The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Curse of malnutrition
Announcing new schemes not enough

IN a country that is one of the most malnourished in the world, any new initiative to tackle malnutrition is more than welcome. Thus, the government’s plan to launch two new food schemes, targeted at improving the health of adolescent girls and mothers, is indeed in the right direction. However, only launching of new schemes will not help solve the problem. Time and again, studies have shown how India lags behind in providing adequate nutrition to its people, especially children and women. Child nutrition rates in India are worse than even in many sub-Saharan African countries. The ill effects of under-nourishment include stunted growth and increased susceptibility to diseases. The low nutritional status of women is often linked to the low birth-weight of babies.

India has launched several nutritional programmes. However, the implementation of these programmes leaves a lot to be desired. Even the Prime Minister noted in 2007, “There is strong evidence that the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) has not led to any substantial improvement in the nutritional status of children under six.” More recently, a study funded by the UK Department of International Development has warned of more acute malnutrition levels if the nation fails to manage its nutrition expenditure better. It is also being feared that India may not be able to achieve its Millennium Development Goal of reducing the number of hungry people even by 2043, what to talk of by 2015 as was planned.

The governments, both at the Centre and in the states, have to act fast to bridge the gap between policy and implementation. Attention has to be paid to increasing the coverage as well as assessing the impact of nutrition programmes. Besides introducing new programmes, the existing ones must reach out to the disadvantaged sections of society, to those who need it the most. While plugging the loopholes in the nutrition service delivery mechanism, efforts have to be made to ensure that the National Nutrition Policy doesn’t remain on paper only. Nutrition is the responsibility of the government and an underfed India cannot claim to be an economic powerhouse.

Falling apart
UP politics is changing fast

THE spectacle of two veteran politicians, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mr Kalyan Singh, humiliating each other in public indicates a certain degree of desperation. Quite possibly, it signals the end of the road for both. Smarting at the defeat of his daughter-in-law in his pocket borough of Firozabad, Samajwadi Party (SP) boss Mulayam Singh took a swipe at Mr Kalyan Singh, apparently because of the belief that the defeat in Firozabad was owing to his hobnobbing with the former BJP Chief Minister. But, then, in the recent byelections, the SP lost not only minority votes. Its failure to win even one of the eleven constituencies, most of them in Mr Mulayam Singh’s backyard, indicates a more serious erosion of support among the other sections of the voters as well. The Kalyan Singh factor alone could not have been responsible for the SP’s disastrous performance.

Mr Kalyan Singh, not surprisingly, retaliated by describing Mr Mulayam Singh a “traitor”. It was Mr Mulayam Singh, he revealed, who had placed the SP’s red cap on his head with a helicopter at his service for canvassing in the election. It was also at Mr Mulayam Singh’s request, asserted the former blue-eyed boy of the BJP, that his son had joined the SP. Mr Kalyan Singh had claimed to have felt suffocated in the BJP earlier but now, after being snubbed by the SP chief, he appears all too ready to return to the BJP.

Both leaders seem to be hopelessly out of touch with the political reality. They strangely continue to promote their personal agenda of securing a place in politics for their sons, nephews and daughters-in-law. While the BJP, which is steadily losing ground in UP, may well be tempted to welcome Mr Kalyan Singh back, it is unlikely to change the emerging equations in UP, where the electorate finally appears to be turning its back on the more cynical politics of the past.

Thought for the Day

Now, what I want is, facts...Facts alone are wanted in life.— Charles Dickens

ARTICLE

BJP in turmoil
Advani just a silent spectator
by S. Nihal Singh

Beyond the crisis in the Bharatiya Janata Party, so publicly on display, are weightier questions of Indian polity. Decades after Independence, we had a virtual one-party rule at the Centre, with parties ultimately making dents on the Congress in the states without breaching the central fortress. It was the Emergency of the mid-70’s and its consequences that brought an unlikely combination into power, but the Janata Party government could not last.

