Benjamin Franklin once said, “There are three things that men are most likely to be cheated in: A horse, a wig, and a wife.” One can easily substitute the word horse for wealth, as the former was considered a measure of a man’s wealth at the time. The desire to become rich has been at the root of all scams recorded in history.
India is not new to scams — they have plagued us right from the time of independence. But the regularity with which they are taking place is truly shocking. Also, given that most of the scams involve the same old tricks of cheating such as underwriting or fudging company books, one will not be wrong in saying that history is repeating itself. The only thing that distinguishes one scam from another is that the companies and the principle actors are different. But the motive remains the same in each case.
The Rs 7,000-crore scam that chairman of Satyam Computers Services Ramalinga Raju has admitted to has taken the wind out of corporate India. He has disclosed that the company’s balance sheets were dressed-up over several years. It is a crime for which he and his brother as well as the chief financial officers of the company have been arrested.
There can be no doubt about the fact that this was a case of corporate fraud of epic proportions, which like other similar white-collar crimes will take centrestage in public memory for some time to come. In the aftermath of the fraud there has been a lot of talk about effective and transparent corporate governance and a system of institutionalised checks and balances.
The role of checks and balances is best illustrated in the thriller Silver Blaze, wherein Sherlock Holmes deals with the theft of an expensive racehorse on the eve of an important race. Asked whether there is any point to which Holmes wants to draw the Scotland Yard detective’s attention, Holmes points to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The detective replies, very aptly, that the dog did nothing, to which Holmes responds that the dog made no noise because it knew the thieves well. Perhaps, this is what happened to the internal and external auditors in Satyam’s case. As it is, the laws in our country are so lax that a thief who has stolen a bottle of liquor gets almost the same quantum of punishment as that of a prince embezzler.
Much has been made of the role of independent directors in the Satyam saga. I asked an officer, who had retired from a top audit and accounts service, as to what he was doing these days. He said that he was an independent director in a large number of companies. Then I asked him as to how seriously he took his job, to which he replied that he was only interested in the sitting fees and perks, and that if he raised too many queries he would be eased out of the board.
The truth is that even Government companies and organisations do not function as models of probity and efficiency because of the continuous interference, not only in taking decisions but also in awarding contracts. Large amounts of funds are misused by those who exercise control over these companies from their seat of power.
When the infamous Harshad Mehta scam took place, Mr Manmohan Singh, who at the time was the Finance Minister, described the scam as a system failure and had subsequently declared that steps would be taken to rectify the situation. But promptly after that surfaced the Ketan Parekh scam.
Each scam that comes to light seems to be bigger than the previous one. And each of them is due to greed and the lack of any deterrence. The best of laws with the worst of men can be misused and the worst of laws with good men will never deter these corrupt practices. There is no coherent, integrated machinery in our country to deal with such fraud in the private corporate sector.
The responsibility of enforcing the law in the corporate sector is split between the Serious Fraud Investigation Office, Department of Company Affairs, SEBI, Banking Department and the State police. The police comes in the final picture and can take action only for offences of cheating, fraud and defalcation. A police case can mean a long-drawn affair, which may take even 10 years to be finalised.
Truly speaking, there is hardly any worthwhile punishment for the collaborators and the auditors in such cases of fraud. The Companies Act undoubtedly lays down the duties and powers of the auditor. But the penalty for non-performance is pathetic and puny. If an auditor fails in carrying out his duties properly, the maximum penalty is a fine of Rs 10,000.
Incidentally, PricewaterhouseCooper, the firm which audited the books of Satyam, received a consolidated audit fee of Rs 4.3 crore for the financial year 2007-08, almost twice as much as Satyam’s peers like TCS, Infosys and Wipro pay to their auditors. Satyam promoters and others who have benefitted — some by insider trading — could not have carried out their scam with the fear of being found out by the auditors. According to one report, about Rs 800 crore was made by insider trading and sale of shares in this scam.
The truth is that there can be big or small money involved in auditing, depending upon the size of the company. No auditor, unless he wants to be out of the business, would be too harsh or expose any wrongdoings. There are many Ketan Parekh, Harshad Mehta and Satyam scams waiting to emerge if company auditors are willing to put their neck on the block and lose their business. But it is doubtful, if anybody would commit harakiri.
According to company law, for fudging of accounts there is a maximum fine of Rs 5,000 and imprisonment of up to two years. No doubt the Companies Act does provide for special audit, investigation, reconstitution of the board of directors and even ‘dawn raids’. But the penalties for non-compliance are as good as non-existent. Moreover, there is no mechanism even for test-checking a few corporate balance sheets and accounting statements certified by auditors.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The investigation into the Enron fraud had also shown its auditors, Arthur Anderson, as guilty as Enron’s CEO. No doubt that there are a number of very good companies with impeccable records, though the same cannot be said about every company. The Government must decide what it should do and then do it to end such occurrences. It would be prudent to remind it of what Mrs Indira Gandhi said: “My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people, those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group. There was less competition there.”
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Chinese threat looms large: Govt must wake up
Throughout history, there have been numerous rulers with the ambition to lord over the entire world or at least a large chunk of it. The Second World War happened due to the over-riding ambition of Adolf Hitler. Thereafter, Soviet Union nourished the ambition to have global ideological sway over the world through its puppet Governments. We all know the end. Today, USA nurtures the same ambition. George W Bush attacked Iraq without any valid reason to control its oil resources as if all the world reserves must belong to the US. Imagine the brutal force of Robert Gates, Defence Secretary of US Administration, frightening Pakistan President Musharraf to be an ally to fight against terror or perish into stone age. That it suited Pakistan, is another matter.
Today, the emergence of China as a world power at par with the US, carries a global threat. Being a neighbour, India should be the most worried country. India has not yet gotten over the humiliation of the 1962 War. The first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, actually lost vigour and ego.
Ultimately, he did not survive this jolt. He underestimated Chinese designs and diplomacy in spite of timely warning from Sardar Patel explaining expansionist ambitions of the Chinese. Similar thoughts were expressed by Dr Mukherjee, Mr Malkani and Prof NG Ranga. In fact, KM Munshi wrote that China's has an aggressive history. Whenever she was strong, it tried to include many countries in its empire.
Recently, The History of China published by the Chinese Government contains a map showing Chinese territory, which includes Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and NEFA (50,000 square miles area). The map also includes Burma, Malay, Thailand, North and South Vietnam, Combodia and chunks of Soviet Siberia, Mangolia, Tajikistan and Khirurgiia. The book declares to bring back every territory. Some think that by-and-large status-quo would prevail in the world order but if one looks at the world's geo-political map of past 500 years, with an interval of 50 years, the map changes drastically. Those who do not think beyond get shocked when international boundaries change.
Nearly 5 months back Defence Minister, AK Antony told that "with China developing anti-satellite missiles, lasers and other space capabilities, India has no option but to be fully prepared for Star Wars in future." Army Chief added that Space War was increasingly becoming the ultimate high ground to dominate war in the future. I can quote dozens of such warnings. China has positioned its nuclear submarines in Gwadar naval base at Baluchistan and more than half a dozen naval bases of Suludao, Quingdao, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Hongkong and others. We have naval bases but inferior submarines at Mumbai, Goa, Kochi, Port Blair and Vishakhapatnam. China has developed observatory towers from where they can watch our movement at Sriharikota and other centres. They have also prepared metal roads till the nearest points of India, Nepal and Sikkim borders. Their missiles in Tibet are targeted towards all Indian cities. Even US targets are included.
It must be noted that the Defence Budget of China viz-a-viz India is atleast double. According to Pentagon's assessment, China's military build up poses a direct threat to India as well as Taiwan, Japan and Russia. China has infiltrated 75 millions 'Hans' to Manchuria, 7 millions to Sinkiang, 8.5 millions to inner Mangolia and 7.5 millions into Tibet. Chinese leadership has always followed the war strategy of their master Sun Tzu. Mao was particularly influenced by him. Sun Tzu has said, "to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence, it consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." This is what China is doing to India through Pakistan. They are aligning with Sri Lanka to develop its war machine. They are also trapping Bangladesh. In Nepal, their mysterious diplomacy has succeeded.
The Defence Ministry's annual report, stated that 50-60 cities are targeted from Greater Tibet. Just this week, Chinese troops entered Sikkim by nearly two kms. Similar happenings have been occurring in Tawang area of Arunachal Pradesh but our Defence Ministry has not taken a serious note and said they are local skirmishes. The Government minimises the seriousness of all these threats.
Our security challenges are multi-fold and include Islamic terrorism in J&K and elsewhere, Bangladeshi infiltration, Left-wing extremism, troubled neighbouring States, insurgency in north-east and Chinese military push.
There are experts in India who feel that there is no immediate threat from China, as its priority is to develop its economy. But this opinion stands discounted by ground realities.
Today, the emergence of China as a world power at par with the US, carries a global threat. Being a neighbour, India should be the most worried country. India has not yet gotten over the humiliation of the 1962 War. The first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, actually lost vigour and ego.
Ultimately, he did not survive this jolt. He underestimated Chinese designs and diplomacy in spite of timely warning from Sardar Patel explaining expansionist ambitions of the Chinese. Similar thoughts were expressed by Dr Mukherjee, Mr Malkani and Prof NG Ranga. In fact, KM Munshi wrote that China's has an aggressive history. Whenever she was strong, it tried to include many countries in its empire.
Recently, The History of China published by the Chinese Government contains a map showing Chinese territory, which includes Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and NEFA (50,000 square miles area). The map also includes Burma, Malay, Thailand, North and South Vietnam, Combodia and chunks of Soviet Siberia, Mangolia, Tajikistan and Khirurgiia. The book declares to bring back every territory. Some think that by-and-large status-quo would prevail in the world order but if one looks at the world's geo-political map of past 500 years, with an interval of 50 years, the map changes drastically. Those who do not think beyond get shocked when international boundaries change.
Nearly 5 months back Defence Minister, AK Antony told that "with China developing anti-satellite missiles, lasers and other space capabilities, India has no option but to be fully prepared for Star Wars in future." Army Chief added that Space War was increasingly becoming the ultimate high ground to dominate war in the future. I can quote dozens of such warnings. China has positioned its nuclear submarines in Gwadar naval base at Baluchistan and more than half a dozen naval bases of Suludao, Quingdao, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Hongkong and others. We have naval bases but inferior submarines at Mumbai, Goa, Kochi, Port Blair and Vishakhapatnam. China has developed observatory towers from where they can watch our movement at Sriharikota and other centres. They have also prepared metal roads till the nearest points of India, Nepal and Sikkim borders. Their missiles in Tibet are targeted towards all Indian cities. Even US targets are included.
It must be noted that the Defence Budget of China viz-a-viz India is atleast double. According to Pentagon's assessment, China's military build up poses a direct threat to India as well as Taiwan, Japan and Russia. China has infiltrated 75 millions 'Hans' to Manchuria, 7 millions to Sinkiang, 8.5 millions to inner Mangolia and 7.5 millions into Tibet. Chinese leadership has always followed the war strategy of their master Sun Tzu. Mao was particularly influenced by him. Sun Tzu has said, "to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence, it consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." This is what China is doing to India through Pakistan. They are aligning with Sri Lanka to develop its war machine. They are also trapping Bangladesh. In Nepal, their mysterious diplomacy has succeeded.
The Defence Ministry's annual report, stated that 50-60 cities are targeted from Greater Tibet. Just this week, Chinese troops entered Sikkim by nearly two kms. Similar happenings have been occurring in Tawang area of Arunachal Pradesh but our Defence Ministry has not taken a serious note and said they are local skirmishes. The Government minimises the seriousness of all these threats.
Our security challenges are multi-fold and include Islamic terrorism in J&K and elsewhere, Bangladeshi infiltration, Left-wing extremism, troubled neighbouring States, insurgency in north-east and Chinese military push.
There are experts in India who feel that there is no immediate threat from China, as its priority is to develop its economy. But this opinion stands discounted by ground realities.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Sorry, but not so sorry
The principles of Westminster system, the democratic parliamentary system that we adopted, modelled after the British government, help us govern the largest democracy in the world. Now that we have finished the gigantic task of electing worthies who will represent us in the national capital, we must look beyond our shores, as we often do for inspiration.
The Palace of Westminster is the seat of Parliament of the United Kingdom and, practically, all former British colonies, with the notable exception of the United States of America, have adopted the legislative model used in Westminster.
While India has adopted the British system, there are differences, and one that has occupied headlines in the UK recently is that the British MPs can, and do, claim expenses for a second home, outside their constituency, in London.
Ever since the British paper, The Daily Telegraph, published expenses claims made by senior British MPs under the controversial Personal Additional Accommodation Expenditure for MPs or second homes allowance, what Freedom of Information activists long held, became obvious-that this is an expense most open to abuse.
Media exposure of glaring cases — like claiming the cost of cleaning a moat, fitting chandeliers and in another case, jacuzzi-style bath — stunned taxpayers, as they learnt exactly what they were subsidising with their hard-earned money.
We must keep in mind that historically, all over the world, more tax is paid by those who do not have homes with moats or chandeliered hallways where their visitors might wait while the butler announces them, or retire to the rest room for a jacuzzi bath. These are blue or white collared workers struggling to pay bills as they balance various aspects of their lives. For them, this extravagance is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
Not that all MPs were extravagant in their purchases: They even billed for routine things like an ice tray for £1.50, and to top it all, a chocolate Santa, for 59p! Hey, a guy’s got a right to a snack. Others were billing the British taxpayers as much as £18,800 over four years in “unreceipted” expenses for food consumed at the designated second home!
Now that they have been exposed, the honourable members are not terribly contrite, they are sorry, but not so sorry as to resign from their positions following public outcry at their extravagances. They have actually found the scapegoat — the House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, who has announced his resignation for failing to handle the crisis of confidence that followed the evisceration of the expense accounts scandal.
Considered the first person from a working-class background to sit on the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, Martin presided over a house that for a long, long time held allowances as a supplementary salary, and receipts as notional, because they were anyways secret.
Now that they had been “outed”, the MPs bayed for blood, and punished their leader. Yet, even after they elect a new Speaker, they will have to reform the system, or be seen to be on the wrong side of fair play, which would definitely lead to the loss of public support. The Honorable Members can still have their chandeliers; clean their moats or have jacuzzis installed, provided they pay for them, like the rest of us.
