The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Vulgarity in virtual space
The law comes down with a heavy hand

The web brings out the worst of people's behaviour under its deceptive anonymity. At least it does so to a few, who believe they can get away with murder in the virtual world. So believed Adarsh Singh and his accomplice who allegedly sent vulgar messages to a woman and her relatives for extortion and blackmailing. They also projected her objectionable photographs on the internet. A case was registered against the accused by the Amritsar police and the accused was denied anticipatory bail by the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Justice M. S. Sullar termed such behavior a "grave and heinous offence" amounting to "outraging honour" of a woman.

The frequency of such crimes against women made the court demand that such cases be dealt with a heavy hand because they ruin the social fabric of our country. The digital revolution is proving to be a double-edged weapon. It puts women at greater risk of receiving obscenity under the garb of anonymity of the offender. The offenders overlook the fact that they can be traced eventually. Though India has enacted the IT Act 2001 to combat cyber crimes, crimes against women often do not get reported for the same inhibitions and stigma attached to other gender-related crimes as also due to lack of awareness about the cyber laws.

Section 66 A of the IT Act provides for punishment for sending offensive messages. It protects women against harassment, even without the help of the IPC. The IT Act has taken utmost care to prevent online sexual abuse of women. Three sections deal with obscenity alone, but the act does not mention the requirement for women staff in the cyber tribunal constitution, which should be addressed seeing the unique Indian social reality. Seeing the frequency of such crimes, the police should launch a drive to create awareness about the IT Act in schools and colleges, for both men and women, the way it does for the traffic rules.

Thought for the Day

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself. —Ethel Barrymore

On this day...100 years ago

lahore, tuesday, january 6, 1914
The protection of minors legislation

AS anticipated, the Indian National Social Conference has gone much further is respect of the proposed measure for the protection of minors than the Hon'ble Home Member is prepared to do. The first amendment it has proposed in the Bill, viz., the substitution of words 'unlawful or immoral for 'unlawful and immoral' in clause 2 of the Bill would perhaps strike at the traffic of girls by barda-faresh, who is generally not touched by its provisions. But the difficulty in adopting the suggestion lies, as explained by Sir Reginald Craddock, the lack of a clear and explicit definition of the word 'immoral,' either in law and usage and consequently the framers of the Bill have confined themselves to making only such acts penal as are particularly connected with the sexual contamination of minors. The second amendment proposed by the conference defines 'illicit sexual intercourse' as 'sexual intercourse without lawful marriage', whereas the Bill defines it as 'sexual intercourse not sanctioned by law or custom,' the object of the latter being to exclude unions short of actual legal marriage among classes and tribes, among whom such union is recognised.

Population of India and the rate of increase

THE population of India has, according to the last census, increased by 20,795,340 or 7.1 per cent. Certain localities have shown no increase but a decrease. Others have shown a better rate of increase. It would no doubt be interesting to know the causes of increase and decrease of population and other phenomena connected with the variation of population. An even and ample distribution of population, a well regulated system of irrigation, healthy climate are doubtless the usual conditions that tend to increase population. But the most fertile tracts sometimes become so unhealthy that no definite causes can be said to be permanently ascribed to the variations of population in India.

ARTICLE

Remodelling public sector banks
Privatisation to ensure capital-adequacy norms
Sanjeev Bansal

Indian banking is standing on the verge of “theatrical remodelling”, thanks to RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan's announcement. His enthusiasm for a "remodel" emerged way back in 2009 through the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms chaired by him. It is notable, however, that there is little novelty in the nature of the remodelling Rajan endorses. Whatever is being finished and what is scheduled to be completed are all schemes that were uncovered in the past by a string of committees — Narasimham I and II, Tarapore, Mistry, Rajan, to name a few.

RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has to go through a giant trial, which is grounded on the assurance to shake up the public sector banks

Rajan's impact appears in the fact that he has commenced executing, in true earnest, the numerous proposals that were in progression. Largely, there has been considerable development in two areas. The first is the series of measures that provide foreign banks larger access to and additional sovereignty in the native banking cosmos. The other is the subject of new private bank licences, for which submissions have been entertained from domestic conglomerates and business clusters as well. The latter had been kept out of this cosmos since bank nationalisation. However, with the committee to scrutinise and select the submissions in place, anticipation is that one or more business groups would re-enter Indian banking. Rajanomics seems to be working, aided by extensive media backing, and probably the fact that now elections would inhabit the nation's attention.

Given the expectations of the stakeholders, the current Governor has to go through a giant trial, which is grounded on the assurance to shake up the public sector banks. The post-reform approach of the government towards public banks has been contradictory. On the one hand, banks have been poked into loaning to areas such as the retail segment and infrastructure, resulting in a mounting size of non-performing loans and a rising volume of restructured corporate debt. While restructuring has facilitated camouflage the degree of inherent default and dress-up of the financial accounts of banks, even the RBI's just-released report on trends in banking articulates concerns about the state of public bank financial statements.

