The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

N-choe kindles hope
Things can, and do change

IF N-choe is Chandigarh’s shame, Buddha nullah is a blot on Ludhiana. Given the crumbling urban sewerage, fund-starved municipalities and an apathetic officialdom, almost every city and town in Punjab has its own sorry tale of civic neglect. Barring a few cases of rural facelift by NRIs, villages are filthy and without sewerage. The persistent efforts of The Tribune, citizen activism and the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s intervention have awakened the sleepy officials of Chandigarh to the need to clean up the seasonal rivulet.

If things could go adrift in a planned city, the plight of other towns is not surprising. Chandigarh, fortunately, has a responsive administration. Not so in Ludhiana, where efforts to clean up Buddha nullah have produced no material change. At stake is the health of 10 lakh people. The Sutlej river too has become a health hazard for the residents of nearby villages. Water-borne diseases are common in the area. The industrial units that discharge untreated effluents in the nullah and the river have the backing of powerful politicians. Now an assembly committee has suggested stiff penalties and non-bailable warrants against the owners of the units that pollute the nullah with impunity. The Punjab and Haryana High Court too is keenly monitoring the Buddha nullah case.

Other cities and towns too have their problems, mostly caused by poor infrastructure. A lot of money is available under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission for clearing the urban mess. But Punjab has not been able to use it because of its failure to meet the prescribed conditions like levying user charges and house tax. Money alone is not a constraint. Poor governance is an issue at various levels. A laid-back administration has got used to things as they are. Media scrutiny and public initiatives too are inadequate. N-choe holds out the hope that things can change — if there is a will.

Making voting compulsory
Gujarat Bill is not practical

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s proposal to make voting compulsory in the state for elections to local bodies has hit a roadblock with Governor Kamla Beniwal’s refusal to sign it. The State Assembly had passed the Gujarat Local Authorities Laws (Amendment) Bill last December. Though the Governor’s reasons for returning the Bill to the government will be announced in the next Assembly session, she has reportedly said that the Bill violates the Constitution which does not provide for mandatory voting and that no one can be punished for not voting. She has also asked the government to separate the voting Bill from the Bill seeking 50 per cent reservation for women in local bodies elections. While it would be interesting to watch the state government’s next move, one has to take a realistic view of the matter. In India, voting is a civil right and not a civic duty. Consequently, neither the Centre nor the state can make it compulsory.

Mr Modi’s enthusiasm to increase the voters’ participation in the democratic process may be praiseworthy. But his prescription for mandatory voting to ensure political stability and cut costs due to frequent elections is conceptually flawed. One must also look at the problem of its enforceability. Does the State Election Commission have the necessary staff and resources to enforce the proposal? Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla has expressed his inability to implement mandatory voting at the national level. More important, in April 2009, the Supreme Court has rejected a PIL in this regard, ruling that how seriously a voter takes his statutory right to exercise his franchise is best left to him.

Countries like Australia, Brazil and Argentina may have made voting compulsory. However, for improving the voter turnout, what is imperative is spreading voter education and awareness in the country rather than making voting compulsory and even punishing the defaulters, which the Gujarat Bill envisages. Moreover, if voters did not like any candidate in the fray, they should be given the option of negative voting or rejecting all the candidates by providing a button ‘None of the Above’ in the electronic voting machines. This would ensure that voters turn up at the polling booths unfailingly and register their choice or the lack of it.

Thought for the Day

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

ARTICLE

AfPak: Will they, won’t they?
Towards civilian supremacy in Islamabad
by B.G. Verghese

THE passage of the 18th Amendment by Pakistan’s National Assembly, rolling back the authoritarian constitutional provisions imposed by General Musharraf during military rule, has been hailed as a major democratic reform. All people of goodwill will wish Pakistan well. As of now, maybe, no more than two cheers are in order.

