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A missed opportunity
Advertise healthy foods |
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Failure to follow the path of socialism
From ‘Kaka’ to Uncle to ‘Babaji’
Shifting sands — the emergence of Iran
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A missed opportunity At his “Lalkar rally” in Jammu on Sunday Narendra Modi moved from the BJP's commonly voiced demand for the scrapping of Article 370, which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, to an open debate on the issue. Earlier, he had a change of heart on Pakistan. Addressing ex-servicemen at Rewari in September, Modi was soft, sober and reasonable towards Pakistan. Jingoism and belligerence have become so much part of his rhetorical speeches that a departure, if any, does not go unnoticed. Eyeing the Prime Minister's office, Modi is perhaps trying to smoothen the rough edges of his personality and preparing the ground for a transition from extremism to moderation to make his candidature for the top post more acceptable. Still, being Modi, he could not change overnight. What he said in Jammu did evoke sharp reactions in Kashmir. He said Article 370 had benefited only select political families in Kashmir. He cited the example of Omar Abdullah and his sister to emphasis the alleged discrimination against women. The Chief Minister challenged his facts, while PDP leader Mufti Mohammad Sayeed questioned his knowledge of constitutional history. The BJP has no answer to the usual counter-question: Why did it not abrogate Article 370 when it was in power at the Centre? Modi draws crowds partly because of his witty, sarcastic and extreme remarks, even if not based on facts. In his attempt to regale his audience, Modi runs down his opponents but forgets to present a serious alternative vision. Jammu and Kashmir is a sensitive state which has witnessed militancy for long, and lately a spurt in killings on the Line of Control. Because of violence over the years, the tourism-dependent state has lagged behind. The challenge before the state and Central leadership is how to restore normalcy and spur economic growth to create jobs for youth and help people lead a life of dignity. As a Prime Minister hopeful, Modi should have given the people of Jammu and Kashmir a reassurance and hope for a better future. He has missed a chance to build
bridges.
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Advertise healthy foods While malnutrition is among the highest in Indian children, the rising percentage of obesity among urban youth spells a new worrying trend. Earlier studies conducted on those in the 24-39 age group had shown an alarming rise in obesity, suggesting up to 70 per cent of urban India to be afflicted with the disorder caused by a sedentary lifestyle and obesity. Now, a study suggests that 30 per cent of urban children, aged 4 to 18, are obese. The study has urged the IAP (India Academy of
Paediatrics) to form a task force to deal with this peril of prosperity. States like Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, with higher per capita incomes, find their young, touted to be India's USP in a globalised economy, to be more prone to diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and cardiovascular problems. The responsibility for these conditions lies with easy access to high-calorie packaged food, colas, little physical activity and a penchant for gizmos, video games and virtual world of the Net. Added to all this is an increase in smoking and alcohol consumption. What probably set the alarm bells ringing on the issue was a November 2010 study, conducted by the National Diabetes, Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation of India, which found that one in three children in private schools in Delhi and Chandigarh were obese. Banning the sale of junk food and colas in schools has been suggested and experimented with in a few cities of India and abroad. But as long as junk food is promoted on TV as the sole saviour of busy, working mothers and colas are projected as the manna from heaven, their consumption will remain high. Secondly, for many, a sedentary lifestyle is not a choice but a compulsion. If the Health and Family Welfare Ministry is genuinely concerned, it should start a campaign for nutritious food and a healthy lifestyle that should match the advertisement campaign of colas and junk food in scale and style. It should move beyond the culture of banning. |
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Thought for the Day People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers |
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Vernacular studies The study of Vernaculars by English civil servants in India is certainly not what it should be. Consequently the bulk of the officers are unable to know the people of this country as well as their official duties and position require them to know. Moreover the study of language and literature of the people will enable the civil servants to understand the ideals and thought of the people and their effect on their daily activity. Two civilians of the United Provinces are just reported to have passed the proficiency test in Urdu. One has passed the higher standard in Persian and one in Hindi. The latter officer has also passed the high proficiency examination in Sanskrit. His example is praiseworthy as the study of Sanskrit gives a thorough insight into the Hindu national ideals. There is some force in the suggestion made last year by some witness before the Public Services Commission that the civil servants should not be entertained before they pass a high standard examination in the Hindi or Sanskrit, Persian or Urdu. Indian sugar growing experiments
