social science subjects

21 july, 2010
Happymon Jacob Share · Comment (33) · print · T+

AP Protesters shout slogans in Pampore, on the outskirts of Srinagar, on Wednesday. Kashmir's latest unrest needs to be seen in context, wherein the politics of New Delhi and Srinagar has lost favour with the Kashmiris.
It is easy to blame Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Opposition for the troubles in Kashmir. But the fact remains that it is the National Conference-led government's deplorable poverty of politics that has set the State alight again.

The ongoing unrest in Kashmir is the result of a failure of politics, political courage, conviction and empathy. If Kashmir burns time and again, it is because politicians in New Delhi and Srinagar have failed to extend a powerful and convincing political argument to the Kashmiris. Gone are the days when a nation state could demand the undiluted loyalty of its citizens by force and coercion; today, a modern multinational state such as India can command the legitimacy of its citizens only by the power, persuasiveness and attraction of its political arguments.

Kashmir's latest unrest needs to be seen in context, wherein the politics of New Delhi and Srinagar has lost favour with the Kashmiris. It is easy and convenient to blame Pakistan, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), dissident parties in Kashmir and the Opposition People's Democratic Party for the troubles. Indeed, they might have even committed their own acts to fuel the unrest. However, the fact remains that it is the National Conference-led Jammu and Kashmir government's deplorable poverty of politics that has set Kashmir alight again.

Forgotten promises

The historic election of 2008 saw Omar Abdullah elected Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir with a remarkable voter turnout of 61 per cent, despite the vote coming in the wake of the Amarnath land dispute. It was hoped by many that the young and dynamic Mr. Abdullah would lead the State towards peace and prosperity. However, the NC-Congress administration in Jammu and Kashmir has failed to accomplish anything more than the preceding governments and has been equally unable to prevent the State from sliding into further turmoil. Mr. Abdullah also appeared to falter on many occasions in the last two years, including recently when he attempted to blame the unrest on the LeT and anti-national elements. This is a sentiment, of course, shared by the NC's coalition partner, Congress. The Chief Minister has said on a number of occasions that Kashmir is a political issue, first and foremost, and rightly so; what then, one wonders, has prevented him from addressing it as such?

The new government in Jammu and Kashmir came to power pledging zero tolerance to human rights violations. But this is observed more in the breach. The Chief Minister also briefly flirted with the idea of setting up a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission' of sorts; however, it remains one of his pet grand ideas and has never materialised. The process to amend various draconian provisions of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is yet to get under way in a serious manner. The five working groups established by the Prime Minister to resolve State issues at the end of the second round table conference in 2006 have not been given adequate attention, despite the encouraging suggestions proffered by many of them.

In 2000, the NC pushed a resolution through the State Assembly demanding autonomy that was rejected in totality by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government in New Delhi, which termed it “anti-national.” One wonders why the NC has not renewed this demand, given that it is now a coalition partner in the UPA government at the Centre. All the NC and Mr. Abdullah have done in this regard, though, has been to make occasional references to it. It is one thing to orchestrate a litany of promises; it is an entirely different thing to have the political will and courage to pursue them.

Premature triumphalism

The previous two years of mainstream politics in Jammu and Kashmir have been marked by a post-2008 election euphoria that has led to a misplaced sense of triumphalism in Srinagar and New Delhi regarding the victory of democracy and the defeat of dissent in the Valley. The politics of indifference and complacency took root in place of a realisation that this sense of relative stability could be used to usher in a programme of political reconciliation and peace. Mainstream politicians in the Valley forget what has always been true in the case of Kashmir: peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, as famously pointed out by Martin Luther King Jr. The politicians of Jammu and Kashmir and New Delhi should have had the wisdom to capitalise on the positive post-2008 atmosphere by promoting substantive conflict resolution processes in the State. The absence of a political reconciliation process has convinced the people, especially the youth, that their trust has been betrayed by the elected leadership.

Meaning of violence

There is also a widespread tendency among officials and those who write on Kashmir to assert that in a purely statistical sense, examining (for example) indices of poverty and other socio-economic indicators, Kashmir is doing far better than most other Indian States: so what are the Kashmiris complaining about? On the other hand, there are those who argue that the way to resolve the Kashmir issue is simply to pump ever more money into the State. Both these positions are half-truths, if not outright absurdities. Those who defend such arguments fail to understand the meaning of violence in its more nuanced sense. Peace and normalcy cannot be measured by poverty levels, or by other well-cited numbers such as the number of deaths by police fire. These statistics cannot capture the extent of political alienation and the severe psychological trauma experienced, especially by the post-1989 generation that has grown up in the shadow of guns and bloodshed. No amount of economic largesse will tempt this generation to buy unconvincing political arguments. When disillusioned youth fight for a meaning to their political existence, the political parties of Jammu and Kashmir ought to pay attention, for it is these youths who will decide their fate.

Pakistan factor

In this context, the argument that peace building and conflict resolution in Kashmir could not progress due to the post-26/11 acrimony between India and Pakistan falls flat. The fact is the governments in New Delhi and Srinagar need not wait to get the green signal from Islamabad to talk to their own people. Non-interference by Islamabad may well reduce violence and keep Kashmir militancy-free. However, the reality is that the current eruption of violence is marginally affected by Pakistan. Ironically, one could even argue that less interference by Islamabad could even prompt the Indian government to become complacent on Kashmir. In truth, it has certainly appeared thus since 2008.

Why should Pakistan dictate our Kashmir policy when we are certain that for the majority of Kashmiris, Pakistan does not even figure in their minds when they take to the streets protesting against injustice? Indeed, barring the marginal Hurriyat faction of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, no other political leader talks about going to Pakistan. Neither does the majority among them demand a complete separation from India.

Many of those in New Delhi and Srinagar who swear by the argument that Kashmir should be resolved “politically” because it is a “political issue” fail to comprehend what this really entails. Simply put, it means that we can win Kashmir back only by making a convincing political argument, by devising a politically conscious reconciliation process, and by being sensitive to the many injustices the Kashmiris have suffered.

(Happymon Jacob teaches at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

source: the hindu

july 28, 2010



David Cameron



Economy isn't the only reason India matters to Britain. There's also its democracy with its three million elected representatives — a beacon to our world.






It's a real pleasure to be back in India. This is my third trip here and with each visit, time seems to have leaped forward by decades in just a few years. It is exhilarating to see a country growing at super-speed before your eyes. But I'm not just here to enjoy the energy of this country. I'm here with a very clear purpose: to renew the relationship between India and Britain — to re-launch a relationship that is stronger, wider and deeper. Both our countries have talked about it long enough. Now it's time to turn those words into reality.

To show how serious I am, I have brought with me the biggest visiting delegation of any British Prime Minister in recent memory: members of my cabinet, industry leaders, top businessmen and women, figures from the arts, sports and local government. We're all here to make the case that this deeper relationship will be beneficial not just for our own countries, but for the world.

From the British perspective, it's clear why India matters. Most obviously, there is the dynamism of your economy. In the U.S., they used to say: “Go West, young man” to find opportunity and fortune. For today's entrepreneurs, the real promise is in the East. But your economy isn't the only reason India matters to Britain. There's also your democracy with its three million elected representatives — a beacon to our world. There is your tradition of tolerance, with dozens of faiths and hundreds of languages living side by side — a lesson to our world. And there is this country's sense of responsibility. Whether it's donating reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Sierra Leone or providing intellectual leadership in the G20, India is a source of strength to our world.

So it's clear why India matters to Britain. But why should Britain matter to India? I believe our two countries are natural partners. We have deep and close connections among our people, with nearly two million people of Indian origin living in the U.K. We share so much culturally, whether it's watching Shah Rukh Khan, eating the same food or watching cricket. Beyond the cultural bonds, Britain has practical attractions for India. We speak the world's language. We are still the world's sixth largest manufacturer and the best base for companies wanting to do business in Europe. We have some of the best universities in the world and we are a great hub for science and innovation. Britain still has the strengths of its history, not least our democracy, rule of law and strong institutions, but there is also the modern dynamism of the nation that helped pioneer the internet, unravel the DNA code and whose music, films and television are admired the world over. All of these things can mean opportunity for Indian investors and entrepreneurs.

So if these are the foundations of a stronger relationship, how can that relationship benefit our countries and the wider world? I believe there are three global challenges we must take on together.

The first challenge is economic. In the past couple of years, we have seen global economic turmoil. Now both our nations must ask how we can emerge from the storm stronger and more prosperous. We come at this challenge from very different angles. On any measure, India's economy is on an upward trajectory. In Britain, we're waking up to a new reality. For centuries my country assumed we could set the global economic pace. But economic power is shifting — particularly to Asia — so Britain has to work harder than ever before to earn its living in the world. I'm not ashamed to say that's one of the reasons why I'm here in India. I believe that to spread opportunity for all our people, from Delhi to Dundee, Bangalore to Birmingham, we would benefit from a common strategy for economic growth.

We must start by making our own economies as open and dynamic as possible. That's why within fifty days of coming into power, our government introduced an emergency budget to cut red tape, reduce corporation tax rates, improve our infrastructure and show that Britain is open for business. Next, both India and Britain must encourage more investment from each others' countries. Companies like Vodafone, Wipro and Infosys are showing the way — now let's go further. Yes, that means bringing together the best and brightest from both our countries through scholarships and by twinning universities. But it also means doing the more difficult thing of opening up our own economies to foreign direct investment. We have welcomed your expertise in car manufacturing and steel production; and we need you to reduce the barriers to foreign investment in legal services, defence, banking and insurance.

But perhaps the biggest economic boost of all will come from more trade. EU-India trade is worth £50 billion a year already — and I'm determined we expand that by sorting out an EU and India Free Trade Agreement by the end of the year. We also need to hammer out a global deal. Agreement on Doha would add $170 billion to the world economy. Together we need to make the argument that we will only get things moving on Doha if we expand it — because when the pie gets bigger, we'll all get a greater share. So let's demonstrate our commitment by opening up our economies and showing we mean business.

The second challenge we must meet together is ensuring global security. Both India and Britain have suffered grievously at the hands of terrorists. We've worked together in the fight against terrorism before and I'm here in India to propose an even closer security relationship. This year and in 2012, Delhi and London are hosting the Commonwealth and Olympic Games. It makes sense that we co-operate closely to ensure both are as safe as possible. It also makes sense for us to share expertise on defence technology — as we've seen with the building of Jaguar and Hawk aircraft in India in recent decades. And when it comes to the security of our people, we cannot ignore what's happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let me be clear: India's relations with those countries are a matter for you — and you alone. But because when we both want to see a Pakistan free from terror, when we both want to see an Afghanistan that is secure in its own right, again it makes sense that we work together to realise those interests.

The third challenge we must meet together is climate change. Decisive action is long overdue — and that must be global action, with all major economies playing their part. It's only fair that those with the longest history of carbon emissions make the biggest contribution to this. But it's also fair that the largest polluting countries contribute too. Indian action is of course different to U.K. action. We know that India's development needs mean that its energy needs and carbon emissions will have to grow. But by working together, we can help you avoid some of the high carbon mistakes we made.

So this is the case I'm making for a stronger, wider, deeper relationship between India and Britain. I have come to your country in a spirit of humility. I know that Britain cannot rely on sentiment and shared history for a place in India's future. Your country has the whole world beating a path to its door. But I believe Britain should be India's partner of choice in the years ahead. Starting this week, that is what we are determined to deliver.








(David Cameron is British Prime Minister.)

source: the hindu

jug Suraiya,
23 February 2010, 08:59 PM IST
Would a Pune-style bomb blast have happened in a Chinese city? Or a 26/11? Or any of the scores of terror attacks that India has been subjected to over the years?



Forget the fact that the Chinese economy has grown faster than India's. Forget the fact that in terms of infrastructural development - be it power plants and highways or hospitals and schools China is way ahead. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between China the world's largest dictatorship - and India - the world's most populous democracy - is the vulnerability of each to terror.



China has its share of internal problems, its discontented minorities, like the Uighurs and the Falun Gong sect. But dissent, even non-violent dissent, has been ruthlessly nipped in the bud before it can erupt into extremist action. The scars of Tiananmen Square are a deterrent testimony to the consequences of dissidence in any form.



China's relative immunity to terror is due to the fact that it is a 'hard' state, perhaps the hardest in the world. When terrorists attack hard states as happened when Chechen extremists held a schoolful of children hostage in Beslan in 2004 the response of the state is often so swift and brutal that it out-terrorises the terrorists. In the Russian case, the final death toll included some 200 children who were sacrificed by the iron-fisted authorities as unavoidable 'collateral damage'.



The game plan of terror or what is sometimes called 'propaganda by deed' is to ensure media coverage in order to highlight the supposed cause the terrorists are fighting for. In hard states like China and to a lesser extent Russia the media can be, and are, kept on a tight rein. In China certainly, a terror strike would be totally blanked out by the state-controlled media, thus negating the publicity value of such an attack. If a tree falls in a forest where there is none to hear it fall, does it make a sound?



In a hard state like China which with impunity recently violated the privacy rights of its Google users real or imagined anti-state elements are denied freedom of movement and information before they can get themselves organised. India's anarchic democracy in which each and every one of us does exactly what we please is the diametric opposite of China's police state, where the freedom of the individual is stringently monitored and curtailed every step of the way.



Yes, India is a free society, and China is a muzzled and shackled polity. None of us or at least not many of us would willingly trade places with China on that count. But the in-built Achilles' heel of any democracy particularly one as determinedly indisciplined as India's is its susceptibility to subversion.



Is exposure to terror the price that we have to pay for the freedom of which we are so justly proud? The freedom to travel the length and breadth of the country as David Coleman Headley did without hindrance. The freedom to congregate in public, as the victims of the Pune bomb blast were doing. The freedom of our media openly to report news, even when such reportage jeopardises rescue operations as happened during the live TV coverage of the Taj Hotel siege during 26/11.



When the intrusive Homeland Security Act was introduced in the US after 9/11, many asked if in the name of deterring terrorism America was undermining the freedom by which it defined itself. If indeed it has done that, then the terrorists have already won. Similar questions might be raised in India. Will the recent tightening of visa and entry rules for foreign visitors be a genuine safeguard against terrorism, or will they merely deter tourists and business travellers, to India's detriment? Will re-introduction of oppressive laws like TADA curb terror or promote more human rights violations?



Is democracy doomed to be the unwitting bedfellow of terror? That's the truly terrifying question.

source: The times of India

july 27, 2010

Post 9/11: a critical study


J. SRI RAMAN









COUNTER-TERRORISM, AID AND CIVIL SOCIETY — Before and After the War on Terror: Jude Howell and Jeremy Lind; Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, U.K. £ 57.50.


On September 11, 2001, millions around the world sensed they were witnessing a turning point in modern history, as they watched two airliners ramming into the Twin Towers of New York, killing thousands. They also knew they had to look far away from the American shores for the larger story.

Many had seen it all coming in the mass-destructive truck bomb explosion of 1998 in the U.S. embassy in Kenya's Nairobi. If the incident led to the inclusion of Osama bin Laden in the “most wanted” list of the United States, his pursuit in post-9/11 Afghanistan has been punctuated with suicide bombings with equally heavy tolls in Kabul. India, placed earlier in a different category despite the July 2008 attack on its embassy in Kabul, is treated as yet another victim of terrorism of the same virulence after the Mumbai tragedy of November 2008.

This volume covers a wide spectrum of countries, with Afghanistan, Kenya and India chosen for case-studies of the ramifications of 9/11 in a specific area. The terrorist strikes have affected the three countries internally as well as externally, especially the relations — their own and those of the Third World they represent — with the U.S.-led West. The impact is more pronounced in ties linked to the flow of aid from the world's rich to the poorer sections of civil society.

Risky venture

A critical study of the post-9/11 developments, the book by Jude Howell and Jeremy Lind — both from the London School of Economics — is the outcome of their risk-laden journeys across the three countries. Their attempt, however, is to point to the dangers of the changed developmental aid policies.

Howell and Lind hardly claim that such aid ever came without “strings”. It has “always been used in foreign policy as a tool”, especially during the Cold War. What is new is “securitisation of aid”. This has been the refrain ever since George Bush unleashed the ‘War on Terror' on an unprepared world.

The authors quote Bush from his foreword to the U.S. National Security Strategy 2002: “...September 11…taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states ... poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.” This may be greeted with a wry smile by those who remember the terrorist networks the U.S. built in Afghanistan under drug warlords to fight the Soviet forces. British Prime Minister Tony Blair carried the theme further. Witness this: “The threat comes because, in another part of the world, there is shadow and darkness...where a third of our planet lives in poverty...where a fanatical strain of religious extremism has arisen...and because in the combination of these afflictions, a new and deadly virus has emerged. That virus is terrorism...” (From Blair's speech to the U.S. Congress in 2003)

Consequences

The book brings out some broadly similar consequences of the policy pursued in diverse contexts under study — especially for democracy, the Holy Grail of the “anti-terror” crusaders. One consequence was the U.S.-inspired legislation designed to combat ‘terrorism' of a certain definition at the cost of civil liberties. India remembers the furore over the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which the far Right advocated fervently. The authors tell us also about a similar political controversy over the ‘Suppression Terrorism Bill' in Kenya. Another consequence was the ‘War on Islam'. “The de-politicisation of Indian civil society … had clear implications for...the rights of disadvantaged groups. This was poignantly revealed in the weak response of voluntary sector agencies to the conflagration … in Gujarat in 2002,...compared to their responses to the…earthquake in Kutch in 2001.”

In Kenya, the “Muslims have come into the gaze of donor agencies post-9/11,” making them uneasy. And this “unease relates to … the perception of a ‘war on Islam'.” As for Afghanistan, the purpose of the aid-receiving agencies is not “building democracy” but “stabilisation objectives of foreign powers through enhancing the legitimacy of the state.”

The authors argue that the Barack Obama administration has belied hopes of a change in this scenario. They blame it on the “thick web of regulations, policies, laws, institutional arrangements and bureaucratic practices.” Do we need another study to expose the social forces behind the tangled web of the ‘War on Terror'?

source: the hindu

july 27, 2010
Fighting AIDS through education


RAMYA KANNAN









THE POLITICS OF PREVENTION - A Global Crisis in AIDS and Education: Tania Boler, David Archer; Pub. by Pluto Press and Books for Change, 139, Richmond Road, Bangalore-560025. Rs. 400.


Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) may have travelled a long way from the time myths and ill-formed notions about it fuelled a strong prejudice. But new myths keep surfacing every other day. What really drives the response to HIV/AIDS is a complex web of politically-motivated concerns.

It is this web that the Boler and Archer's book tries to map, highlighting the intricate network of political motivations that determine the way prevention, education, and support services are offered in countries hardest hit by the epidemic. And the authors do it pretty well, critically, without humming and hawing, and citing real-life situations in support. Here, then, is an open and honest book, from which nations will do well to draw lessons.

Experience

The authors are both with ActionAid. Tania Boler is a specialist in HIV and education who also did a stint with the United Nations. And David Archer is an acknowledged expert in international education. They put their heads and vast experience together to analyse how HIV prevention has “slipped down the international agenda and [how] meaningful attempts to tackle it are hampered by religious ideology and power struggles.”

“None of the children knew what AIDS was — but they knew it was bad.” Young Somchai (in Thailand) introduces the seldom noticed, but significant, component of discrimination at school. Orphaned because of AIDS, Somchai now has access to treatment, thanks to a local NGO, but is still not at school and has no idea that he is positive too. Where the lack of education co-exists with stigma, poverty and patriarchy, there seems to be little chance of making any headway.

Beacon of hope

However, the authors make it clear that, in the midst of all the HIV-wrought havoc and despair, education serves as a beacon of hope. The reasoning is simple: “Simply staying at school means that young children are in a better position to protect themselves from HIV.” Education has managed to provide African girls with the power to make sexual choices that prevent HIV infection.

From India, Africa, Thailand, and even the United Kingdom, voices speak of poverty, inadequate infrastructure, stigma, loneliness, want of political will, and, in some cases, genuine helplessness to face the onslaught of the HIV and the complex political whirl it unleashes.

South Africa's response to AIDS (under the leadership of Mbeki) comes under heavy fire. For a nation that, in 2007 had the most number of people with HIV infection, the government's response was obtuse, dilatory, and negligent.

The United States, under President George Bush, advocated abstinence and fidelity more than any other form of prevention. These messages inspired by religious right wing groups were spread across the world through PEPFAR funding. The authors, citing examples, show how they were — in several cases, based on inaccurate data — born out of fear, and caused serious damage to the condom promotion programme.

Boler and Archer refer to the huge funding the low and middle income countries get and argue that, if in spite of it, they have not responded well enough the reason is traceable to some basic problems in the way the assistance is provided. Sub-Saharan Africa, despite its heavy load, receives little international aid; and the money that comes is accompanied by conditionalities that are difficult to comply with.

Positive stories

There are, as must indeed be, positive stories too. In contrast to Somchai, there is Kwanjai, close to Chiang Mai, in Thailand; Brazil, where an active civil society and an early and serious investment in anti-retro virals helped tremendously with the country's response; and South Africa's Soul Buddyz, a highly popular national soap about HIV/AIDS that has made a difference to the youth;

Peppered right through with examples from real life situations, The Politics of Prevention has its readability enhanced by combining the story-telling mode and facts. To quote Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Boler and Archer “have given us a wonderful investigation of the ways and means of fighting the spread of AIDS through the expansion of education: better schooling, enhancement of public knowledge, and understanding of science.”

source: the hindu

july 26, 2010



Pushpa M. Bhargava



As it stands, the Right to Education Act has several flaws that will prevent its efficacious implementation. Several amendments are called for.






Something that cannot work, will not work. This is a tautology applicable to the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which cannot meet the objectives for which it was enacted. There are several reasons for this.

First, the Act does not rule out educational institutions set up for profit (Section 2.n.(iv)). The protagonists of such institutions cite Article 19.1.g (“All citizens shall have the right to practise any profession or to carry out any occupation, trade or business”). However, they fail to realise that the Article is regulated by Article 19.6: it is because of the provisions in Article 19.6 that no one in the country can set up a nuclear energy plant, or grow narcotic plants, or build satellites, unless approved by the government.

P.N. Bakshi, a member of the Law Commission, in his book on the Constitution of India says: “Education per se has so far not been regarded as a trade or business where profit is a motive.” Yet, the TMA Pai Foundation vs Government of Karnataka judgment of the Supreme Court in 2003 said it is difficult to comprehend that education per se will not fall under any of the four expressions in Article 19.1.g. Therefore, appropriately, the model Rules and Regulations (R&R) for the RTE Act say in Section 11.1.b that a school run for profit by any individual, group or association of individuals or any other persons, shall not receive recognition from the government. However, this Section will not be binding on the States as it is not a part of the Act. If the Government of India were serious about the issue, it should have made this a part of the RTE Act.

The common-sense resolution of the discrepancy between the TMA Pai Foundation judgment and the model R&R for the RTE Act could lie in the fact that education is a generic term. We need to distinguish between the minimum quantum of education that a citizen should have in order to be able to discharge his or her responsibilities and claim rights, and the subsequent education geared to train him or her for a profession such as medicine or engineering.

As regards the first category, it is now virtually universally recognised that 12 years of school education beginning at the age of six, preceded by appropriate pre-school education, is a minimum requirement. Therefore, in virtually all developed countries, a vast majority of children including those of the rich and powerful go to government schools for 12 years of totally free education. The RTE Act is unconcerned about the four most important years of school education – that is, from Class IX to Class XII.

The second category would include three sub-categories: (a) higher education that could lead to a technical diploma, a first university degree in broad areas such as the liberal arts, science or commerce, or post-graduate education in these areas; (b) education leading to a university degree, in a common profession of prime public interest that would cater to the basic needs of society, such as medicine, engineering, law, or management; and (c) education leading to training in specialised areas (which could vary with time), such as flying, catering or hotel management, which does not lead to a degree but is a prerequisite to join the profession at an appropriate level.

It stands to common sense that the first category should be totally free with no hidden costs whatsoever. In the second category, in the public interest and to ensure that quality is maintained, education in sub-categories (a) and (b) must be in a non-profit organisation. The selections should be made on merit in a means-independent way which would imply that appropriate fees could be charged from those who can pay. Those who cannot pay must be able to continue their education through freeships or scholarships, or bank loans arranged by the institution.

There is no argument against education in sub-category (c) of the second category being provided for profit, for the employers will ensure quality in the institutions providing such education.

The judgment in TMA Pai Foundation would appropriately apply to sub-category (c). There is, therefore, a strong case to ensure that Section 11.1.b of the model R&R of the RTE Act is made mandatory for all schools without exception, through an amendment of the Act.

There is the argument that if people can pay for the education of their children they should have a right to have their own schools where the fee charged would be determined by them or the authorities of the school they set up. Indeed, according to the Constitution we cannot ban such schools, which will essentially be the de facto profit-making schools of today where almost exclusively the children of the rich and powerful go. However, the government will be within its rights to say that such schools would not be recognised as they would violate the principle of equity in regard to the minimum education that every Indian citizen should have.

The RTE Act and its R&R fail on many other counts. These are some of them:

•Experience tells us that no government school is likely to function well (or as well as the government schools did till about 1970) unless children of the rich and powerful also attend such schools. Further, it is a myth that private – de facto commercial – schools provide better training than, say a Central School of the Government of India or trust-run schools which are truly not-for-profit.

•The Act places no restriction on the fees that may be charged by unaided private schools ostensibly set up as a Society or Trust but, de facto set up to make money for the investors, just like a corporate company. If they are truly set up not to make any profit they should not be charging any fees, and the fees paid by the children should be reimbursed by the government. They could then function as a part of the common school system in which children of the neighbourhood would have to go irrespective of their class or status.

•Why should unaided private schools have a system of management with no obligatory participation of parents, unlike other schools that require the formation of a school management committee in which parents will constitute three-fourth of its membership?

•Why do we have only 25 per cent poor children in private unaided schools? Why not 10, 20, 40, 60 or 80 per cent? Would it not create a divide amongst the children of the poor, leave aside a greater divide between the children of the rich and the poor?

•No method is prescribed for selecting the 25 per cent poor students for admission into unaided private schools. Selection by lottery would be ridiculous. In the absence of a viable provision, the private unaided (de facto commercial) schools can choose the 25 per cent poor children in a way that the choice would benefit the school.

•There is nothing in the Act or its R&R that will prevent unaided private schools from charging students for activities that are not mentioned in the Act or its R&R. Examples would be laboratory fee, computer fee, building fee, sports fee, fee for stationery, fee for school uniform, fee for extra-curricular activities such as music, painting, pottery, and so on.

•Norms for buildings, the number of working days, teacher workload, equipment, library and extra-curricular activities are prescribed only for unaided schools, and not for other schools including government schools. Only an obligatory teacher-student ratio is prescribed both for government and unaided schools. This means that as long as the teacher-pupil ratio is maintained, the school would be considered as fit. Thus, even if a government school has 12 students in each class from I to V, it will have only two teachers.

•Two arguments often given for continuing to have, or even encouraging, private unaided schools is that the government has no money to set up the needed schools, and that government schools cannot be run as well as private schools. Both these are deliberate lies. There have been excellent studies and reports that show that the government can find money to adopt a common school system with a provision of compulsory and totally free education up to Class XII in the country over the next 10 years. Further, even today the best system of school education in the country is the Central School (Kendriya Vidyalaya) system run by the government. The country needs 400,000 such schools, and India can afford it.

The RTE Act and its R&R are destined not to work. We should recognise that if we do not take appropriate care of school education, agriculture and left-wing extremism – and all the three are related – we may be creating conditions that would encourage internal turmoil.








( The writer is former vice-chairman, National Knowledge Commission.)

source: the hindu

This is a complete verbatim transcript of Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda's interview with Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu, conducted at an undisclosed location in the first week of February 2006. Highlights and excerpts from the interview were published in the print edition of The Hindu of February 8, 9, and 10, 2006.


Varadarajan: Your party has waged a "people's war" in Nepal for 10 years and the anniversary is now coming up. There are some who say that this war - and the Royal Nepal Army's counter-insurgency campaign - has cost the country dearly in terms of the violence and bloodshed that has accompanied it. In your estimation, what has been the main accomplishment of these 10 years?



Prachanda: For 250 years, our peoples have been exploited under the oppression of feudal lords. The people's war has helped crush the feudal structure in the rural areas. We think this is the main achievement. Also, in the overall sense we feel that in Nepal there is going to be a great leap forward in the socio-economic condition because we are going to lead the country to a democratic republican structure. A political situation has been developed through this process, and we feel this is also a very big achievement of the people's war.



Varadarajan: In your party plenum last August in Rolpa, you took a momentous decision - to strive for and participate in multiparty democracy. If you were going to accept multiparty democracy after 10 years of war, why go about this in a roundabout way?


Prachanda: I want to answer your question in two parts. There is the whole theoretical and ideological question that we are trying to develop, because we want to analyse the experience of revolution and counter-revolution in the 20th century on a new basis. Three years ago we took a decision in which we said how are we going to develop democracy is the key question in the 21st century. This meant the negative and positive lessons of the 20th century have to be synthesised in order for us to move ahead. And three years ago we decided we must go in for political competition. Without political competition, a mechanical or metaphysical attitude will be there. So this time, what we decided is not so new. In August, we took serious decisions on how practically to build unity with the parliamentary political parties. We don't believe that the people's war we initiated was against, or mainly against, multiparty democracy. It was mainly against feudal autocracy, against the feudal structure.



Varadarajan: How difficult was it for your party to come to this decision? How difficult was it to build consensus on the need for multiparty democracy within the leadership and cadres?



Prachanda: An agenda was first presented to the Central Committee on democracy. Then there was an internal debate within the party rank and file for a whole year. After that, the CC plenum unanimously decided that within a definite constitutional framework we have to go in for competition. Without competition, we will not be able to go forward. This was a unanimous decision.