In a formal sense, there is an appearance of civilian ascendancy. The President has been reduced to a figurehead, though saved from corruption hearings on account of his constitutional position. The military has, meanwhile, regained prestige at home as its Waziristan /Swat campaigns have enabled Pakistan to look the US in the eye and win greater recognition for its frontline AfPak posture.

The new amendment allows the Chief of Army Staff a four-year-term, which implies a year’s extension in service for General Kayani. But there is no evidence as yet that the military has abandoned control over critical policies pertaining to security, nuclear issues and relations with India, the US, Afghanistan and China. A briefing meeting before the Pakistan delegation, led by the Foreign Minister, left for the recent strategic dialogue with the US in Washington, was taken by General Kayani in Rawalpindi with several Federal Secretaries in attendance! The annual defence budget, largely framed by the military, remains a mere one-line entry and is virtually charged to the exchequer without debate. The Kerry-Lugar amendment imposes conditionalities on how Pakistan utilises US military aid; but it remains to be seen how effective this safeguard proves in practice.

Even setting aside past default on this count, how auspicious are the omens even today? The latest UN Report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 on her return to Pakistan from exile is not very reassuring. Almost a year later, the Zardari administration requested Ban ki Moon to hold a UN inquiry as it feared the involvement of local agencies in what it felt was a staged murder. The three-member commission’s report was to be presented on March 15 but Pakistan sought some further inquiries. This request was turned down.

Pakistan then argued that the Government of Pakistan could alone release the report. This too was rejected and the commission’s 70-page findings were finally presented to the media in New York by its chair, Chilean diplomat Heraldo Munoz, on April 15. The Pakistan Ambassador boycotted the function. According to a columnist of Dawn, Karachi, the Pakistani authorities wished the “establishment” to see the report before they shared its contents with the general public.

Why it might have been thought prudent to provide the “establishment” with prior information becomes apparent from the report. It severely indicts the Musharraf regime, of which General Kayani was a part, for wilful negligence and cover-up, as well as the current PPP Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, who was travelling in the stand-by bullet-proof Mercedes car that was, however, found missing from the scene when it could have rushed BB to hospital.

The military and the ISI have been virtually accused by the UN Commissioners of preventing an autopsy, hosing down the assassination site, thus removing vital evidence, and obstructing the commission’s own inquiries. The report calls on Pakistan to set up a “truth commission” to get to the bottom of the crime. The unfolding in Islamabad will now be watched with interest.

Of special concern to India are the UN Commissioners’ findings that a probable reason for removing Benazir was her “independent position on the urgent need to improve relations with India, and its implications for the Kashmir dispute which the military regarded as its policy domain”. Further, the commissioners found evidence that the Army and the ISI used terrorist groups to further their strategic objectives and that “the bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still remains the work of groups such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which has close links with the ISI”. The LeT has morphed into the Jammat-ud-Dawa, headed by Hafeez Saeed.

General Musharraf quite clearly lied about Kargil, nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan (who was no lone wolf), and the use of jihadi terror against India. Zardari once again reiterated on April 5 that his government would not allow the soil of Pakistan to be used for cross-border terror against India. We must await evidence of that commitment. How the Bhutto case is now handled will be one test of that; else a policy of bland denial, counter-charges of Indian villainy and asking India to dialogue will not wash.

There will be another test in Afghanistan, where Pakistan has been seeking “strategic depth” and a sphere of influence. The US and NATO are up a gum tree and do not know what to do. President Karzai, whom the West sought to undermine, has called a Loya Jirga or gathering of Afghanistan’s tribal elders or highest traditional council on May 2-4 to seek a cross-ethno-cultural consensus on a peace process, national integration of insurgent groups and ground rules for carrying forward this process.

This initiative merits support by all regional and international players whose private, self-serving agendas should be subservient to promoting peace and harmony in a traditionally neutral Afghanistan and bringing stability and progress to the entire region. This too will be an acid test of Pakistan’s sincerity in making genuinely new beginnings as a good neighbour. Moreover, it will strengthen civilian supremacy and give sustenance to democratic forces in Pakistan.