The Palace of Westminster is the seat of Parliament of the United Kingdom and, practically, all former British colonies, with the notable exception of the United States of America, have adopted the legislative model used in Westminster.
While India has adopted the British system, there are differences, and one that has occupied headlines in the UK recently is that the British MPs can, and do, claim expenses for a second home, outside their constituency, in London.
Ever since the British paper, The Daily Telegraph, published expenses claims made by senior British MPs under the controversial Personal Additional Accommodation Expenditure for MPs or second homes allowance, what Freedom of Information activists long held, became obvious-that this is an expense most open to abuse.
Media exposure of glaring cases — like claiming the cost of cleaning a moat, fitting chandeliers and in another case, jacuzzi-style bath — stunned taxpayers, as they learnt exactly what they were subsidising with their hard-earned money.
We must keep in mind that historically, all over the world, more tax is paid by those who do not have homes with moats or chandeliered hallways where their visitors might wait while the butler announces them, or retire to the rest room for a jacuzzi bath. These are blue or white collared workers struggling to pay bills as they balance various aspects of their lives. For them, this extravagance is a bitter pill to swallow, indeed.
Not that all MPs were extravagant in their purchases: They even billed for routine things like an ice tray for £1.50, and to top it all, a chocolate Santa, for 59p! Hey, a guy’s got a right to a snack. Others were billing the British taxpayers as much as £18,800 over four years in “unreceipted” expenses for food consumed at the designated second home!
Now that they have been exposed, the honourable members are not terribly contrite, they are sorry, but not so sorry as to resign from their positions following public outcry at their extravagances. They have actually found the scapegoat — the House of Commons Speaker, Michael Martin, who has announced his resignation for failing to handle the crisis of confidence that followed the evisceration of the expense accounts scandal.
Considered the first person from a working-class background to sit on the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, Martin presided over a house that for a long, long time held allowances as a supplementary salary, and receipts as notional, because they were anyways secret.
Now that they had been “outed”, the MPs bayed for blood, and punished their leader. Yet, even after they elect a new Speaker, they will have to reform the system, or be seen to be on the wrong side of fair play, which would definitely lead to the loss of public support. The Honorable Members can still have their chandeliers; clean their moats or have jacuzzis installed, provided they pay for them, like the rest of us.
Its all about "power",go to hell with "ideology"
If West Bengal’s CPI(M) stood for Communist Party of India (Marwari), it should now be Communist Party of India (Mamata). Not that Didi will ever follow the ‘Hammer and Sickle’. But her Trinamool Congress resembles the Marxists in many ways as it marches relentlessly to Writers’ Buildings.
There was precious little difference between the two manifestoes for the Lok Sabha election. Both parties employed the same rumbustious methods. And the trickle deserting the sinking CPI(M) ship for the boisterously sailing Trinamool vessel may soon become an avalanche. Most important, Ms Mamata Banerjee’s “Maa, Mati, Manush” (mother, earth, people) slogan, the title of a popular 1975 jatra, touched the same emotive, even perhaps xenophobic, chord that the Left Front exploited to sweep to power in the late-1970s.
The Communists were seen then as a wholly indigenous force pitted against a Congress that was at Sanjay Gandhi’s beck and call and the Centre’s tool. Bengalis equated the party ‘high command’ with the cow belt. Without overtly invoking provincial passions like the Shiv Sena or Amra Bangali idealists, the Marxists presented themselves as local men determined to restore Bengal’s glory. Championing peasants and Muslims, Ms Banerjee similarly projects herself as the voice of the most underprivileged elements in long-suffering Bengal.
It will take West Bengal some time to grasp the full long-term implications of her party’s Lok Sabha representation shooting up from one solitary MP (herself) to 19 and the Left Front’s plummeting from 35 to 15. But the Marxists, whose State committee will discuss the rout tomorrow with inputs from the districts, obviously understand their future is at stake.
In a not dissimilar situation in 1977, the Centre’s Janata Party regime arbitrarily dismissed nine State Governments. Three years later, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Congress did the same. The Centre held in both cases that the parliamentary election results indicated that voters had lost confidence in the State ruling parties.
That argument is again being peddled. Though the Left Front controls 235 out of 294 legislature seats, even West Bengal’s Land and Land Revenue Minister, Mr Abdur Rezzak Mollah, advises Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to dissolve the Assembly and seek a fresh mandate. His case is that the Lok Sabha vote showed that the CPI(M) had lost its majority in 198 Assembly segments and that the Congress-Trinamool alliance had made serious dents in the constituencies of 27 Ministers.
Mr Mollah’s principled stand is unlikely to find takers. Instead, the growing clamour among Bengali Marxists against Mr Prakash Karat and the Polit Bureau recalls West Bengal’s history of resentment against central diktats. Mr Jyoti Basu blames the Polit Bureau for not supporting Morarji Desai’s Government in 1979 as he recommended. Worse, it would not allow him to become Prime Minister 17 years later. Apparently, the CPI(M)’s West Bengal unit wanted the parliamentary Left Front to continue supporting Mr Manmohan Singh’s Government last year and was anguished and angered when failing to bring down the UPA regime, the Polit Bureau expelled the Speaker, Mr Somnath Chatterjee, from the party.
It’s difficult to say whether Bengali Marxists reacted to these Polit Bureau decisions as Bengalis or faulted them on political grounds. But the conflict holds unmistakable echoes of the furore over the 1939 Tripuri Congress when Mahatma Gandhi famously regarded Subhas Chandra Bose’s re-election as Congress president as his own defeat since he had sponsored the defeated candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Irrespective of ideology, many Bengalis see Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s arrest and death in custody in a similar light.
Now, the former Lok Sabha Speaker denounces the CPI(M)’s central leadership without naming Mr Karat, his wife or Mr Sitaram Yechury on two counts. First, leaders should contest elections and be accountable to voters. Second, the ‘Third Front’ was only a “myth”. West Bengal’s Transport Minister, Mr Subhas Chakrabarty, agrees.
Less prominent and more outspoken political activists blame the CPI(M)’s plight on the party general secretary’s high-handedness, and accuse Mr Karat of deliberately committing political suicide by toeing Beijing’s line. They stress that China played a negative role in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group until US President George W Bush telephoned Chinese President Hu Jintao. The speculation is that having failed to stop the Indo-American nuclear agreement, China sought to sabotage it through the CPI(M)’s obedient central leadership.
Communists with longer memories claim that betrayal of the national cause has a hoary lineage. They recall that pro-China elements in the undivided CPI opposed SA Dange, the party chairman, when he supported India’s stand in the disputes over the McMahon Line and Aksai Chin. These elements broke away in 1964 to form the CPI(M), thereby establishing a tradition of opposing India’s interests to placate China.
If Mr Mollah is to be believed, a far more remote conflict also casts a sombre shadow on West Bengal. He warns that if the Trinamool comes to power, it will try to replicate the grisly bloodbath that engulfed Indonesia in 1965-66. With three million members, the Partai Komunis Indonesia was the world’s biggest Communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The purge began when six top Indonesian Generals were killed, allegedly by the PKI, and their bodies thrown down a well. The event triggered a reprisal massacre of Communists by the Army under Gen Suharto, probably with US backing.
A CIA study claimed that “In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...” The death toll was estimated at between 500,000 and a million. Sukarno was deposed and Suharto became the ruler in 1967. His dictatorship lasted 31 years.
Such drastic events are inconceivable in West Bengal, even for those who nurse nightmares of the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day and the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’. But turmoil there is bound to be as Communists try to cling to their 32-year monopoly of power and Ms Banerjee, standing high in the Congress’s favour, insists on her reward. She can expect Central help as she sets about storming the bastion of Left Front power.
Mr Bhattacharjee accuses her Trinamool of lacking any “ideological mooring”. She retorts that the CPI(M) is “politically bankrupt”. Both are right. The brewing storm has nothing to do with programmes or policies. It is about power. For ordinary apolitical citizens, therefore, the change can mean jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
There was precious little difference between the two manifestoes for the Lok Sabha election. Both parties employed the same rumbustious methods. And the trickle deserting the sinking CPI(M) ship for the boisterously sailing Trinamool vessel may soon become an avalanche. Most important, Ms Mamata Banerjee’s “Maa, Mati, Manush” (mother, earth, people) slogan, the title of a popular 1975 jatra, touched the same emotive, even perhaps xenophobic, chord that the Left Front exploited to sweep to power in the late-1970s.
The Communists were seen then as a wholly indigenous force pitted against a Congress that was at Sanjay Gandhi’s beck and call and the Centre’s tool. Bengalis equated the party ‘high command’ with the cow belt. Without overtly invoking provincial passions like the Shiv Sena or Amra Bangali idealists, the Marxists presented themselves as local men determined to restore Bengal’s glory. Championing peasants and Muslims, Ms Banerjee similarly projects herself as the voice of the most underprivileged elements in long-suffering Bengal.
It will take West Bengal some time to grasp the full long-term implications of her party’s Lok Sabha representation shooting up from one solitary MP (herself) to 19 and the Left Front’s plummeting from 35 to 15. But the Marxists, whose State committee will discuss the rout tomorrow with inputs from the districts, obviously understand their future is at stake.
In a not dissimilar situation in 1977, the Centre’s Janata Party regime arbitrarily dismissed nine State Governments. Three years later, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Congress did the same. The Centre held in both cases that the parliamentary election results indicated that voters had lost confidence in the State ruling parties.
That argument is again being peddled. Though the Left Front controls 235 out of 294 legislature seats, even West Bengal’s Land and Land Revenue Minister, Mr Abdur Rezzak Mollah, advises Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to dissolve the Assembly and seek a fresh mandate. His case is that the Lok Sabha vote showed that the CPI(M) had lost its majority in 198 Assembly segments and that the Congress-Trinamool alliance had made serious dents in the constituencies of 27 Ministers.
Mr Mollah’s principled stand is unlikely to find takers. Instead, the growing clamour among Bengali Marxists against Mr Prakash Karat and the Polit Bureau recalls West Bengal’s history of resentment against central diktats. Mr Jyoti Basu blames the Polit Bureau for not supporting Morarji Desai’s Government in 1979 as he recommended. Worse, it would not allow him to become Prime Minister 17 years later. Apparently, the CPI(M)’s West Bengal unit wanted the parliamentary Left Front to continue supporting Mr Manmohan Singh’s Government last year and was anguished and angered when failing to bring down the UPA regime, the Polit Bureau expelled the Speaker, Mr Somnath Chatterjee, from the party.
It’s difficult to say whether Bengali Marxists reacted to these Polit Bureau decisions as Bengalis or faulted them on political grounds. But the conflict holds unmistakable echoes of the furore over the 1939 Tripuri Congress when Mahatma Gandhi famously regarded Subhas Chandra Bose’s re-election as Congress president as his own defeat since he had sponsored the defeated candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Irrespective of ideology, many Bengalis see Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s arrest and death in custody in a similar light.
Now, the former Lok Sabha Speaker denounces the CPI(M)’s central leadership without naming Mr Karat, his wife or Mr Sitaram Yechury on two counts. First, leaders should contest elections and be accountable to voters. Second, the ‘Third Front’ was only a “myth”. West Bengal’s Transport Minister, Mr Subhas Chakrabarty, agrees.
Less prominent and more outspoken political activists blame the CPI(M)’s plight on the party general secretary’s high-handedness, and accuse Mr Karat of deliberately committing political suicide by toeing Beijing’s line. They stress that China played a negative role in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group until US President George W Bush telephoned Chinese President Hu Jintao. The speculation is that having failed to stop the Indo-American nuclear agreement, China sought to sabotage it through the CPI(M)’s obedient central leadership.
Communists with longer memories claim that betrayal of the national cause has a hoary lineage. They recall that pro-China elements in the undivided CPI opposed SA Dange, the party chairman, when he supported India’s stand in the disputes over the McMahon Line and Aksai Chin. These elements broke away in 1964 to form the CPI(M), thereby establishing a tradition of opposing India’s interests to placate China.
If Mr Mollah is to be believed, a far more remote conflict also casts a sombre shadow on West Bengal. He warns that if the Trinamool comes to power, it will try to replicate the grisly bloodbath that engulfed Indonesia in 1965-66. With three million members, the Partai Komunis Indonesia was the world’s biggest Communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The purge began when six top Indonesian Generals were killed, allegedly by the PKI, and their bodies thrown down a well. The event triggered a reprisal massacre of Communists by the Army under Gen Suharto, probably with US backing.
A CIA study claimed that “In terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century...” The death toll was estimated at between 500,000 and a million. Sukarno was deposed and Suharto became the ruler in 1967. His dictatorship lasted 31 years.
Such drastic events are inconceivable in West Bengal, even for those who nurse nightmares of the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day and the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’. But turmoil there is bound to be as Communists try to cling to their 32-year monopoly of power and Ms Banerjee, standing high in the Congress’s favour, insists on her reward. She can expect Central help as she sets about storming the bastion of Left Front power.
Mr Bhattacharjee accuses her Trinamool of lacking any “ideological mooring”. She retorts that the CPI(M) is “politically bankrupt”. Both are right. The brewing storm has nothing to do with programmes or policies. It is about power. For ordinary apolitical citizens, therefore, the change can mean jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
Friday, May 22, 2009
SC ruling on interim bail a big step
The Supreme Court judgment regarding the granting of bail is a big win for liberty and constitutional rights. It brings to an end an injustice that has unnecessarily prevailed for long. The apex court has said that courts have an inherent power to grant interim bail to a person pending disposal of the bail application. This means that the practice of courts sending a person who has applied for regular bail to jail, and then looking into the case diary which has to be obtained from the police, has now ended. The Supreme Court has clarified that courts can continue to decide regular bail pleas after perusing the case diaries and other evidence, but it is within their jurisdiction and discretionary powers to grant interim bail to the accused to protect their reputation from being dented by their arrest by the police. It is true that going to jail dents a person’s reputation and image in society. It can cause irreparable harm and loss to a person even when arrested for a minor offence. The Supreme Court has, thus, rightly taken serious note of this and has said that even if the arrested accused applied for bail and was released thereafter, his reputation might still be tarnished irreparably. The apex court has gone on to interpret the power of courts to grant interim bail in the light of Article 21 of the Constitution which protects the life and liberty of every person. It has said in its judgment that the reputation of a person is a valuable asset for him and constitutes a part of his constitutional rights.