Varadarajan: Is this decision a recognition by you of the impossibility of seizing power through armed struggle? That because of the strength of the RNA and the opposition of the international community, a new form of struggle is needed in order to overthrow the monarchy?



Prachanda: Here again there is not only one question. There is a specificity to the political and military balance in today's world. This has to be seen. The second thing to be seen is the experience of the 20th century. Third, there is the particular situation in the country - the class, political and power balance. It is by taking these three together that we came to our conclusion. We are talking of multiparty democracy in a specific sense, within a specific constitutional framework. We are not talking about bourgeois parliamentary democracy. This multiparty democracy will be anti-imperialist and anti-feudal. In other words, only within an anti-feudal, anti-imperialist constitutional framework is multiparty democracy possible. That is why armed struggle is also necessary, and unity in action with the other political parties against the monarchy is also a necessity. The socio-economic change we are fighting for is against feudalism and imperialism and it is within the context of that struggle that we are talking of multiparty democracy.

Road map to democratic republic


Varadarajan: So if the king announces tomorrow that the steps he took last year were wrong and allows free and fair elections under the present Constitution, the Maoists will not take part? Is a new constitutional framework a pre-condition for taking part in elections?


Prachanda: Yes, you can put it that way. If the king says that I was wrong to have done what I did last year, now come on, let us sit across the table, and then he talks of a free and fair election to a constituent assembly, then we will be ready. Our minimum, bottom line is the election of a constituent assembly, that too under international supervision, either by the United Nations or some other international mediation acceptable to all. Under those circumstances, we will go in for elections and accept whatever the peoples' verdict is. This is our bottom line. But if the king says, come on, make an interim government and hold elections, we will not come forward.



Varadarajan: But will you oppose the parties doing that? If the parties agree to go ahead on this interim basis, what will happen to your alliance or agreement with the parties?



Prachanda: If the king asks them to form a government and the parties go in for parliamentary elections without looking at the demands we have been making for the past 10 years, it would be difficult for us to go along with the parties. Because this is what you had before. The king and the parties were together for 7-8 years. That was the situation. And still there was struggle, because the demand for a constituent assembly is a longstanding one. It is not a demand that came up only today.



Varadarajan: How crucial was the August plenum decision on multiparty democracy to paving the way for the 12-point agreement with the parties?



Prachanda: After the Royal Palace massacre itself, we had made an appeal to the parliamentary parties. There was a general understanding and some meetings were also held because the 2001 royal massacre was against democracy. In the 1990 movement, we were together with the Congress and UML [Unified Marxists-Leninists]. We felt the change that was needed in Nepal was against feudalism but the parliamentary parties were not ready for this. For three years we struggled inside Parliament. For three years we were there. Our 40-point demands were placed but there was not even any discussion on this. So the seeds of our armed struggle were sown inside Parliament, in a manner of speaking. This is a very big difference between us and, say, those in India who say they are waging a people's war. They didn't begin from inside Parliament. We were inside Parliament, so we had good relations with the parliamentary parties for a long time.



The 1990 movement produced limited gains. We could have taken more but got less from the palace because of a compromise. At the time we said the Nepali peoples have been cheated. We said this compromise was bad and that there was a danger of the palace grabbing power again, as had happened in Mahendra's time. We said this from the rostrum of Parliament but the other parties did not have the courage even to act against those elements from the panchayat system that the Malik commission had identified as criminals. And gradually a situation arose where those elements were able to enter the parties, the government.



After the palace massacre, we said that what we had predicted in 1990 had come to pass, that diehard elements have hatched a conspiracy and come forward. And we appealed to the parties to unite together as we had done in 1990. The parties were in government so it was not possible for them to understand our appeal. But slowly, the king's designs became clearer: he dissolved Parliament, dismissed the government and took direct power. This is when I think the parties realised they had been taken for a ride all this time. This is also when our plenum took concrete steps on the question of multiparty democracy. And our statement stressed that the time had come for all the parliamentary parties to join hands with our movement and civil society to fight against autocracy and monarchy.



At the plenum, we decided we needed to show more flexibility, that it was our duty to do this. So we took concrete steps and declared to the parties, 'You lead, we will support you.' This so-called king - he is not a traditional king and the Nepali people do not accept him as king. He and his group are well-known goons and people see them as a regicidal-fratricidal clique. He is not even a person who is capable of thinking politically. So we told the parties, come on, we want to help you. Before the plenum, we contacted the Nepali Congress and UML leaders and tried to bring them to Rolpa. But this was not possible.

Commitment to democracy not a tactic


Varadarajan: Nowadays, we hear the phrase 'The Maoists will sit on the shoulders and hit on the head.' Does this mean your alliance with the parties is tactical rather than strategic, that when the head - the monarchy - is weakened or defeated, you might then start hitting the shoulder?



Prachanda: It is not like this. Our decision on multiparty democracy is a strategically, theoretically developed position, that in a communist state, democracy is a necessity. This is one part. Second, our decision within the situation today is not tactical. It is a serious policy. We are telling the parties that we should end not only the autocratic monarchy but monarchy itself. This is not even a monarchy in the traditional way it was in Birendra's time, so we have to finish it. After that, in the multiparty democracy which comes - interim government, constitutional assembly and democratic republic - we are ready to have peaceful competition with you all. Of course, people still have a doubt about us because we have an army. And they ask whether after the constitutional assembly we will abandon our arms. This is a question. We have said we are ready to reorganise our army and we are ready to make a new Nepal army also. So this is not a tactical question.



Varadarajan: The 12-point agreement suggests you and the political parties have met each other half-way. They have agreed to a constitutional assembly and you have dropped your insistence on a republic.



Prachanda: We have not dropped our demand for a democratic republic. But to achieve that minimum political slogan, we have said we are prepared to go through free and fair elections to a constituent assembly. There shouldn't be any confusion that we have now agreed to a ceremonial monarchy. Some people have tried to draw this conclusion from the 12-point agreement but even at the time we explained to the parties that our slogan is a democratic republic. Earlier, we were saying people's democratic republic but this does not mean we have dropped that goal either. It's just that according to today's power balance, seeing the whole situation and the expectation of the masses, and that there [should] not be bloodshed, we also responsibly believe that to get there too we will do so through peaceful means.



Varadarajan: So the struggle for "people's democracy" will also be peaceful?



Prachanda: We will go for the goal of the people's democracy through peaceful means. Today, we are talking of a democratic republic and our understanding with the parties is that the way to realise this is the constituent assembly. At that time, any other party would be free to call for a ceremonial monarchy, some may be for constitutional monarchy - such a thing is possible with the seven parties.



Varadarajan: But whatever the outcome, you are ready to accept it.



Prachanda: We are ready to accept whatever is the outcome. This we are saying in clear-cut language.

Logic of ceasefire


Varadarajan: Your three-month ceasefire, and then the one month extension, did a lot to improve the profile and image of the Maoists, which had been damaged by certain incidents like the Madi bus blast. What was the logic behind that ceasefire and what are the roadblocks in the way of declaring another ceasefire in the near future?



Prachanda: When we called our ceasefire, there was no 12-point agreement with the parties nor was there any particular political or moral pressure on us from them or civil society. But we acted based on the whole political situation, because on our side too, some mistakes were increasing, from below, in the implementation of our policy and plan. At the lower level, some mistakes were happening such as the Madi bomb blast. So with the middle class our relationship was getting worse. Earlier, there was an upward trend in that relationship but we felt there was a danger of the graph falling. We were saying things from the top but still this was not being implemented. So we wanted the middle classes to be with us, and put out our political message to the broad masses in a new way. We also wanted to tell the international community that Gyanendra is not a monarch, these are autocratic, fascist elements who are more keen on bloodshed and violence than anybody else. We wanted to demonstrate this, and rehabilitate our image with the masses. So for these reasons we decided to go for a ceasefire.



As for the specific timing, there were two factors. The UN General Assembly was going to be held and the so-called king was going to go there. There he would have said he was for peace and democracy. Such a notorious element was going to go and create confusion over there. This possibility also needed to be crushed. This was a question. So we thought of a ceasefire as one way politically to hit out at him.



It was only after the ceasefire that the dialogue with the political parties began. And then a conducive atmosphere got created for the 12-point agreement. We also wanted to send a message to the international community that we were different from the way we were being projected ideologically. For example, right now we are having discussions with the European Union and with others, but among all the international forces, U.S. imperialism is the most dogmatic and sectarian element. The U.S. ruling classes are dogmatic. They don't understand what is happening. We are trying to look at the world in a new way, to change in a new way, and we wanted to send out this message. And in this regard, during the ceasefire, we were quite successful.



Right from the outset, we knew the monarch wanted us to abandon the ceasefire immediately. He was under so much pressure, he had to cancel his programme of going to the U.N. He was so politically isolated that he was desperate to provoke us to break the ceasefire. We knew that we had to sacrifice and ensure that for three months at least it was upheld because there were festivals, and we wanted to develop our psychological relations, spiritual relations with the masses. When we extended the ceasefire by a month, it became clearly established that this so-called monarch does not want a political solution, does not want peace. He is a bloodthirsty element, a fascist and autocrat. And when we finally ended the ceasefire, we clearly stated that if a forward-looking atmosphere for a political solution emerges, and all the political forces are ready for peace and democracy, then in that situation at any time we can again announce a ceasefire, and sit down for negotiations. But now, that situation does not obtain.

Nature of alliance with parties


Varadarajan: As a first step, are you prepared to join together with the parliamentary parties, with Mr. Koirala and Madhav Nepal, and go and talk face-to-face with the king to discuss the future of Nepal?



Prachanda: Immediately after the 12-point agreement, I had clearly said that if there is a unanimous understanding with the parties that we should go and talk to the king, then we will go. We are not prepared to meet the king alone, and we are also requesting the parties that they should also not go alone. Nothing will come of it. Only if we act collectively can we achieve anything. The alliance has to be strengthened and taken forward. For example, right now we have this huge drama of municipal elections. More than two-thirds of the seats will be vacant, and still he is trying to stage a drama.



Varadarajan: But rather than the Maoists calling a seven-day bandh, wouldn't it have been better as a tactic for you and the parties to have given a united call for the political boycott of the elections. That way, the king would not get the opportunity to claim the elections were a farce because of Maoist threats.



Prachanda: Yes. I agree with what you are saying. That would have been better. When the 12-point agreement was reached, there was a second understanding that within a week or two, we eight parties - the seven party alliance and the Maoists - would issue a joint statement appealing to the masses to boycott elections and stage mass demonstrations. But that has not proved possible.



Varadarajan: Why?



Prachanda: Because the parties' leadership is a little hesitant. They are perhaps a little afraid that if they join with the Maoists and issue a joint statement for boycott, there could be greater repression on them. I think this could be a factor, though we have not had face-to-face discussions on this with them.



Varadarajan: Some feel that the Maoists' military actions are reducing the political space for the parties. For example, a few days before the parties were planning a big demonstration in Kathmandu, the Maoists attacked a police station in Thankot and the king got the opportunity to impose curfew, thereby ensuring the demonstration failed. Have you considered what actions you need to take so that your political space also increases but the parties don't feel squeezed between the king and you?



Prachanda: I agree a way has to be found. This is a serious and complicated question. When the 12-point agreement was reached, there was a need for continuous interaction between us and them. There was need for several meetings. Only then could we establish some synchronicity between their movement and ours. This did not happen. Despite this, we told the parties through other mediums that whether we stage actions or not, the king is still going to move against you. This is the same king, the same goons - he is also a very big smuggler - who made sure we couldn't peacefully demonstrate. When we went for negotiations in Kathmandu and our team was there, we decided to have a big meeting there. Sher Bahadur Deuba was the Prime Minister at the time. But the RNA and Gyanendra insisted we could not have such a rally and threatened curfew. They compelled us to move the meeting to Chitwan. So we told Girija and Madhav that even if we had done nothing in Thankot, they would not have allowed any big demonstration. Curfew would have been imposed anyway. Instead, Thankot has put Gyanendra under greater pressure.

Nature of monarch


Varadarajan: You mentioned the RNA and I would like your assessment: Does the king control the RNA or does the RNA control the king?



Prachanda: This is a very interesting question. Right now, in fact, this is precisely what we are discussing within our party and outside. Until now, it seemed the balance was 50-50. Sometimes the RNA runs the king, and sometimes the king runs the RNA. But it seems as if we are now going towards a situation where the RNA is in the driving seat. It seems as if power in the hands of Gyanendra is decreasing and he is doing what the RNA dictates. This seems to be the emerging situation but we cannot say this with facts. But looking at the overall situation, it seems that Gyanendra is going down the path laid out by the RNA. One thing is clear. He became king after the royal massacre - and it is clear that without the RNA, that massacre could never have happened, the Army core team was in the Narayanhiti palace and they are the ones who engineered the massacre. So he was made king in the same way as before, during the Rana days, when Tribhuvan fled and came to India and Gyanendra as a small boy was put on the throne. So there is no question of his going beyond the script dictated by the RNA. And this small clique of feudal aristocrats designed the royal massacre and is dominant. The manner in which he became king obliges Gyanendra to follow their direction.



Varadarajan: I too was in Kathmandu immediately after the palace massacre to cover the story. Like many reporters, I was initially suspicious of the Dipendra theory but later, after managing to meet some of the closest relatives of those who died, who spoke to actual survivors like Ketaki Chester and others who cannot really be termed as people connected to any monarchical faction with a particular agenda. And they all said it was Dipendra who committed the crime.


Prachanda: This is impossible. Of course, the clique has managed to establish the story amongst its own circles, among people who may be neutral as you say. They have established it in their class but that is not the reality. You know how different stories were put out immediately. First that the guns went off automatically, then another story was made. There was even an effort to suggest the Maoists had made a surprise attack. In the end, they pinned it on Dipendra. So the question arises, if it was so clear-cut, why didn't this story come out in the beginning? But my main logic is not this. If you look at the whole history of [crown prince] Paras - he was there at the time - now the whole history of Paras is well-known. Second, the role of Gyanendra in the 1990 movement. He had a big role then - he wanted to shoot down 2,000 people in Kathmandu and control the movement through force, he was a die-hard element. Even Surya Bahadur Thapa used to call them the bhoomigat giroh, an underground clique, and their leader was Gyanendra.What kind of goon Paras was - this is also known. For more than a month, the massacre was planned and Gyanendra based himself outside. So I don't think for even a moment that it was Dipendra. And in any case, the Nepali people simply refuse to believe this story.

Reorganisation of PLA and RNA


Varadarajan: Let us say a situation is created for a constituent assembly. In the run-up to that, the People's Liberation Army is not going to lay down its arms. Is it not possible that the parliamentary parties will feel themselves threatened by your dependence on arms? What kind of guarantees can you give in the run-up to any election that there will be no obstacle placed by you or the PLA in the political mobilisation by the parties?



Prachanda: When we had discussions and had an agreement last year - and we hope to meet again and take things forward after these municipal elections - we said we understand you have doubts and reservations about us and our army. We want a political solution to Nepal's problems, a democratic solution. So we made a proposal that you rehabilitate Parliament, we will support you. A two-thirds majority of MPs is with the Nepali Congress, UML and smaller parties. Call a meeting and declare that Parliament has been reinstated, that this is the legitimate parliament and that what Gyanendra is doing is illegitimate and illegal. Do this and then set up a multiparty government. We will not be part of it but will support it. And then you invite us for negotiations and we will come forward. After that, there will be a move to set up an interim government, and the main aim of that government will be to have elections for a constituent assembly.



In this rehabilitation and restoration of Parliament, there is no need to have anything to do with the king. He would have become illegal anyway. He has violated the constitution and also people's expectations for peace and democracy. So he would be illegal, your parliament would be legal and we would fully accept the legality of your parliament. We will come for negotiations with your leadership. Under your leadership, we will be in the interim government.



As for the RNA, you should appeal to the democratic elements within it by saying the king has violated the constitution, and the expectations of the masses, you come over to this side, this is the legal government and it is your responsibility to support it. And then the king should be given an ultimatum of a week or two weeks - that he should move back to the status quo ante before February 1, 2005 and agree to elections for a constituent assembly. If he doesn't agree, we would then abolish the monarchy. And we would tell the international community, this is the legitimate government, please stop recognising or supporting him. Ours is a legitimate government and this should be under the leadership of Girija Prasad Koirala. We are ready to support this.



Under such a situation, the democratic elements of RNA will be there, and so will the PLA, so we will organise the army as a new Nepal army. At that point, the problem will not be our weapons. The problem of arms and weapons is with the RNA which for 250 years has been loyal to the feudal lords. That is the problem. Our army has only been around for 10 years. This is not a problem. If there is a political solution, we are prepared to change that too. This is the first proposal that we have put forward. We will abolish the monarchy, there will be an insurrection (bidroh), the kingship will be over and then we will have the peaceful reorganisation of the army.



This is one way to deal with this problem and we are seriously putting it forward. It is revolutionary, it is viable, it is possible. It is precisely in this way that it is necessary to end the monarchy in Nepal. This is our first proposal and I feel the parties are not ready for this.



Varadarajan: What you are proposing is that the parliamentary parties stage a revolution!



Prachanda: Yes, but we feel their role can be a historic one. But they are not ready. The second way is also what we have been discussing, that the U.N. or some other credible body will supervise things. The RNA will be in the barracks and the PLA will also be under supervision. Both armies and arms will be under international supervision and will not enter the fray. Then there will be elections for a constitutional assembly. Our army will not interfere in the process.



Varadarajan: But what form will this international supervision take? Will it include foreign troops?


Prachanda: No troops. There can be a militia or police, which we create only for election purposes.



Varadarajan: Who will be part of this militia?



Prachanda: We have not gone into such details - there can be the cadres of the different parties, but all without firearms, to manage security for the elections. So there will be elections for the assembly and whatever verdict of the masses comes, it is on that basis that the army has to be reorganised. If the republic result comes, then the RNA's generals and commanders will have to go and the interim government would appoint as generals officers who are loyal to democratic values. If a constitutional monarchy wins, then there is the danger that the old generals will remain. So my point is that the army can be changed. This is the underlying idea behind the 12-point agreement and the parties also agree with this.



Varadarajan: So you are saying the problem of the PLA and its arms is not a big problem.



Prachanda: It is certainly not a problem the way people outside believe. If there is political will on our side and the parties, it can be solved.



Varadarajan: But you concede there is a history, which is why the parties are suspicious.


Prachanda: Yes there is, but we are talking about this too. There have been attacks by us on them, and we had seized property. Whatever had been taken from the Congress leadership has been returned - land and property - UML leadership too. So we are trying to build an understanding. If the parties' leaders say that in the past the Maoists attacked us, then we can also say that the RNA army was deployed against us when you were in government and so many of our comrades were killed. Whatever we may have done, the other side did so much more and this also has to be accounted for. But if we start talking like this, we will not be able to solve the major problem. If we have to make a breakthrough, then we should both review our history. We have to review our mistakes but you have to as well, because we have a common enemy - feudal aristocracy. We have to defeat this enemy and in consonance with democratic values we have to reorganise the army and state.

Role of India, China, and U.S.


Varadarajan: How do you see the role of India today? Last year, when the King seized power, India took a tough stand against him which surprised many. Today, this policy has its critics but the bottom line is that the Indian Government does not seem to regard the Nepal Maoists as illegitimate in the way that the king and the U.S. regard them.


Prachanda: In the past, India's role was not good. It was a policy of total alignment with the king. Last year, after February 1, when the situation changed in a big way, the role of the Indian authorities strikes us as positive. There is now a tough stand against autocracy. Still, the two-pillar theory [that Nepal's stability rests equally on constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy] persists and the Indian authorities have not officially abandoned this theory. They haven't said there is need for only one pillar. So officially, India is still sticking to the two-pillar theory and we want the Indian authorities to change this theory. They are right to support the democratic movement, but sticking to the two-pillar theory causes confusion.


Varadarajan: But if India abandons it, wouldn't the King accuse the Indians of interfering in Nepal's affairs, and then he will accuse the Maoists of being agents of India.


Prachanda: We do not think such a thing is possible. During the 1990 movement, when Rajiv Gandhi imposed a blockade on Nepal, the Nepali people did not oppose the blockade because it was in the context of the blockade that the democratic movement picked up speed and advanced very fast. If India is in favour of the democratic movement and a forward-looking political solution, then it will not be considered intervention. But if India supports regressive forces, this would be called intervention. Exertion of external pressure in favour of the masses is never regarded as interference. This is how it seems to us. The people of Nepal will not see this as intervention.


For example, some political leaders came from India recently to show solidarity with the movement. Gyanendra tried illegally to detain them at the airport, calling it intervention. But more than 99 per cent of Nepali people did not regard that as intervention. They saw it as fraternal assistance. Of course, when Hindu fundamentalists like this Singhal comes to Nepal, the King welcomes him. When they crown him 'King of the Hindus', he doesn't call it interference, but when political leaders come and say there should be democracy, he says this is interference. So the anger of people has grown against the King, not India. This is why we feel it is time for India to abandon the two-pillar theory.


Varadarajan: If tomorrow you were to meet Manmohan Singh, what would you ask him to do?


Prachanda: First, change this two-pillar theory. The Nepali people are trying to end the monarchy and you should end your relationship with it. Second, release all our comrades who are in prison in India. We are fighting for genuine multiparty democracy but they are imprisoned there, in Patna, Siliguri, Chennai. If you release them all, a message will go out. And if you feel the Naxalite movement in India is a problem for you, we feel we are trying to deal with the problems in Nepal in a new way, so if you release our comrades and we are successful in establishing multiparty democracy in Nepal, then this will be a very big message for the Naxalite movement in India. In other words, the ground will be readied for them to think in a new political way. Words are not enough, we need to validate what we are saying by establishing that democracy. Third, once a democratic republic is established in Nepal, then the historical doubts that have existed in the relations between Nepal and India can be ended once and for all. So for all these reasons, you should strongly support the movement for democracy.


Varadarajan: In many ways, the United States has emerged as the king's strongest backer. How do you evaluate Washington's role?


Prachanda: Their role has not been good. After February 1, India's role has been positive - for example the agreement we were able to reach with the political parties, I do not think it is likely that the Indian authorities knew nothing about this. But the U.S. role from the beginning has been negative and they are still trying to effect a compromise between the monarch and the political parties against the Maoists. Despite the fact that we are talking of pushing multiparty democracy, the U.S. has decided our movement and alliance has to be crushed. So they have a negative role.


Varadarajan: What is the American interest in being soft on the king?


Prachanda: It is not that they are afraid of what might happen in Nepal. Rather, their strategy is against the Indian and Chinese masses and also, I think, against the Indian and Chinese authorities. The U.S. has a grand strategy, and Bush is talking of China and India as big economic powers and even as threats. Perhaps they see Nepal as a country that is between these two countries and believe that if the situation here does not give rise to forces which are in step with themselves, then there could be a problem. So the U.S. is looking at Nepal from the strategic point of view. It is not that they have any economic interest here. Political control is the key, so they want to strengthen the king.


Varadarajan: What about the attitude of China? Some people in India argue that if India continues to take a tough stand against the king, he will turn to China for help and Beijing will benefit.


Prachanda: Earlier, we had a doubt, that perhaps China might be behind the king, that China would try and take advantage. But then we analysed the situation and came to the conclusion that China would not play this role. China's relations with India are improving and China will not want to jeopardise such a big interest by backing the Nepal king. And in the end, I think our analysis has been proved correct. Recently, when the Indian Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, went to Beijing, he had talks, and a few days later, for the first time, the Chinese authorities issued a statement that they are worried about the situation inside Nepal and that it needs a careful resolution. Until then, Beijing had always maintained that what was happening inside Nepal was an internal problem. Today, China has no interest in antagonising India to build a relationship with the king. This is our analysis. And it looks like India and China could have a common approach towards Nepal. Certainly, a common approach is needed. If China and India do not work together, there will be a big problem not only for now but the future. So they need to have an understanding in favour of democracy, in favour of the people of Nepal. As far as U.S. interests are concerned, they are neither in favour of Indian or Chinese masses. So at the political level, all of us must come together to counter them, we should not fall under their trap.


Varadarajan: How do you explain for the contradictory nature of some of U.S. Ambassador Moriarty's statements? Last year, he did use tough language against the king in his speech to the Institute of Foreign Affairs.


Prachanda: The U.S. from the start believes the Maoists are a more immediate threat than the king. Even in the most recent statement from the State Department, they said the king should immediately open talks with the parties to deal with the Maoists. And this is the product of their vested interest. If the Bush administration's intentions were good, there is no reason to regard us as a threat. If its intention is in favour of democracy and solving Nepal's political problems, then there is no reason to see us as a threat especially when we are saying we are for multiparty democracy and are willing to accept the verdict of a constituent assembly.
We are glad with the new situation that is emerging after Shyam Saran went to China, it seems the situation can change. Our movement is also going forward and I think in 2-3 months, if the struggle continues, then there is a real chance of ending the kingship once and for all and making a democratic republic in Nepal. This is the best outcome for China and India, and everyone else. The U.S. does not want this. They want to maintain the monarchy at all costs.
Moriarty consistently has been speaking against the Maoists. He is connected to the Asia-Pacific military command of the U.S. He is not a political man. And we know that although his views are different from some in the U.S. establishment like, say, Senator Leahy, but overall, the position of the U.S. authorities is not in favour of democracy and Nepal people.
Leadership question and inner party life


Varadarajan: Has your party put behind it the differences which emerged last year between yourself and Baburam Bhattarai?


Prachanda: There was a problem and we solved it so well that the unity in our party is stronger than ever before. Our problems were not of the kind the media wrote about. We had an ideological debate about how to evaluate the 20th century. Why did the communist movement suffer such an enormous setback? Why did the Russian revolution get overcome by counter-revolution? Why did China also go down that path? This was a debate within the central committee for many years. There were other problems linked to shades of opinion within the party - like the Madi blast - but the purpose was to sort out our future plan. This was the purpose of the debate. But the timing was such that these things happened after February 1. If the timing had not been so bad, there wouldn't have been that much propaganda. But the time the king took over was also the time the debate in our party sharpened.


Varadarajan: The question was raised of a cult of personality in the party. As you know, any objective evaluation of the experience of the 20th century communist movement has to consider the cult of personality as certainly one of the factors in the reversals.


Prachanda: That is correct. But I want to clarify one thing. Between Dr. Bhattarai and me, there was never any debate on the issue of leadership. He has never challenged my leadership. On the issue of leadership personally, there has never been a difference. There were differences on ideological questions, about what we should do now, and there was a debate. And this debate we solved in the Rolpa plenum in August. We took it to a higher level and our unity has become stronger.
On the issue of leadership I want to say that our party will be the first communist party in the 21st century which has picked up on a clue from the 20th century - where it had got stuck - and we are going to open it. At our plenum, we placed a resolution on the question of political power and leadership. That when we go for state power and are in power, then we will not do what Stalin or Mao did. Lenin did not have time to deal with issues of power. Although Stalin was a revolutionary, his approach, was not as scientific as it should have been, it was a little metaphysical, and then problems came. We also evaluated Mao in the plenum. If you look at his leadership from 1935 to 1976 - from when he was young to when he was old and even speaking was difficult - must he remain Chairman and handle everything? What is this? So we decided that when we are in power, the whole team of our leadership will not be part of day-to-day power. Not just me but our team. Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, Badal, Mohra, others, we have a leadership team which arose from the midst of the struggle. When we go to Kathmandu, we will not be involved in power struggles or day-to-day power. That will be for the new generation, and we will train that generation. This is a more scientific approach to the question of leadership. If we don't do this, then we will have a situation where as long as Stalin is alive, revolution is alive, as long as Mao is alive, revolution is alive.
This will be a big sacrifice for our leadership. Of course it does not mean we will be inactive or retire from politics. Our leadership team will go into statesmanship. We are hoping that by doing this we will solve a very big ideological problem of the communist movement. This is not only a technical question but a big ideological question. There can be no question of concentrating power in the hands of any individual or group. When we placed this resolution before the plenum, then our entire leadership team gained confidence in themselves, the movement and the line. Our unity has become much stronger. Now we are in an offensive mood.
We feel we have contributed to the ideological development of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Traditionally, in the international communist movement there are two types of revisionism - right revisionism of class collaboration, and the other, dogmato-revisionism, of turning certain ideas into a dogma and getting stuck to them. This is more among the Maoists. Those who call themselves Maoists are more prone to dogmato-revisionism, and we have to fight against this too.


Varadarajan: To what extent do you think the logic of your line on multiparty democracy applies also to the Maoist movements in India?


Prachanda: We believe it applies to them too. We want to debate this. They have to understand this and go down this route. Both on the questions of leadership and on multiparty democracy, or rather multiparty competition, those who call themselves revolutionaries in India need to think about these issues. And there is a need to go in the direction of that practice. We wish to debate with them on this. If revolutionaries are not going to look at the need for ideological development, then they will not go anywhere.


Varadarajan: The Indian police agencies say you are providing weapons and training to the Indian Maoists but here you are saying they should go in for multiparty competition.


Prachanda: There is no question of us giving anything. They blame us for Madhubani, Jehanabad, but we have no relationship of this kind with them.


Varadarajan: What is your evaluation of the recent political developments in Latin America - with what is happening in Venezuela with the Bolivarian movement, in Chile, Bolivia?


Prachanda: We feel there is a new wave of revolution on the horizon. The first wave began with the Russian revolution and ended with the Cultural Revolution but now it looks like the second wave could be starting. Dogmatism and ideological stagnation is evident in the U.S. Bush is in league with Christian fundamentalists. Throughout Latin America there is resentment and hatred against imperialism, from Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and an explosion can come at any time. The encirclement of America has begun. But I also believe this explosion can start from South Asia. Nepal and India have a big role to play. The U.S. will not be able to control things. And the developments in Latin America are a good augury.


