The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Koda in the dock
Hasten probe against Jharkhand leaders

The Enforcement Directorate’s decision to book former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda and three of his former Cabinet ministers — Kamlesh Singh, Bhanu Pratap Shahi and Bandhu Tirkey — for allegedly amassing assets running into several hundred crores of rupees has given a new twist to the state’s murky politics. This comes at a time when Jharkhand is to have Assembly elections soon. Disturbingly, they have exploited the political instability in the state to fill their coffers. According to the Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), filed before the Prevention of Money Laundering Court in Ranchi, Mr Koda — the first Independent MLA to become a Chief Minister — is alleged to have purchased mines in Liberia besides making other benami purchases in the name of his close confidant Binod Sinha. Mr Koda may have dubbed the ECIR as an attempt by his political opponents to “tarnish his image”, but he has failed to explain how his assets have risen considerably from Rs 13 lakh in 2005.

The ECIR against Mr Koda and others is a result of six months of investigation during which the Enforcement Directorate took the help of an international agency and others. Clearly, the ambit of the probe will widen when the CBI is roped in to investigate their overseas links. Earlier, the Enforcement Directorate lodged cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act against former ministers, Anosh Ekka and Harinarayan Rai. The state vigilance bureau has filed chargesheets against them and both are now lodged at Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Central Jail.

Though Jharkhand is rich in mineral resources, it continues to remain backward because of rampant corruption right from the top. The politician-bureaucrat-contractor nexus continues to loot the state with impunity. Long years of neglect and underdevelopment have exacerbated the Naxalite violence in the state. The investigation against Mr Koda and company should be expedited so that the guilty are tried and punished expeditiously. Unfortunately, long delays in investigation and trial have increased political corruption because the corrupt have no fear of punishment. If at least one politician is tried by a fast track court and given appropriate punishment, it will help in a big way in fighting corruption.

The Aravallis in danger
SC nod to partial mining unjustified

The Supreme Court’s “conditional permission” for resumption of mining in the Aravalli region of Faridabad and Palwal in Haryana is cause for concern. It is bound to be viewed with skepticism by many because the miners and the state government have consistently failed to take adequate measures to restore the exhausted Aravalli mines. The apex court’s Forest Bench consisting of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justice Aftab Alam has permitted mining of minor minerals on a patch of 600 hectares in Faridabad and Palwal following the state government’s submission that it would formulate a mining auction scheme in three months and a comprehensive eco-restoration scheme in six months. However, if the government’s track record is any indication, it has always reneged on its promise.

Significantly, when the apex court had imposed a “blanket ban” on mining in Aravallis on May 8, 2009, it maintained that it was forced to take the “hard decision” because the government and the miners had “completely breached the trust reposed in them”. More important, when the apex court had allowed “limited mining” in 1994 on the basis of the sustainable development principle, the miners blatantly violated this. They relentlessly extracted minerals without undertaking any eco-restoration work in complete disregard of the mining lease conditions.

As indiscriminate mining for past several decades has wreaked havoc in Aravalli hills, mining must be stopped forthwith to protect the environment. There is no material change in the ground realities between May 2009 and today. If the court had banned mining then on grounds of depletion and contamination of ground water, ecological degradation and non-compliance of statutory provisions on mining and environment, the same reasons hold good for continuing the ban today. The Aravallis, one of the world’s oldest hill ranges, are being systematically torn apart by miners in collusion with officials. The apex court’s order for conditional mining is not conducive for the health of the Aravallis.

Thought for the Day

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. — Hannah Arendt

ARTICLE

Chinese are worried
People getting angry over corruption
by S.P. Seth

China’s Communist rulers put up a big show to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of their revolution. But the show was not open to the people of the People’s Republic of China, except on TV screens. The residents with houses and balconies with the parade view were barred from looking out. The hotels were barred from having guests. This says a lot about the regime that doesn’t trust its own people while celebrating the country’s achievements over a 60-year period. What are they afraid of?