Under the law an individual is presumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. Given the low conviction rates in our courts, the majority of those brought before them are innocent. This means that a very large percentage of individuals who were sent to jail and have been denied bail till now are wrongly being detained. Such individuals have had to suffer needlessly in police or judicial custody. Sometimes such imprisonment has extended for weeks depending on the gravity of the alleged offence and resulted in brutal treatment of those detained. In the past the law has also been subject to misuse. False cases have been lodged against individuals merely to harass them. Regrettably, some of these have tended to be politically motivated or at the behest of vested interests. It hardly needs to be said that this power to grant bail, though discretionary, is not arbitrary. Bail should only be denied when absolutely necessary to curtail the freedom of an individual, and bail, not custody, should be the rule. Therefore, the Supreme Court judgment ends the misuse of law and upholds civil liberty.
Under the law an individual is presumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. Given the low conviction rates in our courts, the majority of those brought before them are innocent. This means that a very large percentage of individuals who were sent to jail and have been denied bail till now are wrongly being detained. Such individuals have had to suffer needlessly in police or judicial custody. Sometimes such imprisonment has extended for weeks depending on the gravity of the alleged offence and resulted in brutal treatment of those detained. In the past the law has also been subject to misuse. False cases have been lodged against individuals merely to harass them. Regrettably, some of these have tended to be politically motivated or at the behest of vested interests. It hardly needs to be said that this power to grant bail, though discretionary, is not arbitrary. Bail should only be denied when absolutely necessary to curtail the freedom of an individual, and bail, not custody, should be the rule. Therefore, the Supreme Court judgment ends the misuse of law and upholds civil liberty.
Pakistan must go Sri lankan way
The Greek saying “money is the sinew of war” is proving true in Pakistan as its armed forces have mobilised an all-round assault against the Taliban. However, it appears more to be an eyewash than anything concrete. With the promise of billions of American dollars as civilian and military aid, Pakistan has told the US Administration that it has begun a massive anti-Taliban offensive. Incidentally, it is after two earlier failed attempts that Islamabad had to once again assure US President Barack Obama that its forces are indeed marching forward to dislodge the jihadis from the areas held by them.
According to the Pakistan military sources, the Taliban and its allies had around 5,000 fighters in the Swat Valley. Over the last few years some of the most feared jihadi organisations have opened offices in Swat, a halfway point in a militant transit route running between Indian Kashmir and eastern Afghanistan. How far Pakistan is serious about wiping out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region cannot be ascertained as media and international rescue and relief operations are not allowed within the war zone, and one has to depend on the claims made by the Pakistani Army.
Notwithstanding financial assistance, US Central Command Chief General David Patreaus has warned Pakistan that it will be forced to act if the country is not able to take concrete action against the Taliban. On the other hand, the deteriorating situation in the war zone has forced Mr Obama to comment that the civilian Government in Pakistan is fragile and ill-equipped to handle the crisis on the ground.
It is undoubtedly because of the Pakistani Army’s patronage that the Taliban has gained so much in strength. For media consumption the Pakistani Army says that more than 800 Taliban fighters have been killed by its forces. Yet there is no trace of the bodies. This fact has been confirmed by war correspondents representing national and international newspapers.
The Pakistani Government has demonstrated a lack of capacity and will to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Islamabad needs to learn from Sri Lanka, if it is serious at all about exterminating terrorism from its soil. No quarter should be spared in the fight against the jihadis. Only a take-no-prisoners attitude can win this war for Pakistan.
According to the Pakistan military sources, the Taliban and its allies had around 5,000 fighters in the Swat Valley. Over the last few years some of the most feared jihadi organisations have opened offices in Swat, a halfway point in a militant transit route running between Indian Kashmir and eastern Afghanistan. How far Pakistan is serious about wiping out the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region cannot be ascertained as media and international rescue and relief operations are not allowed within the war zone, and one has to depend on the claims made by the Pakistani Army.
Notwithstanding financial assistance, US Central Command Chief General David Patreaus has warned Pakistan that it will be forced to act if the country is not able to take concrete action against the Taliban. On the other hand, the deteriorating situation in the war zone has forced Mr Obama to comment that the civilian Government in Pakistan is fragile and ill-equipped to handle the crisis on the ground.
It is undoubtedly because of the Pakistani Army’s patronage that the Taliban has gained so much in strength. For media consumption the Pakistani Army says that more than 800 Taliban fighters have been killed by its forces. Yet there is no trace of the bodies. This fact has been confirmed by war correspondents representing national and international newspapers.
The Pakistani Government has demonstrated a lack of capacity and will to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Islamabad needs to learn from Sri Lanka, if it is serious at all about exterminating terrorism from its soil. No quarter should be spared in the fight against the jihadis. Only a take-no-prisoners attitude can win this war for Pakistan.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Evil called child marriage
A new Compulsory Registration of Marriage Act should be introduced. Were this to be linked to the ration card, the birth certificate and the voter identity card, people would learn soon enough that it does not pay to avoid getting the certificate.
People may fudge, but at the end of the day the age of marriage and consequently the age at first birth will go up
Does it take America to dole largesse for preventing child marriages? In the last three weeks, two Bills have been introduced in the US Congress and the Senate called the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act 2009.
What triggered this move was the recognition that US foreign assistance provided for improving education, health and economic prospects for women and girls in developing countries was coming a cropper. Simply because too many girls were forced to leave school to get married. Such girls remained uneducated, increasingly vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted diseases, bearing underweight babies and leading horrifying lives — a downright violation of human rights. Since this phenomenon was negating the effect of investments made in improving their lives, it was money down the drain. The new Bills, therefore, authorise US foreign assistance funding for five years to prevent child marriage and increase educational and economic opportunities for girls in developing countries including India.
Let us move from the international scene, bypassing the national and State levels and go straight down to the district and panchayats. Dewas is a district in Madhya Pradesh which is perched in the middle of the country in terms of social and health indices. It also has exceptionally high child mortality ranked 516th out of 593 districts surveyed by the International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai.
Last week the district Collector of Dewas invited 40 sarpanches to attend a workshop on the “Impact of Early Marriages and Early Conception on Health of Girls.” For starters, it was apparent that registration of marriages was not being done anywhere in the district despite the fact that the State had issued orders under the Special Marriage Act, making it incumbent upon the Gram Panchayats to issue marriage registration certificates under law. The Supreme Court order on compulsory registration of marriages of all religions across the country was unheard of.
At a workshop a film showed 15year olds cradling their infants like toys. These child mothers evinced no rancour, not even self-pity. Only a smiling acceptance that it was their lot in life to bear more children. Juxtaposed against this was the professional advice of a paediatrician and gynaecologist from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences who spoke about the irreversible fallout of early pregnancies, underweight children, lack of spacing leading to a predictable cycle of malnutrition, death and disability. The two perspectives were so divergent that it made sagacious thinking impossible. It was unclear whether the panchayat representatives had understood the mixed messages and whether at all they were amenable to thinking differently.
The workshop went on to draw attention to the legal requirement to register marriages and the correlation of age at first birth with the health of the infant. At the end of the sequence there was pin drop silence. Not one among the 40 Sarpanches wished to speak. Even the national Awardees, among the Sarpanches after receiving recognition from the President of India, albeit for other achievements, were unwilling to speak. Sensing a stalemate, the Collector broke them into four groups, gave them four different subjects to focus on and asked them to return with a plan.
The outcome was unexpected. Far from the wishy-washy faces we had seen an hour earlier, came a newfound enthusiasm proclaiming that indeed it was possible to promote and register marriages after the legal age. Most striking was the fact that they had understood the issues and undertook to do something about it. This sudden change of heart could be attributed to the presence of the Collector. But how much? Even a cynic would agree that it would have been difficult to brainwash 40 Sarpanches from disparate blocks simply because of official presence.
In speech after speech the Sarpanches recounted how the correlation between very early childbirths and safe motherhood and child survival had never been highlighted so vividly. They lauded the Rural Development “Nirmal Gaon” scheme that conferred awards on the cleanest panchayat and recommended that a similar Award scheme should be launched for the best performing panchayat that promoted marriages after the legal age, accompanied by registration of marriage.
Given the importance that the US parliamentarians have accorded to overcoming child marriages in developing countries, it behoves the Government to give far greater importance to making this the bulwark for women’s empowerment and children’s health. A new Compulsory Registration of Marriage Act should be introduced with an office of a Registrar General of Marriages. Were this to be linked to the ration card, the birth certificate and the voter identity card, people would learn soon enough that it does not pay to avoid getting the certificate.
People may lie, people may fudge but at the end of the day the age of marriage and consequently the age at first birth will go up. The future of Indian children is at stake. They are worth all the trouble it might take. It should not need the United States of America to show us the way.
People may fudge, but at the end of the day the age of marriage and consequently the age at first birth will go up
Does it take America to dole largesse for preventing child marriages? In the last three weeks, two Bills have been introduced in the US Congress and the Senate called the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act 2009.
What triggered this move was the recognition that US foreign assistance provided for improving education, health and economic prospects for women and girls in developing countries was coming a cropper. Simply because too many girls were forced to leave school to get married. Such girls remained uneducated, increasingly vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted diseases, bearing underweight babies and leading horrifying lives — a downright violation of human rights. Since this phenomenon was negating the effect of investments made in improving their lives, it was money down the drain. The new Bills, therefore, authorise US foreign assistance funding for five years to prevent child marriage and increase educational and economic opportunities for girls in developing countries including India.
Let us move from the international scene, bypassing the national and State levels and go straight down to the district and panchayats. Dewas is a district in Madhya Pradesh which is perched in the middle of the country in terms of social and health indices. It also has exceptionally high child mortality ranked 516th out of 593 districts surveyed by the International Institute of Population Sciences, Mumbai.
Last week the district Collector of Dewas invited 40 sarpanches to attend a workshop on the “Impact of Early Marriages and Early Conception on Health of Girls.” For starters, it was apparent that registration of marriages was not being done anywhere in the district despite the fact that the State had issued orders under the Special Marriage Act, making it incumbent upon the Gram Panchayats to issue marriage registration certificates under law. The Supreme Court order on compulsory registration of marriages of all religions across the country was unheard of.
At a workshop a film showed 15year olds cradling their infants like toys. These child mothers evinced no rancour, not even self-pity. Only a smiling acceptance that it was their lot in life to bear more children. Juxtaposed against this was the professional advice of a paediatrician and gynaecologist from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences who spoke about the irreversible fallout of early pregnancies, underweight children, lack of spacing leading to a predictable cycle of malnutrition, death and disability. The two perspectives were so divergent that it made sagacious thinking impossible. It was unclear whether the panchayat representatives had understood the mixed messages and whether at all they were amenable to thinking differently.
The workshop went on to draw attention to the legal requirement to register marriages and the correlation of age at first birth with the health of the infant. At the end of the sequence there was pin drop silence. Not one among the 40 Sarpanches wished to speak. Even the national Awardees, among the Sarpanches after receiving recognition from the President of India, albeit for other achievements, were unwilling to speak. Sensing a stalemate, the Collector broke them into four groups, gave them four different subjects to focus on and asked them to return with a plan.
The outcome was unexpected. Far from the wishy-washy faces we had seen an hour earlier, came a newfound enthusiasm proclaiming that indeed it was possible to promote and register marriages after the legal age. Most striking was the fact that they had understood the issues and undertook to do something about it. This sudden change of heart could be attributed to the presence of the Collector. But how much? Even a cynic would agree that it would have been difficult to brainwash 40 Sarpanches from disparate blocks simply because of official presence.
In speech after speech the Sarpanches recounted how the correlation between very early childbirths and safe motherhood and child survival had never been highlighted so vividly. They lauded the Rural Development “Nirmal Gaon” scheme that conferred awards on the cleanest panchayat and recommended that a similar Award scheme should be launched for the best performing panchayat that promoted marriages after the legal age, accompanied by registration of marriage.
Given the importance that the US parliamentarians have accorded to overcoming child marriages in developing countries, it behoves the Government to give far greater importance to making this the bulwark for women’s empowerment and children’s health. A new Compulsory Registration of Marriage Act should be introduced with an office of a Registrar General of Marriages. Were this to be linked to the ration card, the birth certificate and the voter identity card, people would learn soon enough that it does not pay to avoid getting the certificate.
People may lie, people may fudge but at the end of the day the age of marriage and consequently the age at first birth will go up. The future of Indian children is at stake. They are worth all the trouble it might take. It should not need the United States of America to show us the way.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Criminalisation of politics
It was at LK Advani's high-powered book launch at Delhi's Siri Fort Auditorium almost a year ago. BJP bigwigs, a few biggies from other political parties and corporate honchos were all there, engrossed in their chatter, networking and all else. Suddenly the atmosphere changed. In walked "Munnabhai" Sanjay Dutt. Networking was forgotten for a while as all vied with one another to catch Dutt’s attention, and if they were fortunate, hug him. I was immediately reminded of Bill Clinton after his speech to Indian parliamentarians during his India visit. Our star-struck MPs had then created a stampede-like situation. Clinton was a rock star and our humble MPs were like teenage fans. The gathered political and corporate honchos at Advani’s book launch behaved no different.
However, I mention this book release function not to discuss the star appeal of Dutt, which is considerable, but how our values have changed over the years. Dutt had by then spent some years in jail over serious charges, including possession of illegal weapons used in Mumbai blasts. Bluntly put, he had been held guilty of being anti-national. But it didn’t seem to bother these top shots one bit. For them, a demi-god was in their midst and they must touch him and feel blessed.
The same Sanjay Dutt was recently made Samajwadi Party's candidate for the "Prestigious" Lucknow Lok Sabha seat before the country's apex court ruled that his past misdeeds didn't permit him to stand for elections. For a moment, one felt the value system we used to pride ourselves in once upon a time still survives somewhere, before the political party cocked a snook at the nation’s highest court and appointed Dutt its general secretary. He is now travelling all over, seeking votes for the national party’s candidates. Wonderful!
But don't think BJP and SP alone are the ones flirting with infamous demi-gods, for it extends to the nation's oldest party, Congress, as well. And this time it is to do with our nation’s other obsession, cricket.
Just as Dutt kept other interests over his country's, former India cricket captain Mohd Azharuddin was accused of the same too. While courts may not have conclusively nailed him for match fixing, there was enough circumstantial evidence to prove that he did indulge in unsporting activities, enough for the cricket board to ban him from playing for the nation. And what did the Congress do? Propped him up as its candidate from a constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Imagine, the party that fought for India’s independence putting up someone who is accused of betraying his nation as its candidate. Well!