The imports of sugar into India continue on an enormous scale and the attempts made to manufacture Indian sugar have not become successful. It is considered that in a soil so exhausted as Indian soil, it is hardly possible to grow sugar on a scale that will compete with the output on a virgin soil. This idea seems to find confirmation in the working of the agricultural experiments carried on by Government in Jorhat in Assam. The principal experiments were with sugarcane and the Assistant Director writes that the results of the former year's working indicate the possibility of Assam being a large sugar-producing country. |
Failure to follow the path of socialism Article 39(b) of the Constitution was always understood to mean that in India we have to endeavour to set up a socialist society. This is brought out specifically by Dr. Ambedkar in reply to Prof K.T. Shah, who wanted 'socialism' to be incorporated in the Constitution at the drafting stage. Dr. Ambedkar, while expressing his inability to do so for technical reasons, explained that socialism as such was already included in the directive principles. He explained thus: “What I would like to ask Prof. Shah is this: ‘If these directive principles to which I have drawn attention are not socialistic in their direction and in their content, I fail to understand what more socialism can be?’ Therefore, my submission is that these socialist principles are already embodied in our Constitution and it is unnecessary to accept this amendment.” It is self-evident that to the extent there is failure by any government in following the course of the socialist path, it will be held guilty of violating its constitutional obligation. The innocent but misplaced faith of those who still continue to believe that the development of the Indian economy can follow the false premise of globalisation ignores the warning given by respectable economists even of the USA who have clearly pointed out two ominous developments - one in the financial realm and the other relating to the real economy. To talk against globalisation in the well-cloistered quarters of governments and the corporate sector is looked upon as almost treason. So let me invoke Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist, who in his book (2006) is very caustic about the assumed benefits of globalisation. He has commented forcefully that "Globalisation is neither socially benign nor has it been instrumental in reducing poverty". According to him, globalisation has been detrimental to the poor and other weaker sections of society. Globalisation policies have been responsible for many ills of the global financial crisis and loss of employment as inefficient industries closed down under pressure from international competition. The lesson to be drawn from the economic crisis in the US and Europe is clear, namely, that it were the oligarchic financial institutions that were chiefly responsible for it. The sordid story of multinational banks like Citibank and Goldman Sachs which by their greedy operations are responsible for damaging the US economy with their private profit-oriented policies and being rescued only because of the intervention of the US government and its Treasury clearly exposes the much-touted efficiency of the private sector over the public sector. The latest financial disaster in the US relates to — the case of J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, the largest in the US by assets, which faces multiple investigations and a $5.8 billion loss on wrong bets on credit derivatives. Some of the well-known American banks are already under suspicion of the allegation that their firms rigged interest rates or were involved in money laundering. Ironically, the UPA government still feels that the talisman for growth is permitting these very foreign banks' unchecked entry into the Indian market. The government, almost on bended knees, invokes the aid from foreign multinationals and apparently justifies it on the ground that we do not have sufficient financial resources for development and therefore need foreign capital. How mischievously wrong! According to the Union Minister of Commerce, in the last ten years only about $250 billion (about Rs 12 lakh crore) has been received in India. As against this, “The top 500 listed companies have enough cash on their books to double India’s power generation capacity of 2.00,000 mw or build over 40,000 km of six-lane high ways every year (compared with the current 800km), but are refusing to invest because of the slowing economic growth that has been aggravated by policy paralysis. By March 31, 2012, these companies were sitting on cash and cash equivalent of over Rs 9.3 lakh crore or $160 billion”. India is certainly not shining and this is even clear from the Human Development Report released by the Planning Commission in October, 2011, showing the widening gap between the rich and the poor. “In India, the distribution of assets is extremely unequal, with the top 5 per cent of the households possessing 38 per cent of the total assets and the bottom 60 per cent of households owning a mere 13 per cent. Just 66 resident billionaires in India control asset worth more than a fifth of the country’s GDP. Capital at large is three times more concentrated than in the United States”. If the main parties continue to violate the mandate of the Constitution, let them beware of the foresight shown by Dr. Ambedkar, who when winding up the debate in the Constituent Assembly over 60 years ago while approving the Constitution warned us, “We are going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic life, we will have inequality…..We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously constructed”. I humbly submit that the above warning continues to have the same relevance and urgency today. Are the political parties listening? The writer is a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court |