MIDDLE

Canine love
by Surinder Gosain

IT is a story of love and trust that ended in betrayal. Although I have never been comfortable with a dog around, yet this dog, which came quietly to my first floor flat and sat in a corner of my balcony, did not seem to bother me.

It was a Sunday last summer when I first noticed her there sitting on a leaf of a newspaper. Besides her was a bowl of milk and another of salad-nibbles mixed with pieces of a chapatti.

On enquiry, I came to know that Shrawan, my Man Friday, had furtively made the arrangement for her. The slapdash manner in which she was feasting on the edibles amused me. After the meal, she came near me wagging her tail and began licking my foot and with it started a love-bondage. Later, I ensured that she got a non-vegetarian delicacy at least once a week, besides the usual food.

She would come to my flat in the morning and disappear in the evening stealthily. I knew about this routine of her although we met during the day essentially on a holiday. But she greeted me perpetually in the evening as I parked my car and we exchanged pleasantries mutely.

With the passage of time, the tacit love between the two mortals began spinning into mutual trust. She started coming to the flat early morning also before I left for office and as a matter of routine saw me off.

However, with the arrival of new tenants on the ground floor, her entry to my flat was prohibited. With two toddlers in the family, I agreed to their putting up a grill on the ground floor to prevent entry of any “such brute”. Whenever she saw me standing on the balcony, she gaped at me and the grill between us.

Lately, the dog’s visits near my house became less frequent and then almost for a month she was not on the scene. One evening, as I reached home, she came running towards me. Following her were three puppies. She gave me one look and another uncanny one at puppies as if she was introducing them to me.

Last week, Shrawan told me that the dog, usually hiding herself in a corner, was biting one and all passing by our house. He took me to the balcony and what I saw upset me.

Saddened, I rang up the People for Animal to take the dog away. They tried their best to clutch her onto a leash but without any luck. As they sought our help in the task, I told Shrawan to coax the dog inside our boundary wall. The dog got entrapped as she anticipated no threat from any of us.

I saw her being forced onto a van along with her puppies, while the dog looked at me. Tears rolled down her eyes and she looked at me as if she was asking: “Why did you betray?” Biting my lips, I bade her goodbye.

OPED

Of news and trivia
Media should realise its responsibility
by Sajla Chawla

HERE are some headlines from our newspapers: “Sunanda Pushkar: The Minister’s ‘External Affair’”, “Preity and Ness together again”, Carmen Electra regrets getting fake breasts”, “Shoaib Malik: Victim or rogue?” and “I don’t feel the need to marry John: Bipasha”

How much do we really know about Shashi Tharoor and his lady love to comment on their relationship? Photo: PTI

Do you feel strange after reading such news items? Is there a fraternity, like me, who wonders what Preity and Ness being apart or together has to do with us? If Bipasha does not want to marry John, are we supposed to rejoice or lament?

For days and days together the media carried the story of Sania and Shoaib and one poor deserted wife or not a wife! Maybe a one liner would be enough for us to know what the tennis sensation of this country is doing. But to go on and on about it?

Why is then the Press doing this? Why do our esteemed TV channels, with seemingly great commitment to news, do this? Who are they catering to? Is it to the great number of people who live on celebrity gossip and hence lead a voyeuristic life? Perhaps, their own lives are so mundane and boring that all the fun is to be derived vicariously from other people’s escapades and other people’s miseries.

In catering to the masses, as is claimed by the media, are they not creating a readership of people who will read this type of news so religiously? Does this say anything to you about the society we are living in? Don’t some of us, who, when they see such items, feel a distinct sense of the bizarre and the absurd?

The media, especially, newspapers, magazines and TV channels, are a very powerful entity in our contemporary times. They have the power to influence public opinion and thus they inherently have a responsibility towards that public.

