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A whiff of fresh air
Was Lalu’s claim hogwash? |
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Zardari fighting a losing battle
Tackling Pakistan
Eleven Indian gods
America on decline
Upholding human values Chatterati
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A whiff of fresh air
The
last-minute deal struck by the US and emerging economies China, India, Brazil and South Africa at the Copenhagen summit on Friday after frenzied negotiations, marks a limited step forward in the complex quest for tackling global warming. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said at the end of the summit, “The Copenhagen accord may not be everything everyone had hoped for, but it is an important beginning.” The plenary of the summit “took note” of the accord but the deal could not become a UN pact because it was not adopted unanimously as the rules required, with many countries among the Group of 77 opposed to it. Predictably, the deal would find wider acceptance as countries study the gains that would accrue from it. Judged by the fact that but for this deal the summit would have been deemed a complete failure, it is heartening that a framework has emerged upon which further negotiations can proceed. For India, the five-nation deal is a refreshing development and an index of the statesmanship shown by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who played a key role in hammering out the agreement. A significant and very welcome aspect was the coordinated stand taken by India and China at the summit. Had it not been for the partnership between the two, joined in by Brazil and South Africa, the Americans would have stuck to a harder position. Clearly, India’s goals were substantially achieved. The deal is to be backed by $10 billion a year for the next three years and then $100 billion a year that the US government has promised to put together from all sources around the globe. A fund to tackle deforestation would also be available to developing countries. No legally-binding emission cut targets have been provided for in the deal for the developing countries. The stipulation is that developed countries would report their mitigation actions by February 1, 2010, while larger developing countries like India and China would report their “mitigation ambitions” by the same deadline. All in all, the five-nation deal is a worthy starting point for future negotiations, with considerable benefits for the poor countries. It is now incumbent on the rich nations to deliver on their commitments for carbon emission cuts and for countries like India to guard zealously against any violation of the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.
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Was Lalu’s claim hogwash?
The
Railways’ turnaround claims made during the tenure of Mr Lalu Prasad in the UPA-I stand challenged in a White Paper brought out by his successor in the UPA-II. When presenting his last budget on February 13 this year Mr Lalu Prasad claimed that the Railways had a cash surplus of Rs 90,000 crore, he earned all-round applause in Parliament and lavish praise from the Prime Minister. Some of the top business management institutes in the world evinced interest in the “turnaround” story. His Officer on Special Duty, Mr Sudhir Kumar, co-authored a book “Bankruptcy to Billions” to much acclaim, portraying the Railways’ so-called success story. All that, we are now told, was hogwash. The minister was taking his own government, Parliament and the whole nation for a ride. After this, the credibility of what ministers say gets further eroded. Whether the present or previous Railway Minister is right, the government must clear the confusion. It cannot allow mud being thrown around without getting its own image sullied. In 2001 a committee chaired by noted economist Rakesh Mohan had said that the Railways was on the edge of “fatal bankruptcy”. Is it possible for the same Railways, caught in a “terminal debt trap”, to be Rs 90,000-crore cash surplus in less than a decade? The White Paper says changes in the accounting norms had inflated cumulative cash surplus before dividend by 55 per cent. The claimed surplus of Rs 88,669 crore did not account for the payouts for implementing the Sixth Pay Commission report and the appropriation to the Depreciation Reserve Fund, which together leave the actual figure at Rs 39,411 crore. Financially, the best period for the Railways in the last two decades was, according to this document, 1991-96 when Jaffer Shrief was the Railway Minister. Though Mamata’s White Paper seems to have a tacit approval of the government, the UPA must make it clear whose set of “facts” it stands by.
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Zardari fighting a losing battle
The
noose around the neck of Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and many other political heavywights like Interior Minister Rehman Malik and Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar is getting tighter after the country’s Supreme Court scrapped the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) last week. With the amnesty granted to a large number of persons under the NRO no longer valid, the court cases earlier withdrawn against them stand revived. The 17-member Bench, which gave the verdict, has ordered the setting up of monitoring cells at the apex court as well as all the provincial high courts to oversee a quick disposal of the cases against the former NRO-beneficiaries. Mr Zardari has now to explain not only how he “earned” the huge funds that he has in his Swiss and other overseas bank accounts, but also from where he got the money to buy the 20-room mansion — “Surrey Mahal” — in the UK in the 1990s. Pressure is building up from various quarters, including the Opposition, to force Mr Zardari and his tainted ministers to resign to save Pakistan from fresh political turmoil. Interestingly, Mr Rehman Malik finds his name included in his own ministry’s Exit Control List along with that of his colleague, Mr Mukhtar. There are 247 persons on the list barred from undertaking foreign trips. Though efforts are on to devise a strategy to save Mr Zardari and the other big guns hit by the verdict, they are unlikely to escape from the long arms of the law. Mr Zardari discussed on Friday the situation arising out of the apex court historic judgement with Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and leaders of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a partner in the PPP-led coalition government. Going by the mood in the ruling PPP and the government, Mr Zardari will not give up power easily. He is apparently getting ready to fight for his survival with the help of the constitutional provisions that provide him immunity as President. But with the Army being firmly in favour of allowing the law to take its own course, Mr Zardari is unlikely to win the battle. His very eligibility for contesting the 2008 elections is being questioned.