One can give more instances of such characters being feted, but I will restrict myself to these two for now. While one wants to send several lawmakers to Parliament, the other wants to become a lawmaker himself.
I am sure there will be a rebound, including from our readers. What about criminalisation of politics? Are all those who are MPs or even ministers, clean? Has the media been a responsible watchdog? And so on.
Valid questions all, but, these two examples are enough to depict the rapidly rotting times we live in.
However, I mention this book release function not to discuss the star appeal of Dutt, which is considerable, but how our values have changed over the years. Dutt had by then spent some years in jail over serious charges, including possession of illegal weapons used in Mumbai blasts. Bluntly put, he had been held guilty of being anti-national. But it didn’t seem to bother these top shots one bit. For them, a demi-god was in their midst and they must touch him and feel blessed.
The same Sanjay Dutt was recently made Samajwadi Party's candidate for the "Prestigious" Lucknow Lok Sabha seat before the country's apex court ruled that his past misdeeds didn't permit him to stand for elections. For a moment, one felt the value system we used to pride ourselves in once upon a time still survives somewhere, before the political party cocked a snook at the nation’s highest court and appointed Dutt its general secretary. He is now travelling all over, seeking votes for the national party’s candidates. Wonderful!
But don't think BJP and SP alone are the ones flirting with infamous demi-gods, for it extends to the nation's oldest party, Congress, as well. And this time it is to do with our nation’s other obsession, cricket.
Just as Dutt kept other interests over his country's, former India cricket captain Mohd Azharuddin was accused of the same too. While courts may not have conclusively nailed him for match fixing, there was enough circumstantial evidence to prove that he did indulge in unsporting activities, enough for the cricket board to ban him from playing for the nation. And what did the Congress do? Propped him up as its candidate from a constituency in Uttar Pradesh. Imagine, the party that fought for India’s independence putting up someone who is accused of betraying his nation as its candidate. Well!
One can give more instances of such characters being feted, but I will restrict myself to these two for now. While one wants to send several lawmakers to Parliament, the other wants to become a lawmaker himself.
I am sure there will be a rebound, including from our readers. What about criminalisation of politics? Are all those who are MPs or even ministers, clean? Has the media been a responsible watchdog? And so on.
Valid questions all, but, these two examples are enough to depict the rapidly rotting times we live in.
Pappu demands a repoll!!!!!
I was among the multitude of people who couldn’t vote. I couldn’t live up to the shrill ‘MUST VOTE’ campaigns such as ‘Jago Re’ or ‘Lead India’, so I am now a ‘Pappu’ and since I don’t have a dot (the indelible ink mark on my finger), according to another slogan, I am not hot either.
My only solace is that almost three out of five people at the polling booths — I am saying booths and not booth, for I travelled around visiting several — I went to in my constituency couldn’t find their names, so they all are Pappus too.
But jokes apart, isn’t it a shame? I am not exaggerating a bit when I say the polling booths around the urban areas of lucknow were teeming with people. Husbands and wives, uncles and aunts, dadaji and dadiji, bhaiya and bhabhi, all with EPICs (Electoral Photo ID Card) in their hands and moving from booth to booth, from one candidate’s tent to another’s, desperately trying to find their names on a list in Hindi, that too not in alphabetical order, with even the polling officers not sure how it was structured. Brilliant!
In all this confusion, one person suddenly said: "Go to the EC website , it has all the details. And what did this site have? PDFs of sections and subsections within the constituency, in Hindi. Try to find your ward number in a PDF file of 135 pages. Not difficult? What if it requires you to search in Hindi alone? What a contrast between the EVMs, which are the world’s envy, and this pathetic attempt at their website.
Simply cannot understand why, after so many years, we cannot get the electoral roll exercise right? Is it just enough to issue adverts in papers and ask people to spend hours away from work, in some dirty government office for more than half a day to get their names registered, or to check whether all is well? Surely there could be a better way. In fact, the internet itself can be a great medium to check these things, provided the format is user-friendly and in a language that most are likely to access it in. With so many problems, little wonder that person after person felt that this confusion, indeed their names missing from the rolls, was deliberate.
If that be so, how is it a fair election? How can the person elected, when so many eligible voters couldn’t vote, be our representative? Why am I being denied my basic right just because the system is not geared to get a simple thing like an electoral roll in working order? Since I have been denied something for no fault of mine, why shouldn’t I demand a repoll? Is there any place where I can complain because I am frustrated that my basic right has been violated?
With due respect to the Seshans and Lyngdohs and Gopalaswamis, clearly there are more loopholes in our election system than we are willing to accept. It is all right to call ourselves a great democracy, but the fact is, we are still a flawed democracy.
My only solace is that almost three out of five people at the polling booths — I am saying booths and not booth, for I travelled around visiting several — I went to in my constituency couldn’t find their names, so they all are Pappus too.
But jokes apart, isn’t it a shame? I am not exaggerating a bit when I say the polling booths around the urban areas of lucknow were teeming with people. Husbands and wives, uncles and aunts, dadaji and dadiji, bhaiya and bhabhi, all with EPICs (Electoral Photo ID Card) in their hands and moving from booth to booth, from one candidate’s tent to another’s, desperately trying to find their names on a list in Hindi, that too not in alphabetical order, with even the polling officers not sure how it was structured. Brilliant!
In all this confusion, one person suddenly said: "Go to the EC website , it has all the details. And what did this site have? PDFs of sections and subsections within the constituency, in Hindi. Try to find your ward number in a PDF file of 135 pages. Not difficult? What if it requires you to search in Hindi alone? What a contrast between the EVMs, which are the world’s envy, and this pathetic attempt at their website.
Simply cannot understand why, after so many years, we cannot get the electoral roll exercise right? Is it just enough to issue adverts in papers and ask people to spend hours away from work, in some dirty government office for more than half a day to get their names registered, or to check whether all is well? Surely there could be a better way. In fact, the internet itself can be a great medium to check these things, provided the format is user-friendly and in a language that most are likely to access it in. With so many problems, little wonder that person after person felt that this confusion, indeed their names missing from the rolls, was deliberate.
If that be so, how is it a fair election? How can the person elected, when so many eligible voters couldn’t vote, be our representative? Why am I being denied my basic right just because the system is not geared to get a simple thing like an electoral roll in working order? Since I have been denied something for no fault of mine, why shouldn’t I demand a repoll? Is there any place where I can complain because I am frustrated that my basic right has been violated?
With due respect to the Seshans and Lyngdohs and Gopalaswamis, clearly there are more loopholes in our election system than we are willing to accept. It is all right to call ourselves a great democracy, but the fact is, we are still a flawed democracy.
Monday, May 18, 2009
The limits of Modi Magic
Statistically speaking, the BJP has fared better this time by winning 15 out of Gujarat’s 26 Lok Sabha seats compared to 14 won during the 2004 elections. The Congress has actually showed a slight dip in numbers by winning 11 seats compared to 12 in the last elections.
The BJP wrested five seats from the Congress while retaining six. The Congress snatched four seats from the BJP and retained five others. The remaining seats won by both parties are newly created, post-delimitation.
But such a reading would be far too simplistic. The story behind the numbers is one of ambitions and aspirations, claims and counter-claims.
Considering that they were hoping to win up to 20 Lok Sabha seats, the ruling BJP has not fared that well in a state that has been considered a bastion of the saffron party and which played electoral host to a prime ministerial candidate in Lal Krishna Advani even while a section of the party’s national leadership projected Chief Minister Narendra Modi as future prime minister material.
But this decade’s electoral saga in Gujarat has not been about party politics alone. It has mostly been scripted by one man, and that is Narendra Damodardas Modi. His popularity, and his electoral strategies have largely decided the fate of the state BJP.
On the other hand, the electoral fortunes of the Congress have been determined more by projections of Modi’s unpopularity and his miscalculations in the absence of that party’s state-level stars.
This year’s electoral results seem to reflect that Modi’s ‘magic’ did not work to plan or to his party’s calculations. The parliamentary election results appear to mark a dent in his popularity coming as they are barely a year-and-a-half after his second successive thumping victory in the 2007 assembly elections.
Modi had a say in choosing most of the party’s 26 candidates. In the process, as many as 10 of the party’s previous 14 sitting candidates were not fielded partly due to delimitation but mostly due to Modi’s opposition. The fact that Modi may have badly miscalculated appears evident since eight of Modi’s handpicked candidates lost — something that will be the subject of much analysis within the party’s rank and file.
In five out of seven of these eight constituencies, the sitting MP was from the BJP. The defeat in these five constituencies reflects adversely on Modi’s choice and on his decision-making. The eighth, Bardoli, was a newly created constituency.
On the other hand, the two candidates who were not Modi’s choice, i.e. Rajendrasinh Rana (Bhavnagar) and Harin Pathak (Ahmedabad-East), both sitting MPs, won with comfortable margins. In fact, all four sitting MPs who were fielded, emerged victorious.
Only one BJP sitting MLA was able to win the parliamentary elections compared to four Congress sitting MLA’s. All the three Congress defectors that had been fielded by the BJP in Patan, Surendranagar and Dahod were also defeated.
Interestingly, on the other hand, Somabhai Patel, the BJP defector to the Congress, who had supported the UPA government on the nuclear deal against the party, was re-elected from Surendranagar on the Congress ticket. Clearly, both Modi’s personal belief and his party’s confidence that he could get anyone elected single-handedly have been badly bruised in these parliamentary elections.
A nasty shock for the BJP has been its poor performance in the Saurashtra and Kutch region where the Congress increased its tally from a solitary seat to four. In fact both parties polled a similar percentage of votes i.e, 43.09 percent (Congress) and 43.84 percent (BJP).
Much to the BJP’s dismay, it lost two traditional strongholds, Rajkot and Porbandar, after two long decades along with Surendranagar. While delimitation has been attributed as one of the causes, the major factor has been the mobilisation of the Patels away from the BJP, especially in Rajkot, Porbandar and Jamnagar.
The elections also marked the BJP’s first humiliation if not actual defeat at the hands of the Mahagujarat Janata Party (MJP), a breakaway faction of the state BJP, which contested parliamentary elections in the state for the first time.
The MJP’s president, Gordhan Zadafia, who fought from Bhavnagar (also located in Saurashtra), managed to secure 1.5 lakh votes, which resulted in reducing the BJP candidate’s victory margin to just under 6,000.
Yet another significant sidelight from Saurashtra is that Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace, Porbandar, has the dubious distinction of electing a candidate (Vitthal Radardiya) with the maximum number of criminal cases (16) against him in the state. This was one of the three constituencies that Sonia Gandhi visited during her one-day tour of the state.
To the surprise of many political observers, the state’s three main diamond cities voted for the BJP despite many incidents of suicide by diamond workers following large-scale retrenchment and closure of diamond units. While the BJP was able to retain the seats of Surat and Bhavnagar, it was also able to wrest Amreli from the Congress.
But just how close was the electoral contest, thereby indicating the tough fight that the BJP faced this time, is evident from an analysis of some of the victory and defeat margins. In two constituencies each, the BJP and the Congress won with narrow margins ranging between just 800 to 6,000 votes.
While in Kheda and Surendranagar the Congress won with a margin of 846 and 4,837 votes respectively, in Panchmahal and Bhavnagar the BJP won with a margin of 2,095 and 5,912 votes respectively. Then again, in six other constituencies, the BJP and the Congress won four and two seats, respectively, with margins ranging between 17,000 and 27,000 votes.
However, Advani’s cherished desire of winning with a huge margin like last time was not to be. He won with a margin of 1.22 lakh compared to 2.17 lakh in 2004, partly due to an overall reduction of votes due to delimitation and largely due to mobilisation of the Patel vote against the BJP. Interestingly, Advani’s Congress opponent did better in Sanand where Tata’s Nano car project has been relocated.
Advani’s victory margin is the lowest so far compared to his own and Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s earlier victory from the Gandhinagar constituency. Also, his victory margin is lower than that of some of his party colleagues in the state, for example, Balkrishna Khanderav Shukla from Vadodara who won with a margin of 1.36 lakh votes.
Gujarat’s glamour candidate Mallika Sarabhai, who was the most sought after candidate by the media in the state, lost her deposit while contesting from Gandhinagar.
The Congress party’s most significant shock was the defeat of two of its three union ministers — Textile minister Shankarsinh Vagela from Panchmahal of which Godhra is a part, by just 2,095 votes, and Railway minister of state Naran Rathwa from Chhota Udepur by 27,000 votes. The third Congress minister at the Centre, Dinsha Patel, managed to win but by a narrow margin of just 846 votes from Kheda.
In Modi’s Gujarat, it was the Chief Minister who was the sole star campaigner. But evidently, his 80 odd rallies in the state were not enough to swing the tide. Advani, the state’s only non-Gujarati speaking candidate, confined his campaigning to his constituency and that too during the last three days of campaigning.
Modi clearly overshadowed all BJP leaders in his state. The Congress largely managed locally with few star campaigners. Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi made only one visit each, the latter on the last day of campaigning.
Elsewhere in the country, Modi addressed over 300 rallies, reportedly more than even Advani did. The fact that the BJP fared badly in almost every state that Modi campaigned in, is perhaps a reflection of the magic gone awry — something that might be the subject of introspection within the party.
The BJP wrested five seats from the Congress while retaining six. The Congress snatched four seats from the BJP and retained five others. The remaining seats won by both parties are newly created, post-delimitation.
But such a reading would be far too simplistic. The story behind the numbers is one of ambitions and aspirations, claims and counter-claims.
Considering that they were hoping to win up to 20 Lok Sabha seats, the ruling BJP has not fared that well in a state that has been considered a bastion of the saffron party and which played electoral host to a prime ministerial candidate in Lal Krishna Advani even while a section of the party’s national leadership projected Chief Minister Narendra Modi as future prime minister material.
But this decade’s electoral saga in Gujarat has not been about party politics alone. It has mostly been scripted by one man, and that is Narendra Damodardas Modi. His popularity, and his electoral strategies have largely decided the fate of the state BJP.
On the other hand, the electoral fortunes of the Congress have been determined more by projections of Modi’s unpopularity and his miscalculations in the absence of that party’s state-level stars.