The media perhaps does not realise its own power and is very often not acquainted with the responsibility it shoulders or rather should shoulder. That sense of responsibility is somewhere lost now in the race for higher ratings and debating on non-issues. How much do we really know about Shashi Tharoor and his so-called lady love, to comment on their relationship and who are we to conduct a mass scale courtroom drama to ascertain whether Shoaib is a rogue or a victim? More importantly, how do their personal lives impact our lives in anyway?? Is their personal story going to change the quality of our lives? Is learning details about their sex lives going to bring a great revolution in society?

The TV channels have almost lynched the ex-minister and his friend. Propriety has been perhaps transgressed by him but is it reason enough to hound him so mercilessly? Haven’t we seen bigger scams in this country where the government’s money and hence the people’s money has been looted by politicians?

Many esteemed, so-called feminist journalists have tried to rip Sunanda apart with trivial details of her life like her past relationships and her supposed plastic surgery. In what way is that relevant to the citizens of this country and why is the Press creating this sort of inane readership and viewership? The right to expression is fine, but does it have to do away with the judiciary and conduct nationwide media trials very often on people’s personal lives? And all this while the perpetrators of communal violence, dalit murders, rapes and corrupt officials are at large and thriving!

This country has 60 percent of its people below the poverty line. There is a Maoist and Naxal threat. There is no safety or respect for women as is obvious from the number of infanticides, feticides, witch-hunts, rapes and honour killings. There is not much credibility in the working of the government; there is hardly any accountability either. We live in an unsafe world where thousands are homeless and live on the streets of the metropolitan cities, like in the extreme cold of 2 degrees C, in Delhi, where newborns lie uncovered and unattended to on a concrete footpath, while the elite classes, boil and sanitise the bottles of their children or have maids to do so for them. Yet the media hardly takes up these issues and if they do, it is often to sensationalise and then no follow-up.

The media depicts the lavish lives of the rich and the famous. A poor man feels more starkly the difference between the classes. The media is one such powerful estate, which can bring about social awakening and change. Often, they do so, with great results. But very often they focus on non-issues while this big country is caught in such toils and travails and real hardcore survival issues. It is time that the media reassess its role in society and work for development, rather than get caught in trivia.

Do we want to create a nation of thinkers or a nation of gossip mongers? The media holds the key. Let them use it wisely, for all of us.

The writer, a former Delhi University teacher, is based in Goa

Only mavericks trigger reform
by Chandra Mohan

I was a guest at a convocation the other day. While we were being dolled up in those gold-trimmed robes, conversation naturally swung to Jairam’s recent tirade against this colonial outfit and its crass incongruity to our dust and heat.

The first to flash across my mind were naturally the proudly displayed pictures in every home of ecstatic young faces dressed in the ceremonial gold-trimmed black, red and scarlet collecting graduation scrolls. If such is their cherished value, wasn’t Jairam being too harsh? But then, wasn’t he also correct? The legacy is grossly incongruent with our heat. Power cuts only add to the misery.

Fancy robes, caps and sashes and their fine-tuned gradation were adaptations by the Roman Church to symbolise hierarchy in the fast-expanding priesthood required for propagating Christianity in the newly acquired Roman territory. The Pope was all white with gold trim; cardinals in red and ermine; archbishops in white and violet and so on.

The robe design to suit the Mediterranean and temperate climates was natural.

This Vatican practice was later adapted by Oxford and Cambridge u niversities to academics. Because of the pioneering role of these universities in Western education, copying of their dress-code by every university in the Western world was natural. For us, it is certainly a colonial legacy.

This conversation brought back memories of another colonial legacy. Grey-haired compatriots would recall that till the seventies a dark suit was the standard dress code for our corporate and business worlds. Air-conditioning was not so common those days and in the sweltering heat and humidity of Calcutta and Bombay suits were oppressive. By the time you ended the day, shirt sleeves and collars were all grime and sweat. As doyens of modern industry, auto-industry bosses always dressed immaculately following latest fashions from Harrods and Paris.

