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Elusive
consensus Ill-cooked
food Bill |
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Squabbling
sons
Tyranny
of arrogant men
Winsome
smile
In jail
without trial Development beyond
reservations Delhi Durbar
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Ill-cooked food Bill
Since
the hurriedly drafted food security Bill had left many loose ends untied, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has stepped in to ensure a rethink on her pet subject, which had figured in the party manifesto also. The government’s aim in presenting a truncated Bill was, perhaps, to ease the food subsidy burden. The party has its political compulsions. The Bill reduced the food entitlement of a poor family from 35 kg to 25 kg of rice or wheat at Rs 3 a kg. This is also contrary to what a Supreme Court panel has recommended. The party, therefore, has prevailed over the government, which has passed on to the Planning Commission the responsibility to sort out the contentious issues in three weeks. Sonia Gandhi wants the government to include pulses and oilseed apart from wheat and rice in the subsidised basket as the food has to be wholesome. Experts differ over what constitutes a nutritious diet. Besides, the number of the poor households is disputed. The government puts the figure at 6.53 crore, the Planning Commission at 8.1 crore and the states at 10 crore. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee wants the states to estimate the number of below-poverty-line households. Since it is the Centre that has to arrange foodgrains or funds in the absence of food, the states could inflate the number of BPL households. Small wonder, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia dubbed Pranab’s proposal an invitation to “an economic disaster”. How the food items routed through the leaky public distribution system find their way in the open market is well known. There is no estimate of the burgeoning demand-supply gap. In case there is a crop failure and global food prices escalate, would the government be prepared to cope with the situation? Providing food security to the starving poor in this billion-plus country is a gargantuan task, no doubt. The government should consider all aspects instead of rushing with the food security legislation.
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Squabbling sons
Dynastic
politics in Tamil Nadu has more than its fair share of twists and turns. Patriarch Karunanidhi had got his elder son M.K. Azhagiri accommodated as a Central minister in the hope of clearing the way for the anointment of his younger son M.K. Stalin as his chief ministerial successor. For a time this seemed to be working. Azhagiri, who is temperamental and consequently unpredictable, did not challenge brother Stalin’s elevation as Deputy Chief Minister a day after Azhagiri’s induction into the Central Cabinet last year. Last week, however, Azhagiri disturbed a hornet’s nest when he declared that he would not accept anyone other than his father as his leader. In an interview with a Tamil magazine, he said barring the 86-year-old Karunanidhi, no other DMK functionary had the capacity to lead the Dravidian party. This re-igniting of the succession war has predictably not gone down well with Karunanidhi who had announced in December last that he would lay down office after the World Tamil Congress in June this year. The DMK has been ruled like a family fiefdom with no quarter given to anyone outside the Karunanidhi family to even entertain ambitions of leading the party. A few years ago, Vaiko had dared to aspire but he was jettisoned from the DMK and had to form his own small party. While Stalin is credited with having built up the youth wing of the party and of handling the Mayorship of Chennai and then the Local Self Government portfolio in Karunanidhi’s Cabinet with aplomb, Azhagiri is believed to have been instrumental in broadening the DMK’s base in south Tamil Nadu. But how adept they would prove when octogenarian Karunanidhi’s shadow would no longer be with them is anybody’s guess. The moot question is: will the party be able to remain united to face the electoral onslaught of AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa after Karunanidhi bows out. It was Karunanidhi’s apprehension that the two brothers would quarrel that led him to send Azhagiri to the Centre. Now, with the elder son having fired a fresh salvo, the indulgent father has reason to be concerned.