Hastily assembled on the ruins of the Emergency, the Janata Party was no cohesive force or entity. It was an opportunistic alliance born out of an unlikely event, the first serious challenge to Indian democracy, and the inner contradictions and differing viewpoints and interests of its constituents brought the house of cards down. It was much later that the new avatar of the Jan Sangh, the Bharatiya Janata Party, began to coalesce into a viable national opposing party.

The six years of the A.B. Vajpayee-led government in New Delhi gave the BJP the status of a recognised alternative ruling party. Yet it remained a predominantly Hindi-speaking northern party, with a mere scattering of support in the southern states. Inevitably, the BJP’s graduating into a national party attracted more than its share of freebooters and opportunists while the hovering shadow of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh remained its strength and weakness.

However, the BJP did prove a point. It gave the country a rudimentary two-party system for the first time even as regional parties proliferated like mushroom. In fact, the growth of political parties with parochial agenda made it all the more essential for a credible alternative to the ruling party at the national level. Here Mr Vajpayee played a sterling role in rounding the rough edges of the RSS-influenced BJP agenda by keeping his disparate flock together.

And then the BJP came crashing down, not by the mere numbers it mustered in the Lok Sabha election of 2004 (the Congress, after all, did not do that spectacularly well) but by the shock of defeat. It had not imagined that it would not return to power and took years to reconcile itself to its fate. Come the 2009 election, and the BJP geared itself up to return to power. Mr L.K. Advani was declared its Prime Ministerial candidate and his invariable refrain was that Dr Manmohan Singh was the weakest Prime Minister the country had ever experienced.

The BJP’s defeat in 2009 by a more convincing margin set in train a turmoil the party is continuing to face. It was clear that Mr Advani’s attempt at seeking the highest office was his last. What was not clear was the scramble it would unleash among the second rung leaders to secure the top post and the ugly debate it would trigger on the merits and demerits of Hindutva to take the BJP forward. Here the RSS became a far bigger player.

Partly, it had to do with the change at the top in the RSS. Mr Mohan Bhagwat’s predecessors would have dealt with the crisis in the BJP more discreetly because howsoever the link between the party and the RSS is projected from time to time, it is universally acknowledged that in times of crises, it calls the shots. The fiction of the RSS being a cultural organisation was always sought to be maintained, it offering advice when asked for.

Mr Bhagwat, who became the top leader of the RSS at a time the BJP was undergoing its severest test, interpreted his role differently. Not only was he dissatisfied with wielding real power behind close doors, but he also announced his arrival on centrestage by holding a virtual durbar in Delhi. And since then he has been publicly telling the BJP leadership what it should do.

Borrowing from the language of matrimonial advertisements, he stipulated that Mr Advani should retire and his successor should be young, belonging to a circle outside the set of the BJP’s second string of leaders in Delhi and should set the party’s house in order and have a “leadership mindset”. Earlier, he had greatly embarrassed the party by suggesting that the BJP be subjected to chemotherapy, if necessary. Reacting to the suppressed fury of the party leaders in Delhi, he has unconvincingly sought to retract his earlier firmans, saying that, when asked, he had advised the BJP that the president should have the capability to rebuild the party.

For the better part of the turmoil the BJP is undergoing, Mr Advani has been a silent spectator. Misfortunes seldom come alone, and even as the party had been shaken by the intra-party struggles in Karnataka in the only southern state it rules, the vacuum in the leadership ranks has been gapingly wide. Not only did the mining lobby in North Karnataka represented by the Reddy brothers demand its pound of flesh but publicly demeaned the Chief Minister, Mr B.S. Yeddyurappa, by getting him to sack and appoint officials and ministers of their choice. The party acquiesced in this blatant display of money power over the governance of an important state, and the Reddys officially crowned Ms Sushma Swaraj, a claimant to power in Delhi, their “mother”.

In national terms, the weakening of the BJP is bad news because it did lay claim to national status and if the opposition of the Congress is to be made up of a motley of regional parties with a stake only in their parochial concerns, the country is in for a rough ride. The question then arises: how does the promise of the BJP begin to recede so quickly?