Varadarajan: In conclusion, tell us a little about yourself. How old are you now? When did you join the movement? Where did you study?


Prachanda: I am 52 and have been in the movement full time for the past 34 years. I drew close to communism when I was 16, as a student in high school, and became a whole-timer when I was 28. I did a B.Sc. at the Chitwan agriculture university and was studying for a Masters in Public Administration when there was a big movement around the time of the referendum Birendra was organising. That is when I joined the movement, and couldn't complete my course. Since then I have been active, most of the time underground.


Varadarajan: And family life? Are you married?


Prachanda: Yes. My family, of course, is also in the movement.


Varadarajan: Thank you very much for this interview.


Prachanda: Thank you.


source: The Hindu 2006

july 25, 2010


MEERA PRASAD


... Does he exist? Is he for real? If so, there is no greater healing than that for the world.





PHOTO: S. SUBRAMANIUM

In memoriam: For the victims of the Mumbai attack.

Think terror, and you think the worst. I try giving the stereotypical cruel face of terror on my mind's canvas a dab of gentleness and am deluged with an outpouring of high voltage contradictions from within me. There is no place for compassion here, my inner voice reproaches me. Terror's face is black with no shades of grey between.

My thoughts rest on convicted terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab. A broken man today, he weeps and is scared stiff of his impending date with death, as he wastes in a prison cell. The man, who with his band of nine comrades, gleefully went on a killing spree in Mumbai that dark November in 2008 ending hundreds of innocent lives abruptly in a spray of bullets, is cringing at death's call. He wants to marry, have a family and simply enjoy life. And he is moving heaven and earth, even going in appeal to a higher court, to get his death sentence reversed.

Not the whole truth


After every terror attack, I imagine a face in the crowd that's unmoved by the scent of death around. A vengeful face in celebration of death's trail.Yet somewhere there is a part of me that is not ready to endorse this as the whole truth. That part of me which dares to believe, going against the grain of popular thought, that there is humanity in terror's zone. Sounds insane?

My premise is that a terrorist is a human being first and, in the natural course, human beings come endowed with the virtue of humanity. The milk of human kindness dries up when he espouses terror's cause. But the dregs of humanity which lie ensconced in him can never be wiped out — not by guerrilla training, not any extent of subversive indoctrination or brainwashing, not even the lure of money. It can at best be suppressed by these forces, only to be aroused somewhere, some time.

Let's face it; no one opts to make a living by killing. Not even the gun-toting terrorist. He is a victim of circumstances who unfortunately becomes soft target for terrorism's cause. One who is as much oppressed by his actions as those he oppresses.

I daresay that beneath all the bravado and a trigger-happy exterior, the terrorist is a troubled soul, hurting under the ill-gotten weight of his transgressions. There comes a time when he hates himself for the blood on his hands; his moment of truth, I expect. Or there comes his moment of shame, when hiding his face he weeps in private at the suffering and grief he has caused.

I am not for a minute suggesting that the terrorist qualifies for the world's sympathy or pardon. He should be meted out the worst punishment for the massacres he has piled up.

Not that it will ever recompense the parents who lost their children to the diabolical bomb blast at Pune's German Bakery early this year. Or countless others at the receiving end of terror's blows. They will never understand the depths to which depravity can plunge. Can punishment ever be fitting response to the anguished cries of Jewish baby Moshe; the poster face of the 2008 Mumbai terror strike? He and hundreds of babies orphaned like him across the country do not comprehend the blow that terror has dealt them.

The rot has set in deep, and is spreading faster than all the attempts to arrest it. Who knows, any one of us could be the unsuspecting victims on terror's radar next. And that is the victory of terrorism; that it creates a fear psychosis.We need to recognise that the enemy is an astutely organised force, drawing its strength from an unflappable commitment to the cause. But the terrorist is a coward at the core of his existence, who is running scared. It is not in his DNA to face the collective onslaught of public outrage against him. And the plucky voice of the survivor unnerves him.

Moral failure


He fails to understand the strength of the widow who prays for the riddance of terrorism choking on her tears. Or the inner calm a septuagenarian, who lost his son and daughter-in-law to Mumbai's terror attacks, displays when he says he feels nothing but pity for the misguided killers. He shudders at the determination of a mother to get on in life with no malice, notwithstanding the loss of her daughter in the Pune blast. Or when the British businessman, who escaped death by a whisker, says he is no mood to let the strikers take over his life. He listens stupefied as the American sprinter prays for his transformation from her hospital bed. She was shot in both her legs in a terror attack and will never stand on her feet again. But she harbours no rancour.Do we see the stirring of humanity in the face of such dignity in grief? I construct before my mind's eye a penitent terrorist. Is he for real, I wonder? If he is out there somewhere, I would imagine there is no greater healing than that for the world.

source: the hindu

july 25, 2010




Are hunger and starvation acceptable any longer? Despite the campaign for the Right to Food Act which pinpoints several criteria as basic needs, poverty is widespread. A severe moral deficit is an underlying factor, says PRAHALAD SINGH





PHOTO: ANU PUSHKARNA

Plea for freedom: Bonded labourers with their children.

Evidence is now mounting in many parts of our country that there continues to exist what Amartya Sen calls persistent mass hunger, especially acute malnutrition among many children. Recent reports in the media about poor children eating mud and silica to deal with their hunger in village ‘Ganne' in district Allahabad appeared in The Hindustan Times on April 4 and on BBC on May15. These reports raise, once again, serious issues of abject neglect of children and point towards a most uncaring administration.


Collapse of security


An enquiry was ordered by the Supreme Court in response to the media reports on the situation by Ms. Arundhati Dhuru and Prof. Jean Dreze, now member National Advisory Council. The main findings of the enquiry are that there is a total collapse of food security related schemes and 80 per cent of the people are deprived of their entitlements. People are living with starvation and hunger due to acute poverty. 90 per cent of the children examined suffer from severe malnutrition of Grade IV. Elected representatives and administration have failed to secure people's access to the right to food and failed to protect the life and livelihood of families in the affected villages, communities and beyond. Many of the people in Ganne village are working as bonded labourers.

The Right to Food Campaign, civil society and economists like Jean Dreze, point out several facts. The poverty estimates of about 40 per cent given by the Tendulkar Committee to determine the number of poor in our country who will receive subsidised food under the forthcoming National Food Security Act is inadequate to our current situation of hunger, starvation and malnutrition. Others that have submitted their reports in the past two years are the National Committee for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) set up by the Government of India, that estimates that 77 per cent of our population have an income of less than Rs.20 per day in 2004-05; the Saxena Committee set up by the Ministry of Rural Development that says that 50 per cent of our population should be considered below the poverty line.

The Kolkata Group, an independent initiative inspired and chaired by Amartya Sen, has demanded that the Right to Food Act be made non-discriminatory and universal to cover legal food entitlements for all Indians. The Eighth Kolkata Group Workshop (February 2010), has argued for creating durable legal entitlements that guarantee the right to food for all in the country. Sen stressed the need for the firm recognition of the right to food, and comprehensive legislation to guarantee everyone the right. “A Right to Food Act covering enforceable food entitlements should be non-discriminatory and universal. Entitlements guaranteed by the Act should include food grains from the Public Distribution System (PDS), school meals, nutrition services for children below the age of six years, social security provision, and allied programmes” a statement released by the Kolkata Group said. On the basis of exceptionally high levels of under-nutrition in India, particularly among women and children, Sen has argued for the firm recognition of the right to food in general and comprehensive legislation to guarantee the entitlement of food for all. Recent experience (including Supreme Court orders on the right to food as well as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) shows the value of putting economic and social rights in a legal framework.

The paucity of resources can no longer be an excuse for keeping our people hungry. It is more a case of having the right priorities, and a moral deficit. The NCEUS report appointed by the government points out that the safety net can be provided within the available resources and capacity of the government. If a universal subsidy can work in Tamil Nadu state and PDS can work in Kerela state why can't it be made to work elsewhere?

Change in perceptions


A shift needs to happen towards enforceable rights, towards implementation through authentic participatory development, from target group handouts towards empowerment and agency of the poor, socially excluded and the deprived; their capacity building, participation and change in their understanding of interlinking dimension and the need to self mobilize for peaceful public action and more genuine democracy. Amartya Sen advocates economic growth as a means FOR human development, building capabilities and entitlements. Sen is celebrated in India yet his advice goes unheeded.

It is not simply an issue of the need for mobilising economic and other resources but it is more the need to mobilise shame. It is not just a question of balancing the budget and improving fiscal deficit but to recognise the appalling rate of social conscience deficit. A poor family watching helplessly as their child afflicted with starvation not only undergoes physical and mental suffering but also suffers shame, loss of dignity, hope, voice and stake in the system. Such alienation can be traumatic and can sow the seeds of social discord, extremism and upheaval as has happened among the tribals, where malnutrition is highest in the country (up to 90 per cent). By the same token the uncaring society and government suffers an equal loss of their true and higher self, compassion and humanity.


PHOTO: V.V. KRISHNAN

Vulnerable : Adivasis and Dalits demand action.

India wants to reach the moon but the question is whether it can reach its own starving children. Who cares if the Commonwealth of the “Games” is so uncommonly unequal. According to Harsh Mander, a Food Commissioner appointed by the Supreme Court, about ten homeless die every day in Delhi. Says Mander “That so many people die each day at our doorstep, close to the centers of power, is a reminder how scarce is compassion in our public life.”

Where billionaires are doubling every two years and many more have illegally stacked $1446 billion in Swiss Banks, according to the Swiss Banker's Association Report. In a ‘poor' country such as ours, how do you calculate the price of a starving child's life? Gandhiji said that when in doubt, think of the poorest and the weakest; as to how your decision is going to affect or help them. As our leaders calculate the cost and benefit of millions of rupees against the millions starving, and so many infants dying, are they thinking of the marginalised and the most vulnerable; the hungry and starving poor children, living and dying on mud and silica?

source: the hindu

july 25, 2010


KALPANA SHARMA


In a society like ours, is it necessary to rush through with the “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” clause without examining its impact on the vast majority of poor women?





Photo: AFP

Opting out of marriage: Should it be made easier?

What are the laws that need the urgent attention of the government? One that deals with the increasing, and horrific, instances of so-called “honour” killings, where young women and men are being murdered for no other reason than choosing whom they will marry, a right that is guaranteed to them as citizens of this democratic country? Or one that will make divorce easier for those who want to opt out of marriage?

These are not mutually exclusive choices. But because they have a direct impact on the lives of millions of women and men, they cannot be rushed through without adequate thought and debate. On the former, there is still some discussion and no conclusion yet. On the latter, strangely enough, the government seems to have made up its mind and is contemplating introducing a new provision in The Hindu Marriage Act that will permit divorce under “irretrievable breakdown of marriage”.

Divorce is still relatively uncommon in India compared to many other countries. The incidence of divorce is barely 1.9 per cent of registered marriages. This figure of course would not include a much higher percentage of desertions that routinely occur, where men leave their wives and children and live a bigamous life without any fear that the law will ever catch up with them. Such women are left in a limbo, still legally married, unable to go into another relationship, and left without financial support. In a country where poverty and illiteracy are common, the figures if ever collated of such women would be staggering.

Specific grounds


Under the Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act there are specific grounds on which divorce can be sought. These include adultery, cruelty, desertion, conversion to another religion, unsoundness of mind, virulent and incurable form of leprosy, venereal disease in a communicable form, renouncement of the world and not heard as being alive for a period of seven years or more. Section 13-B of the Hindu Marriage Act and Section 28 of the Special Marriage Act also provide for divorce by mutual consent. Under this, both parties have to file a petition in court and are given six months after its admission and up to 18 months to change their minds. If neither party withdraws, the divorce is granted.

The government, and the Law Commission in its 217th report (March 2009), holds that the introduction of a provision of no-fault divorce, that is where neither party has to prove that the other committed an offence such as adultery, or cruelty or desertion to file for a divorce, will assist many couples who get caught in legal wrangles when their marriages have already broken down. Sometimes, even when they use the provision of mutual consent, one or the other party pulls out part way through the proceedings, leaving the other with no choice but to resort to a lengthy legal process to get a divorce. The government believes it is introducing this provision to bring such situations to an end.

But lawyers and women's groups, who have known first hand the problems deserted women, or those who are victims of cruelty within their marriages, or have to live with adulterous husbands, say that such a provision will place a bigger burden on women. At present, a mutual consent divorce is the easiest and only possible way if both parties want to break up. Otherwise, one or the other has to prove a “fault”. Women often do not take the first step, particularly those women who are not financially independent, as they cannot pay for the litigation and also fear that even if there is a divorce, the final settlement will not suffice for them to survive on their own. For instance, apart from maintenance, sometimes the court awards a lump sum if a woman is able to prove her husband falls under any of the categories listed for grounds for divorce. But if the woman has to leave her matrimonial home, she would not have the resources to get another house unless that was part of the final settlement. And the current law does not mandate a formula for a financial settlement that would take care of the woman's shelter needs.

Considerable debate


In countries around the world, including the United States, where the grounds of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” are part of the statute, there has been considerable debate over its introduction and it has been followed by clear and specific mandates on division of property. In some states in the US, everything is divided equally between the couple after a divorce on these grounds. In India, there is no such provision in the existing law or in the contemplated new addition.

What this will mean in real life is that an adulterous husband can file under this addition to the divorce law and even if he agrees to pay alimony, he is not bound by law to ensure that the woman has adequate resources to survive on her own. Also, in a society where being married grants women “respectability”, a divorce means losing that status. There is no legal compensation for this and no sign that our society is likely to change its attitude toward divorced or unmarried women in a hurry. Hence, women will always hesitate before filing for divorce.

The bottom line is that provisions for divorce are not gender neutral in a society like ours where there is no level playing field for men and women. Therefore, before any such provision is introduced, there needs to be a much closer scrutiny of its impact on poor women without independent economic resources who constitute the majority in this country. You cannot bring in a law that would ease the way for a small minority without considering the impact on this majority.

This is not to say that women or men should be permanently tied into loveless or cruel marriages. Divorce is a way out of such situations and marriage is not sacrosanct as some hold. But the provisions for divorce must be just. Of course, women who have a hard time proving that their husbands are cruel, or bigamous, could also use this provision to end their marriages. But such women are usually those with financial independence and the ability to negotiate a decent settlement. The majority of women would not dare use the provision for fear that they would be left with nothing. On the other hand, for their husbands, this would be a very handy piece of law to opt out of the marriage, and then go in for another.

Let me end by quoting from a reader who responded to the news that the government was going to introduce this provision. Writes Dr. Mitu Khurana from Delhi on the Economic Times website (June 14, 2010):“My husband threw me out because I could not give him sons. I have two daughters. After trying for four years to make my marriage work, for the sake of my daughters, now I have initiated legal action against my husband. So has my marriage broken down irretrievably? Now my insistence not to take any more abuse, has it become a ground for my husband to take divorce and remarry to have sons, which he so badly desires? And what is the fault of my daughters in all this? Just that they were born daughters. That means now no mother should take the stand I took, and simply go ahead with female feticide.”

This is just one voice. There are many more. They need to be heard and heeded. Why is the government in such a hurry?

Email the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com

source: the hindu

july 25, 2010



Media reporting of celebrity-related deaths is voyeuristic and over the top, as the recent Viveka Babajee case showed. Isn't it time television channels and newspapers re-examined how they report celeb suicides? SEVANTI NINAN.








A suicide is story, a celebrity suicide a bigger story. There is no getting away from that. And the resulting overkill in coverage is not related to India's current media saturation, or the swamping of the public sphere by competing satellite channels. Celebrity-related stories of crime, death, suicide have always been news. Back in 1986 in the case of theatre director B.V. Karanth's involvement in a Bhopal incident where actor Vibha Mishra was found ablaze,I vividly recall a colleague at the Indian Expresscomplaining about the pressure being put on the Bhopal reporter by one of the paper's senior editors to keep getting more on every possible salacious angle, so that the paper could continue front paging a story that had the arts world agog.

But media voyeurism destroys lives, so there is a need to step back after every overkill and examine whether things can be differently handled.

Media coverage of celebrity suicides has two types of negative repercussions. One is the impact of the coverage on those close to the victim, or associated with her. The most recent example was when a Mumbai-based model Viveka Babajee killed herself last month, leaving a suicide note blaming a man she was seeing as being responsible for her death. The person mentioned became fodder for the media in no time, and his family and associates with him. They have to wait till journalists lose interest to recover their privacy.

Sound bites


You cannot change the way media will react when they see a celebrity suicide any more than you can change the way a dog will react when it sees a meaty bone. The men and women with mikes and cameras are highly unlikely to say, oh dear, let us not invade privacy. But others can do their bit to stem the feeding frenzy. Family and friends don't have to oblige every mike with a sound bite. In Viveka Babajee's case her family was eager to use the media to air their grievances about who was to blame.

Talking to the media has become a career launcher for many Indians. You go from anonymity to recognition with every TV panel or talk show that you are willing to go on. Friends and colleagues of a celebrity victim are tapped for any possible angle, and many are happy to oblige.

The more charitable view is also valid, talking to the media helps to keep a case alive, and the pressure on,in the case of a murder. Jessica Lal's sister and Nitish Kataria's mother recognised that. In the case of a suicide there is little to justify it.

The response of the police to cases of celebrity suicide could do with considerable review. Can they be told not to feed media machine in cases of suicide even if it is a crime under Indian law? If the police are interviewing a string of former boyfriends they don't need to share the information because it is not a mater of public interest. But then reporters build police contacts precisely for occasions like this so even without a briefing the details will out. When there is a suicide note, it gives the media more of a handle than when there is not. The Natasha Padbidri case which followed that ofBabaji died out much faster because there wasn't that much to go on. Before it did we learnt that she drove a Mercedes. Thanks possibly to the police who turn expansive with reporters.

Police reactions


From News 24: A police officer said, “It appears she was depressed as she wasn't satisfied with her professional life. We are probing other angles, including a love angle and financial difficulties”. For a contrast see how the London police behaved when British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found hanging in his home earlier this year. “Police said officers were called by the ambulance service at 10:20 a.m. to an address in central London, and found a 40-year-old man dead. They did not name him but said next of kin had been informed.”

The other type of negative repercussion spawned by indiscriminate celebrity suicide coverage is documented by research done over the years. It shows that media coverage of a suicide leads to more suicides. An Australia-basedweb resource for media professionals (http://mindframe-media.powersites.com.au/site/index.cfm?display=84352) says that over 50 international studies have apparently been conducted looking at the link between media portrayals of suicide and suicidal behaviour. There is strong support for the relationship between media reporting and increases in completed and attempted suicide rates. Specific cases of suicide and their coverage have been studiedto establish that the risk of copycat suicides increases in proportion to the prominence of coverage.

The research summary says higher rates of suicide have sometimes been recorded after celebrity suicides receive front page coverage. A 1984 US study and Austrian studies in 2001 and 2004 apparently found a significant increase in the suicide rate or rates of suicide attempts in months in which articles were published on celebrity suicides. As for the impact of film and television on copycat suicides, these are some of the findings:

A 1982 American study found that the national suicide rate increased for a period of 10 days following a news story on suicide.

Increases in the number of teenage suicides have also been recorded following news stories on suicide in international studies.




Untimely end:Viveka Babajee and Nafisa Joseph.

Coverage of suicide of elderly people has also been linked to higher levels of suicide by older people.

Several studies have found that the number of attempted suicides increased following the broadcast of a television movie or episode of a popular soap opera depicting suicide.

Studies have also found a relationship between the method of suicide portrayed in a fictional film or television program, and increased rates of suicide using this method.

On the other hand, appropriate portrayal may have a beneficial effect, according to a study which showed rates of suicide and suicide attempts by young people fell following the broadcast of telemovies showing the impact of suicide. (Citations for each of these studies are to be found at the url given above.)

The human mind is nothing if not impressionable.

But what is it going to take to get the media to re-examine how they report celebrity suicides? How do you roll back tabloidisation as an approach to news? And given the media industry's eager engagement with fashion, models attract enormous interest and lots of fanciful theorising.

Theories


A writer in Times of India's Crestedition floated the lonely planet theory for models in the wake of Babajee's death. “But, in an alarming trend of the past two years, models who have walked the top ramps around the world seem to be resorting to suicide as a getaway from their lonely planet.” And dug up recent cases of suicides and attempted suicides this year to support her theory. Former Marie Claireeditor Shefalee Vasudev's column in Outlooksaid that “dirges on the fashion world have become a media neurosis” and went on to rebut the picture such stories paint of the fashion industry.

Current reporting offering pat reasons for suicides has a tendency to underplay the complexity of reasons which prompt a person to take his life, often attributing it to a recent painful event. The medical evidence is that over 90 per cent of suicide victims have a significant psychiatric illness at the time of their death, undiagnosed or untreated, or both. (National Institute of Mental Health, U.S.)





There are plenty of suggestions available on the Net on how to report suicides constructively. But if constructive reporting was even faintly the aim of current suicide coverage, why would the writers and reporters confine themselves to celebrity victims? Why would they not give far more space to those whose suicides reflect acute government or societal neglect?

The media will not rein in its voyeurism left to themselves. An effective complaints council — something which does not now exist for either print or television — is likely to be the best remedial agent.

source: the hindu

child labour




More than 12.6 million children under the age of 14 are still engaged in child labour, says Ananthapriya Subramanian

What do three members of the National Advisory Council, two members of the Planning Commission, Editors (including the editor and executive editor of this magazine), MPs from across the political spectrum, CII members and the NCPCR have in common? One single demand: no child under 14 should be engaged in child labour. Forty-five eminent members of society from very diverse backgrounds have thrown their considerable weight behind an ongoing campaign by Save the Children seeking changes in the child labour laws that would ensure that every child under 14 is at school, not at work. The premise of the campaign is this: with the Right to Education Act in place, the Government must waste no more time in removing the scourge of child labour in our society.

According to the 2001 census, there are 12.6 million children under the age of 14 engaged in child labour. This is surely a conservative estimate. The government estimates also do not acknowledge the millions of children working in agriculture. Civil society places the number of child labour at a more realistic 40 million or so. The law mandated with tackling child labour, the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act, 1986, makes a distinction between hazardous and non hazardous categories of work for children under 14. So, for example, the law bans child labour in dhabhas deeming it hazardous labour but not child labour in agriculture. Apart from the moral argument that you cannot have arbitrary definitions of what constitutes child labour to decide whether a child under 14 can work or not, child labour in any form is detrimental to the physical, mental and cognitive growth and development of the child. Even if one were to buy the distinction between what constitutes hazardous and non hazardous work, the agriculture sector is considered one of the three most dangerous industries to work at any age, in addition to construction and mining (ILO, 2007).

Approximately 70 per cent of children in child labour are in agriculture. Owing to the labour intensive nature of cotton production, the use of child labour in cotton fields, especially for cross-pollination, has increased over the years. Children working in cotton fields are continuously exposed to poisonous pesticides. Apart from the health effects such as headaches, nausea and respiratory ailments borne out by various studies, children working in cotton fields are deprived of schooling. Working long hours in the field means that children cannot attend school regularly or even if they are enrolled, invariably drop out at some point.

Whatever might have been the rationale for the CLPRA to be enacted, that logic is now a non sequitur. You cannot have one law that promises elementary education to all children and another one regulating child labour. Children cannot be expected to be both working and in school at the same time. The RTE overrides the CLPRA and the latter is in clear conflict with the former. This being the case, the very first step must be to amend the CLPRA to remove the “regulation” terminology. No child under 14 should be engaged in child labour. India is one of the few countries that have not ratified ILO Convention No. 138 that states that the basic minimum age of employment is 15 years. Also, any law that is mandated with tackling child labour cannot overlook the category of children in agriculture if it is serious about eliminating child labour given that the majority of child workers are in agriculture.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the growth of 7.4 per cent in 2009-10 as one of the best performances in the world after the recent global economic crisis. India is indeed a country of stark contrasts. On the one hand, we have the distinction of doing well on economic growth despite a bleak global scenario. On the other, we have the dubious distinction of having the highest number of child labourers in the world.

Despite being a country of promise and rapid economic growth, poverty is often cited as a reason for the extent of child labour. This is a simplistic, reductionist argument. Families with child labourers are typically from the most marginalised communities in society. More often than not, they are deprived of minimum wages and unaware of any alternate source of income. Lack of education and social discrimination also mean that they fail to stake claim to the benefits of various social security schemes available for them.

Countries that have undergone rapid economic development over the last 100 years have also reduced the extent of child labour. While increased per capita income may be a principal reason for the reduction in child labour, legal and political reform combined with investments in education played a bigger role and it can even be argued that the reduction in child labour was itself a significant factor in subsequent economic growth.

Eliminating child labour should be seen as a generational investment, a sustained commitment to our future generation in order to reap the benefits when they reach adulthood. Initially, the economic burden may outweigh the returns but as has been the experience of some developed countries, the economic dividends from improved health and education can only be positive. The investments necessary to end child labour can be made, and they must be made.

Writer's Email:
a.subramanian@savethechildren.in





Posted on July 12, 2010

source: tahalka magazine

july 24, 2010



Hasan Suroor



There is a growing view that Britain must now abandon its search for a post-Raj role and learn to live by the new world order in which those it once governed are masters.






British Prime Minister David Cameron is set to visit India soon, maybe as early as next week, seeking an “enhanced” relationship — a nice-sounding resolve even though few in London or New Delhi appear to know how it would translate into action. The visit is less about outcomes (the two countries don't have major issues to resolve, so any outcome would be hailed as a success) and more about symbolism as the new administration sets out to rebrand the British foreign policy amid a raging debate over where Britain fits in the “new” world.

Britain's global status, long in decline, has plummeted to a new low, partly because of the broader shift of power from the West to the East and more specifically because London has simply run out of steam as an international power.

The view that Britain has failed to find a role for itself on the global stage since the loss of the empire may have become a bit of a cliché but it is a cliché that can do with some repetition. Britain ceased to be taken seriously long ago even by its erstwhile colonial subjects (more than a decade ago, an Indian Prime Minister dismissed it as a “third-rate power”) but till recently it had enough energy to punch above its weight and get away with it. Now it is too exhausted even to pretend that it is anything other than a “small island off the coast of Western Europe” as one academic put it.

It might have taken Britain a “long time to die,” in the words of Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former Ambassador to the United Nations. But finally the show — as we used to know it — seems to be drawing to a close.

Indeed, there is a growing view that Britain must now abandon its search for a post-Raj role and learn to live by the new world order in which those it once governed are the new masters. But, in refusing to read the writing on the wall, old colonial powers can be like ageing ballerinas who are often reluctant to acknowledge that their glory days are over and time has come for them to leave the stage before push comes to shove.

Thus, like the ageing ballerinas determined to go on and on, Britain's hunt for a new “role” continues though, as Oxford academic Timothy Garton Ash noted recently, most people in Britain don't even “notice there's a hunt on anyway.”

“They are too busy watching their compatriots lose at football, or tennis or cricket. Role-hunting remains very much an elite sport: the polo of British politics,” Mr. Ash wrote in The Guardian in a swipe at the successive governments and policy wonks' obsessive “role-hunting.”

There was, he said, a “persistent strand of self-delusion” in British policy elite's claims about Britain's role often “nicely punctured by memorable jibes” such as the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's remark that its much-touted relationship with America was so special that “only one side knows it exists.”

Defining or redefining Britain's “vision” of its place in the world has become a default instinct of every new administration. Labour, when it came to power in 1997, declared that it wanted Britain to be a global force for good by pursuing an “ethical” foreign policy and through “liberal intervention” in resolving conflicts. Another of its big ticket policy resolves was to put Britain “in the heart of Europe” in the words of Tony Blair.

And what was Labour's legacy when it left office 13 years later? A continuing civil war in Iraq and an open-ended insurgency in Afghanistan. As for Europe, far from Britain being anywhere near its “heart,” their relations took some heavy blows, mostly over Iraq, and also over Britain's resistance to fuller integration with the European Union. Even the “special relationship” with America is no longer so special (that is, if it ever was except in the sense of London playing second fiddle to Washington) as the Obama administration focusses its energies on Asia and elsewhere.

So much so that it has become rather unfashionable to mention the “s” word. Mr. Cameron has, in fact, admitted that he sees Britain only as America's “junior partner.” The Conservatives are trying to make a virtue out of necessity, saying they want to make foreign policy less America-centric and, instead, cultivate the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America. Foreign Secretary William Hague has been talking up his plans for a “distinctive British foreign policy” that would see it focus more on new centres of global power such as China, India, Brazil, Chile and the Gulf states.

“We're getting on with that straight away. Many Ministers will be visiting India in the coming months to strongly signal to India that we want to elevate that entire relationship,” he said in a newspaper interview describing his plans as the biggest change to foreign policy for a generation.

The era of Britain seeing its every decision in terms of its effect on America and Europe was over, he declared arguing that London needed to be more pro-active in pursuing its foreign policy aims instead of always reacting to events. And he had Napoleon on his side, he said quoting the maxim that the side that stayed within its “fortifications” was beaten — and the country that was “just reactive” was in decline.

Impressive, though, the rhetoric is, it is hard not to see that there is more froth than substance in Mr. Hague's brave assertions. In the absence of the nuts and bolts of his new policy, even a lay observer can see that the so-called “distinctive” policy is anything but “distinctive.” To portray the new focus on India and China as something “distinctive” for which they should perhaps be grateful to Britain is patronising nonsense. The fact is no country with a semblance of a coherent foreign policy and which does not wish to be isolated can afford to ignore these new, emerging powers.

And, by the way, the wooing of New Delhi and Beijing started much before Mr. Hague came on the scene. It was under the previous Labour administration that Britain established a “strategic partnership” with India — followed by a procession of ministerial and high-level business delegations of the sort Mr. Hague says would be heading for New Delhi soon. The problem is not that Mr. Hague is trying to pass off old wine in a new bottle but that he (and indeed the entire British establishment) believes that Britain's foreign policy still matters to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn't. This brings us back to the point that Britain's ruling elite still suffers from a “persistent self-delusion” about the country's role beyond its shores. They are yet to “get it'' that much of the world no longer sees Britain as a great power and doesn't share its perception of itself.

