Beyond Labels

Dadagiri in Dwarka

2011-12-05T09:26:00.000+05:30

You must have seen countless films with this storyline: one person bullies an entire locality/village; those who he bullies keep quiet, not wanting trouble; others say let’s keep out of his way, or he’ll get after us next; he gets bolder by the day and finally crosses his limits; the victims stand up to him, but the entire locality turns against them and cows down before him. The victims are isolated and harassed in various forms.
Did you think it ever could happen to you?
I didn’t.
But this has happened to me and a couple of others.
And we stand alone.
On November 19 this year, around 9.30 pm, the guard of the gated locality I live in came with a circular. It was from the present Residents Welfare Association (RWAs) and said an emergency meeting the following day (Sunday, 20 November) to discuss some serious issues had been convened and called all present and previous office-bearers to attend. My name was on it, though I had resigned on October 18.
I went to the meeting and what we heard there made our hair stand on end.
Two young men of the locality (one of whom is a major in the army), along with a friend, had been walking around in the campus around 2 am, chatting. The guard came and said he had received complaints and asked them to leave. They asked who had complained and that they would apologise. Meanwhile, one office bearer (let’s call him Mr X) started shouting at them from his house on the top floor, saying he was in charge of the security of the whole campus (there is no circular to that effect, though). There appeared to have been an exchange of words and then the boys started to return to their flat, cutting across the central park. As they reached the end of the park, Mr X (who had come down from his third floor flat) called them back. Let us allow for both sides not being entirely frank about their versions of the sequence of events that followed, but the short point was that Mr X hit the major with a lathi, the other RWA office bearers who had gathered by then rallied around Mr X. The younger boy had called 100 by then and at some point had received a call asking for directions. When they found the office bearers siding openly with Mr X, the younger boy said let us call the police and let them decide, the general secretary apparently said, ‘tum kya police bulaoge, hum bulayenge aur kahenge kit um logon ke gharon mein jaankh rahe the’ (we will call the police and tell them you were peering into people’s houses). (The general secretary completely denied this, but when the boys confronted him, he said it might have come out like that but that is not what I meant!!!) The altercation was somehow ended and one of the office bearers took the major to the hospital where his wound was stitched up.
When the boys’ mother came to know this, she demanded a general body meeting be convened to discuss this. `What wrong did my boys commit,’ she wanted to know. `And if they were up to something wrong, why didn’t the RWA call the police and hand them over?’ The RWA then convened the emergency meeting of only select people. Sixteen people attended that meeting.
When the boys had finished relating their story – Mr X was out of town and had to be called back, so he arrived late – others present at the meeting, feeling slightly emboldened by the mood, came out with more stories about Mr X’s bullying and intimidating ways. This changed the mood of the gathered people who thought what happened that night was a one-off incident involving Mr X.
Someone said this shows the person concerned is a permanent threat; someone else told the RWA office-bearers that if Mr X wasn’t checked he would become a problem even for those who were now backing him.
People discussed various kinds of action that could be taken against him. Finally it was decided that he would be expelled from the RWA and be barred from contesting elections for five years.
Mr X came and his version was heard. With an air of injured innocence, he said the young men were disturbing people at night and that is why he had objected to them and that he had hit them only because he feared that they were three of them and he was alone and he feared that they would assault him. (My comment: this guy is over six feet tall, extremely muscular and goes around flaunting his muscles in tight-fitting tees, while the two young residents were shorter and much slighter in build.) He said he later realized he shouldn’t have hit them and felt very sorry and that he had told his wife immediately on reaching home, and that he felt worse when he was told that the major required stitches for his wound.
Those assembled asked him and the RWA why the police hadn’t been called and the young men handed over in the first place. They demanded that Mr X apologise to the young men, undertake that he would “maintain decency and decorum of conduct” and that the decisions on his expulsion and bar on contesting elections stay. That very night a circular was issued to this effect. Everybody thought that was the end of the matter and the atmosphere within the campus would be peaceful and relations cordial.
Exactly a week later (Sunday 27 November), Mr X’s downstairs neighbour had to call the police at midnight or so. The police came and the case was allegedly turned against the neighbour. Earlier that evening, the Congress MLA had visited the block and Mr X had flaunted his closeness to him.
On November 29, Mr X’s lawyer sends a legal notice to five of those 16 persons present at the meeting – the general secretary, the two young men, me and a former president of the RWA – leveling various fabricated charges including that of defamation (that is the only charge against me). The former president – an extremely decent, mild-mannered man of high integrity whose views are heard with seriousness in the locality – has been accused of trying to assault Mr X and instigating others to do so. (The only charge that sticks is the one against the RWA general secretary for not following norms in convening the meeting and expelling Mr X from the RWA). We have to unconditionally apologise within 15 days of receiving the notice or pay Rs 21 lakh each to Mr X or else he will file a defamation case against us.
Now an elaborate drama to get the circular withdrawn starts. The young men’s father and the former president approach the RWA asking why only four people who attended a meeting called by the RWA have been targeted and what the RWA is proposing to do. I sense a trap and decide not to speak to the RWA about this. Instead I approach some people who attended the 20 November meeting. They say we are entirely with you, how can this fellow run amok like this, we will call another meeting and take a decision on this. But soon there is a growing mood to take back the circular and the expulsion (this is the trap I feared). People start avoiding us. We hear that others present at the 20 November meeting are being threatened that there are legal notices lined up against them also and will be issued if they come to our help. But nobody will speak openly about this, let alone go to the police.
On 2 December, the RWA writes to the persons named in the legal notice asking for their comments before further action is taken. Acting on legal advice, I respond merely by saying “I have taken a very serious view of the fact that out of 16 people present at the emergency meeting of 20 November 2011 I have been singled out for the said legal notice and am taking appropriate legal action regarding the same.”
(A word about why I was targeted. On 1 November, my car cleaner told me he had been barred from entering the campus by Mr X. I rang up the general secretary (GS) and asked how he could do that. The GS said the cleaner’s work was not satisfactory. I argued that Mr X cannot decide that. The GS called the president and Mr X and there was a heated argument, at which Mr X admitted to slapping an earlier car cleaner because he wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the work and that what he was doing was only to ensure better quality of service. I pointed out then – and later in a long email to the president, GS, joint secretary and a few other residents – that a few RWA members being dissatisfied with the services of someone providing a personal service could not be a reason to bar that service provider from catering to other residents.)
On 3 December the RWA issues another letter to the 16 present at the 20 November meeting asking them to tick on either of two options – whether the RWA go ahead with the court case or whether the case should be amicably resolved by withdrawing the earlier circular. If a majority of the 16 agreed with the second option, another circular withdrawing the first would be issued. This would be done after the legal notice was taken back, those who got the circular were assured.
There was a clear attempt to influence the vote by writing in brackets after the first option (financial implication involved/rift among members may erupt) and after the second (will be able to maintain a harmonious relation). The responses were to be given by the evening of 4 December. There was also no instruction to sign after ticking the option chosen, leaving scope for the vote to be rigged.

Meanwhile, the father of the young men asked for a copy of the circular dated 19 November convening the 20 November meeting. The RWA has been stalling him.
On 4 December evening, a circular is issued withdrawing the earlier one, saying this was with the consent of the majority of those who had attended the meeting of 20 November. This circular was to be issued after the retraction of the legal notice. It was issued before, with no assurance that it will be withdrawn.
One of those who got the legal notice asked the RWA president why the circular had been issued before the notice was withdrawn. He was told oh, Mr X has assured that it will be withdrawn. The word of a person who promises before an assembly that he will behave himself and then proceeds to revert to his old ways is to be relied upon!
A fraud has been committed on us – those who stood up to be counted.
Thirteen people cowed down.
But there is an upside to everything. Yesterday I returned from the South Asian Bands Festival at 10.30 pm. I passed my next door neighbour and his wife on the staircase. This guy who always asks kahaan jaa rahi hain/kahaan se aa rahi hain) (where are you going/coming from) – to which I always say baahar (out) – didn’t say a word. Oh the joys of social boycott!!

Shooting from the Lip

2011-10-10T07:25:00.000+05:30

Has law and justice minister Salman Khurshid done a service to Corporate India by his statement reported in the Indian Express: “If you lock up top businessmen, will investment come?”
He has not.
Worse, he has only ammo to the opponents of liberalization, who will cite this as yet another example of the government caving in to `neo-liberal forces’ and how opening up of the economy has only encouraged big-time corruption.
Remember Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan saying the economic policies post-1991 were the reason for corruption becoming pervasive.
When will these Congress ministers learn to zip their lips?
The following is the exact context of his statement: “What will affect the functioning of the government is if other institutions do not understand the kind of political economy we are faced with today: what is needed to encourage growth and investment? If you lock up top businessmen, will investment come? What optimal structure should be put in place for investment to come?”
Obviously he was talking about corporate biggies – notably Unitech’s Sanjay Chandra and D B Realty’s Shahid Balwa – currently in Delhi’s Tihar Jail facing trial on corruption charges in the 2G case.
But what does investment or the lack of it have to do with businessmen being in jail for corruption charges? If they are innocent, they will come out free. If they are not, they deserve to be in jail.
The Indian investment scenario isn’t suffering because of corruption charges against businessmen. It is suffering due to a poor investment environment – lack of policy clarity, squabbling ministers affecting both policy and its implementation in areas like mining, red tape, corruption (petty as well as high level) and now rising interest rates.
And, yes, corruption.
India ranks 134 in a list of 183 companies in the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report. Taking action against businessmen for corruption is not a criterion. The categories are starting and closing a business, dealing with construction permits, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders and enforcing contracts. Go to this link to see how India fares on all this.
And in 2010, India slipped four notches in the global Corruption Perception Index – from 84 to 87. Ask anyone – this is a dampener for foreign investment.
Has no action ever been taken against corrupt businessmen in the United States or the United Kingdom or any other free market economy? Nowhere in the world will a minister go out and say taking action against corruption will discourage investment.
Khurshid will probably come out and clarify that he meant businessmen being jailed without proof. But that is what the trial process is about – to decide on whether someone is guilty or not guilty. Or is it his case that in corruption cases, it is okay for receivers of bribes to be jailed but not those who pay bribes? (I am not pronouncing a verdict on those jailed in the 2G case).
Corporate India can do without such supporters.
Instead of telling the courts to go easy on businessmen facing charges of corruption, it might be better for Khurshid to tell his Prime Minister, his party leader and ministerial colleagues to do something to improve the investment environment.

Act, Mr PM, Act

2011-09-08T11:49:00.000+05:30

The Prime Minister has said, yet again, this time in the context of the bomb blast at the Delhi High Court, that "we will not succumb".
So we are expected to go around our usual business - breakfast, office, household chores, school, college, back home, saas-bahu serials, trip to the mall, dinner and bed. Just to tell the terrorists that we are not "cowed down".
But why not show that we are not "cowed down" - and the steely resolve with which those words are said - by carrying out the death sentence on Afzal Guru, Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar and Rajiv Gandhi's assassins? And fast-tracking the prosecution of Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab?
Wouldn't that be a better way of showing India will not tolerate terrorism in any form? And that terror attacks cannot be used to blackmail us into inaction (in this case stopping the hanging of Afzal Guru)?
In fact the latest terror attacks should be used to tell political and other groups pleading for clemency to these above-mentioned worthies (for that is what they are to these groups, never mind that each of them has indulged in senseless killings) to stop pleading their case. They never showed any mercy to the people they killed, why should they be shown any mercy?
Does this sound churlish, immature? Perhaps.
Should I exhibit more sagacity and moderation? I see no reason to.
I see no reason why India should come across as a soft state, which people can come and bomb at will.
There is a time when sagacity and moderation have to be set aside. This is such a time.
Of course, there will be the usual arguments against death penalty itself. But as many people have pointed out, why does death penalty get debated only when high profile or political convicts are involved?
Perhaps there is a case against death penalty. Perhaps there isn't. Perhaps we need to debate it.
But after Guru, Bhullar, Rajiv Gandhi's killers and Kasab are hanged.

Slander as Rejoinder

2011-06-08T15:47:00.000+05:30

If you can't fight activists on an intellectual plane, or if they don't submit to your blandishments, discredit them. Question their integrity. Impute motives. Allege links with fanatical organisations. That is the strategy of the government which flip-flops between ignoring activists, then falling at their feet and then getting firm with them.
When Anna Hazare didn't give up his fast and the government was forced to constitute a drafting committee with civil society activists for the Lokpal Bill, the slander campaign was directed against Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant, both members of the committee. Allegations about shady land deals and evasion of stamp duty were planted in the media, which was anyway critical of these activists. The Bhushans had a rejoinder but his got much less play than the allegations. Then came a CD which had the father-son duo reportedly speaking to Amar Singh about fixing some judges. The Bhushans got a lab test to show the CD was doctored; the government got another test to show it was genuine. Only a few newspapers carried the Bhushan version. See this story in a media website for more details.
The idea was to show that the crusaders against corruption (the Bhushans have been at the vanguard of the movement against judicial corruption and also behind the public interest litigation on the 2G scam) were not lily white.
Now it is being said that Baba Ramdev has evaded stamp duty of Rs 58 lakh and has grabbed fertile farmland. And Home Minister P Chidamabaram is on television right now, saying that Ramdev is an RSS agent. Questions are now being raised about the extent of his empire and shady deals are being hinted at. Enquiries have been ordered into the medicines and formulations his ashram produces.
Like I have said before in my previous posts, I have huge problems with the Hazare-Ramdev gang. But their analysis of problems and solutions to them can be countered at an intellectual level. Their pronouncements are so ridiculous that it's very easy to do this. They have been able to capture the popular imagination only because of a trivialising, sensation-seeking electronic media.
But that does not justify slander campaigns against them.
If Ramdev is a stamp duty defaulter, why was action not taken all this time? If his empire is involved in shady deals, why had they not been put under the scanner and action taken? If his formulations were suspicious what were the relevant authorities doing all this time? Did his political clout have anything to do with it? And was the government using all this to bargain with him to be its pawn in dividing the anti-corruption movement? Is all this coming out now only because he didn't play ball?
The latest weapon that this government and the Congress deploys against anyone who crosses their path is The RSS Slur. Chidambaram is on CNN-IBN detailing how Ramdev is a front for the RSS. The television media has been going on about it ever since Sadhvi Rithambra appeared on the stage at Ramlila Maidan. There were some Muslim leaders too. Using that same logic, Ramdev should be the front for some hardline Muslim organisation too! Parts of the media have picked this up willingly, with one shrill television anchor writing a column saying this anti-corruption movement is part of India's right-wing nationalist revolution, if you please.
This is meant to scare the urban English-speaking middle classes away from glorifying (deifying, in the case of Hazare) these activists. It is a kind of McCarthyism at work. If you are not with us, you are not just against us, you are also with fanatical organisations.
The fact that this government and the Congress has only this method to counter a bunch of loose cannons shows its utter intellectual bankruptcy.

Your Activist and My Activist

2011-06-07T18:50:00.001+05:30

At the risk of being dubbed a RSS person, and without holding any brief for the Anna Hazares and Baba Ramdevs, I have to say this: I totally agree with the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat asking if Hazare and Ramdev are outsiders, what about the members of the National Advisory Council (NAC).
I have, in earlier posts, been quite critical of Anna Hazare's fast-unto-death over the Lokpal Bill and of the way his gang of civil society activists were trying to impose an ill-thought law on the country.
I have found Baba Ramdev's pronouncements on black money and corruption highly amusing and I was aghast when I found the government seriously engaging with him. It was a ridiculous attempt to pit one set of loose cannons against another and ultimately it backfired badly.
But when I see the government and the Congress depicting the Hazare-Ramdev bunch as irresponsible and asserting that the government cannot be dictated by them, then I can't help looking at the exalted status that the civil society members of the NAC enjoy.
Now the government and the Congress are saying that law making is the prerogative of the government and Parliament and it cannot be outsourced to civil society. Home Minister P Chidambaram reminds the country that we are a parliamentary democracy and elected representatives should not cede ground to civil society activists. Sure. A very valid point.
So what is the NAC doing, preparing draft legislations and using the clout of its chairperson - Sonia Gandhi - to force the government to accept them? And when the government refuses to accept ill-thought out recommendations, NAC members hold demonstrations.
On 24 May, three NAC worthies - Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze and Harsh Mander - demonstrated outside the Planning Commission along with close to 70 campaigners of the Right to Food Campaign over the definition of poverty.
Is demonstrating wrong? No. Peaceful demonstrations are a vital part of democracy. It is a way of expressing mass sentiment. (It's another matter that often crowds are paid and don't know what they are demonstrating for. Or that participating in demonstrations is just very fashionable these days, as we saw during Hazare's fast.) What raised eyebrows in this case was that the demonstration was led by NAC members. The NAC, after all, is a part of the current political establishment, though it is not a constitutional body and has been set up by an executive order.
The NAC, its website, says, "has been set up as an interface with Civil Society. The NAC would provide policy and legislative inputs to Government with special focus on social policy and the rights of the disadvantaged groups."
The NAC has been trying to dictate the agenda to the government on a range of issues ever since it was set up. Many of its proposals, especially relating to the social sector, put a demand on fiscal resources that will strain the exchequer to the extreme. It drafts legislations and these are forwarded to the government, which is expected to take its recommendations on board.
So one set of civil society activists get a privileged status, while the rest are pilloried and discredited and set upon by the police.
Doesn't seem very fair to me.

Who Is The Irresponsible Voter?

2011-04-13T16:01:00.000+05:30

Anna Hazare has an extremely poor opinion of Indian voters. He says they can be bought for as little as Rs 100, one saree or a bottle of alcohol. “They don’t understand the value of their vote,” he is reported to have said. His comment is finding resonance with a lot of people, especially the urban middle class voters, a fair chunk of which doesn’t vote at all.
Hazare’s comment is being seen as referring only to the poor, uneducated and illiterate voters. Why can’t it apply to the section that is concurring and even endorsing that statement?
Does this section believe that it alone votes in an enlightened manner, with national interest uppermost in its mind? That is bosh and nonsense. The educated urban middle class is as much prone to being bribed as the sections they sneer at.
This section will lament that no government will take action against slum clusters because of votebank politics. But when Jagmohan, who was urban development minister during the National Democratic Alliance government and who was a middle class hero when he razed or relocated slums in Delhi, dared touch encroachments by the middle class he was promptly voted out of the New Delhi parliamentary constituency.
Take also the issue subsidized LPG and petrol. Why is raising the prices of these in alignment with such a political hot potato and never attempted before the elections? Are these items of consumption of people who can be bribed by a saree, Rs 100 and a bottle of alcohol? Certainly not. It is the middle class who are the main consumers of these. National interest – the fiscal health of the country – may demand that subsidies on these are either withdrawn or hugely cut. But that will not be done in the name of the poor, though it is the middle class (the real beneficiary of this subsidy) vote that really worries any ruling party.
Who benefits from free power to farmers? It certainly isn’t the really small farmer or farm labourer who can barely make ends meet. It is the better off and prosperous farmer who can afford pumpsets. It is quite common for parties to come to power with promises of free power to farmers.
Aren’t these all instances of buying of votes? So it is okay for political parties to buy votes of the urban educated middle class, which barely votes, but not okay for it to buy votes of the poor?
Rs 100, a saree and a bottle of alcohol for an illiterate and uneducated group’s vote doesn’t cost the exchequer anything. But these freebies for the middle class and even the prosperous impoverish the exchequer. Will the middle class stop to think of this before it sneers at the poor and illiterate voter?

The Morally Upright Aren't Always Right

2011-04-09T17:13:00.000+05:30

Like I said in my previous post, I have been observing this current anti-corruption crusade with some amusement and lot of cynicism. But now I am getting a tad worried.
People are just not willing to hear any criticism of Anna Hazare’s fast, the tactics employed by the worthies of the India Against Corruption movement or even objective analyses pointing out flaws in the Jan Lokpal legislation they are proposing. Business Standard carried an editorial, which had what could be called a needlessly provocative (though I found it very clever and apt) headline, The Hazare Hazard. The next day’s papers had three or four letters from readers criticizing the edit. The letters did not go into the merits and de-merits of the idea of ombudsman or of the legislation these activists are proposing, but were shocked that Anna Hazare was being criticised at all. Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s piece in the Indian Express has also invited a lot of flak.
I wonder how many people who are speaking up on social networking sites, fasting in sympathy with Hazare, shaving their heads, demonstrating and much else even know the broad contours of the Bill.
I haven’t and so I am not going into the Bill itself, Mehta’s article, this other piece by Rajiv Desai delve into those aspects.
I’m making a larger point – the unquestioning adulation we have for certain public figures who are either morally upright or highly efficient or both, because of which we are not willing to concede that they could be wrong sometimes. We are just not willing to accept that people we idolize can be flawed or that the wisdom or suitability of their actions can be questioned. And this adulation tends to make some of these public figures believe that what they say or do shouldn’t be criticised at all.
I am not even going into the whole Gandhi phenomenon here (not that I think Gandhi should not be criticised and he himself never wanted to be idolised). I am talking about much lesser mortals.
Take Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. No one doubts that he is honest. He knows that. So that is why he believes he should not be held responsible for all the scams that were taking place under his nose and which he could have, but didn’t, check.
Or take E Sreedharan, chairman of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). I got this sms from a friend after she saw pictures of Sreedharan with Hazare: “Sridharan in a-c bandwagon. How laughable! How he fought against rti applying to dmrc! How closed his account books r!”
Neither she nor I believe Sreedharan is corrupt. I admire him for his work on the Konkan Railway and then on the Delhi Metro. But I completely agree with the contents of her sms.
How can he cheer for a movement for more transparency when his organization functions with complete lack of it? After the collapse of an under-construction metro pillar in south Delhi in 2009, resulting in the death of six workers, someone filed a Right to Information application seeking details of the design and layout of the structure. DMRC refused to part with the information and took the battle up to the Delhi High Court which finally said it had to supply the information.
I have had personal experience of the complete lack of transparency at DMRC. While working on a story, I had requested some information from DMRC and an interview with Sreedharan. Some of the information I had requested was very basic which should have been there on the website but wasn’t. I was shocked at the kind of stonewalling that ensured. One woman from the public relations team called me and wanted to know whether I was doing a positive or negative story. “Don’t tell me it will be an objective story,” she said with a sarcastic laugh. When I refused to tell her in advance what kind of a story it would be, the wait for answers got longer and the interview with Sreedharan never materialized. Finally, after much pursuing I got some information but innocuous ones. I never got details on cost overruns (which were reported in the press), cost per km and response to some criticisms by critics of the Metro concept. There was a certain arrogance in the refusal to reply to questions from a journalist who was trying to do a balanced story.
If Sreedharan has become a demi-God of sorts, we are all responsible for it. Remember the shock when he offered to resign in the wake of the pillar collapse? Everybody rushed to stop him and he finally took it back. If the Delhi Metro comes to a standstill without Sreedharan, who is to blame? Shouldn’t it be Sreedharan himself, for not doing proper succession planning?
Also recall the controversy over the model of the Hyderabad Metro project. Sreedharan raised a stink over certain aspects like real estate development. Perhaps he had a point. But I suspect that people got swayed less by the merits of his argument and more by the fact it was Sreedharan who was opposing it. It didn’t help that on the other side was a corporate house.
What puzzles me is that this is happening in India, the cradle of Hinduism which encouraged intellectual debates and questioning of established wisdom. But somewhere along the line, that intellectual tradition has taken backseat to one where you don’t question certain people, especially those who are more educated and knowledgeable than you.
The worst manifestation of it is in the kind of following godmen and godwomen command – blind devotion. I can understand if an illiterate and poorly educated person behaves this way, but why do highly educated people also do the same? Why don’t they read or reflect on things themselves instead of taking as Gospel truth something a morally upright person has said?
Honest and morally upright people can be wrong. It will be better for themselves and for the nation if they and everybody else accepts it.