One answer is that the BJP has never been able to reconcile its central contradiction: how to mesh its essentially exclusivist Hindutva ideology with ruling a pluralist society composed of many creeds and faiths. The RSS answer is that the BJP’s electoral defeats — most recently in a string of state assembly elections — are because it has strayed from the straight and narrow Hindutva path. There are, of course, many in the BJP who would agree, but there are also others who would argue that such a course would be suicidal. After all, Mr Vajpayee’s success in running a jumbo coalition was his ability to postpone the most contentious aspects of the RSS agenda and run the government on traditional centrist lines while claiming to be an RSS functionary on occasions.

Only the future can determine whether a new leader will emerge in the BJP to take the party forward. If Mr Advani could not live down his constant refrain of Dr Manmohan Singh being the weakest Prime Minister, Ms Swaraj would find it difficult to live down her role in placing money power above the party’s interests in Karnataka.

MIDDLE

Lean days ahead
by Dona Suri

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may think that economically, India has turned the corner, but his Food and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar is disappointed with kharif procurement. Recently he declared: “Only a bumper rabi crop can rein in spiraling food costs”. He says that the next three months are going to be tough.

The elite will continue slurping their favorite decoctions in five-star coffee shops no matter what the price, but for the common man (who could buy a week’s ration for the price of just one little cinnamon mocha latte) stretching the budget to keep the kitchen running is a challenge. Here are some helpful tips to save on the food budget:

Waste naught want naught: You can grow many nutritious vegetables yourself. A gumla with a tomato-plant on your verandah is an obvious answer to high vegetable prices but you can go further. A small patch of lawn in front of your house is a real blessing. Grass can be harvested every three weeks and is an excellent source of vitamin B12. The higher grass will look slightly shaggy but this is inconsequential when you think of the lovely saag.

Back to the Future: Here’s another way to reap dividends from your lawn. In most urban areas, keeping a cow or buffalo at home is no longer an option. If municipal bylaws don’t get in the way, space constraints do. The answer is G-O-A-T. This small milk-producer can fit in any small corner during the day and be tethered outside at night to graze unseen and fertilise the lawn. Gandhiji preferred goat milk and you will soon come to like it too. A nicely fattened goat also delights non-vegetarians, although they will have to be more patient than their vegetarian friends.

Stop eating. Not only will you soon be fashionably slim, you will refine your soul, as per our time-honoured tradition. Baba Ramdev strongly approves of fasting and assures that anyone can easily do without food on alternate days. Western literature agrees. In Alice In Wonderland, the Red Queen promises Alice “jam every other day”. After several days pass without jam, Alice confronts the Queen with her promise only to learn that the rule is “jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today”. Apply this rule to your meal schedule and see how much further your ration goes.

Go where the getting is good: The coming lean months also happen to be the wedding season. You don’t have to know the happy couple personally in order to bless them. Dress nicely, saunter in and enjoy. Show real daring by carrying a large tiffin box and telling the mother of the bride that “Uncle is laid up with a fracture but really wanted to come. Do you mind if I take a little for him?”

Assign your family members to different weddings in order to maximise the tiffin-box haul.

When it comes to buffets, conferences are just as good as weddings. Pawar issued his warning while addressing the Economic Editors’ Conference in Delhi. That shows that Pawar Sahib knows how to stretch his food budget — not that a minister ever has to worry about such things. Consult the engagements column every day and eat well all the way until April. Bon appétit!

OPED

BJP – Adrift in choppy waters
No one in sight to steady the boat
by Swati Chaturvedi

ATAL BEHARI VAJPAYEE, former Prime Minister and the only BJP leader India loved and cherished, remains an enigma. Yet, today the witty poet has no words for the party he has created.

Vajpayee could make any debate sparkle with witty asides. When asked in Parliament “Atalji aap atal rahiye”, he smiled and said: “Atal toh hoon lekin bhooliye mat Bihari bhi hoon.’’

