TJS George - Point of View

Nostalgia over the glory days of Bombay: Even CIA fought its cold war there

2012-02-13T11:08:00.001+05:30

No city arouses nostalgic sadness as much as Mumbai does. Other cities might have changed names, like Kolkata, or grown beyond recognition, like Bangalore, to the chagrin of old timers. Bombay not only changed its name; it lost its character, its elan, the creativity and cosmopolitanism that made it the urbs prma in Indies in the first two decades of Independence. Mumbai was built over the dead soul of Bombay.

Just a few names – from the literary world alone – are enough to recall the glory that was Bombay: Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawala, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Dom Moraes, Keki Daruwalla, Laeeq Futehally. There was a forum that brought all of them together, along with other names like Nirad Chaudhury, Satyajit Ray, Agha Shahid Ali, Salim Peeradina, A. K. Ramanujan, Kiran Nagarkar. That forum was a magazine called Quest.

It was edited by Nissim Ezekiel, the university professor who started modernism in Indian poetry in English. He nurtured Quest, too, in a style that was modernistic for the 1950s. Paying attention to the editing of manuscripts and diligent proof reading of typeset pages were uncommon then, but enforced in Quest.

Perhaps it was in looking out for good writing that Nissim set benchmarks. Many bylines appeared in Quest which were to become famous later. Controversies and debates enlivened its pages. In one issue, Jyotirmoy Datta attacked Indians who wrote in English, calling them artistically dishonest social climbers. In a subsequent issue, he got a fitting reply from P. Lal, of Writers Workshop fame, but in language that was elegant and with logic that was clinical compared to Datta's.

Long before The Blaft Book of Tamil Pulp Fiction gave respectability to what was dismissed till then as “footpath stuff”, Quest published an article titled “In defence of pulp literature” (March-April 1976). Ashish Nandy wrote “ A psychologist's guide to assassinations in the Third World”. An article on Konark by Marie Seton was accompanied by dramatic ink sketches by Satyajit Ray. There were poems by Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Allen Ginsberg, Jayant Mahapatra.

Intellectual products of this quality must be part of any country's zealously preserved cultural history. Fortunately a selection of contributions from the magazine's early years had appeared in a book called Ten Years of Quest. A larger, neatly packaged volume has now been published by Tranquebar. The Best of Quest (Eds. Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala, Arshia Sattar) is a generous (660 pages) keepsake. Given the variety of the contents and the adventure of ideas they represent, this anthology is one of the best things that happened in publishing in recent years.

As if to squeeze every drop of nostalgia out of the 50s and 60s, the editors have included some of the familiar advertisements of that beloved era. Ever heard of Erasmic razor blade, or Lambretta and Rajdoot two-wheelers? Binaca talcum powder or Terywool suitings? Tik-20, the pest-killer, was such a household name (since every honest household had resident bugs) that it figured in Vijay Tendulkar's celebrated play Silence! The Court is in Session.

Quest, like Encounter edited by Stephen Spender, was in a political trap. It was funded by America's CIA in the thick of the Cold War to build up an anti-Communist front. The editors of The Best of Quest seem slightly embarrassed and slightly defensive about this. Why should they be? Neither Nissim or Spender knew about the CIA's hand. They both did their work with intellectual integrity and the magazines achieved distinction thereby.

Besides, that bit of ideological politics also is part of the nostalgia of old Bombay. For the war against communism, the CIA picked Bombay, thus acknowledging the city's primacy in the interplay of ideas. The American lobby was a vociferous force then, and Bombay was its nerve centre. The fervour with which personalities like Frank Moraes fought, for example, V. K. Krishna Menon's candidature from North Bombay had to be seen to be believed. Battles then were over ideas – something an unformed mind like Raj Thackeray's cannot comprehend.

The wild animals of politics have sensed that the day of reckoning is here

2012-02-06T10:50:00.000+05:30

This week the citizens of India can look at themselves and say: It's going to be all right. The second freedom struggle – for freedom from corruption – is beginning to show some signs of a satisfactory solution. The rise of public opinion in spontaneous response to Anna Hazare's campaign was the first sign that our country had the inner strength to stand up to the corrupt. Now the judiciary has helped restore a sense of sobriety and balance to a scene vitiated by wreckless corruption. Not that the struggle against the evil men in power is over. But when public opinion is reinforced by judicial wisdom, the wielders of power can no longer do what they thought they could do with immunity. The days of accountability are here. And the days of punishment.

Wild animals are the first to sense the imminence of an earthquake. Ditto with politicians. How else can we explain the unusual spectacles in UP? On election eve, Mayawati dismisses nearly half her cabinet to show that she is against corruption. Mulayam Singh, proud possessor of a feudal mind that sees all females as inferior creatures, feels obliged to withdraw his “offer” to provide jobs to victims of rape.

Ordinary citizens are so enraged by corruption that sometimes their emotions get the better of their judgement. No one will support the man who walked up to a cabinet minister and slapped him. Shoe throwing is less offensive, especially when the throwers do not look like they actually want to hit their targets. Unlike Omar Abdullah and Rahul Gandhi, P. Chidambaram was within hitting distance, yet the flying shoe kept a nonviolent distance from him.

People have also used civilised ways to vent their anger at those suspected of involvement in deals. Like when Suresh Kalmadi was forced to leave a posh restaurant when fellow diners berated him for bringing shame to India. Let us not forget, also, that the disarray in the Anna Hazare team has in no way affected Anna's own standing as a beacon of hope for people who are disgusted with corruption.

The biggest boost to popular optimism comes from the Supreme Court's historical rulings last week. The requirement that public officials could not be prosecuted without the prior sanction of their superiors was imposed on the plea that, without such protection, there would be endless harassment of officials. In practice, it was used to protect corrupt public officials from legal action. More than a hundred officials have been basking under that protection and no doubt continuing their corrupt practices. In one stroke, the Supreme Court put an end to the malpractice. Now if sanction to prosecute is not given in four months, it will be deemed to have been given. A simple solution to what had been nurtured as a complex problem.

Equally historic is the court's verdict that every citizen has the right to petition for action against public servants suspected of corrupt practices. The argument that this might lead to frivolous complaints against honest officials cannot hold water; the courts have repeatedly pronounced severe judgements against frivolous complainants.

In terms of impact, perhaps the most important verdict of the past week was the cancellation of 2G spectrum licences given away by jailed minster A. Raja. It amounted to saying that the Government was collectively corrupt. We can add that the political class is collectively corrupt. Which is the fact of the matter. Which is also the reason why the story is not over. Bigger fish may yet be caught.

All of this is to the good. The manipulators of the system now know that the system is biting back. They know there is a climate change the world over and India is right in the middle of it. Public opinion is roused, activists are out, the judiciary is on guard, and the party is coming to an end for the thugs and pindaris of democracy. For once, we can say with feeling: Jai Hind.

Cynical Politicians Submit to Extremists; Will India Become a Communal State?

2012-01-30T10:01:00.001+05:30

Republican India's pride at the time of its birth was that it was a country where religion was not a factor in policy making, in contrast to the breakaway country of Pakistan where everything was decided by religion. That distinction is fading. We may not become a theocratic state, but religion is steadily moving to centrestage in politics and public life. The newest witnesses are A. R. Rahman, Sri Ram Sene and of course Salman Rushdie.

The reason for the rise of communalism is the rise of cynicism among politicians. If anything is more disastrous than corruption, it is cynicism. Remember Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic – a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Cynicism drives the rulers of the land to forget principles, forget their obligations to the country, and make compromises with evil for short-term gains.

This becomes glaring at election time because selfish, shortsighted parties find it easiest to attract voters on the basis of religion and caste. People like Mayawati and Lalu Prasad, who would otherwise be blots on democracy, become rulers of the land on the strength of blind caste loyalties. Democracy itself has become a farce on account of these aberrations. But the aberrations continue, giving increasing momentum to religious reactionaries.

Consider the strange case of Hosanna. A. R. Rahman composed a song for a Hindi movie and the word Hosanna appeared in it. A gentleman named Joseph Dias representing a Christian organisation took objection. The use of the word in the song, he said, hurt the religious sentiments of the Christians and Jews around the world.

How did he know? Who authorised him to speak for “the Christians and Jews of the world” who seldom agree on anything anyway? Why does the word hurt these communities only when it is used in a Hindi song? It was used in the original Tamil and Telugu versions of the movie a year earlier and Shriman Dias had no problem with that. In any case, Christians and Jews might have used the word Hosanna in a devotional context, but that does not give them any copyright over it. It is a word that has become part of the English language and widely used by even journalists who sing hosannas to their pet protagonists.

If Joseph Dias had asked for a ban on the movie, perhaps the Government would have obliged with an eye on the presumed Christian vote. That is what the Government did when a Muslim cleric asked for a ban on Salman Rushdie coming to Jaipur. In one of the most stupidly handled issues of recent times, the Congress politicians in Delhi and Rajasthan played into the hands of a minority among the Muslim minority to thwart Rushdie's appearance at the Literary Festival. Many Muslim organisations had condemned the Muslim groups that threatened violence against Rushdie. So how may Muslim votes can the Congress win by appeasing only the extremists?

Majority communalism also had its day though it did not attract national attention. In Karnataka, Home Minister Ashok said there would be no ban on the Shri Ram Sene. He admitted, though, that this extremist Hindutva outfit was involved in the recent hoisting of the Pakistani flag in Bijapur; evidently the zealots had hoped to pin the blame on Muslims and thus create communal disturbances. When it comes to hate politics, majority communalism and minority communalism do not cancel each other out; they feed each other.

And they are hugely counterproductive. The clerics and extremists who campaigned against Rushdie actually made him larger than he was, the glamour figure who dominated Jaipur. If they had ignored him, he would have come and gone with nothing more than a few Page 3 flutters. In the event, the extremists also introduced The Satanic Verses to a generation that had grown up without knowing about it. Now they will be curious to read it. How self-defeating. And how moronic of the Indian state to succumb to a fundamentalist viewpoint.

BCCI Cash Machine Collapses, So What? The Shame is Corruption in Sports

2012-01-23T10:25:00.000+05:30

Indian cricket's performance in Australia this time has been described as shameful, humiliating, disgraceful, etc. Actually, it is the best thing that has happened not just to Indian cricket but to India itself. If this “disgrace” can only be sustained for a while, Indians can, perhaps, recover from a madness that has been induced in them by commercial operators.

Of course cricket was always popular in India. But popularity never turned into mandess in the days of Vijay Merchant and Vinoo Mankad. If Bombay's Brabourne Stadium was full when cricket stars were playing a test, so was the nearby Cooperage grounds when football heroes were kicking up their magic. No cricket team ever commanded the preeminence of Mohan Bagan and East Bengal clubs.

Cricket's spoilage began with the arrival of television. TV meant advertisements which meant money. And money meant politicians. Politicians of course meant ruination. Money attracted business tycoons also. The combination of politicians and business tycoons can only lead to one thing – scams of different shades. This happened and transformed cricket from a sport to a commercial activity run for profits.

The climax came with IPL, the correct full form of which was given as Indian Paisa League. It was invented by a man whose genius cannot be denied. Lalit Modi, singlehandedly, converted cricket from a five-day and one-day bore into a three-hour prime time spectacle complete with Bollywood stars and imported cheerleaders – genetic engineering at its wicked best. He sold teams and auctioned players in the ultimate commercialisation of the game. Cricket was fully corporatised.

Unfortunately Lalit Modi's genius was not unlike the genius of Harshad Mehta and Abdul Karim Telgi who too had thought up wholly original business schemes. So in the end rivals brought him down and he had to leave the country to escape legal traps. How long he can remain safely away is in doubt since the cases against him are alive and his passport is impounded according to some reports.

Of course the corruption of cricket was not started by Lalit Modi. The tragedies of South African Captain Hansie Cronje and India's own Mohammed Azharuddin were played out before Modi. But Modi raised cricket from the million-league to the billion-league. The auction of just two IPL teams in 2010 brought in Rs 32 billion. The criminal case filed against Modi alleged a misappropriation of Rs 4.7 billion.

The billions mean that the politicians and the tycoons will dig their feet deeper into the BCCI, the controlling body. That is the real bad news. Because of its monopoly and the pull of the politicians running it, the BCCI conducts itself as a supranational fiefdom. The richest cricket body in the world, it still wants tax concessions, it still argues that its books are not open to outsiders, that it is above RTI rules. BCCI talks of misappropriation by Lalit Modi. Were the other bosses of BCCI twiddling their thumbs when one man was making hay? How many have misappropriated how much?

Sharad Pawar and Arun Jaitley and Rajiv Shukla belong to opposing parties which try to gore one another in the political pit. But the luxury and the privileges and the sheer money cricket provides are so beautiful that they embrace one another warmly on the BCCI's pitch. For once coalition dharma runs smooth as silk. All of Indian sport has been destroyed by self-seeking politicians. India does reasonably well only in individual sports like shooting, wrestling and tennis. The talent in athletics is outstanding, but politicians and sundry exploiters look after their own comfort while subjecting athletes to deprivation and abuse. The example set by cricket and its Pawars and Jaitleys and Shuklas wreaks havoc across the field.

From far away, the New York Times once commented that IPL had become a symbol of “how much the old and often corrupt political and business elite still dominate the country”. This is what really is shameful, humiliating, disgraceful, etc., not the collapse of BCCI's money machine in Australia.

War on Terror was in Fact War of Hatred; now Hatred Triggers Renewed Terror

2012-01-16T10:36:00.000+05:30

Caught between anti-corruption hypocrisies and pre-election manipulations, we are failing to notice the gathering clouds of a new kind of terrorism. Many perspective observers had commented that America's “war on terror” would in fact inflame terrorism instead of containing it. Is that happening already?

It is clear that hatred of America has intensified among those who were targeted by the war on terror. In spite of the civilian government handpicked and installed by the US in Baghdad, Iraqis are known to be seething with anger against the Americans. Not all of Hamid Karzai's clever foxtrotting has prevented Afghans from looking at Americans as persecutors instead of saviours.

Pakistan is the outstanding example of the failure of American policy. Successive American administrations spent hundreds of millions of dollars to sustain both the governments and the military forces of Pakistan. Despite some humming and hawing, the lifeline supplies continue. Yet, the Pakistani establishment heartily dislikes America. Public anger often spills out into the street with venemous slogans and threats highlighting anti-American demonstrations. Despite all efforts by America to dismantle terror camps in Pakistan, the outfits that sustain terrorism have only grown in strength and reach.

Obviously India is a victim of this expansion. While spectacular events like the Mumbai terror attack hit headlines, more sinister is the sustained effort to subvert the economy and simultaneously fund terror modules in India by circulating vast amounts of fake currency. Eleven Bengali construction workers were arrested in Hyderabad a week ago with ten lakhs worth of fake Indian notes. A few months ago fake notes worth 2 lakhs were seized from a lodge in Kerala. Now Mumbai police has tracked down large quantities of counterfeit American dollars made in Pakistan.

According to the National Investigation agency, rupee notes printed in Pakistan are flown to Bangladesh, then taken by carriers who walk across the border into Bengal from where migrant labourers take the lot to southern states, targeting small shops in small towns. The damage this does to India is self-evident. That currency traffic focuses on Kerala is also significant. Kerala recently figured as a recruiting area for terrorist work in Kashmir. Some of the men arrested in that connection created such a ruckus inside their jail that prisons along the coast have been put on special security alert. Such is the power of terrorist cells and their international backers.

Maldiveans visit Kerala fairly often; they can stay in India for 90 days without visa. Maldives has lately seen Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba establishing new active modules. Fundamentalist groups have come up in the country staging protests against the perceived tolerant attitude of the Government. These groups are well funded.

Perhaps the scariest manifestation of newfound terrorism is in Nigeria, known hitherto as an economic frontrunner in western Africa firmly anchored in its oil wealth. For weeks now it has been witnessing violent battles between Muslims and non-Muslims. Some parts of the country have been put under a state of emergency while borders with some neighbours have been closed.

To know the virulence of the hate wars under way, we only have to look at the name of the group that spearheads it in Nigeria. The name is Boko Haram (short form for Jama'atu Ahlet Sunna Lidda'awati Wal-Jihad, meaning People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad. In a local dialect Boko Haram means “western education is sin”).

Founded in 2002, it took to war only by 2009. Was this transformation connected to the thesis promulgated by Ayman al-Zawahiri, chief of the post-Bin Laden Al Queda, that instead of focussing on countries like US, jihadists should concentrate on reinforcing Islamic commitments in Muslim-majority countries and in countries that 'traditionally belonged to Muslims', whatever that means?

The moral is again what perceptive observers had seen long ago – that the Bin Ladens of the world may be taken out, but that would not snuff out terrorism. Greed sparked yesterday's wars. Hatred sparks today's. Wars go on because greed and hatreds go on.

Rogue Politicians at Their Cynical Worst; Will People's Anger Reach Crisis Point?

2012-01-10T10:53:00.001+05:30

Now that the celebratory mood of the New Year has passed, we can take a cool look at what 2011 did to 2012. It did bad things on the business front: growth slowdown, euro crisis, rupee's fall and so on. The ill effects of these will continue to haunt much of the world, triggering not only protectionist policies already initiated in America, but also hate crimes in White countries against non-Whites.

The dead year also did something historically portentous: It brought people out into the street in protest against the selfish rich and the scheming politicians. It was a public rebellion such as the world had not witnessed in recent memory – not even during the turmoil that followed the dismantling of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s; that was a revolution from above although it turned later into a revolution from below.

What 2011 saw was a revolutionary surge from below against tyrannical forces above. It brought about bloody regime changes in some countries. In some other countries hated rulers further entrenched their positions through suppression and killings. In many democracies, the honesty and competence levels of elected governments were challenged by those who elected them. The message everywhere was the same: Those who govern can neither ignore nor take for granted those who are governed.

Nothing summed up that message more poignantly than the oft-quoted story of the small man who started it all. This streetside vegetable seller in a small town in Tunisia was fined, then slapped and publicly humiliated by a police woman. The man went away, but returned an hour later to set himself ablaze in the town square. The anger of the masses was aroused and the Arab Spring was under way.

In America it was not humiliation of the citizen that made the worm turn. It was the ugly face of capitalism, hence the name “Occupy Wall Street”, instead of “Occupy the White House”. Globalisation favoured the Fat Cats, the multinationals, the big banks whose CEOs walked off with big bonuses even as their business applied for bankruptcy. People wanted an end to this exploitation.

In India is was public disgust with corruption that turned the people against the system. The reality about corruption in India is that no party and no leader has made any real effort to combat it, not even the few leaders who were known for their personal integrity. It was as though the system of venality, turpitude and deception was so deeply entrenched that no leader or party could dare to oppose it. When generations of leaders functioned on that premise and decades passed with corruption only getting wider and deeper and more brazen, Hazare happened.

Infuriatingly politicians assume that voters are for fooling, that all the people can be fooled all the time. Look at the happenings in UP. Murderers and rapists were proudly flaunted as cabinet ministers by Mayawati. For more than four years they were allowed to violate all laws and, as the Comptroller and Auditor General reported, misuse public funds in PWD, Housing, Excise, Animal Husbandry, Medical, Family Welfare. After this prolonged plunder, just as the election schedule is announced, she dismisses some plunderers, rapists and murderers. Does she see the people of her state as mules?

We can put the question to the BJP bosses as well because that party quickly absorbed into its ranks several of the dismissed plunderers. The rejects of Mayawati will now be the heroes of the Party With a Difference, now renamed One More Party of Hypocrites. What a cynical abuse of elections? How crude can these manipulators get?

Politicians do not realise that people have started seeing through their trickery. The anger of those who took to the street all over India will intensify as rogue politicians grab power through deceipt and intrigue. The neutralisation of good men like Manmohan Singh and the indifference of power-wielders like Sonia Gandhi will aggravate public discontent. What shape will the Indian Spring take, and when?

If the War Against Corruption Becomes Just a Game, Let Politicians Beware

2012-01-02T10:56:00.000+05:30

Albert Camus begins his famous essay The Fastidious Assassins with a provocation: “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic”. The dividing line is not clear, he warns in aggravation. When India's leaders use democracy to frustrate democracy, is it a crime of passion or crime of logic – or does it not matter since the line that divides them is not clear anyway?

Although we have one of the finest democratic constitutions in the world, it is a fact that the practice of democracy has been at variance with the spirit of it. Indira Gandhi declared a harsh autocracy in 1975 in the name of the Constitution. Yet, the Emergency was only the most dramatic abuse of democracy. Less spectacularly the system has been getting subverted in our everyday lives. The way people with criminal records get elected to legislatures is a result of this subversion. The corruption that engulfs our lives is another.

It is in this context that we must look at the Lokpal brouhaha in and outside Parliament. The honourable as well as the dishonourable members ensured that the debate had very little to do with corruption and the problem of containing it. It was a political game for them – how to appear to be against corruption and yet keep alive the corrupt practices that sustained them in power.

It was no accident that the loudest, almost emotional, speech in the Lok Sabha was that of Lalu Prasad Yadav. He condemned the Lokpal bill not because it was toothless but because it dared to put on some false denture. “Anyone can file a case and hound you, calling you a chor”, he told his fellow MPs. This is a man who has half a dozen cases pending against him, some of them serious enough to hound him even in jail. People called him chor in the fodder scam. But why worry? The master manipulator in Lalu has managed not only to remain out of jail but also to bargain with Delhi to ensure for himself a position of importance in parliamentary arithmetic. Smart cookies like Lalu and Mayawati are above Lokpals and constitutions. They lend meaning to the slogan, Incredible India!

It was farcical to see the BJP accusing the Congress of losing its moral authority when it lost the Constitution Amendment Bill. Which party today has any moral authority to lose? As seen by the people, all parties are selfish and insincere, hence the historical groundswell of support to the anti-corruption movement initiated by Anna Hazare. That support has not ebbed despite the Gandhian's Mumbai fast ending abruptly in an anticlimax.

Of the many points that underline politicians' insincerity, not to mention ulterior motive, consider just three. First, the BJP ensured that the Lokpal Act would have no constitutional status. Which means that a government can abolish the law with the simple expedient of an ordinance. Secondly, the Congress introduced the idea of minority representation in the composition of the Lokpal – as absurd as a minority quota in the Supreme Court or Election Commission, and blatantly politically motivated on the eve of the UP elections.

The third point covers the CBI, a central element in combating corruption. The bill as envisaged by the Congress leaves the Lokpal with no power to control the CBI; the Government will control it. Only during Jawaharlal Nehru's and then Lal Bahadur Shastri's regimes could the CBI function independently. Beginning with Indira Gandhi, every Prime Minister has used the CBI as a political tool. A Lokpal with no real powers of investigation and prosecution will be a phoney Lokpal. It will make no difference to the culture of corruption that is suffocating India.

Towards the end of his essay, Camus asks a question that is scary. “Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end?. To that question, which historic thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means”. That's Camus's way of saying: Beware.

He Called Mother Teresa a Fanatic, a Fraud, and He Called Kissinger a War Criminal

2011-12-26T12:10:00.001+05:30

Christopher Hitchens is not a household name in India. The limited familiarity with it is likely to be coloured by his intemperate condemnation of Mother Teresa as “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud”. MT was a bit of a fanatic and a bit of a fundamentalist, but she was no fraud. And there can be no justification for Hitchens' statement that many people were poor and sick because of the life of MT.

But then, strong and confrontational opinions were the stuff that made Christopher Hitchens the great public intellectual that he became. He was at war with a series of enemies, ranging from George Bush to God. Actually, his views on religion were commonsensical. The real axis of evil, he said, was Christianity, Judaism and Islam. That did not mean that he approved of other faiths like Hinduism. He believed that organised religion was “the main source of hatred in the world”, a view that would be echoed by many who are dismayed by the violence that religion inspires.

The distinguishing feature of the Hitchens persona, next to his intellectual vigour, was his courage. He denounced the then all-powerful Ayatullah culture of Iran for the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. He condemned Zionism as “ an injustice against the Palestinians”. Naturally he made many enemies. But when he fell victim to cancer last week, even enemies rose to salute his wit, his punditic sensibilities and the integrity of his erudition.

His polemical prose was particularly devastating in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger. It was less than 150 pages, but it marshalled facts, figures and arguments that lent powerful support to his theory that the international face of the criminally inclined Nixon Presidency was himself a war criminal.

Pointing out that Kissinger's overall record was “morally repulsive”, Hitchens confines his case to those offences that constitute a basis for legal prosecution for war crimes. These include “the deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina, deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh, the personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation – Chile – with which the US was not at war, and the personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus”. What a record!

Cambodia was bombed in secrecy. Kissinger lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he said that areas in Cambodia selected for bombing were “unpopulated”. Actually “350,000 civilians in Laos and 600,000 in Cambodia lost their lives. In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which persists to this day” with children still being born with disabilities.

In Bangladesh, 20 members of the US diplomatic team, joined later by nine senior officers of the South Asia division at the State Department in Washington, strongly protested in writing against American complicity in the Pakistani genocide of Bangladeshis. Kissinger's response was to transfer them to other posts, and to send a message to Yahya Khan thanking him for his “delicacy and tact”. Hitchens argues that Kissinger was gratifying Nixon's dislike of Indira Gandhi which originated with his loathing for Jawaharlal Nehru. He also describes how, within weeks of an eight-hour Kissinger visit to Bangladesh in 1974, “a faction at the US Embassy in Dacca began covertly meeting with a group of Bangladeshi officers”. In a few months Mujibur Rahman and 40 members of his family were murdered.

The murder of Chile's democratically elected President Salvador Allende followed a similar trajectory. A famous Kissinger statement summed it all up. A country should not be allowed to go Marxist, he said, merely because “its people are irresponsible”. The Nixon-Kissinger syndication was the most lethal in contemporary power politics, its path strewn with massacres and assassinations. The ultimate injustice is that Kissinger, the Mephistopheles of his generation, is beyond the reach of a war crimes tribunal.

Across the Globe, Corruption is the Issue; Will It Defeat Us, or Will We Defeat It?

2011-12-19T10:27:00.001+05:30

The rupee falls to a new low, industrial output drops by as much as 60 percent in some sectors, coal production nosedives for the third month in a row, fears of economic slowdown rattle corporate India – and how does the Government of India tackle the national crisis? It takes Ajit Singh into the cabinet. As if that isn't enough, it gives him civil aviation, a key sector already wrecked by a series of manipulative ministers.

Good for Ajit Singh. In a nation of rolling stones, he has been rolling with every party in the field – with various Janata formations, then with the Congress, then with the BJP, then Mayawati, then Mulayam Singh. Along the way he got Industry Ministership under V. P. Singh and Food Ministership under P . V. Narasimha Rao – and all attendant benefits thereof. But the most important point about Ajit Singh is that, after all these years of rolling, he is exactly where he started. He is not even a UP leader; he is only a Western-UP leader. Even within that restricted geography, his appeal is confined to Jats.

So what wonders is he going to perform for the Congress Party in the UP election? The decision to take him as a partner is supposed to be the brainwave of Rahul Gandhi, so no one within the party will dare raise the question. Only if the brainwave fails to produce results will the party find someone to pin the blame on.

What stands out here is not just the atrophy of a party, but also a bankruptcy of ideas. Everyone's horizon ends at the next election; the mind cannot see beyond. Attention is therefore focussed on deals and shortcuts that can gain a seat here and a seat there. A man with a half dozen members in Parliament becomes worthy of purchase even if he is a serial fence-jumper with a negative track record. In the process feelings of despair grow among the people.

Parties resort to gimmicks because they are unwilling to fight corruption, the biggest issue of our times. They actually give the impression that they have an interest in continuing corruption. Even the latest anti-corruption initiatives approved by the cabinet look more like diversionary manoeuvres than the real thing. The BJP is in the same boat with its record in Karnataka putting even Congress transgressions in the shade. The parties are merely shadow boxing to mislead the public.

They won't succeed because 2011 has become a historical turning point in terms of corruption worldwide. When we saw Greeks and Spaniards protesting against corruption, we thought it was just an offshort of the Euro crisis. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US finally proved that a global phenomenon had developed against the abuse of capitalism and the rich getting richer at the expense of “the 99 percent”.

This has now gripped even Russia. Vladimir Putin, now in the throes of returning to the President's post, has been publicly booed and the vote share of his party reduced. Don't forget, Putin is still the most popular leader in Russia. The Russian economy is doing well, too. Oil prices are high and foreign currency reserves flattering. There has been improvement in roads, schools and hospitals as well.

So why are the Russian people restive? Because they see the government set up as highly corrupt. People are much better informed today because of the internet and the general perception is that Putin's party is a “party of thieves and swindlers”. We are familiar with that kind of perception and can therefore understand why there is unrest in Russia.

The implications of the unrest in India are more serious because, failing to understand the public mood, the ruling class is trying to suppress criticism. That is the surest way to let corruption defeat us instead of the other way round. At Sonia Gandhi's and Manmohan Singh's level, there is stubborn silence. In a crisis, silence is not leadership. It's betrayal.

Choices for Linguistically Warring India; The Canadian Way or the Ottoman Way

2011-12-12T10:43:00.001+05:30

It is becoming clearer by the day that the linguistic reorganisation of states has done more harm than good to our country. Instead of welding the nation into a functioning federalism like Canada or Switzerland, it is reminding us of the Austrian and Ottoman empires that came to grief because they could not turn their multicultural diversity into a viable unity.

Back in the days of innocence, the national movement for independence was structured along the lines of Pradesh Committees, each pradesh generally comprising one linguistic region. That seemed a natural counterpoint to the imperial scheme of presidencies and princely states. Potti Sriramulu's fast to death in 1952 was a coercive tactic, but the States Reorganisation Act four years later did not necessarily appear in a negative light. There was hope that regional languages would flourish and that the overall effect would be progressive.

Ambedkar was among those who warned of the dangers ahead. Nehru had his reservations too. Distinguished foreign pundits cautioned that linguistic division could encourage secessionist forces (See Selig Harrison, India, The Most Dangerous Decades, 1960). The chief argument was that India was different, from Canada and the Ottomans and every other case in history because in India “linguism was only another name for (caste) communalism,” as Ambedkar put it. Proving his point, new states became battlegrounds for Marathi Brahmins and Maratha peasant-proprietors, for Kammas and Reddis, for Lingayats and Vokkaligas. D.R. Mankekar, a prominent editor of the 1950s, said: “We find once again, on lifting the linguistic cloak, casteism and love of office grinning at us”.

Bal Thackeray turned the grin into a growl. His nephew Raj Thackeray went the whole hog to unleash campaigns of violence against non-Maharashtrians. By not checking that tendency, senior leaders like Sharad Pawar and Vilasrao Deshmukh encouraged chauvinistic extremism. Patriotism became indistinguishable from bigotry. Belgaum City Corporation recently passed a resolution not to honour Chandrasekhara Kambar, this year's Jnanapith winner. It did not matter that Kambar was a son of Belgaum and studied there. It did not matter that he was one of the finest poets and playwrights of modern India. All that mattered was that he was a Kannadiga while many corporators considered themselves Maharashtrians.

Sadder still is the Mullaperiyar dam dispute between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Simple logic shows that no two neighbours are more dependent on each other than Tamil Nadu and Kerala. To understand the full scope of this interdependence, it is necessary first to understand the difference in character between Tamils and Malayalees. Tamils are hardworking. Malayalees are hardworking only outside Kerala; at home they are happy with their Gulf money and their nonstop politics.

One consequence of this character difference is that agriculture, which needs sustained hard work, has come to a standstill in Kerala. All necessities are imported. If vegetables and fruits and chicken do not arrive in truckloads from Tamil Nadu daily, the Malayalee will starve.

Firebrand politician Vaiko once tried to take advantage of this. He blocked all truck movement to Kerala so that the Malayalee would starve and learn a lesson. He quickly reversed gear because Tamil farmers, denied their assured market, began starving too. Even Vaiko had to concede that the Tamil farmer and the Malayalee consumer were made for each other. The survival of each depended on the other.