This year’s electoral results seem to reflect that Modi’s ‘magic’ did not work to plan or to his party’s calculations. The parliamentary election results appear to mark a dent in his popularity coming as they are barely a year-and-a-half after his second successive thumping victory in the 2007 assembly elections.
Modi had a say in choosing most of the party’s 26 candidates. In the process, as many as 10 of the party’s previous 14 sitting candidates were not fielded partly due to delimitation but mostly due to Modi’s opposition. The fact that Modi may have badly miscalculated appears evident since eight of Modi’s handpicked candidates lost — something that will be the subject of much analysis within the party’s rank and file.
In five out of seven of these eight constituencies, the sitting MP was from the BJP. The defeat in these five constituencies reflects adversely on Modi’s choice and on his decision-making. The eighth, Bardoli, was a newly created constituency.
On the other hand, the two candidates who were not Modi’s choice, i.e. Rajendrasinh Rana (Bhavnagar) and Harin Pathak (Ahmedabad-East), both sitting MPs, won with comfortable margins. In fact, all four sitting MPs who were fielded, emerged victorious.
Only one BJP sitting MLA was able to win the parliamentary elections compared to four Congress sitting MLA’s. All the three Congress defectors that had been fielded by the BJP in Patan, Surendranagar and Dahod were also defeated.
Interestingly, on the other hand, Somabhai Patel, the BJP defector to the Congress, who had supported the UPA government on the nuclear deal against the party, was re-elected from Surendranagar on the Congress ticket. Clearly, both Modi’s personal belief and his party’s confidence that he could get anyone elected single-handedly have been badly bruised in these parliamentary elections.
A nasty shock for the BJP has been its poor performance in the Saurashtra and Kutch region where the Congress increased its tally from a solitary seat to four. In fact both parties polled a similar percentage of votes i.e, 43.09 percent (Congress) and 43.84 percent (BJP).
Much to the BJP’s dismay, it lost two traditional strongholds, Rajkot and Porbandar, after two long decades along with Surendranagar. While delimitation has been attributed as one of the causes, the major factor has been the mobilisation of the Patels away from the BJP, especially in Rajkot, Porbandar and Jamnagar.
The elections also marked the BJP’s first humiliation if not actual defeat at the hands of the Mahagujarat Janata Party (MJP), a breakaway faction of the state BJP, which contested parliamentary elections in the state for the first time.
The MJP’s president, Gordhan Zadafia, who fought from Bhavnagar (also located in Saurashtra), managed to secure 1.5 lakh votes, which resulted in reducing the BJP candidate’s victory margin to just under 6,000.
Yet another significant sidelight from Saurashtra is that Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace, Porbandar, has the dubious distinction of electing a candidate (Vitthal Radardiya) with the maximum number of criminal cases (16) against him in the state. This was one of the three constituencies that Sonia Gandhi visited during her one-day tour of the state.
To the surprise of many political observers, the state’s three main diamond cities voted for the BJP despite many incidents of suicide by diamond workers following large-scale retrenchment and closure of diamond units. While the BJP was able to retain the seats of Surat and Bhavnagar, it was also able to wrest Amreli from the Congress.
But just how close was the electoral contest, thereby indicating the tough fight that the BJP faced this time, is evident from an analysis of some of the victory and defeat margins. In two constituencies each, the BJP and the Congress won with narrow margins ranging between just 800 to 6,000 votes.
While in Kheda and Surendranagar the Congress won with a margin of 846 and 4,837 votes respectively, in Panchmahal and Bhavnagar the BJP won with a margin of 2,095 and 5,912 votes respectively. Then again, in six other constituencies, the BJP and the Congress won four and two seats, respectively, with margins ranging between 17,000 and 27,000 votes.
However, Advani’s cherished desire of winning with a huge margin like last time was not to be. He won with a margin of 1.22 lakh compared to 2.17 lakh in 2004, partly due to an overall reduction of votes due to delimitation and largely due to mobilisation of the Patel vote against the BJP. Interestingly, Advani’s Congress opponent did better in Sanand where Tata’s Nano car project has been relocated.
Advani’s victory margin is the lowest so far compared to his own and Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s earlier victory from the Gandhinagar constituency. Also, his victory margin is lower than that of some of his party colleagues in the state, for example, Balkrishna Khanderav Shukla from Vadodara who won with a margin of 1.36 lakh votes.
Gujarat’s glamour candidate Mallika Sarabhai, who was the most sought after candidate by the media in the state, lost her deposit while contesting from Gandhinagar.
The Congress party’s most significant shock was the defeat of two of its three union ministers — Textile minister Shankarsinh Vagela from Panchmahal of which Godhra is a part, by just 2,095 votes, and Railway minister of state Naran Rathwa from Chhota Udepur by 27,000 votes. The third Congress minister at the Centre, Dinsha Patel, managed to win but by a narrow margin of just 846 votes from Kheda.
In Modi’s Gujarat, it was the Chief Minister who was the sole star campaigner. But evidently, his 80 odd rallies in the state were not enough to swing the tide. Advani, the state’s only non-Gujarati speaking candidate, confined his campaigning to his constituency and that too during the last three days of campaigning.
Modi clearly overshadowed all BJP leaders in his state. The Congress largely managed locally with few star campaigners. Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi made only one visit each, the latter on the last day of campaigning.
Elsewhere in the country, Modi addressed over 300 rallies, reportedly more than even Advani did. The fact that the BJP fared badly in almost every state that Modi campaigned in, is perhaps a reflection of the magic gone awry — something that might be the subject of introspection within the party.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Pakistan an overview:Zardari,gilani,sharif,army ;making mockery of democracy
Pakistan is today in a tailspin. Extremists and terrorists have captured significant portions of the country's western border areas. Political brinkmanship is pushing the rest of the country into turmoil. Streets of Punjab are witnessing the return of unrest and violence. Pakistan is seething, simmering and slowly disintegrating from its edges. A reluctant and bruised Army is waiting at the doorsteps. There are strong apprehensions of a coup, barely a year after the last military regime exited.
With events overtaking hopes with such a dizzying speed, predicting the immediate future of Pakistan will be like writing on sand. Few assumptions can, however, be made, both for the short and long term, without being swept away by the turbulent events which are likely to intensify in the days ahead.
One thing is sure: President Asif Ali Zardari's days are numbered. An outsider in Pakistan's politics, the February 2008 elections offered him the unique chance of turning the country's face towards a democratic future after nine years of military rule. He blew it within six months of his election. As President he chose confrontation over reconciliation with his political opponents. Though there are attempts to persuade Zardari to compromise with his political opponents, the Sharif brothers, and some kind of rapprochement might be brokered, it will be of the most temporary kind. Both the opponents have gone too far down the road to turn the clock back to March 2008 when they decided to jettison their traditional rivalries and form a coalition in Islamabad.
Zardari, by his sheer dumb-ass attitude, has created enemies within his own party. The most vocal has been the man he picked up from obscurity to be the Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani. An anti-Zardari feeling within the party had been gathering storm ever since the President brusquely sidelined all the Benazir Bhutto loyalists, relying more on his friends and associates to run the party and the government. With Zardari committing hara-kiri, the anti-Zardari group has rallied behind Gillani, giving this political lightweight enough scope to speak out against the President in public.
If events turn out in favour of Gillani against Zardari, it would be the second blow for the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the only political party in Pakistan with support bases across all provinces which has stood up, despite its feudal hierarchy and functioning, against the complete military takeover of the country's political process. The first was the brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the mantle of leadership falling in the laps of Zardari, a corrupt manipulator whose survival instincts have so far been a shade better than a cockroach.
PPP has far remained a vanguard of democracy in Pakistan. Zardari has rendered the party its fatal wound and irrespective of events, the party would witness a break-up in the months ahead. It is today rudderless; Gillani is not a charismatic leader and most important he is not a Bhutto. Zardari, a victim of his own cunning, has shown no commitment or ability to keep his party united and strong. There are other leaders in the party, some with the capability, and character, to lead the party but most of them are provincial leaders and do not have the charisma of a Benazir to gather the demoralised flock to present a unified front against the party opponents, and the Army.
Another certainty is the street power of the middle-class in Pakistan. This is a new phenomenon and is likely to gather momentum as the country struggles with its past follies. In 2007, when lawyers and others came out on the streets after President Pervez Musharraf sacked the Supreme Court Chief Justice, many thought it to be a short-lived phenomenon. When the street protests brought down the once-powerful Musharraf to his knees within months, it was quite clear that people had won over the military. The present round of street protests has naturally raised the spectre of a repeat of 2007, which is not exactly against Zardari alone but, must remember, is built on the demand for the restoration of the judiciary. This has far too deeper ramifications than merely political.
For one, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary was sacked in March 2007 because he was trying to put the Army on the defensive about several people, many of them strong opponents of Musharraf and his policies, who were made to disappear in the guise of War on Terror. Chaudhary was browbeaten and sacked in the presence of the present Army Chief, General Ashfaq Kayani. The street protests that ran like wild fire ended in the resignation of Musharraf. It was one of the most serious blows to the supremacy of the Army in Pakistan's history. Kayani is well aware that street protests this time around would only make the Army's position more unstable in a country where at least some sections of the people are showing signs of `military fatigue`. This does not augur well for the Army which has ruled the country on and off during the past six decades.
Therefore, it has made the Army's proclivity to remove civilian leaders and take over the reigns quite a difficult task under the present circumstances. Kayani knows that a coup at this time would invite a massive public wrath, and this time not only would the lawyers be out on the streets but others too. So a coup in the immediate future is not in sight.
What is therefore likely to happen in Pakistan is to somehow keep the present civilian government in place with or without Zardari (he has already been given a deadline to clean up the act or get out), to restore Punjab to the Sharif brothers or at least to their party and return to the western frontier where the Taliban and its allies have been knocking at the gates for the last two years. Gillani has cleverly positioned himself to take over from Zardari and the Army sees no threat from Gillani as the head of the State. The Sharif brothers too have declared that they would support Gillani. There are, however, several `buts and ifs` to such a proposition. An anonymous bullet, for instance, can unsettle this equation.
What should be more worrying to India is that peace and stability in Pakistan can never be taken for granted. There are too many negatives at work in the country. Ironically, the street protests, which many consider a sign of the unravelling of Pakistan, indicate a glimmer of possibility of people's voice finally getting heard. This is bad for the Army, but good for the country. It is too early to be optimistic. There are too many vested interests within and outside the country which, unlike India, would rather see Pakistan in turmoil.
Awatansh Tripathi
With events overtaking hopes with such a dizzying speed, predicting the immediate future of Pakistan will be like writing on sand. Few assumptions can, however, be made, both for the short and long term, without being swept away by the turbulent events which are likely to intensify in the days ahead.
One thing is sure: President Asif Ali Zardari's days are numbered. An outsider in Pakistan's politics, the February 2008 elections offered him the unique chance of turning the country's face towards a democratic future after nine years of military rule. He blew it within six months of his election. As President he chose confrontation over reconciliation with his political opponents. Though there are attempts to persuade Zardari to compromise with his political opponents, the Sharif brothers, and some kind of rapprochement might be brokered, it will be of the most temporary kind. Both the opponents have gone too far down the road to turn the clock back to March 2008 when they decided to jettison their traditional rivalries and form a coalition in Islamabad.
Zardari, by his sheer dumb-ass attitude, has created enemies within his own party. The most vocal has been the man he picked up from obscurity to be the Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani. An anti-Zardari feeling within the party had been gathering storm ever since the President brusquely sidelined all the Benazir Bhutto loyalists, relying more on his friends and associates to run the party and the government. With Zardari committing hara-kiri, the anti-Zardari group has rallied behind Gillani, giving this political lightweight enough scope to speak out against the President in public.
If events turn out in favour of Gillani against Zardari, it would be the second blow for the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the only political party in Pakistan with support bases across all provinces which has stood up, despite its feudal hierarchy and functioning, against the complete military takeover of the country's political process. The first was the brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the mantle of leadership falling in the laps of Zardari, a corrupt manipulator whose survival instincts have so far been a shade better than a cockroach.
PPP has far remained a vanguard of democracy in Pakistan. Zardari has rendered the party its fatal wound and irrespective of events, the party would witness a break-up in the months ahead. It is today rudderless; Gillani is not a charismatic leader and most important he is not a Bhutto. Zardari, a victim of his own cunning, has shown no commitment or ability to keep his party united and strong. There are other leaders in the party, some with the capability, and character, to lead the party but most of them are provincial leaders and do not have the charisma of a Benazir to gather the demoralised flock to present a unified front against the party opponents, and the Army.
Another certainty is the street power of the middle-class in Pakistan. This is a new phenomenon and is likely to gather momentum as the country struggles with its past follies. In 2007, when lawyers and others came out on the streets after President Pervez Musharraf sacked the Supreme Court Chief Justice, many thought it to be a short-lived phenomenon. When the street protests brought down the once-powerful Musharraf to his knees within months, it was quite clear that people had won over the military. The present round of street protests has naturally raised the spectre of a repeat of 2007, which is not exactly against Zardari alone but, must remember, is built on the demand for the restoration of the judiciary. This has far too deeper ramifications than merely political.
For one, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary was sacked in March 2007 because he was trying to put the Army on the defensive about several people, many of them strong opponents of Musharraf and his policies, who were made to disappear in the guise of War on Terror. Chaudhary was browbeaten and sacked in the presence of the present Army Chief, General Ashfaq Kayani. The street protests that ran like wild fire ended in the resignation of Musharraf. It was one of the most serious blows to the supremacy of the Army in Pakistan's history. Kayani is well aware that street protests this time around would only make the Army's position more unstable in a country where at least some sections of the people are showing signs of `military fatigue`. This does not augur well for the Army which has ruled the country on and off during the past six decades.
Therefore, it has made the Army's proclivity to remove civilian leaders and take over the reigns quite a difficult task under the present circumstances. Kayani knows that a coup at this time would invite a massive public wrath, and this time not only would the lawyers be out on the streets but others too. So a coup in the immediate future is not in sight.
What is therefore likely to happen in Pakistan is to somehow keep the present civilian government in place with or without Zardari (he has already been given a deadline to clean up the act or get out), to restore Punjab to the Sharif brothers or at least to their party and return to the western frontier where the Taliban and its allies have been knocking at the gates for the last two years. Gillani has cleverly positioned himself to take over from Zardari and the Army sees no threat from Gillani as the head of the State. The Sharif brothers too have declared that they would support Gillani. There are, however, several `buts and ifs` to such a proposition. An anonymous bullet, for instance, can unsettle this equation.
