainty

THE BJP was yet to recover from the Jaswant Singh salvo when it has been hit by an Arun Shourie missile. While Mr Jaswant Singh had gone into blast-BJP mode fully after he was unceremoniously shown the door, Mr Shourie has done that perhaps pre-expulsion — and in far more castigating terms. He has not only described the present state of the party as “Kati patang” — certainly an apt description of a party adrift — he has castigated party president Rajnath Singh as “Humpty Dumpty” (a nincompoop). The interesting thing is that he has done so with the RSS shield in hand. Mr Shourie has come to the conclusion that the party has no cure for itself, but to believe that the RSS can save the party is not convincing either. By suggesting that the RSS should swiftly take over the reins of the party, he has perhaps made sure that the counter-fire will only come from the direction of the BJP and not the Sangh Parivar.

Whatever happens in the days to come, the ugly internecine war in the party makes a sad spectacle. The erstwhile ruling party will be only debilitating itself further through such self-inflicted wounds. The fight for supremacy that is currently on among various groups may end up in mutual harm. If things degenerate this way, the next insider-outsider taking potshots at it might very well be Mr Yashwant Sinha who had already made his intentions clear through his remarks critical of the Advani camp soon after the party’s general election debacle.

Mr Arun Shourie has been an outspoken and forthright journalist, and it might not be right to say that he is lashing out only because his Rajya Sabha term is coming to an end and he has nothing to gain from the party. His words may be biting, but he is not off the mark. The present leadership has proved that it is incapable of applying the necessary correctives. But handing over the reins to leaders handpicked by the RSS may also prove counter-productive. Mr Shourie must be knowing this, but he too has not suggested a cure for the party as it is. He could be asking himself why he did not realise earlier that he was in the wrong company all along.

Finances in a mess
Punjab auction of govt securities a bad sign

IT is shocking that Punjab has been selling off over Rs 400 crore of its government securities each month this financial year due to a precarious economic situation, as reported by The Tribune on Tuesday. That it has auctioned state development loans worth Rs 1,743 crore in four months and has plans to raise Rs 5,000 crore in the whole year shows how starved the state is for funds. One would have expected a degree of fiscal prudence from a state whose finances are in bad shape. But there seems no realization of this in the corridors of power. Indeed, the Prakash Singh Badal government has shown appalling myopia by notching up a massive subsidy bill of Rs 4,500 crore this year to curry favour with vote banks. At the same time, its failure to raise resources by imposing no fresh taxes in this year’s budget speaks of grave irresponsibility.

Significantly, the power subsidy bill has been growing with no commensurate increase in revenues. The Badal government has also been subsidising the local bodies department for octroi, sewage and house-tax besides a heavy outgo on the populist ‘atta-dal’ scheme. That such economic recklessness is not having the desired impact on the voter was clear from the Akali Dal-BJP alliance’s performance in the recent Lok Sabha elections. The helplessness that State Finance Minister Manpreet Badal showed during his budget presentation, hinting that he was facing huge pressures within the coalition not to raise more resources through taxation showed that expediency rules supreme in economic decision-making in the state. Adding to its woes, the 5th State Pay Commission has saddled the state with an additional expenditure of Rs 3,000 crore on Government salaries during this fiscal

Clearly, Punjab, which was traditionally one of the country’s richer states, is sliding. Industrial growth is at a standstill and agriculture is still dependent on the vagaries of weather. New initiatives that are required to pull the state out of morass have virtually dried up in a dispensation that lacks drive and dynamism.

Thought for the Day

Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.
— Lewis Carroll

ARTICLE

The BJP loses the plot
Jaswant’s expulsion an exercise in thought control
by B.G. Verghese

THE BJP showed uncanny marksmanship in shooting itself in the foot last week over “Jinnah”. It acted foolishly to display small-minded bigotry and then responded incoherently to ensuing criticism from many quarters. Its treatment of Mr Jaswant Singh, a senior party member and author of a book that was no sin to write but raised pertinent issues that need to be frankly debated in order that the country learn from the past to guide its future, was cavalier and ungracious in the extreme. Clearly, none in the BJP leadership had read the book but felt that any seeming sympathy shown to Jinnah or anything remotely critical of Sardar Patel was anti-national and must immediately be put down. Nehru was, however, fair game. The politics is as plain as the folly.