Combating Corruption

2011-04-06T12:06:00.000+05:30

Social activist Anna Hazare is on a fast-unto-death. This fighter against corruption (he is the founder of the Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Aandolan who returned his Padmashri award because the Maharashtra government did not take action against corrupt forest officials) and campaigner for the Right to Information Act wants the government to start work to enact a Jan Lokpal Bill. Apparently, close to 150 people have joined in, according to one newspaper report.
So why am I not impressed? And why am I amused when a newspaper says the fast has galvanised the nation's fight against corruption?
What fight, I want to know.
I live in a middle class locality of Delhi built by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). DDA rules don't permit water tanks of more than 500 litres per flat on the terrace. Yet in the block I live in and in countless DDA flats across Delhi, people have installed 1000 litre tanks, endangering the structural stability of flats. Complaints are made, officials come to inspect and go away richer by a few hundreds or thousands. Unauthorised constructions abound, pavements have been encroached upon for gardens, motors installed on main water lines. In each case, ordinary middle class people - perfectly decent and respectable otherwise - have paid bribes so that they can flout the law.
When I was renovating my then recently acquired flat four years ago, a neighbour asked me if we could jointly build an extra room. I was agreeable till I found it was against the rules. When I mentioned this to his aged mother, she said, `don't worry, my son will take care of payment to the DDA officials. You don't have to talk to them." I put my foot down and said nothing doing.
These are the very same people who express shock at the various multi-crore scams our politicians and bureaucrats are involved in and rail against corruption in high places. They will praise Anna Hazare and maybe even go to see him. And when they are driving back, they will jump a red light and bribe the traffic cop.
Middle class people think it is okay for them to indulge in minor corruption but not for politicians to do the same on a grander scale. I had touched upon this in an earlier article, Morality of Middle Class Politics, where I had drawn a distinction between bribes that one is forced to give (to get perfectly legal things done) and the bribes that one gives willingly to do something that is patently illegal (unauthorised constructions and disobeying traffic rules, for example).
I feel it is possible to resist bribe demands of the first kind as well. After all, how long can someone hold back a death/birth/marriage certificate (believe me, this still happens) or an income tax refund or a completion certificate for a building.
Former chief justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court, Leela Seth, in her book A Fine Balance, relates the incident about how an inspector in Noida kept delaying a completion certificate for her house, hinting at a bribe. Finally he came to her house and denied the certificate because some column was a couple of inches smaller than the rules permitted. There was again a hint of a bribe to ignore this. Seth spent far more than what a bribe would have cost her to get the column redone. Still the inspector delayed her certificate by over a year.
This may not be a practical option for many. I know a recent case where a newly-married couple had to pay a bribe to get their marriage certificate because the bride had to appear for a visa interview with the certificate. I pride myself on never having bribed but if I was in their position would I have been able to stick to my moral high ground?
But what about bribes paid for what are known to be illegal actions? Are people who pay these petty bribes any better than the politicians involved in mega-scams? I don't think so.
Also, political parties tend to make corruption an election issue? But is it an issue for the electorate at all? Known corrupt people keep getting elected all the time. Not in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but everywhere. Both the DMK and the AIADMK regimes in Tamil Nadu have always been marked by corruption. Yet one or the other party keeps getting elected.
Anna Hazare may succeed in getting the kind of Lokpal Bill he wants. But will that stop people from electing corrupt politicians to legislatures? Will that stop people from offering bribes for an extra floor or room that is not permitted, for flouting some rule that is based on logic and safety concerns?
Denying oneself of food is not going to stop corruption. Denying oneself some comforts that can be got only through bribes is the only way to fight it.

Rape Reparation

2011-04-05T17:22:00.000+05:30

Today's Indian Express has a news item about the Planning Commission proposing a financial assistance scheme for rape victims. Apparently, rape victims will get up to Rs 3 lakh as compensation (apart from official assistance) to tide over the victim's immediate and long-term needs. This, the news item says, is part of an effort to ensure "restorative justice".
Restorative justice is a legal principle (am linking it to the wikipedia definition) and I still have to understand the complexity of it. Maybe the Planning Commission has a point. But I have my extremely cynical doubts about this proposal.

Apparently, in a note to the Women and Child Development ministry, the Commission has said that apart from punishing the perpetrators the woman's dignity and self-confidence must be restored as well.
But is a sum of Rs 3 lakh (or any financial amount) going to do that? A woman's body and spirit have been violated. What she needs is justice and a few lakhs in her bank account is not necessarily going to get her that. Of course, this does not absolve the state from ensuring speedy justice for victims.
I would rather the state spends money in setting up fast track courts for rape cases and sensitising the police and the courts about the trauma of a rape victim and to deal with them with sympathy and sensitivity. Most rape victims baulk from going to the police or to the courts because of the crude questioning they are put through.
I am also worried that this could lead to other problems. To apply for this compensation, victims have to first file a first information report (FIR). Now, we all know how difficult it is to get an FIR filed and a copy obtained even for ordinary crimes, never mind what the police keep telling us. It is even more difficult in the case of rape. Now imagine a situation where a rape victim seeks a copy of the FIR in order to apply for this compensation. Once the cops know that a couple of lakhs at least are involved, are they going to make it easier for the victims to get the FIR? Won't this involve more harassment?
I also fear a rise in false allegations of rape in order to claim compensation. Many will be shocked that such scepticism is being voiced by a woman. But, let's face it, women are prone to misuse laws meant to help them. It won't hurt us to admit that.
I am not sure if in cases where compensation is being sought, the offender has to be identified, but in many cases, the victim does not know who it is. Whether it was the Maulana Azad Medical College student rape case or that of the girl working at a call centre who was abducted from Satya Niketan, neither knew who their rapists were. The police rounded up bad characters in a particular area and zeroed in on them and they confessed.
This increases the possibility of misuse of this provision. The proposal mentions the setting up of a District Criminal Injuries Relief and Rehabilitation Board (see the story for details), but I am not sure how effective this will be, either in providing justice and compensation to victims or in preventing rape compensation scams.

Delhi’s Many Shayan Munshis

2011-03-11T11:29:00.000+05:30

The candles are out once again. This time they are for Radhika Tanwar, the Delhi college girl who was shot dead by what is presumed to be a stalker or a rebuffed suitor. Students are going to take out a protest march about the rising crimes against women. Police inefficiency is being blamed.
There’s nothing wrong with all of that. But let’s see things in proper perspective.
Radhika was shot in broad daylight as she was descending from a foot overbridge to go to her college. It was morning and there were a large number of people on the foot overbridge. They heard some noise, saw a girl collapsing, saw someone running away.
No one stopped him or even tried to.
No one came forward to help the girl. Not even when the police arrived.
No one came forward to give a statement.
No one saw anything. They stood around watching.
Maybe if someone had rushed her to a hospital, she would have been alive and been able to say who could have shot her. Right now, there are conflicting statements, with her friends saying she was being harassed by someone and that her family had beaten someone up and the family denying it completely. The truth may never be known because no one is cooperating. And yet there will be demonstrations and Facebook pages on Justice for Radhika.
It’s easy to blame the police for everything. Sure the police isn’t the epitome of efficiency. It is, on the contrary, the epitome of callousness and corruption. But let’s face it, the police cannot be present on every kilometer every minute. You cannot blame the police for the shooting. The police can be blamed if it had not acted promptly. From all accounts of the current case, there was no delay on the part of the police once it was informed of the incident.
This time the callousness and the delay was by all of those present when Radhika was shot.
A name flashes in my mind. Shayan Munshi, the model and aspiring actor who was a star witness in Jessica Lal murder case. His initial testimony nailed Manu Sharma, who has been convicted for Lal’s murder. But he later turned a hostile witness. He did it because he must have been either threatened or browbeaten. Or simply because he didn’t want the hassle of police questioning and court cases. Maybe he thought, `is jhamele mein kyun padun (why should I get involved in this mess?)’, a typical Delhi reaction.
Munshi has been criticised and ridiculed for backtracking the way he did. He is now going to be tried for perjury. But what about all those people on the foot overbridge where Radhika was shot dead? When they stood around watching, didn’t they also think, `is jhamele mein kyun padun’?
I have dealt with this subject in two earlier posts, Middle Class Angst and Nithari and Us.
Delhi chief minister Shiela Dixit is right. Civil society, she said, cannot remain mute spectators to such incidents. The police cannot act without our help. If we are not going to vigilant and helpful citizens, we should stop demonstrating against the police. And demonizing Shayan Munshi. We are all Shayan Munshis.

DMK and Telecom

2010-11-14T18:00:00.001+05:30

So A Raja has finally quit. After trying till the end to brazen it out, with the full backing of his party, the DMK.
The strategy of getting former officials to come out in the open against him seems to have worked.
I am quite sure that these former officials did not speak out now because enterprising newspapers and television news channels are tracking them down. These people were very much in circulation and the media must have been in touch with them. I think they started speaking out after getting a green signal from the Congress/government. It was all part of the tactics to corner Raja into resigning on his own.
Or getting the DMK to replace him.
But what difference will it make if one DMK minister is replaced by another DMK minister? None whatsoever.
Raja was certainly not acting on his own or for himself alone. The DMK has a vested interest in wanting to keep the communications ministry with itself. Look at the chronology.
When UPA-1 was formed, Dayanithi Maran of the DMK insisted and got the communications portfolio. At that time eyebrows and questions about conflict of interest were raised because he was the brother of Kalanithi Maran, who owns Sun TV. The communications ministry is the nodal ministry for DTH rollout (which was on the cards at that time) and for the allocation of airwaves etc.
Then Maran famously fell out with his grand-uncle’s family and had to quit. But DMK continued to retain the communications portfolio and Raja was brought in. The 2G scandal broke out towards the end of UPA-1’s tenure and when UPA-2 was formed there was pressure on the Prime Minister not to take two DMK ministers – Raja and T R Baalu (who had been roads minister in UPA-1).
The DMK was not willing to give up both portfolios but ultimately succumbed on the roads ministry but insisted on telecom and – let’s not forget this – Raja heading it. Since the allegations under Raja were more serious than against Baalu (he was seen as obstructionist and favouring Tamil Nadu in the roads sector, though there were other whispers too), the Prime Minister was extremely reluctant to take Raja back. If I remember right, the Congress had said they would give Raja any other portfolio, but not telecom. But even that was not acceptable to the DMK. Ultimately the Prime Minister had to succumb to pressure from his party, which was being armtwisted by the DMK – its largest ally in the UPA.
Amid all this brouhaha, the focus was on getting Raja out. What’s being missed is that there is no talk of taking the telecom portfolio away from the DMK. In the light of what I have narrated, it is clear that DMK has a vested interest in the communications ministry. So if Raja is replaced by some other DMK person, the new minister will only continue doing what Raja was.
Raja, it is now becoming clear, brazenly defied the PMO on the issue of 2G spectrum. He clearly did this with the confidence that the government could not act against him. Any new DMK replacement will also do so. More importantly, another DMK minister will not allow a fair probe into the 2G scam.
If the PM wants to clean up Indian telecom, he must take the communications portfolio away from the DMK.
But realpolitik may not allow that.

Killer Buses or Killer Drivers?

2010-10-28T08:59:00.000+05:30

So the Delhi government is going to phase out the notorious Blueline buses from 14 December. It is, we are told, a step towards improving the safety of Delhi-ites.
Delhi's transport minister Arvinder Singh Lovely was quoted in the Hindustan Times as saying "I cannot leave the residents of Delhi at the mercy of the Blueline bus drivers." In The Times of India he pointed out that the Blueline buses had been off the roads in most of Delhi during the Commonwealth Games but within days of their resuming service, one person had been killed by a Blueline.
I contest this belief that removing Blueline buses from Delhi's roads will reduce fatal road accidents by bus drivers. In fact, I find this line of reasoning quite, quite ridiculous.
Are these buses on autopilot which malfunction and leads to them running amok on Delhi roads and killing people? Obviously not. The buses are driven rashly by drivers. Take Bluelines off the roads and these drivers, who will be jobless, will get employment driving some other kind of bus or alternative to the Blueline or some commercial vehicle. What is the guarantee that they will not drive rashly then? (I blame my profession, the media, for some of this facile conclusions. In their search for catchy titles, they end up making non-issues the central issue. Killer Bluelines. Killer BMWs. But never killer bus drivers, killer rich brats). Wouldn't Delhi roads be safer by not allowing such killers to drive, rather than removing buses (which can't move on their own) from the roads? Or suspending the permits of the owners of these buses? But these are politically difficult steps, since the bus owners have enormous clout - political and monetary - and can bail themselves and their drivers out of any problem. So do the easiest - and most foolish thing - take buses off.
We've already had experience of the futility of these kind of bans. First there were Redline buses introduced in 1992 when DTC drivers went on strike and the government decided to bring in private operators. These buses were also death on wheels - they notched up a huge number of accidents. According to Hindustan Times, in one year alone they killed 300 persons. The next year, the Redlines were taken off the roads. Then Blueline buses were introduced. And the killer story was being repeated.
So clearly taking one set off buses off the roads did not help. And it will not help even now.
Unless you change the people driving these buses. The same drivers were driving these buses. And under the same system of operation. The Blueline buses are not under the DTC but get permits from the Transport Department to ply on certain designated routes. I am not clear what the business model is, but the owners want to do the maximum number of trips and so drivers are under pressure because of which they drive rashly (I am not justifying or rationalising their behaviour, merely identifying the root cause).
Has thought been given to this when working out an alternative to Bluelines? I suspect not.
There are alternative that people talk about - a corporatised private bus fleet, a revival of the km scheme (the DTC used to have a scheme long before Redlines were first introduced under which privately-owned buses were driven by an employee of the bus owner but had DTC conductors who gave out DTC tickets. The bus owners were paid on the basis of km and the age of the bus. But this too had its share of problems.)
If the alternative arrangements are going to be just another variation of the current system, then we will have killer drivers - I will not use the term killer buses - back on Delhi's roads.

Selective about Scams

2010-10-17T12:35:00.001+05:30

Much is being made of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi snubbing the Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee honcho Suresh Kalmadi, under fire for mismanagement and corruption).

This is the first sign of the government’s resolve that it will not let the guilty in all the Games-related scams go unpunished. The country was assured that action would be taken immediately after the Games and that seems to have started (the logic behind not axing Kalmadi and other scam-tainted people earlier was that it was too close to the Games and that the event would suffer).

So why am I not too impressed by the cold-shouldering of Kalmadi.

For one, because it has come too late. That things were wrong with the way the Games were being organized were evident one year earlier when the government brought in several IAS officers into the Organising Committee to get things going after Michael Fennel, head of the Commonwealth Games Federation, publicly criticised delay in October 2009 (see this story: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100613/jsp/7days/story_12559538.jsp). Whispers about scams were doing the rounds long before the media got evidence of it and splashed it. So why wasn’t action taken then instead of waiting for media exposes and then expressing helplessness two months before the Games?
And the real test will be - not the social boycott of Kalmadi - but actually bringing all the guilty to book and not making scapegoats of some, while others get away.

There is, however, a larger second point I want to make.

Why haven’t the Prime Minister or Sonia Gandhi snubbed other politicos at the centre of corruption charges?

The most glaring example, of course, is telecom minister A Raja, whose name crops up in the context of the 2G spectrum allocation scam, which is expected to cost the exchequer Rs 60,000 crore. Forget socially boycotting him, the Prime Minister takes Raja into the UPA-2 cabinet in the same ministry as he held in the UPA-1 cabinet, which is when the scam occurred. Giving a scam-tainted minister another ministry is hardly an attack on corruption, but it would have given this government some semblance of respectability. But no, even that was denied to this country.

If that weren’t bad enough, look at what happened on the appointment of the Central Vigilance Commissioner. The CVC is to be appointed by a panel that includes the Leader of the Opposition. This is to bring in a measure of impartiality into the appointment prevent charges of the CVC – who heads an office which has a crucial in checking corruption – being the stooge of the government of the day. But the following story will illustrate how even this important requirement is being treated in a cavalier fashion by none other than Manmohan Singh.

Sushma Swaraj – the Leader of the Oppostion – was called on Friday to a meeting with the Prime Minister and home minister (the panel to select the CVC) and presented with three names for the CVC’s post. She said she had no objection to two of the names but pointed out problems with the name of P J Thomas. She gave her reasons – not only did Thomas’ name figure in a scam in Kerala (he belongs to the Kerala cadre of the IAS) but more importantly, he was telecom secretary under Raja and, as CVC, would have to probe the 2G scandal. The Prime Minister and the home minister said they wanted Thomas. She said they could choose any of the other two. They didn’t agree. She then suggested that the panel of names be widened so that they had more choice. But they said there was no time to do that, since the new CVC was to be sworn in on Tuesday. She pointed out that there was time till Monday. But they didn’t agree and wanted to finalise Thomas’ name that day itself. At which point, she remarked that they didn’t just want his name finalized that day, but that very moment. Prithviraj Chavan, the minister of state in charge of personnel, public grievances and pension, and asked him to prepare a letter appointing Thomas as CVC. Swaraj then insisted on recording her dissent. Swaraj has gone public with this sequence of events and the government hasn’t really contradicted it.

Maybe the BJP’s fears that Thomas may scuttle the probe will prove unfounded; maybe Thomas may prove to be impartial. But the manner in which Thomas was appointed does make one uncomfortable.

If the government did not want the other two retired bureaucrats to be CVC why did it include their names in the panel? Clearly the government had made up its mind to appoint Thomas and expected the Opposition to go along with it silently. Unfortunately, because the main opposition party is the BJP, others are not raising enough of a stink.

What is this if not a sham and a mockery of the principle behind making it necessary to get the approval of the Leader of the Opposition? Is the Leader of the Opposition meant to rubber stamp the government’s choices on crucial appointments?

So far from boycotting Raja, the government appears to be going out on a limb to protect him.

In the light of this, the snub to Kalmadi is laughable. And the flurry of action against the Games-related scams evokes only a cynical sneer.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no sympathies for Kalmadi; I think he represents all that is wrong with Indian politics and sports (I am giving a link to a story we did in The Telegraph on the way Kalmadi has risen to dominate Indian sports http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100808/jsp/7days/story_12786018.jsp).

But this crusade against corruption in the Games will ring true only if it extends to ALL scams. We cannot afford to be selective about scams.

The Demolition and The Verdict

2010-10-02T11:26:00.001+05:30

After seeing my earlier post, a friend asked how I felt as a person when all that was happening.

This was something an RSS functionary had asked me some time after that tumultuous day in 1992. And I am giving the same reply I gave him - I first reacted as a journalist and I was excited - after all there was action; history was being made and I was there to report it; and above all, my story was right.

Let me elaborate.

I was working for a weekly newspaper, Sunday Mail, back then. The paper went to press on Friday evening and my story for Sunday was to be filed by Friday afternoon. On the basis of whatever I had got from November 30 (when I had reached Faizabad/Ayodhya) and December 4, my story (which was the lead) had said `Kar seva will mean construction' and detailed how the sadhus and Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders had upped the ante.

But on Saturday afternoon, at a press conference, almost the very same people had assured that the kar seva would be symbolic and peaceful. I was worried - after all my story was going to be wrong!! All the other dailies had that as the headline. Mine was going to be the only one that said trouble was afoot.

So I was a bit low on December 5 evening and December 6 morning. Journalists had been given I-cards to go to the top of Manas Bhavan, which overlooked the kar seva site. But with nothing happening, many of us wandered down and positioned ourselves around the kar seva site.

So when the first stones stared being thrown at the Babri Masjid and it became obvious that there was going to be trouble, I was relieved (that my story wasn't entirely wrong) and excited. My first thought, I must admit, was `thank God my story is vindicated.' Vicarious, but true.

As I rushed around with other journalists trying to take in as much of what was happening as I could, I was only a journalist gathering information on a live event. I couldn't even react to the momentousness of the situation.

But later, after we were all holed up in Sitaji ki Rasoi, not being able to move around or even take notes (as the earlier post describes) the import of what was happening struck me.

This was the first time I was seeing mobs up close. I had seen mobs during the 1984 riots but from a distance, so never got the frenzy on their faces like I did in Ayodhya. I shivered and the cold of December had nothing to do with it. As I heard the first dome fall, I felt strange. There was a numbness within me.

That was the first time I was reacting as a person. And like I told the RSS functionary, I felt very sad. I just knew what was happening was wrong.

I felt even more sad when we were being taken back to Faizabad (where we were all staying) and saw diyas lit in practically every house, and the next day when a few of us managed to return to Ayodhya (from Faizabad where we were all staying) and saw that the looming black structure was no longer there. A few days before, I had been inside Babri Masjid; now there was only a skyline where it stood.

The sadness intensified as I moved around Ayodhya, probably on Tuesday, and found the house of Mohammed Hashim Ansari, one of the litigants in the case that was decided by the Allahabad High Court on Thursday, burnt, as were shops of Muslim artisans who made padukas. Mosques had also been damaged.

This was not the way the problem should have been resolved. I didn't have an answer then and don't have an answer now to the question - how should it have been resolved.

And there was anger - with politicians and community leaders on both sides, as well as the intellectuals who have stoked the fires in their own way.

They are still doing it. The two main parties have responded to the judgement with maturity. There's nothing to be said about Mulayam Singh Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan, who are talking about Muslims feeling betrayed. They are irresponsible politicians who will never turn responsible.

But look at the statements from are the so-called intellectuals, who are talking in the same vein, some going so far as to say they feel like second-class citizens in India. These are provocative statements, guaranteed to stoke trouble. The average Muslims don't care about the masjid (just as the average Hindu doesn't really care about the mandir). They have other problems to deal with. Why are these people fomenting trouble where none exists?

The Sunni Wakf Board has decided to contest the judgement in the Supreme Court. It would have been best for these people to leave it at that. The appeal process and the final judgement may take years. Statements like these only serve to create wounds and lacerate them constantly.