He went to a RSS “shakha” wearing his customary dhoti and chortled at the sea of khakhi shorts. “Pehle kyun nahi bataya, mein bhi pehen leta’’, he said, underlying the difference between him, a political leader, and the RSS.

Today he watches the RSS take complete and formal control of the BJP with Nitin Gadkari, a provincial leader with no national exposure, set to take over as the president of the BJP as a formal nominee of the RSS.

Every time the RSS Sanghsarchalak, Dr Mohan Bhagwat, a vet in her earlier days, holds forth on how the BJP leadership needs to change, even people who believe that Mr L K Advani is a completely lack-lustre leader who has lost the BJP two general elections, groan.

Says Mr Brajesh Mishra, a former National Security Adviser to Mr Vajpayee, “Vajpayeeji knew where to draw the line. There is a crisis in the BJP today because there is a leadership vacuum. Actions such as the expulsion of Mr Jaswant Singh are pointless and serve to convince people that this is less a political party and more some bizarre cult run by out-of-touch septuagenarians.’’

To be described thus by an insider is a comedown indeed for the principal national opposition party. And the reasons are many: the blind ambition of one man to be the prime minister at any cost, the vapid grasping hold of some second-generation leaders who thought that political graduation came through the drawing rooms of Delhi, and the fluffing over the genuine leadership challenge such as the Gujarat riots and the taint of Varun Gandhi.

So lost was the BJP in its delusions that it actually thought that it would sweep Uttar Pradesh after Varun Gandhi spewed poison. Party president Rajnath Singh promptly tried to clamber on to the bandwagon, cancelled seven announced public meetings and rushed to Naini jail to deliver Varun a change of clothes and the faithful a message.

The miserable failure in the elections nonetheless, Rajnath Singh continued to act on the RSS message. Despite his own singular failure as a mass leader in UP, the man, described by Arun Shourie as a “lachar thakur’’, tried and failed to cut down all other contenders in the BJP.

Mr Rajnath Singh always tried to pretend that he was the man with the magic wand – the RSS – and would wave it and make all political challenges vanish. Unfortunately for the BJP, he never saw the opposition as competition; for him it was personal and always Mr Arun Jaitly.

Take the case of the self-styled Sardar Patel Mark II and the grandiosely known as the PM-in-waiting, L.K. Advani. As Home Minister, he was prevented by Atalji from releasing a white paper on the ISI after the intelligence agencies indignantly pointed out that he would be making their assets public.

On three separate and vital occasions, on issues of vital national interest, Mr Advani suffered selective amnesia, preferring to pass the buck and the blame to the silent Mr Vajpayee.

On the release of Masoood Azhar and two other occasions, he was exposed by his own angry Cabinet colleagues such as Mr Jaswant Singh. But as Mishra, who also exposed the hypocrisy, points out: “How can you call yourself a leader and then waffle and fudge?’’

Even his meaningless offer to resign following the BJP’s worst-ever electoral defeat in the last elections was hollow. His coterie, guided only by self-interest, promptly persuaded him to change his mind.

The story put out that the RSS wanted him to stay put was scotched by Bhagwat himself, leaving Advani with egg on his face. Says one of his erstwhile camp-followers in a catty aside: “The problem is that he has no hobbies, so he is refusing to leave. He should have taken up gardening or bonsai.’’

His followers, the second-generation leaders who have grabbed all the plums, now make unconvincing noises about how he is waiting for a graceful exit. But says a BJP leader, rather ruefully: “When you hang on with your thumb nails and are publicly told to go, what grace are we talking about? Even now, despite the media plants, he still does not want to leave.’’

There was feverish speculation in the BJP on the eve of his 82nd birthday this month, but even that brief flurry of hope came to nothing. Recounts one of his aides: “The minute I saw the photograph of him trying to weight-lift, I knew we had lost. The palpable desperation to project youth in a bid to take on Rahul Gandhi and the daily attacks on a decent and learned man like Dr Manmohan Singh did him in. The BJP was only wallowing in negativity. We had nothing positive to say to the country.”