As Mr. Ash says: “Roles, like identities, are an amalgam of who or what you think you are and what other people take you for. I may be convinced that I'm the finest opera singer in the world, but if no one else thinks I am, then I'm not.''

This is something that is yet to sink into the British ruling psyche. Once it could buy influence abroad through generous financial handouts but the recent economic crisis has left the country so broke that it is no longer in a position even to do that. The Department for International Development is under growing pressure to review its commitments despite the government's promise to protect overseas aid from the austerity measures forced on other departments. And with the Foreign Office facing deep spending cuts, the era of Britain's high-profile diplomatic presence that reflected its status as a world power is over. Embassies and consulates in a number of countries are to be closed at a time when, more than ever before, Britain needs these symbols of power to be more visible.

So, what can Britain do? “The answer is stark: not much, given the state of our finances,” wrote Michael Binyon, columnist of The Times, after attending a Chatham House conference on foreign policy.

Meanwhile, as a once great imperial power slowly dies on its feet it can draw some comfort from a new study that ranks Britain as the best country for the dying with its vast network of hospices and end-of-life care homes. It has prompted some cheeky comments about the country's own health — reminiscent of the jibes it suffered in the 1960s and 1970s when it was dubbed the “sick man of Europe.”

source: the hindu

july 24, 2010



V.R. Krishna Iyer



The best answer to abuse of judges is not frequent or ferocious contempt-sentencing but fine performance.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When judges themselves are guilty of flaws, shortcomings or violations, public criticism is the only way judges can be corrected

The Bench is a sacred seat and divinity is incompatible with arrogance, pride and vanity


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



‘We, the People of India' made the Constitution and the sovereign republic of India, and all power exercised by the three instrumentalities of state function under the Constitution. Its Preamble speaks of justice — social, economic and political — as a fundamental privilege of the people. Social justice and equality before law are of more value to the common masses, while the higher classes are often allergic to the under-privileged and the have-nots.

The judges of British vintage are class-conscious, as Professor Griffith of London University explained in his book, The Politics of the Judiciary. Their perspective is prejudicial to the majority of Indians who are poor and do not enjoy human rights though they are mandated in the Constitution as a fundamental right.

The judiciary as a class must reorient its basic philosophy to suit a socialist secular democratic republic. This transformation is essential if fiat justiciais to be a paramount principle of governance in India as emphasised by Jawaharlal Nehru in his tryst-with-destiny speech as India became independent.

Lord Justice Scruttin said in an address delivered to the University of Cambridge Law Society on November 18, 1920: “Where are your impartial Judges? They all move in the same circle as the employers, and they are all educated and nursed in the same ideas as the employers. How can a labourman or a trade unionist get impartial justice? It is very difficult sometimes to be sure that you have put yourself into a thoroughly impartial position between two disputants, one of your own class and one not of your class.” ( 1 Cambridge Law Journal, Page 8).

The Constitution gives you power. And all public power is held as a trust. If you breach this trust you pay for it: by facing responsible criticism. When there is justice, which is your professional-fundamental duty, criticism loses its sting. And the Preamble to the Constitution spells it out. Social, economic and political justice is your basic obligation, which you have to fulfil without fear or favour. If you fail here, you disrobe yourself and deserve correctional criticism.

The judicature is a noble and never a nocent institution. If you goofily debunk and unjustly bring the judiciary into disrepute, you judges commit contempt and get punished. The court is a magnanimous institution, majestic and glorious, and it sustains the confidence of the nation. But if the judiciary behaves as an elite upper sector and denies the rights of the common masses, criticism is what you earn. Remove those judges who conduct themselves with a sense of contempt for social justice and human rights: that is the fascist, authoritarian way.

“Small is beautiful,” said Gandhiji. You sneer at the slum-dweller, the ill-clad and the illiterate. You are not pro-people. Remember the Roman adage: “Whatever touches us all should be decided by all.” Then you as a member of a class-conscious sector must be denounced.

Above the Executive and Legislature is the Judiciary to guard the values of the Constitution with integrity, fearlessness, frankness and fraternity. That is your institutional glory. No one shall darken your bright image. The little poor seek your compassionate protection. You are the wonder of democracy. I salute you as the humanist defender of people's constitutional rights. When you fail to function, sharp criticism is the only corrective. The question then arises: have the people a right to criticise you, and if so, when does it become contempt of court, and what are the limitations to this freedom of expression?

This has become a critical issue. Judges as an instrumentality under the Constitution have vast powers under Article 141 to 144. When the Executive misuses its powers, the court can strike down its actions. When the Legislature commits excesses beyond the Constitution or otherwise defaults, the court can declare it void. When judges themselves are guilty of flaws, shortcomings or violations, public criticism is the only way judges can be corrected.

Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court observed: “‘Judges as persons, or courts as institutions, are entitled to no greater immunity from criticism than other persons or institutions. Just because the holders of judicial office are identified with the interests of justice they may forget their common human frailties and fallibilities. There have sometimes been martinets upon the bench as there have also been pompous wielders of authority who have used the paraphernalia of power in support of what they called their dignity. Therefore judges must be kept mindful of their limitations and of their ultimate public responsibility by a vigorous stream of criticism expressed with candor however blunt.”

After all, judges are human and may commit mistakes and blunders. Either a Performance Commission or vigilant, vibrant public criticism, dignified and responsible, should correct judicial wrongs. With large powers and a considerable level of immunity, judges are apt to turn noxious and culpable at times. Generally the robed brethren maintain a high order of conduct. Even so, aberrations do happen. Therefore, criticism becomes necessary in a democracy. The Constitution insists that judges should be of good behaviour. The Bench is a sacred seat and divinity is incompatible with arrogance, pride and vanity.

Hugo Black, a great judge of the U.S Supreme Court, observed: “Judges are not essentially different from other government officials. Fortunately they remain human even after assuming their judicial duties. Like all the rest of mankind they may be affected from time to time by pride and passion, by pettiness and bruised feelings, by improper understanding or by excessive zeal.”

Indian judges belong to an elite class like their English counterparts, and can be relieved only by impeachment which is a political operation beyond the pragmatic capabilities of the masses. Therefore, a Performance Commission is an essential instrument to receive complaints about judges and investigate them. Their dignity and decorum never allow frivolity or private motives to affect the functions of, or inflict injury on, judges. Transparency and accountability are democratic attributes. In spite of this, vulgar elements in public life misuse free speech and abuse judges irresponsibly and with a sense of revenge. They deserve to be punished by the punitive use of the power of contempt. This power is wide.

Lord Denning in his Family Storyhas recorded what Lord Shawcross said about one of his judgments: “Denning is an Ass.” The Times (of London) published this. In spite of it, Lord Denning declined to take contempt action since he took the view that he would disprove it not by contempt proceedings but by means of his performance. Of course, he was the best judge of the Commonwealth.

This is an example for judges in India, too. The best answer to abuse of judges is not frequent or ferocious contempt-sentencing but fine performance. Of course, rare cases may deserve contempt impeachment. Bad judges deserve to be censured by a Performance Commission with access to every citizen. How many judges in our High Courts are good by the canon laid down by Douglas? He wrote: “… [T]he law of contempt is not made for the protection of judges who may be sensitive to the winds of public opinion. Judges are supposed to be men of fortitude, able to thrive in a hardy climate.”

The weakness of many judges who escape through contempt power but should not, was portrayed by Lord Goddard: “A judge of first instance need not necessarily be a consummate lawyer. He should be a man of even temper and one who can be trusted to display and continue to display courtesy to the litigants and bar; in short, if I may use a much-abused expression, he should be a gentleman. A sense of humour … is always an asset, but a constant joker is anathema. Another quality devoutedly to be wished for is the ability to keep reasonably silent while trying a case. A garrulous judge is a misfortune; he maddens the bar and slows up proceedings, but, unhappily, it does happen that a somewhat taciturn barrister becomes surprisingly talkative once he is seated on the bench…. The public expression of what some would call strong convictions, and others prejudice, are best avoided by those who desire to become judges.”

And here is a statement by ‘Learned Hand:' “The larger part of my official life I have been in a court where three sit together, and that seems to me of immense advantage; indeed, I know it is an immense advantage. The joint judgment of three is worth much more than three times the judgment of one, unless he is a genius.”

But how many of our learned brethren will qualify to be on the Bench if this test were a condition for elevation?

source: the hindu

Have a history teacher explain this----- if they can.

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday .
Both Presidents were shot in the head

Now it gets really weird.

Lincoln 's secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy's Secretary was named Lincoln .

Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln , was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln , was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939..

Both assassins were known by their three names.
Both names are composed of fifteen letters.

Now hang on to your seat.

Lincoln was shot at the theater named 'Ford.'
Kennedy was shot in a car called ' Lincoln ' made by 'Ford.'

Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran and hid in a warehouse.
Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran and hid in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

And further interesting ...

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe , Maryland
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.

Creepy huh? Send this to as many people as you can, cause:
Hey, this is one history lesson most people probably will not mind reading

july 23, 2010
Love, lost A khap mahapanchayat meet on in Kaithal district, Haryana, in MayGovernment: honour killingsHow Thick Is Blood?No honour in this. The Centre
treads softly on reining in the killer khaps.
Anuradha Raman
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They were supposed to be a cocktail of tradition and modernity. Indeed, when they were first elected to the Lok Sabha six years ago, the young turks from
the old pocketboroughs of Haryana, Rajasthan and western UP almost seemed a breath of fresh air. Of course, they came from the entrenched political families
of the hinterland, but they came armed with fancy degrees from US varsities like Wharton and Indiana and there was this expectation that the new government
would benefit from their progressive educational backgrounds and youth. But in khap country, it all seems so much surface veneer now, as tales of the brutal
honour killings that have hounded our front pages these last few months have shown.Honour killings come out of the belief that individual choices in marriage
are proscribed by tradition and hence a violation must be avenged. The rash of incidents in the recent past where young couples have been butchered, shot
dead and strung up on trees for defying a vague tradition has shocked the nation. Surely it should have elicited a strong reaction from our young, urbane
parliamentarians. But did they take a stand, condemn these primitive acts? Their degrees notwithstanding, the young MPs have either supported the khaps
or maintained a stoic silence on the issueAgainst An Anti-Khap LawThere’s a fear of a back lash from the formidable Jat/Gujjar combine
M.S. Gill asked whether it was fair to indict the entire khap for honour killings by individuals. 
Haryana CM B.S. Hooda publicly defends the khap courts, says they are “like NGOs”.
Kamal Nath says it’s for the home ministry to take the steps required to check the killings. 
Kapil Sibal has doubts over IPC amendments proposed by the home ministry on the issue.
So you have a Deepender Hooda, MP and son of the powerful Haryana CM B.S. Hooda ducking questions even as his father publicly defended the khap panchayat
kangaroo courts saying they represented “informal social organisations like ngos”, and anyway girls and boys of the same gotra had no business falling
in love, let alone getting married. Another MP, industrialist and Page-3 celeb Naveen Jindal burnt his fingers after he defended the khaps on national
TV saying traditions cannot be trifled with (though he condemned the killings).Their words have since found an echo in the cabinet too. Last week, when
it met to take stock of home ministry-suggested amendments to the Indian Penal Code—mostly in the nature of holding the community responsible for honour
killings—the ministers were divided. Senior ones like Kamal Nath, Kapil Sibal and M.S. Gill cautioned others on the need to tread carefully as this was
not a legal issue only but one that dealt with tradition. Incidentally, most cases of honour killings have come from the Jat/Gujjar belt—they constitute
a formidable front and can tip the fortunes of any political party. So what the ministers were actually saying was: don’t rock the boat. As luck would
have it, the matter was referred to a Group of Ministers—from where it is unlikely that a decision will emerge anytime in the near future.But what did
the ministers actually say? Well, hrd minister Kapil Sibal expressed doubts on the amendments proposed by the home ministry as he did not see them solving
the problem. His point, say sources, was that the khaps in themselves were not delivering the death sentence but in censuring the marriages, only creating
conditions for families to disassociate themselves from the young couple. So, to strike at the problem, would it be in the fitness of things to charge
the entire khap for abetment to murder? However, he admitted, after the murders, khap panchayats are known to extol the virtues of a family that had avenged
its honour, which should count as an offence. Clearly, no clear solutions were coming on this front.Sibal was quickly joined by M.S. Gill who said that
states with a sizeable population of Jats and Gujjars must be consulted before a decision was arrived at. Also, as the issue was linked to tradition, it
required more than just a legal solution. Gill said that laws should be simplified so that matters could be dealt with at the local police level.While
Gill seemed to hint at a community backlash if hasty steps were taken to rein in the khaps, Kamal Nath cautioned  colleagues on the need for clear laws
on the subject. He said it was for the home ministry to take the steps required to check the killings. “There is no way one cannot condemn the killings,”
he said.The rumblings within the cabinet has left academic Prem Chowdhry, a Jat herself, deeply worried. She feels the cabinet has betrayed the sentiments
of all women by not acting. She says the khaps are part of a society where individuals take action on the basis of an ideology that the khap exhorts people
to follow. “The khaps claim they are the supreme constitution...so they can actually give an order to stop the killings. They haven’t said a word to either
condemn the act or criticise any family that has killed in the name of honour.”Within the community, Prem’s views, of course, are in a minority. Ghatwala
khap (in neighbouring Haryana) head Baljit Singh Mallik says allowing such marriages means saying yes to incest. Mallik and his ilk are going to descend
on the prime minister’s house on July 21 to press upon him the importance of amending the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, to include a proviso—a ban on same-gotra
marriages. Mallik even goes on to suggest that the Constitution is also an expression of traditions and customs and must reflect that! He goes quiet though
when asked why khap panchayats have not condemned the killings or issued orders to stop them, instead of valorising family members.So it’s a dead end.
The killings are expected to continue for young love, same-gotra marriages certainly won’t be stopped by legislation or social bullying. And till the GoM
takes a call, the government won’t bring in a law that gives couples protection and reins in the khaps.


source: outlook magazine

Interesting geographycal details


Interesting Geography

Alaska


More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska.
Amazon


The Amazon rainforest produces more than 20% the world's oxygen supply. The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more than one
hundred miles at sea off the mouth of the river, one can dip fresh water out of the ocean. The volume of water in the Amazon river is greater than the
next eight largest rivers in the world combined and three times the flow of all rivers in the United States.
Antarctica


Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country. Ninety percent of the world's ice covers Antarctica. This ice also represents
seventy percent of all the fresh water in the world. As strange as it sounds, however, Antarctica is essentially a desert. The average yearly total precipitation
is about two inches Although covered with ice (all but 0.4% of it, i.e.), Antarctica is the driest place on the planet, with an absolute humidity lower
than the Gobi desert.
Brazil


Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.
Canada


Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village."
Chicago


Next to Warsaw, Chicago has the largest Polish population in the world.
Detroit


Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, carries the designation M-1, named so because it was the first paved road anywhere.
Damascus, Syria


Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
Istanbul, Turkey


Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world located on two continents.
Kola Peninsula, Russia


The deepest hole ever made by humans is in Kola Peninsula in Russia, was completed in 1989, creating a hole 12,262 meters (7.6 miles) deep.
Los Angeles


Los Angeles's full name is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula --and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: L.A.
New York City


The term "The Big Apple" was coined by touring jazz musicians of the 1930's who used the slang expression "apple" for any town or city. Therefore, to play
New York City is to play the big time - The Big Apple. There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, Ireland; more Italians in New York City than
in Rome, Italy; and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv,??? ??? Israel.
Ohio


There are no natural lakes in the state of Ohio, every one is manmade.
Pitcairn Island


The smallest island with country status is Pitcairn in Polynesia, at just 1.75 sq. miles/4,53 sq. km.
Rome


The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, Italy in 133 B.C. There is a city called Rome on every continent.
Siberia


Siberia contains more than 25% of the world's forests. S.M.O.M.The actual smallest sovereign entity in the world is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
( S.M.O.M .). It is located in the city of Rome, Italy, has an area of two tennis courts, and as of 2001 has a population of 80, 20 people less than the
Vatican. It is a sovereign entity under international law, just as the Vatican is.
Sahara Desert


In the Sahara Desert, there is a town named Tidikelt, which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years. Technically though, the driest place on Earth
is in the valleys of the Antarctic near Ross Island. There has been no rainfall there for two million years.
Spain


Spain literally means 'the land of rabbits'.
St. Paul, Minnesota


St.Paul, Minnesota, was originally called Pig's Eye after a man named Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant who set up the first business there.
Roads


Chances that a road is unpaved in the U.S.A.: 1%, in Canada: 75% The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one-mile in every five must be straight.
These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.
United States' Waterfalls


The water of Angel Falls (the World's highest) in Venezuela drops 3,212 feet (979 meters). They are 15 times higher than Niagara Falls.

San Francisco, July 20, 2010

DPA

It's as ubiquitous as aspirin, and if you believe its adherents, just as important.

Just six years after its founding, social-networking site Facebook will lure its 500 millionth user this week, cementing its status as the most popular site in the history of the internet and - along with Google - probably the most influential.

The company started as a programming pet project for Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg, who modeled the site on the "facebooks" used by schools and colleges to enable students to get to know their classmates.

His first project landed him in hot water with authorities at his Ivy League university after he hacked into the college website to get pictures of students. But they wisely dropped charges against Zuckerberg when it became clear that the young man was on course to change the world.

Launched in February 2004, Facebook was initially limited to Harvard students. Then it expanded to Stanford, Columbia and Yale, then to other Boston colleges and gradually to colleges all over the US. The next step was to open it to all high school students in September 2005 and a year later anyone age 13 and up with a valid email address could register.

The site's explosion has been the ultimate exposition of viral growth.

It took more than three years to amass its first 100 million users and just 225 days to attract its second 100 million users. Facebook passed the 300 million mark in another 160 days and achieved its fastest rate of growth when it reached 400 million users in just another 143 days, when it was registering almost 700,000 new members daily.

Now the rate seems to be slowing a little - as it took 170 days to add enough users to reach the 500 million mark.

Like a teenager struggling to adapt to his changing body, Facebook has grappled with its meteoric rise as the online vault of our relationships, surfing habits, photographs, thoughts, experiences and every other facet of both our virtual and real-world lives.

"A big part of the challenge that we've had is that we've grown from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of millions," Zuckerberg said at a news conference he called in May following a storm of protest about the site's privacy policy changes.

"It's been a big shift along the way, and it hasn't always been smooth."

As people spend more and more time online, and spend more and more of their online time on Facebook, Zuckerberg has become a poster boy for the young tech billionaire set. But he claims not to care about mmoney and has consistently refused to yield control of the site to the money men. He is reluctant to cash in his stake with a multi-billion dollar initial public offering, which according to some estimates would value the company at more than 20 billion dollars.

Even Zuckerberg's recent privacy missteps were motivated not by a a rapacious hunt for lucrative data, but rather to further his vision of radical transparency, according to David Kirkpatrick, whose book

The Facebook Effect is one of the most perceptive examinations to date of the site.

According to Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg sees Facebook as a social movement dedicated to the idea of radical transparency. He believes that by sharing our data and our public lives we become better people, less able to manipulate, connive and indulge in hypocrisy.

Some may see these ideals as noble, others as downright creepy. But most users will ignore the ideological implications as long as the site remains useful - or, more specifically, as long as their friends keep using the addictive site.

Facebook's hegemony faces other threats. Just as one can become sick of eating too many cream cakes, there's also a growing sense of Facebook overload, when the endless updates, pokes and suggestions from hundreds of "friends" all become too much to bear, says internet analyst Carmi Levy.

"Facebook is very clearly no longer a fad but its own landscape and a major force on the global internet," Levy says.

The company declared it was making a profit on advertising last year and "has nowhere to go but up" in terms of making money, Levy believes.

Levy predicts a drop in time that users spend on the site but has little idea if any company will ever be strong enough to lure away Facebook's massive user base.

"Something may replace Facebook one day," he says. "But if it does, it will be something we've never heard of."

Source:
www.thehindu.com

18 july, 2010


MIKE MARQUSEE


A global grassroots movement of solidarity with the Palestinians is gaining in numbers slowly but surely. But there is still a long way to go.




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The people of Gaza have been plunged into an entirely human-made humanitarian crisis.
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PHOTO: AFP

Out in the streets: People across the world are protesting against the Gaza blockade.

In an effort to mitigate the global outrage that followed its attack on the Gaza aid flotilla, Israel has (ever so slightly) eased its blockade on Gaza. However minimal, this step has only been taken because of the pressure applied to Israel by the international grass-roots protest movement. The primary aim of the Gaza aid missions has been to alert the world to the criminality of the blockade and, in this it has succeeded, though the price has been heavy: nine killed (mostly with shots directly to the head and neck) and 700 others violently abducted, detained and abused.

Unfortunately, President Obama and others have seized on the Israelis' gesture as an excuse to issue them a renewed license to proceed with their assault on Palestinian lives and rights. While now permitting some consumer goods to enter Gaza, Israel continues to block chemicals, medical instruments, construction tools, aluminium, steel and cement, making it impossible to rebuild the homes, schools, hospitals, offices and factories destroyed by Israel in Operation Cast Lead of 2008-2009.

Sealed off by Israel since 2007, the people of Gaza are not only starved of imports but denied the freedom to trade or seek work, education or healthcare. They have been plunged into an entirely human-made humanitarian crisis. The World Health Organisation reports that malnutrition is rife: 66 per cent of infants and 30 per cent of expectant mothers suffer from anaemia. Material assistance is desperately needed in Gaza and the only way to deliver it involves breaking the Israeli blockade.

Israel's assertion of an extraordinary right to assault and detain citizens of other nations in neutral waters is of a piece with its persistent disregard for international law and elementary standards of justice.

Illegal colonisation

In defiance of Article 49 of the fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of an occupying power's civilian population into the territory it is occupying, Israel has colonised the West Bank with Jewish settlements which now control 42 per cent of the territory. In total, across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there are some 200 settlements, all of them illegal, all supported by Israeli funds and protected by Israeli arms. The settlers have appropriated not only land, but water. Last year, the three million West Bank Palestinians were allocated an average 83 cubic metres of water each, while the 500,000 Jewish settlers enjoyed 1450 cubic metres each.

To entrench these settlements, Israel has constructed an extensive network of Israeli-only roads (from which Palestinians are banned), while controlling the local population though a system of more than 600 military checkpoints and a regime of curfews, arbitrary closures, house demolitions and punitive incursions. The massive 700 km concrete barrier Israel dubs the “separation fence” and the rest of the world has come to call the Apartheid Wall cuts deep into the West Bank, annexing large fertile areas, encircling major population centres, isolating villagers from their lands. In the course of non-violent protests against the wall, 19 Palestinians have been killed and 1500 injured by Israeli soldiers, not one of whom has faced charges of any kind.

Second class citizens





The charity Save the Children has found that in “Area C” - the 60 per cent of the West Bank under direct Israeli control - 79 per cent of the people lack sufficient food. On the eastern border of the country, the fertile Jordan Valley is a “closed military zone” where settlers produce crops for export while the legal owners of the land are not allowed to set foot on it.

Soon after the 1967 war, Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem. Palestinians born there are not allowed to become Israeli citizens, although they pay taxes to and live under the jurisdiction of Israel's Jerusalem Municipality. This body provides the city's 700,000 Jews with 36 public swimming pools and 26 libraries, and its 270,000 Palestinians with no swimming pools and two libraries. In recent years, Israel has stepped up the colonisation of East Jerusalem with new settlements while using the wall to cut the city off from the rest of the West Bank. In 2008, more than 4,500 Palestinians were excluded from Jerusalem by Israeli fiat. As it has so often in the past, Israel pre-empts negotiations - in which the final status of Jerusalem is central - by establishing “facts on the ground”.

Within pre-1967 Israel, the 18 per cent of the population who are non-Jewish Palestinians, officially classified as “Arabs”, enjoy what is at best a second-class citizenship. More than 90 per cent of the land is legally reserved for Jewish use, while Israeli Palestinians are confined to a separate and inferior educational system and denied benefits and jobs to which Jewish Israelis are entitled. Israeli law prevents Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs from living in Israel, but anyone else who marries an Israeli is granted Israeli citizenship.

Circumscribed rights

Yes, Israel's Palestinians have the right to vote, but even that is circumscribed. Any political group that advocates amending the “Jewish” character of the state by calling on Israel to become, like every modern state, “a state of all its citizens”, is banned from taking part in elections. Elected Palestinian Members of Knesset who have made such a call have been stripped of Parliamentary immunity and tried for subversion.

Some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners are currently held in Israeli jails, including over 300 children, some 50 elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, plus mayors, municipal councillors and even a few ministers of the Palestinian National Authority. Six hundered are being held without charge under “administrative detention”; others have been charged but await trial indefinitely.

"Security" needs

Israel claims all this is necessary because of its unique “security” needs. If these actions are not taken, it is asserted, the Jewish State and therefore the Jewish people will be annihilated. In fact, it is the Palestinians who face an existential threat, who are being ground out not in theory but in daily practise.

The Israeli definition of “security” means not safety for the Jewish population of Palestine (who are entitled to and must be guaranteed the same rights as any others) but perpetual Jewish domination over the whole of Palestine. By its behaviour toward Gaza and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has sought to make the creation of any viable Palestinian state impossible. Its negotiating tools are the wall, the settlements, the siphoning off of water, the immiseration of Gaza, not to mention the bulldozers that last year levelled some 300 Palestinian homes built on Palestinian land. In this context, not surprisingly, Palestinian resistance continues. While sometimes violent, it is for the most part non-violent, but all forms of Palestinian self-assertion are regarded as a threat to Israel's right to rule and treated accordingly.

Israel claims a global ethnic mission - on behalf of all Jews everywhere - and with it special prerogatives and exemptions. Those prerogatives and exemptions are backed up by the US (another country claiming a global mission), the EU and others, including the Indian government, which has vigorously pursued military and economic ties with Israel.

In response to the complicity of governments with Israel's ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians, a worldwide citizens' movement has emerged to redress the balance. Its campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions has made significant progress in the last few years. Lazy thinkers who believe “real” politics is all about professional politicians should open their eyes. From small beginnings, with few resources, and in the face of formidably well-funded, well-organised and ruthless opposition, the grassroots global movement of solidarity with the Palestinians has begun to shift the balance of power. There is, however, a long way to go. Conscientious citizens of the world, wherever they find themselves, should stand with the Palestinians, doing whatever they can to remove the immediate threats to their existence and to ensure, in the long run, their right to a free life in their own land.






www.mikemarqusee.com

source: the hindu

18 july, 2010


HARSH MANDER


Measuring deprivation, want and hunger is limited and the failure to do so accurately deprives people of their right to affordable food, social security and health care.




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ARE the poor “permitted to have palates and preferences?
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Photo: Sushil Kumar Verma

Measuring hunger:Is it even possible?

There is a bewildering maze of debates about defining and measuring poverty and hunger. I am reminded of an irreverent economics professor who compared statistics to a hapless impoverished tribal man arrested in a police station. “If you torture both enough,” he tells his students, “you can force them to admit to anything!”

Yet we cannot afford to ignore the sometimes abstruse intellectual polemics around estimating poverty and hunger levels and trends, because especially since the 1990s in India, this calculus has been deployed by public planners and finance managers to justify cutting back public expenditures on social and food security. They targeted a hitherto universal public distribution system (through a country-wide network of subsidised food grain ration shops), to only those who are officially ‘measured' and certified to be poor. This approach persists in current officials proposals around the Food Security Bill. When poverty lines are fixed by politicians and administrators with one eye on political implications and another on budgetary ones, commentator Ashwani Saith pithily surmises that this “usually leads to a squint and to cock-eyed vision”.

Severely minimalist

Most poverty lines are constructed around the severely minimalist premise of the least amount of money that an allegedly ‘average' man or woman would require to buy the cheapest food that, when eaten, would metabolise into the minimum calories that he or she requires to lead an active and healthy life. This was pegged by Indian planners at 2100 kilocalories for urban and 2400 for rural persons per day for ‘ normal' work, based on recommendations by the Nutrition Expert Group to the Planning Commission in 1969. Yet studies have established that heavy work such as that which is typically the burden of casual daily workers, such as earth cutting, carrying headloads, mining and pedalling rickshaws, requires even higher ‘food fuel' for the body, close to 3550 kilocalories. Food denials for the unorganised and destitute poor, therefore, take a heavy toll in terms of avoidable sickness and early deaths.

The claims of declining poverty are based on surreptitiously changing goal-posts. Utsa Patnaik painstakingly establishes that even these extremely modest minimal standards of caloric intake prescribed for calculating poverty thresholds, have been quietly (and she believes dishonestly) abandoned by policy planners in India, to mythologise about rapidly falling poverty levels. In 1999-2000, for instance, the price adjusted poverty line was Rs. 328 per month per rural person. By this count, the proportion of poor people in Indian villages had impressively fallen to 27 per cent from 37 per cent in 1993-94. But Patnaik points out that planners are silent that a monthly expenditure of Rs. 328 could enable a person to access at best 1890 kilocalories a day, as much as 500 kilocalories below the modest minimal norm of 2400 officially fixed three decades earlier. If the government adhered to its own norm, as many as 74.5 per cent of its rural people were consuming less food than minimally deemed necessary for an active healthy life. The latest official poverty estimates by the Tendulkar Committee accepts calorie norms of 1800 calories, suggesting that this is an adequate standard for India.

Further, a child in school would tell you that a nutritious diet requires not just calories for energy, but also proteins, and a range of vitamins and minerals. The niggardly poverty line is based on consumption of cereals, which supply calories but not most other nutrition needs. Further, the severe poverty line standards of our national planners, requires them to purchase only the cheapest food, regardless of their cultural and personal preference. Bardhan believes that people should be excluded from poverty calculations if they “forego the opportunity to buy cheaper sources of calories and protein just because these items are not tasty enough”.