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If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle. — Samuel Johnson
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Tackling Pakistan
NO sooner has the euphoria of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington and the substance of his Russian visit evaporated in the atmospherics than we are confronted with two serious developments. They attest to the fact that India’s continuing demarches to the Afghanistan strategy of the US have not cut much ice. As reported by The New York Times, first, the US President has privately promised Pakistani military and civilian leaders what is described as a partnership of “unlimited potential” in which Washington would consider any proposal Islamabad puts on the table. Second, he told a small group of journalists at a White House lunch the other day that “reducing tensions between India and Pakistan, though enormously difficult, is as important as anything to the long-term stability of the region.” Holding even a grain of truth, we have reason to be worried. President Obama’s long-awaited Afghanistan strategy, when it finally unfolded, left more unsaid — especially about the role Pakistan had to play if the strategy had to succeed. It is since the Presidential statement at West Point that we are gleaning the sub-text from leaks, both inspired and unintended. We are being regularly lulled into complacency, here in India at least, that Pakistan has been told in no uncertain terms that unless they themselves go after the indigenous Pakistan Taliban and others of their ilk, the US will do it. There appears to be a good degree of confidence that Pakistan will play ball this time. Nevertheless the threat of increasing drone attacks inside Pakistan has been put on the table. It is, of course, not at all clear when this sub-strategy will be unleashed on Pakistan, given the hype of increasing anti-US sentiment purveyed by the Pakistani media and other sources. Obviously, there will be a period of persuasion and financial carrots — a $ 7.5 billion US aid package has already been authorised — in the hope that Pakistan is convinced of the US serious intent. Yet even this prescriptive exhortation is hedged. Notwithstanding India’s submissions, Washington does not appear to have entirely given up the idea that a resolution of India-Pakistan tensions is the key to making it possible for Pakistan to whole-heartedly partner in eliminating Al-Qaeda and the Taliban on its western border and beyond. Although not articulated it in these terms, it would appear that settling Pakistan’s eastern border may well be an unstated pillar of the revised Af-Pak strategy of President Obama. Dr Manmohan Singh’s visit, although good as a long-term building block of bilateral relationship, does not appear to have laid the ghost of Kashmir which had been initially aired during the contretemps on Holbrook’s mandate. Our determined action at that time vis-a-vis the US Administration ensured that India-Pakistan relations were kept out of his mandate. We felt that we had succeeded in projecting ourselves as a part of the solution and not the problem. We had come away with the belief that we had immunised our bilateral relationship with Pakistan. We have also been led to believe that our views on, and presence in, Afghanistan were being seen as contributing to settling that turbulent country. While we know that our contribution is seen in a positive manner by the Afghans, this clearly does not spell the whole picture. Much has been left unsaid in our interactions with the US, and it appears that the linkage of the Af-Pak situation with the Indo-Pak situation had not been entirely given up. We also need to see these developments in the context of both the US-China joint statement during President Obama’s Beijing visit and the tragic Sharm-el-Sheikh joint statement. The US-China statement, for the first time and overtly, gave China a role in South Asian security and stability without so much as a by-your-leave from India. In so doing the US achieved China’s long-standing aim of keeping us boxed into the India-Pakistan box from which the US-India civil nuclear agreement had extricated us. Nothing brings out more evocatively the contrasting positions of the Bush and Obama administrations on its India policy. More importantly, in hindsight, these statements have set the stage for pushing the envelope yet further by now suggesting the supposed criticality of reducing India-Pakistan tensions for a better passage in Afghanistan. India can expect determined US pressure on it to take steps to reduce tensions with Pakistan by addressing both the Kashmir question and the issue of resumption of the composite dialogue process, never mind that we have so far got no satisfaction on meaningful action by Pakistan against the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack or on dismantling its flourishing terror infrastructure. This is where the Sharm-el-Sheikh document gives them the handle to pressure us to deliver on the “de-linking” commitment it contains, and the stick of Balochistan to hammer it in. As if this is not enough, if there is any basis for President Obama’s offer to Pakistan of a partnership of “unlimited potential”, we can well imagine what it would want, starting with parity in civil nuclear cooperation , not to mention early closure on Kashmir. It is nothing short of frightening in terms of what it would do to India’s regional and global stature and ambitions. We need to realistically analyse our options, both political and diplomatic. The Russian commitment to help us in tackling Pakistan’s “terror deficit” is a welcome boost to our position. There needs to be much greater pro-active diplomacy on this issue, as it is on the verge of being sidelined as a regular mantra that the Indians recite — its seriousness has dissipated both internally and abroad. Politically, the government should strengthen its hands by an all-party consensus or even a Parliament resolution which restates the cardinal points of our current negotiating stance on
Pakistan. The writer, a former diplomat, is Chairman, Kunzru Centre for Defence Studies and Research,
Pune.