As surprising was Mr Narendra Modi’s prompt announcement of a ban on the sale in or import into Gujarat of “Jinnah” as its publication was supposedly an insult to the Sardar that no Gujarati would tolerate. This is to demean Patel, who does not need to be protected by small men who seek greatness by association. Mr Advani hardly enhanced his stature by pleading that he remained agonisingly silent because Jaswant had gone against the “core ideology” of the party. But his own rebuttal of the charge that it was Patel who banned the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 was crudely denigrative. He said that Patel had been “pressurised” by Nehru, thus suggesting that the “iron man” was a man of straw.

Mr Jaswant Singh’s expulsion, which he took with dignity, like the ban on his book, is an exercise in thought-control that is the hallmark of those with fascist and authoritarian tendencies. It is shocking that the Gujarat unit of the Congress welcomed the book ban, which only shows the depths to which competitive politics has sunk at the cost of larger values. This is an assault on freedom of expression and must be both condemned and challenged as an infringement of a cherished fundamental right. Any argument that the reading or sale of “Jinnah” in Gujarat could disturb public order would be a travesty.

The right extremist assault on books, art, drama, film and other forms of expression, culture and creativity has continued unabated and, alas, unchallenged in various parts of the country for years. This must end if we are to remain the liberal and open society that we essentially are. Last week too a college principal and AVBP-affiliated union in Bantwal, near Mangalore, told a newly admitted Muslim undergraduate that she could not wear a headscarf in class as it was a religious symbol. Are then turbans, beards, crosses and hair-tufts to be similarly banned by vigilante groups, who have objected to friendly couples getting together and have used violence to break up inter-faith and cross-gender friendships, let alone marriages?

Assume for a moment that Mr Jaswant Singh had, in fact, been harshly critical of Patel. So what? Are our political heroes above criticism and do they demand blind obedience to protect them from objective intellectual scrutiny? This is the way of fascism and implies a total disregard for the country’s plurality and diversity which is what Hindutva, the renewed BJP-RSS credo after the 2009 electoral debacle, is ultimately about. Mr Advani had a taste of that when he described Jinnah’s August 11 address to the Pakistan constituent assembly as the testament of a secularist. That he was. But, having used Muslim communalism as a tactical ploy, Jinnah unleashed a monster that devoured the state he created, much as his successors have done by nurturing the Taliban and jihadi terror.

Few know that Jinnah had become a prisoner of his own rhetoric and in January 1948, hoist with his own petard, pronounced that Pakistan should adopt an Islamic constitution based on the Sharia. Like Jinnah, the BJP, and Mr Advani as its primary spokesman, have become prisoners of a variously defined but toxic and exclusive Hindutva ideology that they simultaneously embrace and reject as convenient. Thus absurd apologias and extenuations for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat carnage, with Mr Advani expressing some kind of sorrow over the first and exerting himself to protect Mr Modi from punishment in the latter instance. And if Jinnah’s two-nation theory was hatefully communal and divisive, why then eulogise that evil doctrine first propounded by Savarkar in 1927 and later embroidered by the RSS chief, Golwalkar, in “We, Our Nation Defined”. The Parivar’s Indian history is layered with humbug.

In seeking to silence Mr Jaswant Singh, the BJP has punished itself. Such credibility as it had has been further eroded and one can see the party fragmenting or splitting over the next few years. Nationalism is a positive virtue up to a point but chauvinism is a clear and present danger, especially when it invades society and culture and becomes the enemy within. The country needs a strong opposition to provide ballast for a healthy democracy. The NDA might have provided that, but the BJP’s backsliding into the Hindutva embrace once again suggests that this is unlikely to happen. The Left, too, is riven with bitter contradictions and has lost any pretensions to holding the moral high ground. That, too, is suffering erosion and could split.