This is why the Mullaperiyar issue is actually a non-issue. Land on the Tamil side is arid, so water from Kerala is essential to the Tamil farmer. It is just as essential for Kerala that the Tamil farmer gets the water he wants for, otherwise, Kerala won't get its daily food supplies. Never was collaborative coexistence more elementary. And never was the failure of political leadership more evident. Kerala repeatedly assures full water supplies. With that the dispute should have ended – but linguistic egos keep it going. A Tamil employer in Doha, Qatar, sacked his Malayalee employee for supporting the idea of a new dam. Nothing more need be said.

Sure, We are a Happening Country, but What Shouldn't Happen is Happening

2011-12-05T11:33:00.000+05:30

“What is happening in this country”? asked Pranab Mukherjee in the aftermath of the Sharad Pawar slapping incident. Every tax-payer and voter in this country has been asking the same question, though not in the sense in which Mukherjee meant. What indeed is happening under the auspices of the eminent leaders of the Government and the opposition? What the citizen knows is:

□ That dumb things are happening in the country. Like introducing the FDI retail decision at the most inopportune moment. What was the urgency to present it as a cabinet decision when Parliament was in session and a critical election in UP was round the corner? The American Ambassador's very undiplomatic intervention? Is pleasing the Americans worth the price of alienating political allies as well as UP voters? Or was someone trying to divert attention from the 2G fire engulfing P. Chidambaram? It is not easy to imagine Pranab Mukherjee straining a nerve to save Chidambaram with whom he has been openly clashing. The pros and cons of the FDI policy apart, the manner and timing of the government move betrayed a sad lack of political sense. Congressmen themselves came out in open criticism. Did such a mess have to happen?

□ That anti-democratic trantrums are happening in the country. Only Indian genius could invent the idea of attending Parliament in order to block its proceedings. The present Parliament has wasted more working hours than any Parliament in the last 25 years. Leaders like Sushma Swaraj are proud to announce that Parliament won't be allowed to function. Any reason is good enough. In the current session, first it was boycott of Chidambaram. Then it was food inflation. Then FDI. One week of washed-out session cost the tax-payers Rs 24 crore. Parliament is a forum for debate and decisions, not a site for street demonstrations. Common people are unanimous in their call for no work, no pay. But MPs are so shameless that they are demanding red lights atop their cars. This is democracy going bizarre.

□ That intrigue and machinations are happening in the country. Either Sonia Gandhi's health condition, or her partisans' impatience, or the former aggravating the latter, has led to what looks like preparations for a post-Manmohan Singh regime – which need not wait till the end of the Prime Minister's term. This was clear when T.K.A. Nair was ousted from the position of the PM's Principal Secretary and Pulok Chatterji put in his place in July. Nair was Manmohan Singh's close and trusted aide even before he became Prime Minister and Chatterji is a known extension of the Sonia Gandhi parivar. The message was that the Prime Minister's Office was too important to be left to the Prime Minister. So when does Rahul Gandhi step in? And people like Digvijay Singh? The economy is in trouble, but all we have is politics by contrivance.

□ That meaningful efforts to end corruption are not happening in the country. Shaken by the public anger that swelled the Anna Hazare tide, the Government went through some motions of working on an honourable Lok Pal Bill. Now we know it was not all that honourable. A bill with sufficient holes through which bureaucrats and politicians can collect their mamools may well be what comes out of it all. How will public outrage express itself next time?

Look at the one state, Karnataka, where an effective Lok Ayukta had done wonders. The post has remained vacant since Justice Santhosh Hegde retired. They did appoint an exceptionally good successor, Justice Shivraj Patil, but a minor issue involving a cooperative society housing site, was raised to harass him and he resigned. Karnataka not only lost a worthy Lok Ayukta; it is unable to find a retired judge antisceptic enough for the post.

When Pranab Mukherjee raised his question, the answer was staring him in the face: What should be happening in the country is not happening, so what should not be happening is happening.

Travelling was at 3 Miles an Hour, but in that Era too, Mamool was a Habit

2011-11-28T10:46:00.000+05:30

How times change! It is routine these days for a Chennai businessman to take a morning flight to Delhi, complete his work there, and return the same night to the bliss of his own bed. A briefcase is more than enough by way of baggage.

Things were somewhat different in the days of Enugula Veeraswamy, a Madras denizen of 1830s. He went on a pilgrimage to Banares which took him “one year, three months, five days and ten minutes” to complete. That was mainly because the mode of transport was the palanquin. Which meant a large retinue of palanquin bearers, attendants, cooks, porters, handymen for urgent repair works en route, tents and of course armed guards. Veeraswamy was travelling with his wife and children which meant that the retinue had to be that much larger.

One had to be rich to go on a journey of that kind. Veeraswamy obviously had no problem on that count. He was in the service of the East India Company and had risen to the then enviable position of Head Interpreter and Translator in the Supreme Court of Madras. That also gave him valuable contacts with company officials and regimental units along the way.

With all that, his average travelling speed was two to three miles per hour. According to one diary noting, he left a village at 2 in the morning and reached the next halting point at 9 that morning – seven hours for a distance of 16 miles. The progress would be slower when there were rivers to cross, or thick jungles infested with wild animals, or pathless rocky hills to negotiate. Or indeed wayside attackers; the menace of professional assassins called thugs had not yet been eliminated. Sometimes visas were required to cross from one kingdom to another.

Finding resting places was a problem too. Veeraswamy, an orthodox Brahmin, records his joy whenever he found the “convenience of a Brahmin habitation”. His status occasionally helped him enjoy the hospitality of company officials and army camps. For the most part, though, he had to pitch tents on his own. At one place he found that “ a spacious chavadi could be built at a cost of Rs 10” on a tank bund using forest wood. He built one and left the next morning.

At Srisailam, where the holy temple was not easy to reach, he had three dholies (mounted conveyances) built for two rupees each. “I fixed up eight palanquin bearers at four rupees each, eight uppada boyees to carry luggage, one other luggage carrier to carry the luggage and victuals of the luggage carriers. In addition I was accompanied by 15 Brahmins; food for them for five days was also carried in our entourage”.

Being a government servant, Veeraswamy took note of the administrative structure imposed by the East India Company. The areas in and around Srisailam were in the territory “granted” to the Nawab of Kandanur who paid a lakh of rupees to the Company as annual revenue. He in turn collected money from pilgrims. During Shivaratri, for example, the fees were “Rs 7 for a group of Sudras, Rs 5 for a horse, Rs 3 each” for various rituals. During Brahmotsavam, the receipts would amount to 400 varahas. “The Nawab appropriates all these fees and thereafter neglects the maintenance of the shrines”.

That tradition is still maintained by our state authorities and legislators who receive allocations for various schemes, and thereafter neglect the performance of their duties. Rather reassuringly, palm-greasing was also a hallowed tradition. Recalling his boat journey from Prayag to Kasi (pleasurable, though it took six days), Veeraswamy cautions: “Ordinary travellers by boat are troubled by customs peons called 'permit-men'. The poor have to pay a rupee for each person by way of bribe. The salary of a Ghat customs dheroga is only 15 rupees but they earn 200 to 300 rupees by way of these bribes.”

How times never change!

___________________

Enugula Veeraswamy's Journal (original in Telugu) was published in English translation in 2000 by the Andhra Pradesh Government Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, Hyderabad.

Mamata Banerjee: A Big Disappointment, and Pointer to a Dangerous Phenomenon

2011-11-21T11:57:00.003+05:30

Mamata Banerjee is a street fighter. Which is fine; street fighters have a role to play in a stubborn democracy like ours. What is not fine, however, is that she does not see the difference between a street leader and a government leader. Six months into power, she has not done a thing to show that she knows what it is to be the chief minister of a state. Vision? Forget it. Dashing everyone's expectations, she has become India's biggest disappointment.

Consider the way she walked from her house to a police station, shouted at the senior officers there and got two hooligans released from the lockup. The youthful pair had been causing nuisance in the area with loudspeakers and blocking the busy road with a puja celebration. When they were told to clear the road, they stoned the police, damaged vehicles and ransacked the police station. What made them so haughty? They were members of a local club called Sevak Sangh which was run, among others, by Baban Banerjee, the chief minister's brother. Mamata won cheers from the mob by ordering an inquiry into “police highhandedness”.

The police is of course highhanded, all across the country. But when it is a confrontation between hooligans and the police, no chief minister in the country has taken a position against the police. This is the same Mamata Banerjee who said that she would turn Kolkata into India's London. She won't do that in her lifetime because she does not understand what makes London London. Prime Minister Tony Blair was once stopped by the traffic police on a motorway and fined for speeding. The Prime Minister did not walk up to the police station, shout at the officers and order an inquiry. He just paid the fine.

Mamata Banerjee does not have the mind to understand that kind of culture. She does not even understand the need for a head of government to show empathy when tragedy strikes citizens. When newborn babies died in disquieting numbers in Kolkata's government hospitals, unacceptable problems of neglect came to light – lack of doctors and medicines, pathetic facilities in the general hospital, overcrowding and unhygienic conditions. And what did the Chief Minister do? She kept silent for an inordinate period, then made wishywashy statements that seemed to justify the hospitals.

London is a place where the red double-decker bus is maintained as a proud ikon. Models four or five years old are replaced with the latest ones, looking not only new but impeccably clean and gleaming. Kolkata is the only metro in India where the oldest buses still keep running, dilapidated, even scary. The ramshackle trams are no better. Nor the rickety Ambassador taxis of 1960s vintage, museum marvels of survival. All that the people's leader has achieved so far is to give a fillip to Rabindra Sangeet. A good deed, but no big deal.

We look for signs of change on the industrial front. There is none. Improvements in the living conditions of the poor in central Kolkata? There is none. Some badly needed cleaning up? None. Untreated water from the Hoogly passes for water supply in several parts of the city. And the all-important Maoist problem? In her race to power, she seemed to work with the Maoists. Now she has ordered a new campaign to destroy them.

She is not only doing nothing to take Bengal forward; she is still doing what she can to take India backward. Thanks to the “coalition dharma”, she controls the Indian Railways. Never has Indian Railways been so hidebound, so badly led.

Actually, the plight of the railways illustrates the central problem of the Mamata Banerjee phenomenon. She is, like Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi, a one-person universe. Nothing moves without her say-so, and all those who are supposedly in her cabinet are no more than office furniture. Such phenomena are the sustaining force of dictatorships. When they enter the democratic space through legitimate means like elections, they become a dangerous half-breed: Legitimate dictatorship.

Even the Mahavishnu of Market Economy Cannot Equate Slumdogs with Tycoons

2011-11-14T11:32:00.000+05:30

Trust deficit is an expressive phrase. But it is applied only to India-Pakistan relations. It is just as relevant in describing people-government relations in India. The trust deficit on this front was highlighted by two recent statements. The first was by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who said in Cannes that food prices shot up in India because of prosperity.

Less than half the population of India is prosperous. The other half-and-more is at varying levels of misery. A few hundred millions live in abject filth. A few thousand farmers have been forced to kill themselves, a phenomenon that still continues. Do these people have to pay impossible prices for essentials because some Indians are prosperous?

India ranks 134 among 187 countries in the UN Human Development Index. The proportion of underweight (read, deprived of nourishment) children in India is the highest in the world, higher than even African countries notorious for poverty. Barring Bolivia, Cambodia and Haiti, India has the lowest level of access to sanitation (read, highest level of public defecation). This is the country where skyrocketing prices must be accepted as a sign of prosperity?

If the government had been paying less attention to scam-making and more to improving social indicators and basic hygiene, it could have claimed some justification in relating unbearable living costs to prosperity. In this case, it is doubtful whether the Prime Minister can be justified even as an academic theoretician because textbook economics, too, makes a distinction between development and economic growth.

At best, the Prime Minister's statement was a half-truth. The second statement, made by Pranab Mukherjee, was not even that. When petrol prices rose to the highest levels in the world, the Finance Minister seemed angry with the people who protested. The prices were raised, he said, by the oil companies, not by the Government.

That is a new one. It is like saying that taxation levels are raised by the Income Tax Department, not by the Government. Indian Oil and Hindustan and Bharat Petroleum replaced Burmah-Shell, Caltex and Standard Vacuum by courtesy of nationalisation. Like Indian Railways, they are children of the Government.

True, the oil companies incur heavy losses and government subsidies to them are hefty. They make out a case for higher prices that often seems strong. But that does not answer the lay man's questions: Why doesn't the excuse of international prices apply to oil prices in other countries including Pakistan and Bangladesh? Why does petrol cost Rs 230 per litre in Lakshadweep? Why was Murli Deora, a close family associate of oil tycoons, made petroleum minister?

No angry fulminations by Pranab Mukherjee and no academic highfalutin by the Prime Minister can hide the trust deficit caused by bad governance and by equating slumdogs with the Formula One elite. The economist that he is, Manmohan Singh will be the first to realise that there is something to worry about when the United States, the Mahavishnu of market economy, goes through a historic upheaval. The Occupy Wall Street movement is an explosion of public disenchantment with the way the principle of free enterprise has developed in the US. It amounted, in the last few years, to tycoons walking off with public money, with banks collapsing because of licentious mismanagement and the ordinary people being forced to pay for the luxury class's selfishness. People are losing faith in the way capitalism is being misused.

Or is it no misuse after all? Astonishingly Karl Marx had foreseen exactly what is happening today. In Das Kapital, he wrote: “Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and mechanical products, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the state will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism”.

Scary? Re-assuring? Re-read the slogans of the “We are the 99 percent” movement – and wonder.

When a Decision not to take a Decision is the Only Decision, Nemesis Awaits

2011-11-07T10:06:00.000+05:30

Deepak Parekh said it on television. Fourteen industrialists said it in a group statement. The Reserve Bank said it. The Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council said it. On each of these occasions, the Government pretended that it heard nothing. Then Azim Premji said it. Suddenly the Government's apologists took note. Premji must be one business leader the Government is afraid of. Or especially fond of.

The irony is that what they all said was also what the people have been saying for about two years – that the Government is avoiding taking decisions on critical issues. “A complete absence of decision-making among the leaders of the Government”, is how Premji put it.

Deepak Parekh, a pioneer in the financial sector, had given us a rather graphic account of how the leaders avoided their responsibility. Whenever a serious issue came up, they would appoint a Group of Ministers to talk about it. If the issue was very serious, they would pass it on to an Empowered Group of Ministers. The bottom line was that no individual minister would be held accountable for a decision.

Why? What are they afraid of? The best guess would be that ministers are following the Prime Minister's penchant not to take decisions on his own. And the Prime Minister, we know, takes no decisions because the Remote Control is not with him. When a situation of conflict comes up, we see the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister and the Home Minister rushing to explain things to their party President who never lets the people know what her counsel is in such situations. Citizens are left with an impression of secretiveness in the affairs of the state.

Explanations, if any, come from inconsequential spokespersons. They do it with all the fatuousness and absurdity at their command. Premji's comment, Minister Ambika Soni said, did not reflect reality. But of course it did. Absence of decision-making was the main feature of not only the investment and reform sectors the business leaders were referring to, but also the scam sector the lay public was worried about.

Manageable problems turned by indecision into unmanageable ones are numerous – the Commonwealth Games muddle, the 2-G spectrum corruption, the Adarsh Housing scam, Telengana, a series of security-related issues, even urgent defence procurement schemes. Premji was stating the obvious when he said the country's economic growth would suffer if prompt corrective action was not taken.

Issues on which the Government does take a decision end up in disaster. The decision to set up a thugs' army called Salwa Judum to fight Maoists in Chattisgarh actually swelled the ranks of Maoists as government atrocities turned more villagers into rebels. The decision to arrest Anna Hazare boosted his profile and reinforced middle class resolve to fight corruption. The Supreme Court found the Salwa Judum illegal. People found the Hazare arrest stupid.

The Government still does not understand that the people are capable of seeing through pretensions. In a permanent state of denial, it goes on saying there is nothing wrong in what it does, or does not do. And because it does not see anything wrong, it will not set anything right. It has created a trap and fallen into it.

If there's anything worse than not taking decisions on time, it is taking decisions under pressure from public opinion and the courts. Money going illegally abroad is an old story. Published reports mentioned names like Hassan Ali. The Government took no action leading to the conclusion that VIP interests were involved. It is taking no action now about illegal account holders. France has furnished a long list of their names. America has demonstrated how banks can be forced to yield information. Yet, India does nothing and the names of black money hoarders remain secret.

Of course a decision not to take a decision is also a decision. But a Government that protects those it has a responsibility to punish will itself be punished. Sooner rather than later.

Our Own Grand Prix: Rath versus Formula 1. Advani's Yatra Isn't About Corruption

2011-11-01T10:15:00.000+05:30

Singlehandedly L. K Advani had turned the rath yatra into a cliché of Indian politics. A bankruptcy of ideas still pursues him and he is using a rath yet again to compete in what has become a Formula I Grand Prix. We could have enjoyed it as a comedy if it were not such a tragedy.

It is comic that the Congress scams are boosting the BJP while the BJP, with scams to match, is reviving the Congress. The various Dals and Samajs and Desams and Kazhagams add their own comic reliefs. But tragedy envelopes them all. On one side, the Digvijay Singhs and the Kapil Sibals think that denying sin is equal to eliminating sin. On the other side, Advani's yatra against corruption dramatises the corruption engulfing the BJP.

To a tiny extent at least, Advani could have avoided embarrassment by keeping clear of Karnataka. After all, last time the BJP organised an all-India campaign against corruption, it was wise enough to pretend that Karnataka was not part of all-India. But this time the Advani-blessed group in the faction-ridden Karnataka BJP persuaded him otherwise. Actually the public disgrace of the BJP in Karnataka has gone beyond factions. Advani's visit will only draw attention to the party's luminaries being in prison.

The chatter in Bangalore these days is that there is a regular bus service from the Vidhana Soudha to the Parappana Agrahara central prison. Despite occasional detours to a hospital or two, the bus maintains its schedule which must be reassuring to the nearly half dozen members of the cabinet who are currently embroiled in FIRs and things.

Unlike the Parappana bus, Advani's bus has been running into problems all along the way. Senior party colleagues fell ill because the airconditioning conked out. Moral: Other leaders are not up to it like the Big Leader. The roof of the bus got trapped while trying to clear a low bridge. Moral: Bend low if you want to proceed.

The messiest pickle the yatra got into was at Satna, Madhya Pradesh, a state under BJP rule. Since the whole purpose of a yatra is publicity, the main yatri holds a daily press conference. At Satna, attending journalists received envelopes containing currency notes. One journalist objected and went public. A humiliated Advani cancelled his press conference. But it showed how corruption, like God, was everywhere and in everything – in anti-corruption campaigns that bribe journalists and in journalists who take bribes to do their work.

Undeterred, a BJP spokesman announced that Advani's rath yatra was creating a hype against corruption. In the first place, it was Anna Hazare who created a hype against corruption while the BJP tried to hitch a piggyback ride. Secondly, if anyone from the BJP has created a hype against corruption, it is B. S. Yeddyurappa. Even trail-blazers of yester years like Sukh Ram and Buta Singh pale before Yeddyurappa's daring.

Corruption cannot be tackled with gimmicks and cliches. It is doubtful whether Advani's purpose is to tackle it at all. The yatra is more like an internal party manoeuvre. He started not from his constituency in Gujarat but from far away Bihar. The ruler of Gujarat is known to be eyeing the chair that is dearest to Advani's heart. The party's president has even gone through a stomach surgery in his bid to get close to that chair. Ambition is a noble thing, but the wise have told us that ambition also drives many men to become false, to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

The fact is that BJP has contributed as much to the culture of corruption as the Congress and variations on the theme like the NCP, the Bahujan Samaj and the Samajwadi. This lot of politicians will not destroy what sustains them. More jail and more rejection by the people may bring about a new lot of politicians. For now the judiciary is our hope. And eternal vigilance by the people.

It's Peak Time in Jails Again – For VIPs: People See it as Justice, and Rejoice.

2011-10-24T09:59:00.000+05:30

Public anger against corrupt governance has never been as intense as it is today. However, there is also public jubilation as never before. Political VIPs going to jail is an unprecedented spectacle and it fills citizens with unprecedented joy. This is not sadism. This is recognising the sign that there is hope for our country after all.

When A. Raja went to jail, the general feeling was that the arrogance of his party had invited the punishment. From T. R. Baalu's days DMK ministers in Delhi had behaved as though they were viceroys of the Almighty. People have their own ways of reaching conclusions. The general feeling in this case was that, be it A. Raja or Dayanidhi Maran or Azhagiri, they were all using their power for their own and their group's interests.

That same feeling made the public rejoice when Suresh Kalmadi and some of his gang found themselves behind bars. Their misdeeds had brought international shame to our country with videos of filthy bathrooms in the Games Village going round the world and some athletes boycotting the Games. The costs to the country are still mounting, the Sports Ministry having discovered that some of the stadia have become dumping grounds and that several crores would be needed to make them useful in some way.

The jailing that got maximum applause from the public was undoubtedly that of Janardhana Reddy and B. S. Yeddyurappa himself in Karnataka. Reddy was literally above the law, both civil and criminal. No businessman, IAS officer, police chief, or ordinary farmer could survive in Bellary without his permission. His mansion was surrounded by three rings of security and CCTV cameras on approach roads. He had gold plates to eat from, gold water taps to wash his hands, a monogrammed gold throne to sit on and 1200 gold rings to wear. Now he eats kichdi from steel plates. What's it if not justice?

Yeddyurappa was second only to Narendra Modi in flaunting chief ministerial sovereignty, arms swinging like a pahelwan's. He even brought the BJP High Command under his control by using the stick of threats and the carrot of monetary contributions. Now he is “deeply pained” that the public thinks his hospital hopping was to avoid jail. It might be of some consolation to him that the public also was deeply pained by his generosity to sons, son-in-law and sundry relations and cronies. His cabinet has contributed more than any other cabinet in the country to jail population – five of them in one go, another distinction for the “BJP's first government in the South”.

For breaking the myth of ministerial invincibility and re-affirming the limits to power, the credit must go to the judiciary. The tendency of the political establishment was to protect the guilty; look at the way they put off action to curb people like Raja and Kalmadi. It was left to the judges, with some help from newly aroused public opinion, to re-establish the principle that transgressions must lead to punishment. May their tribe increase.

Jail-going was once a badge of patriotism in our country. A man with first-hand knowledge of that phase of history, P. V. Narasimha Rao, told us how that badge was misused. In his novel, The Insider, there is a father who recalls the imprisonment of the great nationalist leaders and says: “My business instinct tells me that some profit must come out of jail-going sometime, somehow. I see my son's jail-going as good business”. During the Emergency jail-going took on another character, best described by one of the victims, Maharani Gayatri Devi. “All the jails were full at the time”, she wrote, “like hotels in peak season”.

It is peak season of yet another kind now. There are ministerial-bureaucratic transgressions awaiting correction elsewhere – in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab. Rapes, kidnappings and disappearances have happened with politicians in power figuring in the suspect list. The call for justice is loud.

What's Going On? There's Need to End this Dangerous Drift to Governmentlessness

2011-10-17T10:48:00.000+05:30

The irony is so stark that it exposes the sham of it all. The criminals who attacked a corruption-fighting lawyer in his chambers called themselves the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena. Those who gathered to see the attackers in a court were assaulted by thugs who called themselves the Sri Ram Sene. Bhagat Singh was a patriot whose writings showed great discretion and judgment and whose memory is honoured by all sections of people. Sri Ram is the most revered of all divinities in the Indian pantheon, a personification of all the virtues of man. That these hallowed names should be used by vile men of intolerance and violence is an affront. The heroes whose fame is falsely evoked will lose none of their glory. Those who perpetrate fraud in their names will go down as dregs of society.

The danger they pose has another, more disturbing, implication. Public life in India seems to have entered a new phase that must worry us all. Fringe groups and fanatics of all kind feel free to do what they like – beat up civil society campaigners today, kill whistleblowers tomorrow. The Government responds with such weak and routine measures that the crimes get bolder as time passes. This could well lead to the collapse of the very democratic system that sustains us.

A cursory look at what has been happening in recent years is sufficient to show how governmental inaction has fanned the flames of bigotry. When impermissible things happened in Mumbai, the so-called secular democrats of the Congress and the NCP were too scared – and too selfish – to take action. The conduct of leaders like Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sharad Pawar was shameless when taxi and autorickshaw drivers were dragged out and beaten up by Raj Thackeray's thugs.

Naturally thugs got bolder. The destruction of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune is one of the unforgivable crimes of our times. A precious storehouse of rare works and manuscripts, it was a jewel on Maharashtra's crown. Even that was not understood by the illiterate zealots who attacked it in the name of Shivaji.

Shivaji is another venerated name that is used as an excuse by criminally inclined people to assault their enemies. A proposal by the Maharashtra Government to build a big statue of the Maratha hero out in the Arabian sea off Mumbai was a legitimate topic for different people to express different opinions. But just because a critical opinion was published by Kumar Ketkar, one of the most distinguished journalists in Marathi and therefore a proud son of Maharashtra, his house and offices were attacked. Again, the authorities took virtually no action.

When a Rohinton Mistry novel was taken off Bombay University's syllabus, protest came from the principal of a college, but the Shiv Sena crown prince who forced the cowardly act by the University simply gloated. Now the Delhi University has censored out a scholarly work on the Ramayana by the internationally renowned scholar A.K. Ramanujan. The hundred Ramayanas he wrote about will continue to enlighten knowledge seekers; the closed minds of fanatics will remain closed in their ignorance.

Can the Manmohan Singh Government afford to quibble and dither in the face of such assaults on the values of democracy the vast majority of Indians cherish? This Government's refusal to take action when it is needed has riled the Supreme Court itself. It is also the prime factor behind the scams that have made even our economy suffer. Such is the warped thinking in government circles that even Salman Khurshid, usually a sensible man, made the dumb remark that putting businessmen in jail discourages investment in the country. No sir, it is gargantuan corruption by the politician-businessman nexus that discourages investors. The Government has become so dormant and non-functioning that the country is slipping into a state of governmentlessness. Now that this is leading to street violence and open bigotry, can government inaction continue? The time of reckoning is now.

In the End, It is Not Power that Matters, but What You Give to the World

2011-10-11T10:22:00.000+05:30

The craze for power is so all-consuming in India that we tend to forget the other things that matter. Steve Jobs was an exemplar of those other things. He was only 56 when he died. But he will be remembered with the same feelings of gratitude and admiration with which people like Thomas Alva Edison are remembered.

Edison, not Einstein. It may well be that geniuses who worked out the laws of the universe such as the theory of relativity are the true mentors of modern life as we know it today. But they operated at levels that were unreachable by the lay public. The benefits of their work percolated down to us through intermediaries who were adept at turning theories into practicalities.

Edison must of course have been dealing with theories, suppositions and postulates too. But he was essentially everyman's scientist, providing everyman's necessities such as the light bulb. He was a direct descendent of whoever invented the wheel, and of the unknown Chinese inventors of paper and the abacus, mankind's first calculating machine. Steve Jobs belonged to this rare species of innovators whose work made life simpler, better, richer and ultimately more worthwhile for others.

Many inventions and discoveries that enrich our lives also have a negative side to them. Einstein's theories paved the way to the nuclear bomb. The gunpowder invented by the Chinese in the 14th century was put to diabolic uses. A 2004 BBC documentary argued that the computer posed threats more real than what was portrayed in the Terminator movies. It warned that the computer might change the world in ways we do not even know.

May be. But Steve Jobs used computer technology to change the world in ways we love. When he unveiled the personal computer in 1977, people thought he had made the impossible possible. When he introduced the mouse-driven Macintosh in the 1980s, people thought he was a miracle man. After that he became a real magician, with the iPod in 2000, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.

The truly great advances in technology are those that come to be taken for granted very quickly. We take electricity for granted as though it had been there from the beginning of time. We see many of the things Steve Jobs did, such as the advances in mobile telephony, as though they have been there for ever. Wherever we are and whoever we are, the fact is that we cannot live without Jobs any more than we can live without Edison.

Admiration for the man must swell when we realise how much he gave the world and how little the world gave him. His early life was messy. Son of an Arab immigrant from Syria, he was “given away” at birth because his father and mother were not married at the time. During his brief stint at college, his only hot meals came from the free kitchen run by a nearby Hare Krishna centre.

Was that why he went to India in search of spiritual peace when he was only 19? He was clearly a restless man and he experimented with drugs as was expected of restless American youth in the 1970s. He would say later that his roots were in counterculture and that this was an essential part of his persona and belief systems. He went back from India a Buddhist and vegetarian.

Jobs was fundamentally a dreamer and marketing genius. Much of the brainwork behind his early products came from his partner, the engineering whizkid named Steve Wozniac. Together they did change the world, transforming the way computing is done, universalising access to music, simplifying and enlarging the uses of the mobile phone. Steve Jobs was a highly controversial and complicated man. But when he died enemies joined hands with friends to acknowledge his worth. Some compared him with Mozart and Picasso. Remember that next time your ring tone calls you.

Forbidden Territory, where Life is Death, and Women Are Sold on Thursdays

2011-10-03T12:32:00.000+05:30

Everyone has heard of the ruggedness of the “Northwest Frontier Province”, the “forbidden area” where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran meet, of the merciless codes of honour that govern the lives of the Pushtuns and the Baluchis, of the primitive pride of the tribes that must battle with nature – and with one another – merely to survive.

But exactly how rugged? How merciless? A new book, The Wandering Falcon, provides a rather frightening introduction to what constitutes everyday life in a part of the world that is virtually beyond the writ of governments. Everyday life here is also everyday death. Here the spirit of revenge is carried from generation to generation, tribal loyalties are unbending, and women pay heavily for any sign of self-assertion.

Human nature raises its head occasionally. A woman of the Siahpad tribe, married to an impotent man, runs away with a servant. The two are deeply in love and manage to hide in a military post. The woman's husband tracks her down after a five-year hunt. Knowing that they have no escape, the lover does what is expected of him: shoot his beloved dead. He then surrenders – to be stoned to death and the head crushed beyond recognition. That, it was proudly proclaimed, was how “the Siahpads avenge insults”.

A bunch of such stories strung loosely together make up this brief novel (180 pages). But they get under the reader's skin because of the stamp of authenticity they carry. Author Jamil Ahmad was born in Jalandhar but spent his life in the Civil Service of Pakistan, mostly in the Frontier Province and Baluchistan in senior positions. He knew the people and their passions at first hand.

There is a pervading air of menace when he describes the Wazirs and the Mahsuds, “the two predatory tribes of Waziristan”. Every few months, he says, “their hate and tensions explode into violence and some men die...If nature provides them food for only ten days in a year, they believe in their right to demand the rest of their sustenance from their fellow men who live oily, fat and comfortable lives in the plains”.

That explains why the Wazirs and the Mahsuds look upon the jobs of hired assassin, thief, kidnapper and informer as honourable professions. We are given graphic accounts of how an informer does his job, how the deputy commissioner pays the informer, how the kidnappers take away their victims and how the authorities pay the ransom and settle the matter. It's all routine.

Our sense of unease grows when we realise that the men who live by their exalted honour code are illiterate and ignorant of the world and its ways. They do not comprehend things like national borders. They have to migrate from the hills to the plains in winter and back to the hills in spring. If someone now tells them that the hills are in Afghanistan and the plains in Pakistan and that you need permission to go from one place to the other, they just don't get it. The result is that migrating groups are sometimes butchered along with their animals.

Jamil Ahmad, a first-time author, narrates all these with detachment, which adds to the horror of the events he describes. There is no judgmental approach even when he tells us about the village of Mian Mandi, the market place where women are on sale on Thursdays.

A judgmental touch is allowed only when he relates the story of how a group of rebel Baluchis were executed. “There was complete and total silence”, says the author, “about the Baluchis, their cause, their lives and their deaths. No newspaper editor risked punishment on their behalf. Typically, Pakistani journalists sought salve for their conscience by writing about the wrongs done to men in South Africa, in Indonesia, in Palestine and in the Philiphine – not to their own people”.

Very true. Of all journalists.