Saith counters by asking whether the poor are “permitted to have palates and preferences? A sweet tooth perhaps? Would life not be a misery for a Bengali or a Punjabi deprived of sweets?” I recall the poignancy of the aged Bengali widow in Deepa Mehta's gentle film “Water”, who dreams for years of eating sweets, and cannot survive the ecstasy when finally she once realises her longing. He asks if poor children are entitled to eat “junk fast food occasionally – not often enough to get obese, but occasionally at least to know how the other half thrives, and to harbour the illusion that they belong to the same universe as other children?” Are poor people only entitled to making ‘good' and ‘wise' choices, whereas even mildly wicked indulgences or fun remains only the rightful preserve of those who are privileged?

Many assumptions

There are many other obvious pitfalls to regarding household expenditure as a measure of well-being. It assumes that impoverished people can depend on reliable, accessible and satisfactory quality services of health and education from the public sector. For instance, a Working Group of eminent and learned economists in 1962, after great debate, fixed the poverty line at a level that excluded any expenditure on health and education. They justified these by simply assuming that both of these would be provided completely free of cost by the State, because it was a constitutional mandate; it also assumed urban housing would be subsidised by the State. These assumptions are light years away from the lived from realities of most poor families. The Centre for Policy Alternatives constructed an alternative poverty index based on expenditure required minimally for basic needs of nutrition, healthcare, clothing, shelter etc, and even by their austere standards, in 2001 an monthly expenditure of Rs. 840 per head, which would place 68.5 per cent of the urban and 80 per cent of the rural population below poverty, a far cry from the upbeat government claims at that time of a fall of poverty ratios to 26.1 per cent.

Actual poverty surveys, when conducted under official patronage, have very damaging outcomes on the chances of survival with dignity and security of the poorest families, by blocking their access to official food and safety nets. For instance, the Planning Commission instituted a rural survey of poor families based on a somewhat whimsical 13 point scoring scale. By the norms of the survey, a household was in peril of being regarded as relatively well-endowed and consequently ineligible for subsidised food and other government aid if its home had a pucca roof, a toilet, children attended school and some of its members were educated, it accessed credit in times of need, and they occasionally ate non-vegetarian food. The survey, in effect, disqualified hunting and foraging forest-based tribals and fisher folk, or conscientious poor people who benefited from government sanitation drives, or those who sacrificed a great deal to send their children to school. The selection of urban poor families is even more arbitrary, based on local enquiries by often corrupt officials of the notorious food department, when poor households apply for ration cards. The procedures effectively rule out those who are most needy in any city, because of their constantly contested citizenship - migrant workers, rag-pickers, homeless populations, wandering mentally ill persons and leprosy patients, destitute people who live by begging, residents of illegalised and demolished slums, minorities (especially if they come from Eastern India and are therefore suspected Bangladeshi illegal immigrants), construction labour, rickshaw pullers and head-loaders, sex workers and domestic workers.

There is an old proverb that what the eye cannot see, the heart cannot grieve. The capacities of governments to see, measure and then list deprivation, want and hunger seem currently acutely limited. Their failures deprive people of their rights to affordable food, social security and health care. But in fact there is no dearth of talent, professional knowledge and resources available to public authorities. What they needs perhaps is just a little more compassion.

source: the hindu

18 july, 2010


SEVANTI NINAN


Journalists all over the world are active social networkers. But what happens when they give vent to personal views on these sites?





PHOTO: AFP

Octavia Nasr: An error of judgment?

How do news organisations separate public perception of the journalist from the individual on social media? Journalists all over the world are tweeting away, presumably acquiring a following that helps build their brand. They comment on stuff happening on their beat, and occasionally offer cute personal takes on kids or gardens. That should be good for the newspaper or TV channel.

But sometimes things go wrong. When a senior editor at CNN lost her job last fortnight for expressing personal admiration for a Hizbollah leader, it revived a debate in the West on policies regarding social media. The New York Timesreported that CNN removed its senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, from her job after she put out a Twitter message saying that she respected the Shiite cleric the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on Sunday. CNN felt the heat after there were sharp reactions from Israel. The broadcaster said it was an error of judgement on Nasr's part and announced rather quickly that she was leaving the company.

Harmless so far

In our blithe, rule-free media universe, blogging or tweeting by a journalists has not become an issue yet, partly because much of what is on Twitter is harmless, even vacuous. There is a lot of “watch such and such programme” from our TV anchorpersons, or “read such and such” from our editors. The rest is comments that feed a fan following. Star News anchor Deepak Chaurasia's Twitter feeds have such profundities as “When Delhi will find the solutions from rain trafic jam” or “Hope the Delhi govt is not treating the games like ghar ki shaadi”. That is, when his tweets are not about the Star Anchor Hunt. Sagarika Ghose tells her followers what the topic will be that day on her programme Face the Nation or offers opinions on a movie or book.

But elsewhere a rulebook is evolving on the use of social media. There are some interesting readings on the subject on the Net by both academics and journalists. News organisations are keen to have their staff use Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter as reporting tools but have reservations about their expressing personal views on these, especially political ones. The New York Times policy on social networking sites explains why: “If you have or are getting a Facebook page leave blank the section about your political views, in accordance with the ethical journalism admonition to do nothing that might cast doubt on your or the Times's political impartiality in reporting the news.”

Other publications such as the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have also formulated policies on social media. The Post came up with guidelines last year after Raju Narisetti (formerly founding editor of Mint, currently one of the managing editors of the Post) expressed views on his Twitter feed on US government spending on the war. And on another occasion, on a retirement age for politicians. The paper's executive editor gave a reason similar to that of NYT: Reporters and editors should not express views that can be considered as political. Narisetti closed his Twitter account. Writing on the subject, the paper's ombudsman had a column titled “Print era shackles for a Twitter world?” which pretty much summed up how critics see restrictions on social media interaction.

What makes this odd is a parallel media ethics trend which says it is perfectly alright for media outlets to be ‘committed' in their coverage, or coloured shall we say, by an ideology. Newspapers have always been identifiable with specific political leanings, both here and abroad, broadcasters with the exception of the Fox network are expected to be impartial. But Guy Black, executive director of the Telegraph Media Group, said recently in an interview that given the multiplicity of satellite TV channels there is really no reason why channels with different political leanings should not be on air. (In his previous job he was director of the Press Complaints Commission in the U.K.) The distinction seems to be that a media group can be identified with a leaning or a sympathy, an individual employee, however senior, should not be. That would invite charges of inherent bias.

Kashmir online

But there are places where such self censorship does not apply, and Kashmir is one of them. Last fortnight's events in Kashmir saw the state go without newspapers for two days, because curfew passes of all local reporters were cancelled. But TV crews and reporters from Delhi were brought in and taken by the army on its flag march so that there could be ‘reporting' on the state for the rest of the country despite the curfew.

So social media came into play in two ways. A local journalist with a blog called kashmirreporter.blogspot.com lashed out at the ‘take' offered by the national media and commentators, calling it embedded journalism, and did so on Facebook. He offered his own take for the solution of the Kashmir crisis. Yet another Kashmiri journalist wrote on facebook that embedded journalism had been introduced for the first time in Kashmir. Whats more, correspondents of national papers posted photographs that were not carried by their newspapers on their Facebook pages.

And in a throwback to Kosovo in 1999 which saw citizens reporting a war that journalists could not access, Kashmiris, including students, went online in the days that newspapers were closed to describe what was happening in various parts of Kashmir. In a state where smses remain banned from the end of June this year, social media now provides the only outlet for Kashmiri citizens and journalists alike. And on it, they are defiant in the views they express.







source: the hindu

18, july 2010

NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN


News production and dissemination have taken on the frenetic pace of a T20 match but none of the issues debated fiercely a year ago has any resonance now. Isn't it time to take another look at the concept of news 24x7?




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Just as we cannot remember the scores of a cricket match played a few days ago, we have no recollection of the debates that happened last week.
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Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

Robert Bresson

One of the supposed psychiatric maladies afflicting children in affluent Western societies like that of North America is the one relating to the problems of inattention and hyperactivity. Thus increasing number of children is found to have difficulties in paying attention and having focus, and is often bored easily. These are complemented with hyperactive and impulsive behaviour. This has been controversially theorised in medical science literature as Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Controversial because in an age when pharmaceutical MNCs and corporate medicine rule the roost, any benign abnormality can be classified, diagnosed and treated with often harmful consequences. But as the medical community debates the veracity of physiological phenomenon like ADHD it appears that this is a malady that increasingly affects our social health; it is a creature of the socio-economic and technological context in which the unbridled pace of change forces us to have no long term attention to, or focus on anything.





Information overkill





The media, especially television has played a huge role in the perpetration of ADHD. We live in the era of information overkill. One of the fundamental features of our condition is the enormous amount of data and information that we have to digest on a day-to-day basis. Recently the Library of Congress decided to acquire the entire archive of Twitter messages from 2006. Imagine, 500 years from now, researchers trying to study the social life of the 21st century will have to plough through the hourly ramblings of a Preity Zinta and a Lalit Modi. The inevitable outcome of such a dispensation is the material condition of reduced attention.





This has been more than evident if we, for example, look at the media coverage recently and in the past one year. It is difficult to believe that the Shashi Tharoor fiasco happened a few weeks ago. Similarly, all the recent controversies like the Shahrukh Khan-Shiv Sena spat, Bachchan-Narendra Modi issue, Sania Mirza-Shoaib Malik marriage and, of course, Lait Modi and the IPL all seem to have happened eons ago. Besides these there were other important happenings which created a stir in the media like caste census, honour killings and khap panchayat, the sentencing of Kasab, the Liberhan Commission Report, police officer Rathore sex offence case, GM and Bt Brinjal debate and the Telengana stir. And the biggest of them all, the Maoist attacks. None of the troubling conditions that gave rise to most of these issues have been positively eliminated. Still we live from one sensational news item to another. We have to rub our eyes in disbelief at the pace at which news agenda are set up and cast aside. It is not surprising that in the age of T20 cricket, news production and dissemination also resemble the frenetic pace of run-gathering. Just as we cannot remember the scores of a cricket match played a few days ago, we have no recollection of the debates that happened last week. We have been forced to become the protagonist of the film “Memento” (indigenised as “Ghajini”) and write all the pieces of our news on our body to remember them.





So what about events from a year ago when UPA -II assumed office? If we were to cast our glance back to the debates that happened then, we would be struck by the fact that none of them have any resonance now (that is if we remember them) precisely because they were artificially-created ones. Just take for example, the raging debate on television at the time of the elections last year. This was about whether India needed an Obama. Of course, the historic event of an African-American in the White House generated the mass hysteria all over the world.





But it was curious to see the media in the oldest Third World democracy uncritically climbing onto the bandwagon of Obamania. Channel after channel seemed to argue that all the problems that India faced were because of the lack of a personality like Obama. He seemed to be the magic wand that we never had. It was comical to see that the nation that produced Gandhi was ruing the fact that it did not have an Obama. No questions were asked about the ingenuity of reducing the complexity of the most diverse nation in the world to the monochromatic politics of the United States. More importantly, the need to go beyond the superficial focus on personalities and understand the complex socio-economic issues that drive societies was completely ignored. The entire focus was on a few figures like the Gandhis and even when less ‘glamorous' personalities like Mayawati were the focus, it was in the form of a vitriolic dismissal of the individual than a nuanced understanding of Dalit politics. Rather than see the elections as an occasion for a debate on substantive issues, it was reduced to the triviality of who will form the government and who will go with whom.

And a year since the clamour for an Indian Obama, there is not a singular mention of Obama in the media. As if the situation that gave rise to the need for Obama has dissipated. How can it be expected of a media that preposterously and shockingly termed the last general elections as a ‘no-issue' election? Such a callous disregard for the real problems facing the millions of people in a nation that is still part of the ‘Third World' is unpardonable. Save for lone voices like P. Sainath, there was hardly a counter view to the elections.





The violent explosion of the Maoist attacks in the last one year seems to be cocking a snook at the media's ivory tower existence. The Maoist ‘problem' is just one example of the utter unwillingness and failure of the media to read the pulse of the country, especially when it comes to the poor and the vulnerable which constitute the vast majority of it. Just after a non-issue election, there has been a veritable churning of the social fabric. Only an attention-erasing media (ironically, while seeking attention) can feed us the myth that these issues are produced out of thin air and without a history. Day in and day out, we see the spectacle of an issue being fantastically flashed as ‘breaking news' and then after a two-day brainstorming with experts and some members of the public, we never get to hear of it again. The eagerness seen in bringing up an issue is strangely missing when it comes to systematically following it up.

Where's the follow-up?





Just consider the media storm that the Lalit Modi fiasco raised and the calmness that pervades now. All the issues that came up like the accountability of BCCI, conflict of interests, insider trading, nepotism and so on have vanished beyond a trace. Of course, the need to follow up does not arise in cases where the news itself is manufactured by the media like the nonsensical wastage of sound bytes and reams of paper on Shoaib Malik's marital status. The Bhopal gas disaster is a classic case of the media and lost opportunities. When in the United States, smokers are awarded damages to the tune of $ 300 million (as in the case of Cindy Naugle) against tobacco companies, our media's utter failure in raising public consciousness and exposing the state-MNC nexus ensured that Union Carbide doled out only alms of $300 each for the victims of Bhopal.





Despite these media effects the common criticism of media sensationalism misses the point that media is not an entity that exists in a vacuum. The growth of inattention and hyperactivity occurs in a material context in which there is a proliferation of a host of mass media technologies and social networking venues like the internet, mobile phones, p2p video streaming, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and so on. This is further made possible by their burgeoning commercial possibilities. As the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued, our everyday life has degenerated because of the relentless incursion of technology into the every pore of its being. The growth of technologies does not necessarily translate into more leisure time, but for him, leisure itself begins to take on the form of monotonous labour. We constantly fritter ourselves in one digital technology or the other. It is in this context of intense competition for our attention that the media has to ‘produce' news ‘24/7' leading to news that has the shelf life of ice cream in room temperature.

It is time to stop going with the flow. At least some media establishment has to summon the courage to go against the grain to stop time and reflect on the news of at least the last few months. It is literally time to stop press. But not to broadcast another sensational piece of news, but to give it a break until we pursued and brought to a closure some of the pressing issues facing the nation.

Dr. Nissim Mannathukkaren is Director of Graduate Program, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University. Currently he is an Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Wroclaw (Poland) and Leipzig (Germany).

source: the hindu

11 july 2010


KANKANA BASU


Women have been portrayed in a variety of ways in Hindi cinema over the years. While some actors rejoiced in author-backed sensitive roles, others were confined to a fleeting appearance in a male-dominated film. KANKANA BASU takes a look at how women are asserting themselves again in Bollywood: both as actors and filmmakers.








When Waheeda Rehman relinquished her dupatta to the winds and cast aside her inhibitions and marital obligations as well, little did she know that her signature tune would become an anthem for generations of women.

Decades after the film was made, kaanton se kheech ke ye aanchal......aaj phir jeene ki tamanna haifrom “Guide” continue to epitomise the blithe, free spirit of women.

One of the first films to have an adulterous heroine, “Guide” remains a path-breaking film in terms of maturity and a deep understanding of a woman's emotional needs. As a young dancer who leaves her abusive and elderly husband for the sympathetic young guide Raju, the character of Rosy was well ahead of the social period it was made in (1965). Women-centric movies continued to be made in later years (bold, timid and in-between) but were destined to follow a rather erratic graph.


Sensitive portrayals


There was a time when entire stories were woven around the female protagonist. Filmmakers like Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Govind Nihalani, Shyam Benegal, Shakti Samant and Yash Chopa will be remembered for the sensitivity with which they handled their screen women.

Their muses (Waheeda Rehman, Nutan, Sharmila Tagore, Madhubala, Sadhna, Nargis and others) continue to be the stuff legends are made of. Satyajit Ray's “Charulata”, a film that explored the innermost labyrinths of the female psyche, remains the eternal yardstick for judging woman-sensitive cinema.





With author-backed roles for the heroines, the filmmakers of that era were masters at portraying women with all their complexities using obtuse techniques involving light, shadows, music and muted dialogue.

“The 1960s and the 1970s were a period of the best in women-centric movies. Actors lived and breathed their roles, so much so that their screen images often spilled into their personal lives. Meena Kumari will always be synonymous with the neglected zamindar's wife of ‘Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam' (who ultimately descends into alcoholism), ditto Waheeda Rehman with the tempestuous dancer Rosy of ‘Guide', Nutan with ‘Sujata', Beena Rai with ‘Anarkali'and Nargis with ‘Mother India'. There was no dichotomy between the actor and the role she played,” says Rekha Banerjee, wife of the late film director and screenplay-writer, Shanu Banerjee.





She recalls Meena Kumari sobbing inconsolably long after the director had called ‘cut', so deeply did she immerse herself in the role; while years later, on the sets of “Khubsoorat” (a movie for which her husband had written the screenplay), she remembers her namesake, actor Rekha, laughing and frolicking much like her movie role of a tomboy.

The next generation of heroines left an equally deep impact as the impressionable viewer came to associate Jaya Bhaduri with Guddi, Hema Malini with the angelic Seeta as well as her naughty twin Geeta and Sridevi with Chandni. “There was an aura of mystery and allure surrounding them and their personal lives were almost as fascinating as their screen lives. Now heroines double up as cricket team owners, fitness gurus, restaurateurs, reality show participants/judges and columnists. Their much-hyped public images often get in the way of their screen roles detracting from the credibility of their performance,” says Banerjee.

Era of revenge


The departure of Rajesh Khanna from the silver screen marked the end of romance, while the arrival of the angry young man Amitabh Bachan heralded a cinematic era of rage and revenge. The heroine found herself relegated to a scattered peripheral presence either as the love interest of the hero or a decorative piece in a movie filled with muscles and testosterone. Consequently, a breed of actors emerged who looked like sculpted goddesses and who were quick to perfect the art of running around trees. The thinking actor was a threatened species and the likes of Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi and Deepti Naval will always be remembered for holding their own during this masculine and masochistic Bollywood chapter.

“The turn of the millenium was a dark phase for Bollywood films: rehashed themes, tinny music, lyrics sans poetry and women often projected in a derogatory manner,” says Naheed Merchant, a keen observer of Bollywood changes. However, this period was responsible for heralding some startling changes in social and gender stereotypes. Yesteryear heroines had been virginal, docile, bathed in virtue, the professions they hailed from being slightly vague; they were either nurses, dutiful daughters, students or beautiful women just content to be. The heroine and the vamp were two distinct identities.

“The sensational,promiscuous cheroot-smoking Zeenat Aman swaying to dum maaro dumin “Hare Ram Hare Krishna” was a defining moment in Hindi cinema, one that was destined to change the image of the leading lady forever. Parveen Babi followed suit by doing a smouldering cabaret in ‘Shaan' and the watertight compartments reserved for the leading lady and the vamp respectively dissolved forever,” says Mumbai based photographer and movie aficionado Deepankar B.

Shades of grey


The heroine was suddenly not a demi-goddess any more but a woman of flesh and blood, often with interesting shades of grey to her personality. Previously attired in traditional attire, the heroine was now ready to experiment with both Western clothes and a liberal international state of mind. “Heroines are no longer hesitant about flaunting their sexuality or making the first move in a relationship,” observes Deepankar. He cites Mahi Gill's character in “Dev D” and Deepika Padukone as Sonali Mukherjee in “Karthik calling Karthik”, to illustrate his point.

The recent spate of movies shows women at the top once again, rubbing shoulders with the leading man in terms of popularity and demand. Vidya Balan as the scheming seductress in “Ishqiya”, who has her male leads running loops around her (and each other), neatly sums up the GenNext heroine. Interestingly, while the actors boasting of hot bods, immaculate looks and carefully constructed public images seem to be falling back in the race for survival, the power house performers with unconventional looks and indifferent fashion sense are proving to be the marathon runners. Kajol, Konkona Sen Sharma, Vidya Balan, Tabu and Nandita Das, are the contemporary faces of intelligent cinema, agree most movie buffs. Of these, Nandita Das, besides acting, doubles up as director and screenplay writer. "From acting in filmsto directing them seemed a natural progression for me. I had the strong desire to tell my own story in my own way,” says Nandita, who is on cloud nine after her debut film “Firaaq” bagged the Filmfare Critics'' choice for the best film. She admits that being a woman director comes with its own share of gender-related hassles, “but which profession doesn't?” is her argument.

The new age heroine not only has a mind of her own but also seems to have a well chalked out career. She could be a doctor, lawyer, journalist, interior decorator, editor, fashion designer, hair stylist or even a cab driver (Deepika Padukone in “Bachna Ae Haseeno”)!

Astonishing transformation


Probably the character who has undergone the most astonishing transformation in recent years is the screen mother. From a sniffling, weary woman weighed down by the cares of the world and perennially slaving over a sewing machine (immortalised by Nirupa Roy), the mother is now smart, savvy, even sassy at times. Reading hi-brow literature late into the night in her pyjamas, crusading for social causes in the day and at all times finely tuned in to the love life of her adolescent son, Ratna Pathak in “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” is the undisputed new-age ‘cool mom'. “I'm frequently told that I'm the face of the new screen mother and it feels very good!” says Ratna. “However, one swallow does not a summer make. Movies generally have manufactured images seen from a male viewpoint. But a definite shift is happening to give a fresh perspective to women,” she says.


Women-centric films that connect with both the male and the female viewers are gaining in number. “Dor”, “Ishqiya”, “Parineeta”, “Fashion”, “Page 3”, “Wake Up Sid” (with its older woman-younger man theme) continue to be favourites “Even though Shah Rukh Khan played the title role, the heroine fighting to avenge her dead son in a foreign land is what comes to mind repeatedly. I think ‘My Name is Khan'belonged to the mother (Kajol),” says Deepankar.

Nandini Rao, professor of sociology, names Madhur Bhandarkar as another director who does justice to women. “He portrays them as strong individuals straining to break out of the shackles of society and carve their own space in a man's world,” says Nandini.

Behind the camera





No one quite understands a woman like another woman and women directors are going places. While Mira Nair's “Monsoon Wedding” tackled paedophilia lurking within the family, Aparna Sen spun “36 Chowringhee Lane” around the loneliness of old age among the Anglo-Indian community. The petite Tanuja Chandra chose to explore the criminal mind (with chilling success) in “Dushman” while Reema Kagti had the crowds swinging to the off-beat “Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd.”.

“Dor”, one of the most sensitive films made in recent times was made by a man, Nagesh Kukunoor. Zoya Akhtar, Farah Khan, Kalpana Lajmi and Meghna Gulzar are other filmmakers who have left a mark on the silver screen.


With the star factory shutting shop, star power is on the wane. It is the day of the thinker and the performer. But for all those who fear that the old order changing may mean cinema losing its lustre and glamour- appeal, there is good news. The ingredients remain the same, it is the treatment that is changing rapidly. With author-backed roles lined up for actors of substance, a breed of visionary film-makers is waiting to greet a new cinematic dawn.


source: the hindu

JAYATI GHOSH


The preparation for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi has led to large-scale displacement, but there is very little effort at relocation and rehabilitation.





RAVEENDRAN/AFP

STREET FOOD VENDORS protest in New Delhi on July 7 against the removal of their outlets as part of the clean-up drive for the Commonwealth Games.

NOW that the month-long football festivities are finally over, and people around the world have to recover from a self-imposed overdose of “the beautiful game”, it may be time to take stock. By almost all accounts, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa was a resounding success. The bright and sparkling new stadia were impressive and generally filled to capacity; the mood of infectious joy and celebration among spectators was only slightly dampened by the early exit of most of the African teams; and the unpredictability and high level of competitiveness of many matches brought surprise and delight to viewers across the world. Even the shocks and sorrows of the tournament reflected this success, of the ability of the game to make people forget about everything else but the activities of 22 men on an often wet field.

Certainly, there is much that the host nation – and the South African government – can be proud of. Most essential of all, the entire competition occurred in a context of relative peace and stability. The smooth conduct of a very complex logistical operation was itself a near miracle given the many uncertainties that characterise life in the developing world, including in Africa. So this is no small achievement.

The infrastructure for players and other visitors was good and the transport to and from venues was apparently efficiently organised. The venues themselves and the surrounding areas were clean and newly beautified in the effort to please and attract the foreign visitors. Thankfully, there was also little of the petty and sometimes extreme violence that plagues most South African cities, though local residents usually described this as a temporary phenomenon that was only possible during the championship.

For South Africans, this was also presented as part of a wider process of healing and dealing with the very wide racial and class differences that still characterise the society and economy, in the hope that the unifying and emotive power of sport would somehow transcend these sharp divisions. To what extent this more ambitious goal was realised is a more difficult question and one that probably provides less positive answers.

Of course, much will depend on how the feel-good factor of having successfully held a major international championship of this magnitude translates into a general and more permanent feeling of well-being for the entire population.

This in turn depends crucially on how involved the average resident felt in the process, and whether the process itself was designed to integrate people and make them feel that it benefits them.

On this specific matter, the planning, execution and management of the football World Cup left something to be desired for the ordinary citizen of South Africa. In fact, it was probably downright negative for the people who were displaced in the rapid rush to provide the spanking new infrastructure for the matches. There was already much debate within the country about the wisdom of spending so much on state-of-the-art sports facilities at vast expense, which are likely to be largely under-utilised in future, when basic needs for so much of the population are denied on the grounds of budgetary constraints.

A bitter joke doing the rounds is that, as has happened too often in history, once again the Africans have paid for a large party for the Europeans to come and enjoy themselves. The question is how expensive this will turn out to be in terms of the social fabric, or whether the costs will be counterbalanced by the pride of apparent national achievement.

During construction, and then again during the games held at the World Cup sites, there was a significantly increased rate of evictions. The estimates are that tens of thousands of people were evicted from their homes. In addition, thousands of small traders were evicted from their places of work and so lost their livelihood, without any compensation. Those evicted from their residences were often not compensated because as recent migrants or temporary settlers they did not have the required legal proof of residence that would entitle them to alternative residence and rehabilitation.

The “lucky ones” among the evicted population were sent to temporary relocation areas or transit camps. Reports about one such camp – Blikkiesdorp in Cape Town – suggest that the conditions in these camps are deplorable with makeshift residences relying on paper-thin walls that provide no protection from the elements, even in what has become a harsh winter. There is insufficient sanitation and lack of adequate access to health and educational facilities. The distance from the city means that there are few and meagre opportunities for work, and the commuting distance makes it next to impossible to work regularly in the city.

It is most unlikely that such people feel all that proud and happy about the holding of the World Cup. And so it becomes less likely that the successful completion of the games will be cause for wider celebration and greater integration in society. Far from reducing rifts and healing divisions, it may even make things worse because the process has been so exclusionary and has reinforced existing disparities.

Lesson for India

This experience has important lessons for India, and especially for the city of Delhi, which is soon to host the Commonwealth Games. The city of Delhi is already challenged in terms of meeting the infrastructure targets for the Games, with promised schedules being missed on a regular basis. Even so, it is possible and even likely that somehow the work will be finished on time, and allow the metropolis to be dressed up to receive all the international visitors.

Of course, this has also been associated with a huge amount of wasteful expenditure, as contractors have a field day with the numerous and often duplicating contracts that are involved in the rapid upgrading, modernisation and “beautification” of the city. The amounts spent become shocking especially in relation to the glaring gaps in availability of the basic infrastructure that affects the lives of most residents, for example, adequate sanitation and piped water in slum settlements or the provision of public toilets, or even sport facilities (just simple playgrounds) for children of poor families who live in congested spaces.

But the human costs of the process of preparation for the Commonwealth Games are already very great. To start with, there is the issue of the condition of the construction workers and their families. Despite many promises and indeed the promulgation of a law for their benefit, construction workers continue to be denied many of their rights, including adequate housing and sanitation, schooling and scholarships for their children and access to proper and affordable health services.

The construction has already led to large-scale displacement, with even less effort at relocation and rehabilitation than has occurred in South Africa. The often laughable and aesthetically misguided attempts to beautify different parts of the city have also been associated with throwing out street vendors, who lose their livelihoods. Slum settlements that are deemed “unsightly” are simply demolished. In some cases even the already pathetic sanitation facilities have been destroyed in the effort to force people to move away. Of course, the issue of compensation for the loss of home and livelihood is never even considered.

Meanwhile, the looming issue of inadequate number of hotel rooms (despite years of knowing what the requirements are likely to be) has forced the Delhi government to take desperate measures. In an extraordinary development, colleges in the city are being offered sums of money to “renovate” their hostel rooms to make them feasible places in which to house sportspersons and other visitors to the Games. The downside of this is that the colleges have to throw out the students who would normally reside in these hostels, until the Games are over.

The amazing thing is that such decisions are being taken without too much public outcry. But there is already a groundswell of protest building up among students who find that suddenly they have nowhere to stay, and that rents in any accommodation near their institutions have skyrocketed so much that they simply cannot afford them.

Surely, this cannot be called an “inclusive” process of organising the Games. Lakhs of people are being affected adversely, and often without even the notion of any compensation. So the social impact of this on the city, once the Games are over, is also likely to be negative.

If all the citizenry is genuinely to get some fun out of the Games, they should have been conceived, planned and executed very differently.

source: frontline the hindu

C.P. CHANDRASEKHAR


The fuel price hike has serious implications for the soaring price levels, and the July 5 bandh conveys the people's anger.





PHOTO: S.S. KUMAR

AT A MARKET in Chennai. The government's failure to control the prolonged inflationary crisis seemed to signal that it could not care less about inflation and its effects on the poor majority that is experiencing a decline in real incomes.