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From ‘Kaka’ to Uncle to ‘Babaji’ The mushaira at a very eminent senior citizen's place had ended and I was looking for my shoes in the verandah when a pretty woman approached me and said, “Beta, apne pitaji nu kaihna main unhan nu milna chauhndi haan." (Son, tell your father that I want to meet him). She took me for the son of the Principal of Architecture College. While I relished her unintended compliment in all the pores of my body, I also felt envious of my father. Since I paid little attention to my clothes I was always casually dressed on weekends. A student's father called on me at my impressive one-acre official residence on the PEC campus and spoke to me for a long time. When wanting to depart he asked me to convey this message, “Principal Sahib aoun taan kaihna main aaya saan” (When the Principal returns tell him that I had come). Quite clearly he had taken me for the boss's attendant! Over twenty years ago I started colouring my beard, and continued to do so despite one embarrassing encounter during my lecture on personality development at the CSIO. A Sardarji in the front row said, “This is a personal question but you must answer it honestly: why do you have to dye your beard?” I said, “There is nothing personal. It’s professional. If I can tell my clients to use paint on the exterior of the buildings I design as an architect, why can't I wear a dye on myself?" Be that as it may, three months ago, I had anyhow resolved to get rid of the hair dye. But this resolve, which was a reluctant mumbling to myself, was typically babu-like in its terminology: “This long-indulged regular weekend exercise would end when the dye stock gets exhausted or I turn 75, whichever is earlier.” Unfortunately, the carpenter's presence fell between the two to make me ‘Babaji’ prematurely. My hurt is not caused by the stabbing revelation but the disappearance of the truth that only three months ago even grandchildren of my students used to call me ‘Uncle’. For me, hell is thus not a place of retributive turmoil-it is a heart-rending quantum leap from ‘Kaka’ to ‘Uncle’ to 'Babaji'! |
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Shifting sands — the emergence of Iran
The agreement reached in Geneva between the P-5 plus 1 and Iran on the latter’s nuclear programme has, called only “a first step”, in spite of the fact that it is only for a period of six months and is almost tentative in its approach. Because of its potential, this has caused a churning of the geopolitics of the region. Though the negotiations were between seven countries, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, the UK, France Russia and China) Germany and Iran, the rapprochement, if that is what the agreement truly signifies, is between the US and Iran, Russia and China being supporters of Iran. Yet, it has global political and economic implications beyond nuclear issues, affecting not only the region, but India as well. The specific issue of the agreement centres on the charge made initially by the US, that Iran was planning to build nuclear weapons and the layers of sanctions then imposed by the UN and the US and its allies on Iran, making the latter perhaps one of the ‘most sanctioned countries’ in the world. Iran, denying any intention of building such weapons has been locked in intensive, often vicious negotiations with the US its allies and the IAEA, for almost a decade, as one side sought to ensure Iran’s compliance with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of which it is a member as a non-nuclear weapon State, and Iran’s efforts to retain the rights contained in the NPT to pursue building the infrastructure for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The problem lies in the thin line between such activities and those related to weapons development. The controversy became global in impact as it was seen as a direct challenge to the effectiveness of the 192-member NPT and the nuclear regime as a whole and when the sanctions affected other countries, including India. A quick overview of how this situation emerged can perhaps clarify the significance of the present agreement. The West, in particular the US, had assisted Iran under the Shah to set up Iran’s nuclear programme in the 1950s. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the siege of the US Embassy with its diplomats kept hostage for over a year, and relations between both countries plummeted to a viscerally adversarial one. To the US, Iran was a part of the ‘axis of evil’ and to Iran, the US was the ‘Great Satan’. Though the accusation by the US that Iran was attempting to build a nuclear weapon in violation of the NPT was made in 2002, US sanctions against Iran started in 1979. The US ordering a freeze on Iranian assets in the US. In 1984, the US declared Iran a country that supported terrorism — (Hezbollah in Lebanon). Trade and investments were banned from the US to Iran in 1995 and the next year the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act was passed which sanctioned non-US business in Iran’s energy sector. To this were added financial sanctions, including, in 2011, the stoppage of foreign financial institutions from conducting oil transactions with Iran’s central bank. Other sanctions were placed including on Iranian institutions and individuals, some in the form of the US President’s Executive Orders. The EU followed suit, but perhaps, the most damaging were the sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council through four binding resolutions. The election of President Ahmedinijad in Iran and his bellicose statements regarding Israel’s right to exist, heightened the tensions, and