Look Beyond Chidambaram-Pranab Drama; The Real Drama is in Secrecy Games

2011-09-26T10:47:00.000+05:30

There was panic in the Congress camp last week. Terror-stricken leaders were scampering about like chicken that had its feathers plucked. The apparent reason was that one of their central pillars, P. Chidambaram, was directly and officially named in the 2-G spectrum scandal that landed former minister A. Raja in jail.

Now Chidambaram is not exactly a popular mascot in Congress circles. An ambitious operator primarily concerned with his own power and prospects, he has more adversaries than admirers. So why did the party frantically rally around him when a Pranab Mukherjee note to the Prime Minister blamed him for inaction? The talk is that Congress leaders were scared that, if Chidambaram was caught, could Manmohan Singh be far behind.

Not that Manmohan Singh is all that beloved a leader either. It is known that he carries little weight in the Government. Coalition partners mock him. Congress ministers themselves often ignore him. So the likelihood of the Prime Minister getting tarred by the spectrum scam cannot be the real reason for the panic among Congress bigwigs.

Then what? Logically, and if we take Congress culture into account, the answer is embedded in another question: If Manmohan Singh is caught in an untenable situation, can Sonia Gandhi be far behind? Now there you have the stuff that shakes empires. The remotest likelihood of damage to the edifice of holiness built around Sonia Gandhi would make Congressmen scamper about like chicken with its head cut off.

Logic does put the Congress President in an uncomfortable position. Consider some recent developments. It now stands proved that three successive Sports Ministers had opposed the appointment of Suresh Kalmadi as the Commonwealth Games boss. The Prime Minister overruled all of them and personally cleared Kalmadi's appointment. Rather uncharacteristic of a play-safe Prime Minister. So what happened? It appears that Manmohan Singh overruled the entire governmental system in order to bow to a recommendation put up by a joint secretary in the Prime Minister's Office named Pulok Chatterji. And who, pray, is Pulok Chatterji? The IAS officer most closely identified as Sonia Gandhi's facilitator. Which means that the Kalmadi buck actually stopped at Sonia Gandhi's desk.

Here's another conundrum of our times. Suresh Kalmadi is in jail for taking money. Amar Singh is in jail for giving money. The conundrum is why would Amar Singh who was never a member of the Congress give money to buy votes in Parliament so that the Congress government could survive? Was he a fool to spend his money to let someone else benefit? That lends weight to Ram Jethmalani's open statement in the Supreme Court that the money displayed in Parliament was paid not by Amar Singh but by Ahmad Patel. And who, pray, is Ahmed Patel? Sonia Gandhi's political secretary. Where does the buck stop this time?

Speculation and all kinds of gossip flourish around Sonia Gandhi thanks to her own addiction to secrecy. The contrived drama about her surgery in America could not have happened in any other democracy. She controls the destiny of every India but no Indian has the right to know whether she is in a condition to do so. Citizens are only entitled to dry titbits dished out by Congress spokesmen trained not to speak a word beyond what they are told.

They have not even told us what her ailment is. How then do we believe what they say? How do we know that she is really back in India? How do we know that she is cured when curing is rare in cancer cases? Photographs are strictly no-no, so how can we not believe that she has lost hair through chemotherapy? By hiding facts, they feed rumours. This is not privacy. This is secrecy. Evidently Congressmen think that there are things about their ruling dynasty that must remain shrouded in secrecy. That is why they panic at the merest sign of a crack in the wall of secrecy. Unfortunately history shows us that walls crumble some day, somehow.

We have Several Million 'Clean' Leaders; Our Unclean System Keeps Them Out

2011-09-19T11:17:00.000+05:30

Here's a brand new idea aired by our brand new messiah. All clean and non-corrupt politicians must leave their political parties and come together to form a new independent party, says Anna Hazare. It sounds like an old idea. Actually the old idea is that there's need for a new political party. That the good guys in existing parties should quit and form this independent party is a new take.

This sounds more practical than the idea of a bunch of amateurs forming a party. That was tried several times in recent years. Mumbai's Professionals Party, formed in 2007, could not win a seat in 2009 although the public mood was against the political class following the terrorist attack a year earlier. Lok Paritran, floated by highly qualified Indian Institute of Technology luminaries fielded candidates from all 28 constituencies in urban Bangalore in 2006, on the assumption that the enlightened voters of India's premier IT city were ready to make a statement in favour of good governance. All 28 lost. Success went to those who had unaccounted money to spend and the backing of important segments of society such as the real estate mafia and the mining robber barons.

Clearly elections in our country cannot be won merely on the basis of qualifications. “Know-how” is the decisive factor. That is why those who have been at the game and know the ropes can, if only they come out of their existing parties, provide the infrastructural strength a new party needs to win elections.

But despite its apparent practicality, the Hazare idea is condemned to instant death. First, “clean and non-corrupt” politicians will not be privy to the “know-how” aforementioned and therefore will be as ineffective as the candidates of the Professionals Party and Lok Paritran. Secondly, existing parties have so few “clean and non-corrupt” leaders that even if all of them came out of their parent organisations, there won't be enough people to form a cabinet.

Take a quick look. Of the 78 members of the Manmohan Singh cabinet, how many would you readily include in a clean-and-non-corrupt list. Count on your finger tips – A.K. Antony, Jairam Ramesh, Salman Khurshid, Ajay Maken and may be a couple of youngsters like Sachin Pilot. That's it. From the old Vajpayee cabinet, the picking is even less. Perhaps, Yashwant Sinha, Suresh Prabhu, Arun Jaitley. That combined total is less than ten when you need 70 to 80 patriots to form a cabinet.
(Of course, we have to completely rule out the alphabet soup of our parties – the BSP, AGP, JTC, INLD, JKNPP, JD(U), JD(S), JMM, LJSP, MAJ, RJD and some 40 others).

It is wonderful to think of a cabinet of decent citizens – of whom we have many millions. Even Manmohan Singh would be a worthy member if he is de-linked from remote controls. Imagine him surrounded by Aruna Roy and Santosh Hegde, by Binayak Sen, Prashant Bhushan, Jean Dreze, Sunita Narain, by Narayan Murthy, H.D.Parekh, Chanda Kochhar, Justice J.N.Verma, Amartya Sen, even Vikram Pandit, Indra Nooyi and Sam Pitroda.All of them will be willing to serve their country, but none of them will get elected. So, obviously, the problem is with the system of elections.

Siddaramaiah, Congress Legislative Party leader in Karnataka, has said that the next election will be his last because fighting an election has become too costly for him to afford. This is a leader who, if he is projected as the Congress's chief ministerial candidate and given a supporting cast of a dozen young leaders, can lead the Congress to victory in the next round because he commands credibility and public opinion is disgusted with the Yeddyurappa party. But the Congress will not do that because it is stuck in the old ways of manipulation and intrigue – a game at which the Karnataka BJP is far superior. So much for non-corrupt politicians and a new independent party. Dreaming is our only right.

What about breaching people's privilege? Dirty tricks experts blunder again.

2011-09-12T14:32:00.000+05:30

Can the Government of India's dirty tricks department never get it right? It had committed serial blunders while handling the Anna Hazare phenomenon. The Government had been embarrassed all along the way. Finally after Parliament accepted Hazare's main demands, there was a feeling that wisdom would prevail.

But the plotters are at it again. As crudely as ever, they have initiated proceedings against the leading members of the Hazare team on one charge or another. Bhushan, Kejriwal and Bedi have been slapped with breach of parliamentary privilege. Kejriwal, a former Income Tax official, has been served with a notice on disputed arrears as well.

Even if the charges were all proper and bonafide, commonsense should have told the Government's intriguers that targetting all three at once was a mug's game. In this case, the charges themselves are quite obviously trumped up and will strike citizens as such. Instead of discrediting the activists, the dumb move will further discredit the Government.

If Kejriwal broke his service rules, why is action taken only now? If he “amassed crores” through his non-government organisation, why is legal action not taken against him, instead of leaving it to Congress's official loose cannon Digvijay Singh to make yet another allegation out of it. (This is the man who said Suresh Kalmadi was innocent). Clearly the dirtytrickwallahs are engaged in a harassment campaign, an exercise in vindictiveness, at a time when the Government should be trying to create trust, not confrontation. Hazare is right when he says that sending “wrong signals” now can well lead to unrest in the country.

The breach of privilege charge in particular is preposterous and counter-productive. MPs are criticised as a class not just by social activists but by people at large. Politicians are also attacked as a class. It is no use saying that all MPs and all politicians are not bad. Of course they are not. But the fact remains that the collective reputation of politicians and MPs today is at its lowest point since independence. They are seen by the people as a class and detested as a class.

Parliament must earn fame before it can be defamed. The recent Murdoch case of illegal phone hacking gave us an opportunity to see how the British Parliament earns its stature and respect. Members could speak without fear of being stopped by their opponents. Respect to the Chair was paramount. When the Speaker stood up, it was a signal for all members to sit down. Order prevailed at all times.

In our Parliament order is the rarest of rare occurrence. We recently saw Sushma Swaraj, perceived to be a responsible leader, declaring that her party would decide each day whether Parliament should be allowed to function or not. The Speaker's pleas for order are uproariously ignored. The well of the House sees more action than the benches. All this on top of the scandals, be it cash for votes or cash for questions. What privilege are we talking about?

This notion of “elected representatives” is a bit exaggerated these days. We are a country where Manmohan Singh cannot get elected, but Pappu Yadav can – repeatedly. Besides, this is an inopportune time to talk about elected representatives when some prominent ones are in jail. Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda has been going from Tihar to Parliament House to serve the country. The ever-elected representative of Bellary's toiling masses, a man used to ignoring even court summonses, is suddenly behind bars.

Rather, this is an opportune time to talk about people's privileges. Every time MPs shout one another down, every time the House is adjourned because of unruly behaviour by members, Parliament is committing breach of privilege of citizens. Intolerance of citicism is itself a breach of democracy. What this misplaced brouhaha in the name of Parliament has proved is that the privilege issue is, as Aruna Roy put it, “fundamentally flawed”. Cleanse the system before talking about privilege.

Are sports bodies also corrupt from head to toe? Who's afraid of RTI?

2011-09-05T11:35:00.001+05:30

Ram Jethmalani was more astute than Lord Acton. He put things in current perspective when he said: “ Power corrupts, and the fear of losing power corrupts absolutely”. That explains many of the abnormalities of our seemingly normal politicians.

The presumed power of a mere party spokesman went to the head of that unfortunate Congress factotum called Manish Tiwari. In the Congress especially it is a survival necessity to be more loyal than the King. So, the robot in Tiwari went for Anna Hazare's jugular. The Gandhian was corrupt from head to toe, the robot said. The world laughed at him. Even the Congress frowned on him in due course. Whereupon the Robocop apologised to the Anna and later announced he was recusing himself from the Lok Pal Bill parliamentary committee. He then recused himself from the recusal. Unstable fellow. Actually he should recuse himself from public life. Which of course he won't do because the fear of losing power corrupts people from head to toe.

More puzzling is the fear among politicians of losing power in sports bodies. One can understand why Jagdish Tytler wants to cling on to the presidentship of the Judo Federation. The party has given him no post, not even an election ticket, so Judo is all that he can possibly cling on to.

But what about Vidya Stokes, head of the Hockey Federation? She is 84. And what about V.K.Malhotra, head of Archery Association, who is just one year short of 80? And what about V.K.Verma, who has been heading the Badminton Association for 13 years? He is known as an obstructionist to whom his own authority is what matters. Badminton champion Jwala Gutta has had the guts to speak out, so we have an idea of the harm this man does to badminton.

Cricket is the messiest of them all. Sure, it makes more money than any other game, so politicians are attracted to it like ants are to honey. But do the Pawars of politics still want money? More likely, they just want to have the power to command such a money-spinner. It certainly promotes exemplary unity among politicians of different colours. Look at the unamimity of views among Congressman Vilasrao Deshmukh, BJP man Arun Jaitley, NCP man Sharad Pawar and National Conference man Farook Abdullah. If only they were half as dedicated to the affairs of the country!

The National Sports Development Bill had sought to put some order into this topsy-turvey world of sports management. But self-seekers and manipulators closed ranks to keep it out of the Cabinet's approval. Sports Minister Ajay Maken had shown imagination and guts to draw up the bill. It is a pity that his progressive proposals did not get the attention they deserved.

Fortunately Maken is effective in articulating his case. He ridiculed the criticism that the Government was trying to control sports. Quite the contrary. The crux of the proposal is that 25 percent of the seats in the executive boards of sports organisations should go to sportspersons – elected by themselves, not nominated by the Government. This is an eminently sensible reform.

What has made sports politicians most angry is the proposal that organisations like the Board of Control for Cricket should be subject to the Right to Information Act. Most citizens perhaps did not know – until Maken mentioned it – that the BCCI had acquired stadium land in Delhi and Dharmasala on terms unknown to the public. Apparently, the world's richest cricket organisation also gets concessions from the Government on things like taxes.

Don't the people have a right to know about these? The Sports Ministry says that there must be transparency in these matters and sports organisations must be accountable in their functioning to the citizens of India. How can anyone object to this? Those sports bodies who object to RTI are obviously involved in activities they want to hide. They must be held to account like Suresh Kalmadi, belatedly, was.

In A Society That Bribes God Himself, Corruption Becomes Part of Life

2011-08-29T10:00:00.001+05:30

The ultimate question remains: Can corruption be abolished by law? We are a society in which dowry and child marriage and untouchability and khap panchayat atrocities continue despite laws banning them. They continue because they are deeply ingrained in the national culture and the political will required to wipe them out is simply not there.

Ditto with corruption. Kautilya said: “It is impossible for a government servant not to eat up at least a bit of the King's revenue”. He famously listed 40 ways in which revenue officers embezzled money, from pratibandha (creating obstacles) to apahara (stealing). He worked out impressively cruel ways to punish the corrupt. It helped. But that political will disappeared with him.

Baksheesh is a coinage of India (Mughal vintage). Its ubiquity turned it into an English word. The Mughals also witnessed the system of field commanders taking bribes to win or lose battles. Robert Clive used this to devastating effect.

British history books taught us that Clive's victory in the Battle of Plassey won India for the Empire. It was hardly a battle. The Nawab of Bengal's field commander Mir Jafar was generously bribed by Clive whereupon Jafar surrendered with his troops.

Clive and his successor Warren Hastings turned plunderers, encouraged by the climate and culture of India. Flabbergasted by the vast wealth with which Clive returned to Britain, the Parliament there held him to account. His response was that, considering the wealth available in India, “I stand astonished at my own moderation”.

Hastings, impeached for being obscenely rich, was acquitted after a seven-year trial. But look at some of the phrases prosecutor Edmund Burke used to describe Hastings: “Captain-general of iniquity”, a heart “gangrened to the core”, “ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead”.

What the British did the Maharajahs continued, revenously devouring the living carcasses of their subjects. Extortionate taxes of princely India were a scandal. They levied duties on trees, cattle, marriages. In Travancore, where the Sree Padmanabha Temple treasures have become a marvel, taxes were levied, based on size, on women's breasts. No doubt officials had plenty of scope for amicable negotiations. High taxes were always a sure way to promote corruption.

To all this must be added the hallowed Indian tradition of bribing God to grant us favours. Bhakti is a powerful force in our everyday life and we make it a point to propitiate our chosen God with hundies placed anonymously, jewelled crowns donated conspicuously and novenas offered arduously. It has gone deep into our mental makeup that God's blessings can be purchased. It follows that a minister's blessings can also be bought though ministers may charge higher rates.

History has stood still for us, but time has not. Kautilya whose count stopped at 40 will be shocked if he were to see how corruption has expanded in scope, range, size and potential in modern India. We pay 5 billion US $ annually as bribes (Transparency International figure for 2005. It must be double that now since mega scams like CWG and 2-G have raised the stakes sky-high).

Corruption is today accepted as part of life. To the Government it is not a problem; only when its hands are forced, it takes action – reluctant half measures. We have become immune even to the moral dimensions of corruption. Anna Hazare's big strength was the moral power of his persona. He jeopardised it by assuming rigid positions and setting an impossible deadline for passing his Jan Lok Pal Bill. When pressure tactics become inseparable from blackmail tactics, they lose their moral force and become another form of corruption.

We all think that corruption is something that other people practice. In fact it is systemic in our social structure and our public life; everyone, willingly or otherwise, consciously or otherwise, is a participant. The real issue is not this bill or that law. The real issue is: How do we change ourselves?

Congress has lost the next elections. So who's next? Brand Yeddyurappa?

2011-08-22T10:43:00.000+05:30

Harakiri is the most painful ritual invented by man to kill himself. Literally it means belly-cutting. You plunge a short sword into the left side of your abdomen, then draw the blade across to the right, then twist it upward. That done, you withdraw the sword and plunge it into your chest, then draw it down to the abdomen across the first cut. Finally, you withdraw the sword and thrust it into your throat.

In the extraordinary week that has gone by, did you see Kapil Sibal plunging the sword into the left abdomen of the Congress party and drawing it to the right and then upping the blade? Did you watch P.Chidambaram sinking the sword just below the chest and then drawing it, across Sibal's cut, into the lower abdomen? In a final demonstration of superhuman resolve, Manmohan Singh withdrew the sword and in one fell swoop stabbed the throat of the party.

The end. Now bookies won't accept any bets, howsoever attractive the odds, on the Congress coming anywhere near power in the next elections.

What monumental lack of vision – or was it arrogance? – that they could not see what was happening right before their eyes. Just as masses of people came out in the 1942 movement demanding independence, people came out last week demanding an end to corruption. The extent of popular disgust with corruption was completely lost on the leaders of the Government.

They thought it was all about a feeble old man trying to usurp the powers of Parliament. They thought that they could win the day by discrediting the man and showing him as corrupt himself and, for good measure, as an agent of dark forces out to destabilise wonderful India with its wonderful economy. What monumental misreading of a situation.

Actually Anna Hazare is not an issue at all. The right to enact laws is not an issue. The only issue is corruption. This is the issue that brought masses of Indians out into the rain. To them Anna Hazare is just a straw of hope. They clutch it because they do not get even a straw from the Government's side. As the public perceives it, Anna is fighting corruption, the Government is fighting Anna, therefore the Government is supporting corruption. How foolish of the Government to spread such an impression.

It does not matter that the mass uprising finally forced the Government to accept defeat and allow Ramlila Maidan to turn into a symbol of People Power. For the Government had lost the trust of the people even before the Hazare wave rose. The worst corruption scandals came up during its watch, men like Suresh Kalmadi were protected for too long, the chase of illegal money in Switzerland was managed with obvious lack of interest leading to the suspicion that top people in the Congress had things to hide. Finally they tabled a Lok Pal Bill that could provide more protection than punishment to the corrupt. This is a Government whose intentions are perceived to be dishonest.

The big surprise is that it could not even device an intelligent strategy to meet the crisis. Imagine pretending that the decision to arrest Anna Hazare was taken unilaterally by the Delhi police with the political leadership having no say in the matter. Another dumb idea was to proclaim, “Take the media away and there would be no Hazare phenomenon”. We can also say: Take the media away and there would be no Manish Tiwari, or Abhishek Singhvi or even Kapil Sibal phenomenon. They took the media away during the Emergency, yet the phenomenon of Indira-Sanjay Gandhi's defeat in the elections happened. It's the people who matter and you can't take the people away.

Today's Congress leadership has proved that it has no capacity to govern this country. It must go and it will. The tragedy is that the people have nothing to fall back upon, except the party of Yeddyurappa.

Why do citizens get angry in democracies? What the riots in Britain tell us

2011-08-16T09:59:00.000+05:30

When something ominous happens somewhere, we ask ourselves: Can that happen to us? We felt that the blood-splattered Arab Spring would not happen in India because we had legislatures, courts and media through which the steam of public anger could be let off.

But Greece and Spain and England are citadels of democracy. Eruptions there should make us, especially our rulers, think. There was an astonishing similarity between Greek and Spanish protests. The main feature of the popular mood in both countries was anger. Protesting Greeks called themselves the Indignant Citizens Movement. In Spain they called themselves the indignados. People feeling angry about their elected governments. Sounds familiar?

It was for the same reasons, too, that the Greeks and the Spaniards were angry: governmental incompetence leading to economic mess. Greece was on the brink of bankruptcy and was forced to take extremely unpopular austerity measures. Spain had to do the same with corruption adding to the problems. When public spending was cut and taxes raised, life became unbearably hard for the ordinary people and the poor. Protestors cried for “true democracy” saying that “the political class no longer represented the people”. Sounds familiar?

In the continent protestors held up placards proclaiming “The Power of Non-Violence”. This is where England was different with wanton violence quickly deteriorating into looting. Usually in such situations the dispossessed ransack supermarkets for food items. This time thieves were on the march for luxury items – plasma TV, hi-fi sets, branded sports shoes, ladies' bags.

Obviously freelance thugs and organised gangs were taking advantage of a sudden outbreak of anarchy. But how did such an atmosphere develop? To know that, we need to look at the broader picture. Then we will also see some similarities between England and Greece-Spain.

Britain is the most socially unequal country in the developed world. The Tottenham area where it all began is part of a borough that has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London. Unemployment rate there is double the national average. Liberal immigration of East Europeans after the Berlin Wall collapse disrupted the labour market and added to tensions already existing.

And don't forget the Metropolitan Police's reputation for racial profiling. London is not as bad as Los Angeles in this respect, but it is bad enough when blacks and ethnic minorities are always the ones who are routinely stopped and searched on the streets. Immigrants from the Carribean are always on the black list.

The latest riots cannot be described as racial. Indeed no demands were raised, no cause espoused. It was just a case of excited youths taking possession of what they could not get otherwise. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the role played by social tensions and economic disparities – and these are always mixed up with race.

The breakdown of traditional values is a factor too. How big is the population of single mothers, to take just one example, and what kind of upbringing do their children get? There is a lost generation out there, easy prey to drug pushers and looter gangs. Some welfare programmes for marginal people like them were cut recently in the name of cost saving.

How disruptive is the gap between the very rich and the very poor? In egalitarian Norway the recent massacre was something that united Norwegians against a mad man and his mad ideas. It did not provide an excuse for gangs to take to the streets and plunder.

Such fundamental issues do not seem to be engaging the attention of the leadership in Britain. The Prime Minister is talking about banning the social media. Perhaps the basic problem in all societies is leadership. As in Greece, Spain and England, so in India: There is no leadership that can understand, let alone cope with, the tensions that beset the people. The political class has lost the way, and lost the people's trust. Warnings are blowing in the wind.

Congress does a trick, BJP stages a farce – and corruption is assured a free run

2011-08-08T10:41:00.000+05:30

It is now clear beyond all doubt: The Congress and the BJP are equally uninterested in fighting corruption. Actually both are interested in continuing it because both are beneficiaries of corruption. All talk about ending corruption and punishing the corrupt is just talk, meant to fool the public.

The Congress showed its anti-anti-corruption state of mind by subverting the public demand for an effective Lok Pal bill and presenting a draft that was only slightly different from previous drafts. Ten bills were introduced between 1969 and 2008. None of them was passed. No further proof is required to establish the malafides of successive governments in power.

There was some hope that the Lok Pal bill presented to Parliament this time would be different. For one thing, popular expectations were high because Justice Santosh Hegde had given to the institution of Lok Ayukta what T.N.Seshan had given to the Election Commission – credibility. For another, a historic groundswell of public opinion had rattled the Government which was forced to consult civil society leaders in drafting the bill. But the wily Government tricked the people and came up with a draft that was essentially old wine in old bottle.

A Lok Pal – or a Lok Ayukta – can be meaningful only if it has independent powers to investigate and prosecute. If it can only forward its recommendations to a “competent authority” for action, then it is a dead Lok Pal. The bill presented by the Government does not provide for a public grievance mechanism or penalties for corrupt employees. Only 'Group A' officers can be probed, which leaves out some of the biggest bribe collectors of the land such as police sub-inspectors, sub-registrars and checkposts clerks. The conduct of MPs inside Parliament is beyond the Lok Pal's jurisdiction. Which means honourable MPs can go on charging money for raising questions.

Politicians would not be resorting to such deviousness unless they have a vested interest in continuing corruption. Money is the most powerful vested interest. Money is prized by individual politicians who love the good life and by parties that cannot conduct even a byelection without spending several crores. Power secures this kind of money. Hence the readiness of parties to keep corruption going.

The show the BJP put on in Karnataka fits into the pattern. It asked Yeddyurappa to resign over corruption charges. Then it put him back in power with another man's face masking his. So what happens to corruption? Nothing. Just as the Congress did with the Lok Pal bill, the BJP made a monkey of the public with the Yeddyurappa removal farce.

By all account the new chief minister, Sadananda Gowda, is a decent sort. But isn't that immaterial when he is hoisted by the tainted previous chief as a mukhota and accepted as such by the High Command? Other tainted BJP brass may also be kept officially out of the cabinet because of the Lok Ayukta indictment. But they too will carry on wielding power as Yeddyurappa does. Karnataka will continue to be drained of its resources and the people will continue to be swindled.

Power blinds politicians. Otherwise the BJP bosses would have seen that Yeddyurappa's victory was in fact the BJP's defeat. Yeddyurappa threatens to get back to power in a few months. He may well do that. But that won't be because of the BJP's popularity or Yeddyurappa's intrigues. It will be because of the incompetence of the Congress. This party has a handful of credible leaders, but the old guard and the mafioso will not let them come up.

A Congress leadership with reasonable imagination could have scored high in the context of the discredit the BJP has brought upon itself. Instead, the Congress scores selfgoals. Hariprasad, a party flunkey from Delhi, recently berated Justice Santosh Hegde for not ending corruption in Karnataka. How depraved can a politician get. Congressmen like this are the real secret of Yeddyurappa's success.

A story of threats, tricks and family love: How a chief minister became a marvel

2011-08-01T13:03:00.001+05:30

Do not underestimate B. S. Yeddyurappa. There is no match to him in Indian politics. He is amazing. He is unbelievable. He is a pulsating anthropomorphic mechatronic phenomenon of terminatorial indestructibility. An absolute marvel.

During his term as chief minister, there was not one day of governance in Karnataka. The days were filled instead with earthquakes of scandal followed by tsunamis of shame. But the man remained unshaken, convinced that he was the best leader Karnataka ever had, worthy, as he said himself, of a Nobel. He proclaimed his greatness in posters stuck on the back of every state transport corporation bus.

How then can we tar Yeddyurappa with the ordinary brush of corruption that we apply to others? Sure, he became rich like every Sukh Ram and Shibu Soren, Lalu Prasad and Mayawati. Getting rich is the badge of success in Indian politics. But he did more. He displayed attributes that put him in a class of his own.

He was the only chief minister in history who could command his party's high command. Driven to the wall, the high command might have turned against him this time, but don't forget how he had successfully blackmailed it in previous crises. The threat that he would split the party in the state used to send the Delhi bellies scampering for cover.

Being a master of the game, Yeddyurappa combined threats with bounteous generosity. Party President Gadkari became such a fan that he once ruled out any action against the chief minister who, as the President put it, had committed only immoralities, not illegalities.

Another attribute that made Yeddyurappa different was his ability to make illusion look like reality. He used to assert repeatedly that the people of Karnataka had elected his government. Actually this was a terminological inexactitude. The Yeddyurappa Government was never an elected government; it was a purchased government. Not that he was the first politician to purchase a majority. But never was it done more blatantly than in Operation Lotus in Karnataka.

The lotus was watered with illegal money to boot, the kind of muck-covered money you dig out of the red earth of Bellary. No other government in Karnataka or elsewhere had shown the same amoral abandon in turning known looters of the land into ministers. The BJP is beholden to these ministers and that is why a mere reshuffle in its governmental lineup will hardly make any difference to the culture of plunder that has overtaken the state.

The ultimate triumph of Yeddyurappa was that he tricked both his party and his community into accepting him as leader extraordinary. The BJP had always led us to believe that it was dead against the concept of hereditary power. Yet Yeddyurappa established India's first BJP dynasty. He loved his sons, his in-laws, his widowed relatives, his departed siblings.

To some of these relatives, this ideal family man allotted valuable urban sites. When a heartless public criticised him for bending the laws, he explained that he was acting out of compassion. But this concept of compassion was in violation of the concept propagated by the revered preceptor of Lingayata who said: “Compassion needs must be towards all living things”. ( Human Values in Vachana Literature, page -15).

A man who put his personal family interests above Basaveshwara's Vachana succeeded in equating his political status with that of the Lingayats. A further disservice was done to the community when he argued that no other Lingayat should succeed him as chief minister. The community has good and competent leaders with a clean image in contrast to Yeddyurappa's sullied reputation. It is a pity that such elements are unable – or unwilling? – to speak up for the community. With leaders like Nijalingappa and Veerendra Patil, Lingayats had become part of the glory of Karnataka. Resurrecting that glory is important not only to the community but also to Karnataka and India. The Nobel Prize can wait.

Media becomes a calamity when it's used as a means to achieve private ends

2011-07-25T11:43:00.000+05:30

Rupert Murdoch is a terror before whom successive British prime ministers have bowed. Tony Blair flew all the way to Australia in 1997 to propitiate him. David Cameron's current prime ministership is under pressure because of his cosiness with him. That such an almighty Lord became a whimpering apologiser before British MPs, with his close associates in jail, would have been unbelievable if the world had not seen it with its own eyes.

This is not merely a matter of the world's most powerful media empire coming to grief. It is also a matter of the world's greatest force for good, the media, being turned into a force of evil – and the world's need to confront and overcome that calamity. This is where the Murdoch tragedy has a clear message to India.

Two factors stand out. First, it is dangerous to concentrate too much power in the hands of one person or one company. Such concentration would make the person or company think that they are above the law and above common morality. That was what made William Randolph Hearst decide that he must organise the Spanish-American war to boost the circulation of his paper. When his man in Cuba cabled that there was no war, Hearst is said to have cabled back: “You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war”.

The second factor is that in the media business growth and competition do not lead to product improvement. If you want to make a mark in the washing powder business, you develop a better washing powder. If you want to win supremacy in the print/TV business, you develop gimmicks; start a war, or manipulate circulation/TRP figures, embrace Page 3 cheesecake sex, dethrone journalists and enthrone business managers.

Those issues hardly engaged the attention of India's instant pundits discussing Murdoch's downfall. They seemed content with the argument that criminalities like phone-tapping were not the Indian way.

So, is the Indian way better? Is publishing paid news without letting the reader know that it is paid for the better way? Is it better to enter into “private treaties” that make newspapers manage the news in favour of their corporate treaty partners – again keeping the reader in the dark? Is it preferable for a media baron to gain undue business advantages by misusing his minister brother's political power?

The Indian way may be different from the Murdoch way but it is just as despicable. Both break the fundamental tenets of journalism. Both use the media as a means to achieve private ends, Murdoch's end being influence and Indian Murdochs's end being money.

Journalism has a higher responsibility compared to other businesses. The reason is that journalism , for example, can incite violence in a way that washing powder makers cannot. The biggest scandal in Indian journalism is that we have owners who publicly proclaim that the only responsibility of a newspaper company is to make profit for its shareholders. Murdochism never went that low.

There is another area where the Indian reality is different. As soon as the scandal broke in Britain, the systems there went into action. Top people were arrested and top police officials resigned as they were implicated in corruption. Police investigations got under way. A judicial inquiry was ordered, the Prime Minister insisting that all aspects of politician-media-police links should be investigated.We can reasonably expect that meaningful regulatory systems will now be put in place along with tighter codes of conduct.

In our country, the worst of scandals produce action only when the judiciary or the channels force the Government to do so. Even then it's sluggish. Obviously we have people at the top who have much to hide. And we have desi Murdochs who have blithely eliminate the institution of editor and turns news into a profit-oriented product handled by marketing whizkids. If Rupert Murdoch wants to start life all over again, he should come to India.

Systems exist to detect terrorist plans; but we focus on cabinet shuffle tricks

2011-07-18T11:22:00.000+05:30

The cabinet reshuffle – essentially a defeatist's exercise – had raised major issues concerning the morality of coalition politics and the Government's very approach to governance. The ensuing public discourse reflected serious worries across the political spectrum about the way the country was going. Presumably that debate could have at least led to a clearer understanding of how not to handle high responsibility.