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When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,/ And when he cried the little children died in the streets. — W. H. Auden
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Tyranny of arrogant men The
recently resumed trial of hapless Bahai’s in Iran, a small, peaceful community, is symptomatic of the tyranny of unstable regimes that fear their own people. As brazen is the feverish anxiety on the part of the Mynmarese military junta to block every single avenue for anything like a remotely fair and free election, the first in 20 years, in that unhappy country. No firm dates have been announced but the charade is planned for sometime towards the end of the year. Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy, who won the last poll by an overwhelming margin, has been barred under a newly announced electoral law that does everything to ensure the poll is rigged in favour of the junta, which has reserved 25 per cent of all elective seats for itself. The Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and the National Unity Party (NUP) are also being desperately propped up to win the remaining “popular vote” as nothing can be left to chance. On March 8, the junta announced five laws with regard to the election commission, political party registration and related matters under a new constitution that was crudely imposed on the people some months ago in a fraudulent “referendum”. A military caretaker government is soon to take over the reins of administration and the new government may not be formed until several months after the poll so that everything is carefully arranged. The media is on a tight leash so that nothing untoward is said. Meanwhile, plans are reportedly afoot for a military makeover with the older guard retiring to make way for a younger lot, while some cadres are enrolled in the legislatures. The ethnic minorities pose a problem. The separate ceasefire agreements signed with 17 ethnic groups in effect entailed a tacit live and let live policy for many without any compulsion to lay down arms. For the past several months the junta has been trying to persuade some of these groups to convert their armed cadres into a Border Guard Force, presumably as a step towards bringing them under the discipline of the Burmese Army. There was recently trouble in the trans-Salween Kokang region on this issue with the Wa State Army coming to the aid of its ethnic allies. The Generals are desperate and earlier surmises about the junta’s nuclear ambitions that North Korea is assisting, though lacking confirmation, merit a close watch as rouge states are known to strive for immunity through nuclear blackmail. The debate on whether or not the NLD should contest the elections, howsoever loaded the dice, has finally been settled in favour of a boycott. This will further strain the credibility of the exercise. China too continues to exhibit fears of freedom. Google has pulled out of the mainland to Hong Kong because of censorship and official hacking into and spying on dissidents’ ID accounts. Now Go Daddy, the American domain name register group, is thinking of following suit. Beijing is also coming under pressure to revalue the yuan upwards so as to stop subsidising its exports. Tibet constitutes a continuing worry as Buddhism remains a “second sun” in the sky challenging (Chinese) communism. Hence the intimidatory and insidious efforts to undermine the authority of the Dalai Lama by heaping abuse on him as a “splittist” and renegade secretly working for independence. However, His Holiness only seeks economic and cultural autonomy for Tibet under the terms of the 17-Point Agreement of 1951 on which Beijing has reneged. The Chinese-chosen Panchen Lama is again being built up and many suspect Beijing will select a docile reincarnation in his place after the present Dalai Lama, now 75, passes on. These tactics will not work. Even as the political drama unfolds, Tibet is caught in the throes of a climate change-induced environmental crisis with the melting of its permafrost and glaciers, the first being in some ways even more important than the second. India and the south Himalayan region in general is already beginning to feel the effects of debris and glacial dams, aberrant river flows with erratic westerly snowfall and attendant sediment surges. The northern Tibetan alpine pasture lands together with the Himalaya/Karakoram constitute a major global weather maker which the world needs to monitor more closely and better understand. The natural ecology, which is both shaped by and shapes Tibetan weather, is however being degraded by uninformed and unwise Chinese policies. A series of Tibetan papers, circulated at the recent Copenhagen climate change summit, outlined a set of looming dangers. Faulty pastoral practices have been imposed on Tibetan nomads who herd sheep, goats, yaks and horses. Initial insistence on enlarging herds to maximise production for a growing (immigrant) population proved unsustainable. This has now apparently yielded to another mistaken policy to restrict the nomads to confined pastures. The new policy of “closing pastures to restore grasslands” has reduced many nomads to “ecological migrants”. This human wrong, compounded by intensive grazing within “enclosures”, instead of the traditionally sound practice of extensive but light grazing, is degrading the rangelands. The delicate balance between pasture lands, permafrost melting, the heat balance, rain and snowfall and their timing and other physical and atmospheric parameters has been adversely affected. The consequence has been greater dust and erosion, dying wetlands, desertification and a lowering capacity for carbon sequestration. This is a complex process that calls for collaborative international research and careful corrective action. India and the world have stakes in this process, as does China. Tibet’s future is at stake in more than one
respect.
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Winsome smile The
golgappa man doesn’t have much going for him. He’s poor, he’s old, and he doesn’t have a shop, or the semblance of one. The odds are stacked against him. As he stands there by the road under the big blue sky, with his table, his packet of golgappas and a largish jar that evidently contains some tangy liquid, he doesn’t look as if he stands much of a chance in life. But a careful look at his countenance establishes the fact that he is always smiling. He looks shabby, weak, aged and tired, but he’s all smiles. I am intrigued and I stare at him everyday as I cross him on the way home from work to see if his expression has changed. It never does. Customers come and go. They obviously pay him a pittance. Surely then, there’s more to his smile than meets the eye. One day, I decide to investigate, stop, and go up to him. “How much are these for?” I ask. “Four rupees per plate” is the business-like, but smiling, response. He hands me a paper plate and does the needful. The golgappas are delicious and I tell him so. His grin becomes wider. “I’ve seen you cross me many a time, but you stopped only today. Why?” our man asks of me. Looking around to see if anyone else is within earshot, I come out with my confession. “Actually, I’ve never had golgappas on the street-side like this, for fear of falling sick. It’s only because I always found you smiling and cheerful that I felt compelled to ask you the reason.” The man’s face brightens up further. “Don’t worry. You wont die of these golgappas! I’ll tell you why I’m never glum.” I nod my head at once, eager to learn the secret. “It’s because I’ve never worried about my fate. My father was really poor, but he taught me to smile. He told me that life is pure, it’s special.” “I have a son, who works as a peon and he looks after my wife and me well. We plan to marry him off soon. I have lived my life with joy and I shall go to heaven and meet God with a smiling face one
day. Would you have another plate?” The trance that I am in is broken by the poser. I stretch out a hand abruptly and accept the offering eagerly. This time the golgappas taste even better. He winks at me and displays his broadest smile yet. I take out a 20-rupee note and ask him to keep the change but he refuses, and returns the balance due. As I get into my car and wave at him, I realise that I have just learnt the most important lesson of life and have met its real winner. I also notice that I’m smiling too. From ear to
ear.