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Eleven Indian gods From
my schooling to university and finally into civil services, I have always been searching for a credible reply to an age-old enigma called God and its existence. Though I grew up imbibing that there is only one God and he is omnipresent, my scientific temper would at times make me swing like a pendulum between a believer and a non-believer. As I matured, I came to realise that we cannot see or touch God because he is intangible and ethereal till I developed keen interest in cricket, a leading religion in India with 11 deities. What a massive public exaltation is enjoyed by them, I experienced it last week when I accompanied my son for a T20 match at Mohali. As the Indian players arrived on the field, they were lustily cheered like mystical icons and given a standing ovation by thousands of teeming mortals. Chasing a target of 207 runs, my son was emphatic that Indian ‘deities’ would easily crush the Lankan demons, re-enacting the ‘Ramayana’ way. What followed thereafter is now a slice of history. The opponents were shredded in tatters by a trademark batting display of T20 trinity of Veeru, Yuvi and Dhoni. Whenever any boundary was hit, the entire stadium stood up in unison forming a pulsating pattern of ‘mexican waves’ demanding-four, demanding-more. The visitors were in a fix whenever an Indian god hit a six! The Lankans had epileptic fits whenever they skied lofty hits! The iconic trio was truly benevolent and answered all the ‘prayers’ of their devotees instantaneously by hitting boundaries on demand. They appeared “omniscient” about their sentiments and did not disappoint them. Despite initial hiccups and sloppy fielding, they somehow succeeded in re-enacting the Shakespearean “Comedy of Errors” and did not let the match slip away. We all kept crying hoarse reciting ‘chaalisa’ in their honour. The incessant cheering and physical aerobatics turned my stiff joints supple. My orthopedic consultant was quick to endorse ‘cricket yoga’ as the panacea for joint aches. The daredevil heroics of 11 musketeers have earned them absolute sovereignty for having seized No. 1 rank in Test cricket, with Sachin Tendulkar still sizzling for two long decades! But now there is not one god that people see only in Sachin but in the playing eleven who bring glory to India in all formats of game. Like our scriptural deities, the contemporary gods have also been ascribed various names, such as, ‘The Wall’, ‘Master Blaster’, ‘Little Master’, ‘Maharaja’, ‘Yuvraj’, ‘Nawab’, ‘Very Very Special’, ‘Turbonator’, ‘Jumbo’ or ‘Dada’ depending upon their cricketing traits. The millennium icons, Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan have aptly summed up that ‘film stars are reel heroes while the cricketing idols are real heroes worthy of emulation’. Various fan clubs have been formed where they are even worshipped. Even I have turned a
believer.