But suddenly debate is disrupted, life itself is derailed and everybody's attention diverted by the most despairing reality of our times – terrorism. Whether the latest Mumbai strike is the handiwork of Indian Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba, whether it is provoked by the occasion of Ajmal Kasab's birthday or Hillary Clinton's imminent visit may all be issues of importance to investigating agencies. What towers above them all, however, is that terrorism persists despite the proven historical fact that it achieves nothing.

Nazi terrorism against Jews achieved nothing for Germany. Jewish terrorism against Palestinians achieved only the isolation of Israel. Velupillai Prabhakaran's terrorism decimated even Tamil leaders who did not join him. Rajapakse's terrorism against Tamils has made him a potential war criminal in the eyes of the world.

Pakistan's parallel government run by the army and the ISI made terrorism a state policy for many years. The result is that the country is stuck in history unable to move an inch forward. There are many educated, liberal groups in that country. But they are also stuck as any move in favour of tolerance and issues like women's rights invite summary punishment from hardliners.

If repeated failures by terrorists to achieve their goals have not blunted the edge of terrorism, the reason must be sought in the vicegrip religious fanaticism has on the human mind. Al Qaida and Taliban have exploited this factor diabolically, sending many young believers to their death in return for a “martyr's” place in paradise. Funding agencies in Saudi Arabia play a key role in popularising hardline religiosity in traditionally tolerant Islamic societies.

What do they hope to achieve? Will Taliban's pitiless system of beheadings, stoning and flogging targetted mostly against women ever become acceptable in, say, the Muslim societies of the Mediterranean? Does Saudi Arabia believe that it can win the allegiance of other countries like it has won Bahrain's? The fanatics are playing a game that can have only one result: Creating counter fanatics.

India is already witnessing this. Repeated terror strikes by Islamist forces have persuaded some radical Hindutva elements to reply in the same coin – a new departure for what has been a famously inclusive sanatana dharma. It may look like a human reaction, but it is in fact a setback for traditional values. Never have two wrongs made a right.

What we need is one right that will prevent more wrongs. We need an efficient intelligence gathering model that will detect terrorist plans in advance. That the US and the UK seem to have achieved this to a considerable extent suggests that the technologies, the gadgets and the systems exist. We need a network of dedicated professionals who will master counter-terrorism technologies and put them to effective use without political interference of any kind.

Which brings us back to the Government's approach to governance and the correlation between efficiency and make-believe cabinet shuffling. Mumbai has been attacked half a dozen times by now and we have a Crown Prince saying that it is impossible to stop all terrorist attacks. Our Home Minister says the terrorists “worked in a very clandestine manner”. How nasty of them. Couldn't they at least send an SMS to the Home Ministry detailing their plans?

Our security systems, like our investigating agencies, are politically controlled. The portfolios of our ministers are decided without taking performance or corruption levels into account. Naturally, we are left with a government that can only ask the people to remain calm after disaster strikes. Perhaps the people have remained calm for too long.

The world's richest gold-jewel collection? Our new pride – and responsibility

2011-07-11T11:22:00.000+05:30

One thing is now clear: India is a very rich country, perhaps the richest in the world. Gold reserves play a decisive role in central banking around the globe which makes the yellow metal a currency rather than a commodity. India has more of this currency than any other country.

It's not in the hands of the central bank of course, but gold is gold. No other people have the fascination for gold that Indian people have. Many an economist has covetously said that if the gold held by Indian households were made available for public purpose, then things like balance of payments and foreign exchange reserves and national debt and credit ratings would swing spectacularly in favour of India.The swing would be no less spectacular if the Indian deposits in private Swiss accounts were made available for legitimate use.

On top of all this comes the mind-numbing news from Trivandrum. What has been discovered from the long-locked cellars of the Sree Padmanabha Swamy Temple must be the single most precious collection of gold-and-jewel artefacts in the world. There is nothing like it anywhere from Istanbul's Top Kapi palace to Salar Jung museum, from the Vatican to the British Crown Jewels. It is several times bigger than Tirupathi Balaji Temple's fabled gold valued at Rs 52,000 crore. It reduces Sai Baba's Yajur Mandir hoard of 98 kg of gold to small change.

Two factors lend uniqueness to the Sree Padmanabha treasure. First, the way it was preserved with a sense of duty by the Maharajas of Travancore. This is one royal house that never built bejewelled palaces or led flamboyant lives. In fact the last Maharaja lived a frugal life, stoically watching the state taking away the properties he had in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. One temple vault was opened in 1931 and four coffers removed to the Palace Treasury for counting. But there was no evidence of any of the royals taking personal advantage of the inestimable wealth that lay in their absolute control. Gwalior and Patiala, Jaipur and Mysore enjoyed their wealth and even claimed a bit of the political pie after independence. Travancore stayed in the background, content being Sree Padmanabha's servants.

The other unique factor of the Kerala find is that it is not just gold and hundis. It comprises works of art. The valuation given to it in daily reports (one lakh crore rupees with a major cellar yet to be opened) no doubt gave it a feel of gigantism, but it was completely meaningless. You can value a bar of gold by its weight. How do you value an exquisite “broom” made of intricately woven gold wires, intended to dust offerings to the Lord? Or a delicately wrought, jewel-encrusted crown? Or ancient, rarest-of-rare gold coins?

You need internationally recognised specialists to estimate the meaning as well as the value of such matchless pieces of craftsmanship. You also need scientifically foolproof and technologically uptodate methods to ensure their safe keeping. Just because they stayed safe for 150-200 years in dark and airless chambers, it does not mean they can remain undamaged in those conditions for ever.

These challenges have prompted some rather extremist views already. That the central government should take charge of the treasure is one.(Which would be tantamount to writing off the priceless collection, given the nature of today's political class and bureaucracy). That communal control be ensured is another. (Which would go against the spirit of both Sree Padmanabha and his daasas who ruled all their subjects with equal vaatsalya).

The state government's decision appears to be the wisest for now – that the treasure is the property of the temple and must be protected as such without inconveniencing the devotees. Perhaps a scientifically secure structure can be erected within the temple complex and the treasure kept there appropriately curated and safeguarded. Let the world marvel at what a corner of India has made possible.

Here's a wiser policy option for a bold PM: Bring 'outsiders' in, keep usurpers out

2011-07-04T11:01:00.000+05:30

There was wit and there was a tit for every tat, but Manmohan Singh still did not get it right on what has grown into the make-or-break issue of our times – how to curb corruption. He did not debunk the civil society movement like his cabinet colleagues are doing, but he said that the Lokpal Bill would be no magic wand to solve the problem.

Nobody said it would. The issue is that 64 years of democracy have not only failed to pass meaningful laws against corruption but, manipulated by self-seeking politicians and bureaucrats, made effective prosecution of the guilty virtually impossible. This has to change which is what today's public clamour is all about.

A well-meaning government would have drawn inspiration from this public mood and taken reformative action. Instead, what we see is a systematic campaign to discredit the people's movement, employing everything from high-decibel propaganda to clandestine investigations by intelligence agencies. This throws the very intentions of the Government into doubt.

Between the suave Kapil Sibal and the cynically suave P. Chidambaram, there is plenty that can be said against “outsiders” trespassing into the law-making prerogatives of an elected Parliament. But it is empty rhetoric. For one thing, people who elect the elected Parliament are not outsiders; they are the masters. For another, elections have become a black-money game that throws legislatures open to charlatans of all kinds. Please do not say that the bribe-takers, exchequer-raiders and mafia types are the exceptions. The good ones are the exceptions.

To the kind of democracy and Parliament that have taken shape under decades of officially condoned corruption, decent and law-abiding citizens of India will always remain “outsiders”. The task is to bring the outsiders in from the cold and turn the usurpers into outsiders. Manmohan Singh had a historic opportunity to achieve this. But he appears to have lost it under the compulsions of narrow party politics – or could it be due to “those who aspire to be Prime Minister” as Justice Santosh Hegde intriguingly put it?

It will be easy for suave articulators of the Government to demolish the likes of Anna Hazare. But it will be a historical blunder for them to imagine that getting the better of the Hazares of the moment is the same as getting the better of the public anger sizzling across the country. The anger was ignited by the sudden exposure of a rush of mega corruption scandals from the 2G spectrum to the Commonwealth Games. The nation was stunned by the realisation that strutting VIPs were in fact plunderers. And perhaps murderers were not far behind if the unfolding drama of the “suicide” of Bacha, A. Raja's aide, is any indication.

Let the articulate apologists of the Government also know that this is a time of heightened expectations among Indians. It is a fact of history that when governments fail to meet the expectations of the people, unrest follows. In dictatorships, this takes a longer time, but it eventually does happen, countries like Libya and Syria being the newest examples.

That type of insurrections may not happen in India. But Naxalism has happened despite every effort by Chidambaram to annihilate it. The Jantar Mantar revolution happened. People's disgust with corruption is now out in the open. Well-accented television appearances by government leaders will not be enough to circumvent it. A bull-headed Government may snub civil society out of the way, but a sharp-eyed BJP will be there to squeeze every drop of advantage from the resulting crisis. Yet another toothless law against corruption may change the game itself.

This is no longer Indira Gandhi's India. Nor P.V.Narasimha Rao's or A.B.Vajpayee's. In today's prosperous, middleclass dominant India, old-style political engineering cannot work. Even contrived transparency cannot work. Look out, Sri Kapil Sibal, Sri Chidambaram, Sri Manmohan Singh, Smt. Sonia Gandhi, Sri Nitin Gadkari. Look out and see the new wind that is blowing.

The miracle of Malaysia: A makeover in just two decades. Like in China

2011-06-27T12:21:00.000+05:30

The Western world almost completely controls our perceptions of events, leaders and of history itself. A fresh reminder of this travesty is provided by the latest bestseller that stares at you from the display shelves of bookstores across Malaysia : A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The West has spread the impression that Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew is Asia's outstanding economic miracle man while Malaysia's Mahathir as a cantankerous ogre, hater of white people and dictator to boot. Both are dressed up portraits. Actually Mahathir is the real miracle man of Southeast Asia.

The Singaporean, scion of a rich and anglophile family, (he was named Harry Lee Kuan Yew, his brothers Dennis and Freddy), developed into a Cambridge-educated intellectual, at home in think-tank circles in the UK and US, and savvy enough to get a BBC man to give him private lessons on how to conduct himself before a camera. The Malay, son of a poor school teacher, never went beyond Singapore to complete his medical education and remained proud of his traditional Malay values. When he confronted double-speak and double standards, he made no attempt to hide his resentment. If he felt he was on the side of righteousness, he didn't care who was offended. It was easy for the West, self-serving as ever, to adopt Kuan Yew as one of its own, and reject Mahathir as an oriental potentate.

Kuan Yew, Prime Minister for 31 years (mentor thereafter) and Mahathir, Prime Minister for 22 years (retired thereafter) naturally had to deal with each other. In his civilised but no-nonsense style Mahathir describes it as “a civil relationship, not a friendship”. There was a brief interlude when Singapore became part of Malaysia. As Mahathir puts it, “Malaysia was a real country, not a city-state, and to become Prime Minister of Malaysia would satisfy [Lee's] ambitions, especially for power and a more than municipal role.” He adds that in the campaign to win support in Malaysia, Lee “revealed himself as a racist”. He also refers to Lee's party PAP using its “characteristic bullying tactics” during campaign rallies. “People who tried to heckle the PAP speakers had powerful spotlights turned on them. The effect was dramatic”. That was the least bullying of PAP's bullying tactics.

These historically revealing details, however, are no more than sidelights. The core of the Mahathir story is the scale of one man's achievements for his country in the span of two decades. Old timers can still remember Kuala Lumpur as an overgrown village with just one five-star hotel and one main thoroughfare through which all traffic and all commerce passed. Yet there wasn't much traffic jam because there wasn't much traffic.

Mahathir turned that village into a glittering global metropolis. In central KL the traffic jam is terrible these days, but that is inspite of Mahathir landmarks like a monorail, a light rail transit, commuter trains, multilayered flyover networks and expressway systems in addition to the famous airport express train. The airport itself is still a pleasant shock to those who can remember the sleepy old Subang airport. Today's KL vies with Singapore and Shanghai.

Mahathir also converted Malaysia from a rubber-and-rice agricultural economy to an industrial economy. His own special pride is that his modernisation drive transformed the social attitudes of the Malay people from servitude to self-assurance. He still criticises his people for not working hard enough and for lacking commercial acumen. A devout Muslim, he also attacks the idea of taking more than one wife. He abhors fanaticism and condemns “the growing problem of deviant teachings among Muslims in Malaysia”.

What makes Mahathir special is that while pursuing economic progress he never lost sight of the larger picture of human values. That cannot be said of Lee Kuan Yew and certainly not of Indonesia's Suharto or Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra. In sheer vision terms, Mahathir Mohamad has only Deng Hsiaoping in his league.

(T.J.S. George is the author of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore published by Andre Deutsch, London, in 1973).

Of course we cannot match the best, though we are as good as any. Why?

2011-06-20T11:03:00.000+05:30

Was anyone surprised when the acharya of science, C.N.R.Rao, said that none of India's premier institutions could match the best in the world? Earlier, the less authentic voice of Jairam Ramesh had said that India's acclaimed IIMs and IITs were not world class.

They were stating the obvious. Rao did not spare even Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science which he had served with distinction in the past. “Name just ten Indians”, he said “whom the world recognises as good scientists today. I cannot”.

No one suggests of course that Indians do not have it in them. Indeed, many Indian scientists have won top honours in their fields, including the Nobel. But they were all associated with universities and research institutions abroad. The moral of the story is clear: Talent exists but it does not flower in the atmosphere and culture provided by India's academic institutions.

This is where C.N.R.Rao's words should sound an alarm in the circles that matter. Most of the world's scientific research today – about 18 percent -- is done in the US, he said. China is pretty close with 13 percent of the world's research. Said Rao: “The Chinese will in the next 20 years become the best in all fields but we will linger around the fifth place”.

China's growth graph should not surprise us. More importantly, we should not look at it in a jingoistically self-serving they-are-a-dictatorship-we-are-a-democracy mentality. We need not even go to the other extreme and adopt a leftist view as Martin Jacques did in his When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. That would be merely ideological just as seeing India as a superpower would be merely patriotic.

But C.N.R. Rao's words about China should make us revisit some hard facts. Last November the Chinese Communist Party's plenum approved plans to invest US $ 600 billion over the next five years in high tech, life sciences, advanced materials, renewable energy, aerospace. To provide the intellectual infrastructure required, China had already identified five universities to be developed as Ivy League institutions of excellence. Describing this as unprecedented, the President of America's Yale University said: “China has built the largest higher-education sector in the world in merely a decade's time”.

We cannot do this because we do not have (a) the will and (b) the leadership that is purpose-driven. Our academic institutions are plagued by the same bureaucratic-political culture that vitiates our governmental and public life. Institutions like the IISc may be faring better in relative terms, but our universities – not excluding the JNU – have failed to free themselves from the stranglehold of party, caste and linguistic politics. Self-preservation may be an Indian virtue, but it hardly helps scientific research.

Given half a chance, Murli Manohar Joshi was on the point of converting IIMs into outposts of cultural nationalism. The “Ten Best” listings of which our weekly magazines are terribly fond have been listing Bombay's St. Xavier's as the best college in the country. Yet this was the institution where a student only had to raise a threatening voice to get a Rohinton Mistry novel taken off the syllabus; the college principal's protests were drowned in the Shiv Sena kid's Tarzan victory calls.

China has reasons to be proud of its dictatorship if it produces not just a military machine that gives the jitters to the US, but also steadily rising GDP, educational and research institutions of world class and supremacy in sports. We have strong reasons to be proud of our democracy, but our democracy has to stop being a means for the political class to fatten itself. It has to make us recognise our priorities properly. In terms of talent and potential we are second to none, be it education or sports. What we lack is a system that promotes talent. When will we get a leadership that understands this? Or a revolution that will produce such a leadership?

Promise of a new future for Bengal and Tamil Nadu, but not Kerala

2011-06-13T11:45:00.000+05:30

Opportunity has been called “thou strong seducer”. From A. Raja to B. S. Yeddyurappa, from the Bengal communists to the UPA-2 high commanders, they have all allowed opportunity to seduce them. Which is a pity because opportunity is also a provider of inspiration for great and noble work.

Following the recent assembly elections, three states saw historically significant regime changes. How are the novice chief minister in Bengal and the veterans in Tamil Nadu and Kerala using their newly-won moment in history? It is barely a month since they took charge. Yet, a tentative appraisal is possible based on first impressions.

Mamata Bannerji, because of her inexperience in state governance and the unpredictabilities of her mood and behaviour, had caused the maximum apprehensions. But she seems to have given the best first impressions. She began with herself, trying to look less unkempt and less temperamental. (The importance of appearance in this television age cannot be over-emphasised. Every time Baba Ramdev is seen walking to his jet, there must be multitudes who wish he wore a shirt. Shapurji Saklatvala, a Labour member of the British House of Commons in the 1930s, once told Mahatma Gandhi at a meeting in London: “For heaven's sake, Gandhi, wear a pair of trousers”).

Mamata's approach to governance also showed a touch of freshness. Although her attack of the CPM is relentless, she seemed anxious to show that she had put old enmities behind her. One of her first acts as Chief Minister was to call on arch critic Somnath Chatterji in his house. Imagine Jayalalitha going to the Gopalpuram residence of Karunanidhi.

The new chief minister's most promising initiatives have been with respect to choosing ministers and advisers. This was clear during the election campaign itself when she reached out to non-politicos with party tickets. Beyond the cabinet, she has also organised an advisory council consisting of experts from several fields. This means that the new Government will have the benefit of guidance from non-party, non-political specialists. It also shows that the chief minister wants to listen to experts, and not just carry on as a party animal.

The chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Kerala have been war-horses for too long to be not party animals. Even so, Jayalalitha has the greatest opportunity among all chief ministers. She wields the most power as she is unhindered by allies or by rivals in the party. She is also experienced and intelligent with an administrative acumen recognised by all. She has in her the faculties to become the architect of a new Tamil Nadu and the builder of a new India.

Two factors have stood in the way of fulfilling this promise – a tendency towards vindictive politics and a tendency to listen to no one. Both can be overcome by recognising her own strengths. The Karunanidhi family has been in a state of self-destruct. She could afford to leave it alone and appear graceful in the process. As for the loner posture,there are some new faces in the cabinet. Nothing will be lost -- and a lot gained – if some able ministers are allowed to speak for themselves instead of the unvarying “Amma-speak”.She has also engaged an outside adviser: Ponraj who played a similar role for A.P.J.Abdul Kalam when he was President. If memories of the earlier “kitchen cabinet” are also given a go-by, we may finally see Jayalalitha coming into her own.

Unfortunately Kerala raises no such hopes. A historically thin majority should have made the Congress alliance cautious. Instead, it gave ministerial posts to a host of tainted politicians with a history of corruption. The Muslim League's president even resorted to the unheard-of tactic of announcing portfolios; the hapless Chief Minister pretended he saw and heard nothing unusual. Kerala is set for a new era of plundering – if the Government lasts with its 2-seat majority. The Congress should be grateful that Achutanandan and the CPM are not Yeddyurappa and the BJP. Such is democracy.

Deceiving the people in legal ways is still deception. It won't work

2011-06-06T11:52:00.000+05:30

Deceiving, alas, has become part of democracy. It can be brazen or it can be subliminal , the latter being more cunning and therefore more destructive. India goes brazen when big private interests have to be protected. But at the subliminal level, it is continuously deceptive – and continuously corroding the vitals of the country.

When Union Carbide's Anderson was given a special plane and helped to flee the country in the wake of the Bhopal gas catastrophe, the state was deceiving the Indian people. In contrast, when BP's oil well caught fire in American waters, President Obama himself led the campaign to get full compensation from the oil major. American interests first for America. American interests first for India too!

It is a perennial mystery that India has no qualms about putting other people's interests above its own. When European adventurers dropped arms in Purulia forests, one of the brigands was able to stop off in Bombay and walk out of the crowded airport a free man; Wikileaks has since told us that the arms drop was a clandestine state operation to topple West Bengal's communist government. The biggest deception of all was the state brazening it out in the Quattrochi case from beginning to end.

Subliminal deception takes place mostly through manipulative legislation. In a nutshell, laws are framed to make office-holders virtually immune to prosecution. This trick began with the dawn of independence. It continues with renewed vigour as we can see in the state's latest hardening of attitude in the drafting of the Lokpal bill.

Remember, the state was ready with a draft bill. It was its toothlessness that led to a groundswell of unexpected public support to Anna Hazare's campaign for a meaningful draft. The Government's acceptance of the Hazare position was quick, evidently because it was rattled by the explosion of public opinion, as it is rattled by Baba Ramdev now. But there were doubts whether the Government would agree to a law with real power to punish corrupt officials.

The doubts are now confirmed. The Government representatives in the drafting committee now insist that any Lokpal legislation should not apply to the Prime Minister, the higher judiciary and – this is revealing – bureaucrats of the lower levels and MPs in their “conduct in Parliament”. The first two categories had been widely discussed and many, including former Prime Minister Vajpayee and some members of the present ruling elite, had agreed to their inclusion. The Government has actually gone back on its previous position.

The exclusion of bureaucrats and MPs from the Lokpal's jurisdiction gives the game away. From the day the Constitution was enacted and conduct rules for the services formulated, bureaucrats have been protecting themselves and their political mentors with all kinds of immunities and exemptions. The most pernicious idea is that to prosecute someone against whom there is prima facie evidence, you need the permission of his higher-up, bureaucratic or political. Since abusers of power operate in packs, permission is hardly ever granted. The guilty remain free to add to their guilt.

The case of MPs is even more scandalous. We have the worst types of people getting elected and the shameful episode of MPs taking bribes to raise questions in Parliament is still fresh in memory. None of the offending MPs was punished, so some are presumably still making money through their “conduct in Parliament”.

What the latest Government stand brings to light is that the intentions of the ruling class are not honourable. They want to have laws that will not punish the guilty. They want to deceive the people. They want to do this while publicly proclaiming, as Sonia Gandhi recently did, that “transparency is the very heart of our governance”. Wrong. Deception is the very heart of governance. It has been so under all political parties. It won't work much longer because the people have seen through the game. Even the brouhaha over Baba Ramdev's 5-star jetset satyagraha will not dilute public disgust with corruption.

Mother of democracies is changing; we should look at serious reform

2011-05-30T11:10:00.000+05:30

Indian democracy is a photocopy of British democracy. Is it reasonable to hope, therefore, that basic changes in the structure of British democracy will inspire some desperately needed reforms in Indian democracy as well? Probably not because we no longer have influence wielders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the “last Englishman” in India.

But at the least we might take note of the winds of change slowly wafting across the British isles. The newfound anger against corruption in India is also a wind of change. Corruption will finally be tamed only if electoral reforms are also put in place. Sooner or later we will have to pay attention to what they are doing in England and California, in Switzerland and Australia.

In early May Britain went through a rare referendum. It ended up in a massive defeat for those who wanted to change the existing first-past-the-post voting system (FPTP, the same as in India) to the complicated alternative vote (AV) system. But the general impression remained that the FPTP needed reform because it enabled parties without majority support to form governments. (Think of Narasimha Rao. Think of Yeddyurappa).

The British seem to be in a mood for change, anyway. There has been talk of reducing the size of the House of Commons (current strength 650) and abolishing the House of Lords (current strength 792). Even if they do not go that revolutionary, the idea of hereditary Lords and Anglican bishops getting seats in the House automatically may be abandoned. Ditto with royalty. The unpopularity of Prince Charles which was in direct proportion to the popularity of Princess Diana might have prepared the ground. See what a columnist said in The Economist at the height of the William-Kate wedding brouhaha: “For the sake of the country, but also as an act of kindness, pension the royals off. Time for compassionate republicanism”. Britain without a king or queen is no longer unimaginable.

California is desperately seeking political reform because excessive democracy (yes, there is such a thing!) has rendered it bankrupt and ungovernable. Alone among American states, it has a constitution that allows “direct democracy”. Citizens can hold a referendum and reject laws passed by the legislature. They can also present what are called “initiatives”. If a majority of citizens vote in favour of an initiative, that becomes the law of the land, the elected legislature having no say in the matter.

Initiatives and referendums are the nuts and bolts of Switzerland's democracy. Swiss citizens may vote more than 30 times a year on various local or national issues. But the Swiss have used this system within sensible limits and thus gained from it. Californians overused it until it hurt.

Perhaps there is scope for a modified system of proportional representation (PR) used successfully in countries like Australia. Basically this system ensures that a party gets seats only in proportion to the votes it wins, not more as often happens in India. The point to note is that several different voting systems exist. We need not be stuck with the FPTP system just because Nehru and Patel, Ambedkar and Alladi Krishnaswamy Aiyar chose it in an age of innocence.

Fortunately we have reached a stage where corruption is the biggest political issue in India. Public outrage over corruption has contributed to what would have been unthinkable a few years ago – ministers, corporate chiefs, senior bureaucrats and even sports officials landing in jail. More will be joining them.

This is a healthy sign. The worst thing that can happen in a democracy is the feeling among citizens that their votes do not make a difference. That feeling will slowly evaporate if the Lokpal Bill emerges with clout and then an electoral reform bill eliminates one-man parties and family parties free of accountability. The healthy signs that have surfaced of late must lead up to healthy results. If the political class is allowed to subvert them, the resulting explosion of public anger may surprise even the subverters.

Assembly-line manufacture of books, the surest way to lose readers

2011-05-23T11:58:00.001+05:30

Like all the superluxury cars in the world opening showrooms in India, all the great book publishers of the world are opening branches in India. The pull of the Indian middle class is as compelling as the pull of the Indian millionaire class.

But the super cars ensure that they remain super; even if they sell only a dozen cars a year, the price tags will justify their overheads. Book publishers have to have large volumes to sustain the overheads. So the diligence that goes into the manufacture of cars cannot go into the manufacture of books.

There are publishers who decide, inside the majesty of their board rooms, that they shall publish 300 or 400 titles per year. Car makers can put in more shifts, add more assembly lines and turn out more units. How do book publishers manage to get 300 or 400 titles to publish each year?

Well, many of our publishers simply put in more shifts and add more assembly lines. So books come out like cars come out of a factory. The assumption is: Car buyers, an unreasonable lot, will complain even if there is a stain in the upholstery. Book buyers, the world's most reasonable lot, will not complain even if there are a dozen spelling stains on every page.

The net result is that books get published in India that should not have reached a paginator's screen. Many of them are about cinema and cinema people reflecting the quick-fix publisher's hurry to get out easy books to hit an easy target. There is no other explanation for the recently published K.L.Saigal: The Definitive Biography.

Bad title to begin with. Because there is nothing definitive about this biography. There is not even a shred of new information. In the West, biographies are still coming out on people like Lawrence of Arabia and Princess Diana and they are lapped up because they present new research, new material, new insights. Saigal was great enough to deserve half a dozen books. But it cannot be done by shortcut artistes.

A. R. Rahman is nowhere near Saigal since he is more a synthesiser of music than an inventor. But he is a big success story and therefore deserves the attention of a serious archivist/curator like Nasreen Munni Kabir. Even so her A.R.Rahman: The Spirit of Music is not the study it could have been. How can you study a subject by merely recording conversations with him?

R.D.Burman: The Man, The Music is at least based on old-fashioned research, due perhaps to the two authors' background; Anirudh Bhattacharjee is an IIT graduate and Balaji Vittal a bank employee. But music is unlike most other subjects. It has soul – an active, living force within. One needs empathy with that soul to bring a musician and his music to life. Admiration is not empathy. I want to live: The life of Madhubala also fails to connect with the soul of the tragic heroin.

Actually cinema is a vast and rich world that waits to be tapped by authors with the patience and the training to slog on, and by publishers with the patience and perseverance to keep the authors going. The instant success of Ambani and Sons should have inspired someone to plan a tome called Prithviraj and Sons on the unrivalled Kapur clan. The fabled careers of Mehboob, A.R.Kardar and K. Asif invite a study called The Movie Mughals. Johny Walker deserves a full-fledged biography.

But quickies won't do. Perhaps the unhurried, purpose-driven “independent publishers” may yield more results than the brand-burdened big-timers with assembly-line production programmes. P. Lal's Writers' Workshop made history in its time. So did Katha and Seagull. The more recent Navayana, Queer Ink and Women Unlimited have been attracting attention in their own quiet way.

The reading public in India has become a magnet to publishers who are losing their fan clubs in internet-obsessed West. But if the reading public is taken for a ride, that last magnet will be lost too.

The big winner? Not Mamata or Jaya. The losers? Not Buddha or Karuna

2011-05-16T11:13:00.000+05:30

Election Commissions and voting machines can only tell us a superficial kind of truth. The substantive, eternal truth is that those who win are not always the winners and those who lose are not necessarily the real losers. Never was this eternal truth more dramatically brought out than in the latest 5-state elections. Look behind the headlines to know who are the real winners and losers.

The biggest winners are not Mamata Banerji and Jayalalitha. The size of their victory margins is as sensational as the comprehensiveness of their adversaries' defeat. This does give their triumph a historic dimension. But take another look and we can see that they won primarily because their opponents had to be defeated.

Bengalis had been longing for a change, considering the cell rule enforced by communist rulers in the countryside, the steady increase in poverty levels and the misery of everyday existence. But they did not know where to turn. The Congress had committed harakiri in Bengal as in several other states and the BJP was always an alien idea. Mamata's steps were tentative in the early phases, but after she joined forces with popular emotions in the Nandigram movement, people found their saviour. Every other vote she won was a vote cast against the ruling government.

Very similar was the case in Tamil Nadu too. When the Karunanidhi Government turned into a dynastic ogre, utterly self-centred and utterly arrogant and utterly corrupt, the voters looked for an escape route. The only available route was Jayalalitha. They had tried her out in the past and found her wanting. But they turned to her anyway because it was the only way to get the DMK gang out of the way. Jayalalitha won because Karunanidhi lost.

Seen in that light, the biggest winner in this round of elections is V.S.Achuthanandan. By every known precedent of Kerala politics, he should have lost ignominiously because he was not only the incumbent, but his own party was against him. Instead, his personal popularity pulled the party through to an unprecedented performance. Technically the Congress-led coalition will form the government and Achuthanandan's Communist-led party will be in the opposition. But the difference between the tow groups is so minimal that victory is as bad as defeat and defeat as good as victory.

Who are the biggest losers? No, not Buddhadev Bhattacharji and not M. Karunanidhi though their defeat has a humiliating ring about it. The really big losers in this election are two men who did not even contest – Prakash Karat and Rahul Gandhi. Their action was as disastrous as their inaction.

Prakash Karat knew at first hand what was going wrong in Bengal and Kerala. Yet he did not lift a finger to correct the course in Bengal or to rein in the party's capitalist-minded syndicate in Kerala. In fact, he sided with the syndicate. If he had advised the party to stand united under the mascot of Achuthanandan, his party would have returned to power comfortably in this election and probably the next one as well. Karat simply does not have the leadership quality his position requires.

In Rahul Gandhi's case, what is in his favour is that no one expects anything constructive from him. But that did not mean that people expected destructive moves from him – like his making fun of Achuthanandan's age, for which he received the most memorable verbal lashing of recent political memory, the “Amul Baby” tag. That one faux pas by Rahul must have got a chunk of votes for Achuthanandan. The Congress princeling made a couple of visits to Tamil Nadu, taking care not to meet his ally Karunanidhi. Nor did he do anything to put life into the dead horse that is the Congress party in Tamil Nadu.

The big political story from this election is that the Congress is losing ground across India. But don't expect it to learn any lessons from the decline. That is the beauty of democracy, you don't have to learn anything.

Is immature TV rivalry a threat to India's national interests ?