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In jail without trial
In the last 37 years the trial could not even begin because the police failed to trace the papers of the case. And for this serious lapse on the part of the police, no action was taken against any police officer. Because of his long confinement Om Prakash became insane. When he did finally come out of jail, he did not know who he was. He could not recognise his 80 years old mother, who was still happy to receive back her son in whatever condition he was at the time — a victim of gross state negligence. Raja Ram, aged 70, spent 35 years in Faizabad jail and Varanasi mental hospital without being proved guilty. In yet another case 70-year-old Jagjivan Ram languished in prison for 36 years because his records were missing. These few instances indicate that if there were a thorough investigation across the country in different jails, there would be many more under-trial prisoners languishing in jails without being convicted. In a different case pertaining to foreigners, 17 Pakistanis, who were found guilty of various crimes by courts, including that of entering the country without valid documents, were sentenced to imprisonment for various terms. They were in jail during the trial period because they could not be granted bail for obvious reasons. So far so good. But after the completion of their jail terms they should have been deported to Pakistan within a reasonable time. However, there were some who were awarded only six months of imprisonment by the court, and yet they were kept in the Foreigners’ Detention Camp, Lampur, Delhi, for periods ranging from one year to more than four years after they had undergone the awarded jail term, without the sanction of the law and in gross violation of their human rights. The plea of the Central Government in such cases that “these prisoners could be released only in return for an equal number of Indian prisoners languishing in Pakistani jails” was rejected by a bench of the Supreme Court of India, consisting of Justices Markandey Katju and R.M. Lodha on March 9, 2010, and they were ordered to be deported within two months. Fourteen of the 17 Pakistanis detained in the camp were deported to Pakistan on March 25, 2010. Nobody was punished for their illegal confinement. Of course, there is no provision for compensation in such cases. The appeal in the high court only a ploy to further harass the accused persons for the prosecution’s failure to get them convicted. It is because of the filing of such special leave petitions (SLPs) in the higher courts that the Supreme Court recently observed that it should not be burdened with unnecessary SPLs causing a rush of cases and avoidable delay in justice administration. It is nobody’s case that the police should abdicate its duty to catch and prosecute law-breakers and criminals. It has, however, been seen that even in cases of abduction and extra-judicial killings the guilty police officers go scot-free while even the most innocent victims suffer for their acts of omission and commission. There should be a proper, accurate and scientific investigation and gathering of real evidence, not concocted one, to sustain a case before the trial court. However, what is essential to make the justice administration system transparent and corruption-free is to devise a system of accountability wherein the prosecuting officers are held responsible for causing unnecessary and illegal detention of the accused. The detainees should be quite adequately compensated for the physical, emotional and social loss caused to them and their families, including the cost of litigation, which is exorbitant. Mere cosmetic police and judicial reforms cannot cure our decayed justice administration system. The writer is the National Secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties
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Development beyond reservations The
accommodation of the minorities, dalits and other backward classes in the Constitution was part of an affirmative action to achieve the basic principles of equity and justice. The idea was that once the communities are empowered through reservations, they would be integrated in the process of development. The reservation had two basic assumptions: first that communities are relatively homogeneous from within and thus every member of a community deserves an equal chance, and second, that over a period of time the boundaries between communities would dissolve, leading to the emergence of a civil society composed of rational actors. Over a period of 60 years both the assumptions have fallen flat and now we have an India that is much more fragmented — both horizontally and vertically. In the process each community has thrown up its own elite leadership that is well integrated at the top across boundaries, i.e. the material interests of the respective leadership have forged unity across different communities at the top at the cost of the purpose with which they got elevated to power. The real issue of empowerment of those sections of society that have been historically discriminated against has been bypassed. At the same time ordinary people find themselves in a big quandary. They repose greater trust in their “own” leadership to address their ever-sinking condition than the formal democratic system which they reject as an alien structure. Reservation, therefore, has turned out to be a scaffolding to reach up to the “sacred cow” that feeds on communitarian ideologies and allows milking only those who have acquired the skill of fanning communitarian exclusiveness. Our Constitution has provisions to constitute commissions equipped with “community scanners” that would prescribe reservations to all the “deserving” sections left out of its purview by