Memories of 6 December 1992

2010-10-01T14:28:00.003+05:30

I finally found clippings of the stories I had done from Ayodhya in December 1992. Scanning them and putting them up will take time so I keyed in the blow by blow account of the demolition that I had written for Sunday Mail, for which I was then working.
The only changes I have made relate to punctuation. Some interpolations (to explain things for readers now) are in brackets and italicised.
Here goes:

Blow by blow account of operation demolition
Seetha/Ayodhya
Sunday Mail December 13-19, 1992

6 am. December 6. I woke up to the faint sounds of Jai Shree Ram and bhajans in Faizabad. Groups of kar sevaks with saffron head-bands and scarves were trekking their way to Ayodhya, seven km away. Faizabad residents were out on their balconies to encourage them and give them refreshments. There was a look of eager anticipation on all faces as they walked down the roads greeting each other.
In Ayodhya, the atmosphere was festive. I could hear the town before I reached it. Bhajans and Jai Shree Rams resounded through the town. On the streets, all I could see were saffron-splashed kar sevaks with large tilaks on their foreheads, some of them dancing on the roads. It was like Holi day when people go around in groups chanting Holi hai. One saffron-coloured mini bus with kar sevaks wound its way through the town with its loudspeaker playing the bhajan, "sri ram jai ram jai jai ram" followed by a jeepful of policemen, some of them clapping their hands in time to the music. Ayodhya children, sitting on the verandas of their houses were also singing the bhajan.
But amidst all this apparent goodwill, there was a discordant note. Some kar sevaks were shouting provocative slogans: "hamari ladayi kisse hai, Babar ke santhanon se" and "teen nahin ab teez hazaar, nahin rahegi koi mazaar".
10 am. BJP leaders L. K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi arrived in a cavalcade. As they get out of their cars, they were mobbed but managed to get to Ram Katha Kunj, from where they were to make their speeches.
Seen from atop Manas Bhavan (where the journalists were to watch the kar seva from) which adjoins the disputed atmosphere, there was a carnival-like atmosphere at the entire complex. As if to match the sunny weather, the sadhus and sants were dressed in robes the colours of which ranged from canary yellow to deep saffron. On the platform (chabootra) built during the kar seva in July, a group of sants and mahants were performing puja which was presided over by Jagadguru Shankaracharya Swami Basudevacharya Saraswati of Jyotishmath. Also on the platform were Mahant Paramhans, president of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, Mahant Avaidyanath and Ashok Singhal., the VHP leaders. To the far left, under tents, kar sevaks were lined up state-wise. They were supposed to march in that order to the kar seva site, carrying fistfuls of Saryu mud, according to the programmed decided upon. Rehearsals for this orderly programme had taken place on Saturday.
At one end of the disputed site, near the Sakshi Gopal Mandir, kar sevaks who were not included in this programme began straining at thei iron barricades and pushing thir way to the site. The PAC constables on duty and sadhus kept pushing them back. One tall, bearded, strapping sadhu, Abhiram Pehalwan, stood out among them, running after the unruly kar sevaks, slapping them, hitting them with a lathi, catching them by the scruff of their collars and literally dragging them out of the area.
The barricade finally gave way and the kar sevaks danced their way in amidst cheers and whistles. Chanting Jai Shree Ram and shouting slogans of "mandir vahin banayenge", they danced, some doing the Amitabh Bachchan jig for the benefit of the photographers. The sadhus tried to get them to sit down but in cain. Finally they appealed to the photographers to leave in order to help them maintain discipline. RSS workers in their khakhi half-pants were then brought in to make the kar sevaks leave but even they had to give up. They began repairing the iron barricades instead. Peace seemed to have been restored.
11.30 am. RSS volunteers, wearing bright yellow headbands, rushed in and cleared the place of kar sevaks in seconds. But at the barricades, there were heated arguments between the two groups. The mood had turned ugly and tense.
Just then, a group of swamis entered the area. The unruly kar sevaks rushed back along with them. This time, some were carrying bricks and iron rods. They had scuffles with
RSS workers who warned photographers not to click. Utter chaos prevailed. Some sadhus, Abhiram Pehelwan again the most prominent, began hitting out at the mob, snatching lathis from PAC constables and using them. But it was clear that the situation had gone beyond control. The PAC deployed there stood watching impassively as did the CRPF jawans in the security corridor leading to the Babri Masjid.
11.50 am. Debabrata Thakur of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, a Swiss journalist (Bernard Imhalsy, as I was to learn later) and me were watching all this from a mound next to the security corridor, which was barricaded by steel rods. Suddenly we heard a clattering sound. "They're stoning the masjid," said Debu and we rushed there slipping through the barricades and past bemused CRPF jawans. As were reached the masjid wall, we saw the first of the kar sevaks clambering on to the building.
12 noon. 15 minutes before the scheduled kar seva was to begin. Many more were climbing the hillock on which the masjid was situated from the sides and the back. When we reached the exit arch in the outer wall, the kar sevaks had already gained entry. CRPF and PAC jawans tried to hit them with lathis but it proved ineffective. The force was hopelessly outnumbered.
A trembling senior superintendent of police, D. B. Rai, panic writ large on his face, was saying to no one in particular, "fire tear gas, fire tear gas". As we went in through the gate, the kar sevaks had climbed on to the dome to the sounds of much cheering. The women CRPF constables rushed out first, all of them looking scared. As I went in to get photographs of kar sevaks on the dome, all Debu could say was, "Seetha, take off your shoes."
Within minutes, the CRPF gave up the fight. The video camera kept there was overturned and smashed. The constables came out with their cane shields and ran down the stairs. A CRPF jawan's shoe came hurting past my ear. Debu got hit on his hand by a brick. We took cover behind the CRPF shields and rushed down. All of us were quickly taken into the adjoining Sita ki Rasoi complex where the police control room was stationed.
We went up to the terrace and watched the street separating the building from the masjid complex. The street and the open ground in front of the masjid were teeming with kar sevaks. All one could hear were whistles and Jai Shree Rams, as saffron flags were put up on the central dome. Kar sevaks jumped and danced around.
Operation Demolition now got under way. Pick-axes and stone breakers (iron rods) with which the kar sevaks had come prepared were used to attack the structure. Some kar sevaks started tearing down the steel rods and barbed wire fencing at the bottom of the hillock and the uprooted poles, bricks etc were also being used as crude implements. CRPF posts were tossed down like toys. Ropes were tied to the by-now heavily damaged outer wall and sections of it were pulled down by those below the hillock. Every time a portion came down, there was wild rejoicing.
Anybody and everybody pitched in - the young and the middle-aged, jean-clad youth and half-clad sadhus. But they all had the same frenzied look on their faces as they destroyed or merely cheered the destroyers on.
Ayodhya residents, the less active kar sevaks and the inactive police watched the proceedings from the open ground behind Sitaji ki Rasoi and from their rooftops. Many of them and journalists were on the terrace of this complex. When I was talking to BJP MP, Brigadier Khanduri (who later became the chief minister of Uttarkhand), a woman kar sevak saw me taking notes and threatened me with a brick, asking me to leave. After this, all the journalists present had to put their notebooks away and pretend to be kar sevaks, wherever possible. Cameras had already been put away.
S. C. Dixit, BJP MP from Varanasi who has now been entrusted with the task of enquiring into the violence, was there. The parents of the Kothari brothers from Calcutta, who had hoisted the saffron flag on the masjid in 1990, were also present.
So were tense police and administration officials who went into a huddle. "Tear gas karen ya firing," one asked. "Firing nahin," said another before he noticed nosey reporters surrounding them and shamelessly eavesdropping. They moved away.
More journalists had come in for shelter, most of them photographers and film crew who had been attacked. Everyone sat around glumly, making plans about getting out and reaching Faizabad.
2.45 pm. There was a rumbling sound, followed by wild cheering. The first dome had fallen. The wanton destruction went on. One could just about make out individual sounds - metal striking stone, stone striking stone, metal striking metal, whistles, changes, bhajans, speeches on the microphone. The combined din was unbearable. An hour later the second dome fell. The cheering grew louder. Injured car sevaks were being taken out.
Meanwhile, Advani and Vijayaraje Scindia, who were watching the events from the terrace of the Ram Katha Kunj building which overlooks the open ground, appealed to the kar sevaks over the microphone, asking them to leave the complex. No one paid any heed. However, between their speeches, Sadhvi Rithambara read out an incendiary poem from the same platform asking the kar sevaks to raise clenched fists and repeat the chorus after her. She got a vociferous response. An hour earlier, another woman on the mike, presumably Uma Bharti, had exhorted kar sevaks to squat on the roads leading to Faizabad so that Central forces would not be able to reach Ayodhya. There did not appear to be any attempt to restrain them.
The journalists were hungry. One woman reporter went out with a policemen and got some fruits. Others wrapped saffron scarves and went to the nearby Manas Bhavan,where a langar was on, to get puris and alu. There the kar sevaks and those doling out the food were asking one another: "how much has fallen?' it was like following a cricket match.
A kar sevak from Madras brought a message that three foreign journalists had taken shelter with them in a nearby dharamshala. A police escort was sent ot bring them back.
4.45 pm. The central dome fell. There was unlimited uninhibited jubilation. People danced around in joyous abandon. There was a look of ecstasy on all faces. Two kar sevaks hugged each other and cried. Their friend had died during the 1990 kar seva. "Jis kaam ke liye aaye the voh ho gayee," people said. "Mubarak ho," they greeted one another. It was all over.
An hour later, the journalists holed up in Sitaji ki Rasoi were escorted out to CRPF trucks and taken back to Faizabad.

A Cancer Without Cure

2010-08-01T16:55:00.001+05:30

I am a member of Delhi Traffic Police's Facebook page, along with 17000 others. In the initial month or so, whenever someone used to sneer about traffic policemen taking bribes, I used to admonish them - no one can force you to give a bribe; follow traffic rules and then you won't have to deal with bribes; when you are stopped and challaned, just pay the fine, don't plead to be let off as that opens the doors for bribes.

I have always had this holier-than-thou attitude towards bribes and `baksheesh'. When the postman who brought my passport asked for `chai-paani' I told him to take the passport back. I was convinced I could use RTI to get my passport. And I have once used RTI to get the DDA to redress a problem caused by bribe-giving neighbours.

But that attitude has taken a serious blow.

If one is stopped for a traffic violation, there are two alternatives. One can either pay the fine on the spot and get a receipt. If one doesn't have the money or wants to challenge the challan, one has to surrender the driving licence/registration certificate and go to court.

Simple and straightforward isn't it?

But no.

Several people have written in on the DTP page complaining about arbitrariness by traffic policemen. Violators are stopped and either higher penalties than what the offence warranted are slapped on them or they are told to pay the fine in court even if they are prepared to pay right then.

The purpose behind this? Psyche violators into pleading to be let off and succumbing to bribe demands. In some cases, they didn’t even wait for the offender to plead. The choice was given right away – pay us a bribe or pay the challan in court. Some succumbed, others didn't and had to do the rounds of courts or had more charges slapped against them.

Some incidents made my blood run cold.

One young man was stopped on the grounds of having jumped a red light. He pointed out that the traffic signal wasn't working properly. When another motorist stopped and supported him, the policemen tried to note his number so that they could slap a few challans on him!!

Another person was stopped and told to pay Rs 1000 fine for jumping the red light (though the fine is only Rs 100) or pay a bribe of Rs 200. When he protested, the lone constable added false charges of drunken driving and lack of documents. When the young man refused to sign the challan with these false charges, another offence of misbehaviour with a public servant was added. His driving licence was impounded and he had to make two trips to the court to get it back.

I had said on the page once that this is nothing but extortion and thuggery by the traffic policemen.

What is even more worrying is that I had raised a few broad questions for senior traffic police officials to answer – is there a policy to slap a Rs 1000 penalty for jumping the red light; if a person is willing to pay the challan on the spot can the policeman insist that it be paid in court; if one challenges a challan, what are the procedures? There has been total silence on this, though I have repeated these questions (though the special commissioner (traffic) has intervened in a couple of instances). Clearly the traffic police brass are either unwilling or unable to check their men on the street.

The only uplifting aspect of all this is a few people refusing to pay bribes and even those who have are coming out into the open and explaining the circumstances in which they paid the bribe and identifying the policemen. In each case, it shows up police bullying at its worst. It’s easy to say stand up to bullying but it’s far more difficult to practice.

The young man in the first incident decided to pay in court rather than pay a bribe. But one of the other page members said that in court, these cases are treated summarily, so the judge has no time to listen to one’s explanations. And as the second incident shows, the ordeal isn’t over in one day.

Paying the fine on a wrong charge and then contesting it also doesn’t help. The special commissioner traffic, intervening in one complaint of a wrong challan, told the complainant he could go meet a particular officer but there is no provision to refund a challan. The police holds all the aces; the people hold all the duds.

In 2004, I was part of a team that brought out a Liberal Budget. One criticism made was that there was nothing in the document to reduce or eliminate corruption. I had responded that we believe scope for corruption would fall dramatically if the state gets out of micro-managing the economy and red tape reduced. Indeed, examples are often cited of how there is no need for bribes to get a telephone connection merely because supply has increased.

But all this logic falls flat when one comes across the kind of extortion that Delhi’s traffic police are indulging in.

But why only the police?

Take income tax. A very well-respected economist, who had been with the Planning Commission long back, had some income coming in as consultant. Being honest to the core, he didn’t show false expenditures and his accounts were all in order. Nothing hanky panky at all But the assessing officer asked his chartered accountant for a bribe – he gave a list of things worth Rs 10,000. The accountant said he could not ask his client. He told the officer who the gentleman was, only to be told that the officer was sitting on a senior cabinet minister’s file! He told the accountant that if he could not ask his client, he should pay the bribe out of his own fees.

Jurist Leila Seth, in her memoirs, talks about how an inspector refused to give the completion certificate for her house, because she refused to bribe. After much pressure he came and said some essential construction was 4 inches less than the required measurement. Leila Seth spent double the amount he was asking as bribe to break down that particular element and reconstruct it. And the guy still took a year to give the certificate. When told who she was, he said I have made ministers and cabinet secretaries succumb.

My friend Sunil Varma’s angst-ridden Facebook status message -- "I'm convinced, we Indians are the most corrupt people in the world! p.s. - Any argument with me on this assertion is quite pointless..." – set off this post.

Sunil gives the example of his friend’s husband who tried to get a power connection for his factory through legitimate means. Apparently the electricity would be cut off every day on grounds of load shedding. The poor man finally had to succumb.

Increasing supply of goods and service providers could eliminate corruption in some areas. This gentleman may not have had to succumb to bribe demands if power distribution was not a monopoly. Technology can also help – it has reduced the role of touts in regional transport offices.

But what is the solution to the kind of extortion that we are seeing on Delhi's roads and in income tax offices? You can't have competition in law and order enforcement or in tax assessment and collection (though many of my libertarian friends may say yes, you can).

I just want to repeat something I said on Sunil's page - corruption is no longer something about which to feel sad about. It's bloody scary.

Killing the nation’s honour

2010-06-22T21:24:00.001+05:30

The Supreme Court has issued notices to eight states and the Central government on the issue of honour killings. It has asked them what steps they have taken/will take to protect young couples from the wrath of their families. This is in response to a public interest litigation filed by an NGO, Shakti Vahini.

And as I write, the National Commission of Women chief Girija Vyas is talking on television about the need for tougher laws to deal with honour killings.

There's no disputing the fact that honour killings are a blot on society. And khap panchayats have no role in a civilized society and democratic polity. Also, young people have a right to marry whom they want to. Parents too have a right to oppose and point out problems of inter-caste/inter-religion/same gotra marriages. But they don't have the right to force their children to obey their will. Or kill them if they don't listen.

But can the issue be dealt with through judicial intervention? Or through tougher laws?

I have my doubts.

This is a mindset issue, which goes beyond kangaroo courts in rural hinterlands. It exists in urban areas, among so-called highly educated, sophisticated families. Remember the Rizwanur Rehman case in Calcutta? Or the Nirupama Pathak case in Jharkhand? Indeed, the marrying-beneath-one's-status issue is a universal one, going beyond religion or caste or gotra.

The NGO and the Supreme Court are probably going to focus on how runaway couples are tracked down and murdered and are not helped by the police. In fact the police often takes the side of the families. Think again of Rizwanur. Or of Rajnish Sharma of Jammu who was found hanging in a Srinagar police station. He had married a Muslim girl who alleged that her family and the police had colluded to murder him. Or of the trumped up rape charges that are always slapped against the boy. In fact, the Supreme Court came down strongly on the police on this count.

But let's go back to another Supreme Court order in December 2009. Two of its judges reduced the death sentence pronounced on a brother who killed his sister's husband, who belonged to a lower caste, and his father and brothers in 2004 in Bombay. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Just read what the two judges - V S Sirpurkar and Deepak Verma - observed while reducing the sentence:

...Caste is a concept which grips a person before his birth and does not leave him even after his death. The vicious grip of the caste, community, religion, though totally unjustified, is a stark reality. The psyche of the offender in the background of a social issue like an inter-caste-community marriage, though wholly unjustified, would have to be considered on the peculiar circumstances.

These are learned judges making statements like this. How do you expect a relatively less educated policeman from a conservative, rustic background to react when a girl's family comes to him talking about ghar ki izzat and all that?

Look at the complexity we are dealing with. In the Bombay case, the brother - Dilip Tiwari, a brahmin - was assisted in the murder by two people from a lower caste - Manoj Paswan and Sunil Yadav. Obviously they found nothing ironic in the idea that they were helping a high caste man murder someone from a lower caste. After all, ghar ki izzat ka sawaal hai. If a girl from their families were to marry someone from an even lower caste, clearly, they would mete the same treatment to her.

Am I saying that the problem of honour killings should not be addressed at all? Not at all.

But I wonder what a court can do in the matter. Maybe ask states where this is more rampant to ensure that the police help harassed couples. That's easily said, but how will it be ensured?

Should we have a separate law on honour killings? What will it say? Murder is illegal, whether for honour or not. So what are we talking about here?

The only way this problem can be addressed is through a mindset change. Someone should have challenged the order of the two Supreme Court judges who reduced Dilip Tiwari's sentence and the death penalty should have been restored.

Politicians have to come out unequivocally against khap panchayats and not entertain them at all. Naveen Jindal should have lost his Congress membership the day he asked a Times of India journalist who went to interview him on his support of khap panchayats whether her parents would allow her to marry someone from the same gotra.

Mindset changes don't come overnight. They take time. But laws and judicial activism also will not solve the problem overnight. It all needs to go hand in hand.

The Republic and Us

2010-01-26T18:00:00.000+05:30

Standing on my balcony, musing over the farce of the Padma awards -- people like NRI businessman Sant Singh Chatwal, who has faced charges of defrauding Indian banks, are on the list, as if awarding Saif Ali Khan, Barkha Dutt (in an earlier year) weren't bad enough -- I saw something that left me even more depressed. The residents' welfare association (RWA) of my block was hosting Republic Day celebrations in the park that my house overlooks. The little park appeared full of people. Almost 70 per cent of the residents were gathered there, socialising and gorging on free snacks. The heavy mist that blanketed Delhi till well past 11 am was no dampener.

Why is that depressing? Because whenever there is a general body meeting (GBM) of the RWA, attendance drops to just about 30 per cent, give or take 0.5 per cent of 1 per cent. GBMs are called to discuss affairs relating to the block and to review the functioning of the office-bearers of the RWA. But barring the 30-odd regulars nobody bothers to attend them.

To me the RWAs and GBMs represent democracy at a microcosmic level and the way people behave here only gets projected at the state or national level in the state assembly and Parliament. The GBM is like a full session of Parliament and the executive committee of the RWA is like the executive arm of the state – the government, which is charged with implementing policies and programmes sanctioned by Parliament (or GBM).

The RWA charges a certain amount every month from the residents. Most pay up and there are a few defaulters. This corresponds to paying taxes and that should prompt a demand for some accountability. It’s not easy to demand and ensure that accountability at the state or national level, but surely it should be easier at the level of the locality you are living in?

And yet what do I find?

That people believe they should get their money’s worth in terms of services, but apart from ranting against the RWA or fighting with its office-bearers if they suffer some personal inconvenience – no water, theft, service lanes not clean – they are not willing to take the next step forward to be more involved.

One potent way they can get more involved is in attending the GBMs. That is like a Parliament session where the executive is grilled on its performance, larger issues are debated and decided on. Once a GBM has decided on something, it is applicable to all members of the RWA.

But people find all kinds of excuses for not attending the GBM. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, errands to run, relatives dropping in. None of these excuses are trotted out when there’s free food available. Even thick fog won’t keep them away. Ask them why they don’t attend GBMs and the pat answer is – kuch hota to nahin hai. So why don’t you come, make yourself heard and ensure kuch hota hai? Kya fayda, what’s the point?

If a GBM does decide on a particular course of action and it inconveniences someone that person just decided to ignore it. When it is pointed out that the GBM has decided this, the immediate reply is – what GBM, how many people attend the GBM, I wasn’t there, so how was it decided? So why don’t you attend? Kya fayda? There seems to be no winning this argument.

What happens as a result? The office-bearers behave pretty much like our politicians do once they are elected. There are rules about the number of GBMs to be called in a year (much like laws about Parliament sitting) but the required number of GBMs is never convened. No one questions them about it.

RWAs are run pretty much like fiefdoms – contracts being awarded for a cut or for personal favours, guards running personal errands for office-bearers, the houses near those of the office-bearers benefiting more than others. And people will just grumble but never demand accountability.

The annual election of the executive committee is also an interesting replica of state or national elections. Two groups gang up and decide to contest elections. Each go around with a kind of manifesto promising the moon. The challengers accuse the incumbents of corruption and ineffectiveness.

Most committee members have their own agendas and the temptation to use the one year in office to make money is strong and often not resisted.

Which brings one to the question that dogs national politics – why don’t good, honest, effective people become office-bearers? The answers, unfortunately, are the same. The honest people are often mild-mannered and don’t have the kind of aggression that is required to deal with rogue elements – and there are many. The honest, effective people are the ones who hold regular jobs and are not able to devote the kind of time that an RWA needs. Above all, RWA politics can be as dirty as state and national politics and these people just don’t have the stomach for that kind of politicking and worse.

Is it any wonder then that our state legislatures and Parliament are in the state they are? If we cannot ensure democracy and responsibility at our individual levels, can we do so at larger levels?

The NRI Vote

2010-01-10T19:38:00.003+05:30

This post is likely to cost me a few NRI friends. It could have been relatives too but you can't lose relatives; you can only lose contact with them.

I am pretty worked up about the move on voting rights for NRIs. A Bill to amend the Representation of People Act to allow this was moved in 2006 and the standing committee of Parliament made certain observations. The Bill has remained stuck because of that.

I have had an e-exchange with my friend Krishna Srinivasan, who works for the IMF, on the subject. "If we are still citizens, why should we not be allowed to vote?" asks Krishna. He went on to say, "voting is a fundamental right for every citizen. No reason why they should be prevented from voting just because they relocate overseas for a few years. As long as a NRI remains an Indian citizen, she/he should be allowed to vote."

Krishna certainly has a point. I was worried that the Bill would allow even NRIs who had taken citizenship of other countries to vote. Fortunately, it does not - the right to vote is not being conferred on even those with Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) card.

My issue is not about people who have relocated for a few years but those people who have gone abroad with the intention of settling down there and the only reason they are still Indian citizens is that they cannot get citizenship of the other country before a stipulated time period. Technically, yes, they are Indian citizens but are they Indians at heart? Speaking Indian languages, being part of the Indian community in the other country, sticking to Indian rituals, food and dress, visiting India every year, investing in Indian businesses etc doesn't count. Are they involved with the country in the way that all of us who choose to live here and put up with the trials and tribulations of living in India are? Should people who chose not to endure this country with all its hardships be allowed to determine who rules all those who chose to do so? That is my fundamental question.

My fear is that the amendment Bill seeks to allow such people to vote. The amendment Bill proposes that "a person absenting himself from his place of ordinary residence owing to his employment, education, or otherwise, outside India, whether temporarily or not, shall not, by reason thereof, cease to be ordinarily resident in India." Note the words, "temporarily or not". That means even those who have gone permanently will be allowed to vote because they have still retained their Indian citizenship.

I think that is unfair. NRIs don't pay taxes in India (some probably do) so why should they be allowed to determine the government? No taxation without representation should surely also mean no representation without taxation.

There are a whole lot of practical problems with the proposal, many of which have been highlighted in the standing committee report on the Bill. Apparently, conferring voting right on someone also confers on that person the right to stand for election. Now that is worrying.

The biggest problem, according to me, is - how are NRIs going to judge which party/candidate is best for the job? Can they make an informed choice the way a voter living here can? (Sure, even people here don't make informed choices, but that is another issue). The move will also skew the playing field against the smaller parties and independents who may not have the resources to reach out to NRI voters, thus giving the big parties with a higher profile an unfair advantage. I am worried about how some parties are going about studiously wooing the NRIs. I cannot believe it has to do with wanting to keep them engaged with India and its development. It’s about engaging with their particular brand of politics. It will be easier to fool NRIs, in spite of the information and technology revolution.

There was something else in my exchange with Krishna that disturbed me. He said allowing NRIs to vote "will, hopefully, contribute towards improving governance". Later he elaborated (in response to a riposte from me) that "I would like to believe that many/most NRIs would not be swayed by the populist measures used by politicians to get votes. This would, hopefully, help elect the right candidate and not the one with most money/influence, which in turn would help improve governance."

My riposte had been that the white man's burden is now morphing into the NRI burden: these desis back home don't know how to vote the right people, so we NRIs need to step in and help them improve governance etc. But Krishna's counter is similar to that smug middle class attitude all of us have - the poor vote depending on how much they are paid; it is us educated people who vote responsibly. But as I have pointed out in an earlier post, this is a myth. The middle class voters are as prone to being bribed as the poor. Not in terms of cash or liquor or whatever, but in terms of benefits - protection for encroachments, continuation of undeserved subsidies etc. What is the guarantee that NRIs won't have their own narrow agendas?