On the other, the RBI and the government seem dyed-in-the-wool to warranting that Indian banks meet the steadily tough capital adequacy requirements set by the new Basel guidelines. Three consequences flow from this assurance. First, since the early 2000s, the government has been forced to permeate capital into the public banking system to fortify their balance sheets and push them into compliance of universally recommended standards. The government has so far infused Rs.746 billion into the public banking system, with bulk of it having been provided since 2009. However, this is far insignificant of estimates of what the banks would need if Basel III has to be complied with.

Secondly, with the government still expecting the banks to offer the credit that would finance private investment and consumption, non-performing loans are destined to increase. Henceforth, prospects are that the amounts required for recapitalising the progressively fragile bank balance sheets would escalate.

Thirdly, since the course of recapitalisation is under way, the kind of capital required to beef up the Tier I capital on bank balance sheets has altered. More importantly, what is necessary is tangible common equity capital. If this has to be guaranteed while keeping the government's equity holding in public banks constant, much public resources would be required. The former Governor of the RBI, D. Subbarao, had projected that the government, which holds 70 per cent of the banking system, will have to pump in Rs 90,000-crore equity in the public sector banks to preserve its shareholding at the existing levels.

If the government is to meet this requirement, it would not be able to do it with off-budget measures such as the issue of recapitalisation bonds as it did before 2010. It must now provide resources in the budget to buy into equity, with associated repercussions for expenditures. If revenue escalations cannot finance those expenditures, the fiscal deficit will expand, which goes in contradiction of the self-inflicted targets of the government. This has set off a demand that public sector banks should sell new shares in the open market to finance recapitalisation. But there could be one problem. The existing law entails that the government should hold at least 51 per cent equity in public sector banks. A case is being made that decreasing public shareholding from the present levels to 51 per cent will not yield sufficient capital for recapitalisation that permits realisation of Basel III standards. Hence, the case for recapitalisation has been converted into a case for privatisation of the Indian banking sector.

Thus the call for privatising public banks also predates Rajan. The Narasimham Committee on Banking Sector Reforms had as far back as 1998 called for a reduction of the government holding in public sector banks to 33 per cent to make them more vibrant. The Percy Mistry Committee had moved out further to claim that privatisation is desirable because state-ownership had adversely affected the quality of financial intermediation. The solitary transformation at the moment is that the case is being put up on the ground that privatisation is compulsory to ensure capital-adequacy norms.

Therefore, while delivering on the public bank segment of his agenda to "remodel" Indian banking, Rajan would only have to implement a policy that has been hard-pressed for fairly some time now. But then again, implementing this feature of the financial restructuring agenda is more challenging since it requires altering the law, which, in turn, has political dimensions. Although the modelling may be difficult to lay down, Rajan's view undoubtedly is quite optimistic.

The writer is a Professor of Economics in Kurukshetra University

MIDDLE

Women, terriers and walnut trees
Col IPS Kohli

In the mid-sixties I was in Class 7. Father Aloysius G. Rego , a Roman Catholic priest, Goan by birth and a bastard by disposition, taught us 'Language in English'. He would enter the classroom and after a stern look at the class standing ramrod straight would bark 'sit' and never a 'sit down'. He would start the day checking home work. The smarter ones arrived before the morning assembly and did a neat cut-copy-and-paste job. The not-so-lucky were asked to line up. Rego carried an oiled cane. One by one the boys were asked to bend and before unleashing six vicious strokes on the posterior, he would whisper ominously 'neither a sound nor a whimper'! Boys of Class 7A grew up to be men with tempered backsides and steely resolves.

'Unusual proverbs' was Rego's pet subject. There is one I don't forget - 'A woman, a terrier and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten the better they be'. I have completely forgotten the paraphrasing that must have followed. I consulted Mr. Google and drew a blank. Another friend who has seen 65 summers and maybe more, when asked, answered sagely that though some of it sounded true, he had otherwise never heard the proverb.

Can a teacher today, unlike the priest, get away lacerating bums -- homework or no homework? Teachers invite the wrath of parents for lesser demeanours. Mollycoddling is the name of the game. My time all bums were fair game. Harder the kick, the better was the finished product. Today it is my generation providing senior leadership in all spheres and quarters of the country and numerous Father Regos have to be thanked for that. I veered from the proverb -- I wonder who coined it. Needless to say that no textbook dare carry it in the present milieu. Today women are equal stakeholders. For every Mulayam there is a Mayawati providing equilibrium. If there's a Vijender there's also a Marykom. Kareena's wages are no less than Shahrukh's. Special laws enacted by Parliament provide gender equality and security to women. Aberrations of 'Tehelka' kind will happen (I have known Tarun Tejpal and his family personally for 35 years). They are as straight and decent as any one of us. Yet Tarun transgressed.