Obviously, even after China’s impressive economic growth and growing military might, the regime still worries about its popular legitimacy. They don’t seem quite sure if the implied social contract they have made with the people for legitimacy, based on economic growth, is working or not.

China’s communist oligarchy seeks legitimacy for monopoly of power indefinitely, without popular participation. The exclusion of people from the sixtieth anniversary celebrations is a classical example of both arrogance and paranoia.

There are two elements to China’s strategy to keep people on its side. The first is continuing economic growth to absorb the growing pool of unemployed people. The recent economic slowdown has put a damper on it despite the large economic stimulus package.

The hastily-packaged stimulus spending is creating further distortions in an economy already lopsided to fuel real estate and stock market fluctuations as well some shoddy infrastructure spending.

The government is now reining down some of it for fear of fueling inflation. But with so much dependent on maintaining economic momentum to contain social instability, it seems like the government is all the time trying to plug a leaking boat which might flounder somewhere along the line. And since there are no measurable yardsticks of popular support like democratic elections and supportive institutions, the government is always second-guessing its people. There is widespread social unrest across the country. The government has stopped publishing annual statistics of such protests because the situation is getting worse. This is not to suggest that there is an imminent threat to the Party’s power but there is a steady, though scattered, groundswell of frustration and anger.

And this is coalescing around corruption. At its recent party meeting, the leadership admitted that the corruption has “seriously damaged the party’s flesh-and-blood bond with the people and has seriously affected the solidity of the party’s ruling status.”

Corruption is everywhere in the country. The Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, has reportedly listed China as the second worst country in bribery out of 22 in its 2008 report. Corruption now is institutionalised and because it involves all levels of the Party and government, it is becoming increasingly difficult to root out.

And even when some big fish is snared occasionally and punished severely, it is generally attributed to political vendetta. And this general sense of malaise and corruption is not helped when the sons and daughters of top party leadership control some of the biggest business conglomerates in China.

For instance, the former president and party general secretary Jiang Zemin’s son is reportedly the country’s telecommunications tsar. Li Peng’s family is controlling the power sector. Zhu Ronji’s son is into banking. And President Hu Jintao’s son recently sold automated ticket machines to Beijing city government.

All these princelings might be shrewd businessmen and women in their own right, but it is only fair to ask if they would have made it to the top business league but for their political connections? No wonder, corruption and nepotism have become the focus of people’s frustration and anger against the system.

As the problem is systemic and entrenched at the highest levels in some form or the other, there is lack of concerted action to deal with it.

Therefore, despite impressive economic growth as an exercise in legitimacy, the Party is not so sure about its rapport with the people.

The rural masses of the country have largely missed out from economic growth, with resources mainly directed to China’s industrial economy. Indeed, they have been subsidising industrial growth through diversion of rural land, water supply, relatively depressed prices of rural products and export of cheap labor to work on urban construction and industrial sites.

There is widespread paranoia at the Party’s top level about danger lurking everywhere, evident in the exclusion of people from official celebrations. Which manifests itself even more severely when dealing with ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and Uighur people. Indeed, the Party is not averse to using mainstream Han population against these marginalised minorities to whip up national hysteria, inside and outside the country. This was evident at the time of the Beijing Olympics.

There is also a deeply felt sense of historical humiliation inflicted on China during the 19th century, as well as the Japanese invasion and atrocities of the last century. Therefore, when Mao declared China’s liberation and the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, he also proudly announced that this was the moment when “China has stood up”. In other words, China’s “liberation” was essentially couched in nationalist terms.

However, Mao got distracted with his power plays leading to purges. Disastrous experiments of economic and social engineering like the Great Leap Forward culminated in the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution.

It was only after Mao’s death that China’s leadership got a clear sense of direction under Deng Xiaoping about building up the country into a modern and powerful state. And to achieve this it was imperative to create a growing and modern economy.The only successful model for this was to harness aspects of capitalism to build up China.