THE July 5 bandh against the recent hike in the administered prices of petroleum products did shut much of the country down. This may or may not shake the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II out of its indifference to political and parliamentary disagreement on the correctness of its manifestly elitist economic strategy which favours industry, finance and the well-to-do over the common person. But it does seem to mark a turning point in the six-year-long innings of the UPA in government. The claim that the UPA and its economist-Prime Minster has managed to build a consensus around the market-friendly, pro-business, neoliberal strategy it pursues has been challenged not just by the political opposition to it but also by the mass support that opposition has received, as reflected in the success of the bandh.

The fact that there is no such consensus but only an artificial one constructed by a governmental propaganda machinery and an elitist media is corroborated by many developments. For example, the myth that there is no opposition to inflation partly because its effects are no more so damaging (presumably because Indians on average are richer now and can “afford” it) and partly because some inflation is recognised as the unavoidable outcome of adjustments needed to promote growth, has been exposed for what it is: a myth. Political circumstances may have delayed strong public expression of anger, but such anger was clearly there and is now visible on the streets. It has clearly not been diluted by the periodic claims of apologists labelled as economists (non-resident, imported or locally cloned) that if we wait a few months inflation would just go away.

Second, the opposition is now strong enough to dismiss the malicious propaganda used to delegitimise dissent against a callous set of policies that penalise the poor for no reason other than the desire to reward the insatiable appetites of India's rich. This propaganda of delegitimisation has many elements. That such dissent is merely the opportunistic coming together of the Left and the Right for political gain and not because of conviction about the correctness of their demands. That responding tosuch demands would drive the exchequer bankrupt. That the opposition to such policies, through a bandh for example, results in losses totalling thousands of crores of rupees, as “established” by spurious estimates purveyed by organisations, such as the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), that represent the interests that benefit from market-driven pricing.

Finally, the lack of consensus was reflected in the official advertising campaign against the bandh launched by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Recognising that the opposition to the petroleum price hike was receiving public support, the Ministry decided to drop any pretence of a consensus and chose instead to manufacture one. Poorly designed advertisements occupying substantial newspaper space (at a cost, of course) asserted that the price hike was a “small price” to be paid today to “reap big benefits tomorrow”. Besides being opaque on what those benefits were and how they were to be derived from a price hike, the advertisements gratuitously declared that the bandh was “not a solution”. It was another matter that none was arguing that the bandh was a solution to anything other than governmental intransigence. In any case, it was unclear which problem the Ministry had in mind. In the event, the advertisements served no purpose other than that of paying off some newspapers that were using their editorial columns to justify the price hike and attack all opposition to it.

The opposition to the petrol price hike was as strong as it was because the hike came in the midst of a prolonged inflationary crisis that the government had failed to control. Coming when it did it also seemed to signal that the government could not care less about the inflation and its effects on the country's poor majority that earns money-incomes that are not indexed to inflation and is therefore experiencing a decline in real (inflation-adjusted) incomes from their already abysmally low levels.

Consider, for example, the aggregate rate of inflation as reflected by the Wholesale Price Index (WPI). The WPI figures for May reflected three worrying trends. First, for the fifth month in a row, the aggregate annual rate of inflation as reflected in the month-on-month increase in the WPI had been near or well above double-digit levels. The figures for May put inflation at 10.2 per cent over the year. Second, this inflationary surge was particularly sharp in the case of some essential commodities, as a result of which the prices of food articles as a group had risen by 16.5 per cent and of foodgrains by close to 10 per cent. Though food inflation had declined to 12.9 per cent during the weekended June 19, the figure was still high and reflected more a base effect rather than a slowing of the extent of price increase. Finally, there were clear signs that what was largely an inflation in food prices was being generalised withthe increase in the prices of fuel by 13 per cent and of manufactured goods by 6-7 per cent.

As has always been the case, the inflation has been much greater at the retail level than at the wholesale level. The retail prices collated by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution indicate that the average across centres all over the country at the beginning of July had increased over the previous two years' by 19 per cent forrice and wheat, 58 per cent for toor dal, 71 per cent for urad dal, 113.5 per cent for moong dal, 73 per cent for sugar and 32 per cent each for potatoes and onion. By any count this is an astounding rate of inflation, and a similar situation prevails in the case of vegetables, which are an important component in the food consumption basket of the common person.

Structural influences

The government's periodic response has been that while inflation is a matter for concern, the trend is likely to reverse itself. In his inaugural address at a conference of Chief Ministers on the prices of essential commodities held in February this year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the worst was over on the food inflation front and expressed confidence that the Centre would soon be able to stabilise food prices. But it could not in practice because it did little and ignored important structural influences on the pace of price increase in the current conjuncture. One is the long-term neglect of agriculture, which has affected the level and pattern of agricultural production to such an extent that supply-side constraints are leading to inflation every time growth picks up. The sudden and sharp hike in the support prices for pulses announced recently is an acknowledgement of this problem by the government. However, given the likely lag in output responses, the immediate fallout of that price increase could be an aggravation of inflationary trends.

A second structural influence is the effect the government's policy of reducing subsidies, raising administered prices and dismantling price controls has on the costs of production. Finally, inflation is high and persistent despite expectations of a normal or good monsoon because the decision to give private trade a greater role in the markets for essentials and permit futures trading in some essential commodities has provided the basis for a new bout of speculation, which the government seems unable or unwilling to control.


PHOTO: NAND KUMAR/PTI

A PROTEST BY traders in Lucknow during the Bharat bandh on July 5 against the fuel price hike.

While there is some consensus on the role of speculation in driving inflation, official statements ignore the importance of liberalised marketing arrangements and liberalised futures trading in ensuring that speculative expectations of a rise in prices are realised. Moreover, with its emphasis on subsidy reduction and targeting of food distributed through the public distribution system (PDS), the Centre has paid little attention to enhancing the spread and penetration of the PDS, making it a less potent instrument to combat speculation.

In fact, many States have complained that they have not been allocated adequate supplies to cater to rising demand, undermining the role of the PDS as a safeguard against inflation in open market prices.

As opposed to focusing on these matters, the UPA government has sought to divert attention and induce a sense of complacency about future price trends. Besides periodically declaring that inflation would subside in due course, the government has chosen to identify the inflation that has been with us for the past few months as being the collateral fallout of policies and developments elsewhere in the domestic and world economy. For example, at the Chief Ministers' conference, among the reasons reportedly cited for the price rise were increases in the minimum support price for farm produce instituted to help the farming community, increases in international prices, increases in demand “due to the increase in purchasing power” resulting from higher growth, excess liquidity in the system, “inefficiencies” in marketing of farm produce, and the high cost of intermediation. Many of the factors are either out of the Centre's control or otherwise positive economic outcomes that cannot be countered. This amounted to an implicit declaration that food-price inflation of some intensity is inevitable.

Moreover, in yet another indication of its callousness, the Centre sought to transfer the blame for inflation to the States. At the Chief Ministers' conference, the Prime Minister, who had earlier argued that the States were not doing enough to deal with speculation, attributed the wide gap between farm-gate and retail prices partly to the proliferation of State and local taxes, cesses and levies. Claiming that taxes on food items added an additional cost burden of as much as 10-15 per cent at the retail level, he implicitly suggested that the States should forgo revenues to neutralise some of the price increase.

Besides this, he made a case for enhancing competition at the retail level by opening up the retail trade, though the evidence elsewhere is that this merely increases concentration at the retail level and widens rather than reduces trade margins. Not surprisingly, the Prime Minister's remarks, which were hailed by senior executives of many domestic retail majors, were seen as a signal of the government's intent to allow a larger role for foreign companies in India's retail industry.

The gap widens

This was being done when evidence, even in India, suggested that allowing corporates (both domestic and foreign) to enter the market for grain and other food items had led to some increase in concentration of distribution. This contributed to the widening of the gap between farm-gate and wholesale prices and the gap between wholesale and retail prices. As a result, farmers have benefited less from periods of high prices even as consumers suffered, because the benefits are garnered by middlemen. Whether it is agricultural, energy or industrial price inflation, a few corporate and trading interests seem to be the principal beneficiaries.

It is in this context that the recent decision to hike the prices of petroleum products and the opposition it has generated need to be assessed. The immediate- and near-term impact of the oil price decision would be an aggravation of inflationary trends that currently burden the common person. Petroleum products are consumed in some measure by all. Given the fact that these products are universal intermediates, entering into the costs of production of a number of goods and services, the cascading effects of the price hike on the costs and prices of a range of commodities is likely to be significant. With prices of essentials already on the rise, the move threatens to make inflation the country's principal economic problem. It follows, therefore, that this is the worst time for hikes in and decontrol of prices of petroleum products.

The government claims that this was unavoidable because of the “losses” being suffered by the oil marketing companies (OMCs). When the domestic prices of oil products are controlled but the price of imported oil is rising, oil marketing companies receive from the consumer less than what it costs them to acquire the products they distribute. This leads to what are termed “under-recoveries”, which would affect the accounts of the oil marketing companies (Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation and IBP) that obtain their supplies of petrol and diesel from the refineries at prices that equal their import price inclusive of customs duty. According to estimates, if retail prices had not been raised under-recoveries by the oil marketing companies would have exceeded Rs.70,000 crore in the current fiscal year. Since this is unsustainable, it is argued, the hike in prices and a shift out of a controlled pricing regime is unavoidable.

Under-recoveries

The government's argument is by no means water-tight. While under-recoveries are a reality, they do not turn oil refining and marketing firms into loss-making enterprises because those firms deliver a range of products and services, the prices of all of which are not controlled. If, for example, even if we consider the profit after taxes of the most important oil companies over the past 10 years, they have remained positive in all years and quite substantially so in some. Under-recoveries are notional losses that only lower book profits relative to some benchmark. Thus, there was little danger of the industry going bankrupt even if prices had been kept at their earlier levels.


PHOTO: ARUNANGSU ROY CHOWDHURY

ON JUNE 26, following the transport strike called by the CITU, in Kolkata labourers carry loads of vegetables to the wholesale market.

There is, of course, the question of fairness. Since there are many players involved in the industry there is no reason why under-recoveries should affect only the books of the oil marketing companies. The returns on net worth earned by the oil marketing companies are far more volatile and vulnerable than those garnered by the upstream oil companies (ONGC, OIL and GAIL). The burden should be shared by the latter, which receive prices that more than compensate for costs; by the Central government, which garners revenues in the form of customs duties and excise duties (besides dividends from the oil majors); and by the State governments, which benefit from sales taxes. This requires, for example, the oil refineries to offer discounts when selling products to the OMCs and for the government to reduce the taxes it levies on oil products in order to absorb part of the under-recovery.

The controversial question of how the burden should be shared was analysed by a committee appointed to examine the issue. Headed by C. Rangarajan, it spent much of its energies on the different stages through which imported and domestic crude is converted into petroleum products supplied to the consumer, and the cost escalation that arises as the raw material passes through these stages. The numbers suggested that there was an adequate buffer to shield domestic consumers from the effects of increases in international prices, so long as segments that can afford to take a cut in petroleum-related revenues because they have alternative sources of resource mobilisation are willing to accept such a reduction.

Thus, if at all there is an argument for price deregulation it can only be that it is for some reason wrong to expect the oil companies and the government to bear the burden of the irrational fluctuations in the global prices of oil. That argument, too, is difficult to justify.

When the industry was wholly in the public sector, the prices of oil products were treated as one set of instruments in the tax-cum-subsidy regime of the government. Any losses suffered by the industry or any shortfall in funds required for investment as a result of price regulation were to be met from resources mobilised through progressive taxes rather than from regressive price increases. The government should have adopted a similar approach in the current situation and focussed on rules that can and have been devised.

It needs to be noted here that oil prices have not been held constant in recent history. Rather the average annual increase in prices over the past two decades indicates that the increase has been much higher in the case of retail prices of petrol, for example, than in the wholesale price index for all commodities. The common person has, indeed, borne some of the burden of volatile oil prices.

The question remains as to why the government is adopting policies that transfer most of the burden on to the aam aadmi and aggravate inflation. An ideological commitment to neoliberal policies and the misplaced belief in their ability to put India on the “world stage” may be playing a role. But, more importantly, the government's moves or lack of them seem intended to favour corporate interests of various kinds. Hopefully, the Opposition would be able to drive home the point that the people are not willing to accept this kind of cynical extraction of surpluses for profit.

source: frontline the hindu

Death for love


T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in Sonepat and Delhi


Lack of governmental action to stop honour killings comes up for criticism even as the crime continues unabated.





SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA

The police removing the body of a girl from Wazirpur who was found dead in a car at Ashok Vihar in New Delhi on June 22.

NOTHING, not even the death penalty awarded by a Karnal court to five people in the Manoj-Babli case on March 30 this year, seems to deter honour killings in India. In the past few months, there has been a spate of murders in the name of protecting family or community honour in areas adjoining the national capital region.

In the latest such incident, Sham Mohammad, 18, a Muslim, and his friend, Reena, 16, a Hindu, were found dead on the premises of a school in Samain village of Fatehabad district in Haryana on July 4. The boy had been bludgeoned to death and one of his eyes was almost gouged out, while the girl had apparently been forced to consume poison. The police arrested the girl's maternal uncles and a few others in connection with the case.

The youngsters had studied in the same school and when the families came to know of their friendship, the boy was sent away to Punjab and the girl discontinued her studies. Sham had come to his native place for a vacation when the incident occurred.

Significantly, persistent interventions by organisations such as the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) have emboldened people to report cases of honour killings to the police. But governments have been accused of showing a lack of will in dealing with the situation. Recently, the Supreme Court too voiced its concern over the lack of governmental action to stop honour killings.

On June 21, taking cognisance of a public interest petition filed by the non-governmental organisation Shakti Vahini, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court issued notice to the Centre and eight State governments – Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh – seeking an action plan. The NGO argued that while killing for honour was an extreme reaction, victims were often subjected to long-term, low-level physical abuse and bullying as a punishment for “bringing dishonour on the family”. Such abuse included battery, torture, mutilation, rape, forced marriage, and imprisonment within the home. These premeditated crimes were intended to protect the family honour by preventing and punishing violations of community norms of behaviour, especially sexual behaviour of women.

Many a time, the petition said, harassment and threats drove young couples to suicide. The law enforcement agencies, it said, were mute spectators, intervening only after an incident had happened. They were caught in the “midst of lack of political will to act against such feudal forces as these forces also represent vote banks”, it said.

The petition demanded that the Supreme Court lay down a series of guidelines for law enforcement agencies to deal with such crimes on the pattern of the guidelines for combating sexual harassment at the workplace. It also pointed out how the States had failed to comply with the directions issued by the court in 2006 ( Lata Singh vs State of Uttar Pradesh and Another) to ensure that no one harassed or threatened couples who married out of caste or religion.

The court directed that the police should institute criminal proceedings against anyone who issued or carried out threats of violence. “There is nothing honourable in these killings and, in fact, they are nothing but barbaric and shameful acts of murder committed by brutal, feudal-minded persons who deserve harsh punishment,” it said.

The petitioner contended that as a state party to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Government of India was under obligation to see that discrimination against women in matters relating to family and marriage was eliminated. This included ensuring that informal decision-making bodies such as khap panchayats (caste councils) were restrained from enforcing their dicta and interfering with the right of women to choose their spouses, the petition said. Also, as a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, India had an obligation to protect the lives, rights and liberty of individuals and protect them from such heinous crimes, it said.

There has been a strident demand, especially after the Karnal court judgment, to amend the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, in order to prevent same- gotra marriages. This has been at the centre of the latest debate on honour killings. On June 19, the Delhi High Court dismissed a petition demanding a ban on same- gotra marriages. Castigating the petitioner for “wasting the time of the court”, the judges demanded to know which Hindu text prescribed banning of sagotra (same clan) marriages.

The petition in the High Court was filed soon after the Supreme Court dismissed a similar one on the grounds of jurisdiction. Arguing that same- gotra marriages were violative of fundamental rights and against Hindu tradition, the petitioner wanted the court to appoint a commission that would suggest amendments to the Hindu Marriage Act in order to prohibit such marriages.

But not all honour killings in the recent past were instigated by caste councils. For instance, on June 25, two cousins, aged 14 and 12, of Mohalla Kot in the old city of Sonepat district were battered and strangled allegedly by their own grandmother and paternal uncles. Their bodies were thrown amidst hyacinths on the embankment of the Western Yamuna Canal.


SANDEEP SAXENA

MEMBERS OF VARIOUS women's organisations demonstrating at India Gate in New Delhi against honour killings, on June 30.

Mohalla Kot is a part of Sonepat that is cut off from the city. Its narrow bylanes make access to it in any big four-wheel vehicle difficult. People here keep to themselves and, not surprisingly, very few were willing to talk about the murder of the two children. The grandmother and the uncles are reported to have said that they killed the girls for having an illicit liaison with their 16-year-old stepbrother, who has been arrested and booked for rape.

There has not been much sympathy for the slain children either from the police or the larger society. Media reports have constantly referred to the girls as having had an “affair” with their cousin. Even the police viewed the incident as a normal outcome of a wrong that had been committed by the girls.

“It is not a case of honour killing. It is a case of illicit relations. The family has a history of its members being arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act,” K.K. Rao, Sonepat's Superintendent of Police, told Frontline. According to a section of the police, the girls were “of age” and not minors though the post-mortem and school records revealed otherwise. They had been subjected to sexual intercourse as well. But whether the arrested minor boy is the real culprit or not is now under the scanner.

The circumstances in which the girls lived were pathetic, to say the least. The father of the 14-year-old girl was in jail and the mother was living away from home. The parents of the other girl, too, were living away from the family. A relative of one of the slain girls said the children were innocent.

The Wazirpur murders

The triple murders in Wazirpur, near Delhi, were equally horrific. The landed Gujjar and Jat communities in the village, an island in the midst of posh colonies in Ashok Vihar, became wealthy overnight, thanks to the real estate boom. Shops here display the latest brands and swanky cars whizz past its roads. Most of the houses are multi-storeyed. Young boys and girls dressed up in the latest fashion move around with nonchalance.

“The mentality of the residents of Wazirpur village is mediaeval despite all the modern amenities,” said a resident. “The boys here do nothing. They just roam around. There is a lot of easy money as land prices have gone up tremendously.”

The village has a chaupal (a place for panchayat and public meetings), used mostly by the men of the dominant castes, as in much of rural North India, where the elders sit and smoke their hookahs. It was in this setting that Kuldeep, a Rajput boy, and Monica, a Gujjar, decided to tie the knot four years ago. They were the first couple to have married out of caste in the 400-year-old village.

On June 21, two of the girl's cousins, in their early 20s, killed them in the name of honour. The next day, another girl, a cousin of Monica, too, was found murdered. The boys, who confessed to the crime, said they could not bear the taunts of the villagers after the girls had supposedly “shamed” them, one by marrying out of caste and the other by aspiring to be a model.

Less than a week earlier, a girl and a boy belonging to two different castes were electrocuted by the girl's parents and maternal uncles in a colony in north-east Delhi. These are not just stray incidents.

In nearby Haryana, on June 21, two teenagers were found murdered in a village in Bhiwani district. Six members of the girl's family were arrested. The girl was a student of Class XI. Six days later, a couple belonging to two different castes in Dheera village killed themselves by jumping in front of a train following resistance to their relationship.

In April this year, in Bhainswal village in Sonepat, a boy strangled his 16-year-old sister for having a relationship with a boy of the same village. A day later, the girl's friend committed suicide. In October 2009, a Sonepat couple, who married from the same gotra, had to face the community's ire. The man was killed and his wife raped after being lured to a place in Delhi.

It is clear that the matter of honour killings cannot be dealt with by law alone. There also has to be some form of social reform plan on the agenda of political parties, in addition to an attitudinal change in the people. Significantly, such crimes are committed more often in States that have skewed child sex ratios and a high rate of crime against women and children, and where distributive justice in both economic and social terms is very low.
source: frontline the hindu

U.S. Arrests 10 on Charges of Being Agents for Russia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 28, 2010


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ten people have been arrested for allegedly serving as secret agents of the Russian government with the goal of penetrating U.S. government policymaking circles.

The Justice Department announced the arrests Monday.

According to court papers in the case, the U.S. government intercepted a message from Russian intelligence headquarters in Moscow to two of the defendants. The message states that their main mission is ''to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US'' and send intelligence reports.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Ten people have been arrested for allegedly serving as secret agents of the Russian government in the United States, the Justice Department said Monday.

Eight of 10 were arrested Sunday for allegedly carrying out long-term, deep cover assignments in the United States on behalf of Russia.

Two others were arrested for allegedly participating in the same Russian intelligence program within the United States.

Their job, according to the court papers in the case, was ''to search and develop ties in policymaking circles'' in the United States.

Each of the 10 was charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison on conviction.

The cases were filed in U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York.

Federal law prohibits individuals from acting as agents of foreign governments within the United States without notifying the U.S. attorney general.

Nine of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum 20 years in prison on conviction.

FBI agents arrested the defendants known as Richard Murphy and Cynthia Murphy at their residence in Montclair, N.J., and they were appearing Monday in federal court in Manhattan.

Three other defendants also were being taken to federal court in Manhattan -- Vicky Pelaez and a defendant known as ''Juan Lazaro,'' who were arrested at their residence in Yonkers, N.Y., and Anna Chapman, who was arrested in Manhattan on Sunday.

Two other defendants known as Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills were arrested at their residence in Arlington, Va., and were appearing in federal court in Alexandria, Va., on Monday.

Also being taken to federal court in Alexandria was Mikhail Semenko, who was arrested Sunday at his residence in Arlington.

Two defendants known as Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley were arrested at their residence in Boston on Sunday and were appearing in federal court in Boston on Monday.

The Justice Department said that a defendant known as Christopher R. Metsos was not in custody.

The arrests were the result of a multiyear FBI investigation into an alleged network of U.S.-based agents who concealed all connections between themselves and Russia.

The U.S. government intercepted a message from Russian intelligence headquarters in Moscow to two of the defendants, Richard and Cynthia Murphy.

''You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,'' the message from Moscow. ''Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. -- all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and sent intels,'' the message added.

june 28, 2010










— PHOTO: AFP

General Sekouba Konate casts his ballot in Conakry on Sunday.

CONAKRY: Guineans headed to the polls on Sunday in the West African nation's first democratic election since independence in 1958, hoping to end half a century of military and civilian dictatorships.

Long queues of patient voters built up around the country to take part in the crucial election just nine months after the Army massacre of at least 156 opponents of a military junta in a Conakry stadium. “I am happy to vote freely,” said shopkeeper and mother-of-five Marieme Kande (50), who was the first to cast her ballot in Conakry.

Abdoul Barry (55) said it was the “second happiest day of my life” after his wedding in 1986.

“I have had many occasions to vote in Guinea, but I always refused because one could not trust the results.”

In a working class neighbourhood in the Conakry suburbs, polling stations were flooded with an enthusiastic but disciplined crowd mostly composed of youths.

“I don't know my number,” or “where is my polling station?”, asked anxious voters who were unable to read in the Cosa neighbourhood, in a country where two-thirds of the population is illiterate.

A large turnout is expected among the 4.2 million Guineans eligible to choose a President from among 24 civilian candidates, including one woman, at 8,261 polling stations around the country.

The three frontrunners are the former Prime Ministers Cellou Dalein Diallo and Sidya Toure, and a former opposition leader, Alpha Conde.

The new leaders will have their work cut out for them in a country which is one of the world's poorest and unstable despite massive mineral wealth in bauxite and iron stores.

Guinea has been led by a transition government for the past six months, headed by General Sekouba Konate, the architect of a coup that followed the death of long-time President Lansana Conte, another military leader, in 2008. — AFP
source: the hindu

june28, 2010







editorial

In a move that some describe as bold and others as callous, the central government has substantially raised the prices of petrol, diesel, kerosene, and LPG. It has also moved to a decontrolled price regime in the case of petrol and promised to implement the same for diesel in the near future. The immediate and near-term impact of these decisions would be an aggravation of the inflation focussed on essential commodities that currently burden the common person. Petroleum products are consumed in some measure by all. Being universal intermediates, increases in their prices have a cascading effect on the costs and prices of all commodities, including essentials. Given the current inflationary surge, therefore, this is the worst time for hikes in, and the decontrol of, the prices of petroleum products.

The government's claim that this was unavoidable because of the “losses” being suffered by the oil marketing companies (OMCs) is difficult to swallow. When the domestic prices of oil products are controlled but the price of imported oil is rising, oil marketing companies receive from the consumer less than what it costs them to acquire the products they distribute. This leads to what are termed “under-recoveries.” However, in most years these under-recoveries do not turn oil refining and marketing firms into loss-making enterprises. This is because they deliver a range of products and services, the prices of all of which are not controlled. Under-recoveries are notional losses that only lower book profits relative to some benchmark. Thus, there is little danger that the industry would be bankrupted even if prices were kept at their earlier levels. Moreover, because until recently the industry was wholly in the public sector, the prices of oil products were treated as one set of instruments in the tax-cum-subsidy regime of the government. Any losses suffered by the industry or additional funds it required for investment could be met from resources mobilised through taxes that fall on the rich. There is, of course, the question of fairness. Since there are many players involved in the industry, there is no reason why under-recoveries should affect only the books of the oil marketing companies. This requires the oil refineries to offer discounts when selling products to the OMCs and for the government to reduce the taxes it levies on oil products in order to absorb part of the under-recovery. The government should have focussed on these matters for which rules can and have been devised. Opting instead for a steep hike in petroleum product prices in the midst of an inflationary episode is clearly mistimed, insensitive, and politically self-damaging. It also seems intended to favour the private companies that have been allowed to enter and expand in this sector. Private companies will treat any shortfall in profits as a “loss” and demand price adjustments. But they cannot be placated by unduly burdening the rest of society, especially the hundreds of millions of poor people.
source: the hindu

View and Download "Presidential Trivia" in PDF format


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George Washington, 1st President: 1789-1797
• Washington was the only American president to be unanimously elected.
• Washington never lived in the White House. The nation’s capital was located in Philadelphia, as well as several other cities, prior to its move to Washington, D.C.
• George Washington was the only president who did not represent a political party.


John Adams, 2nd President: 1797-1801
• John Adams was the first president to reside in the White House, moving in November 1800 while the paint was still wet.
• When Adams and his family moved to Washington to live in the White House, they got lost in the woods north of the city for several hours.
• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the 50th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826. Not knowing that Thomas Jefferson has already passed John Adams was quoted as saying "Jefferson survives," when he whispered his last words.


Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President: 1801-1809
• Thomas Jefferson was the main author of the Declaration of Independence.
• Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be inaugurated in Washington, D.C.
• Thomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph never mentioning that he served as president. His epitaph read, "Author of the Declaration of American Independence, Author of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the Father of the University of Virginia.


James Madison, 4th President: 1809-1817
• James Madison was one of two (George Washington was the other), American presidents to sign the Constitution. Madison’s contributions towards the development of the Constitution earned him the title "Father of the Constitution."
• Madison was the first president to wear trousers rather than knee breeches.
• James Madison was the shortest and lightest president at 5 feet, 4 inches and about 100 pounds.


James Monroe, 5th President: 1817-1825
• James Monroe was the first president to ride a steamboat.
• Monroe’s daughter was the first to be a bride in the White House.
• Monroe was wounded during the Revolutionary War.


John Quincy Adams, 6th President: 1825-1829
• John Quincy Adams dug the first spade of dirt near Little Falls to begin the construction of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal on July 4, 1828.
• John Quincy Adams regularly swam nude in the Potomac River. The first American professional journalist, Anne Royall, knew of Adams’ 5:00 a.m. swims. After being refused interviews with Adams many times, she went to the river, gathered his clothes and sat on them until she had her interview. Before this, no female had interviewed a president.
• John Quincy Adams was the son of a former president and the first to be photographed.


Andrew Jackson, 7th President: 1829-1837
• Andrew Jackson was the first president born in a log cabin (South Carolina).
• Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride in a train.
• Andrew Jackson was the first American president to experience and survive an assassination attempt. Jackson was at the Capitol when an unemployed house painter fired a pistol at him. The pistol misfired. The would-be assassin drew a second pistol, which also misfired.


Martin Van Buren, 8th President: 1837-1841
• The term "O.K." is credited to Van Buren who was raised in Kinderhook, New York. After he went into politics, Van Buren became known as "Old Kinderhook." Soon people were using the term O.K. referring to Van Buren and the word "okay" was derived.
• Van Buren was the first U.S. president born in the United States. The presidents preceding Van Buren were born in colonies that later became states. Van Buren was the first to be born after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
• Martin Van Buren was the first president of Dutch ancestry. He and his wife spoke Dutch at home.


William Henry Harrison, 9th President: 1841-1841
• William Henry Harrison was the only president who studied to become a doctor.
• William Henry Harrison served the shortest presidency.
• Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address, and was the first president to die in office, about 32 days after elected. On March 4, he gave a 105 minute speech and did not wear an overcoat or hat. He developed pneumonia and died in the White House exactly one month after giving his speech, on April 4.


John Tyler, 10th President: 1841-1845
• John Tyler was the first vice president to ascend to the presidency upon the death of a president. He did not make an inaugural address, and he never ran for the office of the Presidency.
• Tyler was the president with the most children—he had 15.
• The tradition of playing "Hail to the Chief" whenever a president appeared at a state function was started by Tyler’s second wife.


James K. Polk, 11th President: 1845-1849
• The first president to have his inauguration reported by telegraph.
• The first annual White House Thanksgiving dinner was hosted by Polk’s wife, Sarah.
• James Polk fulfilled all his campaign promises. During his administration Polk acquired California from Mexico, settled the Oregon dispute, lowered tariffs, established a sub-treasury, and retired from office after one term.


Zachary Taylor, 12th President: 1849-1850
• Zachary Taylor received his nomination for presidency late because he refused all postage due correspondences.
• Taylor did not vote until the age of 62. Until that time, he had not established an official place of residence because he had moved many times as a soldier.
• Zachary Taylor was the second president to die in office. Taylor spent July 4, 1850, at a ceremony at the Washington Monument. He became ill from the heat and died five days later of intestinal ailments. Recently, his body was exhumed because some believed he was poisoned, but this was proved to be false.