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America on decline
This
decade began and ended in dread. It began with Wall Street – the World Trade Center – targeted for mass murder. It ends with Main Street fearful and reeling from economic reverses that Wall Street helped create. It was the decade of distraction. While the U.S. economy bubbled and then crumbled, the president for eight of the decade’s 10 years embroiled us in a grudge match with Saddam Hussein and then persisted in throwing lives and money into the chaotic conflict that (as many predicted would happen) ensued. The decline of the American middle class was nowhere on his radar screen. The stocks bubble of the late 1990s was succeeded by a bubble in housing; these were the engines of our economic growth. America’s production of goods no longer received the level of investment that had made it the engine of our economic growth from the mid-19th century through the 1970s. The change began at the outset of the Reagan years, when the percentage of corporate A report from the International Labor Organization published last week shows where the money went: to shareholder dividends, disproportionately benefiting the wealthy. In the prosperity years of 1946 to 1979, dividends constituted 23 percent of profits. From 1980 to 2008, they constituted 46 percent. Finance boomed. The gap in annual wages between workers at financial companies and workers at non-financial companies, the ILO reports, grew from $11,000 in 1989 to $40,000 in 2007. The financial sector defended this shift by arguing that it had created many innovative financial products – the very financial products that managed to turn downturn into Great Recession. In an interview in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, former Fed chief Paul Volcker said that he has “found very little evidence that vast amounts of innovation in financial markets in recent years have had a visible effect on the productivity of the economy.” He went on to say: “All I know is that the The dread in the land today isn’t just a fear of losing your job – or of your spouse, sister, father or child losing his or hers. It’s a fear that America has been hollowed out, that we don’t have a sustainable path back to mass prosperity, let alone to economic preeminence. A poll taken last month for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) shows that 44 percent of Americans considered China to be the world’s leading economic power, while just 27 percent thought the United States still held that throne. Such fears can only be intensified by public policies that fail to champion America’s national interests by fostering the flight of investment abroad. Overcoming some of our national phobia about having an industrial policy, the Obama administration has rightly targeted the renewable energy sector for investment – a long overdue shift back to real, rather than financial, production. But we don’t yet have policies to ensure that the real production we’re fostering is done at home. As Joan Fitzgerald, director of the Law, Policy and Society program at Northeastern University, notes in a recent article, 84 percent of the $1.05 billion in federal clean-energy grants distributed since September has gone to foreign wind turbine manufacturers. Unionized, high-wage Germany and non-unionized, low-wage China both have thriving wind-power industries that profitably export their products to us. We have shunned policies that bolster domestic production, which is why more Americans are betting on China’s economy than on our own. The problem is that America’s economic elites have thrived on the financialization and globalization of the economy that have caused the incomes of the vast majority of their fellow Americans to stagnate or decline. The insecurity that haunts their compatriots is alien to them. Fully 85 percent of Americans in that CFR-sponsored poll said that protecting U.S. jobs should be a top foreign policy priority, but when the pollsters asked that question of the council’s own members, just 21 percent said that protecting American jobs should be a top concern. The moral world that we see in that poll is the moral world of Charles Dickens. Of the elite of his day, he wrote in “Bleak House,” “there is much good in it. ...” But, he continued, “it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.” —
By arrangement with LA Times-Washington Post
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Upholding human values There
is a film called “Torch-bearer” on the life of an ordinary farmer, whose concern for the death of a large number of pregnant women led him to construct one of the most modern hospitals in rural Assam.
Over the years his hospital succeeded in saving nearly 30,000 women from dying an untimely death. That farmer passed away recently. In a tribute Mahesh Bhatt wrote, “India has not stopped producing Gandhis, the fault is in our eyes that we fail to recognise them”. One such person is UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Madanjeet Singh. In his book called “Kashmiriyat” he makes a strong case how the age old “pluralist Sufi-Bhakti-Rishi culture” can work as an antidote against the mindless violence unleashed by jehadi elements and security forces in the Valley. This is what Tasleema Nasreen has said about him: “At the age of 84, the values that Madanjeet Singh symbolises are something that the new generations of South Asians should imbibe. They are sinking in the stagnant pool of conservatism, narrow-mindedness, fanaticism and fear”. The chapters – “The Secular Legacy of Aasi” and “This, My People”, – can move one to tears. Madanjeet’s work had even moved the then Prime Minister of India, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, to write a foreword for one of his books, and that too in his own hand writing! Ambassador Madanjeet Singh has been described as the “Mandela of South Asia” and a “living Gandhi” among us that not many of us recognise. Over a period of last 10 years, the South Asia Foundation (SAF), founded by Ambassador Madanjeet Singh, has set up institutions of excellence in all the SAARC countries to foster closer ties, especially among youth of the region. It has been exhorting them to rise above the influence of parochial and