2011-05-09T11:04:00.000+05:30

The time has come to ask whether the passionate patriotism of our television channels is harming our national interests. Competitive shrillness is the trademark of most of our news anchors. When this shrillness is extended to Pakistan, the provocative, often insulting, language used is enough to make even liberal groups in that country angry and hurt; the jihadi groups will be energised to plot new terror strikes. On this side, the TV posturings make India's position with a difficult neighbour more difficult. Thus the needling ends up in a double disservice to India.

As soon as the American commandos sortied to Abbottabad and took out their enemy in a sovereignty-defying feat, our TV anchors worked themselves into a patriotic frenzy. The little screen screamed with headlines: 'Pakistan exposed completely'. 'Pakistan shamed before the world'. 'Pakistan's double game'. 'Pak lies uncovered'.

No sign anywhere of a measure of subtlety, some restraint, some maturity even, let alone journalistic professionalism. The attempt instead is to incite. Confronted before camera, India's army chief said Indian forces had the capability for any operation, a natural statement for an army chief to make. The Pakistani army chief responded the only way he could – that any misadventure by India would lead to serious consequences.

Our passionate patriots jumped in with the proclamation that what India said was right, but Pakistan took it out of context and over-reacted. More screaming headlines followed: 'Pakistan threatens India'. 'Kayani dares India'. 'Pak bluster or direct threat?' 'Pakistan's ridiculous reaction'.

From ridiculous headlines to incitement to direct action, it was a small step for passionate patriots. Why can't Indian commandos go into Pakistan and take out Dawood Ibrahim as Americans took out Osama? Instant panels were assembled to debate the issue. Eveready experts held forth on India's capabilities. A few sombre voices advised caution, but many egged Indian Government to do what America did. Among them was a former Intelligence Bureau chief.

How easily bravado can carry us away? We are a country where the Intelligence community could not even follow up explicit information on the 26/11 terrorists. Western agencies had given India the coordinates of suspicious boats moving towards Bombay. Even the mobile phone numbers of some terrorists were provided. Internal bickerings and/or plain inefficiency prevented our intelligence agencies from taking any action. But they can sit in a TV studio and talk big.

Besides, India is not America. Pakistan is in no position to take on America at any level. America publicly stated that more raids inside Pakistan territory would be carried out if necessary, and all that Pakistan could do was to swallow it.

India is utterly different. The American operation only embarrassed Pakistan. Any Indian operation of the kind will be taken by Pakistan as a declaration of war. Unable to take so deep a wound to their psyche, the Pakistani military may indeed over-react even if it means a suicidal operation for them.

The real irony is that the remotest possibility of any military strike by India is now ruled out because TV channels have discussed the action plans in the open. One channel even gave out details of India's special action units and their different capabilities. Imagine a panel discussion on CNN on the US Navy Seals' equipment, capabilities and plans ahead of the Abbottabad operation.

Pakistan is a lost state. It does not even know the reason for its existence, the violent separation of “East Pakistan” having wiped out what was supposed to have been the reason. It is ruled by the military half the time and by homegrown terror groups the other half. It does not even have an economy of its own. All it has is a notion of military pride. By lacerating that pride with a childish display of triumphalism, we only incite irrational behaviour. Above all, when TV channels imagine that they are duty-bound to lay down the foreign policy of a country, that country is in trouble. We need our country. We don't need immature news channels.

Others take care of their people, India takes care of lobbies

2011-05-03T09:45:00.002+05:30

The endosulfan controversy is typical of India, of Indian politics, of Indian corruption, of Indian morality. There were 173 countries in the Stockholm Convention that debated whether or not there should be a global ban on this notorious pesticide. Of these 125 had banned it outright. All 47 of the remaining 48 sat on the fence and generally kept quiet. Only one argued vehemently on behalf of endosulfan. That one-in-the-world nation was India.

India was further isolated by the silliness of its arguments. It said, for example, that America's Federal Drug Administration ruled in 1998 that endosulfan posed no health hazard. The US has the most stringent and independent regulatory agencies in food and environmental matters and therefore American rulings are taken as a benchmark in the rest of the world.

But India cited American authority only to mislead. In 1989, a decade before the purported FDA ruling, the US Fish & Wild Life Service had said that endosulfan was fatal to endangered fish species. In 2007 the US Environment Protection Agency began a review of pesticide policies and decided, in 2010, to phase out endosulfan. The industry lobby said this was not a ban,but only a deregistration. The fact was that Bayer, the first and principal manufacturer of the pesticide, closed down its American factory. The only remaining factory, an Israeli company, started winding down as per the phase-out period allowed by the Government. The pesticide, it was declared, “poses unacceptable risks to farm workers and wild life”.

In America and Europe, in China and Japan, scientific studies lead to fairly quick policy decisions. In India about 80 expert study teams have reported on the Kasargod victims of endosulfan, examining everything from breast milk to male reproductive systems. Yet the Government kept saying that expert studies were needed before a ban could be considered. Sharad Pawar was the sole fighter for endosulfan initially. Later the Prime Minister and the green warrior Jairam Ramesh joined him. What was going on?

It is true that excessive and careless use of pesticides led to the tragedies in Kasargod (where children are born with horrible defects) and in Punjab's Bhatinda area (where cancer is endemic). Civilised societies impose responsibilities on the industry as well as on government agencies to ensure proper and controlled use of poisonous chemicals. In Bhatinda what steps did the industry and the Government take to guide farmers many of whom could not even read the instructions on the packets?

The Kerala Government's lapse was even more reprehensible. Irresponsible aerial spraying of the lethal chemical was carried out by a government undertaking, the Plantation Corporation. Was any official of the Corporation booked for the offence and punished? The state's case against the Central Government would have been stronger if it had held its own offenders accountable.

Perhaps we should not be surprised at Delhi's defence of the indefensible and its indifference to India's isolation in the world. India already has a shameful record of bowing before multinational lobbies. Drugs that are banned in Western countries become easily available in our country. Field trials disallowed in America are carried out on unsuspecting Indian patients. Genetically engineered products must be so labelled in other countries. In India there is no such rule because the GM lobby has “persuaded” the authorities against it.

Many things happen in India that cannot happen in countries concerned about public welfare. The needle of suspicion must naturally point to the possibility of corruption. We hear pesticide lobby's arguments from the mouths of government leaders. We hear arguments in favour of chemically engineered brinjal from agricultural experts who have received lucrative research grants from GM companies. World opinion has now forced India to agree to a phase out of endosulfan over the next 11 years. Given the hold the lobbies have on India's power structure, there is no guarantee that the phase-out will work as transparently in India as it did in the US. Scepticism is in order when decisions about poisons in our water bodies and soil and food chains are in the hands of people like Sharad Pawar.

Corrupt politicians on a sabotage mission

2011-04-25T11:02:00.000+05:30

Svengali was a fictional character and Rasputin a real-life one. One used hypnotism and the other psychic faith-healing to gain enormous power over others. The two words are today part of the English vocabulary. They mean a person of evil intent who manipulates others to achieve what he wants.

Suddenly dozens of Svengalis and Rasputins and Mantharas and Sakunis are on the march in India. The air is choking with conspiracy and intrigue, plotting and scheming and arrant manipulation. What is behind this bizarre frenzy is obvious. The political class is scared that the ongoing anti-corruption campaign may succeed. At any price they want public opinion to be defeated so that the cosy system that allows politicians to plunder the country can continue.

And see what they have achieved. A determined, cleverly executed campaign to discredit the committee has succeeded to a large extent. A petition has challenged the committee's constitutionality. In Maharashtra Assembly, Sharad Pawar's NCP and the Congress together have demanded an inquiry into charges of corruption against Anna Hazare and his trusts.

Most importantly, the toughest members of the committee, the Bhushans, have been morally damaged. The Sakunis and Rasputins must have calculated that if somehow these men could be compromised and ejected, it would be a powerful message to the other members of the committee and to civil-societywallahs in general.

It is surprising that the Bhushans, men of great legal acumen, did not foresee this turn of events. In the first place, there was no imperative need to include both father and son in the committee. It is true that they were best equipped to push civil society's positions through in the discussions of the committee. But they should have known that demolition squads were lurking in the shadows and diplomatically withdrawn one Bhushan from official limelight. Certainly, they should have shown more caution in handling their property matters. Lack of attention to details merely supplied sticks to their enemies to beat them with.

But these indiscretions were no reason to subvert the basic issue of drafting a meaningful anti-corruption bill. By using the Bhushan issue in conspiratorial ways, the political manipulators not only diminished important members of the committee; they distracted attention from the committee's task itself and cast shadows on its future working. If this is the intensity with which they assault members involved in drafting the bill, what diabolic plots will they hatch when the bill comes up for discussion in Parliament?

And just who are these self-appointed devas fighting to save the country from presumed asuras?. Sharad Pawar, Amar Singh and Digvijay Singh are men who had always promoted narrow group interests at the cost of the country. Reckless abuse of power marked their years in office. Pawar, true to form, stayed behind the scenes. But only he would have dared to conjure up the idea of slinging mud at Hazare himself. Amar Singh was intensely aggressive in his TV performances this time. Not only was he acting out his declamations with unusual gesticulations; he exploded into sudden bursts of shouting, as though loudness of voice was an argument. Digvijay Singh, also animated and extraordinarily partisan, tore into Baba Ramdev asking about his wealth and whether he was paying taxes. He was bigotted enough -- and ignorant enough -- to cast aspersions even on Santosh Hegde, the most honourable of them all. The relentlessness of this senior Congress general secretary’s attack on the committee also raises doubts about Sonia Gandhi’s honesty in telling Hazare that she supports the campaign against corruption. Does she really?

In any case, what right do rejected politicians have to pose as moral interrogators calling others to order? What is their own record? They could not have made more obvious their eagerness to safeguard the prevailing culture of corruption. If the current bill-drafting exercise is discredited and derailed, this generation's last hope of controlling corruption will have been lost. It is a loss even the Amar Digvijays of our country will regret some day.

Beyond Amul Baby, there is a war coming

2011-04-16T11:56:00.000+05:30

Having to wait for a whole month to know who will rule key states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala is not just unfair; it is cruel too. Prolonged anxiety will cause severe stress syndromes. It is true that a couple of truly delectable items were provided by the campaigners for us to chew upon as we wait. Mamata Banerji employing beauticians to do pedicure-manicure-facials is, in historical terms, a revolution. It's her way to out-revolutionise the professional revolutionaries of the Left Front. Let's hope that a presentable Mamata will win Bengali hearts so that the Railway Ministry can at last be rescued from her.

The real campaign gems of this election came from Kerala, though. Rahul Gandhi tied himself up in knots by ridiculing Achuthanandan for his age, 88, while swallowing the age of Karunanidhi, 87, because Karuna is a Congress ally. Achuta hit back in a manner that Rahul Gandhi will not forget for the rest of his life. He raised his voice to a sarcastic pitch and described the Congress princeling as an “Amul Baby”. That tag at once went into the political lexicon of the country even as it reverberated across the land.

All that is fun, but what about the serious business? For the first time in recent years, political parties in Tamil Nadu employed bribery openly and in defiance of election rules to buy votes. The Election Commission's own officials seized Rs 50 crore in currency notes as they were about to be distributed to voters. Five or six times that much money must have actually gone into voters' hands.

This is a throwback to the primitive practices of Bihar-UP in the early elections when booth capturing was a fashion. The disturbing element this time is that the Election Commission saw what was happening but was unable to prevent a great deal of illegalities. The Chief Election Commissioner openly admitted that money-flaunting had become a major problem in Tamil Nadu and that the party in power was the principal culprit.

The electoral fight vitiated by such blatant malpractices is not going to help the state, whoever wins. The silver lining is that it will add more voices to the cry for electoral reform. This is already part of the agenda set by the Anna Hazare movement. Anti-corruption legislation will have little meaning without a parallel arrangement to ensure crook-proof elections.

Getting that arrangement in place is going to take a major war. The Government agreeing to give independent civilians a role in drafting the Lok Pal Bill was a minor victory for public opinion. Perhaps the Government calculated that, once the emotionalism of a fast unto death was dissipated, things would be easy to manipulate. Reports of divisions in the Hazare camp seem to justify this reading.

Hazare is no magician and his ideas are not the final solution to all our problems. But it would be a mistake on the part of the Government and of politicians in general to underestimate the public anger over corruption. The string of scandals in recent times culminating in the Commonwealth Games and 2G spectrum and Hasan Ali cases have created a national mood the politicians can ignore only at their peril.

Decent Indians are trying to cleanse the country of the malignant politics that has attacked it in recent years. They are doing this through peaceful, constitutional means. With remarkable faith in the constitution, for example, Binayak Sen's case was pursued until the Supreme Court largely undid the injustice that was meted out to the doctor in the name of justice. This case underlines yet again that what we need are institutions we can rely upon rather than institutions vested interests can manipulate. The incredible spontaneity with which public opinion roused itself when Anna Hazare provided an opportunity should convince the politicians that they cannot be “people's representatives” and continue to ignore people's sentiments. The corrupt must go not to assemblies and Parliament, but to jail. There can be no more fooling of the people.

People's notice to crooks: Change or Go

2011-04-11T14:13:00.000+05:30

Television has spawned many evils. One of them is the animal called 'party spokesperson', a species that is found only in India. By occupational necessity, they are motor-mouths; just turn the battery on and they go blabbering nonstop. They are also robotic; they see and hear and speak nothing except what their creators have programmed them to see and hear and speak.

Spokespersons come in different shapes, colours and sizes. The only feature that is common to all is pompousness – the air that they know all that is there to know and those who disagree with them are blockheads. Look at the staring eyes of Abhishek Singhvi, the self-assured expression, the tilt of the head, and look at the laboured seriousness of Manish Tiwari, his tone, his style and you'll know at one that if Ravi Varma were to do a portrait of “Arrogance”, these would be his models. They never ever seem to understand the mood of the people before whom they pontificate every day. The most glaring example of this disconnect is the insensitive, overbearing and insolent manner in which Singhvi and company reacted to the Anna Hazare phenomenon.

It's a conspiracy, they said. The Government is being black-mailed, they said. “This is a free country, anyone is free to go on fast”, said the pompous Tiwari in his pompous accent. This poor Gandhian “has been instigated” to go on fast, said the haughty Singhvi. They are misguiding Hazare as they misguided Jayaprakash Narayan... And so on and on.

It was the Government that misguided the nation. JP's movement in the 1970s electrified the people because they were feeling suffocated by the Indira-Sanjay Gandhi autocracy. Hazare's initiative electrified the people because it offered a faint hope of fighting corruption which had broken all conceivable boundaries. Both became spontaneous people's movements because both held out the promise of desperately needed change.

The fact is that people are angry. Not only because gargantuan corruption has devoured the country; they are angry because the corrupt seem to flourish and the Government shows no sign of sincerity in combating the evil. A few officials of the Commonwealth Games have been arrested, but someone is protecting Suresh Kalmadi. Some officials who helped pilots get fake fitness certificates have been arrested, but who is protecting the top guns? Who is keeping former Chief Justice Balakrishnan in the Human Rights Commission? Who forced the CBI to mess up Quattrochi's court cases and to release his London funds?

Above all, why is Sharad Pawar still strutting about like Mephistopheles buying up other people's souls? Despite those land scams in Maharashtra, the duplicate World Cup, the rotting foodgrains and the endosulfan victims, he was one of the ministers handpicked to oversee the anti-corruption bill. No greater proof is needed to establish the Government's dishonourable intentions – and the validity of Anna Hazare's demand that the anti-corruption bill be drawn up by a joint committee that will also include people of integrity from outside the government.

The Government has had the good sense to accept that demand, however belatedly. To that extent, what we have witnessed is a historical triumph of democracy. But this is just a beginning. The Lok Pal Bill may now be expected to get enacted with sufficient teeth in it. The real challenge will come when it begins to get implemented.

Will the evil forces that compromised other instrumentalities like CBI and CVC subvert the new act as well? Will the Lok Pal be able to smoke out every Mephistopheles in the system and hold him to account? A few kings of corruption must go to jail, only then will the world know that we have a system that does not condone the plundering of public money. There is reason to be hopeful because what we have just experienced is an unprecedented awakening of public opinion, especially of youth power which distinguished itself by remaining peaceful throughout. This is a new India, a maturing India.

The message cannot be clearer: Change must come to India, and a political class that cannot handle change wisely must go.

No need to bribe a British journalist

2011-04-02T11:13:00.000+05:30

When Neville Maxwell is on the move, can misfortune be far behind? This former British journalist recently published an article on “the pre-history of the Sino-Indian border dispute”. The gist is that India has no business being in Arunachal Pradesh.

Maxwell's thesis is that Henry McMahon who drew the present border “engaged in cartographic trickery” to produce a “deceitful map”. As for Olaf Caroe who succeeded McMahon, he “began to falsify evidence so that the aggressive annexation [ of Chinese territory] could be disguised as belated administrative correction”. China, Maxwell informs us, has been protesting all the time, only to be ignored by British India and then by Indian India.

Read this alongside China's recent moves to push Arunachal to the forefront – strident protests against Manmohan Singh's visit to the state, stapled visas for two Arunachal sportsmen, public statements by China's ambassador about his country's claims, preventing Asian Development Bank's loan to Arunachal-specific projects and, above all, developing superfast air and rail links to border posts for quick transportation of heavy military equipment and troops. Is Maxwell privy to something we are not?

For those not blessed with a long memory, Neville Maxwell is the famous author of the famous book India's China War. The book argued that India was poking China for a long time until China decided that if India was edging towards war, “then the Chinese were not going to wait to be attacked”. Thus it became India's China war and not China's India war.

Few informed Indians believe today that it was all a case of one-sided Chinese aggression. In many ways Nehru's India was foolish in its handling of China. Nehru's chaperoning of Chinese premier Chou Enlai at the Bandung conference of Afro-Asian nations was seen by the Chinese as patronising. When Chou visited India, our self-righteous Morarji Desai put him down quite unnecessarily.

This was on top of border needling by N. B. Mullick, the lionised founder of India's intelligence services whose influence on Nehru was too profound to be good. For Nehru Mullick could do no wrong. Yet Mullick did much that was wrong as he used the Border Security Force to establish armed outposts in remote areas that were vulnerable. All internal criticism of Mullick's “forward policy” ended when Gen. B. M Kaul, another Nehru favourite, became operational military boss of the border area. The rest is history.

India is mature enough to take these mistakes in its stride. Where Maxwell went wrong was not in exposing Indian blunders, but in doing so in a patently hostile mode. He wrote not like the London Times correspondent that he was or like the university scholar that he became, but like an apologist for China who had a deep dislike of India for some reason.

That dislike led him to make a prediction from which neither he nor the London Times ever recovered. On the eve of the 1967 elections, he reported that Indian democracy was disintegrating and that the world was witnessing “ the fourth – and surely last – general election”. He predicted the army taking control under a presidential system.

Clearly he lacked the basic attributes of a reporter or political analyst. It is reasonable to assume that an important book like India's China War would have been beyond him if he had not got to see the Henderson-Brooks Report on the Indian Army's debacle – a report that is still held top secret by India. That could also explain why he has never written a second book of any significance despite a lifetime of professorship and journalism.

But we should never make the mistake of assuming that Maxwell wrote the damn-India book at the behest of China. For one thing, China is too smart to make use of hacks with questionable powers of prediction. For another, as Humbert Wolfe reminded humanity: It is impossible to bribe or twist / Thank God, the British journalist; / But seeing what the man will do / Without a bribe, there's no occasion to.

Memo to Buffet on the beauty of Daana

2011-03-26T11:44:00.000+05:30

Warrent Buffet is a capitalist's dream. Sitting in his patch of the world, he watches stock markets and investment conditions, learns what moves to make at what time and turns himself into a billionaire many times over.

But Buffet is also a capitalist's nightmare. He has this strange belief that billionaires must give their wealth away for the benefit of others. So he formed an alliance with another equally crazy capitalist, Bill Gates, to form history's biggest give-away empire.

In America it makes sense to give your money away. If you don't, you'll have to give it to the Government anyway. For your image, goodwill and for your soul, charity is a better choice. It was a good socially responsible idea on the part of early law makers in America to create a tax structure that encouraged philanthropy.

Buffet and Gates are promoting the idea of giving for the sake of giving, not just to save tax. They went to China, and last week they came to India, to persuade other billionaires to join them in an initiative they have named “Giving Pledge”. It seeks the seriously rich to pledge half their wealth to philanthropy in their life time.

It is an initiative we should welcome. But let it also remind us that India had a tradition of philanthropy that was as lofty as the best. What Jamshedji Tata did had a farsightedness and a structural stability that benefit large numbers of citizens and institutions to this day. Birla charities have acquired a religion-oriented image which is not really fair because their donations to educational institutions are widespread and massive if less known.

Actually the concept of charity is part of the inner core of India's philosophical inheritance. But it appears in different nuances at different times. Karna offers a disturbing example here. The ultimate personification of charity, he would never ever say no to a request. Such a noble quality should have led to good results. Instead, it led to his destruction because he allowed Indra to trick him into giving away his protective armour. He listened to the call of charity above and beyond his personal safety.

If Karna demonstrated the perils of giving, Manu the law-giver reduced it to a quid pro quo business proposition. Manusmriti lists precisely what you will get for what you give. Give water and you will get contentment; give food and you will get happiness; give silver if you want to get physical beauty; give bulls for prosperity, gold for longevity, vehicle and bed for a virtuous wife.

This business code must be the one many of our public-spirited industrialists follow. Give donations to a chief minister's charitable trusts and get a few acres of land denotified; give loans to TV channels, scholarships to nephews, foreign jobs to nieces and boxes containing cash to MPs and in return receive whatever you desire.

Which is unfortunate because the same philosophical heritage that sustains Manusmriti also holds aloft the most ennobling concept of daana known to humankind. P. Lal once said that “the word Dharma has many nuances and cannot be exactly Englished”. The word Daana is like that; it cannot be translated in its full richness. All that we can say is that it is more than charity, more than giving.

Bhagavatam scholars explain that true Daana is accompanied by Maana, reverence for the recipient of a gift. Daana is an act of worship, the giver worshipping the receiver. What a magnificent thought! Giving can never be an act of condescension. You are not doing a favour; you are receiving a favour.

The beauty of this concept can never be equalled by modern-day givers. In so far as Warrent Buffet and Bill Gates – and Azim Premji and Nandan Nilekani – are giving without expecting anything in return, they honour the spirit of the ancient preceptors. That's enough for us to rejoice. Charity that is dispensed to achieve an end is not charity; it is bribery.

Leaders win always; India loses always

2011-03-19T11:47:00.000+05:30

A difficulty with Indian elections is that they don't take the country forward. At the end of the Second World War, the hero who won it for England, Winston Churchill, was rejected by the voters so that Britain could keep pace with a changing post-war world. When Barack Obama appeared on the scene, Americans seized the opportunity to peel off one more layer of racial prejudice from their history.

We do take an occasional forward step – as we did when Indira Gandhi was trounced after the Emergency or when Nitish Kumar was chosen to wipe out the Lalu Prasad disgrace. For every forward step, however, we take several steps backward. Today cynicism and corruption dominate. As Hyderabad MP Assaduddin Owaisi put it (in his talk with an American official, now revealed through WikiLeaks), giving bribes to voters may be illegal “but that is the great thing about democracy”.

He meant of course Indian democracy which sends crooks, mafiosi, communalists and family retainers to Parliament. Fighting elections on the basis of issues has become a forgotten art. The state elections scheduled for next month are already showing signs of cynical manipulation aimed at personal profit.

Note that no party is bothered about political morality even in appearances. The BJP depicts Karunanidhi's DMK as an epitome of evil. Which is true. But next door in Karnataka is an epitome of evil that will make Karunanidhi envious. Yet, the BJP holds up the Yeddyurappa-Reddy axis as an epitome of virtue. It makes the party a laughing stock, but who cares.

Many years of unchallenged power by the DMK have not taken Tamil Nadu foward though it has taken the husband-wives-sons-stepsons-daughters-nephews-hangerson circus very far indeed. How long can this electoral farce go on? Jayalalitha, though her record is not enlightening, looks angelic by comparison; at least she has no extended family for the people to look after. For our collective dignity if not for Tamil Nadu's deliverance, we must hope that the Imperial Family will get a drubbing this time.

Did more than three decades of uninterrupted Left rule take West Bengal forward? That state has India's most moribund passenger buses still in service, and the trams look like ancient ruins. More damning is the abject level of poverty in the state. Tens of thousands of young Bengalis migrate to distant states like Kerala where they are forced to live in pitiable conditions but where there are jobs and better wages.

There is no certainty that an eccentric like Mamta Bannerji with weird notions of administration will bring about the economic salvation that Bengal deserves. Besides the CPM has adopted a policy of “renewal” allotting 149 of its 210 seats to youthful first-timers. Their rural strength may largely be intact, too. The best thing that can happen is for the Trinamool group to get just a bare working majority so that a strong Left opposition can keep the Government on its toes.

In Kerala the Left front had a historical opportunity to get re-elected again because of (a) the popular initiatives of Chief Minister Achuthanandan and (b) the dominance in the Congress-led front of men who are notorious for a variety of evils, from corruption to wanton womanising. But the opportunity was thrown away by a vengeful CPM party secretary and his syndicate who sabotaged the Chief Minister's moves at every turn. They tried to deny him a seat this time too, but public outrage forced them to retreat. Only the people's disgust with the looters and philanderers in the Congress-led camp will help the Left this time.

Small men dominate our politics, their smallness surfacing most dramatically at election time. Unpopular communists keep popular communists out, Congressmen secretly work for the defeat of Congressmen, the Muslim League disregards its moral postures and fields the immoral, BJP “sells” votes in constituencies where it cannot win. When bribery, deceipt and selfishness become “the great thing about democracy”, leaders enrich themselves, cadres suffer and India loses. A pity.

Democracy: Threat from unseen forces?

2011-03-12T11:28:00.000+05:30

For the first time in our history the viability of India's democracy is being doubted. This should cause serious worry because the distinguishing feature of India has always been, undoubtedly, its democracy -- noisy and chaotic, but firmly rooted and strong.

Now Mark Tully tells the BBC's listeners that India's democracy is not delivering. Deepak Parekh, among the most respected voices of Indian business, says that investors are going away. The Supreme Court asks bluntly what the hell is going on.

Indeed, what the hell is going on? It is tempting to answer: Corruption. But corruption per se is not the reason democracy's foundations are shaking. The real reason is the establishment's reluctance to take actions that would check corruption. Because of the reluctance the sweep of corruption spreads in ways that no country can afford to tolerate. India at the official level appears to tolerate it. That's the rub.

The problem is further complicated by the BJP's campaign to hold the Prime Minister responsible for all the manifestations of corruption. Even as political tactics this is bad because charges of corruption cannot easily stick to Manmohan Singh, an odd man out in a den of thieves. The presence of Manmohan Singh at the helm is an incidental reality which the wily men in the Congress are taking advantage of; it makes it easier for them to pretend that the Congress Government cannot possibly be an abettor of corruption when such a sattvic person is heading it.

That is deception. Take the case of that miserable P.J.Thomas. The panel that approved his appointment as Central Vigilance Commissioner consisted of Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram besides Sushma Swaraj. All attacks by the BJP following the Supreme Court's summary rejection of Thomas's appointment have been directed at the Prime Minister. What about the Home Minister's role?

Actually, it was Chidambaram who pushed Thomas's appointment through. He dismissed Sushma Swaraj's objections as “thoughtless allegations”. The allegation she made – that Thomas was an accused in a corruption case – was far from thoughtless. But Chidambaram fobbed it off with the false assertion that Thomas had been acquitted in that case. Why is Manmohan Singh made the principal target when his failure, at worst, was that he allowed his Home Minister to mislead him?

That of course does not excuse the Prime Minister. He has allowed too many lapses under his watch. Perhaps he is helpless. Perhaps his real – and unsolvable – problem is that he has to function as Number Two in the power structure. Which raises another vital question: Why is it that no one ever asks whether Number One has any role in the cases that eat into the vitals of our democratic system?

We all know that nothing happens in the Congress party or the Government without Sonia Gandhi's tacit approval. She is recognised as bigger than the Prime Minister. She is also known to have an inner coterie that wields power without responsibility. The result is that whenever something happens without a rational political explanation, the popular belief is that the unseen force of 10 Janpath is at work.

This was the general impression throughout the astonishing Quattrochi saga right up to when the CBI succeeded in closing the case. This is the impression when Suresh Kalmadi is gently treated, when the Hassan Ali case is soft-pedalled forcing the courts to chastise the Enforcement Directorate. B. Raman, former head of the counter-terrorism division of RAW and one of the sharpest strategic analysts in India today, wrote quite pointedly: “[Sonia Gandhi] has been conducting herself as a neutral disinterested bystander... If one has to find out the real truth behind the recent controversies, it is important to go into her role as it is to go into the role of others. The assumption that Sonia Gandhi can do no wrong has to be challenged by the public”.

Amen. A thousand times Amen.

Unbreaking news: Party channels coming

2011-03-05T11:36:00.000+05:30

What does not happen in any other democracy in the world is about to happen in India: the Indian National Congress is ready to launch a national television channel in Hindi. Two regional channels in Maharashtra and Rajasthan are also in the works under the general umbrella of Jai Hind TV.

This is equivalent to the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in Britain starting a channel of its own. Or imagine the Republican Party of the US having a channel in feisty opposition to the Democratic Party channel. Brits will puke at the idea; Americans will revolt.

Italy is the only democracy in the world where the Prime Minister is also an active television owner. But Silvio Berlusconi was an owner of channels first and then political leader; it isn't that his or any other party in Italy has a news channel.

India will be unique. The Congress Party will own the channels and directly run them. They will of course be in addition to Doordarshan which is patriotically inclined to carry the messages of the ruling party to the masses. But a party channel can afford to be more strident than a government channel.

Stridency is going to be an important part of the Congress channel. Oscar Fernandes who is spearheading talks over the new channel said bluntly: “Party-owned channels will help to spread information in a proper manner”.

Not that party-owned channels are anything new in India. The southern states have been under their thumb for a long time. Channels owned by the Karunanidhi family and by Jayalalitha have a virtual monopoly in Tamil Nadu. Jagan Reddy's Sakshi came out of the blue and established itself with investments no one else could match. In Karnataka H. D. Kumaraswamy started his own channel. Very recently the widely disliked mining king, Janardhan Reddy, followed suit.

Perhaps the most successful party-owned channel is the CPM's Kairali. Actually Kerala is a case by itself with 20 channels already filling the air and 14 others about to enter the fray. Kairali, one of many entrepreneurial initiatives launched by the capitalist leaders of the communist party, is now a high-asset entity with its own very valuable real estate in the centre of the state capital.

No doubt to counter Kairali, the Congress leadership in Kerala started the Jai Hind channel in 2007. It has put Rs 60 crore into it already and has lined up another Rs 50 crore to add to it. Oscar Fernandes said “the Kerala experiment was a huge success”. By what yardstick, he didn't say. While Kairali disguises its partisanship with a touch of professionalism, Jai Hind lays it on thick. Probably it is a success because it gives an uninterrupted platform to Congress leaders to hold forth.

When Congress rushes in, will others fear to tread? The BJP may now launch three channels at once, to suit the three ideologies it is simultaneously pursuing – one for the country, another for Gujarat and the third for Karnataka. The Thackerays must follow. The channel worth waiting for will be Maya TV from Uttar Pradesh. And Mamta TV? What a free country is India!

But the ultimate question remains: What is the effectiveness – even relevance – of propaganda that looks like propaganda? Are voters swayed by what party mouthpieces dish out? Not all the propaganda of the emergency years could save Indira Gandhi in 1977. Not all the grand claims of the Janata Government could stop Indira Gandhi's return in 1980. And not all the propaganda of the Rajiv Gandhi years could prevent his rout in the post-Bofors election. Jai Hind TV will do no better.

The Indian voter has a surprisingly well-developed political instinct. Propagandists have failed to subvert this instinct. The voter will watch TV humbug, even collect his free TV set and 2-rupee rice – and vote as a responsible citizen should. Jai Hind!