Millard Fillmore, 13th President: 1850-1853
• Millard Fillmore was the last president born in the 18th century.
• Fillmore and his cabinet helped fight the Library Congress fire of 1851.
• Fillmore refused an honorary degree from Oxford University because he felt he had "neither literary nor scientific attainment."


Franklin Pierce, 14th President: 1853-1857
• Franklin Pierce gave his 3,319-word inaugural address from memory, without the aid of notes.
• Pierce was the only president to have no turnover in his cabinet.
• Pierce was the first president to have a Christmas tree in the White House.


James Buchanan, 15th President: 1857-1861
• The only president that never married. The White House hostess was his niece, Harriet Lane. In 1819, Buchanan became engaged to Ann Coleman. A misunderstanding took place and their engagement was broken. A short time later, Ann died. Buchanan vowed he would never marry.
• When England’s Prince of Wales visited the White House in 1860, so many guests accompanied him that Buchanan had to sleep in the hall.
• Upon the election of his successor, Buchanan sent him a note saying, "My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving, you are a happy man indeed."


Abraham Lincoln, 16th President: 1861-1865
• Abraham Lincoln was a man of perseverance. Before Lincoln’s election as the 16th president of the United States he failed as: a business man - as a storekeeper, failed as a farmer - he despised this work, failed in his first attempt to obtain political office, he failed when he sought the office of speaker, he failed in his first attempt to go to Congress, he failed when he sought the appointment to the United States Land Office, he failed when he ran for the United States Senate and he failed when friends sought for him the nomination for the vice-presidency in 1856.
• Abraham Lincoln was the first president to wear a beard and the tallest president at 6’ 4".
• Lincoln was the first president to die by assassination. On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.


Andrew Johnson, 17th President: 1865-1869
• Andrew Johnson had no formal education. His wife taught him reading, writing and math.
• Johnson was impeached for removing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton during the turbulent Reconstruction Period but was acquitted by one vote in the Senate.
• Johnson was buried beneath a willow tree that he planted. His head rests on a copy of the Constitution.


Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President: 1869-1877
• Ulysses S. Grant was the victorious Union commander of the Civil War. He received General Lee’s sword at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
• Grant finished his memoirs in 1885, a few weeks before his death from throat cancer. The book earned over $450,000 for his family after his death.
• Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the nation's first national park on March 1, 1872.


Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President: 1877-1881
• While Rutherford B. Hayes was still in the Union Army, Cincinnati Republicans ran him for the House of Representatives. He accepted the nomination, but would not campaign, explaining, "an officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer... ought to be scalped."
• To set a good example for the country Rutherford B. Hayes banished liquor and wine from the White House.
• Hayes held the first Easter egg roll on the White House lawn.


James A. Garfield, 20th President: 1881-1881
• James A. Garfield was the last of seven presidents to be born in a log cabin.
• President-elect Garfield campaigned for the American presidency from the front porch of his house.
• Garfield was the second president to die by assassination. Two months after being sworn into office, Garfield was shot in a Washington railroad station. Doctors repeatedly probed for the bullet with non-sterile instruments and unwashed fingers, the president died 80 days later.


Chester A. Arthur, 21st President: 1881-1885
• Chester A. Author was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a fatal kidney disease; a year after he succeeded to the presidency. Arthur ran for a second term in 1884 in order not to appear that he feared defeat, though he knew the more active he was the greater his chance was of succumbing to the disease. He did not gain his party’s nomination and died in 1886.
• Nicknamed "Elegant Arthur" because of his fashion sense.
• Arthur is credited with saying, "I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damned business."


Grover Cleveland, 22nd President: 1885-1889
• Grover Cleveland personally answered the White House phone.
• Cleveland was the only president married in a ceremony at the White House, June 2, 1886.
• President Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty on October 28, 1886.


Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President: 1889-1893
• Benjamin Harrison was the only president to be a grandson of a president (William Henry Harrison) and great-grandson to a signer of the Declaration of Independence (Benjamin Harrison).
• Harrison made 140 completely different speeches in 30 days.
• Benjamin Harrison was the first president to use electricity in the White House. After he got an electrical shock, his family often refused to touch the light switches and sometimes would go to bed with the lights on.


Grover Cleveland, 24th President: 1893-1897
• The only president to be elected two nonconsecutive terms. (22nd President)
• Grover Cleveland was the first president to have a child born in the White House; his daughter Esther in 1895.
• The public believed Cleveland went on a fishing trip in July 1893, but he was actually having surgery for a cancerous growth in his mouth. It was not until 1917 the truth was revealed.


William McKinley, 25th President: 1897-1901
• First president to ride in an automobile.
• First president to campaign by telephone.
• The third president to die from an assassin’s wound. He was shot during the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. He died of his wounds about a week later.


Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President: 1901-1909
• Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to call his residence in Washington, D.C. the "White House". Prior to his term, it had been called the Executive Mansion or the President’s House.
• Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the prize in 1906 for his role as peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War.
• The name "Teddy" bears for stuffed animals was coined in 1903 when a stuffed toy bear was given to the noted outdoorsman Roosevelt.


William H. Taft, 27th President: 1909-1913
• William Taft was the first president to own a car.
• Taft is the only president to also serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930).
• First of two presidents to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. John F. Kennedy is the other.


Woodrow Wilson, 28th President: 1913-1921
• Woodrow Wilson was the first president to have earned a Ph.D. He received a degree in political science in 1886.
• During his presidency a flock of sheep was raised on the White House lawn. The wool was used to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.
• The only president buried in Washington, D.C. Wilson is interred at the Washington National Cathedral.


Warren G. Harding, 29th President: 1921-1923
• Warren Harding was the first president to speak over the radio.
• Harding was the first newspaper publisher to be elected into the presidency.
• Harding had the largest feet of any president. He wore size 14 shoes.


Calvin Coolidge, 30th President: 1923-1929
• Coolidge lighted the first national Christmas tree in 1923 on the White House lawn.
• Coolidge refused to use the telephone while in office.
• A man of few words, a dinner guest made a bet that she could get him to say more than two words. When she told the president of her wager, he replied, "You lose."


Herbert Hoover, 31st President: 1929-1933
• Herbert Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi River.
• Hoover approved "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem.
• Donated his salary to charity.


Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President: 1933-1945
• Franklin D. Roosevelt is the only American president to be elected four times and the first American president to be inaugurated in January (1937). After FDR, the 22nd Amendment ratified in 1951, limited the presidential office to two terms. [No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.]
• FDR was the first president whose mother was eligible to vote for him.
• Roosevelt was paralyzed from the disease polio; he served his entire presidency without the use of legs.


Harry S. Truman, 33rd President: 1945-1953
• Harry S. Truman was the first president to travel underwater in a submarine.
• Truman was the first president to give a speech on television.
• Harry Truman use to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to practice the piano for two hours.


Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President: 1953-1961
• Dwight Eisenhower was in charge of the D-Day invasion during World War II.
• Eisenhower played football at West Point and was injured trying to tackle Olympic and NFL star Jim Thorpe.
• Eisenhower was the only president to serve in both World War I & World War II.


John F. Kennedy, 35th President: 1961-1963
• John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic president and the first president born in the 20th century.
• JFK was the first president to hold a press conference on television.
• JFK was the youngest American elected president and the youngest to die in office.


Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President: 1963-1969
• Vice President Johnson was riding two cars behind President Kennedy's car when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Johnson was administered the presidential oath aboard Air Force One.
• Before becoming a politician, Lyndon Johnson taught school in Texas.
• Johnson was the first American president to name an African American to his cabinet.


Richard Nixon – 37th President: 1969-1974
• Nixon was the first president to visit all 50 states and the first president to visit China.
• Richard Nixon talked to astronauts on the moon from the White House by radio-telephone on July 21, 1969.
• Nixon is the only U.S. president to resign.


Gerald R. Ford, 38th President: 1974-1977
• Gerald Ford became vice president and president without being elected to either office.
• Ford once worked as a fashion model.
• Ford is the only president who was employed by the National Park Service. He served as a Yellowstone park ranger in 1936.


Jimmy Carter, 39th President: 1977-1981
• Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.
• Carter studied nuclear physics at Annapolis.
• Carter was a speed reader, having been recorded reading 2,000 words per minute.


Ronald W. Reagan, 40th President: 1981-1989
• At age 69, Ronald Reagan became the oldest person ever elected U.S. president.
• Reagan was twice named TIME magazine's "Man of the Year."
• Ronald Reagan was the first actor elected president. He acted in 53 films before becoming president.


George H.W. Bush, 41st President: 1989-1993
• George Bush was the first vice president elected president since Martin Van Buren and also the first vice president to lose re-election since Van Buren.
• Bush is distantly related to Presidents Pierce, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ford, and Winston Churchill.
• George Bush was one of the youngest U.S. naval carrier pilots in the WWII Pacific Theatre.


William J. Clinton, 42nd President: 1993-2001
• As a delegate to Boys Nation while in high school, Clinton met President Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden in 1962. The encounter led him to enter a life of public service.
• Bill Clinton was the first president to be a Rhodes Scholar.
• Clinton was the first U.S. Democratic president to win reelection since Franklin D. Roosevelt.


George W. Bush, 43rd President: 2001-2009
• First son of a president to become president since John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams.
• Pilot in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 until 1973.
• First managing general partner of a Major League baseball team (Texas Rangers) to become president.

Barack Obama, 44th President: 2009-Present
• First African American to be elected president.
• Winner of 2 Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album; Dreams for My Father (2005) and Audicity of Hope (2008).





Updated: September 28, 2009



source: www.nps.gov/pub_aff/pres/trivia.htm

June 25, 2010 15:38 IST
Tags: Indira Gandhi, Rajni Patel, Mrs Gandhi, Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee, North India
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CommentIndira Gandhi may have thought she was invincible after reducing India [ Images ] to a dictatorship under the Emergency, but she had to pay a heavy price for the excesses of those 19 months of autocracy.
The Congress party was wiped out in North India making way for the first non-Congress government to govern India, though for a short time.

Mohan Dharia, a minister of state in Indira Gandhi's [ Images ] government, resigned in 1975 when Mrs Gandhi refused to engage in a dialogue with Jayaprakash Narayan, who was then spearheading the anti-Indira Opposition.

Dharia, who was imprisoned for 17 months during the Emergency, spoke to Rediff.com's Archana Masih about the possibility of another Emergency.

Part I: The man who defied Indira Gandhi

Who, in your opinion, were the main villains of the Emergency apart from Indira Gandhi?

Mr D K Borooah (then the Congress president), Siddhartha Shankar Ray (then the West Bengal [ Images ] chief minister), H R Gokhale (then the Union law minister), Rajni Patel (then the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee president) and the Communist leaders. She was surrounded by them.

Rajni Patel was a master at collecting funds. Her government was corrupt. There was corruption earlier, but the major push came from her during the Emergency.

Before the imposition of the Emergency, Borooah had called JP a traitor at Bordi. I told him he was a great patriot and not a traitor and left the meeting.

People like S S Ray wanted to remain in power and please Mrs Gandhi. H R Gokhale had no base at all in the whole of Maharashtra [ Images ], but he was in the Cabinet. All these people played their role including I K Gujral (then the minister of state for broadcasting), Om Mehta (then the minister of state for home), my own colleague...

Did you feel betrayed by colleagues like Om Mehta?

Of course! They went to the extent of defending Mrs Gandhi. Except Nanasaheb Goray (the socialist leader) no one raised a voice why Mohan Dharia, Chandrashekhar were arrested, on what offence?

What provoked Indira Gandhi to suddenly end the Emergency?

In the world she was being described as a dictator and she wanted to prove she wasn't. Her own department did a survey and told her if she held the election during the Emergency she would return to power.

But the people played their historic role and threw her government out even though the Emergency still existed. The Emergency was withdrawn immediately after her defeat in the Cabinet meeting she convened to submit her resignation.

She didn't want to be affected by the Emergency because had it continued then the Janata government could have put her behind bars under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) (laughs).

What kind of a leader was JP?

I have seen Mahatma Gandhi [ Images ], Maulana Azad, Acharya Kriplani, Nehru, Patel and many leaders, but never seen one like JP. He was so crystal clear in his thoughts, lovable, a man of understanding, commitment to the people and a real leader.

In my whole life I have had no guru or accepted anyone as my leader -- there were those who were leaders of my party but they weren't my leaders. Had there been a situation where I had to choose a leader or a guru it would be JP.

What damage did the Emergency do to Indian democracy?

After the damage inflicted by the Emergency, the damage was done by the Janata Party. If they had governed the country well perhaps we would have seen a different country today.

Later the policy of looking at the USA and following a free market economy has done great damage to India.

We look at 8 to 9 per cent growth. The number of people living below the poverty line is not 28 per cent, but more than 45 per cent.

After 62 years if 30 crores (300 million) of our people are illiterate, is this freedom?

Can the Emergency happen again?

I don't think so. If the government fails in rendering social justice, militants and Naxalites [ Images ] may grow. There were 7 districts dominated by the Naxalites, now there are 145. This is because of poverty, social imbalances and atrocities on Harijans, Adivasis.

If this continues the government in power may impose an Emergency, I don't know. But I don't think it will happen now.

What are your impressions of Sanjay Gandhi [ Images ]?

I never met him personally, but he played the most destructive role as far as Indian politics is concerned.

For a country that had struggled against the British -- how was it that Indira Gandhi could suspend civil liberties, bypass Parliament, dissolve state legislatures, gag the press, coerce the judiciary, arrest opponents, subjugate democracy -- without much resistance?

My friends and relatives weren't prepared to come to my house for fear of being arrested. Even those who sent wedding invites used to say they would understand if we didn't come so in effect they meant don't come (laughs).

When I was in Nashik jail there were two police vans with 20 cops each outside my house and people were afraid to visit us. Under those circumstances it was not possible for people to rebel.

source: rediff.com

India is the highest consumer of heroin in South Asia and also appears to be producing its own opium poppy, which is the raw material for heroin, according to the latest report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Of the opium that is not converted into heroin, two-thirds is consumed in five countries: Iran (42 per cent),Afghanistan (7 per cent), Pakistan (7 per cent), India (6 percent) and Russia [ Images ] (5 per cent). India consumed 17 metric tonnes of heroin in 2008 and current opium consumption is estimated at some 65-70 mt per year. The opium consumed in India does not appear to come from Afghanistan, which is the largest producer of opium.

In 2008, approximately 2,700 mt of Afghanistan's opium was refined into an estimated 380 mt of heroin to supply the global market. Coming in a distant second is Myanmar and the Laos People's Democratic Republic which yielded some 40 mt of heroin in 2008--processed in Myanmar.

The UN report stated that the information provided by the Indian government indicated that foreign-sourced opium has neither been seized nor reported as trafficked into India. "Consequently, such a consumption level (6 per cent of the estimated global total) would require the illicit cultivation of some 1,500-2,000 hectares of opium poppy on Indian territory," it said. Another possibility as a source of opium was the diversion from licit cultivation but the UN noted that this was unlikely because the limited size of licit cultivation(6,000 hectare in 2009) and the Indian authorities claim to be in control of this production.

Opium is being increasingly consumed in India's neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal. But neither Afghanistan nor Myanmar appear to be the source of the contraband. Recent field research has confirmed the existence of (limited) illicit opium poppy cultivation in Nepal, as well as in the border areas of Bangladesh and India.

The estimated amount of heroin consumed in Bangladesh amounts to 4 mt in 2008, and Nepal's consumption has also increased to around 800 kg. According to official reports from the governments of Nepal and Bangladesh, almost all the heroin consumed in those countries originates in India.

The UN recommended in-depth heroin consumption and trafficking study to be carried out in India.

The report highlighted that the lack of accurate and current information on the prevalence of opiate use among the general population in India did not allow a determination of the number of users. In a national survey in 2001, a high prevalence rate was observed among Indian males (monthly prevalence rate of 0. 7 per cent among the male population, aged between 12-60 years old), but the lack of information on female opiate use prevents the calculation of reliable prevalence rate.


The report also noted that there was a rise in cannabis use in the region over the past year but the two most populated countries in Asia -- China and India -- did not have estimates of cannabis users among the general population.


A survey carried out in India in 2001 estimated a monthly prevalence rate of cannabis use at 3 per cent of the male population (aged between 12-60). However, the lack of information on cannabis use among females prevents an accurate estimate of the prevalence rate among Indians.

Naxalites have decided to train their guns against Multinational Companies (MNCs) operating in India.

In a statement sent to select media houses on Wednesday, the CPI-Maoists have declared that they would "rise up as a collective fist to drive out MNCs" from the country. The statement also reiterates that their mission is to wipe away the "treacherous rotten regimes" at the Centre and the states.

The Naxalites have said because mining activities by corporates have not benefitted the tribals it is justified to launch an armed struggle. However, government reports claim local leaders of the insurgent groups regularly extort hefty sums from miners to allow them to do business.

The tirade against the MNCs has come in the backdrop of the Bhopal gas tragedy verdict. Launching a scathing attack against the government and corporate India, Naxalite spokesperson Azad said, "We appeal to all democratic forces to unite, oppose and militantly resist the continuous sell-out of the country's interests to imperialist sharks. Time is running out. Unless we act collectively against the disastrous policies of the traitorous UPA government and various state governments we cannot prevent the whole of India from becoming a Bhopal."

The radical insurgents have also demanded that the assets of Dow Chemicals be confiscated and the "criminal" be forced to clean up toxic material from the Bhopal site. The banned outfit also took up another popular demand that the Dow be made to pay compensation to the 500,000 victims.

The outfit, blamed for the recent Jnaneshwari Express accident that took more than 180 lives, has expressed its "deepest anguish" at the plight faced by lakhs of people in Bhopal.

It claimed that the common man can never get justice from the "so-called courts of law or from the ruling-class parties whether it is the Congress, the BJP or the so-called Left."

Blaming the Congress as well as the BJP for the crimes committed by "MNC sharks like the Union Carbide", Azad targeted the government for rolling out the "red carpet, signing up MoUs, granting extraordinary concessions like free land, water, power, tax holidays and ban legitimate trade union activities."

S. DORAIRAJ


The Chennai Corporation launches an intensive drive to nab beggars who have not complied with the deadline to stop begging.





HANDOUT

Beggars rounded upby the Corporation herded into a van for transportation to the Communicable Diseases Hospital.

Let the world-maker loiter and rot
If ‘beg and live' be human fate.

– Tirukkural; Couplet 1062

IN contrast to the general middle-class hostility to and resentment against beggars, Tiruvalluvar, the Tamil savant, did not hesitate to sympathise with these “children of a lesser god” 2,000-odd years ago. However, the Corporation of Chennai, governed by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which invokes Tiruvalluvar on every other occasion and talks of “seeing god in the smile of the poor”, launched an intensive drive starting June 7 to ensure that beggars are off the streets and roads in the city. According to Mayor M. Subramanian, the campaign is backed by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and Deputy Chief Minister M.K. Stalin. A total of 38 people were picked up on the first day of the crackdown.

Earlier, in the first phase of the campaign, which commenced on April 28, mentally ill people moving around the city were targeted. The helpline set up by the civic body received 451 calls, and 179 people, 121 of them mentally challenged, were rescued and rehabilitated.

While the mentally ill were admitted to the government Institute of Mental Health (IMH), others were sent to old-age homes and care centres run by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or handed over to their relatives. Some of the rescued were admitted to the government General Hospital in the city. “The condition of the rescued persons is being monitored continuously by the Corporation,” the Mayor said.

Shortly after a meeting with activists of 18 NGOs on May 24, Subramanian said the Corporation, with the help of the police, would launch a drive against beggars who failed to comply with the June 5 deadline to give up begging. The authorities would secure four categories of beggars – children, women, the aged and the physically challenged. Rescued persons would be rehabilitated in coordination with the government agencies concerned and NGOs, he said. The Mayor denied the existence of any organised beggar mafia in the city. About the children carried by some women begging at traffic signals, he said they were either stolen or hired. The babies were sedated in order to draw public sympathy, he maintained. The Mayor claimed that “the entire operation is carried out on humanitarian grounds as it is aimed at rehabilitating the beggars and the mentally ill, apart from enhancing the health and hygiene of the city and removing traffic snarls”.

Efforts would be made to provide training and employment opportun-ities to the able-bodied persons among the rescued, he said. “Our ultimate goal is to ensure that Chennai city is free of beggars,” he declared.

But Chennai Corporation is not the first in the State to embark on a campaign against begging. The district administration and the police in Madurai launched a similar drive following a court order on March 26, 2007, calling for “strictly implemen-ting the provisions of the Tamil Nadu Prevention of Begging Act, 1945”.

Now, after a gap of three years, issues relating to begging have come to the fore though almost all political parties have been maintaining a stoic silence over this sociological problem involving several thousands of the less fortunate. Releasing the report of a fact-finding team that visited the Communicable Diseases Hospital and the IMH in Chennai and the care camp at Melpakkam in Tiruvallur district, A. Marx, State organiser of the People's Union for Human Rights, explained the political and economic context of the Corporation's move.

According to him, there is a link between the recent mass eviction of slum-dwellers from the city and the crackdown on beggars and homeless people. With India emerging as a key player in the global market despite increasing socio-economic disparities, metropolitan areas are boosted as world-class cities with sweeping highways, gleaming buildings and elegant business centres and made attractive for foreign direct investments, particularly in the neoliberal environment.

“The Chennai Corporation's drive to get rid of beggars, as part of efforts to create ‘Singara Chennai' [beautiful Chennai], coincides with Delhi's campaign to clear the streets and roads of beggars as the capital city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games,” he pointed out.

Rights violated

“With an increasingly erratic climate failing agriculture, agrarian workers from Tamil Nadu and other States are making their way into cities to eke out a living in informal sectors. As they pour into Chennai city, with no low-cost or affordable housing, pavements, bus stands and markets become their temporary or permanent shelters. Neither the State government nor the Chennai Corporation has shown any concern for the plight of inter-State and intra-State migrant workers,” he said.

Those workers who remained unorganised were severely exploited and in the absence of workplace safety, compensation for loss of lives or limbs was denied or not paid fully, he said. “With no livelihood guarantee, especially for those who are differently abled, many of them have taken recourse to begging. It should also be noted that begging is a symptom of poverty, which is the making of the same dominant elite class who are now driving these people out of their last possible survival mechanism,” he added.

Marx urged the Mayor to release a White Paper on the Corporation's drive against the mentally ill and beggars. Around 30-40 per cent of the detained persons were migrant labour from other States. Pointing out certain procedural and human rights violations allegedly committed by the authorities of the civic body in detaining them at the IMH, he said a medical team comprising doctors from other States should be invited to examine them. He stressed the need for a clear framework for engaging private institutions in the rehabilitation of the mentally ill.


M. KARUNAKARAN

At the government rehabilitation centre at Paranur in Kancheepuram district.

According to human rights activists, another dimension to the issue is that laws enforced in different States, including Tamil Nadu, to curb begging do not protect beggars. The Tamil Nadu Prevention of Begging Act, 1945, for instance, treats begging as a crime. Its basic premise seems to be that begging is an outcome of choice and not compulsion. The pre-Independence era law calls for “the detention and employment of beggars and their dependants in workhouses or special homes, and for the custody, trial and punishment of beggar offenders in the (State of Tamil Nadu)”.

According to Section 2 of the Act, begging means “(i) soliciting or receiving alms in a public place, whether under the pretence of singing, dancing, performing tricks or selling articles or otherwise; (ii) entering on any private premises for the purpose of soliciting or receiving alms; (iii) exposing or exhibiting, with the object of obtaining or extorting alms, any sore, wound, injury, deformity or disease, whether of himself or other person or of an animal; [and] (iv) allowing oneself to be used as an exhibit for the purpose of soliciting or receiving alms.”

However, the law has made it clear that earning a livelihood by displaying skills and talents by street artists and performers in the oral tradition, bards, jugglers and street magicians will not come under its purview.

The penalty clauses are stringent: “(1) Whoever is found begging shall be punishable – (a) on a first conviction, with fine which may extend to fifty rupees or with imprisonment which may extend to one month; (b) on a second or subsequent conviction, with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months (2) Any police officer may arrest without a warrant any person who is found begging….”

The Act enables the magistrate to “order detention of able-bodied accused of eighteen [years] or over to a workhouse for a period of not less than one year and not more than three years”. It also provides for detention in a special home for a similar period of persons who are not physically capable of ordinary manual labour. Under the Act, the magistrate has the power to release them on a bond executed with or without sureties assuring that the person would abstain from begging.

Higher penalty of detention ranging from three to seven years will be awarded to persons who resume begging after detention and if they are convicted for the second or subsequent time, the detention period will range from three years to 10 years.

In the case of persons, including juveniles afflicted with leprosy and the physically challenged, the law seems to be more inhuman as it provides for “indefinite detention” in an asylum.

Expressing his views on the Act, K. Elango, the general secretary of the Tamil Nadu unit of the All India Lawyers' Union, said the rehabilitation clause was introduced by the State government through an amendment in 1964. The original Act betrayed the intention of the British rulers to prevent begging and nothing more than that, he said. Although the amendment tried to see beggary as a social problem, it did not offer any comprehensive solution.

“Begging cannot be termed an offence. It should be treated as a socio-economic problem, though in metropolitan cities, professional begging is encouraged by some gangsters,” he said.

According to him, giving sweeping powers to the police to arrest beggars, the problems in differentiating between street artists who earn a livelihood and those soliciting alms under the pretence of singing, dancing and performing tricks, and levying fine on persons who have nothing to begin with are among the grey areas. He wondered how people selling articles could also be brought under the definition of beggars. On the claim that begging at road signals posed a traffic hazard, he said the problem caused by the alms-seekers was minimal and there were several other major factors distracting drivers.

Official sources, however, point out that ever since 1954, when a camp for beggars convicted by the judicial magistrate was set up at Melpakkam, several rehabilitation measures have been taken by successive governments.

Presenting the policy note for 2010-2011 on the “welfare of the differently abled persons” during the Budget session in the State Assembly, Karunanidhi recalled that 10 rehabilitation homes for leprosy-afflicted persons were started by the government between 1971 and 1974.

Official sources also claim that the inmates are provided with free board, lodging, clothing, medicine and recreation facilities. They are also trained in weaving, tailoring and shoemaking. With the inmates moving out to live in free environment, many of the camps have only around 50-60 per cent of the sanctioned strength of 400 adults and 25 children, local people say.

In the Melpakkam camp, which is under the control of the Social Welfare Department, there are only 106 inmates, including five women, against the sanctioned strength of 950, including 180 women.

The collapse of some of the old buildings in the camp has resulted in a drastic scaling down of the strength, official sources said. Most of the inmates are in the 50-60 age group and they belong to the southern districts, including Madurai and Ramanathapuram.

Interactions with representatives of NGOs, legal experts, government officials, inmates of the care centres and villagers reveal that contrary to the theories relating to the “flourishing beggar industry”, which stem from the typical middle-class attitude towards the poor and downtrodden, there are several factors that contribute to the problem in the State, which has 48.63 lakh families below the poverty line. Mass deprivation, abject poverty, disability, illness, inter-State and intra-State migrations owing to failure in business or agriculture and family disputes are some of the major factors.

Discarded by their kin and faced with social stigma, beggars afflicted with leprosy are forced to live in 48 segregated colonies in different parts of the State.

The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority's second Master Plan claims that “Chennai is a city of migrants”. The migrants not only come from the surrounding Tamil- and Telugu-speaking areas but also from other parts of the country, it says.

According to P. Banu, childline coordinator of Don Bosco Anbu Illam, seven or eight boys in the 12-16 age group on an average arrive at the railway stations in Chennai and the bus terminus at Koyambedu every day. The boys migrating from other States struggle to find a survival mechanism owing to the language problem, she said. There are several instances of people belonging to other States and other districts in Tamil Nadu bringing their mentally ill relatives to the city and abandoning them before taking the next bus back home. These mentally ill people, particularly women, are subjected to harassment by antisocial elements, NGO activists claim.

The absence of any proper survey of beggars has come in the way of taking up a comprehensive rehabilitation programme. However, some activists claim that their number will run to a few thousands. Children are hired by brokers for Rs.100 for begging, they allege.

Tamil scholars and historians are of the view that hatred towards beggars is an alien phenomenon, as traditional Tamil society has always been tolerant towards the have-nots. According to C. Santhalingam, senior archaeologist, there is historical and literary evidence to show the existence of arachaalai (endowments) during the 10th century A.D. for feeding the poor. Manimekalai, the 6th century Tamil epic, speaks of its heroine using amudhasurabhi, the magic bowl, to feed the poor and needy. Although Puranaanooru, a Sangam Age work, describes begging as a despicable act, it dubs denial of alms a greater insult, he pointed out.


source: frontline Volume 27 - Issue 13 :: Jun. 19-Jul. 02, 2010

AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA


Delhi gets rid of its beggars in order to showcase the capital as a world-class city ahead of the Commonwealth Games.





MANVENDER VASHIST/PTI

A woman with her newborn begs on a street of New Delhi. A November 2009 photograph.

IN a drive that began in April, ahead of the Commonwealth Games scheduled for October, the Delhi government is sending back beggars found on the streets of the National Capital Region to the towns and villages from which they migrated. Firm about dealing with the “social menace”, the government has formed 13 teams to round up beggars and declared 12 “zero-tolerance zones”. Two mobile courts are already in operation to prosecute beggars.

Delhi's Social Welfare Minister Mangat Ram Singhal has a ready explanation for these measures:

“Beggars are a nuisance, and begging has to be stopped. When we make Delhi a world-class city, it will be compared with other world capitals. One does not come across beggars in other countries. Why should there be beggars in Delhi?” In another interaction with the press, he said: “We Indians are used to beggars. Westerners are not. So, we must make the city free of them.”