Apart from economic growth, nationalism (increasingly as xenophobia) is another important plank in the Party’s exercise in popular legitimacy.

The sixtieth anniversary military parade, with China’s armed might on display, was intended to rally people around the Party as the architect and builder of China’s national power as well as to serve notice on the world that China really means business when it comes to defending and promoting its perceived national interests.

And these national interests are not static but expanding with its global power. Deng Xiaoping advised that China should bide its time while getting on with the task of building a strong and powerful nation.

Today’s Communist leaders believe that China is now in a position to flex its muscles but without going overboard as it still has quite some way to go to attain military parity with the United States. But the upcoming generation of new Communist leadership material is quite jingoistic in terms of China’s national interests.

Wang Xiaodong, an influential leader of the China Youth and Juvenile Research Centre, for instance, is quoted in the Australian newspaper (in a report from its China correspondent) to say that the younger generation “will globalise its (China’s) national interests, and this will affect not just our close neighbors but the whole world. It (China) must gain the capacity to protect those interests.”

The process of expanding China’s national interests and to secure them with greater projection of its military power has already begun evidenced from the scramble for resources. Its stark manifestation was the jostling of a US ship in the South China Sea and similar incidents of lesser intensity.

Communist China’s 6oth birthday was a massive display of its power, with obvious message for the world. And if the Party comes under pressure from increased social unrest (as seems likely), the temptation to turn up the nationalist heat to rally people around the flag might be irresistible. And this is not what the world is looking for from a rising China.

MIDDLE

Regrets only
by Raj Chatterjee

In 1951 I was transferred to Ahmedabad, then regarded as a “punishment” station on account of C.M. of Bombay Morarji Desai’s obsession with prohibition. Gujarat and Kathiawad (Saurashtra) were, at the time, governed from Bombay.

My family and I were lodged in an enormous building in Shahibagh which had been constructed during the War for the use of Army officers.

The ground floor was divided into the office and my flat while my two assistants lived upstairs. Even so, there was plenty of room to spare.

The building was over-endowed with bathrooms. There were 14 of them, each with a long bath. I often felt like asking one of our friends to “drop in and have a bath sometime”.

This is only a preface to a treatise on the subject of invitations. These, I think, can be classified, broadly, into three or four groups.

First there are the casual “you must come round sometime” or “we must get together” kind that are not meant to be taken seriously.

Then there are the printed cards requesting the pleasure of your company to meet someone you have no desire to meet or to bid farewell to someone you wish never to have met.

If you are wise, you will write and plead a previous engagement much as you would like to say, as Oscar Wilde once did, that you are prevented from coming because of a subsequent engagement.

In all probability the person sending the invitation has not heard of Oscar Wilde, so your sarcasm will be wasted and you will be taken for an ignorant fellow who does not know how to answer an invitation.

Thirdly, there are the invitations given over the telephone, usually with considerable ambiguity in regard to the date and time. So you are likely to turn up in your best suit on the wrong date. Or, if you’ve got the date right you appear wearing a bush-shirt and find that the word “informal” means a lounge suit.

Of course, if your wife has taken the message, you are liable to go to the wrong house, on the right date and, having admitted that it was all your fault, you end up paying for an expensive meal at a restaurant of her choice.

The invitations I positively dislike are those issued weeks in advance. They leave you no scope to manufacture a good excuse. There are only two ways of dealing with such invitations. You delay your reply hoping that a week before the event there will be a mild case of mumps in your family. You then write and say how much you had been looking forward to the occasion but you couldn’t possibly go round spreading the infection.

Or you can reply promptly expressing your deep regret that on the date in question you will be out of station, visiting your mother-in-law. The risk in this is that on the very day of the party you may run into your host or hostess out shopping.

If I have given the impression that I am an unsociable fellow I must hasten to correct it.