Not giving NRIs voting rights will certainly affect all those who have gone abroad purely temporarily - people on foreign assignments or jobs with international organisations or multinational corporations, students who may later choose to come back, people who have only gone to earn money for their families back home (like the poor people working in the Gulf who repatriate all their earnings), people like my friend Krishna. If some way can be found to define `temporarily' in the amendment and allow these genuine people to vote, sure go ahead. But if that cannot be done, I am afraid these people will just have to wait till they return in order to vote. We cannot allow people who have no stake in the country and don't understand or want to endure its problems to determine our governments.
P.S. I am giving a link to a summary of the Bill and the standing committee recommendations.

Justice has to be just

2010-01-02T14:25:00.002+05:30

Now there is a Facebook group called Justice for Ruchika. I got invites but am not planning to join. It’s not that I am not angered by the piffling conviction that S P S Rathore got. No woman who has traveled in a Delhi bus will feel differently.

But I am not joining the group for two reasons. One, I feel such groups are no different from meaningless candlelight vigils about which I have written earlier.
More importantly, I am just not comfortable with all that is happening now.

Slapping new charges, filing fresh FIRs (which eminent legal experts like Ram Jethmalani and K T S Tulsi have criticized) is perhaps not the best way of going about getting justice for Ruchika.

The right way to go about it would have been to pressure the CBI to appeal the verdict in a higher court and press for a longer sentence there, which is what happened in the Jessica Lal case, and making sure that the arguments are watertight.

Take the new charges of abetment to suicide. That seems to be on very weak ground. Apparently this had been dismissed by the high court and Supreme Court earlier. The CBI officer who had headed the probe has clearly said that the charge was weak even then because Ruchika had committed suicide three years after the molestation incident and left no suicide note. So on what basis are charges of abetment to suicide be framed and made to stick? Am not sure if abetment to suicide charges can be levied only by relatives saying so or whether it requires a suicide note. I would like to be educated about this.

The immediate rejoinder to that will be that the CBI official was protecting Rathore. Maybe. But that charge can stick only if the officer deliberately overlooked or destroyed strong evidence of abetment to suicide. There is nothing right now to suggest that.

There is unhappiness over the fact that Rathore has got interim anticipatory bail and I heard Anand Parkash saying on television that this shows the system is still trying to shield Rathore. Now this is clearly unfair. Giving bail to someone on a bailable offence is hardly an attempt to shield that person.

The initial outrage over the laughable six months that Rathore got has now snowballed into something uncontrollable and often ridiculous. The Indian Express had an editorial, Call off the mob, which highlights the danger of letting public outrage dictate justice. The points it makes are very valid. The topic of NDTV’s Big Fight programme is going to be “Is media trial the only way to get justice”. This is, quite simply, appalling. There can be no justification for the media arrogating to itself the role of judges.

Like I wrote in the end of my post on the media behaviour in this case on my other blog, the travesty of justice which happened should not become an excuse for vigilante justice.

Two Addendums

2009-12-30T07:21:00.002+05:30

I have two additions to my previous two posts, which I am clubbing into one.
Today, December 30, the Right Honourable Shibu Soren, will be sworn in as chief minister of Jharkhand once again. In my last post on the issue, I had pointed out how corrupt and criminal politicians keep getting voted to power by voters, even after information is now available about their antecedents. The Association for Democratic Reforms has done an analysis of the antecedents of MLAs in the new Jharkhand assembly. The list is telling and tragic.
Twenty-six of the 79 MLAs in the Assembly (73 per cent) have criminal cases of a serious nature pending against them. The serious charges are murder (four), attempt to murder (14), theft (14) and kidnapping.
This is information collected from the affidavits all election candidates are supposed to provide. That means this information was in the public domain from the minute these candidates filed their nomination papers.
And yet they got elected. This is the value we attach to our votes.
Going on to the Ruchika Girhotra case. I am now beginning to seriously think that far too many people are cynically capitalising on this case.
Apparently a Chandigarh NGO, World Human Rights Protection Council, has decided to file a public interest litigation seeking harsher punishment for S P S Rathore and on the issue of the harassment of Ashu, Ruchika's brother.
And M S Bitta, head of the All India Anti Terrorist Front, toodled off to honour the Parkashes for the strength shown by them in fighting the case. Bitta is a publicity monger of the worst kind. I remember with disgust seeing his antics at the funeral of news photographer, Pradeep Bhatia, who got killed in Kashmir while covering a gun battle between terrorists and security forces. He was roundly ticked off but his face had an absolutely shameless look. Where was he all these years when the Prakashes were fighting alone? I am disappointed that the Prakashes refused the honour till such time as the case reaches its logical end. At that time, will they accept dubious honours from even more dubious people like Bitta? Why didn't they just snub him there and then?
I can understand Ruchika's father now deciding to come out into the open and knock the doors of higher courts for justice. After all, he no longer has to live in fear of S P S Rathore. But surely all these other people didn't have the same fear. And if they had all come forward to help the Girhotras when they were being harassed, could Rathore have gone to the extent he did? It is specious to argue that they didn't know of the case. Lakhanpal is an advocate in Chandigarh. How could he have not known of the case? Bitta is a politician. I find it hard to believe that he was absolutely clueless in all these years. One newspaper had written about the case and Rathore's harassment of Ashu Girhotra when he was made DGP. So why were they silent then?
Some of the issues that are being raised is absolutely pointless now. Like the inquiry against Sacred Heart Convent which expelled Ruchika on grounds of late payment of fees. That surely must have pushed the child over the brink. Someone should have come forward to help the Girhotras and Parkashes and fought the school then. Someone should have held the school authorities to account then. Nineteen years later, does it matter? Can anything be done to rectify it?
Right now, there are only two persons who should be proceeded against. Rathore and the then Superintendent of Police, Ambala, K P Singh, who, according to the Indian Express, registered all those false cases against Ashu. He definitely should not be allowed to go scot free.
People like him and Rathore must learn that the long arm of the law is actually long.
At the same time, let the publicity mongers be kept away.

Jharkhand and Us

2009-12-25T12:49:00.001+05:30

As one sees the sight of the thoroughly immoral Shibu Soren insisting that he should be made chief minister of Jharkhand, the only thought that comes to mind is - perhaps states also need to be born under auspicious stars. What else can one think when one sees the tragedy of Jharkhand. When it was carved out of Bihar, it had a bright future. After all, it was undivided Bihar’s industrial powerhouse, it was immensely rich in mineral and forest resources, it had the benefit of a vision document for economic development prepared by the Confederation of Indian Industry (something the two other states created at the same time, Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal, which is now Uttarkhand, did not have). But the state is sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss because of political instability and a thoroughly corrupt political class.

Now we will all sit and lament about the political system, the quality of public life and how corrupt politicians go scot free. But who is allowing them to go scot free? Why do corrupt politicians and those with criminal backgrounds keep getting elected? Because we vote for them.

Earlier it was attributed to lack of knowledge about politicians. But that is no longer the case. Ever since the Association of Democratic Reforms, through it public interest litigation, succeeded in making it compulsory for those contesting elections to declare their assets, educational background and involvement in criminal cases, people can’t claim to be ignorant any more. And yet we keep electing criminals and corrupt politicians. I quote from an earlier post, The Four Cs:

I have always held that the Indian voters may love to carp about corruption in plush drawing rooms as well as DTC buses, but that is hardly an issue in elections. Yes, it became an issue in 1989, when the Bofors scandal shook the nation. But that was probably because of the scale of corruption involved and that the Prime Minister himself was under a cloud. But has it ever been an issue after that? Why, Rajiv Gandhi was all set to return to power n 1991 when he was assassinated. Sukh Ram, the telecom minister in whose house currency notes were found stashed in mattresses, had no problem getting elected. The DMK and the AIADMK keep getting voted in and out alternately even though they are known to be corrupt. Similar examples abound. So if anyone thinks voters are going to rise in anger against corruption and throw bribe-seeking politicians out, they would be well advised to perish the thought.

Clearly, we are not willing to do much more than rant in our living rooms about corruption, as I had argued in Morality of Middle Class Politics. Till we are willing to do that, we have to suffer the Shibu Sorens of the world.

More Meaningless Vigils

2009-12-25T11:57:00.001+05:30

Oh no, not again. That was my first reaction when I saw the news clips of the candlelight vigils for Ruchika Girhotra. Like it happened in the Jessica Lal case, this too may lead to a relook at the judgement giving S P S Rathore a laughable six months imprisonment and Rs 1000 fine. And it will be all hailed as a victory for middle class activism.

But I find this whole candlelight vigil business quite farcical. Read an earlier post of mine Middle Class Angst to understand what I am trying to say. I made a similar point in another post, Nithari and Us.

I wonder how many of those who participated in the vigil in Chandigarh knew the Girhotras and stood by them in all these years? From all accounts, it was only the Parkash family who did that. The Girhotras were forced to shift houses and leave Chandigarh because of harassment by Rathore. When he sent goons to their house to pelt stones did his other neighbours come out in a group and confront them? Or did they all sit quietly behind locked doors and watch the drama from their windows? When her brother was booked in false cases and tortured, did anyone other than the Parkash family take up his cause?

It’s very easy now to participate in a candlelight vigil after Rathore has been convicted. And once everyone is sure he is not in a position to harm them any more. I would have saluted all these people if they had done something like this in all these 19 years.

This candlelight vigil doesn’t mean that more Ruchikas won’t be harassed by more Rathores any more. I am absolutely certain that among those in the vigils there will be many who will not do even an iota of what the Parkash family did for the Girhotras when faced with a similar situation. Why, they will not even stop to help if they see a girl being teased in a bus. Even if it happened to their own daughters, they will, in all probability, hush things up.

We don’t need more candlelight vigils. We need more Parkashes.

Violence By Any Other Name

2009-11-02T16:15:00.001+05:30

Sunil Varma has left a comment on my previous post and he has said something very relevant and interesting in the end. “I just feel we forget very easily and conveniently some aspects of this country's tragic past.”
How very true. Everybody is now remembering Indira Gandhi for being this great leader, and trying to gloss over the fact that her economic policies and his dictatorial/dynastic side did more harm to the country than good.
We keep remembering the 2002 riots in Gujarat but forget the Godhra massacre, which sparked it off (I am not justifying the Gujarat riots or the inaction of the Narendra Modi government. It should have anticipated the riots and taken steps to prevent it. It is as guilty as the Congress government in 1984 was.) As for the human rights brigade and the left-liberals, the less said the better.
In college, I was one of these human rights types – admired PUCL etc because of the opposition to the Emergency and the fact that eminent people like V M Tarkunde, Nayantara Sahgal and a lot of leading anti-Emergency types were associated with it.
But I got cheesed off with the entire human rights brigade when in all those years on the TOI desk, processing news about terrorist killings in punjab, I never saw any criticism of killings by terrorists though the human rights activists were always quick to flay fake encounters and even real ones (though i don't justify fake encounters). That’s still happening – in Jammu and Kashmir, in the Naxalite heartland, in the NorthEast. Not one prominent human rights activist has openly commended Kashmir’s Rukhsana who killed a LeT commander or condemned the retaliatory militant attack on her house three days back. Left liberals rant against the Salwa Judum (a vigilante citizens force set up to counter the Maoists) but are silent against killings by the Maoists. On top of that, they urge the government to open a dialogue with these people on issues of development. But when the government says ok, stop violence, let’s talk and the Maoists reject that offer, they are silent.
I once argued about this with someone years, years back and was told that terrorists/militants etc are not responsible individuals, they function outside the system and that it was pointless to criticise them. What utter balderdash.
But there’s one point on which I differ with Sunil. “Whilst the Prime Minister of India has apologised for the carnage that happened after Indira Gandhi was assasinated by those who were supposed to have protected her with her own life, has ANY sikh ever apologised for the countless Hindus that were killed by the extremists in Punjab?”
The Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi before him apologised not as individuals but as symbols of the Congress Party whose top Delhi leaders were instigators of the anti-Sikh violence.
But expecting individual Sikhs to apologise for killings by terrorists is to brand the entire community as having supported the terrorist movement. Which they didn’t.
Can the same argument be extended to the Congress Party – that is, the entire Congress Party was not to blame for what a few individuals in it did? No, it cannot. Because a political party is a more cohesive unit than a community and therefore has more control over its members. Because even though everyone in the Congress knew what was going on, the violence continued for three days. Because after the violence came that unpardonable `jab ek bada ped girta hai, to dharti hilti hai’ statement by the new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. And above all, because the perpetrators of those killings continued to be rewarded with plum posts by the Congress Party.
The entire Sikh community never identified with the Khalistan cause or had any sympathy for the terrorists. Sure, the extremists got local support, but it was from a microscopic minority. Often food and shelter was taken by terrorists from Sikh families in the villages at gun point. The bulk of the support for the terrorists came from NRI Sikhs sitting safe in Canada and the United States and from Pakistan.
So yes, maybe members of the Babbar Khalsa, the All India Sikh Students Federation, the Khalistan Liberation Army (these are some of the names I remember from those days) should apologise, but not ordinary, individual Sikhs. They were also victims, though the violence was being done in their name.

Two Days I Will Never Forget

2009-11-02T12:52:00.002+05:30

One journalist had recently written that nobody can forget where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of Mrs Gandhi being shot. I remember too.

I was on morning shift in The Times of India and had popped into the cabin of the late V.D.Trivadi, the satirist and in charge of the middles section of the edit page, and Gautam G.S. Vohra, assistant editor and now a development activist. Someone (I don’t remember who) opened the door and said news had just come that Mrs Gandhi had been shot. We came out and moved to the teleprinters. Some of us young sub-editors smirked - `another attack drama?’ we wondered. Some years earlier, a stone thrown at her during a public rally was termed an assassination attempt. But no, this time it was for real.

The rest of the day went in a blur. A special edition had to be brought out, the teleprinters clattered without a pause. I don’t remember very much.

But there’s another thing people in Delhi will not forget – their first experience of/encounter with the anti-Sikh riots. Riots? Hell, no. It was a one-sided, targeted, cold-blooded massacre.

It was November 1. I was on morning shift again, which started at 9 a.m. I was on a 703 or 704, from Janakpuri to ITO. As the bus stopped at the red light on what is known as the Lajwanti crossing on Jail Road, we saw massive crowds on the road leading from the Delhi Cantonment railway station. No one had a clue what was happening (there were only small reports of Sikhs being attacked in South Delhi in the newspapers). Someone thought some train had got cancelled. And then the import hit us – several men got into our bus. “Koi sardar hai kya?” There were none. I quickly lowered my hand which was on the bar of the seat before mine and covered the kada I wear on my left wrist.

As I looked out of the window, I saw a middle aged Sikh man with his old mother on a two wheeler and the mob chasing him. He drove towards some office – it was probably a municipal corporation office or part of the Tihar Jail complex – right on the corner. But the employees there wouldn’t open the gate. There was fright on his face as he tried to speed away. The light turned green and my bus turned. I don’t know what happened to that man and his mother. Did they get to safety? Did the mob get to them? That picture haunts me to this day.

I reached office without any further incident. It was only towards afternoon that the magnitude of what was happening began to strike us. Cars were sent to pick up people in later shifts. When my shift got over, I was sent home in a car with someone else who had to be dropped home, crack reporter Ravi Bhatia (now deceased) and a photographer, probably Chadha saheb.

The images will never leave me. Panchkuin Road furniture shops being looted. “Gaadi rok, mere ko bhi ek chair chahiye,” Ravi joked, as only he can. We all laughed but all of us were shaken to the core.

I couldn’t believe that the ghost city I was driving through was the city I was born and brought up in. Burnt vehicles, still smouldering, blackened shopfronts.

The Kirti Nagar timber market was up in flames – we could feel the heat in the car. At one point, a lone policeman armed with just a lathi (a lathi!!), trembling with fear, flagged our car down. `Don’t go further, there’s violence there.’ With me in the car, Ravi and Chadha saheb decided to take another route. Near Naraina village, we saw a group with a Congress flag chanting that now famous slogan - `khoon ka badla khoon’.

And on the Delhi Cantt flyover – Janak Setu – the most horrifying sight of the day (for me, that is) – the half burnt body of a Sikh, his hair spread out.

And as we turned into Janakpuri from Jail Road, there was a huge poster that had been quickly put up – We mourn the sad loss of our beloved Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It had been put up by Bakshi Properties – a known property dealer of the area and a Sikh.

Did that get him immunity from the rioters? Some said yes, and some said no. I never came to know.

The Four Cs

2009-05-23T21:32:00.004+05:30

There is little doubt that four Cs have been the bane of Indian politics for some time now. They are – not necessarily in order of importance or significance – communalism, criminalisation of politics, corruption and casteism. Each of these (barring criminalisation) was made a major issue by some political grouping or the other. So what verdict did voters give? I feel that despite fulminating against all these evils and blaming politicians for fostering them, people haven’t reacted sufficiently against them.

Communalism

Everybody says that Verdict 2009 was a vote for the middle path, that people rejected the politics of polarisation. The evidence that is being offered is:

# the poor performance of the BJP, which also found its vote share dropping from 22.4 per cent in 2004 to 18.8 per cent in 2009.

# the lacklustre performance of the party in Gujarat – headed by an extremely polarising Narendra Modi – where also its vote share dropped from 47.37 per cent to 46.52 per cent and it managed to increase its 2004 tally of 14 seats by just one (it now has 15 seats in Gujarat).

# the poor performance of the Shiv Sena – far more polarising than the BJP or even Modi – which won only 11 of the 47 seats it contested and found its vote share dropping from 1.81 per cent in 2004 to 1.55 in 2009.

But is this enough to presume a rejection of communal politics? Somehow I am not sure. After all a hate-spewing Varun Gandhi won, with a huge margin. Of course, there is the possibility that this could be because his mother had nurtured that constituency. And the BJP’s lacklustre performance across the country is being attributed to the disenchantment with its lack of firm action against Varun. But I am fairly sure that the hate speech – or at least the over-the-top action taken against him – did swing things in his favour. The drop in the party’s vote share in Gujarat between 2004 and 2009 is less than 1 per cent. That means the Modi brand of politics still has a significant number of takers.

If the Shiv Sena did poorly, it had a lot to do with the fact that the Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti, which had exactly the same plank as the Shiv Sena, cut into its votes hugely, something that made Bal Thackeray fume publicly.

Corruption

Criminalisation

Many people I know have been heaving a sigh of relief that high-profile criminals like Atiq Ahmad, Mitrasen Yadav, Mukhtar Ansari, Taslimuddin, Abu Azmi and Mohd Tahir as well as the wives of Pappu Yadav and Mohammed Shahabuddin got defeated. But the verdict against criminalisation is also mixed. The Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), which has been tracking the financial and criminal backgrounds of legislators has done an analysis of the winners in these elections and its findings are interesting:

# The number of MPs with criminal charges has actually increased – from 128 in 2004 to 153 in 2009.

# The number of MPs with serious criminal records has also increased – from 55 to 74 – between 2004 and 2009.

But there appears to be a silver lining.

# In 85 per cent of constituencies where only one candidate had criminal cases, voters chose the clean candidates. In 68 per cent of constituencies where there were two candidates with criminal backgrounds, clean candidates were chosen. The percentage of clean candidates however went down to around 40 per cent in constituencies with four or five candidates.

The press releases (available on the ADR website http://www.adrindia.org) are not very well drafted and I am not sure if I have paraphrased them properly. The data in the tables is also a bit confusing – how does ADR define criminal charges and serious criminal charges, for example. (This isn’t nitpicking but even defying prohibitory orders to demonstrate is a crime under the IPC). Anyway, this this gives a sense of the general drift – there is no overwhelming verdict against criminalisation.

Caste

Of the four Cs, I am most optimistic about the role of caste diminishing. I know I am sticking my head out by saying this, given how the caste composition of a constituency determines the choice of candidates. Some people also cite the poor showing by Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, which won only 21 of the 500 seats it contested and couldn’t put up a sterling performance even in Uttar Pradesh where it is in power as further proof of the voter rejection of caste-based appeals, which also polarise. But the BSP actually increased its vote share to 6.12 per cent from 5.35 per cent in 2004. why I am confident in spite of that, is that I believe Mayawati’s debacle has to do with a range of factors that relate to governance, among other things. The upper castes who voted for her in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2007 had done so because she held out hope for an alternative to the corrupt and criminalised Samajwadi Party government. There was no way they would have voted for a Dalit party, whose slogan was `tilak, tarazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote chaar’. When they found her government was not very different, they dumped her. So when they believed she would perform, her caste didn’t matter. When she belied those expectations, her caste-based appeals didn’t work.

Clearly, we are going to have to suffer the four Cs for some more time. They cannot be eliminated unless voters rise decisively against them.

Verdict 2009

2009-05-17T15:47:00.001+05:30

Thank God we’ve got a stable government at the Centre. The thought that a rag-tag bunch of either the Third Front or Fourth Front would come to power or even play a decisive role in any government formation was giving me sleepless nights. Through the elections, I had only one thought - that either the BJP or the Congress should come to power on its own or at least in such a decisive position that crucial policies and governance aren't held to ransom by regional or caste- and individual-based parties with no national vision at all. The shenanigans of the Dravidian parties over the Sri Lanka issue only reinforced my misgivings about regional parties playing a decisive role at the Centre.
The people of India have clearly voted for stability. They want a government that lasts for five years and is not pushed into inaction by blackmailing small parties that have no vision for the country. Or an outdated vision, as in the case of the Left parties. Parenthetically, maybe the Left should be given credit for this win. Maybe if they hadn't been so disruptive and pig-headed, such a clear mandate may not have come about!
This is a vote for national parties to form the government at the Centre. The BJP has emerged as the second largest party. So the contest was really between the Congress and the BJP (as BJP's Arun Jaitley had been saying time and again for a long time), and the people preferred the Congress to the BJP.
That said, I don’t think regional and small parties have lost their relevance. In fact, regional parties have a significant role to play in such a vast country like India. Regional parties have arisen in a particular context and have caught the public imagination because of genuine grievances. N T Rama Rao became a huge success in Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s, riding on the Telugu pride wave, because the Congress chief ministers there were seen to be nothing more than dummies of the Centre, who were changed at the will of Indira Gandhi. The DMK and AIADMK were always regional parties, but they have tapped into an emotion which national parties like the Congress (which was once a force in the state) never did. Whether it is the Asom Gana Parishad, the Akali Dal, the National Conference or the People’s Democratic Party, the fact cannot be denied that regional parties articulate and address state-level issues in a way national parties cannot or do not.
The problem begins when these regional parties start playing a major role at the Centre. Then they are not able to replace their regional perspective with a national perspective. They are not interested in reconciling regional issues with national issues, as the Dravidian parties stand on Tamil Eelam shows. Does that mean they should have no presence at all in Parliament? No. They need to articulate regional issues at the national level so that policy making is more balanced. But should they be in such a position (as they have been in the NDA and the UPA governments) where they hold national policies (especially foreign and economic policies) and their implementation to ransom. The answer to that also is No.
But there is an interesting facet to the performance of regional parties in these elections. Not all regional parties have been decimated. TDP and AIADMK were punished because they chose to go along with a Left-led cluster which got identified by completely irresponsible politics. The Asom Gana Parishad, which once fired the imagination of the youth, had gone into a decline for some time now and got only one seat. But parties like the JD(U) in Bihar, BJD in Orissa, National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir, who were never identified with blackmailing tactics when they were part of the NDA, not just won but won handsomely.
The outlier is Samajwadi Party’s performance in UP. But that has more to do with voter disillusionment with Mayawati than anything else. Ditto for the Trinamul Congress (Mamata Banerjee can be quite, quite irresponsible). The TMC and the Congress benefited from the huge, huge disillusionment with the Left in Bengal).
So the second crystal clear fact about this election is this – people have voted against irresponsible politics.

What Next?

2009-05-17T15:45:00.001+05:30

Is the decisive win for the Congress going to change the way the party functions and the way the new government will function?