Either way, the country seems poised for some political re-engineering. Fissures in the Left and Right and deadwood in the Congress have laid the basis for a realignment of forces within and between political boundaries. From this churning could well hopefully emerge new and more vibrant and forward-looking political and social formations for the 21st century. A settlement with Pakistan could catalyse such a process. That is why understanding and debating the recent past, as Mr Jaswant Singh has done, is so important.

MIDDLE

Men from Kunihar
by Harish Dhillon

There are many assumptions which people make that come to be regarded as general truths and pass into the folklore of these people. I first came face to face with one such assumption about half a century ago.

I was in school at Sanawar and my uncle was a senior officer at the Central Research Institute in Kasauli. My aunt, God bless her soul, believed that love was best expressed through a showering of food. Consequently, every Sunday morning, Indra, the School photographer, while on his weekly round, would arrive with a packet of food for me. We would spend half an hour together on the parapet in front of my dormitory, in friendly chatter.

I asked him once how long he had been waiting and he said since well before breakfast.

“Why didn’t you meet me then?”

“What, and have you go without food the whole day!” Seeing my bewilderment he explained.

“I am from Kunihar. There is an old belief that if anyone sees a Kunihari in the morning he goes without food the whole day.” He laughed as he said this and I joined in the laughter.

“There is little chance of that happening considering you always bring me food.”

I came across the old adage again many years later when I returned to Sanawar as the Headmaster. On my way to attend a wedding reception at Tiara we passed through Kunihar at first light.

“Close your eyes, sir,” Kikar the driver warned, “You don’t want to see a Kunihari in the morning and go hungry the whole day.”

More recently my son took me out to dinner. Our waiter was a young, Himachali boy. While he was serving us, the steward came to speak to him. Something in the boy’s inflection or tone reminded me of Indra.

“Are you from Kunihar?” I asked. His face lit up.

“Yes,” he said happily. “Thank God I didn’t meet you in the morning”.

“You wouldn’t be eating this delicious meal if you had, ” he countered and we both laughed heartily.

I have tried very hard to find the origins of this adage but without success. I now know that Kunihar is called “Chhoti Vilayat” because it was here that the British first camped for some length of time before they climbed slowly up to Sabathu, then to Dagshai and Kasauli and finally to Shimla. But I have failed to find the story on which this myth is based.

Like so many similar assumptions the origins of this one, too, seem to have been lost in the mists of time. I cannot vouchsafe for the truth of this superstition but I can vouchsafe for the fact that Kuniharis are gifted with the rare talent of being able to laugh at themselves. With this gift I am sure it would be a pleasure to meet them at any time of the day and for this pleasure a day’s fasting would be a small price to pay.

OPED

Managing drought
Need to instil faith in the farmers
by Harender Raj Gautam

India is facing the worst drought this year. The Centre’s concern was reflected in the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the nation from the ramparts of Red Fort on Independence Day. He said that the Centre was committed to tackle drought on priority.

The Prime Minister also took stock of the situation at the Chief Ministers’ conference. In all, 177 districts have been declared drought hit. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Haryana, Assam, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh and parts of other states are likely to be affected by the deficient rainfall. Manipur and Himachal Pradesh have declared drought in all districts.

The monsoon deficiency has dropped to 29 per cent of the normal and the situation is grim. In different regions, northwest is 43 per cent deficient, northeast 36 per cent, central India 19 per cent and south peninsula is 23 per cent rainfall deficient. According to the Indian Metreological Department, annual rains are likely to be 87 per cent of the normal LPA (long period average). Deficient rainfall will result in 20 per cent decline in sowing of kharif crops.

According to the latest data of the Agriculture Ministry, the paddy coverage is 57.1 lakh ha less than the last year. There is also a deficiency of 1.17 lakh ha in area under total coarse seeds and 1.29 lakh ha in sugarcane. However, pulses have been sown in around 6 lakh ha more and cotton around 11 lakh ha more.