then. Heaps of data would be generated in order to prove the marginality/discrimination of the given sections before the prescriptions for reservation are made. The idea is not to empower the disadvantaged but to woo the leadership of the respective community into the folds who did them favour by constituting the commission. After every report, such as that of the Mandal Commission or the Ranganath Mishra Commission the real debate always revolves around for and against reservation whereas the voice of the ordinary people is lost in the din. Nowhere in the world the art of hypocrisy among the ruling elites is as perfected as in India. Every leader starts his public discourse empathising with the people at the margin and would make every promise to do anything on earth to ameliorate their deplorable condition. In reality they would often wish the perpetuation of rampant poverty and illiteracy so that the price to buy the consent of the people before every election does not escalate disproportionately. Indian democracy is a living example to show how a democratic structure can be appropriated by feudal, or even pre-feudal, ideologies and social relations to strengthen the latter at the cost of the former. The introduction of the women reservation Bill in the Upper House is the latest example of the feudal use of Parliament whereby marshals were used to muffle the voices of dissent. The gender power exuded such a cementing force that even the “stark enemies” hugged each other with open arms only to display their perfection in the art of deceiving masses. A wide spectrum of welcome to the women reservation Bill by the left-right-centre political parties shows that the ideologies are only the mask whereas there is a wide consensus underneath on peacefully sharing political power, of course in the name of helping the poor. Even those who are opposing the Bill are not against it in principle; they are rather asking for furthering the reservation to the sub-constituencies from where they are drawing their power and legitimacy. The arguments above should not be construed as opposition to any form of reservation in the institutional and cultural spaces of empowerment under the Indian democracy. Reservations in the present form have a limited success in fulfilling the desired constitutional goals of equity and justice. Is it not the time to take a pause and think of better ways and means to empower the people left outside the process of development? Compulsory universal quality education, improved health and medical facilities and better employment opportunities are some of the important sources of empowerment yet to be addressed seriously. Are our political elites ready to throw away their masks and show courage to face the people squarely? The writer is a Professor of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh
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Delhi Durbar Of
late the CBI is increasingly finding itself at the receiving end of the judiciary as well as the media whether it is at fault or not in handling sensitive cases, forcing the premier investigating agency to do a lot of explaining. On its part, the CBI has clarified that it is conducting a thorough and fair probe in all cases without bothering about the personalities involved. The agency has faced criticism in a number of cases, including those against Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, RJD chief Lalu Prasad and SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi wanted in the Bofors payoff case. And to make matters worse for the CBI, it is not even in a position to defend itself against media criticism in matters which are sub-judice such as the delivery of a cash-stacked suitcase at the doorstep of a judge.
Quite a team
Union Secretary, school education and literacy Anshu Vaish and her husband Avani Vaish, currently the Chief Secretary in Madhya Pradesh, make quite a team. While Anshu is part of a core group in the Human Resource Development Ministry which put together the historic Right to Education Bill and pushed it, Avani Vaish set the ball rolling for implementation of the Act in MP, which emerged as the most proactive state at the start of the law’s rollout on April 1. So while the HRD Ministry was busy in the capital, familiarising the stakeholders with the nuances of the Act, Madhya Pradesh was already on the move, organising “shiksha chaupals”, and going door-to-door with the RTE campaign. The Chief Secretary got the MLAs to know the Act enough to talk about it. A unique orientation programme was organised in the state for members of the legislative assembly, who are now ready to go to the field and disseminate information on what the Act means and whose collaboration it seeks in educating children. The orientation programme was organised despite the Vidhan Sabha in session.
Saran still in govt? Shyam Saran, the former Foreign Secretary who was the Prime Minister’s special envoy for the Indo-US nuclear deal and climate change, quit his high-profile job last month. Though, he did not specify any reason, it is believed that he was finding it difficult to work on the climate change issue with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. And when Shiv Shankar Menon, Saran’s successor, was appointed the National Security Adviser (NSA), Saran felt it was time to say goodbye to the PMO. But many in diplomatic and media circles wonder whether Saran has actually given up his job. He recently represented the country at a conference on India-Japan cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy. His speech in Tokyo was posted by the MEA on its website and reporters on the MEA beat were duly informed about it through SMS.
Contributed by R Sedhuraman, Aditi Tandon and Ashok Tuteja
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