It’s probably in bad taste to raise this issue, but when I saw Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh addressing the press yesterday, the body language was not that of two equals, which is what it should have been if one assumes that the Congress was voted back on the basis of performance of the government. Singh was not deferential towards Sonia, but the sense one got was of her being the dominant one of the team.

That misgiving got further reinforced when I saw Jyotiraditya Scindia on NDTV talking about Rahul as Prime Minister. Utterly disgusting any way but even more so coming from a young man whose father was considered prime minister material and the only thing coming in his way was the Dynasty.

I am raising this issue because there is a larger question involved – the Congress may have got a free hand vis-à-vis its allies, but how much of a free hand will Singh get vis-à-vis his own party? The separation of the party president’s post and the prime minister’s post is good, but the balance between the two is an uneasy one in any party and is likely to be non-existent in a dynastic party like the Congress.

Will Singh have a free hand to pick his team? In the last government, apart from the coalition partners who were in a position to dictate terms, there were any number of Congress ministers who were foisted on Singh because they were family loyalists and who made public display of the fact that they owed their allegiance not to the Prime Minister but to Sonia Gandhi. They functioned pretty much like loose cannons and Singh could do nothing to rein them in. The coalition pressures will still be there but will Singh be able to hold his own against party pressures?

I am also worried about is the impact of the election results on economic policy, especially because of the talk that this is a vote for the middle path etc. Already Congress leaders are going around talking about how schemes like NREGA, farm loan waivers etc brought in the votes. A lot of the economic thinking in the Congress is woolly-headed socialism and I fear that the mandate will be seen as one for such bleeding heart policies and they will just continue.

What the country needs is a good dose of drastic economic, administrative and police reforms. I, certainly, will judge Singh by what he does on all three counts, now that he is not shackled by blackmailing allies.

Challenging Political Cartels

2009-05-02T21:23:00.005+05:30

Independents in the poll fray are increasingly facing criticism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called them spoilers. Singh's harsh words can be forgiven - even dismissed - as arising from pique, since they cut into votes. All political parties feel that way about Independents.

But when a columnist like Shekhar Gupta starts questioning their relevance, as he has done in this article, then it is time to worry.

Gupta is pretty scornful of people like Meera Sanyal, the banker who contested from Mumbai South, and Capt Gopinath, the founder of Air Deccan who contested from Bangalore South, and even Mallika Sarabhai, the danseuse who contested against L K Advani from Ahmedabad. He says they `betray an ignorance of our democracy’ and `lack respect for the ordinary voter’. Party politics, for him, is the essence of parliamentary democracy and Independents are trying to invent a new kind of politics that is `undemocratic’.

Firstly, I fail to understand how contesting for an election is `a lack of respect for the ordinary voter’? It is, in fact, an acknowledgment of their power. Isn’t that better than politicians who have lost Lok Sabha elections or who know they can never win one entering Parliament through the Rajya Sabha?

But I have far more serious issues with Gupta’s arguments. I admit that there are practical and logistical problems with too many independents in the fray. They reduce the chances of one single party getting a majority, something that is necessary for administrative stability and coherence in policy. But to term the rise of independents as undemocratic is carrying things a bit too far.

Why are such people are coming into politics, and as Independents? Gupta himself points to the growing anti-politician mood in the country. It has been there for several years now, but became more strident after the 26/11 attacks. Such tirades have always been met by taunts – especially from politicians – that it is easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise; why don’t these critics engage with the system and try to bring about change? But when they do just that, they get flak for being spoilers and for being undemocratic! It’s clearly a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t scenario.

Ok, so Gupta isn’t criticising their joining politics, but in their jumping in as Independents. He equates this to `challenging and wrecking’ the system from outside and then building a new one.

But why must people who want to join politics do so only a member of a political party? What if no party represents their ideology or world view? Should they stay out of politics, then? Will political parties give space to such people and listen to what they have to say?

In any case, what’s wrong with trying to build a new system? The point is that the existing system isn’t delivering on a lot of things. So clearly some change is needed. And that is unlikely to come from those within the current system – the political parties. Remember how Rajiv Gandhi tried to reform the Congress? And how miserably he failed? Change has to come from someone new. What is wrong if these new entrants appear `driven by a divine right to come and clean up our politics and governance’, as Gupta sneers? On a lighter note, there is a certain family which thinks it has a divine right to rule this country!

Let's look at Parliament as a political marketplace and apply the rules of the market to it. All markets function on the basis of competition and delivering value to the consumer. Different producers of a product package and price it differently to compete. But market distortions take place. Price cartels are formed and the producers gang up against the consumer, who then has no choice but to continue buying what is on offer.

What we are seeing in Parliament today is a market distortion, really. Existing parties have formed a cartel. Their products (their ideologies) may be different, but the kind of politics they indulge in is all the same. Just like commercial cartels gang up on pricing or other unfair trade practices, so do political parties display a rare unanimity on a range of issues that further their interests alone – hiking salaries of MPs, blocking moves to bar criminals from contesting elections, to name just two – even as they fight bitterly over measures that will further the welfare of the people.

In the market, cartels can be dealt with in two ways. One, government intervention or regulation, which doesn’t always work because crony capitalism tends to kick in. Two, new players in the market, who tap into the dissatisfaction of the consumers and offer them a better, or a more reasonably priced, product. This is a more effective way but will work only if there are no entry barriers.

Forcing people to join politics only as members of political parties is like putting entry barriers to challengers to the current brand of politics. It will mean allowing the existing cartels to continue unchallenged. That doesn’t seem very democratic to me.

I concede that a few Sanyals and Gopinaths may not be very successful. In fact they may be miserable failures. People don’t identify with them, don’t understand what they stand for. But that doesn’t matter. Initially all new players start small, face problems of acceptability and make losses. But they persevere and one day they challenge the incumbents and force them to change. The Indian marketplace is full of such examples. At least these Independents are giving some choice to people who don’t want to vote for the same tired lot of incumbent parties.

Gupta is apprehensive that even 10 per cent of independents could lead to sheer anarchy. I feel that is exaggerated, but even if one grants that, maybe we need some kind of churning in the near term from which a better system may evolve.

That said, this market parable should be understood by the Independents as well. If they seriously want to change the system, they should not disappear after losing one election. Instead, they should continue to engage in political activity in some form and contest elections. At least Sanyal and Gopinath, hailing as they do from the world of business, should know that success is always a long haul.

If they don’t hang on, put up with the grind, then they will prove Gupta right. And we will continue to suffer the current system.

Mayawati and the Middle Class

2009-05-01T20:55:00.003+05:30

I am getting a bit tired of all criticism of the idea of Mayawati as Prime Minister being attributed to urban English-speaking middle class snobbery and a class prejudice. I have seen several commentators take this line in recent months, the latest being Suryakant Waghmore in today's Indian Express.

I am quoting from his article (to which I have provided a link) only because I have it in front of me, but the points that he makes have been made by several others.

First he says "while the English speaking middle class largely opposes Mayawati because of her caste, they do not express this by hurling caste abuses. They try to respond (not react) through English politeness and thus create a new English speaking middle class caste-culture.

"This, surely, runs contrary to a truly liberal attitude that would have celebrated Mayawati's great success and recognised what she has done as a single Dalit woman without any family legacy, in a highly patriarchal and hostile environment."

Now this is patently ridiculous. I have a sneaking admiration for Mayawati for where she has taken the BSP. I am sure that she could not have done this if it were not for Kanshi Ram's patronage, but I concede that she could have wasted that patronage but did not. I fully agree with Waghmore that "Mayawati and BSP's growth represents the deepening of democracy in India."

But look beyond that. What else is Mayawati known for? Personal aggrandisement and corruption. Has she done anything for Dalits or for the state in each of her tenures? Or even the current tenure, when the BSP has a complete majority? Apart from building statues and monstrous memorials, that is? Waghmore comments on English speaking middle class obsession with her statues. But why shouldn't that be subject to criticism? Is that a measure of development of the state or the uplift of Dalits? When, in 2007, Mayawati came to power on the basis of a new social coalition, eschewing the upper caste hatred that had marked the BSP's politics till then, many expected that this would be a sobering influence on her and that she would behave in a more responsible way, focussing on administration and good governance. Two years on, can anyone testify that she has done that? She appeared to be making some right moves in the beginning, especially on the economic front. But she quickly backtracked. The counter argument is that the Mulayam Singh was equally bad. Sure, but the thought of Mulayam Singh as Prime Minister will also frighten a lot of people. Sure no government has ever done anything for Dalit uplift. But does that mean Mayawati should not be criticised for doing nothing for the group she claims to work for?

Arguments like Waghmore's precludes the possibility of the urban middle class reacting to issues like corruption and personal aggrandisement. Despite my cynicism about its apathy, I think this is an unfair charge. The middle class was quite accepting of a Dalit as president and now as Chief Justice of India. If it was reacting purely on the basis of prejudice, then there would have been equally sharp reactions to these appointments.

I am an English speaking urban middle class Iyengar Brahmin. I am petrified at the thought of Mayawati as Prime Minister. But I am equally petrified at the thought of J Jayalalitha (who is not a Dalit but an English speaking urban middle class Iyengar Brahmin) becoming Prime Minister. Because Jayalalitha's regimes have also been marked by rampant corruption and a highly personalised style of functioning. Just like Mayawati.

I am petrified at the thought of Lalu Yadav becoming Prime Minister. Not because he is a Yadav or because of his rustic ways, but because of the way he ruined Bihar. I am more comfortable with the idea of Nitish Kumar as Prime Minister, even though he is a Kurmi and though he is an engineer by education, he is not an English speaking urban middle class person. I am petrified of Ram Vilas Paswan becoming Prime Minister one day not because he is a Dalit but because of stories about his corrupt ways. But I am also petrified of Kamal Nath, an English-speaking urban middle class person, becoming Prime Minister (never mind that he probably doesn't have those ambitions) again because of his reputation for corruption.

Behind such insinuations of the kind Waghmore makes is the belief that Mayawati should not be opposed or criticised just because she is a Dalit. This is carrying the politics of victimhood a bit too far.

Candles Aren't Enough

2009-05-01T18:18:00.002+05:30

When, a month or so after the 26/11 attacks, I had written my post, After the Candles, some friends told me I was being cynical. I had criticised the swish set of Mumbai for their meaningless candlelight vigils, spewing venom at politicians and `the system’, calling for tax boycotts and use of Rule 49 O of the Conduct of Elections Rules, which allows one to register presence at the polling booth and say that one is not exercising the right to vote. I had said these people need to go beyond lighting candles, that the system is made up of individuals and each one of us needs to change for the system to change.
But the voting turnout in the third phase of elections, has shown that, finally, all the ranting on Facebook and on television channels was just that - idle ranting. Voter turnout in South Mumbai (the hub of all the protests) was a mere 43.33 per cent, less than the 44.22 per cent turnout in 2004.
I had written a feature for The Telegraph on 4 January chronicling individual efforts to bring about change and had spoken to some Bombay-ites who were attempting this. One was Owen Roncon, an entrepreneur but better known as Priya Dutt’s husband. He was working to promote active citizenship and said confidently: "Things are going to happen." Maybe I should go back to him and ask what happened.
Another veteran social activist - Samuel Paul of the Bangalore-based Public Affairs Centre – had sounded a note of caution: "This will not be easy to sustain. All this is more a reaction to a crisis than a lasting shift to a higher plane or a mass movement." How right he was.
This is not the first time I have been accused of being cynical about the middle class. In April 2006, I had written an article, Middle Class Angst, in DNA, after candlelight vigils in Delhi and Lucknow and sms protests. This was seen as THE definitive sign of middle class awakening and that this section was shaking off its apathy. I had questioned this view and said in that article, “It's so much easier to light candles and send outraged SMSs. That's a quick salve for our collective guilty conscience.”
That feeling has only got reinforced since then. I am particularly impatient with all this candle lighting business. It has become a meaningless fad. Someone gets murdered and if the case is not solved within two days, there’s a candlelight vigil, with posters demanding justice for the victim. The merits or the difficulty of the case don’t seem to matter. The candlelight vigil worked in the Jessica Lal case because the issue was so outrageous – the murderers had been acquitted by the court after the case dragged on for years because the police botched up on the investigations. But now we have candlelight vigils at the drop of a hat.
But ask these very people to cooperate with the police in solving crimes and they’ll immediately back off. Ask them to not turn away when they see something wrong being done – or worse, not do wrong themselves – and they’ll ignore you.
The middle class is not capable of ushering in any lasting change. That requires an effort that will make our lives a little less comfortable, as I explained in Middle Class Angst, to which I am providing a link. Heck, they’ll have time for nightlong vigils but they can’t go out and stand in a line for an hour or so to vote. This is the middle class awakening that we are all applauding?
Another Bombay-ite I spoke to for the article in The Telegraph was Vishal Dadlani, the singer (of the Vishal-Shekhar duo) who filed a petition against the media coverage of the 26/11 attacks. He said: "It's no longer about sitting in drawing rooms and criticising the state of affairs. Each individual needs to stand up and say I will do one small thing to change things."
Forget it Vishal, just forget it.

Singh Ain't King

2009-04-11T22:27:00.001+05:30

So Manmohan Singh is smarting at L K Advani's barbs about his being the weakest Prime Minister and is hitting out. Addressing members of the Indian Women's Press Corps on Friday, he boasted that he would have quit if the Indo-US nuclear deal had not gone through and that it was his firmness that saw the deal being signed. And of course he took potshots at Advani's record as home minister - citing the Kandahar hijacking, the attack on Parliament etc.

A bad back prevented me from going to the IWPC do, but if I had gone and had got a chance to ask him a question I would have asked him this: Mr Prime Minister, you are the one of the key architects of economic reforms in this country. When you took over it was widely recognised that reforms needed a big push. But the Left stalled you at every point. Why did you not exhibit this firmness when crucial reforms that would have done far more to make this country economically strong were stalled? Why did you buckle under Left pressure each time?

I have no opinion for or against nuclear power or the deal. But when I saw the government striking unholy deals with an unholier party (the Samajwadi Party) just to stay in power after the Left withdrew support over the deal, I wondered whether it was worth it. I have dealt with this in my previous posts, Hypocritical Compromising and Nuked by Ambanis.

Another post, Reforms RIP, had pointed out the various economic reforms measures that are pending. If Manmohan Singh had made this as much as a prestige issue as he did the nuclear deal, the country would have benefited far more.

But let's get back to the point about Singh being the weakest Prime Minister. Do we really need an Advani to point this out to us? It isn't about succumbing to Left pressure (one can argue that Atal Behari Vajpayee also succumbed to coalition pressures on several occasions during his prime minister-ship). But Singh provides so many other examples to prove that he was a weak Prime Minister and that he devalued the office itself.

# Let's face it, Singh and Sonia Gandhi may go blue in the face denying it, but she always had a veto power over any major decision - from appointment of ministers to crucial policies. I'm not talking about ministers from coalition partners, but Congress ministers. Most of them owed their loyalty more to Sonia Gandhi than to Singh. Some were decent enough not to make that evident. Many were not. One Congress minister himself lamented to me about the loose cannons from the Congress in the cabinet. Singh couldn't do anything about them. And what could be more galling than to see a Sikh Prime Minister (and one who is supposed to have been extremely upset about the 1984 massacre) helplessly take Jagdish Tytler, an accused in the killings, as a minister and then to have to see him refuse to resign for several days even after the Nanavati Commission indicted him.

# Neither Singh nor Sonia Gandhi may have had a choice in terms of choosing ministers from the coalition partners, but once they were in was Singh doing enough to see that they performed properly? The answer clearly is No. T R Baalu, the surface transport minister, just wouldn't let the highways programme proceed smoothly even when the economy was in dire need of pepping up. But the Prime Minister could do nothing. Baalu kept fighting with chairmen of the National Highways Authority of India and had several of them changed in the five years that he was a minister. Surely Singh could have put his foot down on this and refused to transfer them? But he didn't.

Take also the example of health minister Anbumani Ramadoss. The Prime Minster watched helplessly as the minister hounded the AIIMS director, P Venugopal. This reached ridiculous levels when the Supreme Court had to direct Ramadoss to sign degree certificates of graduates (the minister had refused to sign them because the director also had to sign them and he didn't want his signature along with Venugopal's). Affected doctors had to go to the Supreme Court as the absence of degree certificates was adversely affecting them. Did the Supreme Court have to intervene? Didn't the Prime Minister know about this? Couldn't he have intervened and insisted that Ramadoss sign them?

# The crowning glory in all this is perhaps the un-edifying spectacle of the Prime Minister going with a bouquet to the airport every time Sonia Gandhi went on a foreign trip.

I rest my case.

Filmy Hypocrites

2008-12-13T17:56:00.005+05:30

Sorry to go on and on about the hypocrisy of the swish set, but the following incident involving Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor was something that was niggling away in my mind when I wrote the last two pieces (What a Shame and After the Candles) but I couldn’t remember the names of the persons and the details.

Today the Hindustan Times carried a piece by Varghese K George where he juxtaposes Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor’s joint statement from the United States after the terror attacks (they said they were disgusted with politicians who provide no leadership while arming themselves with so many security guards) with this incident in October 24 (the incident I couldn’t remember). This was again a report in the Hindustan Times:

“Recently, Film stars Saif Ali Khan and Kareena 'Bebo' Kapoor got a taste of the tight security at the domestic terminal of the IGI Airport in New Delhi. As they were about to step into the lounge, the CISF inspector on duty asked Kareena Kapoor to present identity proof. While the lady appeared a tad embarrassed, Khan asked the inspector, "Aap inhe nahin jaante, kis duniya mein rahte hain? (You don't know her? Which world do you live in?)" At this point, another CISF jawan on duty stepped forward and questioned Saif, "Arrey, aap kaun hain (Who are you?)," much to the amusement of the other passengers lined up in the queue. The security staff were all smiles when the other passengers told them that they were both film stars.”

The report had not mentioned whether Saif and Kareena finally showed their identity proof or not. But that is not the point. Why did they think that their face and fame should get them special treatment, especially on matters relating to security? How are they any better than Somenath Chatterjee and Anand Sharma who throw tantrums at being frisked?

An Open Letter to Rahul Gandhi

2008-12-12T21:41:00.001+05:30

Dear Rahul
It was nice to read about your speech in Parliament on the terrorism issue. Specifically your bemoaning the over-tight security for VIPs, and the near-absent security for ordinary persons. You are probably the only politician to have raised this issue and hats off to you for that.
But, Rahul, merely lamenting this is not enough. You have to walk the talk. This is a subject I had dealt with in an earlier post. I will not begrudge you your security. Your family has seen two assassinations, you belong to an important political family which deserves protection from the state. I am not even remotely suggesting that your security cover be withdrawn.
But can a start be made by listening to security forces who say that a large number of VIPs getting SPG and other protection don’t need it? Can our politicians stop letting their ego get in the way of a revamp of the security system? Can governments stop using SPG cover as a bargaining chip for support ( I refer obviously to Amar Singh’s security being stepped up after the Samajwadi Party bailed the government out on the trust vote)? It’s bad enough that the man is getting that security at all.
Some of this may be out of your hands. But can you start within the Congress by getting the government to withdraw SPG cover to people accused of leading rioters during the 1984 riots? And a whole lot of others who don’t deserve any security, let alone SPG security? You are the Gandhi family scion, but if you give an indication, the fawning Congressmen will fall in line.
Even within your family, you can make a start. All of you, including your brother-in-law, are exempt from frisking. Make a gesture and subject yourself to frisking. No, you are not a potential terror threat, but then nor are millions of us who are subject to frisking. If you take that initiative, minions like Anand Sharma who throw tantrums at being frisked, will hopefully get the message and behave more responsibly.
Maybe then you (and other young MPs, many of whom seem quite responsible) can go and make your point to elders like Somnath Chatterjee, who refused to go to countries on official trips unless he is assured that he will not be frisked. Tell him that sends out a wrong message and only increases resentment towards politicians.
So next time you get on to a flight, or attend a public function where people are being frisked, go stand in the line, Rahul (along with your security guards, of course) and get frisked. There will be people (mostly fawning Congressmen) who will be aghast at the idea. People will make you jump the queue and get you frisked (perfunctorily, of course) before others. But it is for you to stand firm and say if the life of every Indian is precious, I should not get special treatment beyond a certain point.
As a certain group on Facebook is titled, Be the Change. You will endear yourself to all Indians much more.
Give it a thought.

Section 49 O

2008-12-09T12:39:00.003+05:30

Today, I have got a long comment from one Ganesh Kumar to my 2005 post `Is Negative Voting a Negative Idea' (I am providing the link to this and the comment comes at the end). The comments makes several important points about Section 49 O of the Conduct of Elections, which is suddenly being much debated today.
Few outside of Bombay had heard Section 49 O till the electronic media and the south Bombay crowd started this anti-politician campaign. Some in Bombay had heard of it since the Indian Liberal Group, which had been started by late Minoo Masani and of which I am a member, had widely publicised it before some Bombay municipal elections and the 2004 general elections and people have used it there. I had circulated this by email ahead of the 2004 elections.
I strongly support the idea of this section, but am wary of the frenzied campaigning around it in the wake of the Bombay terror attacks. I am not in favour of a blanket use of this provision to reject all politicians, which is what the current campaign is focussed on. We are a democracy and we cannot do away with politicians. In the last post, I had argued that there is nothing negative about negative voting and that it is a positive cry for change. But the current campaign for it makes it a negative idea. Let me hasten to add that I don't club Kumar's suggestions in that category.
Negative voting has relevance for individual constituencies. If, for example, in my constituency I am faced with a choice of only criminals or politicians who practice divisive politics (caste-based or religion-based) or are corrupt, then I should use Section 49 O if I feel strongly about not voting for them. I cannot believe that all 545 Lok Sabha constituencies and all the assembly constituencies will face that situation.
I also do not find anything wrong in small groups of people boycotting an election, if they find that is the only way to make themselves heard on an issue - whether it is cleaning of drains or some much larger issue. But, again, I do not believe that election boycott can be used as a general weapon.
It's easy for the swish set rooting for Section 49 O to do so. Mostly they don't have a stake in the system or they are influential and can get their work done, regardless of the political party in power or the bureaucrats in office. (But by saying so I am not belittling the contribution these people make to the country or say that their views don't matter at all or that they don't represent the `real India'. I find the last part totally ridiculous). The rest of us have a stake in the system, in the policies that are formulated, in the manner they are implemented. So we have to be careful about whom we vote for and how we express our dissatisfaction. Negative voting, election boycott, right to recall (I would like to study the details and see how it has been used in Madhya Pradesh before making more detailed comments on that or recommending it wholeheartedly) are all measures not just to express our dissatisfaction but to work for a positive change and to make the political system more accountable and responsible than it is today. But we have to use these powers and rights responsibly.
Footnote: Talking about individual responsibility, the subject of my last post, on voting day in Delhi - the operations in Bombay were still not over, mind you - a friend who lives in the posh Anand Niketan area of south Delhi was aghast to find a lady and her daughter throwing tantrums because they were not allowed to take their cellphones into the polling booth! Apparently in other parts of south Delhi, people were complaining about `being inconvenienced' by not being allowed to take their cellphones. I am willing to bet that these are precisely those people who, in drawing room conversations, be lamenting the sorry state of security! At my polling booth, it was a completely opposite picture. I had driven down and absentmindedly had taken my purse and cellphone with me. There was some confusion about my name on the voters' list and when I reached the booth I realised my mistake. I was quite prepared to ask the policeman outside or anyone else in the queue to hold on to both while I voted. But the policeman didn't stop me, even though he could see the cell phone in my hand. There was some further confusion about my name in the booth, the booth officials could see I had a cellphone. BUT NO ONE OBJECTED. Others were also taking their cellphones inside. I thought the ban on cellphones had been lifted but no, it is very much in place!!!