Good rains have been received in Orissa and West Bengal and have normal sowing of major crops. In 2002 also, the country had disastrous monsoon that fell to 83 per cent of the normal. That year the worst-drought compressed economic growth to 3.7 per cent, drove inflation to a two-year high, and led to a 19 per cent fall in output of summer-sown crops, including a slump in the oilseeds harvest that drove up imports.

In major announcements, the Centre has decided to postpone the date for repayment of farmers’ bank loans and provide additional support to farmers for payment of interest on short-term crop loans. In the long-term measures, the Prime Minister has exhorted the people to give more attention to programmes for water collection and storage. ‘Save Water’ should be one of our national slogans. To put the concerted action on the ground, the Centre has constituted a high-powered Group of Ministers under the chairmanship of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to suggest immediate measures to help the farmers.

The Centre has taken many steps to help farmers face the drought and protect the standing crops from further damage. A diesel subsidy of 50 per cent has been provided to farmers with a maximum of Rs 1000 per hectare to facilitate supplementary irrigation in drought affected and rainfall deficient areas.

Additional power has been made available from the Central pool to the affected States such as Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam. The aim is to ensure that all agricultural operations are carried out in time to arrest loss in production. Against a total seed requirement of 110.96 lakh quintals required by different states, availability of 126.50 lakh quintals of seed has been ensured.

Procurement and distribution of Truthfully Labelled seeds has also been permitted as a special measure for kharif, 2009. Distribution of mini-kits has also been included as an admissible item under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) and age relaxation of seed varieties has been permitted under the National Food Security Mission (NFSM).

State agricultural universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) have been directed to ensure timely dissemination of advisory services to the agricultural extension staff and farmers. In areas where crop status is good either due to good rainfall or developed water sources for irrigation, supply of needed inputs, especially fertilisers and pesticides would be ensured to maintain and protect the crop health.

Schemes such as the RKVY, the NFSM, the National Horticulture Mission (NHM), Macro Management in Agriculture (MMA) have been provided with additional funds and flexibility to use the available funds for crop development to support alternate crops. The government has also placed special emphasis on improving the availability of farm credit through increased coverage and renewal of Kisan Credit Cards.

Though the buffer stocks of the Central Government are enough to feed the nation for 13 months, the drought will make people more prone to hunger and malnutrition due to less availability of foodgrains and rising prices of commodities. However, the Public Distribution System (PDS) is one of the most important instruments in providing food and nutritional security in India.

There is an urgent need to further strengthen the public distribution system to ensure the availability of some more essential commodities like pulses in addition to wheat, rice, sugar, kerosene oil and edible oils to meet all the nutritional requirements of the public. The supply of foodgrains and other commodities in the drought-hit districts should be ensured.

The Mid-day Meal scheme is well targeted to cover the children. It should be monitored closely in drought-hit areas. In some long-term measures, the Centre and the states should facilitate the setting up of local level community food banks comprising locally grown grains and legumes so that the availability of food articles is ensured in the hour of need. In such food banks, food articles should be loaned as per the need and should be realised after the surplus harvest.

Setting up of food buffers at Gram Panchayat and Gram Sabha level are a must for regular and timely supply to the needy.

The network of crop insurance should be increased to cover more crops and areas to avoid distress among the farmers and also lessen their debt burden.

In this critical period, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) will be a great buffer to mitigate the miseries of the drought-affected people. It will, certainly, enhance the access of more than four crore households to food. The Centre should help farmers purchase inputs for the next rabi crop. It should take every possible measure to instil faith in the farmers.

The writer is Scientist, Mycology and Plant Pathology, Dr Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni (Solan)

Ecology: Crisis endangers life in Kenya
by Daniel Howden

Francis Maina is hunched over a tree stump. He secures a rusted chain around it and signals for the tractor to start earth like a tooth from a jaw. As he works, the nearby standing forest soaks up a gentle afternoon rain, pulling it into the soil. In Maina’s razed field the water runs down the cratered hillside in channels of black mud.