After Kasab, another Pakistani strike ?

2011-02-26T11:32:00.000+05:30

There are things you can do with Pakistan and things you cannot. Among the “cannot” is reasoning over the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. Pakistan's stonewalling on this issue has been so relentlessly self-serving that we should now expect a worsening of the situation. In answer to the death sentence confirmed on Ajmal Kasab, Pakistan may now show its defiance by (a) releasing Kasab's handler and the operational leader of the Mumbai attack, Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, and (b) attempting a new 26/11 as quickly as possible.

They have three advantages while India has none. First, the Pakistani military's visceral hostility to India gives it a motivation that matches only Israel's unstoppable motivation to destroy Palestine; even if they get Kashmir on a silver platter, the war against India will continue because the need to justify Pakistan's communal birth will continue. Second, China's unconditional support enables an otherwise emasculated Pakistan to match the economic giant that is India, bomb for bomb.

The third and surprising factor is America's support to Pakistan which is as decisive as China's. America's problem is that it recognises only terror against America as terror. To fight America's war against terror, it needs Pakistan's logistical cooperation. Pakistan cleverly takes the Americans for a ride, extending cooperation one day, denying it another day. In the process, India's war against terror makes no blip on American radar. American military supplies come pouring into Pakistan with user's manuals stipulating that they fire/fly only westward, never eastward.

That's dumb. But what we should note here is that Pakistan, client state though it is, has the guts to stand up against its provider. It did so when unmanned US drones wreaked havoc in its tribal areas. It is doing so right now over a US embassy man (CIA ?), killing two Pakistanis (ISI ?). America has threatened the worst, and eventually Pakistan may yield, but not until it gets its pound of flesh.

Does India ever stand up when it is bullied, challenged, insulted? When Australian racists took it out on Indian students, when American security guards body-checked India's ambassadors because one wore a saree and another a turban, when America put radio-tags on Indian students who had valid visas, when Sri Lankans killed our fishermen, we said gravely each time that it was unacceptable. Then we went on to accept it lying down. Never once did we take action that was acceptable.

The result is : Not one country in the world respects us, to say nothing of fearing us. And fear – of military might, trade retaliation, diplomatic offensive, covert countermoves – is one of the more effective planks of international relations in today's cynical world. Our weight in this world is far below what our size, economy and potential warrant.

Pakistan knows this all too well. Pakistani leadership not only has no fear of India; it has contempt for India. This came out most tellingly when the recently ousted former Foreign Minister, Mehmood Qureshi, brought his full arrogance to bear on S.M.Krishna – with Krishna taking it in stoic silence. Civilised behaviour is wasted on the uncivilised.

Pakistan uses big words like “non-state players” to justify its inaction over 26/11. And why not? India, meak and eminently bulliable as always, is suddenly saying that it is ready for a resumption of dialogue, no conditions attached. So what happened to the earlier publicly stated policy that dialogue was meaningless when terror went unchecked ?

The answer in all likelihood lies in Washington. It does not require inside intelligence to guess that America must be pressurising India to resume normalcy with Pakistan. It doesn't take much pressurising either because Manmohan Singh's India loves nothing more than being in the good books of America.

So Pakistan is free to do what it loves more than anything else – appearing to assist America's war on terror while carrying on its own war on India. Unless India learns how to stand up, we have reasons to worry.

For real scoundrels, look beyond media

2011-02-19T11:11:00.000+05:30

Does the media distort facts? The Prime Minister thinks so. By “focussing excessively” on scam after scam, does the media spoil India's image? The Prime Minister thinks so. For the leader of a government that is neck-deep in scams, it is natural to think as the Prime Minister does. But that does not make it right. In fact the Prime Minister is hopelessly wrong.

Manmohan Singh was in conversation with television editors. A great deal can be said in criticism of news channels. Generally speaking, they are amateurish, childish in their “me first” claims, irritating in their competitive sensationalism, more irritating in their loudness, superficial, repetitive and often plain unprofessional. But, like newspapers, they are essentially mirrors.

News journalism may have its weaknesses, but functionally it merely reflects the reality around it. It does not generate governmental corruption, it only reports it. If scams demoralise the nation and spoil the image of the country, the blame lies squarely with politicians and officials and fixers who produce the scams and benefit from them. The Prime Minister must attack the scamsters, not the mirrors.

Actually, the media is doing an incomparably valuable national service by bringing corruption to public attention. After all, if the media had resolved not to do anything that would “spoil India's image,” what would have happened? The shame of India would have spread anyway as the world would have known that India was a country where a roll of toilet paper could be sold for Rs 4000, and where decisions on spectrum allocations were made in Chennai's Gopalpuram area, and where there were billionaires with more illegal funds in Swiss banks than billionaires in the top five countries put together. It is the people of India who would have remained in the dark about the extent of their rulers' criminalities.

Worse, India would have sunk deeper and deeper into corruption since the corrupt would have been emboldened by the fact that they would never be exposed. The media, for all its excesses, has put the fear of god into the hearts of the criminally inclined politician, bureaucrat and “crony capitalist”. That even their private conversations may someday become public property is one of the best disincentives we have against corruption. The Prime Minister would have been smart to acknowledge this instead of suggesting that the media was negative in its attitude.

It is true that the media also has developed a taste for corruption. It has a long way to go before it can be called mature and creative. But even in its present three-fourth-baked state, it performs the function of a conscientious opposition. Without the media playing this role, Indian democracy would lose much of its substance especially since the formal opposition in Parliament is playing a petty obstructionist's role.

Both in Delhi and in the various states, the Opposition's role is to oppose – oppose for the sake of opposing. If the Government says the sun rises in the West, the Opposition will say: No, it rises in the North. In no other democracy is Parliament's functioning completely blocked as a form of Opposition politics. Even on urgently needed social and electoral reforms, they never show the unanimity they readily bring out when their salary increase bills come up for passing. When corruption cases come up, different parties take different positions as all are entrenched in corruption in different ways.

In such an environment the media becomes the only reliable forum for actionable information and democratic mobilisation. Even those who get the wrong end of the stick really have no reason to grumble. As Ram Mohan Roy explained: “A government conscious of rectitude of intention cannot be afraid of public scrutiny by the Press since this instrument can be equally well employed as a weapon of defence”.

Those who are beyond defence cannot of course use the weapon. But Manmohan Singh should have known that the real scoundrels who spoil India's image are outside the media.

IS THE BRUTAL CLASS HIJACKING INDIA?

2011-02-12T12:14:00.000+05:30

Defiance has become the distinguishing feature of our democracy. Catch a minister in an illegal act, he defiantly claims innocence. Catch a civil servant in a corruption situation, and he defiantly rejects all charges. Catch an MLA in a rape case, and he defiantly accuses you of political motivation. Those in power seem convinced that they are doing us a favour by governing us.

The way Central Vigilance Commissioner P.J. Thomas clings to his chair is typical of this new culture. The point is not whether he is innocent by IAS conduct rules; the point is that he is seen to be not impeccably clean – a fundamental requirement for the CVC's post. Instead of admitting that public perception is important to his post and quitting with his dignity intact, he justifies himself by telling the Supreme Court that 153 MPs are faced with criminal cases. If that is the argument, he should become an honourable MP, not a dishnoured CVC.

Look at Thomas's photographs in the papers. With head tilted defiantly up, he wears a triumphant smirk that seems to dismiss the common run of humanity as inconsequential. The IAS fraternity's expression of support to him has given that smirk an edge that proclaims all is well with the world.

Actually, television enables us to see our netas and babus up close and get a feel of their body language. Who will not be impressed by the defiant, self-important stride of A. Raja even as hefty CBI hands hold him tightly in their grip? Who will not notice the cynicism that plays on Suresh Kalmadi's face as he swaggers up and down in supreme confidence?

In the departments of both swagger and smirk, we have had two astonishing specimens – Haryana police chief S.P.S. Rathore and UP's ruling party MLA Purushottam Dwivedi. Rathore's molesting of a girl led eventually to her suicide. Dwivedi, after violating his helpless backward-class victim, put her in jail on a convenient theft charge. What stood out was the arrogance of the two men. Rathore always had an irritatingly smug smile radiating confidence in his macho prowess. Dwivedi constantly flashed an incredible grin of victory as if to proclaim: Catch me if you can.

Of course we can't catch him. He is an MLA belonging to Mayawati's BSP. It is all very well to say that UP has a Chief Minister who flaunts her Dalit status. But it is in UP that the largest number of attacks have taken place against Dalit women. The police have no time to look into this because they are busy cleaning the Chief Minister's shoes. Nor has the BSP any qualms about the criminalities of its stalwarts. As yet another rape case hit the headlines, a party spokesman appeared on TV to argue that no charges had been proved. When a girl's ear is cut off and nose disfigured and knife wounds inflicted on her body for resisting rape, what proof does the party want – a severed head instead of a severed ear?

The BSP spokesman's attitude is similar to that of the railways, headed curiously enough by another powerful woman. In a lonely ladies' compartment in a Kerala train, a habitual criminal attacked a young girl, kicked her off the train, dragged her bleeding across the rails, suppressed her screams by smashing her skull with a rock, then raped her to his heart's content. She died later. As public indignation mounted, the railway authorities filed an affidavit in the High Court in connection with a previous attack in a ladies' compartment. It said such attacks occurred because lady passengers were careless.

After 5000 years of civilisation and 64 years of vibrant independence, is India losing its way? Is an indifferent and criminally inclined ruling class hijacking our country? Is brutality becoming a way of life? There is something terribly horribly wrong with 21st Century India. High growth rates will not help a nation that loses its soul.

Civilisational Cairo vs. Fools

2011-02-05T11:45:00.000+05:30

Cairo has a distinction other ancient, continuous-civilisation cities like Damascus, Baghdad and Varanasi have never had: It is the heart-beat of pan-Arab culture, its influence stretching for beyond its national boundries. Egyptian novelist Naguib Mehfouz was the Arab world's novelist, not just Egypt's. Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram was the Arab world's newspaper. Egypt's Al-Azhar university was the Arab world's university.

Typical of Egypt, the Al-Ahram newspaper was always government-owned, yet often was independent in its conduct. Which contributed significantly to its intellectual and policy impact. It was the arbiter even in the writing style of Arabic for all Arab countries. Al-Ahram (which means the Pyramids; you have to be careful when you hop into a Cairo taxi and say “Al-Ahram” because the driver might take you to the pyramids when you mean the newspaper, or vice versa) was a mighty voice when Mohammed Heykal was its editor-in-chief, from late 1950s to mid 1970s. A thought leader himself, Heykal attracted celebrated literary figures as regular contributors, among them Edward Said, Taha Hussein, Azmi Bishara and Mahfouz himself. Any writer, well-known or otherwise, who was visiting Cairo was free to use a private office and secretarial facilities at Al-Ahram for as long as he stayed in the city. Such was the paper's sense of responsibility to the Arab world's intellectual resources.

Egypt was also the springboard of ideological revolutions as distinct from ambition-driven personal revolutions. Syria and Iraq for example saw some of modern history's cruellest palace coups that put blood-stained military men in dictator's chairs. But in Egypt when Gamal Abdel Nasser helped end monarchy once and for all, he was hailed as a hero in all of Africa and Asia. Nasser, Tito and Nehru were the inspirational Trimurtis of a generation of Afro-Asians.

It is this historical background that gives the upheaval in Egypt a significance popular protests in neighbouring countries do not have. Spontaneous popular uprisings drove Tunisia's dictator out of the country, shook Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Lebanon and made Syria, Libya and Morocco nervous. These other outpourings of public anger show, as much as the blowup in Egypt does, how long and how brutally suppressed the Arab people have been despite the enormous wealth oil gave many of their countries.

Egypt's wealth was never oil. But its civilisational leadership had endowed its people with a vigour and vitality seldom seen elsewhere. Unacceptable levels of poverty exist in Egypt, both in urban jungles and in the countryside. It is unnerving to see young and middleaged men in Cairo and Alexandria reduced to robotic existence and extending their arms for baksheesh at every turn. That level of impoverishment and joblessness is enough to condemn Hosni Mubarak who ruled with an iron fist for thirty unforgivable years and was planning to install his son as dictator for perhaps another three decades. The duration of his reign is a pointer to the harshness of his methods of torture and elimination.

He must have been surprised that the worm turned. In a bid to crush the worm, he appointed intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as Vice President. Suleiman is known for two things: His no-nonsense brutality against critics and his closeness to Israel. Notice how “pro-Mubarak” crowds suddenly appeared in the streets to battle the protesters. Notice also the alacrity with which Israel rushed anti-riot equipment to Cairo.

It is Israel and the Jewish lobby in America that sustain West Asia's worst dictatorships. This is ironic because the radicalisation of Islamism threatens both Israel and the US. Much of this radicalisation is the direct result of Saudi Arabian religious propaganda through Wahabism and of course Saudi financing. Yet America describes Egypt and Saudi Arabia as its “staunchest allies”.

How long can this false posturing continue? What we see in Egypt is a battle dictatorship will eventually lose to democracy. No force can stop the human mind's natural yearning for freedom and some dignity. That is why a barefoot army in Vietnam defeated history's mightiest military machine. But fools never learn.

Looking for moral freedom

2011-01-29T11:33:00.000+05:30

Has the Indian state failed? That is sensational wording for a discussion topic. Yet that was precisely what was on offer at the Bangalore launch of the late L. C.Jain's autobiographical book “Civil Disobedience”. Considering Jain's lifelong crusades, it was an appropriate topic too. But either because of its provocative nature or because the evening was all too nice and friendly, no one touched the topic mentioned in the notice. Instead they dwelt exclusively on the magic of L. C. Jain.

Which was a pity because the panelists were eminently qualified, in their respective ways, to dissect the current state of the Indian State. Nandana Reddy had seen first hand the state's questionable sides, U.R.Ananthamurthy had exposed the state's underbelly in more than one memorable novel and Ramesh Ramanathan had shown the inner strength to give up corporate certainties and plunge into the uncertainties of activism. Even Nandan Nilekani, although part of the state now, had experienced enough of the travails of the entrepreneur to talk knowledgeably about the state's current direction.

With all of them deserting the featured topic of discussion, we were left with only one person to boldly address it: L.C. Jain himself. Fundamentally he was against the state as it developed after 1947, much like his hero Mahatma Gandhi was.

Gandhi consciously turned against the state as soon as independence was won the way it was won. Even as his comrades in arms were savouring the first inebriating taste of power, Gandhi said: “The Congress won political freedom, but it has yet to win economic, social and moral freedom”. Those words of 1948 have only grown grimmer over the decades. It would be correct to say today that social and moral freedom would never be won by the Congress or any other political party as they are presently constituted.

That is the failure of the Indian state. It had started in 1947 itself. One of the biggest issues of the day was the resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who flowed in from Pakistan. Various schemes were worked out including the creation of new townships like Faridabad. But the bureaucracy's obstructionism at every turn would have been unbelievable but for the first-person account provided by L. C. Jain.

Nehru himself developed attitudes that spelt danger. There was an uprising against landlords in the Telangana region and the communists made the movement effective by killing landowners and redistributing the land among the poor. Jain writes:

“The news of the killings, of hanging dead bodies on trees, shook newly independent India. Nehru was deeply disturbed. But as Prime Minister he did not say, 'A major issue has arisen; how do we deal with it politically'? Instead, he sent in the army. The communists sought refuge in the jungle. To hunt them the army started setting fire to the forest, cutting down trees... The Congress became politically dead”.

India's saving grace was that the Nehru generation, including visionaries like Ambedkar who disagreed with Gandhi-Nehru, laid firm foundations for the democracy that India embraced. That democracy has in many ways been reduced to a farce, but the foundations are holding. That is why the Indian state has remained successful in comparison with Pakistan or Bangladesh.

But unlike in the time of the Nehru generation, the state has developed a tendency not to respond to the voice of citizens. The over-riding tendency is to brazen it out when irrefutable evidence of moral degeneration surfaces. The state does not even recognise the anger it has provoked among the people. We seem to have reached a stage where the state is not only not representative of the people but actually in opposition to the people. That is not the characteristic of a democratic state. India is by no means a failed state. But nor is it, despite the flattering growth rates, a successful state. The course is correctable and there is time enough to correct it. But what if we do not have a moral leadership interested in correction?

Bribe money, crime money – safe money

2011-01-22T11:28:00.002+05:30

India will not chase those illegal funds in foreign banks, that's for sure. The real reason is that virtually every VIP politician and bureaucrat is involved in it. It is mass guilt, not international treaties as the Prime Minister says, that makes India helpless.

The US has proved that a determined government can get things done. And let's not forget that America's stakes are much less than India's. A Swiss Banking Association report revealed in 2009 that Indians had $ 1456 billion stashed away in secret accounts, more than all the others in the top five put together. Russia, the second ranker, had $ 470 billion, UK $ 390 billion, Ukraine $ 100 billion and China $ 96 billion; USA was not even in the top five list.

Yet America was the one that decided to challenge the system, systematically, doggedly. Here is what it did. The Internal Revenue Service, America's tax collecting agency, launched an extensive investigation into tax evasion by its citizens. The evidence collected included dozens of memos and e-mails sent out on behalf of the prominent Swiss bank UBS suggesting that American millionaires could take advantage of, as the New York Times put it, “ a UBS plan to help rich customers evade taxes by hiding money in offshore havens like the Bahamas”.

The Justice Department then filed a case in the US seeking to compel UBS to divulge the identities of 52,000 Americans suspected of using secret accounts at the bank. A day earlier, realising the noose tightening around its neck, UBS had agreed to pay $ 780 million to settle claims that it defrauded America's Internal Revenue Service. The Justice Department case revealed damning details of UBS's secretive operations – from using code words to providing wealthy clients with special electronic devices to access their accounts in secrecy. It was the filing of a watertight case in US courts that compelled UBS to pay reparations to avoid criminial prosecution.

We do the exact opposite. Even when a watertight case exists, we dilute it and obfuscate it and mess it up until it becomes untenable in any court of law. This is what the best brains in our government did to let Ottavio Quattrochi go free when he has caught in Malaysia and then again in Argentina. We also use the sanctimoniously phrased “voluntary disclosure of income” concept to let the thieves legalise their stolen wealth. Those who stashed away billions were allowed to pay taxes at the ridiculous rate of 3-4 percent of their “declared” money and keep the billions with a clean conscience.

Take the case of Pune's Hassan Ali Khan, much in the news these days. Income tax raids in January 2007 had revealed that this gentleman had $ 8 billion (that's right Billion) deposited in UBS, Zurich and that he had not filed IT returns since 1999. A show-cause notice demanded from him Rs 40,000 crores on taxes alone.

In August 2009 the Government disclosed in the Rajya Sabha a list of tax defaulters. Hassan Ali topped the list with outstanding arrears of more than Rs 50,000 crore. Chennai-based chartered accountant M.R. Venkatesh calculated that if Khan's dues were taken along with his Kolkata associates, the “amount could be a staggering Rs 100,000 crore”. In an interview in The Week, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the Government seemed to have recovered the tax dues from Khan. “However”, said Venkatesh, “the revised estimates for 2009-10 do not reflect this. Rs 100,000 crore is too large a sum to be lost even in the Government of India's budget”. Besides, a budget proposal for 2010-11 sought to make Khan's case admissible by the Settlement Commission. Plugging the loopholes, so to speak.

Why this interest in the country's most sensational defaulter? As Venkatesh notes: “ A stud farm owner could not have been the originator of such a large income, indicating that it was not his money that was laundered”.

See why we will not go the American way? Our hoard comprises bribe money, crime money, mafia money – all sacrosanct, all safe.

Rising anger, growing warnings

2011-01-14T16:50:00.000+05:30

Manmohan Singh's popularity is marginally down and Sonia Gandhi's steeply down, according to a new opinion poll (India Today). Yet, the Congress is considered better than other parties in handling the country's problems. Generally optimism prevails, especially among the young. APJ Abdul Kalam is their role model and their faith in India's growing economic strength is abiding.

(Not that opinion polls are definitive. This one for example ranks Rahul Gandhi as best qualified to be Prime Minister. Best “qualified”? Even Kanimozhi does not believe that M.K. Stalin is best qualified to be the next Tamil Nadu Chief Minister. Nevertheless, two-thirds of Lok Sabha MPs below 40 are “qualified” by heredity. In politics these days DNA is the best qualification).

Of course a vibrant, young population is India's best guarantee for the future. In the short-term, however, they are at the mercy of the crooked old population of political manipulators. So the question is: How long will be the short term? Indications are not encouraging because none of the manipulators in power today show any sign of giving up their deceitful, foxy ways.

No One Killed Jessica is an apt message of our times. If anybody missed the message, there is a stronger one to wake them up: No One Killed Aarushi. An MLA in Uttar Pradesh raped a girl – and promptly the girl was put in jail. Public outrage finally forced the authorities to arrest the MLA. Perhaps he will now be put in the same cell as the girl. Eventually the police may prove that it was the girl who raped the MLA. And UP is ruled by a woman Chief Minister.

People are in no position to react immediately to such perversions by the ruling class. But people get angry. There is a great deal of public anger in India today. The Kalmadis, the Sharad Pawars, the Quattrochis, the Yeddyurappas, the A. Rajas are adding fuel to the fire of this anger. Someone should pause to think what would happen if the collective anger of a people is allowed to build up to bursting point.

In fact, many are already flashing warning signals. Ashok Mitra, West Bengal's veteran Marxist, recently wrote: “Discontent is going up as disparity between rich and poor gets pronounced. Sooner or later this will get mobilised... and we will have an incendiary situation”.

Even if we say that the Marxist in Ashok Mitra is exaggerating, what about Devadutt Pattanayak who is a vedic scholar and mythologist? As he sees it: “India's growth is dangerously unequal..... It is only a question of time before this leads to violent confrontations”.

Other voices, widely recognised as intellectual, competent and sober, tend to think along the same lines. Writing in Outlook recently, author Sunil Khilnani referred to “the ambiguities of coalition politics, a volatile Hindu nationalism and intense caste politics” to conclude that “there will be more crises and surprises ahead”. Editor R. Jagannathan cautioned that if politics are not made “consciously right,” then we will have to “face the consequences of social conflict”. Filmmaker Sudhir Misra warned: “The system will have to change its values or else the whole fabric will be rent”.

Foreign voices are strident. For all the admiration India has won from Western investors, the public criticism in Western media is unsparing. In a popular prime-time television discussion in Germany, a panelist quoted from a blog: “If all the scams of the last five years are added up, they are likely to exceed the British colonial loot of India of about a trillion dollars”.

A German business daily editorialised that “India is becoming a Banana Republic instead of an economic superpower”. A French newspaper article mentioned the name of Hassan Ali of Pune and his wife as operating a one-billion-dollar illegal Swiss account with “sanction of the Indian regime”.

How harmful can a country's reputation get. How dangerous can a country's internal contradictions get. Must India collapse in order to rise again?

Our lost moral universe

2011-01-08T10:06:00.001+05:30

There is no sign that “our shrinking moral universe” will stop shrinking any time soon. Politicians and bureaucrats, even Nityanandas and Kalmadis, do not betray the slightest sense of shame although the earth is littered with the debris of their sins.

See what happened when the Bofors skeleton rattled again in the cupboard. Every Indian knows that it was the first big kickback case in India and who paid the moneys and who received them and who were the middlemen. The blatancy with which the CBI and the Congress establishment manipulated the handling of the case only confirmed what everyone knew – that the highest in the land were directly involved.

This time the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal reaffirmed the evidence and said that the privileged middlemen, including the most privileged Mr Q., owed taxes to the country for the bribes they took. And what did the CBI do? With awesome coldbloodedness it asked the court to close the case against Mr Q. The Congress establishment wept like angels over the persecution of the innocent.

Actually the Congress's only decent argument is that non-Congress governments were in power for long but did not pursue Mr Q. Which is true. And which only leads to the conclusion that there is honour among thieves. They help each other out, in times of need.

It is typical of the moral collapse of Indian politics that the BJP cried foul about Bofors corruption while paying no heed to its own. It out-Congressed the Congress when it brazened out the Yeddyurappa scandals. Its grand Brashtachar Virodhi Mahasangram, a “national campaign” against corruption, left Karnataka out of it – as if Karnataka did not belong to the nation.

Maybe it does not. Nowhere else in the nation do we see an open mandi for MLAs and panchayat members as there is in Karnataka. Within 24 hours of the zilla panchayat election results coming out last week, the BJP opened its bidding. The ignominious Bellary Brothers had suffered an important setback when they failed to capture the local panchayat. No problem. At a campfire celebration arranged by the mining lords, Congress winner Nagaratnamma announced that she was joining the BJP. Patriotism, of course, not money. With that Bellary panchayat was back in the capacious pockets of the Reddys.

So what are elections all about? Our lay belief is that people choose a person representing a party. If people's choices are subverted by subsequent buyers and sellers, why go through election processes in the first place? Why not let the candidates go to the mandi and sell themselves to the highest bidder? The BJP has turned that into its official policy line anyway.

The same amoral approach prevails in other fields as well. What a shame that a freshly retired Chief Justice of India should suddenly find himself in a sea of family scams? Credible evidence about his immediate family members amassing wealth is bad enough. Worse is Justice Balakrishnan clinging to his post-retirement post. Several of his brother judges have publicly appealed to him to help protect the dignity of the judiciary by stepping down until his name is cleared. But he takes no advice. What makes people like Balakrishnan and Vigilance Commissioner P. J. Thomas give up every modicum of self-respect and hang on to office? Human nature is truly mysterious.

One thing is sure. We can no longer claim 5000 years of civilisational heritage. Our post-Emergency heritage has wiped out all that was before it. In Kosala, as Kambar described it, “None were generous as none was needy; with no liars around Truth never needed to speak up; no learning stood out as all were learned”. In Brashtachar Virodhi Bharat today, all are needy yet none is generous; Truth speaks up but liars shout it down; no learning stands out as all are unlearned.

We are a blot on the fair name of Kosala, we have no right to talk about its capital Ayodhya, and we have badly let down its king Rama. We are not even ashamed.

Nine dreams and one wish

2011-01-01T10:57:00.001+05:30

Even from the depths of gloom, human nature longs for happiness. At the dawn of a new year the longing surfaces with vigorous anticipation. This time the anticipation has a desperate edge to it because, during the year that has just gone, our trust in many of our institutions and individuals was shattered. We badly need to restore that trust; without trust in the basic structure of society and the custodians of that structure, survival itself would be under threat.

So how do we get back our faith in the system? What the citizen can do by way of action is limited. But we can dream. Dreaming is a way to reshape reality closer to our heart's desire. A means to harmless pleasure. It's one freedom we enjoy unfettered, one human right no politician or policeman can take away from us. Let's dream:

1. That Manmohan Singh will abandon his silences and act and speak up like a Prime Minister. He has it in him as he showed while pushing the civil nuclear bill with an iron will. If we dream hard enough, maybe he will show more of that iron.

2. That India will stop kow-towing to America. The Reserve Bank's decision to stop a 35-year-old arrangement for the purchase of Iranian oil is not only a surrender to American pressure and therefore a disgrace; it is also potentially dangerous because the sudden stoppage of $11 billioin worth of oil imports can lead to catastrophic price spiralling across the board. And what do we get in return from America? Stupid body search of even our senior diplomats at US airports – which of course we take obediently lying down.

3. That Sonia Gandhi will give up being the deity of the Congress and its government. Such is her unstated mightiness that when the Congress takes a stubbon stand perceived as wrong, her hand is suspected. From Bofors to the present PAC stalemate, the stubbornness has been so hard-core, unbending, relentless that an explanation-seeking public could only suspect her hand. That kind of omnipotence does her no good. It does the country no good.

4. That the unseen coteries in Delhi enjoying power without responsibility will either stop wielding power or come out into the open and be accountable. The coteries comprise the likes of Ahmad Patel, T.K.A.Nair of the PMO, Christie Fernandes of Rashtrapathi Bhavan and Vincent George of 10 Janpath.

5. That India will start punishing the corrupt. Not necessarily like the Chinese who shoot top people like Mayors and CEOs found to be corrupt, but at least like the US where CEOs caught in fraud get quick trials followed by jail sentences.

6. That agencies like the CBI and police will get the autonomy without which they become a menace instead of the cleanser they are supposed to be. Political shackling of such institutions is at the core of India becoming a corrupt and corrupting democracy.

7. That the two remaining pillars of our democracy, the judiciary and the media, will realise that they will cease having any meaning if they cease having any credibility.

8. That all those in positions of influence, from ministers to journalists, will pay heed to a phrase Sonia Gandhi used: “Our shrinking moral universe”. It is their action/inaction that caused the shrinking. So – stop preaching, start doing something.

9. That our political parties will at least camouflage their hypocrisies instead of making them so blatant as to insult the intelligence of voters. BJP chief Gadkari proclaimed before camera that Yeddyurappa was okay because his actions were “only immoral, not illegal”. From a party that pretends to be moral to the core, what unashamed duplicity!

With all those dreams lighting up our horizons, let us also have one solitary wish as well --

That the Good Lord have mercy upon us for we are unlikely to get it from any other source.

Does Pawar know his onions?

2010-12-25T11:45:00.001+05:30

Of what use is Sharad Pawar to India? There are many reasons to believe that the country would be better off if he were nowhere near power. The latest onion crisis is just one of them.

Like all crises that have occurred during Pawar's watch in the Food Ministry, the current onion crunch could also be seen coming well before it actually hit. The rains misbehaved and onion traders quickly noticed another opportunity shaping up to exploit the people. A watchful Food Ministry could also have seen what the traders saw, but it chose to be otherwise busy.

Even when the crisis exploded threatening grave political fallout, Pawar was typically indifferent. The rains caused it, he said – as if we didn't know. The high prices would last a fortnight or so, he said – as if that was all there was to be said.

It was left to the Prime Minister, already harassed by other crises and conscious of the political potential of onions, to take some corrective action. The PMO and the Cabinet Secretary moved quickly, ordering among other things raids on the godowns of hoarders. It helped to some extent. A concerted action plan by an alert Food Ministry would have made all the difference, anticipating that tomato and garlic traders would also try to take advantage of the situation.

Pawar's erratic handling of his ministry is nothing new. When foodgrains rotted in government godowns, he merely explained it away – blaming state governments, for example – without taking any meaningful action. When the horrible effects of endosulfan were demonstrably proved by the pitiable plight of sufferers in Karasgod, Pawar dismissed it and appointed yet another inquiry committee headed by a man who had already headed a previous committee which had ruled in favour of the pesticide lobby. How irresponsible can a minister get.

A cursory look at Pawar's career will show that using governmental power for the country's good was nowhere in his agenda. His high-profile party colleague in the Union Cabinet, Praful Patel, has grievously harmed Air-India; its assets have been reduced and its schedules have been changed to give advantage to Jet Airways and Kingfisher.

Pawar's NCP has ministers in the Goa Government also. The current status there is weird. An NCP Minister, Mickky Pacheco, had to resign when he became the main accused in the death of his lady friend Nadia. The poor lady drank rat poison, said some people. But the post mortem showed several wounds on her body, some inflicted by a heavy object. While people wondered how rat poison could cause wounds on the body, the American Government said that Pacheco was involved in a “massive immigration and money laundering racket” and soon CBI and Income Tax sleuths raided the man's premises with charges of forgery and cheating. Pacheco, denied bail by Goa High Court and by the Supreme Court, was later given bail by the Margao district and sessions court. That's when Sharad Pawar asked the Goa Chief Minister to make him minister again. That's how much he cares for public opinion or the proprieties of democracy.

Pawar was publicly annoyed with Delhi for putting the brakes on the Lavasa real estate project. The project got going when the Krishna Valley Development Corporation gave what eventually amounted to 141 acres of land to Lavasa promoters at a ridiculously cheap rate. The Chairman of the KVDC then was Ajit Pawar, Sharad Pawar's nephew. Among the shareholders of the Lavasa project (until they withdrew in 2006, or was it 2004?) were his daughter Supriya Sule and her husband. How nice and cosy.