What should be more worrying to India is that peace and stability in Pakistan can never be taken for granted. There are too many negatives at work in the country. Ironically, the street protests, which many consider a sign of the unravelling of Pakistan, indicate a glimmer of possibility of people's voice finally getting heard. This is bad for the Army, but good for the country. It is too early to be optimistic. There are too many vested interests within and outside the country which, unlike India, would rather see Pakistan in turmoil.
Awatansh Tripathi
15th Loksabha:Challenges to face
Elections are over mandate is out and UPA is in power again in a much stronger position from the last time.This mandate has not only given the chance to make a stable govt. but also to do more in the national interest without any compromise as it was a very often situation in the 14th loksabha.
Today's period is not the same as it was in 2004 , now the situation is very different with hell a lot things to face and to do..
let us take an overview what are the situations one has to face and change.
EDUCATION: There is much to do whether its primary, secondary or higher education.Primary education is free but we dont have proper infrastructure to imply it in a much effective way...and infrastructure not means to build buildings etc but to give a regular incomes to rural and urban families so that they willingly send there kids to schools for education & not for food.The same thing implies to secondary education but now we will even have to introduce sports at a great level whether its in secondary level or higher.Vocational courses must be introduced from the secondary level only as per according to the vision of mahatma.
Turn your heads you will say many engineering, medical, law colleges etc. but are they all providing "quality" education?This must be improved in a very steady and proper manner.Research based studies at university level must be encouraged.Easily available education loans at 1-2% interest rate must be given to every student in need.
AGRICULTURE: Slow agricultural growth is a concern for policymakers as some two-thirds of India’s people depend on rural employment for a living. Current agricultural practices are neither economically nor environmentally sustainable and India's yields for many agricultural commodities are low. Poorly maintained irrigation systems and almost universal lack of good extension services are among the factors responsible. Farmers' access to markets is hampered by poor roads, rudimentary market infrastructure, and excessive regulation.
Irrigation facilities are inadequate, as revealed by the fact that only 52.6% of the land was irrigated in 2003–04, which result in farmers still being dependent on rainfall, specifically the Monsoon season. A good monsoon results in a robust growth for the economy as a whole, while a poor monsoon leads to a sluggish growth.
This govt. must take steps so that our dependency on monsoon must be decreased.Farmers must get easy loans on a very low interest rate of 1-2% as in many other countries.Awareness for crop and farm insurance must be increased as soon as possible.
DEFENSE:Our defense is very strong and there is no doubt in it whether its aerial, naval or land based.But still there are reforms to made , we are facing scarcity of officers in our forces as everyone needs something for living..so we need to revise the pay and wages of armed forces and give a job security to everyone who joins it.
Now the most important thing; our armaments ,we need to get self dependent in this field as due to this we are the worlds largest importer of arms and ammunition in the whole world.
This will not only save a lot of money but also strengthen our defense.
ECONOMY: Even in this period of global recession we are like the healthiest patient in the ward.But we need to take ourselves again in the same position and in an even better position.Privetisation must be contained as it was in the previous govt.Banking reforms must be introduced to contain foreign direct invests in the banks in future.
And...and...and....it must be ensured that every single penny thats is been issued for the public must go to the public.
SECURITY: This is the biggest concern in the present time not only for india but for the whole world.We are surrounded all around by a group of hostile nation.Terrorism is on its height.separatist movements are on rise in many parts of the nation.Serial blasts are happening every where.
Special forces trained specially to contain terrorism must be formed.Tougher and effective laws must be made.
Special courts must be established for the cases concerned to terrorism.
And as its a trend from many years that we just look after only one issue must be changed....an even bigger issue of naxalite problem must be looked after and while doing this ist should be kept is mind that it falls in other category as all these naxalites are a result of our ill governance , exploitation of poor peoples by local powers and government.We Just need to give them opportunities and and componsate them for what they had suffered and believe me in no time we all will be walking hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder.
TECHNOLOGY & SPACE PROGRAMME: By 80's how many people were knowing about computers ,IT,or even "technology" itself.We were rejected by USA when we asked for a supercomputer...and then a change tooks place in the vision of Late.Rajiv Gandhi and in no time we made our supercomputer by ourself.And now we are the IT king of world exporting thousand of IT products and professionals throughout the world.
Now in todays period al we have to do is to take on a new height and maintain its success.
Well as i believe whosoever is going to get the space is going to get the whole world.We are on a very good track in our space research but need to maintain and increase its speed by increasing the funds and raise awareness in our youth to be a part of it as technicians, engg.,scientists etc
CULTURAL & SOCIAL UNIFICATION: This is very important and difficult challenge that this govt. has to face. A lot of dent has been made by the regional parties in the name of region and religion, cast and language.
we will have to aware the people
that we are indian first rest is later.this will not only strengthen our unity but our manpower too.This govt.must aware people that states were made to develop a pace in our development and to provide better law and order,not to create a so called "sub-nation status".
I hope this govt. takes positive steps for our betterment...
.
.
Well thats all for now more coming soon..
"An Indian to an Indian for the whole mankind."
Awatansh Tripathi
Today's period is not the same as it was in 2004 , now the situation is very different with hell a lot things to face and to do..
let us take an overview what are the situations one has to face and change.
EDUCATION: There is much to do whether its primary, secondary or higher education.Primary education is free but we dont have proper infrastructure to imply it in a much effective way...and infrastructure not means to build buildings etc but to give a regular incomes to rural and urban families so that they willingly send there kids to schools for education & not for food.The same thing implies to secondary education but now we will even have to introduce sports at a great level whether its in secondary level or higher.Vocational courses must be introduced from the secondary level only as per according to the vision of mahatma.
Turn your heads you will say many engineering, medical, law colleges etc. but are they all providing "quality" education?This must be improved in a very steady and proper manner.Research based studies at university level must be encouraged.Easily available education loans at 1-2% interest rate must be given to every student in need.
AGRICULTURE: Slow agricultural growth is a concern for policymakers as some two-thirds of India’s people depend on rural employment for a living. Current agricultural practices are neither economically nor environmentally sustainable and India's yields for many agricultural commodities are low. Poorly maintained irrigation systems and almost universal lack of good extension services are among the factors responsible. Farmers' access to markets is hampered by poor roads, rudimentary market infrastructure, and excessive regulation.
Irrigation facilities are inadequate, as revealed by the fact that only 52.6% of the land was irrigated in 2003–04, which result in farmers still being dependent on rainfall, specifically the Monsoon season. A good monsoon results in a robust growth for the economy as a whole, while a poor monsoon leads to a sluggish growth.
This govt. must take steps so that our dependency on monsoon must be decreased.Farmers must get easy loans on a very low interest rate of 1-2% as in many other countries.Awareness for crop and farm insurance must be increased as soon as possible.
DEFENSE:Our defense is very strong and there is no doubt in it whether its aerial, naval or land based.But still there are reforms to made , we are facing scarcity of officers in our forces as everyone needs something for living..so we need to revise the pay and wages of armed forces and give a job security to everyone who joins it.
Now the most important thing; our armaments ,we need to get self dependent in this field as due to this we are the worlds largest importer of arms and ammunition in the whole world.
This will not only save a lot of money but also strengthen our defense.
ECONOMY: Even in this period of global recession we are like the healthiest patient in the ward.But we need to take ourselves again in the same position and in an even better position.Privetisation must be contained as it was in the previous govt.Banking reforms must be introduced to contain foreign direct invests in the banks in future.
And...and...and....it must be ensured that every single penny thats is been issued for the public must go to the public.
SECURITY: This is the biggest concern in the present time not only for india but for the whole world.We are surrounded all around by a group of hostile nation.Terrorism is on its height.separatist movements are on rise in many parts of the nation.Serial blasts are happening every where.
Special forces trained specially to contain terrorism must be formed.Tougher and effective laws must be made.
Special courts must be established for the cases concerned to terrorism.
And as its a trend from many years that we just look after only one issue must be changed....an even bigger issue of naxalite problem must be looked after and while doing this ist should be kept is mind that it falls in other category as all these naxalites are a result of our ill governance , exploitation of poor peoples by local powers and government.We Just need to give them opportunities and and componsate them for what they had suffered and believe me in no time we all will be walking hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder.
TECHNOLOGY & SPACE PROGRAMME: By 80's how many people were knowing about computers ,IT,or even "technology" itself.We were rejected by USA when we asked for a supercomputer...and then a change tooks place in the vision of Late.Rajiv Gandhi and in no time we made our supercomputer by ourself.And now we are the IT king of world exporting thousand of IT products and professionals throughout the world.
Now in todays period al we have to do is to take on a new height and maintain its success.
Well as i believe whosoever is going to get the space is going to get the whole world.We are on a very good track in our space research but need to maintain and increase its speed by increasing the funds and raise awareness in our youth to be a part of it as technicians, engg.,scientists etc
CULTURAL & SOCIAL UNIFICATION: This is very important and difficult challenge that this govt. has to face. A lot of dent has been made by the regional parties in the name of region and religion, cast and language.
we will have to aware the people
that we are indian first rest is later.this will not only strengthen our unity but our manpower too.This govt.must aware people that states were made to develop a pace in our development and to provide better law and order,not to create a so called "sub-nation status".
I hope this govt. takes positive steps for our betterment...
.
.
Well thats all for now more coming soon..
"An Indian to an Indian for the whole mankind."
Awatansh Tripathi
ISI & The role of Pakistan in "war on terror"
Much is now being made of the 'indigenisation' of Islamist extremism and terrorism in India as purportedly opposed to the earlier Pakistan-backed terrorist activities. It is crucial, at this juncture, to scotch emerging misconceptions on this count. Islamist terrorism in India has always had an Indian face -- but has overwhelmingly been engineered and directed from Pakistan, and nothing has changed in this scenario. Going back to the March 1993 serial explosions in Mumbai, which killed 257 people and left 713 injured, and were executed by the Dawood Ibrahim gang, for instance, it is useful to recall that nearly 1,800 kg of RDX and a large number of detonators and small arms had been smuggled from Pakistan through India's west coast prior to the bombings. The operation was coordinated by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ibrahim and a number of his gang members have since lived under state protection in Karachi.
Similarly, Al Ummah, which was responsible for a series of 19 explosions in February 1998, which left 50 people dead in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, and which had established a wide network of extremist organisations across south India, was also aided by Pakistan, with a considerable flow of funds from Pakistan-based terror groups, often through the Gulf. The Deendar Anjuman, headed by Zia-ul-Hassan, which orchestrated a series of 13 explosions in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa between May and July 2000, was, again, bankrolled by the ISI.
The then Union Minister for Home Affairs had stated in Parliament that investigators had established linkages between the Deendar Anjuman and Pakistan's covert intelligence agency. Hassan himself was based at Peshawar in Pakistan, where the sect was established under the name of Anjuman Hizbullah, and he is said to have floated a militant group, the Jamaat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in Pakistan, in order to 'capture India and spread Islam'.
It is entirely within this paradigm that the evolution of Students Islamic Movement of India as a terrorist group is located. Absent the support and involvement of Pakistan's covert agencies and an enduring partnership with a range of Pakistan-based or backed terrorist groups, SIMI may have had an amateur flirtation with terrorism, an impulse that would quickly have been exhausted with a handful of low-grade and at least occasionally accidental bomb blasts. Instead, its leadership and cadre have had a long apprenticeship alongside Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Jammu & Kashmir, and several of the more promising candidates have crossed the border to secure 'advanced training' on Pakistani soil or in Bangladesh.
The control centre of SIMI has, for some time now, been based in Pakistan. Operational command in a number of major attacks, including the Samjhauta Express bombing of February 18, 2007, and the two serial attacks in Hyderabad in May and August 2007, was known to have been exercised by Mohammed Shahid aka Bilal. Bilal was reported to have been shot in Karachi in September 2007, and, while Indian intelligence sources remain sceptical, no confirmed sighting has subsequently been reported. Operational control thereafter has shifted to the Lahore-based second-in-command, Mohammad Amjad.
I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that Pakistan's ISI -- as an organ of the country's military and political establishment -- has been, and remains, the principal source of the impetus, the infrastructure and the organisational networks of what is inaccurately called 'Islamist' terrorism across the world. An overwhelming proportion of so-called 'Islamist' terrorism is, in fact, simply 'ISI terrorism'.
While the Indian establishment remains unusually coy about this reality -- with fitful and often quickly qualified exception -- some measure of satisfaction may now be derived from a growing American recognition of Pakistan's pernicious role as an abiding source of Islamist terrorism. Had this recognition come in the first weeks after 9/11, that could have saved thousands of lives, most significantly in Afghanistan and India, but also in Europe and across Asia.
Nevertheless, Western commentators and Governments are now increasingly acknowledging Pakistan's duplicity in the 'global war on terror', the proclivity to act as an 'on-and-off ally of Washington'. While providing fitful cooperation in US anti-terrorism efforts, The Washington Times notes, "in other ways, Pakistan aids and abets terror. US officials say that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence... was behind the recent bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul. And the Pakistani Government's refusal to confront Al Qaeda has helped create a de facto safe haven for the group and its allies in locations like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas region of Pakistan".
US Intelligence officials, The Washington Times notes further, compare "Al Qaeda's operational and organisational advantages in the FATA to those it enjoyed in Afghanistan prior to September 11", and warn that "Al Qaeda was training and positioning its operatives to carry out attacks in the West, probably including the United States".
These disclosures coincide with reports that President George W Bush had secretly approved orders in July 2008, allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani Government. US Forces have executed numerous missile attacks from unmanned Predator drones on Pakistani soil in the past, but the September 3, 2008, attack by NATO and US ground troops at a Taliban-Al Qaeda stronghold in South Waziristan was the first instance in which troops had participated. The incident has already been followed by drone attacks on September 9 on a seminary run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, in which 20 people, including some senior Al Qaeda operatives, were killed; and on September 12 at Tul Khel in North Waziristan, in which an Al Badr Mujahideen commander was targeted. Haqqani, it is significant, was known to have engineered the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, using a LeT suicide cadre Hamza Shakoor, a Pakistani from Gujranwala district, on behalf of the ISI.