I love a good party, but the invitations I like to receive, or give, are limited to a small circle of friends. The food doesn’t matter. Kabab-paratha, or even samosas and pakoras, go down better than chicken biryani and sheermal.

There must, however, be something stronger than nimbu-pani to ease the flow of conversation. Then one can let one’s hair (if any) down and say scandalous things about people one dislikes.

OPED

Some pride, some regret
From Raman to Venkatraman
by Rajesh Kochhar

India-born, UK-based, US citizen Venkatraman Ramakrishnan’s shared 2009-Chemistry Nobel Prize comes a hundred years after Jagadish Chandra Bose became the first Indian scientist to be recognised and honoured in the West.

In a letter written to Bose in 1903, Rabindranath Tagore gushingly declared Bose to be God’s instrument in removing India’s shame. Those indeed were the days when God operated through the West. But as far as India is concerned, things do not seem to have changed much since.

The Indian reaction to Ramakrishnan’s award has been on predictable lines. Beginning with the President herself, every important or self-important person has greeted him. The Indian official scientific leadership now wants him to tour India to inspire youth.

The youth on their part, more particularly, students of his alma mater, Maharaja Sayajirao University Vadodara have expressed their joy by bursting crackers which presumably had been acquired earlier in connection with the cricket trophy.

The new superstar is mildly exasperated by the fuss. “I think it is a mistake to define good work by awards”, he told BBC Hind service pointedly, noting that nobody called him about his work “ even two days ago”.

Subramanya Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, was more pungent. Declining to be felicitated, he pointed out that he had had two heart surgeries either of which could have been fatal. If he had died before nomination, he would not have got the award. Surely, he argued with irrefutable logic, his place in history could not depend on a doctor’s skills.

Sadly, placement in contemporary history still depends on a testimonial from abroad. When an Indian academic wins laurels abroad we immediately make him into a poster boy. He is the proof , because proof is needed all the time, that “Indians are no less talented than people elsewhere in the world”. At the same time there is regret that his own country was not the theatre of his activity.

The days when a Bose or a C V. Raman could do cutting-edge research by using college lab equipment are gone for ever. Basic science today is a child of high technology. Biology is the scientific discipline of today and the near future. It is still possible to make significant contribution to it.

This would require a two-tier approach. We need to set up a truly national lab equipped and maintained at international standards. There should in addition be a number of smaller feeding labs. We need a Cambridge surrounded and supported by a ring of Utahs.

Before moving to Cambridge, Ramakrishnan worked at the University of Utah from 1995 to 1999. Its Vice-President of research points out that since they “don’t have the money to hire the people who are already famous”, they “spot the talent and nurture it”.

Spotting and nurturing talent is the key thing. Ramakrishnan and the co-winners published their independent work on ribosome simultaneously in 2000.

Western recognition followed immediately. He became a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2002, fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003, and of National Academy of Sciences, USA, in 2004.

Curiously, the Indian National Science Academy admitted him as a fellow only in 2008. It may or may not be a coincidence, but the same year he became a fellow of Trinity College.

It is noteworthy that Ramakrishnan took a cut in salary when he moved from the US to Cambridge (just as Amartya Sen had done before him). Quite obviously, to a dedicated scientist facilities and research atmosphere matter more than the pay slip. Indeed, a position in the Laboratory for Molecular Biology at Cambridge has been called “a dream job” for someone in structural biology.

Note that it is a national lab in the sense that it is funded by the Medical Research Council. Yet it is located within a university. Lab’s Nobel prize winning streak began in 1953 with Francis Crick and Jim Wilson. The factory has so far produced 13 Nobel laureates.

Significantly, the afternoon parties to celebrate the prizes have always been organised by the same person, a technician. The Director, the Director-General, the Vice-Chancellor, the minister, etc. do not seem to figure in these celebrations.