divisive forces, which have embroiled the subcontinent in the vortex of poverty and inexplicable suffering. It’s remarkable the way it has been encouraging singers, writers, painters, and mobilising prominent people from all walks of life to protect the human values that are so dear to all of us and has been on the forefront of promoting gender equality in the region. It would have been a lot better if instead of US President Barack Obama, the Oslo-based Nobel Prize Committee had conferred the Nobel Peace Prize on the SAF and Ambassador Madanjeet Singh. Other than mouthing platitudes, Obama is yet to achieve anything significant for world peace, and has, in fact, even failed to prevent his popularity nosediving in his own country that gave him a landslide win with high hopes not so long ago. In the look “Kashmiriyat” Madanjeet emerges as an author who all through his life had the courage to call a spade a spade. If he’s been unsparing in his attack on Islamic fundamentalists, he’s no less scathing in his attack on elements in the Sangh parivar, and that’s why he even went to the extent of saying that “the political strategy that Modi is emulating to win Gujarat elections is a carbon copy of Hitler’s Nazi goons, and the mysterious fire that engulfed the train in Godhra was no different from the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin that Hitler used as a prelude to winning elections in Germany”. Quite impressing was his stand not to accept the Padma award. His refusal to such a high State honour is absolutely unthinkable, especially at a time when so often we come across people in our circles working overtime to get their names recommended for some award and recognition, by hook or crook. His assertion that, “I will not accept any award till the Picasso of India (MF Husain) is in exile” is nothing but the manifestation of his strong secular credentials that so many of our leaders just preach. But strong political posturing is not the only thing Ambassador Madanjeet Singh has been doing. His stand on common currency for South Asia and innovative ways to reduce the tension and mitigate the suffering of people in the region are the real need of the hour. As a filmmaker I have worked a lot in EU countries so I know what he’s aiming to achieve. No longer the countries of the EU waste their human and financial resources in manning their borders and arm their troops to teeth to fight one another, but here in the subcontinent where the countries don’t even have enough resources to meet the most basic needs of their people, they squander billions in making their forces defend the barren and most inhospitable pieces of lands and for buying armaments that we all very well can do without. The writer is a film director and CEO
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Chatterati A Union minister, while chatting the other day, happily categorised his colleagues into three groups, based on their “efficiency, proficiency and shrewd political aptitude”. The likes of Pranab Mukherjee, P.Chidambaram, Kpil Sibal, Jaipal Reddy, Sharad Pawar, CP Joshi, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kamal Nath, always come to Cabinet meetings prepared. They are briefed by their secretaries and thoroughly read the agenda papers. But there are other ministers who bank on views of a section of the Cabinet and accordingly formulate their own “biased” opinions. Ministers such MK Azhagiri and Mamata Banerjee skip meetings, leaving it to their secretaries to do the needful. And if Mamata does attend a meeting, she throws tantrums. Why do they get away with this? Then we have the ones who rarely have anything to say. But to be fair, it’s usually the Congress ministers who come prepared. The other UPA ministers really don’t have to answer to anyone. So, why bother? Politicians in cricket Having lost to Union Minister Joshi as the president of the Rajasthan Cricket Association, Lalit Modi seems to be surrounded by problems. Having to shake Jagmohan Dalmiya’s hand for support is really a sign of desperation for him. And here Dalmiya is the one smiling. But now we have very few states where politicians are not heads of cricket associations. Starting from Farooq Abdullah to Lalu, and of course the mighty Sharad Pawar. The common man just cannot understand the importance of becoming the head of a cricket association in the state. Maybe he should understand the money involved. Also it has become fashionable to be amongst cricketers. But it is really a sad state of affairs for such tall leaders to waste their time on games. People elect them for doing development work and not to become a part of the elitist game. Rent a bag Now Delhi girls, who’d love to show off a branded handbag but can’t afford one, can rent one. A website called Bagsutra is going to start its operations in Delhi soon Mumbai. They charge a certain amount and give high-end bags, sunglasses and other things on rent. It’s a very American trend, to rent luxury accessories. Website like Bag Borrow or Steal and Bags to Riches have allowed many women in Europe and the US to flaunt expensive bags, sunglasses and shoes from the brands they can’t afford. But is Delhi the rent-a-bag kind of city? Knowing Delhi society women, I am sure it will work. Everyone wants a feel of the stuff from these high-end brands. As long as the identity of the person renting the items is not disclosed, people would love it. Delhi is brand-conscious and this will allow the middle class also to flaunt a bag they have longed for. It could work because the membership fee is only Rs. 10,000. If you do the math, you will realise that it turns out to be very economical. However, I see two problems here: one, the bags are not going to be from the latest season. And two, they might not be in great condition, what with so many people borrowing and renting them! Also, what is the guarantee that people won’t run away with a product worth more than a lakh that they can get by just paying a deposit of Rs 10,000? This whole renting business is for a different market segment completely, like college kids who can’t afford to buy one on their own. Also, one must keep in mind that it is not in the Indian ethos to have second-hand
things.
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