In a bizarre kind of parallel with Pakistan and Jinnah, which the BJP seems to be obsessed with, it was almost as if the BJP had trapped itself in a negative mindset – stuck in partition somewhat like Pakistan – while the rest of India had moved on and did not want the politics of grievance mongering.

Today Advani finds himself all alone while all the second-generation leaders he created such as Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitly , Venkiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar are publicly told by the RSS that they are most “unwanted’’.

Even in their 60s they call themselves the ‘’second-generation’’. “The late Pramod Mahajan told this writer half in jest: “I have become a grandfather and the party still considers me a teenager.’’

“While the Congress party has a genuine youth leadership, we still have these seniors fancying themselves as young and ensuring that no real youth even come in to the party. In a way Advani’s continuance for the last election ensured that the second generation had no future’’ rues one of them.

Even without the daily tantrums of the second generation, the BJP is shying away from grasping the Modi nettle. This, in essence, is the crisis of the BJP.

Many believe that the Gujarat riots cost the BJP a general election, yet currently Modi is the only genuine mass leader of the BJP. If he was made the party president, it would electrify the faithful yet would ensure that the BJP could not become the party of government in alliance.

Even the intellectual dishonesty repeatedly displayed, be it the destruction of the Babri Masjid or the complete lack of regret for the Gujarat riots, has eaten away at the heart of the national project that the BJP was.

And, one man who had the intellect to understand the idea of India and make all of India connect to him watches silently like Bhishma on his bed of arrows as the RSS and the BJP indulge in a modern Mahabharat . Let’s give the last word to Jaswant Singh on Vajpayee: “When there is too much to say, the wise keep quiet.”

Computers need to learn grammar
by Philip Hensher

We're all getting, I fear, a computerised reading device for Christmas, allowing us to read the complete works of dozens of novelists through the magic of a seven-by-four screen. What happens if the logical conclusion is reached, and the computer takes to reading what we write, and judging it, too?

Experiments with using computers to mark exams have been on the rise for some time, and have now reached the point where they are supposed to be able to judge styles of writing.

Last week, the Westminster Education Forum amused itself by hooking an exam-marking computer up to various classic works of literature and rhetoric. What mark would Jane Austen, William Golding, Hemingway, Churchill get?

The answer was predictable: too much repetition; not proper sentences; even grammatical incorrectness (it thought Churchill's phrase "the might of the German army" was a misuse of the conditional "might").

The conclusion was clear: a computer was at least as likely to make mistakes in marking as a student is in writing. But computers don't make up these standards themselves. They arise out of the principles of writing installed in them by, I am afraid to say, schoolteachers.

Those school-taught principles have a way of hanging around in the head. It's surprising to discover what a load of old rubbish many of them are. First, teachers were always telling pupils not to repeat words – this is the one that did for Hemingway in the forum's experiment.

But why not? The alternative is something called elegant variation – not a good thing – and the style of very old sports reporters; Wayne Rooney, for instance, becomes, in succession, "the recent proud young father", "the lad from Liverpool", "the Scouse bruiser", "the pug-faced virtuoso of the leather globe" and so on, deliriously. Much better to stick to the accurate word.

A specific terrible application of this comes when pupils writing a story are asked not to repeat "he said" and "she said", but to vary the verbs of speech, so that people are always described as murmuring, stating, enunciating, chirruping, guffawing and so on. I expect teachers want to increase their pupils' vocabulary, but the fact remains that only truly terrible writers do this; good ones generally stick to "he said, she said".

Probably, nowadays, the demented old rules about not ending a sentence with a preposition and never splitting an infinitive have disappeared. But what seems to have taken their place are some creative-writing derived principles.