It would be instructive to follow the career graph of the Shanghai-born Charles Kuen Kao, this year’s co-winner of the Physics Nobel Prize for work done four decades earlier. Kao started the electrical engineering department in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1970, and later (1987-1996) served as its Vice-Chancellor. Thus although personal honour for him has come rather late in life, his own country has benefited from his expertise

We deliberately install our certified celebrities on a high pedestal so that we do not have to listen to them, emulate them or learn from their example. As things stand, may be a scientific Venkatraman cannot become world famous without becoming Venki. (Note in passing that the use of an ‘i’ rather than a ‘y’ in the spelling is the modern-day world’s concession to Indian sensitivities.)

Ramakrishnan’s fame arises from the fact that he made a three-dimensional map of a ribosome sub-unit. Will the country have some use for the three dimensional man himself ? Or, shall we make him into a two-dimensional image so that it can be hung on the wall and saluted?

The writer is a former Director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Department Studies, New Delhi

If the dollar continues to tumble
by Stephen King

It’s no great surprise that, in Britain and elswhere, the collapse of the dollar has gone largely unnoticed. Sterling has fallen even further but, from a global perspective, the dollar’s difficulties are much more relevant.

The dollar’s fall from grace has had a much longer gestation. Its last really big peak was in 2002, at least when measured against a basket of currencies representing America’s major trading partners.

Then, the US economy bounced back remarkably quickly from the stock-market crash, the very modest recession which followed and the traumas of the Twin Towers. Investors believed the US had, once again, demonstrated the success of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model. No one wanted euros or yen because both Europe and Japan continued to be buried in economic stodge.

Funnily enough, Europe and Japan are still looking rather stodgy. Their economies, like their populations, are increasingly old and infirm. Their currencies, dosed up with financial Viagra, have nevertheless been extraordinarily virile.

Movements in currencies are, of course, all about relativities. The yen and euro may recently have risen in value against both the dollar and sterling but this could just as easily reflect yen and euro strength as opposed to dollar and sterling weakness. On the whole, it is more likely to be the latter. After all, with low interest rates and weak growth, neither the eurozone nor Japan offers the cyclical attractions which typically get currency investors excited.

Disillusion with currencies often stems from inflationary fears. If inflation is about to take off, it makes sense to get out of cash and invest in something else which might provide some degree of inflation “protection”. Yet most of the usual anti-inflation suspects are, themselves, rather weak. Residential property prices have risen a bit but still remain at very depressed levels. Commercial real estate is under heavy downward pressure. Equities have shown a strong rally but only from a very low base. Bond yields are very low by historic standards.

And inflation in the US is, if anything, too well-behaved: including all items, prices fell 1.5 per cent in the 12 months to August; excluding the volatile food and energy components, prices rose a rather modest 1.4 per cent.

If inflation isn’t a problem, why are investors turning their backs on the dollar? The answer, I think, relates to increased frustration with the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. Reserve currencies become reserve currencies for good reason. They’re trusted and universally acceptable.

In our modern world of huge international capital flows, the US doesn’t borrow so much from its own citizens. Instead, it borrows from foreigners. China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are among the countries which have been major creditors to the US in recent years. They have mostly chosen to lend to the US in dollars.

If the US adopts a policy of benign neglect towards the dollar – through low interest rates, a large budget deficit and the gentle hum of the printing press – the risk for these creditor countries is a fall in the dollar which would leave them nursing losses on their huge dollar assets, mostly held in the form of foreign exchange reserves. For the US, this would mark a convenient shift in the pain of economic adjustment from domestic debtors to foreign creditors.

US policymakers will doubtless shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” After all, other countries had the option of holding fewer dollar assets. Indeed, the US argues that China’s holdings of dollar assets are a direct consequence of its desire to hold its exchange rate at a super- competitive level, thereby boosting Chinese exports at the expense of American jobs.

Yet the US has also gained. Without those creditor nations, US interest rates would be a lot higher, debt levels a lot lower and consumer spending a lot softer than they’ve been in recent years.