The increasing frequency of US-NATO attacks -- manned or unmanned -- into Pakistani territory, and the Bush Administration's approval of Special Operations into Pakistan without prior sanction from Islamabad, has reconfirmed the country's status as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and an area of growing anxiety for the world. There is, however, still very little understanding of how heavy and sustained the Pakistani footprint has been in Islamist terrorist activities across the globe. The enormity of this 'footprint' is, for instance, reflected in the long succession of terrorist incidents, arrests and seizures, separately, in India, the US and Europe, in which a Pakistani link has been suspected or confirmed.
Awatansh Tripathi
Similarly, Al Ummah, which was responsible for a series of 19 explosions in February 1998, which left 50 people dead in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, and which had established a wide network of extremist organisations across south India, was also aided by Pakistan, with a considerable flow of funds from Pakistan-based terror groups, often through the Gulf. The Deendar Anjuman, headed by Zia-ul-Hassan, which orchestrated a series of 13 explosions in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa between May and July 2000, was, again, bankrolled by the ISI.
The then Union Minister for Home Affairs had stated in Parliament that investigators had established linkages between the Deendar Anjuman and Pakistan's covert intelligence agency. Hassan himself was based at Peshawar in Pakistan, where the sect was established under the name of Anjuman Hizbullah, and he is said to have floated a militant group, the Jamaat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in Pakistan, in order to 'capture India and spread Islam'.
It is entirely within this paradigm that the evolution of Students Islamic Movement of India as a terrorist group is located. Absent the support and involvement of Pakistan's covert agencies and an enduring partnership with a range of Pakistan-based or backed terrorist groups, SIMI may have had an amateur flirtation with terrorism, an impulse that would quickly have been exhausted with a handful of low-grade and at least occasionally accidental bomb blasts. Instead, its leadership and cadre have had a long apprenticeship alongside Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Jammu & Kashmir, and several of the more promising candidates have crossed the border to secure 'advanced training' on Pakistani soil or in Bangladesh.
The control centre of SIMI has, for some time now, been based in Pakistan. Operational command in a number of major attacks, including the Samjhauta Express bombing of February 18, 2007, and the two serial attacks in Hyderabad in May and August 2007, was known to have been exercised by Mohammed Shahid aka Bilal. Bilal was reported to have been shot in Karachi in September 2007, and, while Indian intelligence sources remain sceptical, no confirmed sighting has subsequently been reported. Operational control thereafter has shifted to the Lahore-based second-in-command, Mohammad Amjad.
I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that Pakistan's ISI -- as an organ of the country's military and political establishment -- has been, and remains, the principal source of the impetus, the infrastructure and the organisational networks of what is inaccurately called 'Islamist' terrorism across the world. An overwhelming proportion of so-called 'Islamist' terrorism is, in fact, simply 'ISI terrorism'.
While the Indian establishment remains unusually coy about this reality -- with fitful and often quickly qualified exception -- some measure of satisfaction may now be derived from a growing American recognition of Pakistan's pernicious role as an abiding source of Islamist terrorism. Had this recognition come in the first weeks after 9/11, that could have saved thousands of lives, most significantly in Afghanistan and India, but also in Europe and across Asia.
Nevertheless, Western commentators and Governments are now increasingly acknowledging Pakistan's duplicity in the 'global war on terror', the proclivity to act as an 'on-and-off ally of Washington'. While providing fitful cooperation in US anti-terrorism efforts, The Washington Times notes, "in other ways, Pakistan aids and abets terror. US officials say that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence... was behind the recent bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul. And the Pakistani Government's refusal to confront Al Qaeda has helped create a de facto safe haven for the group and its allies in locations like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas region of Pakistan".
US Intelligence officials, The Washington Times notes further, compare "Al Qaeda's operational and organisational advantages in the FATA to those it enjoyed in Afghanistan prior to September 11", and warn that "Al Qaeda was training and positioning its operatives to carry out attacks in the West, probably including the United States".
These disclosures coincide with reports that President George W Bush had secretly approved orders in July 2008, allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani Government. US Forces have executed numerous missile attacks from unmanned Predator drones on Pakistani soil in the past, but the September 3, 2008, attack by NATO and US ground troops at a Taliban-Al Qaeda stronghold in South Waziristan was the first instance in which troops had participated. The incident has already been followed by drone attacks on September 9 on a seminary run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, in which 20 people, including some senior Al Qaeda operatives, were killed; and on September 12 at Tul Khel in North Waziristan, in which an Al Badr Mujahideen commander was targeted. Haqqani, it is significant, was known to have engineered the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, using a LeT suicide cadre Hamza Shakoor, a Pakistani from Gujranwala district, on behalf of the ISI.
The increasing frequency of US-NATO attacks -- manned or unmanned -- into Pakistani territory, and the Bush Administration's approval of Special Operations into Pakistan without prior sanction from Islamabad, has reconfirmed the country's status as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and an area of growing anxiety for the world. There is, however, still very little understanding of how heavy and sustained the Pakistani footprint has been in Islamist terrorist activities across the globe. The enormity of this 'footprint' is, for instance, reflected in the long succession of terrorist incidents, arrests and seizures, separately, in India, the US and Europe, in which a Pakistani link has been suspected or confirmed.
Awatansh Tripathi
Post mandate poltical scenario:India chooses congress
India voted decisively for continuity and stability in the general election to the 15th Lok Sabha, giving the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance another five-year term in office. In contrast to 2004, the UPA, with close to 260 of the total 543 seats, will not need the support of the Left parties, and should be able to get a comfortable majority with the backing of the Samajwadi Party, which emerged as the single largest party in Uttar Pradesh. In terms of seats, this is the best performance by the Congress since 1991, the last time the country saw a single-party, although minority, government. Verdict 2009 gives little scope for the smaller parties or groupings to engage in backroom negotiations to decide the shape of the next government. The Congress holds all the aces. The prime ministership will not be up for bargaining, as some of the smaller players were hoping. For President Pratibha Patil, the task on hand couldn’t be simpler: there is no need to consult constitutional experts to decide on whom to invite to form the next government. Manmohan Singh, the declared candidate of the Congress and the automatic choice for Prime Minister, could be the first Prime Minister since Indira Gandhi to have two full terms.
The triumph of the Congress was actually an aggregation of specific successes across different States. The party retained its base in Andhra Pradesh; cut its losses in Madhya Pradesh; recovered lost ground in West Bengal, Kerala, and Rajasthan; and combined well with its allies in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. There was no one big surprise anywhere, but the party pulled out one small surprise after another across the regions of India. When it seemed to take the long view in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and spurned alliance offers by regional players, few predicted any immediate gains for the party. But now, one of the significant features of this election is surely the re-emergence of the Congress as a key player in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where 80 seats are on offer. The same strategy did not work of course in Bihar, where the alliance of the Janata Dal(United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party rode on the good track record of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. All the same, the Congress seems to have sown the seeds of its own resurgence by adopting a long-sighted strategy in the two key Hindi-speaking States.
The principal opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, needed to expand beyond its core support base to get ahead of the Congress. This it was unable to do. In 2004, the BJP fared very well in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Karnataka — the States where it is locked in a more or less direct fight with the Congress. To merely repeat that success would have been a considerable achievement. But this time, it lost badly in Rajasthan and yielded some ground in Madhya Pradesh. The successes in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka could not compensate for the losses sustained in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. To have a realistic chance of forming the government, the BJP not only had to hold its ground in the Hindi belt; it also needed its allies to do well. While the JD(U) obliged in Bihar, the Shiv Sena disappointed in Maharashtra. The honours were more or less even in Punjab. But more importantly, potential post-poll allies such as the Telugu Desam Party and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti in Andhra Pradesh and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu did not do as well as they were expected to. And this came after the demoralising loss of a long-time ally, the Biju Janata Dal, in Orissa. After reaching a plateau in the Hindi belt, the BJP needed to grow outside its traditional strongholds to really threaten the Congress. In recent years, its only success in this regard has been Karnataka. But in other States in the south, the party is far from being a player of any significance.
Other than the BJP, the big loser in the current election is the Left. In both West Bengal and Kerala, the Left parties suffered severe reverses; if the loss in the southern State can be explained in terms of the customary swing of the pendulum, the failure to win a majority of seats in the eastern State is the first in more than three decades. This has meant that the Left parties will no longer be the influential force they were at the Centre between 2004 and 2008. Although they were not part of the UPA government, the Left parties helped shape a Common Minimum Programme and kept up pressure on the government to comply with it. Factional infighting in Kerala, and a strong oppositional, even if opportunistic, alliance in West Bengal, have succeeded in beating back the Left, which will need to do serious introspection on where it went wrong.
In a tough contest, the UPA overcame not only the anti-incumbency factor, but also the shrill, communal campaign of the BJP. But the mandate must not be read as an unqualified endorsement of all that the UPA government did in the last five years. In many States, regional issues came into play. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue dominated campaign rhetoric in Tamil Nadu, but the voters rewarded neither those who advocated the cause of the LTTE nor those who blamed the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka on alleged complicity and inaction by the Central and State governments. In Bihar, the fight became a virtual referendum on the performance of the Nitish Kumar-government after years of Lalu-Rabri rule. In Maharashtra, the split in the Shiv Sena engineered by Raj Thackeray seems to have played as big a role as the coming together of the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress. India faces a number of internal and external challenges: in particular, the impact of the global economic slowdown, and the tensions and instability in the neighbourhood. The UPA must guard against complacency and must use this second innings to improve governance and respond effectively to the big challenges.
Awatansh Tripathi.
The triumph of the Congress was actually an aggregation of specific successes across different States. The party retained its base in Andhra Pradesh; cut its losses in Madhya Pradesh; recovered lost ground in West Bengal, Kerala, and Rajasthan; and combined well with its allies in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. There was no one big surprise anywhere, but the party pulled out one small surprise after another across the regions of India. When it seemed to take the long view in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and spurned alliance offers by regional players, few predicted any immediate gains for the party. But now, one of the significant features of this election is surely the re-emergence of the Congress as a key player in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where 80 seats are on offer. The same strategy did not work of course in Bihar, where the alliance of the Janata Dal(United) and the Bharatiya Janata Party rode on the good track record of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. All the same, the Congress seems to have sown the seeds of its own resurgence by adopting a long-sighted strategy in the two key Hindi-speaking States.
The principal opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, needed to expand beyond its core support base to get ahead of the Congress. This it was unable to do. In 2004, the BJP fared very well in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, and Karnataka — the States where it is locked in a more or less direct fight with the Congress. To merely repeat that success would have been a considerable achievement. But this time, it lost badly in Rajasthan and yielded some ground in Madhya Pradesh. The successes in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka could not compensate for the losses sustained in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. To have a realistic chance of forming the government, the BJP not only had to hold its ground in the Hindi belt; it also needed its allies to do well. While the JD(U) obliged in Bihar, the Shiv Sena disappointed in Maharashtra. The honours were more or less even in Punjab. But more importantly, potential post-poll allies such as the Telugu Desam Party and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti in Andhra Pradesh and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu did not do as well as they were expected to. And this came after the demoralising loss of a long-time ally, the Biju Janata Dal, in Orissa. After reaching a plateau in the Hindi belt, the BJP needed to grow outside its traditional strongholds to really threaten the Congress. In recent years, its only success in this regard has been Karnataka. But in other States in the south, the party is far from being a player of any significance.
Other than the BJP, the big loser in the current election is the Left. In both West Bengal and Kerala, the Left parties suffered severe reverses; if the loss in the southern State can be explained in terms of the customary swing of the pendulum, the failure to win a majority of seats in the eastern State is the first in more than three decades. This has meant that the Left parties will no longer be the influential force they were at the Centre between 2004 and 2008. Although they were not part of the UPA government, the Left parties helped shape a Common Minimum Programme and kept up pressure on the government to comply with it. Factional infighting in Kerala, and a strong oppositional, even if opportunistic, alliance in West Bengal, have succeeded in beating back the Left, which will need to do serious introspection on where it went wrong.
In a tough contest, the UPA overcame not only the anti-incumbency factor, but also the shrill, communal campaign of the BJP. But the mandate must not be read as an unqualified endorsement of all that the UPA government did in the last five years. In many States, regional issues came into play. The Sri Lankan Tamil issue dominated campaign rhetoric in Tamil Nadu, but the voters rewarded neither those who advocated the cause of the LTTE nor those who blamed the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka on alleged complicity and inaction by the Central and State governments. In Bihar, the fight became a virtual referendum on the performance of the Nitish Kumar-government after years of Lalu-Rabri rule. In Maharashtra, the split in the Shiv Sena engineered by Raj Thackeray seems to have played as big a role as the coming together of the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress. India faces a number of internal and external challenges: in particular, the impact of the global economic slowdown, and the tensions and instability in the neighbourhood. The UPA must guard against complacency and must use this second innings to improve governance and respond effectively to the big challenges.
Awatansh Tripathi.
Why the future belong to india
'The future belongs to india, not china'...this is a much debated topic throughout the whole world and a lot of confusions too.Now if we realy want to know the final conclusion we must go back before the recession.....now at this time(before recession) india is having a growth rate of 8% on an avg. and china 10%. i know its quite a difference.
Now many of you will ask if we grow by 10% we will save almost 20yrs and thats a generation and we can uplift millions into middle class in this generation only...well i agree with you...but dont you think we had waited for almost 3000yrs for this position so why not 20yrs more in an indian way, well i know many eyebrows will raise now and i wont argue for this and many of you will even say me i am against progress....but i again say why dont we do in an indian way?
I know that the cost of democracy is the price the poor pay in the delay of their entry into the middle class.I did not elaborate the 'Indian way' but it must include taking a holiday on half a dozen New Year's Days! It is easy to get mesmerized by China's amazing progress and feel frustrated by India's chaotic democracy,but do we really want to gain 2% more on cost of democracy?Think...
In referring to the 'Indian way',I mean that a nation must be true to itself. Democracy comes easily to us because India has historically 'accumulated' its diverse groups who retain their distinctiveness while identifying themselves as Indian.
China has 'assimilated' its people into a common, homogeneous Confucian society. China is a melting pot in which differences disappear while India is a salad bowl in which the constituents retain their identity. Hence, China has always been governed by a hierarchical, centralized state - a tradition that has carried into the present era of reform communism. China resembles a business corporation today. Each mayor and party secretary has objectives relating to investment, output and growth, which are aligned to national goals. Those who exceed their goals rise quickly. The main problem in running a country as a business is that many people get left out.