brought Israel into the equation. Israel felt that a nuclear-armed Iran was an existential threat to it and has been seeking a military solution to Iran’s reported continued nuclear weapons programme. Saudi Arabia and the UAE too, were reported to be nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while the former saw in Iran a challenger to its leadership of the Islamic Ummah. In this background, the Geneva agreement was bound to create a sandstorm as the shifting sands seemed to unveil the emergence of a stronger Shia power in the region with close linkages not only with Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and with Shia majority Iraq, but with affinity and as some alleged, close and subversive ties to Shia minorities in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States that had withstood the churning of the Arab Spring. The agreement, as has been pointed out, is valid for six months only. Put simply, it freezes the Iranian programme at current levels in return for a partial lifting of sanctions. Iran has agreed to stop all uranium enrichment beyond 5 per cent (90 per cent enriched uranium required for a bomb), to dilute it stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium to 5 per cent,halt construction of a heavy water reactor at Arak and permit IAEA inspectors greater access, including to its nuclear sites at Natanz and Fordow. The US and Europe have agreed to lift sanctions of a value of US$ 7 billion (out of $80 billion frozen), through imports of gold, aviation and automotive spare parts and the export of petrochemicals. Financial and trade sanctions remain in place. A comprehensive agreement is to be negotiated after the six-month period, if the earlier arrangements have been implemented. Iran’s nuclear weapons programme has been ‘capped’, it needs now, by the US approach, to be ‘rolled back and eliminated’. Clearly, there are obstacles ahead. Israel has denounced the Geneva agreement and its lobbies in Washington are at work with the US Congress . At the same time, hardliners in Iran too might put a spoke in the wheel. Saudi Arabia is now reported to have mutedly supported the deal having found itself in the uncomfortable company of Israel in its earlier objections. It is the US which has a major task here to ensure that the balance between Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arabs and Iran is maintained, so that the sectarianism that is causing so much violence is controlled and the region regains its much-desired stability. India has welcomed the Geneva agreement. While a successful comprehensive agreement would entail fairly obvious benefits, that is likely to be some time away-if at all. One should not underestimate the political difficulties the US Administration faces in its divided polity. At the same time, one needs to note that it is not just that stability in the Gulf region is of vital importance to us — our six million expatriates and our dependence on that region for our energy security makes this area one of strategic interest to us. India also has important relations with the countries of the region, including Israel which is today a major source of our defence purchases; our relations with Saudi Arabia too have been improving of late. India’s relations with Iran are more complex — seen as it is by Iran today thorough the lens of its relations with the US and its sanctions-ridden economy. If this situation changes, that is, if relations with the US are normalised and sanctions are lifted, Iran’s approach to India may be determined by other factors. On nuclear issues, India and Iran have rarely been on the same page. On other issues too, Iran was not a known sympathiser of India’s causes such as Kashmir, though India was a major purchaser of Iranian oil. India was in the process of building up relations when Iran became snared in the nuclear controversy. At the moment there are, however, other spin-off effects of the current agreement that are not a part of India-Iran bilateral relations, but affect India’s wider interests at least in two areas. If the Iran-US rapprochement is sustained, the US could find some leeway in its efforts to ensure a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan using the Iranian route. It is interesting that the National Security Adviser has asked for urgent action to move the development of Chahbahar port in Iran ahead. The loosening of the US dependence on Pakistan for its withdrawal could ensure that the final political negotiations are not necessarily dictated by the sponsors of the Taliban. It is now known that the back channel discussions between Iran and the US which have been taking place over the past year have touched on non-nuclear issues as well, such as Syria. It would be natural that Afghanistan would also be on the agenda. The other area of benefit to India from stability in the region and the resumption of the flow of Iranian oil would arise from a lowering of oil prices. There has to be a caveat here, though. The sectarianism that has been tearing countries of the region apart has already got Pakistan in its grip. If there is not an understanding between the Arabs and Persians on the need to start a healing process, the instability will continue and possibly increase. The Gulf is a region of shifting sands — and the shifts are unpredictable. For India with such vital interests at stake, a proactive policy to approach all the stakeholders to grab this opportunity for stability, would be in our own interest. The writer is a former diplomat who was the head of the Indian delegation that participated in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty negotiations in Geneva in 1996.
Timeline 2013 January April September November |
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