The good principle of not using unnecessary words is interpreted by teachers, and I dare say computers, to mean "if you can cross out a word, do so". A "tiny little" object means something different from either a tiny, or a little, object; Sebastian Barry's memorable title A Long Long Way is different from both a long way, and a very long way. Either of these examples would get the computer's alarm bells ringing.

Computers could be programmed to recognise and deplore the passive voice, such as, indeed, "could be programmed". Teachers hate it, despite its obvious usefulness.

They could even be instructed to identify instances where students have lapsed from that saddest of creative-writing instructions, "Show don't tell", or to reward the pathetic belief that writing in the present tense is somehow more vivid than in the past.

But should they? Some of the things we are told in school, and apparently go on believing quite fervently, are not good general rules to which genius provides an exception. They are just terrible rules.

Incidentally, I just ran this page through my computer's grammar checker. It ticked me off for two fragmentary sentences, one misspelling and one non-existent word ("Scouse"), and made an impertinent suggestion regarding a comma. Its day, I think, is still to come.

— By arrangement with The Independent

Delhi Durbar
BSP takes up assault issue

At the meeting of political leaders convened by Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar ahead of the winter session of Parliament last week, the BSP was the only party that raised the issue of MNS legislators assaulting an MLA in the Maharashtra assembly for daring to take the oath in Hindi instead of Marathi.

While all other leaders, including the one from the SP whose MLA Abu Azmi was roughed up by Raj Thackrey's men, were silent on the issue, the BSP's leader in the Lok Sabha Dara Singh Chauhan spoke up.

"Ab to Hindi bolne se pehle sau baar sochna padega”, Chauhan said, ensuring the MNS (mis)deed did not go unmentioned at the leaders' meeting.

Advani celebrates birthday

Last week L.K. Advani celebrated his 82nd birthday with much fanfare. His camp followers, Sushma Swaraj and M Venkaiah Naidu, saw to it that the truce between the warring factions in the party’s Karnataka unit was announced on this day and at Advani’s house, accompanied by a lot of camaraderie and bonhomie between the rivals.

Chief Minister B S. Yedyurappa and his bete noire, Tourism Minister Gali Janardhana Reddy, were seen offering cake to each other even as Rajnath Singh posed before photographers offering cake to Advani himself.

In the evening Advani’s daughter, Pratibha, organised a preview of a film she made on the important roles older characters played in Hindi cinema. Advani, a film buff, sat with his family, select friends and camp followers.

A song in the collage film was really poignant and reflected the overall sombre mood of the day for all the apparent festivity. It was from Dev Anand’s film “Hum Dono” and went like this “Barbadiyon ka sog manana fazul tha, barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya”

As Oz PM spoke, they slept

The organisers of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s address at the Sapru House last week had issued a limited number of passes for the speech, expecting a huge crowd in the backdrop of racial attacks on Indian students Down Under.

Strict security arrangements were in place for the function with many people, who actually were interested in listening to the Australian PM, being turned away as they did not have passes.

The auditorium was almost half empty just before Rudd was to arrive. Nothing could be done at that stage. So employees of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), who had just finished their lunch, were hurriedly summoned by the ICWA bosses to occupy the vacant seats.

The result: many of the ICWA staffers dozed off in their seats even as Rudd spoke on India-Australia ties, much to the embarrassment of their superiors.

Contributed by Aditi Tandon, Faraz Ahmad and Ashok Tuteja

Corrections and clarifications

n The headline “Ex-US lawmaker gets 13-year jail for bribery” (Page 13, November 16) should instead have been “US ex-lawmaker gets 13-year jail for bribery”.

n In the second deck of the Page 1 lead headline (November 16) the word “Channelising” should instead have been channelling”.

n In the headline “Create conducive atmosphere for talks, Mirwaiz asks govt” (Page 6, November 13), the appropriate word in place of “asks” would have been “tells”.

n The headline “Manu parole: UT police may find itself in a fix” (Page 1, November 13, Chandigarh Tribune) should more appropriately have been “Manu parole: UT police finds itself in a spot”.

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