Dare anybody mess with terriers and invite the wrath of Menaka Gandhi, SPCA, PFA, PETA etc! As kids, hearing lions roar at a circus at the crack of a whip was a huge thrill. Today a 'purr' is the most one can expect out of them. Except mankind, almost every other mammal falls in the category of a protected species. Soon trapping a rat might lead to a few days penance in the clink.

The walnut tree stumps me. Will somebody from the Horticulture Department tell me whether a sound walloping in any way leads to an increase in the yield of walnuts?

OPED

Gaitonde leads, contemporaries wait
The first-ever auction held by the global auction house Christie's in India saw a lesser known artist Vasudev Gaitonde's painting sold for ~23.70 crore or $3.792 million. Gaitonde's works are almost inexplicable. The sold painting became a talking point for the price it received
Johny ML

At Mumbai airport on December 22, 2013, I was waiting in the lobby to catch a flight to Delhi. A middle class family was sitting next to me. The father, who seemed to have nothing to do with art or art related activities, was reading that day's newspaper. His daughter was pestering him with a word, Taekwondo. Induced by the jolly mood of a prospective air travel, the father was teasing her with a word, 'Gaitonde'. Irritated, she replied eventually, 'Yes, I want to do Taekwondo and want a Gaitonde too.' Had it not been the Christie's first ever auction on the Indian soil on December 19, at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai, I would have been surprised to hear Gaitonde's name uttered by a random middle class gentleman in an airport lobby.

Economy intertwined with art
Boom in the Indian art was predicted six years ago, when the economy was promising.
Following the credit crunch and world wide banking collapse in late 2008 value of art works plummeted, the art funds and speculators left the market making thousands lose their money.
According to the independent art market analysts, Art Tactic, the September 2013 sales of South Asian art at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the Indian online auctioneer, Saffronart, were down 33.6 per cent from last year.
Christie’s chose to conduct their auction in India to save on 15 per cent cost of transportation and import tax.

Suddenly, the name, 'Gaitonde' was on everyone's lips. The late artist, who had been a recluse throughout his life, had fetched a whopping sum of Rs.23.7 crore at the Christie's auction. It was sort of a resurrection from near oblivion to the status of a demi-god. Surprises were sprung on the 19th evening as the usual suspects like Syed Hyder Raza (Rs.1.82 cr), Tyeb Mehta (Rs.19.78 cr), Ram Kumar (Rs.3.50 cr), Amrita Sher-Gil (Rs.3.62 cr) and Manjit Bawa (Rs.3.86 cr) performed beyond expectations. Bhupen Khakar (Rs.4.82 cr) and Ganesh Pyne (Rs.2.30 cr) turned out to be future hopes for the auction players. In their India debut Christie's made a total sale of Rs.96.60 crore.

Booster dose

Social networking sites and text messaging went haywire as the news of the auction results from the plush Taj Mahal Palace trickled out. Eminent personalities in the Indian art scene who are otherwise reluctant facebookers went out on a virtual partying mode by making optimistic and euphoric comments. A gallerist went to the extent of saying that it was a direct booster injection into the ailing heart of the Indian art market. Though skeptics did not fail to capture the opportunity to post their doubts, the general mood was ecstatic and euphoric. Gaitonde was immediately hailed by the media as the Indian Rothko, an expression that explicated the still indispensable effect of our colonial past. Gaitonde himself, who turned out to be the real rookie in the auction, according to his sister Kishori Das, would have taken the news with a strange coldness, had he been alive. The artist was like that. When he won a huge amount as a Japanese fellowship many years back, he showed no excitement. He did not even tell his family members about it. His mother woke him up with cautious words, fearing that the figures would cause him a heart attack or something and broke the news. To her surprise, he said that he knew about it almost a week before. This was the case when the news of Padma Shri in 1971 came in search of him. His family members knew about it when the neighbors went into a celebration mode.

Gaitonde — Untitled

Amrita Sher-Gil — Untitled (Hungarian Village Church)

Tyeb Mehta — "Mahishasura"

The enigmatic man

Born in 1924 in Nagpur, Maharashtra, Vasudev Gaitonde obtained his fine arts education from the illustrious Sir J.J.School of Art. He joined hands with F.N.Souza, M.F.Husain, S.H.Raza, K.H.Ara and Sadanand Bakre to form the Bombay Progressives or Progressive Artist Group in 1947. More like Raza he turned to abstraction after toying with the early 20th century stylistic experiments from the west. His initiation into the art of abstraction is said to have come from Mark Rothko, Paul Klee and Joan Miro as he got many opportunities to travel widely in Europe and America in 1950s. A man, who remained an enigma throughout his life, he was short in stature and many of his contemporaries craved for a meeting with him. An enigmatic man perhaps elicits more words from others than speaks for himself. Recently, "Chinha," a Marathi art magazine published a huge volume on Gaitonde's life and works and this is slated to be translated into English soon.