The 60-year-old farm labourer stands in the midst of an ecological rape scene: scorched earth scattered with the burnt stumps of centuries-old trees. He is one of thousands of Kenyans who have settled inside this supposedly protected forest that stretches from the Mau escarpment down to the Maasai plains and up to the central highlands.

The largest forest in East Africa acts as a water tower for an otherwise arid land, feeding its lakes and rivers, regulating the climate and refreshing its underground acquifers. But an epic drought has plunged Kenya into an ecological crisis and its dried up rivers can no longer turn the blades of the hydro-electric turbines. Power rationing is switching off the lights in the capital Nairobi for days at a time.

Which means the fate of the forest has finally caught the attention of Kenya’s warring politicians who have vowed to evict the “squatters” from the Mau. While they argue over land claims and compensation demands, Maina and hundreds like him are finishing the job of killing the forest.

“The politicians have their own land,” Maina says with a scowl. “Now they want to move the poor people so they can take our land.”

Turqa Jirmo, a senior warden with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), is heading a task force set up last year to save the forest. He still hasn’t recovered from his first task which was to fly over the land for four days to assess the damage. “I was amazed. I never believed the destruction had gone so far. I couldn’t see the forest because of the charcoal smoke coming from the ground.”

Charts on his office wall map out the complexity of 12 forest blocks that make up the Mau’s 400,000 hectares. Mr Jirmo estimates as much as 40 per cent of it has already been destroyed. The challenge of saving what’s left is complicated by illegal loggers or “wood poachers” as he calls them; a flourishing illegal charcoal trade, and the deeply politicised issue of the settlers. The green lines of the protected areas on his maps are marked with red zones where past governments have doled out woodlands to their supporters in a blatant example of land for votes.

While the politicians haggle over compensation in their Nairobi offices lit by petrol generators, speculators are using the hiatus to slash and burn as much profit as they can ahead of possible evictions.

In February, the Mau complex was engulfed in flames, with an inferno that destroyed thousands of hectares and burned for four days. “People deliberately set the fire,” Mr Jirmo remembers. “There are confusing signals from the politicians and people are trying to harvest as much of the forest before the government can evict them.” The head of the Mau task force sees any failure in his mission in the starkest terms. “The forest is a lifeline for Kenya. Without it Kenya has no future.”

The disaster is already present in Lake Nakuru, renowned for its spectacular flamingoes. The two rivers that feed the lake have dried up and the KWS is having to pump water from deep underground to keep the animals alive.

Kenya’s vital tourist industry would buckle, he warns, as already the spectacle of the Great Wildebeest Migration has been ruined by the historically low levels of the Mara river. World-famous parks, like Kenya’s Masai Mara and Tanzania’s Serengeti would also be at risk.

Conflict between humans and wildlife will rise as “rivers no longer flow to pastoral areas.” And urban centres will not escape. Sondu Miriu, one of the country’s major hydro-electric stations that lies downstream from the Mau, is already running at one-tenth of capacity.

And competition for water could even re-ignite the ethnic clashes that last year killed as many as 1,500 people and displaced tens of thousands more. “This is going to be a security problem,” Mr Jirmo warns.

Kenya’s Nobel prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai is orchestrating the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign to halt the destruction and identify the culprits. Underneath the environmental catastrophe, she asserts, is a political scandal as venal as Kenya’s notorious public financial frauds.

The small Ogiek tribe of traditional forest dwellers have found themselves at the unwitting centre of the sting. “The Ogiek were used as a way to get access to the land,” explains Christian Lambrecht from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is based in Nairobi.

One of the most heavily populated illegal Mau settlements is Sierra Leone, given its name after being handed out to army officers returning from peacekeeping operations in West Africa. Entire stretches of the Mau are carved into lucrative wheat farms openly owned by ministers who served the former president Daniel Arap Moi.