In 1979 Rahul Bajaj was the Chairman of the AMA and George Fernandes, Union Minister for Industry, was the chief guest at the association’s AGM in Ashoka Hotel. Despite the fact that George had already driven out IBM and Coke from India, expectancy of pro-industry announcements by the minister ran high.

Everyone, including Rahul, was taken aback, when George launched a tirade against the auto industry: “...Industrialists are like rats who desert a ship and run away the moment a leak develops and they foresee trouble. All that they are interested in is lining their pockets and maintaining their fancy lifestyles and London suits …. ”

Safari suit was born out of that tirade. It became the national dress code for business next year onwards.

The academic world, however, is not so simple. Each of its many fine-tuned levels is a coveted honour and distinction: DSc, PhD, M Phil; masters and graduates. Standards are zealously guarded by the fraternity and clearance of stipulated theoretical and practical standards is mandatory. Symbols which broadcast levels are, therefore, important ego-boosters.

Can we not replace those unwieldy and sweaty legacies by something which suits our climate? But it must serve the same purpose. It must also be Unisex. It must look elegant with every style commonly worn by Indian students. Significance to Indian heritage would be ideal.

Deeper thinking on solutions led me to the angavastram. With its elegance, heritage stature and wide use for ceremonial occasions it could certainly fill the bill. It can be worn over any dress. Infinite variations in background colour and number and design of gold and silver braids provide all the fine-tuning flexibility required for academics.

If we can go the whole hog to rename towns, shouldn’t the HRD Minister assign the task of evolving an Indian dress for academic ceremonies to a committee of Vice-chancellors and Directors of IIMs & IIT’s? A national competition to which our famous fashion designers like Rohit Bal, Tarun Tahliani and H2O/CUE are also invited, would surely bring out interesting results.

Bangalore Diary
Shubhadeep choudhury
Gill? Must be KPS

K P S Gill/M S Gill

Since he successfully scuttled the Indian cricket team’s tour to Pakistan in 2008 citing the 26/11 incident, Union Sports Minister M S Gill has not been in the news much. The 74-year-old minister was described as “K P S Gill” during his recent visit to Bangalore.

While MS, because of his disappearance from the news space, has got obliterated from public memory for the time being, the other Gill, owing to his eventful tenure as the police chief of Punjab during the days of militancy and his knack for courting controversy, has become a permanent feature in the mindset of the people in this country.

So when M S Gill came here recently and shook hands with Karnataka Chief Minister Yeddyurappa, photographs released by the state government of the meeting described the Union minister as K P S Gill. It took three hours for the state government to correct the mistake and restore to the Union minister his name.

Astroturf ground

The game of hockey is close to the heart of all Punjabis. It turns out that the “Madrasis”, too, love the game. The Madras Engineering Group (“Madras Sappers”), known for its personnel’s nimble skills with deadly explosives and erection of bridges in difficult terrains, recently got an astroturf hockey ground at their sprawling campus in Bangalore.

This is apparently the second such ground belonging to the Indian Army. The 6591 sq metre ground in Bangalore has been created by a German company at an expense of Rs 3 crore. The ground has been certified as being of the global class I category by the Federation of International Hockey.

Jewel thieves

An all South-American gang did a hit in Bangalore only to get busted later. Four persons, including a woman, were arrested by the Bangalore police from Goa for stealing gold ornaments worth more than Rs 1.5 crore from a Bangalore hotel.

The ornaments were brought to Bangalore by jewelers from Jaipur for an exhibition. Two of the culprits are from Colombia, one from Venezuela and one from El Salvador.

The picture of one of them captured in the Hotel CCTV camera led to their arrest. No other clue was left by the gang members who teamed up in Malaysia and visited various Indian cities looking for suitable objects to steal.

WW II veterans

The Karnataka Government has enhanced the monthly honorarium for the World War II veterans and their widows from Rs 1,500 to 2,000 with effect from April 1, 2010. In other states the WW II veterans continue to get Rs 1,500 or less.