After the candles

2008-12-07T12:42:00.001+05:30

So the drama over the chief minister of Maharashtra is all over. Amid another sordid drama, of course. Ashok Chavan became chief minister and promptly Narayan Rane revolted and was expelled from the Congress Party. Even at a time like this, our politicians cannot get over their own petty personal agendas and interests!
Equally disgusting is the reported behaviour of outgoing chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. DNA’s Arati Jerath writes in today’s edition that Deshmukh “made no secret of his frenzied efforts to keep his job. His meeting with Sonia Gandhi would have made his film actor son proud. According to reports Deshmukh was embarrassingly contrite and grovelled for forgiveness. He told Gandhi that he would never shame the party again and begged for one more chance.” I have no reason to disbelieve this. Jerath’s contacts in the Congress are formidable and this must be the truth. (Parenthetically, I wonder why DNA, a Mumbai-based paper, didn’t play this up as a story but let it remain as part of Jerath’s Sunday column).
She further writes “Deshmukh's mentors in Delhi worked overtime to save him. What may have tipped the balance for quicker action is Rahul Gandhi's intervention. Take a decision soon, he is believed to have told defence minister AK Antony who doubles up as the point person for Maharashtra at headquarters. The family scion was galvanised by phone calls from south Mumbai friends who warned him that the Congress would be wiped out unless Deshmukh is sacked. This was the PLU (people like us) connection at work.”
So if the south Bombay circle hadn’t kicked in, Deshmukh would have been allowed to continue? All the bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people – middle class, lower middle class – died didn’t matter. How does one describe this – brazen? Callous? Words fail me.
Which brings me to the anger of the swish set. I hold absolutely no brief for Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi’s disparaging comments about lipstick and powder sporting women ("Some women wearing lipstick and powder have taken to streets in Mumbai and are abusing politicians spreading dissatisfaction against democracy. This is what terrorists are doing in Jammu and Kashmir."), but am getting a bit tired of the champagne set suddenly attacking our politicians and breast-beating about the chaos in a democracy, asking people not to pay taxes or exercise the option not to vote. The candles have been lit and extinguished. It is time for some introspection.
Sure the political class is to blame for much of our ills. But what about each one of us? I repeat the incident that ended my last post – about the lady in the chauffer-driven saloon who didn’t stop her car for checking at the Taj Mansingh in Delhi. She belonged to the same set that now wants to hold politicians accountable. It’s a noble enough cause, but what about each one of us, regardless of the socio-economic class we belong to? Aren’t we accountable too?
I was speaking to a former Research and Analysis Wing chief and told him about the Taj Mansingh incident. He said terrorists are sitting and watching such incidents. They are observing the culture and ethos of the nation, not just its intelligence and security set up.
Yesterday, I was driving and my 11-year-old nephew couldn’t understand (as probably a lot of others) why I had to drive 300 metres to take a U-turn and come back to a crossing which was only a 100 metres away if I chose to drive on the wrong side of the road. As a whole lot of other people routinely did. I tried telling him that if everybody broke rules, then it would be easier for criminals and terrorists to operate, since everybody’s guard would be lower. I doubt whether he understood. But he is 11. I wonder if adults would understand the point I am making.
Let’s face it – we are a law-breaking nation. It is not just the politicians and the criminals who don’t respect the law; each one of us is guilty of the same. We jump red lights, we overtake from the wrong side, we drive in the face of oncoming traffic, we keep our cellphones on during flights (some keep it in silent mode, not realising that the phone can still receive signals and this interferes with the plane’s communications), we make unauthorised alterations to our homes. The list is endless. And when we get into trouble for any of these, we simply bribe our way out. The swish set does it, the salaried middle class does it, the lower middle class also does it.
And if such indisciplined behaviour gets us into trouble abroad we scream `racial profiling’. Remember the incident some years back when a panicky flight crew got a Northwest Airlnes flight from Amsterdam to Bombay to turn back to Amsterdam because of the `suspicious behaviour’ of 12 Indians? They were simply being boorish Indians and not following instructions, but the flight attendants didn’t know how indisciplined we are as a nation. Thank God, they didn’t. If they had, they would have just shrugged their shoulders and left it at that. And some terrorist would have exploited that weakness sometime in the future.
Our security is as much in our hands as in the hands of our security forces and politicians. Sure politicians must take the lead – let all those who are exempted from screening and frisking voluntarily subject themselves to it. Of course, it is a moot point whether, if the Prime Minister or Rahul Gandhi says frisk me, our feudal mindset will allow anything but the most cursory frisking by the guards. But let them make a start. Let the lady who didn’t want her car checked because she was getting late for a meeting start by following all security-related rules. And let each one of us start by observing whatever rules there are, no matter how irksome or mindless they are. If they are mindless let us lobby to change them. But till they are around, let us follow them. Let us not provide any chink that terrorists can exploit.

What a shame

2008-12-02T22:27:00.004+05:30

It’s as if all the anger is futile. The tragedy in Bombay brought forth an outpouring of anger against our politicians. Let me quote just two, both by Sunil Varma on his Facebook profile:
“Sunil rejoices that the ordeal is finally over. Now, just watch out for the politicians...the disgusting, putrid, rancid set of people who're supposed to serve us.”
“But do we also have to live with our politicians? Just wait for the crap they will spew out from their cussed mouths in the days to come.”
Narendra Modi, R R Patil, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, V S Achuthanandan have made Sunil’s predictions come true.
As I write, there’s the NDTV scroll on the television, one person is saying hand the politicians over to Pakistan, another saying let the terrorists kill them, another saying hand over the country to the military.
But has anyone learnt anything?
The usual blame game is on, albeit in a much more subdued manner. But what is even more disgusting is the drama in Maharashtra over the chief minister. It is clear now that Vilasrao Deshmukh has to go. That should have been done within days of the end of the terror attack, the way Shivraj Patil was replaced at the Centre on Sunday itself. But Deshmukh continues to be Maharashtra chief minister. All because the Congress has not been able to decide on his successor. And the way his successor is being chosen is a slap in the face of all of us, and especially all those who have suffered at the hands of terrorists - across the country.
At the Centre, P Chidambaram’s reputation for efficiency and competence led to his being chosen as home minister to replace the very ineffectual Shivraj Patil, who finally had to go. There seems to be an all-round acceptance of his selection.
But in Maharashtra, caste and other equations are the deciding factors in choosing Deshmukh’s successor. One view is that a Maratha should be made the chief minister in order to checkmate Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party. Another view favours Sushilkumar Shinde because he is a Dalit and his choice could help the Congress cut into the base of the Bahujuan Samaj Party in the elections! The name of Prithviraj Chavan, who is now in the PMO, was also being considered, but he is not favoured by the NCP, which is a coalition partner of the Congress in Maharashtra. Chavan himself is not keen on moving to the state. Where is competence and efficiency in all this? Is this what a state ravaged by terror attacks needs?
There’s talk that politicians are out of touch with popular sentiment. Are they? I doubt that. I think it is just sheer arrogance – they know people feel this way about them but they couldn’t care less.
NDTV had a discussion the other day asking whether we would be willing to give up a bit of our personal liberties in the fight against terror. My reply to that would be: yes, I will, but what about Somenath Chatterjee, who refuses to visit foreign countries on official tours if they cannot assure him that he will not be frisked? What about Robert Vadra who is exempt from frisking only because he is married into a particular family? Actually, what about all those who are exempt from frisking for some reason or another?
Sunil wrote on his Facebook profile: “The time to be lazy, apathetic and indifference is over now!” ” Yes it is. It is time for ordinary people like us to question why, as The Times of India reports, 1700 out of 7000 National Security Guard personnel are guarding VIPs (some whose names we've never heard of, others with highly dubious credentials like Sajjan Kumar who was seen to have led mobs against Sikhs in 1984) but the rest of us have to depend on our good luck to escape terror attacks. Why Somenath Chowdhury should be exempt from frisking but the rest of us have to subject ourselves to it? So we are all potential carriers of terror just because we are not in politically powerful positions or are not born into or married into politically powerful families?
But why blame politicians alone? As I was watching the terror attacks on television , one image just kept coming back to my mind. It was after the attack on the J W Marriot in Pakistan and hotels here had tightened security. Cars were being checked at the gate of the Taj Mansingh in Delhi. There was a small queue of three or four cars. The large chauffer-driven car immediately before mine was third in the queue and there was a lady sitting in it. As the car before hers got checked, her car moved forward. To my horror, the lady leaned forward and said something to the driver and the car shot forward and drove straight to the portico without being checked, leaving the guards with their equipment aghast. And as she got out of the car and ran into the hotel, I am reasonably sure, she was a member of a prominent media family from the south.
God save our country from such VIPs.

Our Obama Moment?

2008-11-06T20:44:00.000+05:30

Those who have followed my blog will know that I disagree with Leftits on practically everything. But there are times when I have to acknowledge that they have done or said something right. The latest being the suggestion from the CPM that governors of states should not be ex-officio chancellors of universities. This is part of a paper on Centre-State relations. There could be other suggestions in that which I may seriously disagree with, but on this particular point I think the CPM is right.

The immediate provocation for this is the incident where the vice-chancellor of Kanpur University having to resign following a rebuke from the Uttar Pradesh governor, T V Rajeshwar, for denying Rahul Gandhi permission to hold a meeting in the university premises.

A niggling thought - would the CPM have taken the same position if it was still on good terms with the Congress? It is now cosying up to Mayawati and the vice-chancellor's action in denying permission to Rahul Gandhi was said to be prompted by instructions from the Uttar Pradesh government.

But that still doesn't take away from the larger point - should governors be chancellors of universities, considering most governors are highly political. Would Rajeshwar have rebuked the vice-chancellor if Rahul Gandhi were not involved? He, after all, was appointed Uttar Pradesh governor by the UPA government.

That brings me to another point. Ever since Barrack Hussein Obama, all of 47 years old, became the President of the United States, we've had this chorus about when we will get our own Obama moment. And I wonder - will we ever?

Obama's win is the triumph of talent. Can we say the same about young people in politics? Do any one of them (barring Rahul Gandhi) have even a remote chance of getting to - forget the top job - even a job that is commensurate with their talent? If Rahul Gandhi is not holding any significant post, it is only because he hasn't taken it up for his own reasons. Otherwise, there are enough Congress leaders who insist he is Prime Minister material.

Maybe he is. Maybe I am wrong in dismissing Rahul Gandhi. Maybe he is learning from his father's mistakes and is preparing himself for the top job. But look at the difference between him and Obama. He is preparing for a job that he knows will be his one day. Obama dreamed what could have been an impossible dream and got there out of sheer dint of hard work.

I would have no issues if other young people in the Congress got the same chance as Rahul Gandhi. But they never will.

Take the other parties. Are they any better? No. The BJP's prime ministerial candidate is 80-year old Lal Krishna Advani. The so-called younger generation comprise a bunch of 50-plus year olds!

Take the regional parties. Sukhbir Badal is heading the Akali Dal because of his father Prakash Singh Badal. When Mulayam Singh Yadav steps down as head of the Samajwadi Party, his son, Akhilesh Yadav, will take over. Omar Abdullah heads the National Conference because his grandfather founded it. In the Janata Dal (S) in Karnataka, the people who reign are H D Deve Gowda and his sons. Ditto for the DMK.

Mayawati is often spoken of as the Indian answer to Obama. I disagree. She has come to where she is because she was spotted by BSP founder Kanshi Ram who recognised her talent and groomed her - the same way Rahul Gandhi, Sukhbir Badal, Omar Abdullah and Akhilesh Yadav were and are being groomed. Like Rahul Gandhi, she knew the top job was hers. She didn't have to fight her way up, struggle the way Obama has. Kanshi Ram didn't give the same opportunities to other young people in the BSP as he gave Mayawati.

Till Indian political parties start recognising talent - genuine talent - and giving it space to nurture and grow, I am afraid we will never have our Obama moment.

And quite separately, listening to Obama's speech gave me goosebumps. When was the last time any of our leaders has given such a stirring speech, outlining a vision for the country. The closest would be Rajiv Gandhi's speech at the Congress centenary celebrations in 1985, the famous one in which he lambasted the powerbrokers in the Congress. But that was a vision for the party. What about the nation?

I was also moved by John McCain's speech conceding defeat. How gracious and dignified. Again, when was the last time we saw such dignity in defeat in India? Leaders of parties that have lost promise to play a constructive opposition role and after that token statement, indulge in petty and absolutely graceless barbs.

We, as a nation, will have to address all this before we can have our own Obama moment.

Let's talk communal for a change

2008-11-06T20:37:00.003+05:30

A wonderful piece in DNA.

R Jagannathan

Why does the emergence of terrorism in the Hindu fold come as no surprise to anybody? My answer: every community in India, at some level, has a sense of aversion or ambivalence towards the "other", whether that "other" is defined in religious, caste, racial or linguistic terms. We all know it, but pretend otherwise.

Raj Thackeray has Biharis, Hindus have Muslims or Christian as hate objects, secularists have their Sangh Parivar, the Marxists have their class enemies. Everyone has an "other" - real or imaginary foe - to fight with. Once we are sure there is no "other" within earshot, our true feelings emerge. Xenophobia, bigotry and insecurities emerge centre-stage.

We cannot be truly secular unless the unstated fears and insecurities of all our peoples are acknowledged and addressed. Once we let it all hang out, we can learn to be less communal, less sectarian. Bigotry thrives only when we fail to acknowledge our deepest worries and concerns, however unreal they may be.

If Muslims fear that their identity is going to be overwhelmed in a Hindu-majority India, let us acknowledge it. If Hindus are worried about conversions, let them say so without fear of ridicule. We can find ways to address these fears. Instead, what we have done is de-legitimise these concerns by branding it all as communal. This leaves the Sangh Parivar as the sole torch-bearer of Hindu concerns.

So how do we build a truly tolerant and secular society from here? I have four broad suggestions.

First, we should never accept any justification for violence by anybody. If Hindu extremists justify the Malegaon blasts as retribution for earlier acts of terror by Muslims, the latter can justify their handiwork as revenge for the post-Godhra massacres. Hindus can then talk about the Godhra train fire. There is only one way to end mindless violence - and that is by ignoring all rationalisations for it.

Second, we should abolish all politically-appointed commissions of inquiry and replace them with a permanent Truth Commission manned by people with impeccable personal credibility. Two enquiries were set up to look into the Godhra fire - one by Lalu Prasad and the other by Narendra Modi. Both gave out findings convenient to their political masters. If commissions have to have any credibility, they have to be citizen-oriented and depoliticised. A permanent Truth Commission that is charged with the responsibility of finding out the truth - and improving on it with more evidence - would be able to do this much better and with far less rancour.

Third, all histories must be recognised as partly true. Historians tend to think of history as their property. This is not simply true. Every history has a bias, and there are several ways of telling it. If histories are not told openly, they will be told subversively - feeding communalism. Just as there is a Marxist view of history, there can be Hindu and Muslim views. There can be Dalit and OBC views. There can be psychological and sociological renderings of history. In short, all history is a work-in-progress. History gets communalised when there is no space in it for alternative versions. The only way to decommunalise it is by giving partial legitimacy to all versions.

Fourth, all communities must take responsibility for violent elements in their midst. Hindus must deal with Hindu extremists and Muslims with Muslim ones. To keep saying "no Hindu/Muslim can be a terrorist" is a cop-out. It is also easy to take cover under motherhood statements like "Islam is a religion of peace" or that "Hinduism is the most tolerant" of faiths. There is no such thing as Islam or Hinduism outside the minds of the faithful. A violent Hindu makes Hinduism intolerant. Religions take on the hues of their believers. So it is we who make Hinduism or Islam tolerant or peaceable, not the religions themselves. No community can thus shirk its responsibility for people from their own faiths who turn violent. In the end, terror in the name of Hinduism can only be defeated by Hindus.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1203808

Politicising Encounters

2008-10-18T22:06:00.001+05:30

After having driven Ratan Tata out of Bengal, Mamata Banerjee seems to have forgotten about getting acquired land back for the farmers of Singur. And she's now doing a good turn to Amar Singh who was there to lend her moral support on Singur. So Mamata-di and Singh are chorusing on the Batla House encounter and demanding an enquiry.

Mamata-di has said if the inquiry proves the encounter was not fake, she will resign. Singh was thundering in Azamgarh today that the youth arrested on terrorism charges were innocent and if it is proved that they are terrorists, he himself will shoot them.

The antics of these two is amusing but this entire debate over the Jamia encounter and the so-called branding of all Muslims as terrorists raises several issues.

One, are probes any use? If the findings don't suit a section, the report will be debunked. If an inquiry finds the encounter was a genuine one and the slain youth were actually terrorists, will Singh, Mamata, Mushirul Hasan and sundry others insisting the youth are innocent accept it? They won't. Just like the BJP won't accept the U C Banerjee report on Godhra and the secular brigade won't accept the Nanavati report. Each side will question the credentials of the author of the report, no matter how upright and honest he/she is.

Two, always questioning the police version on everything, if it doesn't suit us. I am no admirer of the Indian police force. It is perhaps the most venal, corrupt and insensitive force in the world. Yes, it has sullied its hands with fake encounters and some which are bizarre mistakes (like the Connaught Place shoot out, where it was just a case of mistaken identity). But to question every arrest or encounter is carrying things a bit too far. The media is also to blame for this. Every time a suspected terrorist is arrested, off it goes to interview the parents who then say their son is innocent, he wouldn't harm a fly, he is being framed. What else will a parent say? Regardless of what the charge - drunken driving or rape or terrorism - parents will always say their child is innocent. But whether it is the Jamia shootout or the arrest of Yahoo engineer Mohammed Mansoor Asghar Peerbhoy for sending terror emails, the police is unearthing evidence, incriminating documents etc. Surely all this can't be fake?

It is a bit hard to believe that the police randomly pick up innocent youth without any leads and then put them behind bars or engage and kill them in an encounter. Why does the police zero in on only XYZ innocent Muslim youth and not ABC or GHI? These charges that the police are picking up innocent youth gives the impression that the police does eenie-meenie-mina-mo every morning with a list of Muslim names and then just goes and arrests/kills them without any proof. This is ridiculous.

That brings me to the third issue - this whole fuss about racial profiling and the lament that all Muslims are being viewed as terrorists. I think that is exaggerated. Ordinary people are not branding all Muslims as terrorists. It is the Amar Singhs and the so-called secular brigade who are giving terrorists and ordinary criminals a religious identity. A terrorist is a terrorist. Why, if he has a Muslim name, should it mean all Muslims are being targeted? If a terror suspect happens to have a Muslim name, should the police not arrest/question him? The counter to that may well be that how come only Muslims are being picked up? But if the terror is being unleashed in the name of Islam, are Hindus, Christians and Sikhs to be picked up? During the Punjab trouble, Sikhs were picked up, in Sri Lanka Tamils are picked up, in Ireland, Irish were picked up. That is natural. Terrorists are known by the cause they espouse.

These people who claim to speak on behalf of the ordinary Muslims are doing them a terrible disservice. By rushing to sympathise with a terrorist (instead of distancing themselves and saying the law must take its own course) just because he has a Muslim name, it is these people who are indulging in racial profiling.

Finally, it is not my case that the police don’t pick up innocent people or torture suspects. The human rights of all have to be protected. But the right way of doing that is not to rant against arrests, but ensure that those arrested get whatever rights are due to them. It was appalling that the police did not allow the families of the Delhi blast accused to meet them even as it allowed journalists to interview them. That is absolute nonsense and it is good that Prashant Bhushan and other public spirited citizens got a court order to allow a meeting with the families. That is a perfectly valid way to help the accused. But to say that all arrests are frame ups and all encounters are fake is a bit much.

Don’t get involved with this Tiger

2008-10-16T22:47:00.001+05:30

It was quite distressing to read about the Prime Minister giving in to pressure from the DMK and making a statement calling for a negotiated political settlement in Sri Lanka and the need to respect the human rights of minorities, particularly Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka.

This came after an all-party meeting in Tamil Nadu where a resolution was passed giving the Centre a two week ultimatum to the Centre to stop the war against Tamils in Sri Lanka, failing which all 39 MPs from the state would resign from Parliament. DMK supreme Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi has already sent in her resignation to her father.

This is utterly ridiculous. Sri Lanka, these Tamil MPs need to be told, is not an Indian state that can be pulled up by the Centre. Even within India, the federal structure puts limits on what the Centre can do. Sri Lanka is another country altogether. The Indian government cannot do anything that will impinge on its sovereignty.

The government is treading on extremely dangerous grounds here. It is nobody’s case that human rights in Sri Lanka should be given the complete go by. Remember, however, that the country facing a separatist movement, which it is trying to address through a mix of political and military means. Remember also that the violence is not one-sided. The Tamil terror groups also have the blood of thousands on their hands.

India, coping with its own problems, cannot get involved in this. If it does, then it will have no right to get worked up every time Pakistan makes a similar charge about India in the context of Kashmir. Indians cannot get all hot and bothered when other countries ask us about Muslims killed in riots or attacks on Christians. India’s Tamil politicians will probably argue that the two cases are not similar, that what is happening in Lanka is far more serious than what is happening in India. But that is all a matter of perception.

We have already paid a heavy price for our involvement in Sri Lanka – Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Tamil militants. It is surprising that a government run by a party headed by his widow should go soft on Tamil terror.

More than that, the principle of respecting another country’s sovereignty has to be respected.

Politicising Development

2008-10-12T21:33:00.002+05:30

I had, to take a dig at the Luddite leftists and tongue firmly in cheek, drafted the following press release the day the announcement of the Nano plant to Gujarat happened.

REACTION OF SECULAR FORCES ON NANO IN GUJARAT

We, the self-appointed upholders of the secular fabric of India, strongly condemn the decision of Tata Motors to shift the Nano plant to Gujarat. This is nothing but a victory for communal forces in the country. It is shocking that industrialist Ratan Tata who is a member of a minority community - perhaps the smallest minority community in India - has decided to shake hands with Narendra Modi, that unrepentant butcher of minorities. Ratan Tata's ancestors may have hailed from Gujarat but that is no mitigating excuse.

This action of Ratan Tata is doubly damned because it came after he spurned the abject pleadings of a communist government and preferred to go along with a communal government instead. He also did not seriously consider the offer from a relatively secular Maharashtra government, which is the state where Tata Motors head office is located.

It also puts a greater burden on all secular socialist forces to fight this evil combination of capitalism and communalism. We will not be found wanting in this fight. Our failure to get Modi out of Gujarat will not dampen our spirits. We got Tata out of Bengal, we can drive him out of Gujarat too.

To continue our struggle, we allocate the following work to the following persons - Medha Patkar to sit on dharna at the Tata site, with her ragtag bunch; Arundhati Roy to write a cover story in Outlook on the capitalist-communal conspiracy, Teesta Setalvad to devote an entire issue of Communalism Combat to ranting about this unholy, oops sorry, un-comradely nexus, and Tehelka to reveal previously undisclosed footage on Modi, Tata and Mamata planning a grand conspiracy to keep Bengal in a de-industrialised state.

When I wrote this, I had stopped watching the news, so didn't see Sitaram Yechury's reaction, when he said it was sad that Tata had shifted to a BJP-ruled state! So I was bang on, as it turned out.

Would it have been better for Bengal if Tata had chosen a site in a non-BJP state? Yechury's reaction is understandable; he is in politics and politicizing development is second nature for our politicians.

But how does one account for journalists writing about the Nano plant shifting to Gujarat giving credibility to Narendra Modi? When I had emailed the above press release to some friends, one of them wrote implying that I was trying to convert people into a Modi fan!! After that there have been edit page articles bemoaning how Modi will use this to his advantage.

I have a few questions to all these people.

# Must business decisions be based on politics? Shouldn't business environment and infrastructure be the guiding principles?

# Assuming that politics must be a factor, then, if industrialists should shun Gujarat because of Modi's inaction during the 2002 riots, should any industry go at all to China, where state-sponsored genocide in Tibet is no secret? Why shouldn't all countries boycott China and snap all economic ties with it? And why should new businesses be set up in Delhi, where hundreds of Sikhs were butchered in 1984, and which now has had a Congress government for 10 years?