And when current Prime Minister Raila Odinga set out to name and shame land-grabbers in the Mau he found half of his own political allies among them. The poor that have cleared, rented or bought plots here now offer cover to the bigger interests who stand to benefit from any government compensation.

Godana Guyo is a KWS ranger with 18 years of experience and admits that he is pessimistic about the chances of saving the forest.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Gram Sabha’s initiative to help the poor
by Awanish Somkuwar

Sattan Bai’s joy knew no bounds when she received the first monthly pension of Rs 200 in Maniya in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh. This was not part of any government scheme but the result of a bold step taken by the village community though its Gram Sabha.

Maniya village probably becomes the first village in the state where Gram Sabha has started its pension scheme for destitutes, the most vulnerable and for those who are physically unable to do any work for their living”, says Ajab Singh Maravi, Sarpanch, Chhatarwada Gram Panchayat.

The Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Project, which works through Gram Sabhas, took this initiative for promotion and protection of livelihoods of the rural poor. It found quick takers amongst the village body in Maniya, predominantly comprising the Gond tribe.

“The Gram Sabha has taken a radical decision to give pension to the most vulnerable persons” says Pramod Singhai, member of Zilla Panchayat. The step, according to Sukirti Bhushan, programme coordinator of Tagore Shiksha Samiti working in 14 villages in the district, was a direct result of the strengthening of the Gram Sabhas.

The Gram Sabha is aware that it cannot be a substitute for a more expansive government policy to cater to the needs of the underprivileged. Sukhchain Singh Chicham, Gram Panchayat Secretary, says that the pension will continue till the government benefits under similar schemes reach people like Sattan Bai. He acknowledges that government social protection schemes do exist but procedural complexity becomes a hurdle.

Lamu Singh Maravi, social worker, says that access to welfare schemes is difficult for the poor specially in remote tribal villages. Villagers hear about the schemes but no official visits or guides them through the procedures. As a result, they remain bereft of its benefit.

Another lacuna is that many deserving families do not meet the eligibility criteria. And this is where the Maniya Gram Sabha has stepped in to protect the people. Lamu Singh Maravi says, “We are happy to have taken this decision because we have Rs 1.50 lakh in our Gram Kosh (Village Fund).

This sentiment finds resonance across the village community. Nainvati Bai, member, Social Protection Committee, says “the Gram Sabha has evolved a set of rules sanctioning the pension which makes the entire process methodical and transparent”.

The entire process of the Gram Sabha reflects a flexibility to go beyond the confines of a set criterion defined for beneficiaries and respond to their needs directly. Sattan Bai’s is a case in point. “We found that Sattan Bai in our village deserves help as she is 96 years old and her widow daughter works in a crusher unit”, says Adan Singh Up-Sarpanch, Chhatarwada Gram Panchayat.

Shiv Prasad, who heads a self-help group, is worried about how long this can continue. After all, he says, the Gram Kosh will exhaust some day. The members of the social protection committee, however, believe that government help is inevitable and the mechanism at the Gram Sabha level is only for an interim period. Once the government scheme meets the need of an individual, having fallen within its eligibility criterion, the Gram Kosh pension will be discontinued. The Gram Kosh will function as a safety net so that no one is left out in the cold.

— Charkha Features

Corrections and clarifications

n In the report “MEA protecting individuals with criminal past” (Page 1, August 25), in the sentence “The condemnation came from Information commissioner Annapurna Dixit as the MEA refused provide information…” the word “to” should have come after “refused”.

n Jaitley has been mis-spelt as “Jaitely” in the headline on Sehwag’s meeting with the Delhi and District Cricket Association President (Page 16, August 25).

n It should have been “India-built” in the headline “First Indian-built T-90 tanks roll out” ((Page 18, August 25).

n The headline “Millers not to contribute in national pool” (Page 4, August 24) should instead have been “Millers not to contribute to national pool”.

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,
Editor-in-Chief