In fact land has always been Sharad Pawar's object of fascination. Long before Yeddyurappa knew about the possibilities of denotification, Sharad Pawar, as Maharashtra Chief Minister, denotified 285 plots in Bombay to be sold to industrial houses. Political insiders consider Pawar as the richest politician in India.

India has been of invaluable use to Sharad Pawar. Of what use is Sharad Pawar to India?

Who's protecting the guilty?

2010-12-18T12:17:00.001+05:30

In both number and scope, the latest CBI raids on Raja-Radia targets are dramatic. If they mean a newfound determination on the part of decision-makers, it is even more dramatic. Not only were some three dozen raids simultaneously launched; the exercise went sensationally close to touching DMK boss Karunanidhi in person.

Raids on the premises of A. Raja and Niira Radia were daring enough, given their political and corporate connections. Raja was cornered from all sides. Not only his friends and business associates but even the university quarters of his brother were searched by CBI investigators. Among other surprises was the raid on the residence of Pradip Baijal. This is no ordinary IAS celebrity. He was Secretary, Disinvestment when the Disinvestment Ministry sold off government hotels in Mumbai in highly controversial circumstances. He was later chairman of the telecom regulatory authority playing a role in the 2G spectrum pricing mess. On retiring from that post, the gentleman straightaway joined Niira Radia as a paid staff member. Inconvenient coincidences on which the CBI will now have some useful information.

Significant as these raids are, they are dwarfed by others that can only be described as politically defiant. For the first time, Karunanidhi's most prominent wife, Rajathi Ammal, and their favoured daughter, Kanimozhi, came within the CBI's orbit. The two ladies had already figured in the published Radia conversations – and not in a flattering light. Now Rajathi Ammal's auditor had his premises raided. Also raided was a priest, Gaspar Raj, who ran Kanimozhi's favourite NGO, Tamil Maiyam.

Auditors are usually raided when there are dubious financial transactions. Rajathi Ammal's name was also dragged into a major land deal in central Chennai acquired by people close to her. As for NGOs, when the Reverend Gaspar Raj is also associated with activities related to the LTTE, a banned organisation, the altruistic aura of an NGO dims somewhat. That Kanimozhi was a strong supporter of Raja doesn't help either, now that Raja is seen as a bad egg even by important sections of the DMK leadership. She is isolated in the family and is seen as a political novice.

With the CBI looking into the account books and diaries of VIPs hitherto considered beyond its reach, corrective action can at last follow to stop India's drift into corruption-triggered decay. Ay, there's the rub. With politicians we can never be sure of their true intentions. All too often a show of determination on their part is no more than diversionary tactic, leaving the guilty ultimately unpunished.

Two factors make us wonder if the present investigations will be carried to their logical conclusion swiftly and decisively. First, why did the authorities wait so long to take action? For a year or perhaps two, the information brought out by the Radia tapes must have been available to government agencies. But nothing happened. Only when media exposure and public anger mounted, was the CBI told to get into hyperaction. Something suggests that there is someone somewhere who wants to avoid action and let things drift. That someone has to be at the very top.

Secondly, a lack of will has been a distinguishing feature of the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi dispensation every time corruption cases came into the open. That lack of will is still dominant as the top leadership's shillyshallying over Suresh Kalmadi shows. It has reached a stage where the CBI has complained to the Government that Kalmadi and Commonwealth Games secretary Bhanot are obstructing investigations and must therefore be removed from their posts. Why on earth are these hated men still in their posts? Who is their protector? Why? Again the protector has to be at the very top. Is there someone at that height who is desperate to hide something? Silence and the tactic of brazening it out brought the Prime Minister under the critical scrutiny of the Supreme Court. Sonia Gandhi and her unseen advisors will also be under public suspicion if this brazening-out continues.

Leaks: It's people vs. governments

2010-12-11T10:56:00.001+05:30

If the arrest of WikiLeak's Julian Assange highlights the essential wickedness of governments, two related developments reassure us about the essential goodness of human beings. First, WikiLeaks will continue regardless. Secondly, there is a groundswell of public opinion in support of Assange. Never was the adversarial relationship between people and governments more sharply exposed.

Let us not forget that WikiLeaks did not reveal any classified information about national security like, say, America's strategic nuclear secrets. What it disclosed was the hypocrisy behind America's operations in Iraq/Afghanistan and the double-speak character of its diplomatic posturings. These embarrassed government leaders – mostly at a personal level. The enraged egoists of the US establishment turned vengeful against the messenger.

The establishment betrayed its own value system in the process. Official documents were leaked not by foreign spies or saboteurs or thieves, but by Americans brought up on the tradition of freedom, equality and human virtues. Some of them were outraged by the cruelties of American policies and the sadism of field troops. The man arrested for some critical leaks, Bradley Manning, said his motivation was the conviction that information must be free and available to the public.

Manning had hit the headlines even earlier. A soldier assigned to Iraq, he had come across US soldiers on a helicopter in Baghdad shooting a bunch of civilians dead. They did it for fun. The video of this savagery became public because a shocked Manning got it released. In jail since May, Manning, who is only 23, is a folk hero. There is a Bradley Manning Support Network (with the motto, “Exposing war crimes is not a crime”), a Bradley Manning Defence Fund, a vigorous internet campaign and public rallies demanding his release.

Another conscience-stricken whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, had leaked the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, official documents that revealed how the White House was lying about the Vietnam war. He had worked with the Government in Washington and in Vietnam and was privy to the goings-on. He too was arrested and tried but he was let off when illegal activities by the Government to trap him came to light.

Julian Assange will meet the same tribulations the earlier crusaders for truth faced. But he too has strong public support. Britain's most celebrated human rights lawyer cut short his holiday in Australia and rushed home to voluntarily assist Assange in his fight against extradition to Sweden. Wellknown public figures have grouped together to stand guarantee for him in his bail pleas. Credit card companies that barred donations to WikiLeaks were hacked by angry donors. Clearly WikiLeak's disclosures were appreciated by people in many countries as earnestly as governments disliked them.

It is a pity that democratic leaders who fight for human rights go into revenge mode when citizens ask them to correct their own record. There is in fact a streak of viciousness in the way the US authorities pursue its whistleblowers. The infamous break-in mafia in Richard Nixon's White House hatched an “Ellsberg neutralisation plan” meant to lace his food so that he would appear like a hopeless drug addict. Bradley Manning is projected as a homosexual with serious psychological problems. Julian Assange is arrested on charges of sexual misconduct. Ironically, the charges are filed by Sweden, a no-holds-barred culture where there is no such thing as misconduct in the area of sex. Call a man a dog before you hang him.

In this case, even when you hang them, they don't die. An Ellsberg may escape jail, a Manning may languish there. But the bid by sinners to hide their sins will never succeed. Even if Assange is taken away by a vindictive America, new forces will come up daring to reveal the secrets of those who should not have secrets. That reality applies to America, to Spectrum Raja, to the Tatas and to celebrity journalists. That's why we will have more WikiLeaks and more Niira Radia tapes. And so be it.

Is Congress courting disaster?

2010-12-04T11:07:00.000+05:30

It looks like the planetary position is not favourable to the Congress these days. Its decision-makers are getting bad advice and their moves are alienating public opinion. At this rate disaster may befall the party and catch its eyeless leaders by surprise.

Two decisions in particular are astonishingly dumb: the ones regarding the Central Vigilance Commissioner and the Commonwealth Games fuhrer. As a man against whom a case was pending, P.J. Thomas should never have been appointed CVC in the first place. That’s commonsense because a Vigilance Commissioner should be not only impeccably clean but seen to be so. So why was he appointed? Was he deliberately planted there to serve some secret purpose?

That suspicion was strengthened when the Government took the decision to brazen out a Supreme Court snub Actually, the Court merely asked what every citizen was asking: How could a CVC under a CBI inquiry oversea spectrum corruption inquiries? A self-respecting CVC would have stepped down immediately. A Government leadership that respects public opinion would have encouraged him to go.

Instead, the Government saw to it that the CVC merely “recused” himself from supervising the 2G spectrum inquiry while he retained his post and stayed in his chair. What was the need to perform this circus act? There could only be two reasons. One, the Government was unable to find a single unblemished citizen in our country to fill the CVC post. Two, the Government had something to hide by retaining a tainted man distrusted by the public. By this act the Government itself lost the last shreds of people’s trust in its bonafides.

The Government’s loss of credibility was greater in the Kalmadi case. As the Commonwealth Games concluded, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi realised that Kalmadi was a widely hated figure: they ignored him at public functions and kept him out as they mixed with the medal winners. Why was this realisation not reflected in governmental action? Why was he removed only from a meaningless party post when, in fact, his position in sports organisations was what brought disgrace to the country and therefore those were the posts from which he should have been removed?

Indians squirmed as they watched this detested Indian gallivanting in Guangchow and Monaco and then walking into Parliament House as if he was the darling of the people. His aides were raided and arrested, all of them squealed on him, yet all that we had for too long a time was that the CBI was tightening its noose on him and that he would be nabbed soon. Maybe, but the rope he was given was so long that suspicions spread among the people. Was Kalmadi, like A. Raja, sharing his pickings with people high above?

Similar questions rise in older cases too. Why was Vilasrao Deshmukh, removed from chief ministership because of his insensitive handling of the Mumbai terror attack, accommodated straightaway in the Union Cabinet? Why is Ashok Chavan, in whose watch deplorable acts of omission and commission rocked Mumbai, still a visible presence in Congress leadership circles? For that matter, why was Buta Singh, forced to leave Bihar Governorship in ignominy, made Chairman of the Scheduled Castes/Tribes Commission where too he got involved in disgraceful corruption cases? Why is the other inexcusable gubernatorial offender, Syed Sibley Razi, still in office? He was at the centre of land scams in Jharkhand and his handpicked special-duty staff were raided and arrested, but he himself was only transferred to Assam where he could plunder pastures new.

The Congress leadership desists from punishing the crooks in its ranks. From Bofors days, it has shown a tendency to defend the indefensible. It should not forget what happened when it ignored public opinion, ignored even commonsense, and went on justifying Bofors. That one case of corruption was the reason why Congress was defeated in the 1989 election. There are many cases of corruption round its neck today. And the next election is not too far away.

Glamour is not credibility

2010-11-27T12:20:00.001+05:30

Journalism started going astray with the birth of financial dailies in the 1960s. With full-fledged newspapers devoted exclusively to business, corporate houses became hyperactive. The next thing we knew was press conferences ending with gifts of expensive sarees and suitlengths to reporters.

That was innocent child play compared to what has hit the headlines now – charges of celebrity journalists working hand in hand with a professional lobbyist to fix things like cabinet appointments and big-ticket business deals. Excerpts from taped conversations between the star journalists and corporate lobbyist Niira Radia have been published. Radia was promoting the prospects of some DMK personalities as well as the gas interests of one Ambani brother and the spectrum interests of the Tatas. The journalists became her tools.

Lobbying is a recognised activity in democracies. But it is a tricky line of work because sometimes unconventional methods might become necessary to secure the case of a client. Given Niira Radia’s experience and efficiency, acknowledged by companies like Tatas, we must assume that she took care not to cross the line. Anyway we can leave it to the Enforcement Directorate which is looking into the matter.

Journalism is as different from lobbying as nariel paani is from singlemalt. Any crossing of the line may be a tribute to the power of singlemalt, but never justifiable. Unfortunately the journalists show themselves as amenable to doing the unjustifiable. They agree to convey messages favouring A.Raja to the Congress bosses. They agree to take the side of the Ambani brother Radia was promoting as against the other brother.

The moment the tapes were published, the journalists mentioned in it rushed to rebut all insinuations. The arguments were that journalists had to talk to all sorts of people, that “stringing” along with a source was no crime, that promises had to be made sometimes to get information from a source. The employer of one journalist said that it was preposterous to “caricature the professional sourcing of information to ‘lobbying’”.

The question is whether the journalists carry credibility. Of course drunks and murderers have been among the valued contacts of journalists. And of course journalists have moved very closely with political leaders. Few people were closer to Jawaharlal Nehru than B. Shiva Rao of The Hindu. Prem Bhatia of the Statesman used to walk the corridors of Delhi as if he owned them. The hardest
nuts in the power circle cracked happily before Nikhil Chakravartty on his morning rounds. Not once did these men ask for a favour or recommend a businessman friend. They were not social celebrities, but they did their profession proud by keeping the highest possible credibility level.

Today’s celebrities assume they can win credibility by simply saying that they talked to Radia only as a source and that they never kept promises made to her anyway. Is a veteran networker like Radia so easily fooled? Obviously she is close to her journalist contacts and must have had promises from them before. She wouldn’t waste her time if she knew that they were promises not meant to be followed up. At one point she actually tells another contact that “I made [the journalist] call up Congress and get a statement”. This is Radia speaking, not a naïve greenhorn. To say that this kind of work on behalf of a lobbyist is legitimate journalism is like Yeddyurappa saying that all he has ever done is development work. To say that they promised to talk to the likes of Sonia and Rahul only to outsmart a war-horse is like the BJP high command saying it has outsmarted Yeddyurappa.

The glamour of celebrityhood has a way of going to one’s head. Delusions of grandeur are never a journalistic virtue. The real virtue is the mind’s ability to maintain a degree of detachment. When the game is played at the 5-star level, one can never be sure of who is fooling whom. It will be good for everyone to remember that there is one lot that can never be fooled: The people.

Salute to a Purushottama

2010-11-20T12:07:00.001+05:30

These are days when the success of an author depends less on the worth of his writings and more on the vigour with which he promotes himself through book launches, television conversations and lectures organised by the marketing department of publishing companies. P.Lal did none of these. So his death (November 3) went almost unnoticed. A newspaper paragraph or two in his home town of Kolkata and that was that.

Yet P.Lal’s place in the literary history of India will be more exalted than that of many an author who basks in popular fame today. His contributions included poetry, essays, anthologies and translations. Above all, he was a pioneer in book publishing and in the propagation of English as an Indian language. Both were perilous pursuits when he embarked on them in the afterglow of independence. But he persisted in his quiet and unobtrusive ways until both his causes acquired value.

Two achievements will remain his lasting memorials – his translation of the Mahabharata and his nursing of the Writers Workshop. Numerous of course are the translations of the Mahabharata, but no one before Lal had dared to tackle the epic in its awesome fulness. He undertook what he declared as a 20-year project, transcreating (his preferred word) Vyasa in his entirety, all 100,000 slokas.

In quality, too, it was out of the ordinary. A poet himself, P.Lal was not afraid to have different renderings of the same passages, a result, he said, “of changes in my understanding and appreciation of Vyasa”. But his aim always was “to re-tell the story…in Vyasa’s own words, without simplifying, interpreting or elaborating”.

And how did he understand Vyasa? “The Ramayana rouses compassion, the Mahabharata an almost cosmic awe…Vyasa posits an intricate dharma, where right and wrong are bewilderingly mixed… No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead”.

Thanks to the poet in him, there was a pleasing emphasis on the oral/musical tradition of the epic. He took a characteristic step towards bringing this to public attention when he began spending one hour every Sunday morning at the Samskruti Sagar library hall in Kolkata reading aloud his transcreated slokas. He continued this practice until about a week before his death.

The Writers Workshop (WW) was a labour of love. Today publishing is a crowded, glittering, highprofile, million-dollar enterprise in India. It is important to remember that WW was started in 1958 when the Republic was less than ten years old. Half a dozen idealists were behind the venture which eventually became P.Lal’s one-man band. There never was any money in it. It actually ran on whatever “shekels” he earned from lecture tours and visiting professorships abroad. When travel stopped on health grounds, he devised the system of asking authors to buy 100 copies in advance. If an author was too impecunious to afford this, he went ahead anyway.

Each WW book was a curious little work of art. The types were handset, the titles and chapter headings handwritten by P.Lal himself, a distinguished calligraphist. The books were handstitched, the cover design executed in handloom silk. Editing, proof-reading, page layout and correspondence with authors were done by P.Lal who never had a secretary or an assistant or an office. That never prevented him from publishing the early efforts of a galaxy of stars-to-be, from A. K.Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes to Kamala Das and Vikram Seth and Anita Desai.

Professor Lal taught at St.Xavier’s College for 40 years. Devoted friends called him Profsky, rather reminiscent of D.G.Tendulkar (biographer of the Mahatma) calling Dom Moraes Domsky. Was it some kind of a psychedelic association with radical thinkers like Trotsky and Laski? Lal did not look like a radical, but his achievements were reformist. Glamour-obsessed Indian media might have ignored him, but The Economist featured him in its famous page-length Obituary column. That must have surprised Purushottama Lal, whose first name now shines like a title the country has bestowed on him.

India promotes what the world shuns

2010-11-13T11:35:00.001+05:30

So everything went off well. Obamaji was nice, Michelleji was nicer, and the kababs at Rashtrapathi Bhavan were nicest. A good time was had by all. Now, what about the fine print?

We can ignore Obama’s pitch that India must stand up for democracy and human rights in Burma and Iran. We can do a pahle aap number here and wait for the US to first stand up for democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia. We can also more or less ignore the India-US strategic partnership for “East Asia” which is China. China is quite capable of looking after itself.

The fine print we should really worry about covers the pronouncements on agricultural cooperation. This is not a “sexy” subject like democracy and China, so it does not attract public attention. That means backroom operators can do their thing quietly. And the things they do are sinister and may now get more so.

For example, ten months before the Obama visit the Indian cabinet approved, without any announcement, a Memorandum of Understanding on agricultural cooperation and food security. It opened the doors to private investments in the farm sector, farm-market linkages (read retail trade), and agribusiness-to-business collaboration. It will clearly lead to India fitting into the US model of vertical integration of the food chain – a system that promotes the growth of monopolies.

The system works reasonably well in the US because checks and balances are strictly enforced by the Government. When a citizen complains that a supermarket chicken has been found contaminated, investigators can trace the route of the chicken, where it was processed and which farm it originally came from. Remedial action follows quickly. In India the authorities are not only lax in enforcing minimum safety rules, but actually promote deadly pesticides. This attitude of irresponsibility caused tragedies in Punjab and Kerala.

Pesticides, like electricity, are good only when they are used correctly. The Green Revolution in Punjab, which Obama mentioned repeatedly, was facilitated by the use of wrong pesticides in wrong ways. Farmers, low on literacy, would let their hair, eyes, clothes be covered with the deadly poison they were spraying. The inevitable followed. From Bhatinda, in the heart of Punjab’s cotton belt, some 60 cancer patients would travel every day to Bikaner where treatment was affordable. They called it the “Cancer Train”.

Learning nothing and caring less, India has become the world’s only country to oppose a global ban on the deadliest pesticide of them all, endosulfan. Sharad Pawar, who sees no difference between a farmer’s plough and a cricket bat, went on record saying that endosulfan was good for some crops. He has now appointed yet another committee to study endosulfan. The man he picked to head the committee was already in an earlier inquiry committee and had given his verdict in favour of that pesticide.

The irony is that all developed countries have banned this particular poison and America itself is about to join them. US policies had already made the main manufacturer of endosulfan, Bayer, to close shop. The sole remaining manufacturer, an Israeli company, has been told to plan its exit. The Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that endosulfan “is unsafe and poses unacceptable risks to farm workers and wild life”. A formal ban is expected soon.

Yet, Sharad Pawar wants a new inquiry. And he wants India to oppose the ban the rest of the civilised world is demanding. And, worst of all, he wants the government-run Hindustan Insecticides to go on manufacturing endosulfan even in its plant in Kerala where a High Court ban on the pesticide is in force.

The obduracy of leaders like Pawar and the general inefficiency of India’s supervisory systems are magnets for pesticide and genetic engineering companies that are thrown out of other countries. India is home to them all. That is why the Obama-induced agribusiness cooperation will lead to our food coming under the lobby-dominated American system without its saving clauses.

Swagatham, yes. Expectations, no

2010-11-06T10:56:00.001+05:30

Our guest this week is not the shining Obama, but the dimming Obama. The way the world was thrilled by his march to the White House is now memory. Many of his promises remain unfulfilled, even the promise to close the horror prison in Guantanemo. His home policies have angered Americans who are vexed by rising costs of living, job losses and tax burdens. Midterm Congressional elections have made him virtually a lame-duck. The stirring slogan “Yes, we can” has given way to “No, he can’t”.

But Barack Obama is a nice guy and we must see him as such. Anyone who has written the kind of books he has can only be a civilised person. He is such a relief after that mixed-up evangelist George Bush. He has a trust-inspiring look which Bill Clinton could never manage. He even has the most popular presidential wife since Jackie Kennedy. He deserves a warm and sincere swagatham from us.

But not undue political/business hopes. American presidents are more severely enslaved by the system than Indian prime ministers are. And the American system is both selfish and assertive while the Indian system is prey to pressures. This contrast was visible in recent years in a series of India-US issues, from the civil nuclear treaty to opening Indian agriculture to US monopolies.

If America has been gaining the upper hand in many of its dealings with India, it is because America knows how best to use its bargaining power while India knows neither its strengths nor how to use them. On flimsy grounds, for example, America put the twin national symbols of Indian excellence, ISRO and DRDO, on their bad boys’ list. Simultaneously, America has mounted pressure on India to buy billions of dollars worth of American weaponry and civil nuclear equipment. Why doesn’t India link one with the other, not semantically but in ways that would hit America where it hurts?

Countries like France and Russia are willing to invest in Indian civil nuclear plants on India’s terms. They are also ready to share cutting-edge military technology along with the sales of their military hardware. Why then should India buy from America which always attaches conditions to its military sales and then bullies India with crucial spare parts politics?

Notice, too, that on Obama’s agenda in India is the demand that India buy US seed companies’ technology. One of his scheduled meetings in Mumbai is a “round-table” on agricultural cooperation. This shows the stranglehold business lobbies have on the American system. To India, however, what this means is a heavy push at the presidential level to put India in the pocket of Monsanto – a campaign that is already half won because of the buyability of crucial elements of Indian policy processors

India, especially under Manmohan Singh, has shown an inclination to please America at every turn. Even Pakistan does not do this; it gets every dollar it can squeeze from a scared America and then merrily goes on helping the Taliban. That scares America more, making it give more dollars and more fighter planes to Pakistan.

This is how games are played in today’s cynical world. But India tends to take things lying down, even when America does not part with critical David Headley information that could possibly – just possibly – have averted the Mumbai terror attack. America is protectionist in every field these days. India must learn to bargain and protect its own legitimate interests. America does not respect allies that do its bidding. It respects those who stand up to it. Today’s India has the strength to stand up and assert itself. All that is needed is the political will to do so.

Barack Obam will enjoy India, its colour, its vibrancy, its latent dynamism. We, too, will enjoy his visit if only to see the highfalutin fuss: One guest booking the whole of the Taj and Maurya hotels and having his own bombers and warships patrolling the scene. Enjoy by all means, but don’t be carried away.

The world’s favourite dumping ground

2010-10-30T11:13:00.000+05:30

The worst offenders have the best lobbies to protect them. Perhaps it is a law of nature. The more one has to hide, the greater the paraphernalia one needs to hide them. Laws of this kind work extremely well in India because our bribability quotient is pretty high.

How else can we explain the recent spectacle of a shipload of New York City municipal waste being dumped in Kochi port? Or a condemned ship with most of its parts deadly with radioactive material coming to our west coast for scrapping? It is well known that medicines banned in the West are freely sold in India and that poor Indians are used for field testing that are not allowed on American citizens. Such things happen because same Indians like to get rich at the expense of their fellow citizens and their country. And because the state shirks its responsibility.

The same principle has made India the favourite hunting ground for promoters of Bt. brinjal and endosulfan. Both are long-running scandals, but Monsanto has added a new, revealing twist to the genetic engineering mess: they don’t want labelling of GM products made mandatory in India. Companies voluntarily labelling products as not containing genetically modified organisms is all right, but no legal requirement should be there, they say. In other words, an internationally suspect corporation like Monsanto (and its Indian avatars) must have the right to hide what it wants to hide; people do not have any right to know what they are eating.

Even if we leave out the European Union (Monsanto was banished from Europe), countries like China, Japan and Australia have enforced mandatory labelling rules. India has done nothing of the kind, showing the power of the lobby on the one side and the “influenceability” – to put it mildly – of the Indian establishment on the other.

These factors are even more dramatically evident on the endosulfan front. Actually India should have been in the forefront of the global campaign to get this poisonous pesticide banned. It was only in India that endosulfan was sprayed from the air across acres of cashew plantations for as long as 20 years. This callous operation by the Plantation Corporation of Kerala ruined the soil and water of the area. Pitiable deformities and horror diseases spread among the people living in the area.

But the pesticide lobby rejected pictorial evidence provided by TV channels and on-the-spot surveys done by researchers. Instead, it spread the story that there was no proof to show that endosulfan was the cause of the tragedy. Ministers in the Centre and the state mouthed this argument; Union Minister of State for Agriculture repeated it last week though he should have known better since he comes from Kerala.

Two factors expose this irresponsible ministerial posture. First, if endosulfan is not the cause of the neurological disorders and hormonal imbalances, then what is? Mosquitoes? No minister has bothered to look into this. Scientific panels have indeed linked the pesticide with genetic disorders, but these were brushed aside in favour of “official” panels who echoed the lobby line.

Secondly, India is the world’s largest remaining producer of endosulfan. In addition to several private companies, the Government of India’s Hindustan Insecticides runs three manufacturing units. With this vested interest, when India becomes the lead country opposing the ban much of the world is demanding (sixty countries have already banned it), we present a reactionary, retrograde profile to the world. The pesticide lobby doesn’t care, but India should.

The first thing the Government should do is to privatise Hindustan Insecticides and cut endosulfan out of its products line. Then it must ensure that the poisonous pesticide is not manufactured or used in India at all; Kerala banned it but the stuff still finds its way into the state in various disguises. Obviously the lobby is powerful enough to defy the laws it finds inconvenient. Even over the twisted, tangled bodies of helpless victims, the worst offenders have the last laughs.

Thrishna and Gill; Thrishna and MLAs

2010-10-23T10:47:00.000+05:30

Thrishna encapsulates a concept the philosophical sweep of which cannot be captured in the English equivalent, desire. It is like the term agni which is larger, deeper, more multi-layered in its meanings than fire. The English words are essentially literal whereas the Sanskrit terms are civilisational.

Thrishna in its fullest, widest sense is on display in contemporary India. The Bhagvat Gita had seen with astonishing clarity what was going to happen in the 21^st century in Bharat that is India. Identifying thrishna as a rajas guna, it tells us that all actions born out of rajas are directed towards securing sensual enjoyment and therefore cause bondage resulting in several lives.

That friendly warning never curbed the thrishna of the Commonwealth Games organisers. All their actions were directed towards self-aggrandisement. Even after the Games, they persist in activities that will lead to bondage. Sports Minister M. S. Gill wanted to go and spend a week in Glasgow to study how Scotland was preparing for the next Games four years away. Why on earth would he want to study that after contributing his share to the mess in Delhi? Fortunately for the tax payer, the Prime Minister shot down Gill’s self-serving desire.

The tragedy of self-seekers is that they can never stop. Nothing is enough. They are never at peace because, as Panchatantra teaches us, only he finds peace who is no tormented by greed. In his thrishna for more and then more, Gill was ready even to compromise his constitutional position. As Chief Election Commissioner, he was obliged to be strictly apolitical and non-partisan. But after he laid down the job, he accepted a political appointment under the Congress party. How are we to know that his decisions as CEC were not influenced by his desire to win that party’s backing in due course?

The last CEC, Navin Chawla, accepted a Governor’s posting as soon as he retired. At least he had no reputation to lose because he was known all along as a star of the Emergency and an unquestioning camp follower of the Congress dynasty. Judges, Speakers and Comptrollers & Auditors General are all supposed to be never beholden to parties. That worthy democratic convention has been roundly violated in our system because of the debilitating power of thrishna.

Sri Krisha was specific when he said that the thirst for pleasure, power and wealth propels people into activities meant to satisfy the desires, then into further activity to acquire more. Krishna equated thrishna with kama and said it was a fire which only burned more when it was fed.

That was a remarkably apt description of what Karnataka’s MLAs were going to do some yugas later. Ironically the aptness has been brought out by the BJP which of course claims copyright on the wisdom of the Gita. When the electorate gave the BJP a minority status in the Assembly in 2008, the party proceeded to acquire a majority status through the simple activity of buying MLAs in the marketplace. That activity has now led to further activity to acquire more MLAs from the open market. The more their kama is fed, the more the fire burns.

Evidently political parties have discovered that buying and selling can effectively defeat both the democratic and judicial systems, especially if you have a colluding Speaker on your side. In the ongoing second round of trading in Karnataka, the going rate is said to be in the range of Rs 50 crore per MLA. That’s more money than the equivalent weight of steel or cement fetches. Electoral reform can end these collective insults to voters. A rule, for example, that an MLA who resigns is disqualified from re-election for the next five years. But to ask legislators to pass rules that curb them is like asking a thief to call the police.

The much-touted “first BJP Government in the South” has certainly created history. The innocent had thought that the culture of the South would change the BJP for the better. In truth, the thrishna of the BJP has changed the South for the worse.

Evil as spectator sport

2010-10-15T16:20:00.001+05:30

One chief minister, four days, two confidence votes. That certainly puts Karnataka in the history books. But the twin victories are more Pyrrhic than the one Pyrrhus won against the Romans at unsustainably high cost. They have merely proved John Kennerth Galbraith’s theory that television has turned politics into a spectator sport. Honourable members assaulting security marshals and one honourable member doing an honourable striptease standing on an honourable desk must have fetched record TRP ratings.

One set of politicians called the vote the triumph of democracy. Another set, the murder of democracy. In the process they proved yet again that all parties follow the same code: “When I do wrong, it is right. When you do wrong, it is very wrong”.

With great self-righteousness BJP president Gadkari said there was horse-trading by the opposition parties. The current season of horse-trading was in fact started by the BJP when MLAs were openly purchased to turn Yeddyurappa’s minority government into a majority one in 2008. The rates were high because money mined in Bellary was in plentiful supply. The other parties found matching money this time, hence the vulgar scenes last week. Therefore, what Gadkari meant was: When I do it, it’s democracy; when you do it, it’s horse-trading.

Again with great self-righteousness Arun Jaitley accused Governor Bharadwaj of using the Raj Bhavan for political purposes. True, but who is he to complain? In 2001 it was the BJP Government, with Jaitley as Law Minister, that decided to sack Tamil Nadu Governor Fateema Beevi. Her offence? When Karunanidhi was arrested, the Governor did not send the critical report that Delhi wanted. In 2003 UP Governor Vishnukant Shastri, an RSS leader and a BJP favourite, did not invite Mulayam Singh Yadav to form the Government although his party had won the largest number of seats in the Assembly.That was because the BJP was in cahoots with Mayawati then. Jaitley, too, meant: My wrong is right. It’s your wrong that’s wrong.

It is a pity that Governor Bharadwaj played into the BJP’s hands by talking too much and doing what governors should not do – hold press conferences, partake in channel chats and talk politics like “I am fed up of this kind of corruption”. His indiscretions diverted attention from the BJP’s iniquities.

Those iniquities are unprecedented as well as numerous. It was bad enough that the Yeddyurappa Government was born in the immorality of MLA-buying. It then turned politics into an openly unprincipled, power-at-any-cost exercise in greed. Greed was a feature of most governments in the state in the last decade or two. But not on the scale, and not with the brashness, of the Yeddyurappa-Reddy dispensation. The ground for the latest implosion was prepared by the Bellary Reddys who “rebelled” when their abuse of power came under attack. The final spark was provided by charges of land deregulation by the Chief Minister to financially benefit his sons and other land-grab charges involving Katta Subramanya Naidu, Minister holding several lucrative portfolios, his wife and son; this son was even put in jail by the Lok Ayukta police. Between unscrupulous mining barons and unscrupulous land sharks, Karnataka has become a lost paradise – and the BJP will go into the history books for that too.