Two important facts emerge from the Minister's statements, both made in the context of the preparations for the Games. First, making Delhi a world-class city rests high in the urban imagination of the people's representative. Second, it is India's prestige that is at stake if the poor are seen roaming the streets seeking alms from the visiting foreigners. The goal of making Delhi shine as a well-developed city has led to unprecedented activities in the past five years involving the construction of flyovers, development of a metro rail system, street-scaping, and the renovation of prominent markets. Slums have been cleared and dhabas that dotted the lanes of Delhi removed. The result is a stark rise in the number of homeless people. It is unfortunate that the burden of hosting the Games falls on the city's poor.

Instead of securing the right to livelihood for citizens, the government has maintained that begging is illegal. It has invoked the Bombay Prevention of Beggary Act, 1959, which criminalises begging. The Bombay Act, also applicable to the Union Territory of Delhi and invoked by the Delhi government in 1961, was not enforced until two years ago.

The Act prescribes punishment up to 10 years for a person found begging. It bans begging, vending on roads, cleaning vehicles at traffic junctions, singing for money in buses and displaying physical disability to seek alms. A person penalised under the Bombay Act is sent to a special “beggar court” or is tried by the mobile courts. These courts have suddenly become active under the Delhi government's initiative to remove anyone found vending, squatting or sleeping on the streets, railway stations, bus stops or any other public places.

According to the Social Welfare Department, Delhi has an estimated 60,000 beggars. Of them, 30 per cent are below 18 years of age; 69.94 per cent of them are males and 30.06 per cent females. But non-governmental organisations claim that there are more than a lakh beggars in the Union Territory. However, a report by Action Aid in 2004 claimed the number was 60,000. A study by the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi, found that around 90 per cent of the beggars in Delhi were migrants from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, pushed to the national capital by poverty.

Mangat Ram Singhal had announced the setting up of a dozen mobile courts to try arrested beggars. The two mobile courts in operation have tried 60 persons so far. The Delhi government has built 12 shelters, which can house 2,200 inmates. A senior official in the Social Welfare Department said: “We prepare a social investigation report of those arrested under the Beggary Act. We try to find out whether the person had any other means of earning a living. In most of the cases the beggars are found to be professionals who otherwise could have earned a decent living.”

Predictably, such an understanding completely ignores the root causes of poverty and migration. With increasing inequality in urban India and the government's excesses in view of the Commonwealth Games, many physically challenged people and economically distressed families are resorting to beggary.

Harsh Mander, a social activist who has filed a public interest petition in the Delhi High Court over the arrest of elderly and sick people on charges of begging, said the poor feared police high-handedness. “It's like a war against the poor,” human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves said. “I would like sportsmen from the Western world and people coming for the Commonwealth Games to write letters of protest to our Prime Minister, to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and say: ‘Please stop this. We don't want you to clean up Delhi for us. We don't mind if people beg,'” he told a national daily.

The universities in Delhi have been instructed to get their hostels vacated during the 12-day sports event, which means even students have to find alternative accommodation. This effectively means that the less powerful people in the city are being made to suffer in the name of national prestige.

HLRN REPORT

Civil rights groups wonder about the sanctity of this kind of development. In the second week of May, Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), one such group, came up with a detailed report titled “The 2010 Commonwealth Games: Whose wealth? Whose Commons?”


V.V. KRISHNAN

Seeking alms at a traffic signal in New Delhi.

The report delineates some important findings and asks how huge sums of money are being spent on the CWG and whether such funding has been approved by the democratic institutions of the government. The findings of the report are bleak.

It says, “India's decision to bid for CWG '10 was non-transparent and undemocratic and cost the country Rs.137 crore. India offered $7.2 million to train athletes of all Commonwealth nations – an offer which allegedly clinched the bid in India's favour. The GOI [Government of India] and the Delhi government decided to underwrite costs and budget shortfall of the games, despite the fact that the Ministry of Finance and Department of Expenditure, GOI, cautioned against it in 2003.”

It also says that the budget for the CWG has risen from an initial projection of Rs.1,899 crore to an official figure of Rs.10,000 crore and independent expert committee estimates of Rs.30,000 crore.

It has revealed some shocking data. The expenditure on sports infrastructure is already 2,160 per cent of the initially projected budget, and the Union Budget allocation for the Games from the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports rose by 6,235 per cent between 2005-06 and 2009-10. This increase excluded the budget for other infrastructure, beautification projects, and security. A July 2009 report of the Comptroller and Auditor General raised questions about certain financial aspects of the Games, including sponsorships and revenue generation.

Funds for social expenditure have been diverted to manage the Games. For instance, funds from the 2009-10 Scheduled Caste Sub-Plan (Special Component Plan) worth more than Rs.2,500 crore have been diverted to cover the CWG expenditure from 2005-06 to 2006-10, according to the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights report. Over one lakh families have been evicted and 44 slums are to be removed before the Games, according to the Delhi government's figures.

The HLRN report says there is rampant exploitation of workers at the CWG construction sites, which includes low pay, inadequate living conditions and lack of safety equipment. The People's Union of Democratic Rights report in 2007 on the CWG village, too, shows violation of workers' rights in a big way. Most of the projects have not got environment clearances and social impact assessment reports.

The HLRN report concludes that the entire process relating to the Games has been characterised by secrecy, lack of government accountability, and unconstitutional activities. “Preparations for the Games have already resulted in an irreversible alteration in the social, spatial, economic and environmental dimensions of the city of Delhi. Much of this has taken place in contravention of democratic governance and planning process,” it says.

“The scale of the CWG and the excessive costs involved are hard to justify in a country that has glaringly high levels of poverty, hunger, inequality, homelessness and malnutrition. When one of three Indians lives below the poverty line and 40 per cent of the world's hungry live in India, when 46 per cent of India's children and 55 per cent of its women are malnourished, does spending thousands of crores of rupees on a 12-day sports event build national pride,” said Shivani Chaudhry, associate co-ordinator of HLRN.

It is clear that such development schemes are the result of a particular kind of elite imagination of having a world-class city. The term world class as defined by the Delhi Master Plan is exclusionary. It says that a world-class city is where you can have mega sporting events and high tourism revenues and can hold international conventions. It hardly matters to the government that the infrastructure built during the Asian Games in 1982 is lying largely unused. The government appears to be racing towards a goal without any legal and moral commitment to its own people.

Amitabh Kundu, an urban economist with Jawaharlal Nehru University, summarises the situation best: “It is a process of exclusionary urbanisation that is at work. Such urbanisation has already started to show its impact. From 1991 to 2001, the overall rate of migration has actually declined. The nature of migration has changed. Delhi is allowing only skilled and semi-skilled workers into its territory. There is a formalisation of the informal sector. There is no space in a modern Indian city for the most marginalised and the most poor.”



source: frontline Volume 27 - Issue 13 :: Jun. 19-Jul. 02, 2010

A Pakistani court has reportedly ordered a ban on nine leading websites, including Google, Yahoo and Hotmail, for allegedly posting blasphemous material.

Media reports said the Bahawalpur bench of the Lahore high court on Tuesday directed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to immediately block nine websites -- including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Bing and Amazon -- for publishing and promoting sacrilegious and blasphemous material.

Justice Mazher Iqbal Sidhu issued the order while hearing a petition filed by a man named Muhammad Sidiq who claimed these websites were publishing sacrilegious material.

The judge also ordered the PTA chairman to appear in court on June 28 with relevant material.

Sidiq, in his petition, sought a ban on the websites for publishing blasphemous materials and twisting facts about the Quran.

Aslam Dhakkar, head of a local bar association, was quoted as saying that the court had given a historic decision.

He said the legal fraternity in Bahawalpur will observe a strike on Wednesday to protest the publication of blasphemous material by the websites.

However, officials of the PTA told PTI that they had received no instructions to block the websites.

They said they had only seen media reports about the court's order.

Wahaj-us-Siraj, a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, said his organisation had not received any directions from the PTA to block websites.

Pakistani authorities had blocked popular social networking website Facebook in May over a competition on blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Mohammed.

The access to the website was later restored on the orders of the court.

Supreme Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 21, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court upheld the government's authority Monday to ban aid to designated terrorist groups, even when that support is intended to steer the groups toward peaceful and legal activities.

The court left intact a federal law that the Obama administration considers an important tool against terrorism. But human rights organizations say the law's ban on providing training and advice to nearly four dozen organizations on a State Department list squanders a chance to persuade people to renounce extremism.

The justices voted 6-3 to reject a free-speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups to the law that bars ''material support'' -- everything from money to technical know-how to legal advice -- to foreign terrorist organizations.

The aid groups were only challenging provisions that put them at risk of being prosecuted for talking to terrorist organizations about nonviolent activities.

But Chief Justice John Roberts said in his opinion for the court that material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways.

''Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,'' Roberts said in an opinion joined by four other conservative justices, but also the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

Justice Stephen Breyer took the unusual step of reading his dissent aloud in the courtroom. ''Not even the 'serious and deadly problem' of international terrorism can require automatic forfeiture of First Amendment rights,'' he said. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued the government's case at the high court more than two months ago before President Barack Obama nominated her to replace Stevens, who will retire in days.

The Obama administration said the ''material support'' law is one of its most important terror-fighting tools. It has been used about 150 times since Sept. 11, resulting in 75 convictions. Most of those cases involved money and other substantial support for terrorist groups.

Only a handful dealt with the kind of speech involved in the case decided Monday.

Human rights groups said they were stunned by the ruling.

David Cole, a Georgetown law professor who represented the aid groups at the Supreme Court, said the court essentially ruled that ''the First Amendment permits the government to make human rights advocacy and peacemaking a crime.''

The aid groups involved had trained the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey on how to bring human rights complaints to the United Nations and assisted them in peace negotiations, but suspended the activities when the U.S. designated the Kurdish organization, known as the PKK, a terrorist group in 1997. They also wanted to give similar help to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, but they, too, were designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997.

Representatives of the Tamil Tigers appealed the designation to a federal appeals court, which upheld the government. The PKK has not challenged its terrorist designation.

No serious dispute exists in the U.S. over the designation for groups such as al-Qaida, Abu Nidal and the Shining Path. But some others have legitimate political arms and extensive social missions as well as associations with violence through paramilitary or insurgent means. Hamas, for example, won a majority of Palestinian support in democratic elections.

Once the State Department places a group on the list, it is illegal for Americans or others in the country to provide ''material support or resources'' to the group. The law also bars travel to the U.S. by representatives or members of the group and freezes any assets that it has in U.S. jurisdictions.

In this case, the Humanitarian Law Project, civil rights lawyer Ralph Fertig and physician Nagalingam Jeyalingam, among others, wanted to offer assistance to the Kurdish or Tamil groups.

The government says the PKK has been involved in a violent insurgency that has claimed 22,000 lives. The Tamil Tigers waged a civil war for more than 30 years before their defeat last year.

Lower courts had repeatedly found parts of the material support law unconstitutionally vague in a lawsuit that began in the late 1990s.

Despite the risk of prosecution, Fertig said he would continue his work on behalf of the Kurds. ''We will not let it inhibit our commitment to the Kurdish people,'' he said.

In his dissent, Breyer recognized the importance of denying money and other resources to terrorist groups. ''But I do dispute whether the interest can justify the statute's criminal prohibition.''

Breyer said the aid groups' mission is entirely peaceful and consists only of political speech, including how to petition the U.N.

But Roberts said the U.N. was forced to close a refugee camp in northern Iraq, near the Turkish border, because it had come under PKK control.

''Training and advice on how to work with the United Nations could readily have helped the PKK in its efforts to use the United Nations camp as a base for terrorist activities,'' Roberts said.

The other justices in the majority were Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The cases are Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 08-1498, and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, 09-89.

------

AP Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.


the source is new york times
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20, 2010


HARSH MANDER


For the destitute and the disadvantaged, however old or infirm, the choice is between undignified, low-paying hard work or hunger. There are no safety nets provided by the State or communities…




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Old people need to work regardless of whether they live separately or with their grown sons


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Photo: Sumit Dayal

A difficult life on the margins...

The engagement with markets of destitute, powerless, socially isolated and devalued individuals, who try to daily battle hunger, and feed their dependants is always highly unequal and unjust. One striking universal finding in our studies of hunger and destitution was that however infirm the destitute are, however sick, however challenged to feed small children alone or themselves, there is no prospect for food unless and until they work. If begging is also considered work — and it should be because it is arduous and both physically and psychologically stressful — then this is virtually a universal rule that applied to every highly disadvantaged person we met in the course of our field studies.

Marti, an aged woman in Rajasthan, illegally cuts down trees from the scrub forests near her village, and burns these to make coal so that it is not too heavy to carry and sell in the market. She remarks fatalistically, ‘Let us see how long I will live. Once my body refuses to move, I will not be able to make coal and then I will starve. As it is, I am down to eating one meal a day'. Many old widows, who can barely walk, take on work of grazing cattle on hillsides. Antamma in Andhra Pradesh also goes to the forest to gather wood to sell and wild shrubs to eat, but twice in the past month she fainted while in the jungle. They persevere with enormous determination, but a time will come when their spirits start to ebb. Starvation and eventual death is inevitable.

No succour


Old people need to work regardless of whether they live separately or with their grown sons; they still need to contribute to the household in productive ways. In finding work, old people have to depend on the local economy, since migration as an option is ruled out physiologically and culturally. The migration of young people does create opportunities for work for aged people in villages, and also for single women and disabled persons, but since employers know they are desperate and powerless, they therefore pay them very low wages, often nothing more than food, country liquor and a new set of clothes every year. The work they are offered is low paid and physically difficult like cattle grazing on steep scrub hillsides with little foliage, weeding, sewing, cutting grass for fodder, cleaning cowsheds, husking and drying grain and gathering firewood and dung and similar activities that require work that is exacting and toilsome, and payment exploitative. Even this is always offered like charity to the unproductive and undeserving, rather than as a rightful claim to work.

This is ultimately the story of every day of every destitute life: the stark merciless choice between back-breaking undignified work, or hunger. There was no third choice, of well earned retirement and rest, of secure care, of adequate social security organised by the State, or by local communities and families.

Kamala in Rajasthan talks of her drift to the dangerous and stigmatised vocation of brewing illegal liquor. She remarks bitterly, “Who will give work to a widow? Everyone thinks she is searching for a man”. She lost her husband to TB when she was very young, but she could not take off even one day to mourn, as she had to feed her three small children. She was driven away from her husband's land by his brother, and cleaning cowsheds in the homes of the Patels brought her little more than stale food. She mortgaged her few belongings, but finally turned to brewing liquor. She collects mahuapods from the forest and ferments them for a week, adding many unsavoury ingredients. It is a dangerous vocation, on the dark side of the law. She has to regularly bribe the police, and the rowdy men who flock to her hut each night to get drunk are the same men who ostracise her by day. Although she is redoubtable and fierce, she is still a woman, and the drunks sometimes pay her less and even smash her earthen pots of liquor if she protests.

We found that most disabled adults were engaged in hard work which ‘ able-bodied' people were unwilling to do. We encounter Dhanu from Orissa and Kava from Rajasthan, both severely disabled, but fed and given a roof (but no walls) by their brothers, in return for hard unpaid labour of grazing goats and cattle. When Dhanu runs after the goats, the sores on his legs start bleeding. He cannot even hold an umbrella upright during the rainy season due to his finger-less hands, and so he returns home drenched after days of rain. When we visit Dhanu, his goats are suffering from some contagious disease. He is tense and anxious not only because the goats are his only companions; but also in case the goats are to die, what then would become of him? His brother would not continue to give him food and he could not hope to get any other work. Kava is older than Dhanu, born with a congenital physical disability. Both his legs are joined, and he cannot walk, only crawl. Kava's hands are full of sores because he takes his brothers' sheep to graze in the stony hill terrain in return for food at his brothers' home.

The markets are found to discriminate grossly with these people from the margins not just in work and wages, but also in extending credit. Old people are mostly rudely turned away when they seek food on credit from shopkeepers and trying to buy groceries on credit is always a humiliating experience. Shopkeepers say that there is no guarantee how long old people will live; they may slyly slip away to the other world without repaying their loans. Kampalli can never coax credit for food from the kirana shop as she is too old to be credit worthy, therefore she often just sprinkles salt on boiled rice and gulps it down with water, no dal, no vegetables. It is even harder for an elderly widow. Somi says, “When my husband was alive, we never had a problem finding credit, even though he was mentally slow. A man can get credit from anywhere, he can ask many people. But a woman is turned down more firmly.” They find that shopkeepers charge them more and give them less than their due because they are too weak to protest. Single women report that even formal banks turn them away, as do even many self help groups. If credit is extended by shopkeepers and landlords to those who have no assets to mortgage, they must pay for this dearly with labour in their farms or homes for low wages and long hours, especially for single women. This is indeed the resurgence of a new kind of short term bonded labour.

Humiliating


Many people with disability testify that even the thought of going to the kirana (grocery) shop stresses them greatly, but still there is no escape from it as the kirana shop not only provides them with many of their daily needs, but also at times is the only source of credit. So they weather visits to the shop in spite of routine dishonour and indignities. Indradeep is routinely refused credit from the shopkeeper, even though his son earns as a migrant labourer. The dealer tells him each time to come back the next day. When he returns the next day, he is told the same thing. He listens and goes home helpless and empty-handed. “Sometimes I wish that I was alone, then I would have managed somehow, but with a family it is very different. I can beg myself, but I would not let them beg for food for anything in the world.”

source: the hindu

june 19, 2010



Rajiv Bhatia



If African governments give greater priority to Asia rather than the EU and the U.S., they would discover that Asia, stretching from India to Japan, has much to share with them.






As World Cup drama unfolds on the African soil for the first time in history, it may be apt to examine the question: Whither Africa? This is particularly relevant as 17 African countries celebrate completion of 50 years of their freedom this year.

Since the ‘scramble for Africa' among European powers for establishing colonies in Africa in the 19th century, the continent has come a long way. On its journey, it has passed through a cycle of exploitation, stagnation, hope, setback and subsequent explosion of new expectations. The past decade seems to have witnessed the second ‘scramble', the competition among ‘old' powers — the U.S. and the EU — and ‘new' powers — China, India, Russia and Brazil, not to speak of ASEAN, Turkey and Iran — to re-engage Africa. Will the coming decade see African countries moving on the road to faster development?

What is required is a realistic evaluation of how Africa has performed in the years since Ghana became the first country to attain Independence in 1957. The late 50s and early 60s represented a special moment in African history as country after country overthrew the colonial yoke. This was the age of hope and of giants such as Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Ben Bella, Senghor, Lumumba and Nyerere. Soon, however, hopes were belied as parts of the continent were engulfed in conflicts. Africa had been caught in the vortex of post-colonial tensions. Neo-colonialism and cold war-related compulsions ensured that both democracy and development suffered enormously. According to one calculation, Africa went through 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations between 1960s and late 1980s.

Regenerated optimism

The past two decades have regenerated optimism. The end of apartheid and emergence of a democratic South Africa was a big boost. In 1994, there were only eight democracies; today the number is 35. Economic performance has been improving. Between 1995 and 2005, GDP growth rate increased, averaging 5 per cent in 2005. Projections for 2011-12 indicate that growth would be between 4 and 5 per cent. However, these figures can hardly conceal the stark reality of poverty and its brutal consequences in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Television images of emaciated children, teenaged soldiers brandishing guns, and congested urban settlements infested with crime still define our idea of Africa. News stories about disastrous impact of HIV/AIDS, grossly inadequate facilities for health and education and poor governance continue to pour in. Besides, new challenges such as climate change, likely conflicts on water, energy security, and deepening marginalisation in world affairs complicate the situation.

Are Afro-pessimists right then in claiming that Africa's angst would not end in foreseeable future? Africa has been running behind other regions of the world in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. UNDP estimates that, by current trends, Africa would be unable to halve extreme poverty by 2147 AD.

I do not share this pessimism. Having spent seven and a half years in Kenya and South Africa and having travelled extensively in these countries as well as elsewhere on the continent (i.e. Lesotho, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Egypt and Algeria), I have experienced, first hand, a strong yearning for change. The role of that deep yearning in hastening transformation is important. I have also witnessed talent, creativity, hard work, discipline and dedication on part of youth, women, civil society, media and business. They do not merely clamour for change; they have been working for it.

My considered view is that Afro-optimists are right in maintaining that Africa's turn too will come. But the important stipulation is that it will have to do more to achieve it. This task would become easier if its key international partners become more enlightened and less selfish.

What more can Africa do to secure its salvation – nirvana if you please, from poverty, disease, corruption, conflict and marginalisation?

Mbeki's prescription

Thabo Mbeki, South Africa's President from 1999-2008 and an intellectual giant, offered a thought-provoking prescription at an address in Pretoria on May 27, 2010. Referring to a World Bank report, issued in 2000, which suggested how Africa could “claim the 21st century,” Mbeki observed that its suggestions were “correct and unexceptionable,” but he emphasised that two important elements were missing. One was the need for Africans “to recapture the intellectual space” and to develop their “intellectual capital” so that they themselves could define their future. The second was the need to take necessary steps to ensure that Africa occupied its “rightful place within the global community of nations.”

In order to achieve its goals, suggested Mbeki, Africa should consider the following “Six Steps Forward”: build and nurture intellectual cadre committed to transformation of Africa; develop the capacity of state, government, business, and civil society institutions; resurrect African Renaissance Movement; achieve African cohesion resulting in Africa speaking with one voice on matters of common interest; and develop the media and means to communicate correctly about Africa's present and future. In my view, Mbeki's suggestions deserve wider attention.

About Africa's role in the world, the old colonial mindset seems to be alive and kicking. Recently a senior French minister called Africa “our El Dorado”, a legendary city of gold. France reportedly wants to ensure broader influence in Africa, seen as “a frontier for profit-making.” Many American, EU and Chinese companies seem to share this perspective.

Will Indian companies be different? Will they give to Africa as much as they receive from it, if not more? This is perhaps what Ratan Tata had in mind when he recently recalled that South Africa had been a victim of “exploitative and extractive enterprise”. He suggested that India and South Africa could have “a different relationship”, one based on mutual benefit and genuine partnership. His advice applies to all Indian companies operating in Africa, not just in South Africa.

Friendly governments such as India can certainly help Africa in its efforts to increase its representation in the institutions of global governance. India should take the lead in extending strong support to Africa's demand for greater representation in G-20.

Many African governments have let down their peoples. They will have to shape up. But, people's real hope lies in strengthening the triad of civil society, business and African Diaspora. The more these stake-holders contribute, by working together, towards empowering public opinion and curbing negative tendencies of governments, the more they will bring the day of salvation nearer. International partners should help by creating a stronger synergy with this triad.

A word of advice for African governments: they need to craft their own version of ‘Look East' policy. If they give greater priority to Asia rather than the EU and the U.S., they would discover that Asia, stretching from India to Japan, has much to offer and share with them.

At India-Africa Forum Summit in Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke of India's wish “to see the 21st century as the Century of Asia and Africa with the people of two continents working together to promote inclusive globalisation.” These words struck a chord in many African capitals.

Amidst a rising crescendo of excitement before the World Cup began, South African President Jacob Zuma proclaimed grandly: “Africa has arrived.” Maybe, but realists are unlikely to agree.

Mother Africa would have “arrived” when democracy, peace and progress touching all her children, prevail on a lasting basis.








( A retired diplomat now, the writer served as India's High Commissioner to South Africa and Kenya.)

source: the hindu

june 18, 2010
June 18, 2010 21:42 IST
Tags: United States, Barack Obama, Pew Research Center, Ratings of America, Muslim
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CommentMost Indians have positive image of the United States, with 66 percent expressing a favourable opinion, as President Barack Obama's [ Images ] job approval rating among his own people declined sharply, an opinion poll suggested on Friday.

Obama remains popular abroad where he gets a thumbs-up for the way he handled the economic crisis, but his job approval rating among his people has declined sharply, according to a new global study conducted by Pew Research Center.

"President Barack Obama remains popular in most parts of the world, although his job approval rating in the US has declined sharply since he first took office," it said.

The survey conducted between April 7 and May 8 also finds that the image of the US as a country is also better than what it was during the presidency of George Bush [ Images ].

In India [ Images ], the superpower gets positive marks with 66 percent expressing a favourable opinion but this is down from last year when 76 percent of the people held this view.

America's overall image has slipped slightly in Indonesia, although 59 percent still give the US a positive rating in the world's largest Muslim nation.

In other Muslim countries, however, the US receives overwhelmingly negative marks especially in Turkey and Pakistan where only 17 percent hold a positive opinion.

The new poll finds opinion of the US slipping in some Muslim countries where opinion had improved in 2009.
In Egypt [ Images ], America's favorability rating dropped from 27 percent to 17 percent -- the lowest percentage observed in any of the Pew Global Attitudes surveys conducted in that country since 2006.

"And while views of Obama are still more positive than were attitudes toward President Bush among most Muslim publics, significant percentages continue to worry that the US could become a military threat to their country," the report said.

The survey also finds that overall opinion of Obama remains broadly positive in most non-Muslim nations. But while president's ratings remain generally positive, his standing is not quite as high in 2010 as it was a year ago.

The new poll by Pew Research Center found fewer in many Asian and Latin American countries saying they have confidence in Obama and approve of his policies generally. Even in Europe the large majorities who were positive are not quite as large as they were in 2009.

In Mexico, however, only 44 percent of Mexicans gave the US a favourable rating following the signing of the bill that deals with illegal immigration by giving police increased powers to stop and detain people who are suspected of being in the country illegally.

Before the enactment of the law it was 62 percent.

America gets overwhelmingly positive ratings in Western Europe with 73 percent in France [ Images ] and 63 percent in Germany [ Images ] saying they have a favourable view of the US.

Ratings of America have improved sharply in Russia [ Images ] (57 percent) up 13 percentage points since 2009, in China (58 percent), up 11 points, and in Japan [ Images ] (66 percent), up 7 points.

Opinions are also highly positive in other nations around the world including South Korea (79 percent), Poland (74 percent ) and Brazil [ Images ] (62 percent).

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june 17, 2010



Sabine Rennefanz







The obituaries are in. All the hopes of the German government now rest on Mesut Ozil and Thomas Muller. They aren't members of the cabinet, they're the new stars of the national football team. If anybody could, they might turn the destiny of Chancellor Angela Merkel's hopeless coalition. If they win the World Cup in South Africa, the whole country will party relentlessly and nobody will worry any more about the disastrous government. At least that's a possibility. It has worked before: poor governments have carried on thanks to a wave of football fever. “Drink beer, watch football,” said one Christian Democratic Union member of parliament the other day, when he was asked by a journalist how to survive the following weeks.

Germany has a similar coalition to Britain's: an agreement between the conservative CDU and the liberal Free Democratic party. But, unlike Britain, there was never a honeymoon in Berlin. From the start, last September, there has been constant infighting, disagreement — chaos. Cabinet members refer to each other as “ Gurken” (cucumbers) or “ Wildsau” (wild boar). Merkel's once ideal partner, the pro-business FDP has turned out to be a nightmare.

While the CDU has become a modern conservative party with a strong interest in social equality, gay rights and environmental protection, the FDP is stuck in the 1980s and is a single-topic party: it wants to cut tax, or at least block tax rises. Under the guidance of its erratic leader, Guido Westerwelle, the foreign secretary, its members happily ignored the pressing problems of the international financial crisis.

And up to now, the coalition has managed to disagree on everything — the budget, health reform, how to help the struggling carmaker Opel.

The most recent low point was last week, when Merkel and Westerwelle presented what they called a “saving package.” They want to save €80bn by 2014, mainly by cutting social spending, and support for poor parents and the long-term unemployed. It read like the wish list of the FDP. There was an immediate cry of outrage — and not only from the opposition. CDU members found the package socially imbalanced, they said, claiming that wealthier people do not contribute at all. About 20,000 people demonstrated at the weekend against the proposed cuts in Berlin, and the papers published obituaries of the coalition government. “ Aufhoren!” (“Stop!“) reads the cover headline this week of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, above a picture of a troubled-looking Merkel and Westerwelle.

Merkel was once dubbed the Queen of Germany because of her presidential style. In the grand coalition with the social democrats (SPD) she was able to remain less hands-on, and merely moderate the process of governing. She had strong counterparts like finance minister Peer Steinbruck. But confronted with a very different coalition partner she appears remarkably weak — almost paralysed, and unable to control the constant arguing of the coalition members. The electorate wait in vain for some inspiration or explanation of how to go on. Merkel herself does not appear to know what the purpose of her government is. She has made uncharacteristic mistakes: she did not go personally to persuade the president Horst Kohler to stay, before he threw his job away. Instead she talked to him on the phone. She also humiliated important allies such as the work and labour minister, Ursula von der Leyen.

Merkel's weakness is felt in Europe, too. With the currency in crisis, previous German chancellors would have taken a leading role. She, on the other hand, seems uninterested. Her actions are lacklustre; she's happy to leave the initiative to France's Nicolas Sarkozy to agree new rules for the European Central Bank. At the most recent meeting of Sarkozy and Merkel, the differences were emphasised — both talked about a common European business policy but they seemed to be referring to different things. Merkel just wants better co-ordination and tougher punishments for countries who spend too much; Sarkozy demands more solidarity from Germany — in the past he has criticised German spending cuts. The unity once shown by Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl has long gone.

The crunch day will be 30 June: that day the new president will be elected. If Merkel's candidate, Christian Wulff — the bland CDU first minister of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) — doesn't get enough votes, it will be the end of this coalition government and new elections would have to be held. But it is unlikely to happen, since many MPs would lose their jobs in that process. They're likely to grit their teeth and hope for 11 July. That's the day the World Cup final takes place.

( Sabine Rennefanz is an editor at the Berliner Zeitung.)








— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

reproduced by the hindu