# If industry doesn't go to Gujarat while Modi is chief minister, who will suffer? Modi? Or the people of Gujarat? Or is it the case that the Gujarat public deserves to be punished for electing Modi?

Rajiv Gandhi's Legacy

2008-09-14T20:35:00.002+05:30

Haven't had time to write though there are so many issues I want to comment upon. But am taking the easy way out and posting an excellent article on Rajiv Gandhi's legacy by historian Ramachandra Guha in Hindustan Times.

Rajiv: The other side

Ramachandra Guha

Hindustan Times 14 September 2008

I think it was Voltaire who said that while we can flatter the living, the dead deserve nothing less than the truth. I recalled that injunction when reading Vir Sanghvi's tribute to the late Rajiv Gandhi (Remembering Rajiv, Sunday HT, September 7). This praises Gandhi as a compassionate visionary who helped heal the wounds of a divided nation and then gave it a charter for the future. Gandhi's achievements are marked and celebrated. At the same time, no failure or flaw is admitted.

Sanghvi's one-sided approach is (as I shall presently show) at odds with the historical record. But it is also at odds with his own record as a political analyst. I have long admired Sanghvi for the elegance of his prose and the independence of his opinions. He refuses to see the world in black and white. Unlike many other Indian liberals, he is honest enough to criticise Muslim bigots as harshly and as often as the bigots of his own faith.

In this particular instance, however, Sanghvi has shown a conspicuous lack of historical judgement. Consider this statement, which appears early in his column: "It was Rajiv Gandhi's five years in office... that showed the world that India was here to stay. We had our problems. But our survival was not in doubt."

This is an audacious claim, that does serious violence to our history, and gross injustice to those who actually assured India's survival as a free and democratic nation. These were our first generation of nation-builders, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, and others, who forged a nation from a thousand different fragments, against a backdrop of famine and civil war, and then gave it a democratic constitution and a plural political culture. By the time India held its second general elections in 1957, it had successfully confounded the Western sceptics who claimed that it was too diverse and divided to survive as a single nation. At this time, if memory serves, Rajiv Gandhi was playing with his Meccano set.

Sanghvi makes much of Rajiv Gandhi's modest means. "He was the first Prime Minister to have ever held a job," he writes, "to have watched with alarm as his provident fund deduction went up and to have struggled to make ends meet." This he contrasts with "the unexplained wealth of political families". Once more, one is obliged to remind him that Indian history did not begin in 1984. Rajagopalachari, Patel, Ambedkar and many others gave up lucrative legal careers to serve the nation. Then, speaking of Prime Ministers, there was a certain Lal Bahadur Shastri, who was so poor that he had to swim across the Ganges to college since he could not afford to pay for a ticket on the boat. Austerity and integrity were for a very long time the very hallmark of Indian politics. If Rajiv Gandhi is to be compared to the politicians who followed in his wake, then he must also be compared with those who came before him.

Sanghvi exaggerates when he says that "the only reason India is a software power today is because he [Rajiv] had the vision to see the future" (other reasons include the emphasis on technical education in the 1960s, the nurturing of domestic capability after IBM was kicked out in the 1970, and, of course, the entrepreneurial drive of the 1990s). However, the most remarkable thing about his column is not what he says but what he is silent about. Among the words missing from his assessment of Rajiv Gandhi's record in office are Shah Bano, Ayodhya, and Kashmir.

In April 1985, in awarding alimony to a divorced woman named Shah Bano, the Supreme Court called for honouring the constitutional commitment to a Uniform Civil Code. The Congress had a two-thirds majority in Parliament. However, instead of taking the Court's verdict forward, Rajiv Gandhi had a Bill passed overturning it. Less than a year later, the locks of the shrine in the Babri Masjid were opened. As the political analyst Neerja Chowdhury wrote at the time, "Mr Rajiv Gandhi wants both to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds." Chowdhury remarked that "a policy of appeasement of both communities being pursued by the government for electoral gains is a vicious cycle which will become difficult to break".

This was a prophetic warning. A quarter-century later, Indians are still living with the consequences of those altogether disastrous acts. The BJP won a mere two seats in the 1984 general elections; helped by the appeasement of the mullahs and the concession in Ayodhya, they marched on to become a national party. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism encouraged the Muslim fundamentalists, leading to the cycle of riots, bombs, and more riots that is now apparently a permanent feature of the Indian political lansdcape. The religious polarisation has been hastened by the rise of the insurgency in Kashmir, in whose making, too, Rajiv Gandhi's government played a part, by its rigging of the 1987 elections, among whose defeated candidates were some future leaders of the jihad.

One person who would certainly have disapproved of Rajiv Gandhi's twin capitulation was India's first Prime Minister. After Partition, Jawaharlal Nehru's principal aim was to ensure that India did not become a "Hindu Pakistan". In the country's inaugural general election, his party's main plank was the safeguarding of the secular fabric of the Republic. The tone was set by Nehru's first election speech, at Ludhiana, where he declared "an all-out war against communalism". He "condemned the communal bodies which in the name of Hindu and Sikh culture were spreading the virus of communalism as the Muslim League once did...". These "sinister communal elements" would if they came to power "bring ruin and death to the country".

As the leading liberal born in a Hindu home, Nehru keenly understood the importance of encouraging liberal tendencies in traditions other than his own. He had hoped that Sheikh Abdullah would be the voice of progress and reason among Indian Muslims, but the Sheikh had other ambitions. Then Nehru put his faith in the brilliant, Cambridge-educated scholar, Saifuddin Tyabji. Tragically, Tyabji died in his early forties, just as he was making his mark in Parliament.

In the 1950s, Ambedkar, as Law Minister, and Nehru, as Prime Minister, reformed the personal laws of Hindus, allowing Hindu women to choose their marriage partners, to divorce, and to own property. They believed that when Muslims were more secure and had developed a liberal leadership of their own, such reforms would be made to their archaic laws, too. The conjunction that Ambedkar and Nehru had hoped for finally arrived in 1985.

Rajiv Gandhi had 400 MPs, a Supreme Court verdict, and a liberal Muslim willing to bat for him (Arif Mohammed Khan). That he still flunked it may be attributed either to a lack of a sense of history or a lack of a robust commitment to liberal principles - or perhaps both.

I do not want to make the reverse mistake, of seeing Rajiv Gandhi's record in office as wholly flawed. He did reconcile the Mizos, he did encourage technological innovation, and he did promote panchayati raj (a contribution strangely unmentioned by Mr Sanghvi). At the same time, his policies encouraged the most reactionary elements among Hindus and Muslims, whose rivalry has since promoted a huge amount of discord and violence, the very discord and violence that Sanghvi himself, in other columns, has tried bravely to combat.

Disgusting Churlishness

2008-07-29T23:08:00.000+05:30

What can one say about Sushma Swaraj’s remark that the blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad were to divert attention from the cash for votes scandal, and that it was a ploy to raise a bogey about the BJP to woo back the Muslims whom the Congress had alienated because of the nuclear deal. Bilge, as a friend, Sunil Varma, describes it. When, in 2004, she threatened to shave her head and sleep on the floor if Sonia Gandhi became Prime Minister, it was just very funny (not the least because she became the butt of ribald jokes by journalists even as they were waiting for the BJP briefing to start at the party headquarters). But this is not funny. It is disgusting. It is sickening.

What it brings to mind is the United States immediately after the 9/11 attacks and former President Bill Clinton immediately declaring all support for incumbent President George Bush. No finger pointing, no blame game. Dignified support. Bush’s post-9/11 policies may be attacked by the Democrats but at the time of crisis, there was no name-calling.

What’s surprising is how the BJP is not distancing itself from her remarks, with its top leaders preferring to keep quiet. Are we to believe, then, that the party endorses her views?

But why blame Swaraj alone? She has only taken to an extreme and disgusting degree what all our politicians are adept at – blame the other party, especially the ruling party, for everything that goes wrong. So what if when your party was in power you did exactly what the present one is doing. We are all reacting now because of the words she used, but after every blast in any state, there is an immediate cry from the opposition in that state that the government has failed in its duty and should resign. So every time there is a blast the BJP will accuse the Congress of going soft on terror (forgetting what it did in the Kandahar hijack case) and every time there is a communal riot when the NDA is ruling, the Congress will blame the BJP for it. This cuts across politicians and parties. What can you do with a bunch of politicians who politicise even the Nithari killings and the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case?

Look at economic policy. Economic policy has a strongly political angle to it, but how can stands change depending on where a party is sitting –the ruling or the opposition benches? But that is precisely what happens. The NDA is now saying it will not support the pending economic reform legislation in Parliament. This is absolutely ridiculous, especially since the BJP-led NDA had done the groundwork for many of the legislations.

There are so many examples of opportunistic flip flops. The BJP opposed the opening up of the insurance sector when it was in the opposition. When it came to power, it passed the required legislation. Yashwant Sinha, as NDA finance minister, worked really hard to get the VAT system in place. He couldn’t complete it for various reasons. But minute the NDA loses the elections, he starts opposing the implementation of VAT. When the NDA makes a success of the privatisation programme, Manmohan Singh, as an opposition member, questions the ideological basis of a policy that he himself initiated when he was finance minister. As opposition leader in Punjab Amarinder Singh lambasted the Akali Dal’s freebies, especially free power to farmers. A few years after becoming chief minister, he himself did the same. One could go on and on with similar examples.

There’s another curious phenomenon – don’t take the same view as your opponent, even if the view is something you believe in. Take the dilemma of the Left in the run up to the trust vote. They were worried at being seen as voting with the BJP. If you strongly believe in something, does it matter that your arch enemy also believes in it and will you stop fighting for it just because of that? So the issue on which you withdrew support to the government suddenly became less important than being seen to be on the same side as a party you hate?

That is the only problem I had Omar Abdullah’s otherwise stupendous speech, especially his statement - `they (the left) want me to side with the BJP and bring down this government’. Does that mean that tomorrow if the BJP does something which is right in his opinion, he will keep quiet about it or oppose it just because the BJP is also on that side?

This is childishness, nay, churlishness. And when it plumbs to the level Swaraj took it to, it is. . . . words fail me.

Reforms RIP

2008-07-09T20:24:00.002+05:30

So the Left has finally withdrawn support. In any other circumstance, that would have been reason to celebrate. But if its place is going to be taken by the Samajwadi Party batting for one industrial house (see my previous posts below) then there's not much cause to cheer. One blackmailer has been replaced by another. The latest is that Mulayam Singh wants his nominee for the post of CBI Director. The more things change, as they say....

What's amusing is the unanimous reaction that this will help revive the stalled economic reforms process. True, the Left has been the most strident of the opponents of economic reform, but it would be wrong to say that the Communists the only opponents of liberalization. There are many others who will not allow crucial reforms to be effected. These sections are not just ideologically driven political parties but a slew of vested interests - politicians (cutting across the political spectrum), bureaucrats, middlemen (who operate through politicians). The Left has been stupid in revelling in the label of anti-liberalisers. It has generated all the sound and the fury, but its opposition has been less effective than that of these groups, who have operated quietly in the background and let the Comrades take all the blame. To that extent, the Left has allowed its principled opposition to be used by manipulators.

The Left was hardly in the picture during the six years of the BJP-led NDA rule. But still a lot of reforms were stalled (though that government did manage to get far, far more done than the UPA has). Some of the stalling was done by parties that are part of the UPA now.

Remember also, that there is a sizeable section within the Congress that is opposed to any liberalisation. The socialist lobby within that party - Arjun Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar, are its more well known members - can hardly be discounted.

The process of economic liberalisation reduces government meddling in the economy. In doing that, it also removes the power of patronage from politicians and bureaucrats and reduces the scope of corruption. It also reduces the role of middlemen. So all these groups are hurt by economic reforms, far more than the poor are (actually reforms are the only way to help the poor, but how and the costs will have to be the subject of another post). But it is in the name of the poor that the reforms are stalled. Then, of course, there is industry. Every established player in a business wants to restrict competition - the essence of market-driven economic policies - so that it enjoys a monopoly.

Let's look at a few pending economic reforms.

Agriculture. The economy's largest private sector is also the most regulated one. Sure the sector needs a heavy dose of public investment, but it also needs an equally strong dose of market-oriented economic reforms. The current policy regime, the large farmers benefit more than the small and marginal ones, who are in a pitiable state. One of the key reforms is the relaxation of the state-level Agricultural Produce and Marketing Committee Acts to allow competitive markets to come up. But that will significantly reduce the clout of the arthias and get farmers a fair return for their produce. So movement on this is slow. The arthias and the large farmers are the ones with money and clout in the rural areas. They are the ones who can bankroll politicians; not the small farmers in whose name the politicians act.

Privatisation. Why the government needs to be running a whole lot of businesses - airlines, hotels, to name the more ridiculous ones - is beyond understanding. The opposition to privatisation comes from powerful employees' unions (many of them affiliated to communist parties, yes) as well as politicians and bureaucrats. It is no secret that politicians and bureaucrats milk PSUs. The existence of PSUs also gives them power and patronage. All these will disappear once they are privatised. Recall that the so-called liberaliser Chandrababu Naidu had no compunction in opposing the privatisation of Rashtriya Ispat during the NDA regime because the PSU is located in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and he didn't want to face the political backlash of people being rendered unemployed (never mind that a handsome VRS package was built into all privatisation deals).

Retail. Don't for a moment think that only the Left is opposed to the entry of foreign retailers. Large domestic retailers are working behind the scenes to ensure that Walmart and Carrefour and Tesco don't come in. There is also the small retailers lobby which is now opposing all organised retail. Small retailers form a large chunk of the BJP's support base, so opposition will come from there too.

Freeing up petroleum pricing. The NDA initiated the dismantling of the administered pricing mechanism in line with the Kelkar committee report. But it was NDA petroleum minister Ram Naik who started meddling in pricing again. Of course, Mani Shankar Aiyar carried it further. Petroleum products pricing is a highly emotive issue and few politicians are willing to see reason on this. Opposition to this will come regardless of who is in power and whether or not the Left is supporting the government.

Aviation. Foreign airlines cannot invest in Indian airlines (though foreign funds can) or operate in the local market. Yes, the Left is behind this. So are powerful Indian airlines owners.

Foreign investment in media (my industry). Again something the Left is vocal about. But powerful media groups will not allow this.

But above all, remember, this is an election year. Despite clear evidence that sensible economic policies reap political dividends, no party is prepared to take hard decisions in the run up to elections. In the mid-1990s, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh stopped the reforms process they initiated in 1991, because the Congress lost several state assembly elections and this was blamed on reforms. The NDA in its last year in government removed a sensible finance minister like Yashwant Sinha and stalled reforms. This government will do the same.

So it hardly matters if the Left supports the government or not. Reforms will go into a limbo till the next general elections.

Nuked by Ambanis

2008-07-07T18:10:00.001+05:30

DNA today has a story on the three demands of Amar Singh – an immediate ban on export of petro-goods by private oil companies; a “fair and transparent’’ policy regime to make spectrum available to telecom companies; rework the dollar-rupee exchange rate.
The first is designed to hit Mukesh Ambani and the second to directly benefit Anil Ambani. This only reinforces my belief (see the previous post) that the nuclear deal is not worth this kind of compromise. What’s the point of saying the government won’t be held hostage by the left and then agree to be held hostage by a corporate house?

Hypocritical compromising

2008-07-06T17:54:00.001+05:30

Vir Sanghvi is bang on when he says in his column Counterpoint today, “there is a certain paradox involved in saying that you are taking a moral stand on the (nuclear)deal and then going, cap in hand, to those paragons of virtue Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh.” The Samajwadi Party is not supporting the government because it feels the nuclear deal is in the national interest but because it wants a whole lot out of the Congress.

Finance minister P Chidambaram’s second tenure as finance minister may not have been as great as the first (I am not very knowledgeable about the petroleum ministry, so can’t comment on Murli Deora’s performance) but to sacrifice them or to take decisions on taxing certain industries at the asking of a regional party just to save the government is ridiculous. I am fairly sure that the SP has struck some unholy deal with the Congress if not these specific ones. If Manmohan Singh wants to take the moral high ground on the nuclear deal, this is hardly the way to go about it.

I did not have very strong views on the nuclear deal but I feel if this is the price we have to pay for it, then Indian public life is better off without it.

Our Venal Politicians

2008-07-03T10:54:00.002+05:30

I though M K Pandhe’s remarks about Muslims and the nuclear deal was the desperate rantings of a rabble-rouser from a party full of them. And that others would refrain from such outrageous statements. But clearly our politicians love disappointing those who have any expectations of them. Now others are also picking up the refrain. First, one newspaper reported an anonymous Congress leader worrying about the Muslim fallout. Then Mayawati goes to town about how the nuclear deal is anti-Muslim. And now the Samajwadi Party (which, incidentally, told Pandhe that it didn’t need a certificate of secularism from the CPM) is supposed to be worrying about the Muslim reaction! All the television channels are going on about how the SP is trying to find a via media between saving the government and not alienating its Muslim votebank.

Has anyone asked the Muslims what they really feel? But this is the problem with our political parties – they just assume the role of spokespersons for entire communities. So the BJP decides that it is the sole protector of Hindu interests and the Left, the SP and Ram Vilas Paswan’t Lok Janshakti Party and Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal claim to be the only ones speaking for the Muslims and the poor, while Mayawati has assumed the role of saviour of the Dalits, even though many Dalits may be cringing at her tactics and a lot of it is about uplift of her own family than of Dalits in general.

What is also worrying is the SP cosying up to the Congress. If it does save the government in the event of the Left withdrawing support, it will want its pound of flesh. What will it be? The ostensible reason will be keeping `communal forces’ at bay (though why all those playing the Muslim card escape the `communal’ tag beats me). But the SP is hardly a party which functions on the basis of principles and ideals alone. There will be some hard bargaining on personal issues as well – not raking up cases, protection from Mayawati’s harassment, remaining a silent spectator to corruption by SP leaders. Let no one be fooled that this is about the nuclear deal alone. Amar Singh going to meet the National Security Adviser to understand the deal is all drama.

Today’s Times of India reports that among the SP’s wishlist is removal of the finance minister, petroleum minister, Reserve Bank governor and India’s ambassador to the US. This is downright ridiculous and I hope Manmohan Singh has the courage to say no. The problem is this time he may be under a lot of pressure from within the Congress to succumb. This is a small price to pay for a few more months in power. A stray thought – in making these demands, is the SP really acting on its own or is it somehow putting forward demands from the Left?

Why only the SP? What can one say to Ajit Singh, head of the Rashtriya Lok Dal, who was on television saying the opposition to the nuke deal is not on merits but is political. Does he think no one sees through the fact that his belated support is also political – with an eye on garnering Congress support? This is a man who goes along with every coalition government that comes to power at the Centre (and always becomes a minister) and he wants us to believe that he is in favour of the deal because of the merits. There’ll be some hard bargaining on his part, be sure.

Everybody is just fishing in troubled waters for their own gains.

Like it is happening in the case of Jammu and Kashmir over the land for Amarnath yatra pilgrims. Yesterday, I got an SMS about how Muslims are opposing the temporary shelter for Amarnath pilgrims, so why should Hindus put up with a Haj terminal at the Indira Gandhi International Airport as well as Haj subsidies. It was sent by a friend but it must have been a forward and must have had its origins in some radical Hindu group. Anyway, that is neither here nor there.

The point is that these kind of sentiments are bound to grow given the mishandling of the entire issue and its exploitation by unscrupulous political groups. General S K Sinha, the former governor of Jammu and Kashmir, who is credited with the proposal to use forest land for facilities for the pilgrims, has said in an interview today that this was supposed to be a temporary facility for two months only, but that this fact is being ignored. He says the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) created trouble for its own political ends. Sinha is seen to be a BJP sympathiser. But keeping that aside, has anyone bothered to check if what he said is true. If it is, then shouldn’t that be explained to the people? Surely, ordinary Muslims in Kashmir, who have never been hostile to the yatra, would have understood? If he is lying, then surely he should be exposed. But nobody has bothered to do either.

The role of the PDP is not above suspicion. The marriage between the PDP and the Congress in Kashmir was always an uneasy one. So I have little doubt that the PDP has played some mischief here. So has the BJP, which has no doubt instigated the Hindu protests. But the BJP wouldn’t have had to work too hard for that. The spark had already been lit and it only had to do some clever and cynical fanning.

As we head for elections, these are extremely worrying signs.

My second blog

2008-06-27T08:37:00.004+05:30

I have started another blog - mediaruminations.blogspot.com - where I will be posting stray thoughts about what disturbs me about the media and journalists. I will be cross posting some of them on this blog as well, like the one I have done below.

Dadagiri by Journalists

2008-06-27T08:32:00.002+05:30

I was aghast to see in today’s Pioneer a report about how journalists are demanding revival of CGHS (Central Government Health Scheme) facilities for them. Apparently at the cabinet briefing, they gheraoed the minister of state in the PMO, Prithviraj Chavan, and forced him to assure them that he would take up the matter with the Prime Minister. But they were not satisfied with that and said they would not let the briefing start without a satisfactory answer. They were finally persuaded to allow the briefing to proceed.

This is nothing but dadagiri. One, journalists have no business demanding health facilities from the government, especially those meant for government employees. An unrelated point: the CGHS facility for government employees (which is hugely corruption ridden) is itself being pared down because of the financial strain. Secondly, they have no business holding up a press briefing on a cabinet meeting for these kind of demands.

Beyond Reservations

2008-06-26T21:34:00.002+05:30

This article in Outlook Business is a must read. Chandrabhan Prasad, the well known Dalit commentator, has always had a sensible approach to the issue of Dalit uplift and now he is engaged in some serious on the ground work about how this can only be possible in a free market environment. The study - Occupation-Food Habit-Lifestyle Changes amongst Dalits since 1990” - covers 20,000 Dalit households in two blocks Bilariaganj in Azamgarh district in east UP and Khurjain Bulandshahar district in west UP- both having almost ten thousand Dalit households each.

I have a PDF of a study he has done, Market and Manu, as well as some questionnaires etc. Till I figure out a way of posting them on the blog read the article.

http://www.outlookbusiness.com/inner.aspx?articleid=1774&editionid=47&catgid=84&subcatgid=845

Communalising Foreign Policy

2008-06-25T22:09:00.001+05:30

So CPM general secretary Prakash Karat has been forced to come out and say that politburo member M K Pandhe’s warning to the Samajwadi Party that an overwhelming majority of Muslims are opposed to the nuclear deal and that it should therefore not support it do not reflect the views of the CPM. This follows outrage among Muslim groups as wonderfully reported in the Indian Express (http://www.indianexpress.com/story/327171.html). They told the CPM to stop firing from their shoulders and using them for its political ends. Mulayam Singh’s lieutenant Amar Singh also snubbed Pandhe.

But who started this communalisation of foreign policy? Prakash Karat himself. In November 2005, when India was caught in a dilemma about how to vote on Iran’s nuclear programme at the IAEA, Karat while addressing a rally in Lucknow said “there is a close link between Lucknow and Teheran”. At the same rally, a Shia leader Mukhtar Anees claimed that after Ayodhya, Iran is the biggest issue for Muslims. It will go against Congress.”

That time only the Indian Express had written an editorial against the communalising of foreign policy. This time almost every paper has hit out against Pandhe’s remarks. But I think it was the reaction of the Muslim organisations that has forced Karat to distance the party from Pandhe. But make no mistake; this is only a tactical retreat. The Left will not stop playing the Muslim card.

And these are the defenders of secularism!

That’s another bogey being played out amidst this crisis over the nuclear deal – that secular forces should stay together. So the BJP and its allies are communal forces and the UPA and its allies who are cynically exploiting the Muslims with meaningless tokenism are secular!