Unfortunately for the people, the opposition consists of the JD(S) which will never command popular support because of the negative credibility of party patriarch Deve Gowda, and the Congress which has never been as bereft of credible leaders as it is today. In other words, the voter has no one to vote for.

That situation is unlikely to change. The relatively popular elements in the JD(S), including former chief minister Kumaraswamy, will not have the courage to keep Deve Gowda out of the picture. The Congress has lost its will to power and therefore will not put its untainted leaders, including the younger ones, at the helm. This is the era of the unworthy who win by default. Taxpayers in Karnataka are forced to sustain a circus that’s felonious and venal. At least Gadkari and Jaitley must recall Tilak’s words: “Defending an evil does not make it good”.

Good Indians vs Evil Indians

2010-10-09T11:16:00.000+05:30

The Devas finally came to the rescue of India. The Rakshasas have not yet been destroyed, but they have been exposed sufficiently enough to save India’s honour before a watchful world. We can now walk with our heads held high as befitting citizens of a great country.

Such was the hold of the demons that the Devas had to appear in multiple avatars – as Bharat Bala, as Shyam Benegal, as Prasoon Joshi, as the all-conquering Keshav and as hundreds of nameless but astonishingly coordinated school children. Together they made the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games a moment of pride for us, effacing if only for a while the shame of greed and incompetence that preceded it.

All of us had always known that India had the abilities and the skills to organise the most challenging of events. But our political sphere allows the scum of society to occupy commanding heights of organising committees. In the case of the Commonwealth Games, it was clear that a Disorganising Committee was making a hash of it. But that Committee reckoned without the assurance of our protectors that “for the destruction of evil-doers, for firmly establishing righteousness, Sambhavaami yuge yuge”.

So the avatars came. And how magnificent India looked before the world. The seven years and seven-thousand crores spent by the Disorganising Committee brought us disgrace. The ten months and one hundred fifty crores spent by the creative cultural team for the opening ceremony brought us glory.

That difference came about because of the difference in attitude. The primary interest of the Rakshasas was to feather their nests. Pride in their country was a sentiment totally alien to them. The Devas, by contrast, were motivated by nothing but pride in their country and culture. Some of them who led the team did not even take a rupee as fees. This is India at its finest. The pity is that all too often the vilest outgun the finest.

More worryingly, there seems to be no stopping the Chief of the Rakshasa Brigade. People like Jaipal Reddy and M.S.Gill, having discovered that they were outstanding non-performers, kept away from the limelight at the opening ceremony. But not the unashamed Kalmadi. That he was allowed to speak at the august function was an affront to the country. He made it worse by acknowledging the presence of Abul Kalam Azad ( May his soul rest in peace!) and later by thanking Prince Diana (will her soul now rest in peace?). This man is a serial blunderer too.

But even he, given to selective deafness and selective blindness, must know that he is hated by the people of this country. The crowd at the opening jeered him. Some days earlier, when he was dining at an upmarket Delhi restaurant, upmarket people from nearby tables went up to him and abused him. The internet is full of scorn and derision.

Nothing seems to penetrate his skin, though. He is said to be busy with p.r.campaigns designed to convince the world that the opening ceremony was a smashing success because of his untiring efforts behind the scenes. Claiming credit for other people’s work is an integral part of the fixer’s techniques. He will claim credit for everything that goes well with the Games, putting the blame for things that go wrong on Mani Shankar Iyer’s and other available shoulders. That’s the style of this kind of operators.

But the machinations of the guilty men should in no way lead to their exoneration. They need to be held accountable and punished, not acquitted. If their political godfathers, who let them run wild in the first place, continue their misplaced sponsorship even after the Games are over, then the godfathers’ role in the shenanigans will also have to be tracked and exposed. We are a land blessed by the Devas. Rakshasas belong to the nether regions where they can organise a Paataala Olympics.

A witness who walked tall

2010-10-01T14:40:00.003+05:30

Out of the blue, as it were, a new and wholly unexpected voice broke above the newspaper din in India in 1959. In a politics-obsessed world, this voice began talking about development projects – Bhakra Nangal, Damodar Valley, Hirakund, Nagarjunsagar – and then about “brand names of distinction” like HAL, HMT, BHEL, ONGC etc. These were all new terms at that time and the overall picture that came through was that of a massive change under way in the thinking as well as structural composition of India. It was as good as a scoop.

That was B. G. Verghese’s entry into public attention. He had entered journalism ten years earlier, unplanned and unprepared, and spent time writing editorial notes until he got himself transferred to reporting. His ground-breaking reportage on “the temples of Modern India” was a departure for journalism itself. Verghese’s editors in the Times of India recognised this and published his series on the front page. (Those were days when the TOI was a NEWSpaper led by some of the finest journalists India has known).

The freshness of his “Bharat Darshan” tours and the importance of the message his reports conveyed remained the trademarks of Verghese’s journalism ever since. It made him a unique institution not comparable to anybody else in the vast galaxy of Indian journalism. It gave his career a historical edge. Hence the relevance of his just-published autobiography, a big-ticket 573-page tome called First Draft: Witness to the Making of Modern India (Tranquebar).

Frank Moraes, once Verghese’s editor, titled his political autobiography Witness to an Era. Both men were witnesses to great events and both were professionals to the core. But there the comparison ends. Moraes was ideologically partisan: Pro-American, pro-big business, anti-communist. Verghese has strong views, but no ideological hangups.

Verghese crammed several lives into one. He was a reporter, an editor, a traveller, a bureaucrat as information adviser to the Prime Minister, visiting professor at the Centre for Policy Research, Fellow of the Administrative Staff College of India, Chairman of the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission and of course author.

The journalist prevails over all others in the writing of this autobiography. So his account of events, his references to the dramatis personae and his summing-up observations have the appeal of honesty, not the evasiveness of diplomacy.

His stint as adviser to Indira Gandhi allows him to speak frankly about the reality of high-level activities – how drafts for after-dinner speeches are finalised only after the dinner has started, how the Government does not work out a world view and relies instead on tired slogans, “the haphazard manner in which government functioned and the Prime Minister’s inexperience in so many matters”.

Verghese’ assessment of Indira Gandhi is a highlight of the book. He pays tribute to her qualities of leadership, the dignity of her deportment, her pride in India. But he is unsparing in his condemnation of the Emergency, the “savage and thoroughly illegal demolition orgy” of Sanjay Gandhi and of Indira’s own “split personality”.

B.G.Verghese is a serious person, concerned with serious, “un-sexy” topics like water resources. That makes his humour more appealing. The quality of his mind is reflected in the lightness with which he describes his introduction to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat.

“There was no airconditioner in the room as the previous incumbent was a mere deputy secretary who ‘as per rules’ was not entitled to feel overly hot. The official theory was that the blood grew thinner with ascending seniority, entitling the officer to one, two or more airconditioners. The same theory worked for arm rests, back rests and foot rests….. Nor did I allow my chaprassi to hover around the car park in the morning to relieve me of my briefcase the moment I arrived. Official research had established that senior officers carry so much responsibility that the weight of a briefcase could do incalculable damage to their spine”.

His briefcase tightly held in his own hand, Verghese kept his spine straight and walked tall.

A failure of leadership

2010-09-25T11:01:00.002+05:30

Is there a curse upon India? Why do monstrous problems attack us all at once, and why does each one of them get more petrifying by the day instead of getting resolved as in most other countries?

The Commonwealth Corruption Games, the explosion of popular anger in Kashmir, the unrelenting terror spectre, the Maoist campaign, China’s unfriendly posturings and, in a bizarre instance of timing, a court verdict on a sensitive religious issue that has been hanging fire for half a century – proof yet again that when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.

The one problem that was within our reach to avoid/contain/solve was the Commonwealth Games messup. When evidence of massive corruption was revealed by the Comptroller and Auditor-General and by other independent investigators, the Organising Committee should have been disbanded and responsibilities given to a group of proven management executives. Instead, our political leadership defended the corrupt and allowed them to carry on. It’s almost like we wanted bridges to collapse and ceilings to fall.

Above all others, therefore, it is the political leadership that must be held accountable for the disgrace the Games have brought upon India. Loathsome creatures like Kalmadi would not dare pay four-thousand rupees for a roll of toilet paper if their political godfathers were not encouraging the kickback culture. The loot brigade is known for its system of sharing.. When the whole world is flabbergasted by the scale of sleeze, incompetence and irresponsibility, our politicians still refuse to take it seriously. For Sheila Dikshit and Jaiplal Reddy and M S. Gill, the disasters that shocked the world are “minor hiccups”. No wonder the guilty do not feel guilty and corrective measures receive no attention.

And where has been our Prime Minister? A few “PM steps in” headlines appeared in the eleventh hour when several star athletes had already pulled out, BBC was showing humiliating pictures of filthy beds and bathrooms and government leaders of Australia and New Zealand had publicly expressed concerns. All that “steps in” meant was that the PM called another meeting of ministers and officials – behind closed doors.

What stopped him from making a public statement, acknowledging the lapses and promising remedial measures? If this were followed up by the removal of Kalmadi, the symbol of all that went wrong, it would have helped restore confidence. Were there – are there – forces that prevent the Prime Minister from taking meaningful action? Why is Kalmadi still strutting about when his mere appearance has started offending the public? The inaction with which P.V.Narasimha Rao damned himself over Babri Masjid is being replayed by Manmohan Singh over the Commonwealth Games. A pity.

India has the resources, the talent and the organisational infrastructure to stage the Commonwealth Games and shows bigger than that. What it does not have is the political will and the political leadership. Nor the political imagination. The Prime Minister, allegedly sidelining Kalmadi (which is not true; the man is still too visible), gave all powers to the two most uninspiring ministers in his Cabinet – Jaipal Reddy who has shown no initiative whatever in his portfolio and M. S Gill, a sports minister who combines ineptitude with uncommon arrogance. Imagine that he had, instead, given the reins to an army general and/or a company or two like L & T. Alas, we can only dream of such decisive leadership.

Indeed, the political high command may be quite happy about the Games fiasco. The scandals have so completely grabbed public attention that the vexatious issue of Kashmir is forgotten. Given the short-sightedness of our leadership, they will see this “forgetting” by the public as an achievement, not realising that the kind of anger sweeping across Kashmir won’t just blow away. Nor will the respite provided by the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya case eliminate the inflammable communal divisiveness promoted by our politicians. Seldom in history has so capable a people been led by so maladroit and self-serving a political class.

Starve. This is !ncredible !ndia

2010-09-18T11:38:00.001+05:30

What’s it with these economist wizards – that they can see figures and percentages so clearly and yet are blind to human beings. Food rotting in godowns when people go hungry attracts little or no attention. But the slightest suggestion that foodgrains likely to rot are better given away to the poor makes them throw textbooks at you.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia was the very picture of wizardry when he said that free distribution of grains would not be good for food security. The implication is that letting them rot in godowns would ensure food security. We the people cannot comprehend such obfuscating profoundness. That’s why we are not wizards and they are.

But who is talking about “free distribution of grains” anyway? The proposition is that free distribution is better than free rotting. To ignore the rotting situation and dwell on the economic philosophy of free distribution as such is not exactly wizardry. It is dodging. It is insensitivity which appears to have become an essential ingredient of governance Indian style.

The reality is worse than what we might innocently presume. The rotting, most of us thought, took place because of inefficiency leading to lack of storage space and lack of transportation. But in fact the unseen operators of the government machinery are very efficient. They allow the rotting because it is beneficial to them. To put it simply, this is another story of corruption.

It turns out that babus can make money from decaying wheat which is an ingredient liquor companies need. So a quiet little tie-up with breweries is a nice little way to get rich. You can also have quiet little tie-ups with big-time grain merchants because thousands of tons of grain going bad means higher prices in the market.

Sharad Joshi, the maverick farm crusader of Maharashtra, threw light on another aspect of the corrupt system. According to him large-scale rotting of foodgrains and periodic fires that gut the government’s cotton godowns fit into the same pattern. In both the Food Corporation of India and the Cotton Corporation of India, procurement is often less than recorded figures thanks to (a) profitable pilferage at source, (b) profitable generosity to vendors, and (c) profitable diversion of stocks. (Profitable, that is, to the crooks).

“The accounts of Maharashtra’s Cotton Procurement scheme”, says Joshi, “can never be tallied unless there are half a dozen fires in the cotton stocks at different places in the state. Wheat is not as combustible as cotton, but it is susceptible to spoilage”.

The likes of Montek Singh Ahluwalia may not even be aware of these grassroots realities. They are ivory tower wizards. The real wizards are the faceless, nameless denizens of babudom and clerkdom who device loopholes in every foolproof system, every economics theory.

This must have been known to our Union Minister for Cricket, Sharad Pawar, since he is a politician and not a PhD. That perhaps explains why he said that free distribution of grains to the poor was not an implementable idea. When the Supreme Court said it was an order and not just an idea, the Minister promptly said he would try to implement it. Of course he won’t because, among other things, he can’t.

The “other things” include the sinister influence of foreign consultants. It transpires that substantial storage space the government had rented earlier was returned to the property owners five-six years ago. This was on the advice of an MNC consultant. Now there is a proposal to rent space again. Naturally the rents will be double or triple what they were six years ago. Large property owners across the country will benefit and perhaps another well-connected foreign consultant.

The problem is beyond Ahluwalia’s wizardry to solve. The culture of middlemen and politician-bureaucrat nexus will triumph because the wizards make no attempt to counter it. Therefore wheat will rot, cotton will go up in flames – and the starving will continue to starve. We are !ncredible !ndia !ndeed!

The politics of kidnapping

2010-09-10T15:32:00.001+05:30

Our world shuddered with horror when one of the four Bihar policemen kidnapped by Maoists was murdered in cold blood. Three were released unharmed – and we rejoiced. But is this the end of this cruelest of political games?

Of course not. Within days of the Bihar release, three insurance agents were kidnapped somewhere near Kolkata by suspected Maoists. Why insurance agents? The question is really irrelevant because any human beings will do for militants around the world. They may be policemen, civil servants, children, women, journalists or air/train passengers. Human lives are the best bargaining chips.

Bihar had seen, according to police records, 32,085 kidnappings between 1992 and 2004. As much as 20 percent of these were for ransom. Politicians were widely believed to be partners of the kidnap gangs. Lalu Prasad’s regime was branded by the scandal. Bihar-UP even developed the “ Pakatuah Shadi” system in which families with marriage-age girls would kidnap eligible bachelors, preferably IAS candidates, and get them forcibly married. There were cases where the bridegrooms were beaten up to make them amenable.

Lalu’s Bihar might have taken kidnapping to the level of an everyday business. But whether it is a doctor kidnapped for ransom, or a busload of passengers hijacked by an aggrieved policeman as in Manila, there is a unique fear factor in this business. When Mumbai-based American journalist Daniel Pearl was captured by terrorists in Pakistan, video footage released by the captors, masked men holding guns to the kneeling victim’s head, terrorised the whole world. Then that innocent young man was beheaded. The extraordinary cruelty involved in many kidnappings makes this perhaps the most vexatious problem of our times.

That could also explain why most politically motivated kidnappings are successful. The Iran hostage crisis lasted 444 days in 1979-81 following the seizure of the US embassy in Teheran by militants. It lasted that long because neither side wanted a bloodbath. The Americans staged a military rescue operation, but it failed. Eventually diplomatic negotiations by third parties led to the release of all 66 American hostages.

The Tupamaros guerilla movement in Latin America succeeded in ending the myth of American invincibility. Their most dramatic operation was the kidnapping of the US ambassador near his home in Rio de Janeiro in 1969. In two weeks the Brazilian Government capitulated and agreed to release 15 Leftist prisoners. In 1970 the German Ambassador in Guatemala was kidnapped. But the Government refused to free prisoners in exchange and the hapless ambassador was killed.

The Indian Airlines hijack saw the most abject of surrenders. One passenger was killed and many wounded. Even then Delhi not only released the prisoners named by the terrorists, but Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh personally accompanied them to Kandahar. The need for that special tribute to terrorism still remains unexplained.

By contrast, Veerappan was rather decent the way he treated the captured Rajkumar in 2000. The Kannada hero was held captive for 108 days. The desperate Karnataka Government was willing to release the prisoners Veerappan mentioned, but the courts barred any release. In the end money changed hands, though nobody admitted it. But the point was that Rajkumar was safe and sound – and rather more philosophical about life, as was evident from the grace and dignity with which he met the press upon release.

Kidnapping ordinary people is an easy crime to commit. Hence its appeal to those who operate beyond the lines of legitimacy. Religious terrorists do it for a doomed cause. Political terrorists may cite a more plausible cause such as fighting for the rights of the poor and exploited. But all are terrorists and all are taking advantage of the helplessness of the unprotected.

We don’t know what bargains were struck to save at least three lives in Bihar. But we know that more kidnappings, more cowardly acts like train derailment, will take place as long as the problem of basic deprivations of people is not addressed. The more is the pity.

Options we have; have we the will?

2010-09-04T11:14:00.000+05:30

Another war with India is unlikely to be on China's agenda. But menacing military build-up and other needling tactics to divert India's energies and attention is central to its agenda. It’s an old ploy. But the level of aggressiveness is new.

India's politicians, the TV channels in particular, have a way of reacting to such unfriendly actions in an emotional, high-decibel style. Which is reminiscent of the Nehru-era cries like “we won't let them get one inch of Indian territory”. If anything, such declamatory posturings only reduce our own ability to work out counter-strategies in a cool and calculating manner.

Actually, we should learn from the Chinese how to be calculating. With a hundred-year perspective, they planned the strategic encirclement of India, with bases in Burma, Sri Lanka and Pakistan – even as we steadily lost our influence in neighbouring countries. With the same long-term view of history, they built up their road and rail networks in the Tibetan territory previously considered inhospitable to such transportation facilities. Recently they successfully tested their strategic airlift capability, an area where they have advanced very far with 450 high-capacity military cargo planes.

India is famous for dithering when it comes to military acquisition. Unseen middlemen still controlling the bulk of the transactions is only half the problem. The other half is our insistence of all kinds of special provisions, from incorporating systems still on the drawing board to establishing joint venture facilities. The result is that in all three wings of the defence forces, our strike capacity is well below the required level.

Sure, we have deployed significant troop numbers along the northern border and mountain road networks are being expanded. There will be no repeat of 1962. But it will take a heavy dose of unilateral patriotism to claim that India is a match to China in the military field.

The Chinese have been very smart in their diplomatic tantrums as well. Look at the calculations that must have gone into the stapled-visa system they invented for residents of Jammu & Kashmir. By introducing that system, China did not deny the validity of Indian passports held by Kashmiris, nor did it debar Kashmiris from travelling to China because of their Indian passports. It merely established that it did not recognise J & K being a part of India either in theory or in practice.

Smartly, again, it made no such distinction vis a vis residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir; they continue to have their visa stamped on their passports. By doing so, China established its recognition of the PoK areas as a legitimate part of Pakistan. A cleverly nuanced dual policy that hit India on the head and patted Pakistan on the shoulder.

Pakistan has been no less smart. By pretending to fight the Taliban, it has won the backing of the Americans. It has won also all-inclusive support from the Chinese by giving the Chinese three vital services they need: Keeping India pinned down, providing access routes to Iran and suppressing the Muslim nationalists in Xinjiang. While it encourages and finances Islamist groups, it suppresses the Uighur Islamists who are fighting the Chinese. It gets full help from China and the US at the same time.

India is demonstrably friendless because (a) we do not have a bold enough political leadership and (b) we are too obsessed with the US. We should be having a stridently active programme in east and Southeast Asia. From Japan and South Korea to Indonesia, all the countries of the region have been angered by China’s claim that all of the South China Sea is its territorial waters. This is a theatre where India would be warmly welcomed.

The first thing to do is to have a military-strategic action plan with Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. As China’s economic power grows, its ambitions to dominate the world are also growing. This is the explanation for its newfound haughtiness. India has options in such a context – if it has the will to use them.

Our petty little bureaucrats

2010-08-28T11:23:00.000+05:30

It is strange that 5000 years of civilisation have left many of us uncivilised. Stranger still that most of the uncivilised end up as government bureaucrats. And because the bureaucrats – unseen, unobserved and always thinking small – manipulate most decisions on behalf of the country, the country is force-marched from one national shame to another.

Consider the wholly avoidable misadventure over Viswanathan Anand. It takes the crooked genius of a bureaucrat to think up ways of thwarting a doctorate being given to this wizard of chess. A man who brings glory to India many times over is insulted by a petty-minded file-pusher. The Minister apologises. Anand himself, with extraordinary grace, tells everyone to forget it and move on. That petty little bureaucrat must be enjoying the furore he has created and, lurking in his hole unseen and unobserved and always thinking small, figuring out how to shame the nation next to satisfy his petty little ego.

Do we as a race lack a sense of national pride? Look at the way we let foreigners escape after they have committed offences against our country: Ottavio Quattrochi of Bofors fame, Warren Anderson of Bhopal fame, even the British adventurers who dropped illegal arms in a Purulia forest many years ago and simply flew home. Contrast that with the US Immigration Office detaining an Indian simply because he was carrying suspicious religious literature in his baggage. Nothing has been found to nail him, but he remains nailed.

What happens at the sports level is even more humiliating to us as a nation. Will any Indian with a modicum of national pride make such a miserable mess of every detail of the Commonwealth Games? The stink rose so high that bossman Kalmadi was snubbed and disgraced with his powers taken off. But he clings to his chair becoming not just disgraced, but disgraceful too.

How different was China. That too is a country where gargantuan corruption prevails. But when the Olympics came around, every official and every citizen realised that this was something the world was watching. What followed was a national movement of a kind the world had seldom seen, from top officials to city gardeners doing their utmost to outperform themselves and achieve targets ahead of time. And what a show they mounted!

The most touching moment in the Beijing Olympics was when Liu Xiang, reigning champion of 110-metres hurdles, failed at take-off point because of leg injury. He was a superstar whose legs had been insured for $ 13 million. He was in such pain that he should not have shown up at all. But this was China and this was Liu, the hero all Chinese were looking forward to with pride. When the leg failed and Liu retired in excruciating pain, tens of thousands of Chinese left the stadium crying; they didn’t want to see the remaining events. At a press conference, Liu’s coach cried. Members of the Chinese media cried.

In India our officials, sports politicians and unseen bureaucrats take delight in putting players down. They don’t pay outstanding dues to tennis stars who win fame abroad. They send athletes from one state to another in unreserved compartments. Nutritious food is not served at training camps. Women from weightlifters to hockey stars have to face the tantrums of horny coaches.

Viswanathan Anand was checkmated by a civil servant who wanted proof of the master’s Indianness. Actually, is there any proof that that bureaucrat is an Indian? Minister Kapil Sibal did well to apologise. But why did he take refuge behind the excuse of “procedural delays”? Why did he not name the bureaucrat concerned and initiate action against him? How come even the vigilante media has not tried to find out which bureaucrat caused such a national disgrace? The failure to do this will mean that more disgraces will follow and more uncivilised civil servants will go scot free.

Why greed is endless

2010-08-21T11:25:00.001+05:30

There are no outstanding parliamentarians in India, but there is an Outstanding Parliamentarian Award, duly conferred by the President upon a handpicked MP. At last week’s award ceremony, Vice President Hamid Ansari spoke a few honest words. Lung power had replaced oratorical skills, he said, and discussions were drowned in noise and disruption. “It detracts from the dignity of Parliament and invites public scorn”.

This body of men and women whom the public of India scorns has now given unto themselves a three-fold increase in salary and allowances. They brayed for more: a five-fold increase. To describe them in English as a shameless lot will not bring out their despicableness in full. The Hindi term is slightly better: Besharam log.

It is so typical of the political class that Lalu Prasad Yadav should have been the most animated speaker demanding the pay hike. This is a man who not only got embroiled in serial misappropriation cases during his chief ministership in Bihar; he allowed kidnapping, especially of well-to-do doctors, to become the most paying industry in his state. He escaped from punishment only by bargaining with an amoral Congress. Last March, for example, he declared that he would not withdraw support from the Manmohan Singh Government over the Women’s Bill. As if on cue, the CBI took measures to neutralise a pending corruption case against him.

Whether the man is punished or allowed to escape, the people of this country have formed a clear opinion that he plundered everything he came across in his days of power. Why would such a man insist so loudly on a big pay increase? It must have something to do with the attitude of mind politicians develop after several years of looting and grabbing with immunity. When you can do such things and still get elected as a patriot, then you develop special complexes. You feel that you are elected because people admire even the way you plunder. Then plundering becomes an end in itself, a status symbol, a sign of your greatness. Once you are used to getting everything for nothing, there is no end to what you want. Greed feeds on itself.

More pathetic was the argument proferred by Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, another vociferous supporter of the pay increase. He said a substantial hike would attract a better quality of persons to politics. So puerile was this argument that the usually genteel Manmohan Singh had to put him down by asking him to be brief.

No salary is going to attract a “better quality” of citizens if Parliament remains a mockery of the system where members take bribe for raising questions, and use diplomatic passports to smuggle a lady or two to Canada. As many as 120 MPs out of 543 in the 2004 Lok Sabha had criminal cases against them, according to the Association for Democratic Reform. Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda today goes to Parliament from his cell in Tihar Jail. That he will now get a triple salary increase is an insult to the people of India.

This kind of situation will not change as long as the politicians have the power to form their own rules. That is what Andre Marlaux called “politicians’ politics” as distinct from “people’s politics”. What we need is, first, outside mechanisms like an independent Pay Commission to take decisions on pay and allowances and, secondly, mandatory termination of membership when criminal misconduct is proved. The money-for-questions MPs were only admonished, so there are perhaps others who still do it.

What is required is not an increase in the emoluments of MPs, but something the other way round. When MPs cause disorder and force the House to be adjourned, let them refund their new daily allowance of Rs 2000. (Or is it 10,000? Perhaps 20,000 a day?). Hit them where it hurts, then even Lalu Prasad may behave like a good citizen.

Disgrace in the name of sports

2010-08-14T11:40:00.001+05:30

Miracles happen, so the Commonwealth Games may take place without some stadium roof collapsing. But that is not the issue. What we should really be worried about is: How do dunderheads, frauds and double-dealing fixers come to represent this great country? How do humbuggers, thimbleriggers and pettifogging pretenders get the power to humiliate us before the world?

It is possible to see thugs in leadership positions when the Government itself loses its legitimacy and is artificially propped up. This happened during the Emergency. Parliament saw an influx of ruffians and hooligans whose assignment was to shout down opponents. Cabinet positions went to odious men. When Jayaprakash Narayan was arrested in Chandigarh and district authorities there were worried about his deteriorating health, Defence Minister Bansi Lal’s response was: Let the swine die.

Emergency produced a culture favourable to swine. But what about today? India is breaking new ground on the business/industrial front, Britain is relaxing visa rules to attract high-spending Indian tourists, and our government is headed by an internationally respected economist. We build the most modern airports and ports for the countries of the world, take over an ailing icon like Jaguar automobiles in UK and make it profitable, and become a world leader in steel. Surely we should be able to handle a project like commonwealth games with a smartness and flair that is at our beck and call?

Instead, we have a mess on our hands. What we have put on display is not the smartness and flair we are capable of, but the ease with which slimy careerists can worm their way into positions of power in our country. And stay there. We wouldn’t have minded if they made a lot of money in the bargain; we are a traditionally generous people. But to bring such international shame to India is inexcusable. Suresh Kalmadi and company has been bad for India. Period.

Obviously the man is a consummate politician. The Indian politician’s penchant to head one sports organisation or another was taken to dizzy heights by Kalmadi. He became chairman of the Indian Olympic Association (fourth time now), Asian Athletic Association, Athletic Federation of India and a half dozen other organisations. Every move of his has been controversial, to put it mildly. Former Indian Hockey captain Pargat Singh is one man who did not care to put it mildly. He accused Kalmadi of being India’s “sports mafia”.

The dirt that has come out in the current games scandal does point to a great deal of inexplicable things. Congressmen and amateur ministers like M. S. Gill made it worse by trying to defend Kalmadi and failing to find one convincing argument to make the defence credible.

The big question persists: Was this the only man the establishment could find to hold the Indian flag in international sports bodies? With neither qualifications nor a decent track record, how did Kalmadi get the political backing he needed? Are there key politicians also having a stake from behind the scenes in making a sham of our sports organisation?

Kalmadi is also the chairman of the Olympics 2016 Bid Committee on behalf of India. We may think that after the present disaster, India would not dare make a bid for the 2016 Olympics. But nothing is beyond our political manipulators. Imagine what our schemers can do if they get the Olympics to play with.

But the world will save us. After having watched the horrors of the Commonwealth Games preparation, other countries will keep India firmly out. Already many athletes of distinction have announced their decision not to attend the Delhi Games. We are a butt of ridicule already. Kalmadi, his party and his backers will have the satisfaction of knowing that they have disgraced India in the eyes of the world. For someone’s private ego? For thirty pieces of silver?

The importance of being Mathew

2010-08-07T11:18:00.000+05:30

Being famous is different from being important. The trimurtis of English journalism in India – Pothan Joseph, Frank Moraes, M. Chalapathi Rao – are still unequalled in their star value and brilliance of writing. But historically they mattered little because they introduced no movement that transformed their profession.

Devdas Gandhi of Hindustan Times and Kasturi Srinivasan of The Hindu were not celebrities, but they were historically important personages because they helped convert pre-1947 missionary journalism into an organised industry, lending it strength and direction. Ramnath Goenka was both celebrated (for his king-maker role in politics and his daring in opposing the Emergency) and important (for launching the then-original concept of a newspaper chain covering the vastness of India).

C.P Adityanar of the Daily Thanthi and Ashok Sircar of Ananda Bazar Patrika are other print media leaders who carved a niche for themselves in the history books. Both encouraged innovations to turn newspaper language from scholarly “written” style to accessible “popular” style. This was a major step towards the era of mass readership in India.

When we look at the media scene in this wide perspective, we see one man standing out as historically more significant than most others. The importance of K.M.Mathew rests not so much on the growth rate and acceptance level he achieved for Malayala Manorama as on how he achieved them. First, he had a visionary outlook. Secondly, he had that rare ability to change with the times.

When he became chief of the family-owned newspaper in 1973, it was selling 30,000 copies. He told a circulation department functionary: “If we can somehow reach 50,000, we can have an all-India presence, right?” What was noteworthy was not the figure mentioned, but the vision of an all-India presence for a language paper from a small town in Kerala. A few days before Mathew’s death last week at age 93, his paper crossed a record print order of 18 lakhs.

He worked the magic by becoming an innovator. Eager to learn from others, he was instrumental in bringing the International Press Institute’s Tarzie Vittachi to India. Mathew helped Vittachi visit other newspaper establishments as well, often making the arrangements himself. Seminars and workshops followed. Several newspapers benefited, but none more than Mathew who built a team of young journalists and managers, giving them training in India and abroad and professionalising management practices as well as journalism.

Mathew’s innovations were effective because he was a modernist who changed as ideas around him changed. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, the world changed in revolutionary ways, I T and mobile phone leading the way. Mathew was ready with new inroads into television, FM radio, on-line editions. He even devised ways to reorient print journalism so that it could rise above television’s 24-hour breaking-news advantage.

Only in political orientation, he remained old-fashioned. Anti-communism sat as heavily on his paper as the position that the Congress could do no wrong. But Mathew’s personal warmth towards ranking communist leaders helped keep bitterness away.

Besides, his paper’s social involvement was too deep for anyone, including political critics, in ignore. Special teams were commissioned to propagate one movement after another – water conservation, environment protection, garbage disposal. Large funds were spent to provide free heart surgery for children and housing for victims of earthquakes and tsunami. On development issues he spent company money to convene meetings of experts so that constructive ideas would emerge for the authorities to act upon. He never cheapened these projects by using them as publicity gimmicks. He was a corporate citizen in the truest sense.

The greatest lesson Mathew left behind was that a newspaper could achieve commercial success and simultaneously fulfil its social responsibilities in a big way. This is a timely lesson because some very successful papers today have adopted the philosophy that they have no social responsibility whatever. That is selfish, ignorant bunkum, and the proof is K. M. Mathew.