The success of Gaitonde's work has something to do with the enigma created by the artist himself. He rarely spoke of his works. Early this year, when Gaitonde's works were being posted in the social networking sites like Facebook, as a keen art market observer, I had sensed that he would be the next sensation in the auction circuit. Though social networking sites do not give a real picture about the real people and their real intentions, the subtexts that their postings create, most often give away their hidden agendas. The sudden eruption of an interest in Gaitonde's works was not accidental, I felt. As teaser, I had raised a question regarding the 'nature and meaning' of Gaitonde's works. Through my Facebook page I requested people to explain his abstraction in two or three comprehensive lines. Without revealing the fact that I considered Gaitonde's works as sort of meditative that depended much on layering of colors with a faint evocation of the oriental wash paintings, I asked the art fraternity friends to speak about Gaitonde's works. Some people were agitated in their answers as they did not speak about Gaitonde's works. The ones who responded to the question seriously went on explaining in paragraphs after paragraphs, mostly speaking of the esoteric meditative quality of those works. As their words have proved, Gaitonde's works remain important because they are inexplicable in terms of meaning but could be tackled either by speaking about esoteric meditation or stylistic formalism.

Quality via rarity

However, what makes Gaitonde's works dearer to the auction circuit now is not the rarity of his aesthetics but the rarity of numbers (of his works). Gaitonde was not a prolific painter. Even if he was, his works were not heavily collected by people. The collections that have Gaitonde's works are also those collections that hold the works of a certain period. They are not the collections like our contemporary times. Seen in this context, the phenomenal amount fetched by Gaitonde's work at the Christie's auction seems to be a bit manipulated. Though the name of the bidder is mentioned as a 'US Private Collector', the rationale of acquiring this particular work for this magnificent sum is not explained by anybody. Once the results were out, there were concerted efforts to locate Gaitonde's artistic stature within the Indian art history but not much has been talked about why Gaitonde's works are distinct in comparison with other abstract artists of his time.

In my view, this auction result and the similar auction results in the previous years reveal an emerging pattern. As the contemporary art market in India during the boom years had randomly bought and sold the works of contemporary artists without heeding much to quality but giving all emphasis to quantity, it has become imperative for the market players to look for rarity than to look for works that have speculative price with nothing to substantiate in terms of art history. Hence, the emerging pattern shows that this trend of pitching on the works of the modern masters who are dead and gone would eventually ensure quality via rarity. While living artists would create more therefore their existing oeuvre is rendered a bit mundane, the dead masters assure restricted supply or no supply at all.

Forecasting change

Also, in the case of modern artists, as quality of production and preservation of the works were not so important during their life time, those works that have withstood the test of times and climes would eventually fetch higher prices. In this sense, those buyers who have collected Gaitonde or other artists from the same time span, stand a better chance to gather maximum profit in the auction circuit. Besides, this emerging pattern shows that the next big names are going to be from late 1970s and 1980s. The indications have already been given in the Christie's auction by the biddings attracted by artists like Bhupen Khakar and Vivan Sundaram.

While I feel that auction houses are working from within the linear history of Indian modern art, as evidenced by the Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy collection that went under hammer at Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, under the aegis of Christie's, a vast treasure house of the pre-modern Indian art and also the art from regional centers during the pre-modern and modern times are still to be explored by them. Ashish Anand, who has just now expanded his Delhi Art Gallery operations in Mumbai would also become one of the key players in the auction circuit in the coming years. Anand not only has a good collection of the moderns but also holds a vast and deep inventory of the pre-modern art works, especially from Bengal. So is the case with the older galleries like Kumar Gallery, Dhoomimal and Vadehra Gallery in Delhi. Once they, with their strategic tie ups with the auction houses bring out their collections for auctions, there would be interesting changes in the Indian art market.

The secondary market has already been abuzz with the sales of modern and pre-modern masters, some even many months before the Christie's auction. The coming auctions are definitely for the art of 1980s. At the same time, one could be sure that before the auction houses turn their attention to the contemporaries, there would be diligent experiments in the market by acquiring regional modern masters and pre-modern art experiments from regional centers. In the meanwhile, as an insider says, market for contemporary art would remain a buyer's market for a long time; the buyer would negotiate the price unlike the seller and the artist calling the shots. The youngsters however, need not lose their steam. According to a Mumbai gallerist, it is just a two years' wait from now before the market for the contemporaries stages a come back. Till then, it is all about the moderns, for good or bad reasons.

The writer is Managing Editor of Art & Deal magazine.