India, on the other hand, can only manage itself by accommodating vocal and varied interest groups in its salad bowl. This leads to a million negotiations daily and we call this system 'democracy'. It slows us down - we take five years to build a highway versus one in China. Those who are disgruntled go to court. But our politicians are forced to worry about abuses of human rights, whereas my search on Google on 'human rights abuses in China' yielded 47.8 million entries in 13 seconds! Democracies have a safety valve - it allows the disgruntled to let off steam before slowly co-opting them.
Both India and China have accepted the capitalist road to prosperity. But capitalism is more comfortable in a democracy, which fosters entrepreneurs naturally. A state enterprise can never be as innovative or nimble and this is why the Chinese envy some of our private companies. Democracy respects property rights. As both nations urbanize, peasants in India are able to sell or borrow against their land, but the Chinese peasants are at the mercy of local party bosses. Because India has the rule of law, entrepreneurs can enforce contracts. If someone takes away your property in China, you have no recourse. Hence, it is the party bosses who are accumulating wealth in China. The rule of law slows us down but it also protects us (and our environment, as the NGOs have discovered).
We take freedom for granted in India but it was not always so. When General Reginald Dyer opened fire in 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh, killing 379 people, Indians realised they could only have dignity when they were free from British rule. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, where 300 students were killed, was China's Jallianwala Bagh. China today may have become richer than India but the poorest Chinese yearns for the same freedom.
Because the Indian state is inefficient, millions of entrepreneurs have stepped into the vacuum. When government schools fail, people start private schools in the slums, and the result is millions of 'slumdog millionaires'. You cannot do this in China. Our free society forces us to solve our own problems, making us self-reliant. Hence, the Indian way is likely to be more enduring because the people have scripted India's success while China's state has crafted its success. This worries China's leaders who ask, if India can become the world's second fastest economy despite the state, what will happen when the Indian state begins to perform? India's path may be slower but it is surer, and the Indian way of life is also more likely to survive. This is why when I am reborn I would prefer it to be in India.
Awatansh Tripathi.
Now many of you will ask if we grow by 10% we will save almost 20yrs and thats a generation and we can uplift millions into middle class in this generation only...well i agree with you...but dont you think we had waited for almost 3000yrs for this position so why not 20yrs more in an indian way, well i know many eyebrows will raise now and i wont argue for this and many of you will even say me i am against progress....but i again say why dont we do in an indian way?
I know that the cost of democracy is the price the poor pay in the delay of their entry into the middle class.I did not elaborate the 'Indian way' but it must include taking a holiday on half a dozen New Year's Days! It is easy to get mesmerized by China's amazing progress and feel frustrated by India's chaotic democracy,but do we really want to gain 2% more on cost of democracy?Think...
In referring to the 'Indian way',I mean that a nation must be true to itself. Democracy comes easily to us because India has historically 'accumulated' its diverse groups who retain their distinctiveness while identifying themselves as Indian.
China has 'assimilated' its people into a common, homogeneous Confucian society. China is a melting pot in which differences disappear while India is a salad bowl in which the constituents retain their identity. Hence, China has always been governed by a hierarchical, centralized state - a tradition that has carried into the present era of reform communism. China resembles a business corporation today. Each mayor and party secretary has objectives relating to investment, output and growth, which are aligned to national goals. Those who exceed their goals rise quickly. The main problem in running a country as a business is that many people get left out.
India, on the other hand, can only manage itself by accommodating vocal and varied interest groups in its salad bowl. This leads to a million negotiations daily and we call this system 'democracy'. It slows us down - we take five years to build a highway versus one in China. Those who are disgruntled go to court. But our politicians are forced to worry about abuses of human rights, whereas my search on Google on 'human rights abuses in China' yielded 47.8 million entries in 13 seconds! Democracies have a safety valve - it allows the disgruntled to let off steam before slowly co-opting them.
Both India and China have accepted the capitalist road to prosperity. But capitalism is more comfortable in a democracy, which fosters entrepreneurs naturally. A state enterprise can never be as innovative or nimble and this is why the Chinese envy some of our private companies. Democracy respects property rights. As both nations urbanize, peasants in India are able to sell or borrow against their land, but the Chinese peasants are at the mercy of local party bosses. Because India has the rule of law, entrepreneurs can enforce contracts. If someone takes away your property in China, you have no recourse. Hence, it is the party bosses who are accumulating wealth in China. The rule of law slows us down but it also protects us (and our environment, as the NGOs have discovered).
We take freedom for granted in India but it was not always so. When General Reginald Dyer opened fire in 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh, killing 379 people, Indians realised they could only have dignity when they were free from British rule. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, where 300 students were killed, was China's Jallianwala Bagh. China today may have become richer than India but the poorest Chinese yearns for the same freedom.
Because the Indian state is inefficient, millions of entrepreneurs have stepped into the vacuum. When government schools fail, people start private schools in the slums, and the result is millions of 'slumdog millionaires'. You cannot do this in China. Our free society forces us to solve our own problems, making us self-reliant. Hence, the Indian way is likely to be more enduring because the people have scripted India's success while China's state has crafted its success. This worries China's leaders who ask, if India can become the world's second fastest economy despite the state, what will happen when the Indian state begins to perform? India's path may be slower but it is surer, and the Indian way of life is also more likely to survive. This is why when I am reborn I would prefer it to be in India.
Awatansh Tripathi.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Current scenario of indian politics.
well elections are over now and every political party and whole of the india is eagerly waiting for the much awaited results.
Let us leave the results for a while and think about what all these so called "national parties"( and also the small parties) are banking on......got any answer, well i guess everyone is confused....i give you a clue...do you remember if any party has given a vision for the future or the social unification of our country ...you got a simple answer for this "NO".
I read the manifesto of SP and by any chance if its applied we will be all the way back to 19th century....well then they can work for reducing greenhouse gases.
whenever i listen to political debates or some rally everyone is accusing other of being anti-secular or a hurdle in development and being uncapable to check terrorism and bla bla....but none of them says that what they themselve are going to do for it.
In a rally i heard SP supremo MSY accusing another party of contesting criminals in the elections and i guess maybe you people know or not but MSY himself is under more then 5 serious criminal cases including adultry and cheating. His party announces to be secular and has given ticket to the Babri demolisher "klyan singh".
now the mighty congress....there leaders are accusing others of being anti-secular....damn , i wanna ask them what does it mean to be secular and anti secular and who is gonna decide if one is secular or not...i am asking this to every party. and believe me as you ask this they will utter in their mouths "ruling party'..Bravo. I salute them for the nuclear deal but i want to slap them for their failure in bigger issues like checking terrorism , corruption , poverty and providing quality and easily available education in past 5 years.And now its leaders have openly accepted of using CBI against there opponents. Guys maybe i am harsh but think, is gandhi family made to serve congress or congress made to serve them? and yes i didnt said "India"
BJP.....here comes the baby (i said bcz if modi thinks congress is an 119 yr old woman then you know...)well they have made us proud by the 98'pokhran blasts....but what we all dont know is that by 98' pakistan wasnt a nuclear state but these blasts provoked him to be nuclear state and we all know we had to think twice before taking any harsh step against pak due to their nuclear assets...i know thats not very big but a nuclear attack is a nuclear attack. We had already conducted succesful tests in 74' so 98' wasn't necessary. But all that hppns is for good is what we can say now.
BJp can be credited with giving us quality infrastructures in form of highways etc. But they have a bigger dark spot inform of gujrat riots and creating religion based pressure groups like bajrang dal.
now comes the Statue queen BSP....once there slogan was "tilak taraju aur talwar inko maro jute chaar."...i guess most of you got what it means..and now they say "hathi nahi ganesh hai brahma vishnu mahesh hai" & "dalito ne pahchana hai , brahmano ne mana hai , chatriya bhi inke saath hai ab baniyon ki bari hai behenji hamari hai".....according to me BSP should be renamed as "behnji sewa party"....well i didnt found any development made by this party anywhere, else in mayawati's wealth which made her india's richest politician by paying an advance tax of 180,000,000 INR!!!!!!!!!.All she has done is made statues, parks, parks , parks and parks more parks...woho i wont be amazed if she got a new kinda "Park-insons" desease. there is a slum in lucknow just 1 km from her house and infront of her dream park, ambedkar park.She has spoiled 1300 crore rs. in ambedkar park but not a single penny for that slum. also just infront of her residence every night you can see many rikshawala's sleeping on the square under open roof...but who cares as she know they dont have voter cards.
I guess she thinks that the statue of ambedkar should be placed in better place then humans.
and yes she is the first indian politician to unveil her own statue worth 75,00,000Rs/-.BSP can also be credited with maintaing social divide in the name of castes and religion....honestly speaking i dont give a damn about any persons caste or religion....i guess most of us.
truly speaking if by any chance she became the PM maybe you can see a new bank note with the pic of mayawati himself or Maya gate instead of india gate...who knows..we
Now the Left parties....well in a simple line..."Made in china for India"...they say that china loosed more than india in the 62" war....is that true????...or just favouring the communist china....(and here i wanna state i am not against communism).these parties have degraded the ideology of marx whether it was singur or backing off from the nuclear deal.
you know "khichdi" an indian dish..its accopanies with curd (dahi)...so khichdi is the alliances forming govt. like upa and nda...and dahi is left parties ...so you can eat khichdi by mixing dahi in it or without mixing it in it...just keep it aside....The same thing hppnd in the last govt...left were supporting upa from out.....and they will be just "dahi" forever.
i didnt said anything about other parties as they are very small to mention....in other words truly opportunist ....they are seeking just who is going to be in action and will give them support by the policy of give and take....whether its lalu, jaya, shard panwar, karunanidhi,naidu,paswan, and many more...and yes all of them are also prime ministerial candidates too...except lalu's party no other of these parties have more then 10 MP's.
Friends its time to make these idiots realise that our country is not a ring of politics....
i urge all of you to be an indian to an indian for the whole mankind.
Awatansh Tripathi
Let us leave the results for a while and think about what all these so called "national parties"( and also the small parties) are banking on......got any answer, well i guess everyone is confused....i give you a clue...do you remember if any party has given a vision for the future or the social unification of our country ...you got a simple answer for this "NO".
I read the manifesto of SP and by any chance if its applied we will be all the way back to 19th century....well then they can work for reducing greenhouse gases.
whenever i listen to political debates or some rally everyone is accusing other of being anti-secular or a hurdle in development and being uncapable to check terrorism and bla bla....but none of them says that what they themselve are going to do for it.
In a rally i heard SP supremo MSY accusing another party of contesting criminals in the elections and i guess maybe you people know or not but MSY himself is under more then 5 serious criminal cases including adultry and cheating. His party announces to be secular and has given ticket to the Babri demolisher "klyan singh".
now the mighty congress....there leaders are accusing others of being anti-secular....damn , i wanna ask them what does it mean to be secular and anti secular and who is gonna decide if one is secular or not...i am asking this to every party. and believe me as you ask this they will utter in their mouths "ruling party'..Bravo. I salute them for the nuclear deal but i want to slap them for their failure in bigger issues like checking terrorism , corruption , poverty and providing quality and easily available education in past 5 years.And now its leaders have openly accepted of using CBI against there opponents. Guys maybe i am harsh but think, is gandhi family made to serve congress or congress made to serve them? and yes i didnt said "India"
BJP.....here comes the baby (i said bcz if modi thinks congress is an 119 yr old woman then you know...)well they have made us proud by the 98'pokhran blasts....but what we all dont know is that by 98' pakistan wasnt a nuclear state but these blasts provoked him to be nuclear state and we all know we had to think twice before taking any harsh step against pak due to their nuclear assets...i know thats not very big but a nuclear attack is a nuclear attack. We had already conducted succesful tests in 74' so 98' wasn't necessary. But all that hppns is for good is what we can say now.
BJp can be credited with giving us quality infrastructures in form of highways etc. But they have a bigger dark spot inform of gujrat riots and creating religion based pressure groups like bajrang dal.
now comes the Statue queen BSP....once there slogan was "tilak taraju aur talwar inko maro jute chaar."...i guess most of you got what it means..and now they say "hathi nahi ganesh hai brahma vishnu mahesh hai" & "dalito ne pahchana hai , brahmano ne mana hai , chatriya bhi inke saath hai ab baniyon ki bari hai behenji hamari hai".....according to me BSP should be renamed as "behnji sewa party"....well i didnt found any development made by this party anywhere, else in mayawati's wealth which made her india's richest politician by paying an advance tax of 180,000,000 INR!!!!!!!!!.All she has done is made statues, parks, parks , parks and parks more parks...woho i wont be amazed if she got a new kinda "Park-insons" desease. there is a slum in lucknow just 1 km from her house and infront of her dream park, ambedkar park.She has spoiled 1300 crore rs. in ambedkar park but not a single penny for that slum. also just infront of her residence every night you can see many rikshawala's sleeping on the square under open roof...but who cares as she know they dont have voter cards.
I guess she thinks that the statue of ambedkar should be placed in better place then humans.
and yes she is the first indian politician to unveil her own statue worth 75,00,000Rs/-.BSP can also be credited with maintaing social divide in the name of castes and religion....honestly speaking i dont give a damn about any persons caste or religion....i guess most of us.
truly speaking if by any chance she became the PM maybe you can see a new bank note with the pic of mayawati himself or Maya gate instead of india gate...who knows..we
Now the Left parties....well in a simple line..."Made in china for India"...they say that china loosed more than india in the 62" war....is that true????...or just favouring the communist china....(and here i wanna state i am not against communism).these parties have degraded the ideology of marx whether it was singur or backing off from the nuclear deal.
you know "khichdi" an indian dish..its accopanies with curd (dahi)...so khichdi is the alliances forming govt. like upa and nda...and dahi is left parties ...so you can eat khichdi by mixing dahi in it or without mixing it in it...just keep it aside....The same thing hppnd in the last govt...left were supporting upa from out.....and they will be just "dahi" forever.
i didnt said anything about other parties as they are very small to mention....in other words truly opportunist ....they are seeking just who is going to be in action and will give them support by the policy of give and take....whether its lalu, jaya, shard panwar, karunanidhi,naidu,paswan, and many more...and yes all of them are also prime ministerial candidates too...except lalu's party no other of these parties have more then 10 MP's.
Friends its time to make these idiots realise that our country is not a ring of politics....
i urge all of you to be an indian to an indian for the whole mankind.
Awatansh Tripathi
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