A dollar collapse would be a disaster all round. It would drive up the cost of borrowing in the US. It would leave the international monetary system short of stability and long of fear. It would unleash economic upheavals on a similar scale to those seen in the 1970s. And, as the dust settled, the world would be scrambling for a new beacon of stability.

For Asia, the Middle East, Africa and, perhaps, parts of Latin America, that beacon may eventually prove to be the renminbi yuan. After all, China now has an important, and growing, role as a major trading partner for other nations, particularly in the emerging world. By standing to one side as the dollar comes down, the US is not just playing with monetary fire: it may also, inadvertently, be encouraging an epochal shift in the world financial order.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Delhi Durbar
When Jaitley was disappointed

Arun Jaitley must have been a very disappointed man after the lacklustre T-20 match between New South Wales and Diamond Eagles last Friday. As is well known , the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha dons several caps: a legal practitioner of eminence, an articulate and forceful advocate for the BJP. However, the one he seems to love the most, particularly in the current bad phase for his party, is the chief of the Delhi District Cricket Association.

The DDCA controls Ferozeshah Kotla Grounds where the Capital’s cricket lovers flock to all big cricketing events. Last Friday Jaitley had banked heavily on cricket crazy people storming Kotla Grounds, jumping the fences, scaling the walls and breaking the gates.

In anticipation he got the turnstile entry system prevalent at Delhi Metro stations, erected at a very high cost to the DDCA with the difference that these are huge iron gates which no one can jump over. But contrary to all his expectations, there was no one to scale the walls, jump the fence or break the gates, the presence of Bipasha Basu notwithstanding.

Hard questions

Law Minister M. Veerappa Moily’s interaction with the press last week was primarily meant for legal correspondents. But a number of reporters covering the Congress had barged into his small office on the fourth floor of Shastri Bhavan, putting political questions and in the process turning the meet into some sort of an AICC briefing.

There were questions about convening the Congress Legislature Party of Andhra Pradesh to have an elected Chief Minister to replace the incumbent chosen by the high command immediately after the tragic death of YSR Reddy in a helicopter crash.

Moily insisted even K. Rosaiah was chosen in consultation with the party MLAs. The high command knew its job very well and that no one was above it. “Even the Law Minister is not above the high command,” he remarked, evoking laughter among media personnel. But Moily had obviously failed to drive home his point as after a short while he was queried about the logic behind withdrawing the case against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi in the Bofors pay -offs.

Kalmadi sidelined

The high-profile sports-czar of the country, Suresh Kalmadi, faced a situation he is not accustomed to. The Home Ministry had invited security experts from countries that are to participate in the Commonwealth Games next year. Kalmadi hogged the limelight on day one.

The next day Home Minister P. Chidambaram reportedly told Home Secretary G K Pillai to brief the media on the security arrangements as it was purely a security issue.

So as Pillai sat there discussing security for the games, Kalmadi sat quietly to the left of the Home Secretary. No mike facing him and no questions shot at him. He obviously did not appear pleased.

Contributed by Faraz Ahmad, R Sedhuraman, Ajay Banerjee

Corrections and clarifications

n In the report “EC still undecided on counting centres” (Page 1, October 12) the last para has two errors—the use of instated in place of instead and there for their.

n In the report “Flood relief: Karnataka too gets Rs 1, 000 cr” (Page 2, Oct 11) the first sentence begins with “Snuffing out the allegations…. This should have been “Dismissing the allegations…..

n In the report “Barclay Bank told to pay Rs 10, 000 (Page 2, October 9, Chandigarh Tribune) the name of the bank is Barclays not Barclay.

n In the report “Patiala cops in dock over ‘fake’ contraband case” (Page 3, Oct 9) the word “heroin” has been repeatedly mis-spelt as “heroine”.

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 twice a week — every Tuesday 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