A failed promise

2008-02-13T22:17:00.000+05:30

So Raj Thackeray has finally been arrested, after much pussyfooting by the Congress government. It says a lot about the lows to which politics in this country has gone when a simple law and order situation is viewed purely politically. Here is a man who is fomenting hatred and inciting violence and instead of arresting him, the political ramifications of his arrest are being calculated.

There’s another larger issue here – how our younger generation of politicians, far from bringing in a breath of fresh air to our politics, are content to carry forward old ways. Raj Thackeray is only the latest example.

Why do we lament the fact that our political parties are dominated by leaders in their sixties and seventies, if not more? Why do we sneer at the BJP for selecting an 80-year-old as their prime ministerial candidate. Because we expect the younger generation to bring in a more modern vision, a new kind of politics, shunning the identity-based and outdated appeals of the older generation, and a new style of functioning, eschewing the patronage politics of yore.

We remember fondly the political greenhorn Rajiv Gandhi, who held out a hope for the country, never mind that he wasn’t able to realize it and became a prisoner of the old guard.

But today’s younger lot of politicians appears to be letting us down. On the face of it, they’re suave, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, liberal. But to what use? Dayanidhi Maran, 42, appeared to be the ideal telecom and IT minister – a young man who understood technology and the power of Indian entrepreneurship (he and his brother had built up a cable and television business). He was doing all the right things – wooing the private sector, further opening up the telecom sector, bringing in huge investments into the information technology sector etc. But scratch that veneer and he wasn’t any different from the older lot. He demanded and got the telecom and information technology ministry even though it involved a conflict of interest because of the business his brother ran. He wanted an independent regulator overseeing the telecom sector to toe the ministry’s line on a range of issues, even if this meant backtracking on telecom sector liberalization. He tried armtwisting the Tata group to add his family’s television channel as a joint venture partner in a proposed DTH venture. The list could go on.

Take Anbumani Ramadoss, just short of 40. His crusade against AIIMS director P Venugopal was all about being denied patronage rights over the country’s premier medical institute. His interventionist campaigns against smoking and fast food smacks of an outdated mentality where it is alright for the state to dictate people’s choices.

Sukhbir Badal, 45, has been educated abroad and when I once interviewed him when he was minister of state of industry at the Centre, came across as a young man with modern ideas. But he has not given shape to those ideas, even though he has been the virtual chief minister when his father Prakash Singh Badal was ruling Punjab.

So are Raj Thackeray, just a few months short of 40, and his cousin, Uddhav, 48, any different? Sadly no.

Why has the younger generation not been able to strike a different path? Some of it has to do with the way they come into politics. All the examples given above are from regional, family-run parties. That is the only political culture they are familiar with. So they see no contradiction between their otherwise cosmopolitan, modern lifestyles and the feudal style of operation.

But then how do you account for Sachin Pilot, otherwise a sensible young man. Yet he couldn’t stay away from jumping into a caste-ist fray when the Gujjar agitation broke out in Rajasthan. So you had a Wharton-educated young man making patently identity-based appeals.

The younger generation is not living up to its promise. What a pity.

Rose-tinted Reminiscences

2007-12-30T17:20:00.000+05:30

Tragic though the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was, it was galling to hear, amid all the outpouring of grief, those fulsome praises of her. I didn’t have a problem with the countless nostalgic reminiscences about Pinky in Oxford – people generally like to hear and read about personal stories of leaders and other famous people; such stories tend to humanize them.

But it was a bit much to be told that she was this great democrat who wanted to uplift the poor of Pakistan and had a different vision of Indo-Pak ties. This is absolute nonsense. I felt the same when she returned to Pakistan in October in this blaze of glory and was being hailed (as was Nawaz Sharif) as the democratic alternative. Two people whose regimes were marked by corruption and venality being hailed as democrats is a bit difficult to digest. Was Benazir helping the poor in Pakistan when she spent millions on importing Evian water for her family during her stint as prime minister? Or when her husband got the tag of Mr 10 per cent? Just about seven years back, the Pakistani public was bursting crackers and dancing in the streets when General Musharaff overthrew Sharif. Nobody was clamouring for Benazir then. Public memory is short. The failures of the Musharaff administration made Benazir and Sharif seem more acceptable. We’ve seen this happen in India as well, when Rajiv Gandhi was voted out on charges of corruption in the 1989 elections and was all set for a stupendous comeback in 1991 before he was assassinated. There are so many more examples. But does that mean the media and weighty commentators on public matters should also fall into the same trap? Should they abandon their objectivity in the face of a tragic death?

I find the comparison between Benazir and Rajiv also a bit odious. The only similarities are that they came from political dynasties and their parent (father in the case of Benazir and mother in the case of Rajiv) met violent deaths, which pitchforked them into the centrestage. And that both of them were voted out and were all set for resounding comebacks when they were assassinated.

But Rajiv at least had a vision for the country. It’s another matter that many disagreed with his vision and that he couldn’t help realize it. But what vision did Benazir have for her country during her first term? I have read many articles on her after her death, but nobody has talked about where she wanted to take her country.

Rajiv was really reluctant to enter politics. He was forced into it by his mother and later circumstances. Benazir, according to several accounts, often said she didn’t choose this life but this life chose her. That contradicts all the Pinky in Oxford tales from her classmates who remember how hard she tried to be Oxford University union president. Clearly she was hardly the reluctant politician that Rajiv was.

So let us mourn the tragic death of a young leader. Let us be angry about the violence that is consuming the sub continent. But let us stop idolizing someone who clearly does not deserve a halo.

Cliches Continue

2007-12-16T12:07:00.000+05:30

I have little respect for most film critics, barring a couple. I get the feeling that they tend to bring their personal prejudices into play when reviewing. I can almost predict what one female film critic is going to say about a film. If it has Aishwarya Rai, then the film has to be bad. If Aishwarya happens to be in a film directed by a crossover film director, then the film will be good, but Aishwarya will be bad. If it’s a crossover film, it’s always good. Shahrukh Khan will always lift a film above a shaky plot and shoddy direction. Salman Khan is always to be sneered at. I now try to imagine what she will say about a movie and then read her reviews only to see if I am right. I usually am!

I find one thing common among all film critics, though – their Shabana Azmi-Naseeruddin Shah blind spot. Any film starring these two (especially Shabana) have to be raved about, no matter how bad it is. Take the case of Dus Kahaniyan, the movie which is ten movies strung together. All the reviewers gave mixed reactions to nine of the stories. Only one got a unanimous rave review – Rice Plate, starring – you’ve guessed it – Shabana and Naseeruddin. The story was sensitive, the acting nuanced. All the usual reviewing clichés were there.

Till I saw bits of Dus Kahaniyan on cable. Rice Plate quite simply appalled me. Shabana was hamming and Naseeruddin had nothing to do. People criticize Amitabh Bachchan for over the top acting in Black. Why is everyone silent about Shabana in Rice Plate. Old south Indian ladies do not carry themselves the way Shabana did. She could have taken tips from the way Konkona Sen Sharma prepared for her role in Mr and Mrs Iyer. That was authentic down to a T.

The story was a bit ridiculous too. No woman (no matter how orthodox) who has lived in Bombay for decades will sit in a taxi only because it has pictures of gods and then recoil in disgust when the driver turns out to be a Muslim. Or refuse to take back a packet of namkeen she has dropped when she collided with a Muslim man (Naseeruddin) just because he picked it up. Even village women don’t react that way, for heaven’s sake. But just because Shabana and Naseeruddin acted in this film, no one pointed out this basic problem. Clearly, for film critics, willing suspension of belief is not a malaise affecting films in which these veterans star!

Apart from this, what got me was the usual cliché about Hindu orthodoxy, a subject I’ve dealt with in earlier posts – Dixie Chicks and Parzania (16 February 2007) and Profiling and Labelling (27 August 2006). Two stories in Dus Kahaniyan made me see red (a lot of my critics would say saffron, I know but that only reflects on their prejudices).

If Rice Plate dealt with Hindu orthodoxy, another story in Dus Kahaniyan, starring Neha Dhupia and Mahesh Manjrekar, dealt with a woman saving a child from rioters. The way she tried to save the child was ridiculous, of course – she sexually assaults the sword wielding rioter! – but once again the rioter is a Hindu and the child he’s wanting to kill is a Muslim.

As if Muslims don’t have their prejudices and Hindus don’t get killed in riots!

Two-faced Fascists

2007-11-24T17:48:00.000+05:30

I am posting below a column written by my ex-boss, R Jagannathan, in DNA, which is so absolutely bang on.

It’ll also be interesting to see how the Taslima Nasreen case will pan out. Though several newspapers have pointed out the hypocrisy of the so-called secular brigade in taking up cudgels for victims of Hindu fundamentalism while remaining silent on Muslim fundamentalism, that group has chosen to keep a low profile. There’s no hysterical outpouring of condemnation of Nasreen’s victimisation by the more prominent members of that brigade. I can understand Brinda Karat keeping quiet (her party is involved) but what about the other prominent jholawalas? What about those who organised a protest rally in Delhi against the persecution of the artists in Baroda by Hindu extremists? Weeks after their march, Nasreen was attacked in Hyderabad. It was met with silence. As her current situation is.

The Left as a fascist force

R Jagannathan

DNA, Thursday, 22 November 2007

http://digital.dnaindia.com/epapermain.aspx?queryed=9&eddate=11/22/2007

It's interesting to see how Nandigram has changed perceptions about the Left, and especially the CPI(M). In recent weeks, one has seen not only traditional Left intellectuals rallying against the party's violent "recapture" of Nandigram, but even stalwarts like Ashok Mitra, who was finance minister in Jyoti Basu's government, now think the party has become arrogant and inept.

This is the same Mitra who once arrogantly proclaimed, "I'm not a gentleman (bhadralok), I am a Communist." The Mitras of the world are now coming to realise that being Communist in the old mould could mean fascist as well. So much so, that even ordinary people have now started talking about Nandigram and Godhra in the same breath, never mind the dissimilarities.

Between the murder of over a thousand in Gujarat and a few score in Nandigram there is definitely some difference, never mind what the BJP and the Sangh Parivar may like to think. But the mindset is the same. If a Narendra Modi could talk of an action-reaction scenario after Godhra, it did not take long for the West Bengal chief minister to justify the party's decision to take the law into its own hands in Nandigram the same way. He said: "(In the) last 11 months, the Bhoomi Uchched Pratirodh Committee, the Trinamool Congress and the Maoists were creating violence with arms. And (in the) last two-three days, CPI(M) workers had paid them back in their own coin." If this is not state sanction for revenge, what is?

The RSS and CPI(M) are two sides of the same coin. One espouses fascism in the name of the party and the other in the name of Hindutva. Neither is democratic. One hears little about what goes on in RSS conclaves or at the CPI(M)'s politburo meetings. And the reason is the same: if one knows who said what at a meeting, then individuals will begin to matter and the party/sangh can never reign supreme.

Let's look at other similarities. The Left accuses the Guru Golwalkar of the RSS of being a Hitler fan, but sees no ignominy in lionising Stalin and Mao, the biggest mass murderers after Hitler. One mindless reference to Hitler in Golwalkar's book (later expunged) is enough to condemn him as fascist, but decades of idolisation of Stalin does not taint the Left with fascistic attributes.

Why hasn't the general public seen through the Left's mask of democratic behaviour? Two reasons. One, we all naively believe that the Left champions the cause of the poor. This automatically blinds us to the possibility that they may be after power for its own sake; and to gain power and retain it, they may be as willing as Modi to use violence. For most of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was by no means certain that the Left would win again and again in West Bengal, they were busy using strong-arm tactics to win elections. The latent arrogance and fascism is surfacing overtly only now because they have come to believe that their hold on power is absolute.

The second reason is their antagonism to the Sangh Parivar. Since few people have any doubts about the character of the Sangh, we assume that anyone fighting the RSS must be a democrat or secular or both. Clearly a fallacy. In fact, the only two groups that have fought pitched battles for non-sectarian reasons are the RSS and the CPI(M) - in Kerala. The reason is simple: they look at each other and see themselves. This is what they are trying to exorcise by calling each other fascists.

It has taken the murder of Rizwanur and the mayhem in Nandigram to open the eyes of intellectuals all over the country. We now know, fascism is not defined by the colour of your warpaint. Saffron or red, it's your mindset that defines it.

The de Soto Path

2007-11-24T17:39:00.000+05:30

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto was in town in last month and I did this interview with him which appeared in BusinessWorld. Funny really, how no one has invited this man to India though what he says and his writings are far more relevant to us than what a whole lot of others say. He had been invited by McKinsey. Interestingly, he told me he was to be here in October at the invitation of Sonia Gandhi but couldn’t make it. Did woolly-headed socialist Sonia really understand the significance of de Soto? He probably would have rubbished half the things her government is doing.

http://www.businessworld.in/content/view/2935/3015

IN CONVERSATION

'Most Heads Of State I Work For Are Outright Marxists'

Few economists have the distinction of having been attacked with 500 kg of dynamite and machine guns. That's perhaps a measure of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's influence. His first book, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism, countered the philosophy of the Shining Path rebels of the 1980s. Designated by Time as one of the five leading Latin American innovators, de Soto is not a blind advocate of western-style capitalism, as evident from his second book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. His issues are those most developing countries are wrestling with - informal economy, property rights, unauthorised constructions, land acquisition, etc. The poor are at the core of his writings. The Lima-based Institute for Liberty and Democracy, of which he is the president, advises nearly 80 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa and East Europe. Talking to Seetha while on a private visit to Delhi, de Soto argues for empirical research and numbers to strengthen the case for market-oriented reforms that help the poor. Excerpts:

You are perhaps the only economist who has been the target of bomb attacks.

That probably means I had a meaningful and very radical message. The Other Path provided very clear alternatives to the ultra-left Shining Path movement in Peru. The book was taken up as a motivational force by many groups. As more and more people used it to explain why it was a good idea to have economic freedom of a certain sort, the rebels found it more and more in their interest to bomb us. They said they were having trouble recruiting for their ranks. But it only made us much more visible and popular. It was not just an academic work; it was a book that had consequences. It was put in a political context - to give an alternative explanation for poverty and oppression - and it worked.

You're a strong advocate of market economy but you also say capitalism is like a private club.

I term capitalism for a few as mercantilism. The first bourgeois capitalists were very exclusivist. They didn't necessarily believe in the market, though they believed in the private sector. The fact that a few succeed doesn't mean it is a real market order, but only a system that works for a few. If it is perceived as a system that does not provide opportunity for everybody, it will collapse. I favour a market economy that's open to everybody, not as an act of faith, but simply because I don't know of a better system.

In India, market-oriented economic reforms are criticised as catering only to a small elite. What could we be doing wrong?

I don't know India. People all over are basically ingenious and entrepreneurial. If the system favours a few, that means it is clogged up. You have got cholesterol in your veins. You have to trace the history of poor people trying to get into business through real cases. Once you find where the cholesterol is, both the left and the right will support you in removing it; they have to be crazy not to.

The other problem is that somebody who thinks tradition must be protected just doesn't allow an opening up, in the name of preserving the culture of indigenous communities. Generally, these desires come from intellectual classes; but when the poor people are given the choice, they move to the United States.

In India, there is a lot of talk about inclusive growth. Should this be through government programmes or simply by freeing entrepreneurial energies?

It's not a bad idea to do both things -remove blockages to the market through change of rules and provide ambulances, hospitals and wells.Everyone knows that what is achieved through charity is minuscule compared to what is achieved through rules that are inclusive. But it's human nature to do the former and get photographed. You can't photograph a change of rules.

But don't all governments tend to indulge in economic intervention and strengthen the role of bureaucracy?

The first motivating force of negative intervention in economic activity is essentially the politician. Politicians are guided by the desire to be popular, to do things that are well-serving. If they don't, it's because the arguments in favour of liberalising the economy have not been well-structured. The tendency of people who believe in the market economy is to repeat and plagiarise a western standard term. So they appear pro-elite. But if you are able to indicate - with numbers, facts and logical structure - that your programmes are good for poor people, you'll have to find a very crazy politician not to support it. More than half the heads of state that I work for are outright Marxists.

Capitalism or the market economy never looks exactly the same in any country; it has different cultural traits. Copycat movements of the west are unsuccessful. You have to have a local adaptation.

You say a lot of unrest and dissatisfaction within countries is caused by a sense of disempowerment of the poor. Is that the only reason for all terrorism?

Terrorism is usually born where there is helplessness - whatever you do, you don't see a future. Secondly, terrorists provide services - the protection of the businesses and the assets of the poor. Give the poor a property right that is efficient. It should not be only a recognition of their land. That's like giving them a knife with only one blade. Give them a land that has a series of functions - that can be used for starting a business, sold and leased, used as collateral. It should be like a Swiss army knife. People will take the Swiss army knife over terrorist protection. Then the terrorists lose their constituency.

Thirdly, don't give up on terrorists. Don't forget that some of the most radical reforms in favour of the market are done by illuminated terrorists like Deng Xiao Ping. People do change their mind. But you have to indicate to them in terms that they can understand.

You say the poor are not the problem but the solution.

The market economy is essentially about scale. How can you get scale if you don't bring in the poor? They're the consuming mass and they are conglomerated, which is what you need for the division of labour. There is a problem when you have people out in the jungle with no connections whatsoever, like the headhunters of Peru or the sheep people of Colombia. But people conglomerating in cities are the solution. Both Marx and Adam Smith said so. I'm not saying anything new. All I'm saying is identify them in our areas.

Why do you say property is a key institution for the poor?

Property is not just land or a physical object. It is simply the right that one has to give an asset - tangible or intangible - a series of functions and create an identity. Secondly, the value of all things tends to increase. When you become more productive, the value of things goes up. Financial value is captured in a property title. You ask Bill Gates or anyone from Infosys the value of what they've got and they will show you a piece of property paper. If you do not give the poor property over the little that they own, their chances of making it in a capitalistic world are zilch. Because they have no way to capture identity, location, capital or give guarantees for credit.

The issue of land rights has come up in India in connection with land acquisition for industry, giving tribals rights over common land and slum clearance programmes. How are these issues to be dealt with?

When private sector came into Britain, they had something called the enclosures. The oligarchy moved with great agility and took over the forests and left a lot of the proletariat in the situation of Oliver Twist - dispossessed. But that's not what happened in France, Germany, United States or Canada. They didn't let the oligarchy take away the forests or the buildings. They gave equal access. It all depends on how you do your laws.

Secondly, in the beginning all poor people lived in slums; that's the starting point. The question is whether you're going to have property over it and whether you're going to use it as a tool for moving ahead. Steve Jobs that started Apple started in a garage. Practically all American billionaires of today started in garages.

A property right means a person's right to something is recognised. It's like a voucher which tells them that they have a title over something that will have to be substituted for something equivalent. But give them security. If they feel you're going to expropriate them without any form of compensation, they will simply stop any movement towards change.

But what about cases where people have encroached on government land?

If you have got 100,000 people who have encroached on government land, how are you going to take them out? It's just not realistic. It's not going to happen. What you can do is empower them and find a way to make sure that when you do, you are not going to set an example for more encroaching. In Peru, it took 21 years to go from custom (encroachment) to law. If you lower the cost of getting land legally, everybody would prefer to earn their land through legal measures than illegal measures. Illegal measures are not costless - it means you have to get thugs on your side, accept corruption. People will always choose the law provided it's cheaper than the illegal part.

But when doing this, it is important to get the numbers. Numbers are very convincing. For example, in Egypt, we tried to find out how many people live in public housing and how many people were given public housing. We found that the number of people living there was ten times the number who had been allotted houses. Obviously, people had built additional storeys on public housing. So the question was do you bring down the additional storeys and destroy the city or do you say I forgive you but this is the last time you're going to do it.

The thing is when you've got numbers, you are able to see what is politically feasible and what is not. If you have to choose between 25 million people and 5,000 big landowners or a few bureaucrats who don't want change, you're going to go for the 25 million. But the first thing you need is an inventory of where you are. How big is your informal sector? What is it constituted by, where are the real obstacles? And then you will see that politicians will do very rational things. Because there is such a thing as reward for satisfying constituencies.

Should the government be acquiring land for private industry?

Logically, if what you are going to do with the land industrially is put it to a higher value use than the person who owns it now, you should be able to buy it. Let the poor people become rich because the land on which they are can be put to more profitable use. Let the market deal with it. This doesn't mean that eminent domain has no role but its use should be very selective. Property should be fungible so that the highest price takes it in the right direction.

In India, operationalisation of a legislation giving tribals rights over traditional land is being held up because of opposition from environmentalists saying this will endanger forests.

That's not a valid argument. The advantage of making sure that whoever has the land or the asset is clearly identified through property record is that you can sanction them if they are damaging the environment.

(Businessworld Issue 13-19 Nov, 2007)

Jamshedpur and governance

2007-08-09T16:05:00.000+05:30

This is an article I wrote for DNA last year, probably my last one there. I should have posted it when it was published, but don’t remember why I didn’t. Don't know what the status of Jamshedpur is now, but the questions that the article raises are still relevant.

Anyway, here goes.

Saying tata to good governance?

Saturday, November 18, 2006 21:11 IST

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1064785

Conundrum of democracy in Jamshedpur

Seetha

"It is creating anxiety in the people of Jamshedpur as they are used to a certain standard of life ..." B Muthuraman, managing director, Tata Steel, sounded very much like a colonial potentate as he said that on camera during a programme on the brouhaha over the status of Jamshedpur. The natives wanted a benevolent ruler (in this case, the Tatas) to manage their affairs for them, he seemed to be saying.

But there's no ignoring the fact that over 50,000 people submitted a petition against converting the Jamshedpur Notified Area, administered by the Tata Steel-owned Jamshedpur Utilities & Services Co (Jusco) into an elected municipal corporation. The issue of Jamshedpur's status is currently being seen in black-and-white terms - bad politicians versus good Tatas. But it is really one of a choice between a representative democracy versus a controlled democracy.

There's no denying that the century-old administration by the Tatas is what made a backward village called Sakchi into a bustling township that is India's only UN Global Compact city. On the face of it, in a liberal democracy, an elected body is to be preferred over any non-elected one, since the former is seen to be more accountable.

So when Muthuraman said, "While you have one successful model which has been there for a hundred years would you like to bring in some other model which however lofty may not yet have been tried", it did come across like a desperate attempt to cling on to control.

Except that many urban middle class Indians feel that the other model - a municipality - has been tried and has failed miserably. The politically-stoked tumult over the drive against unauthorised shops in Delhi (which has an elected municipality), only reinforces fears about rapacious politicians and urban decay. The other proposal - that Jamshedpur should be declared an industrial township - is also flawed from a democracy point of view, though the 74th Amendment relating to urban local bodies allows this arrangement where companies are willing to provide civic amenities.

Providing basic infrastructure is the function of the state and the industrial township idea absolves the state of its primary responsibilities and pushes the burden on to someone whose responsibility is to generate wealth and employment.

The controversy over Jamshedpur also throws up some larger issues about the quality of democratic governance. Isn't it tragic that in a 60-year-old democracy, a representative institution like a municipal corporation is seen as negating good governance, and a non-elected body is being preferred in its place? Isn't there something wrong with our democracy if people are scared of those they elect to office?

There is a democratic way of solving the Jamshedpur issue. Let its fate be decided by its residents, through a referendum, perhaps. If the majority wants to retain the current status, let it be so. If they want it to become a municipality, so be it.

But the choice of Jamshedpur's residents is not going to be end of story. Why should an elected municipality mean a decline in standards of civic life? Shouldn't the 50,000 people who want Jamshedpur to stay the way it is then get more involved in the way it is run, either actively or by electing responsible people to the municipality?

Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. These people - and their sympathisers across the country - can probably never hold their own against greedy politicians and corrupt bureaucrats. Their own apathy will be partly responsible for this. But is the political lethargy of citizens reason enough to prefer a bureaucrat or technocrat dominated system over a representative one?

There are no easy answers to all these. But these are questions each Indian must wrestle with and find answers to. Because on that will depend the kind of democracy India will be.