Passionate About India

The steel story! Will Indians finally use Chinese labour to surge ahead?

2012-01-27T06:00:00.001+05:30

I have very fond memories of a great patriotic politician of India (very few such men can be found amongst today’s politicians), Vasant Sathe. Apart from his very intelligent, practical and radical views on the tax structure, I remember how he always compared Korea to India to show how a small nation could surge ahead so fast while we kept cheating our countrymen. When I went to Korea recently, I couldn’t but help feel the same; I even wrote about this a few weeks ago in one of my editorials. In the week gone by, I had the opportunity to sit with a gentleman who is a consultant to a company called Electrosteel Steels Limited. He told me the most amazing story of a venture – for setting up a steel plant – by one Mr. Kejriwal near Bokaro on about 1500 acres of land. It is a steel plant being set up with a capacity of 2.2 million tonnes. Hearing the fascinating story (I’ll explain later on why I found it fascinating) of this plant made me remember Mr. Sathe again. Amongst various things, steel was of special interest to him – as should be to any politician with vision, for after the Stone and Bronze Age, it was the Iron Age that was decisive for building the comparative advantage for nations. And it was during the Industrial Revolution when the entire world saw and realised the power and economies that this metal could create. With the invention of steel, everythingchanged further. Today, almost all industries ranging from automobiles to defence use steel and related products extensively. Steel has been one commodity that to a large extent has been pivotal for economic development and social prosperity, and thus has been a key ingredient in the nation’s future plans. Mr. Sathe would always compare the Indian productivity to Korean productivity to explain the rot in the Indian system – and then, of course, he would invariably talk about China too. So today I thought I’ll dig a little deeper into some facts and figures about this key aspect symbolizing a nation’s development.

A recent Wall Street Journal report foretells decisive growth in China and India’s steel industry for 2012. The details are very interesting. India’s position in steel production is meek and lagging, mainly on account of government control, bureaucratic hurdles and red-tapism, coinciding with poor planning, unprofessional functioning, and poor productivity. Not just Asian countries like South Korea, but even countries like Malaysia have productivity standards much better than India’s. A research report titled “Indian Steel Industry: Outlook to 2012” predicts that Indian crude steel production will grow at a CAGR of 10% during 2010-2013. Still, India’s average consumption of finished steel is significantly less than that of its neighbours. Not only is India’s annual steel production capacity, in absolute numbers, far less than what nations like China and South Korea have; but the per capita consumption is also at a rock-bottom figure. A time-series analysis indicates that both India and China started their tryst with steel production approximately during the same time. Just after Independence, India’s and China’s annual steel production were at the same level. However, by the end of 1990, where the per capita steel consumption in China increased by 65 kg and touched a figure of 160 kg, India’s per capita consumption languished at 29 kg (an increase of just 7 kg per capita) by the end of 2003. As per the latest ASSOCHAM report, the per capita consumption of steel in India is only 35.5 kg per capita per year compared to 220 kg in China and 950 kg in South Korea.
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An analysis of India's pathetic 95th rank in the Corruption Index and its far reaching social impact!

2012-01-20T06:00:00.001+05:30

Amongst the many critical predicaments that the Indian economy suffers from, corruption has been one of the biggest monsters, and thankfully the most talked about in recent days. Needless to say, corruption has corroded every delivery system and has made it completely dysfunctional. The entire Indian public life is riddled with overriding rates of corruption – from the Adarsh land scam to Commonwealth Games misappropriations to the 2G spectrum scam – the list here has been endless, and the magnitude, obscene. In fact, India’s public life was never clean – the infamous Bofors scandal, Harshad Mehta’s nexus with senior politicians and Ketan Parekh’s stock market manipulation – all had their own perilous impact on the economy! It requires no empirical study or statistical survey to exhibit that we comfortably are the top performers in all corruption related global indices.

Take for instance, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) where India’s rank has been slipping consistently – languishing at the 95th position now with a score of 3.1 (on a scale of 10), a sizable 23 ranks down from 2007! We are far behind China that stands at 75th position with a score of 3.6. CPI score is not only about corruption but is more about the way corruption has got institutionalised in our system. Also, it is a fact that India’s score could have been better had it not been battered with the monstrous 2G spectrum scam. Interestingly, all the least corrupt countries like New Zealand, Denmark and Finland with 9.5, 9.4, and 9.4 scores respectively are not just socially developed but also economically progressive. And that’s why these are those nations that experience very few cases of crime, corruption and other forms of social malaise – unlike India.

The thumb-rule that set the pattern is that the developed countries mostly have high CPI scores, whereas at the bottom of the table are the countries mired by civil strife and oppressive regimes; and in-between are the emerging economies as well as former communist blocks. There is also a direct correlation between CPI rankings and Human Development Index (barring some aberration like Greece, which, in spite of being a developed country is ranked below China at number 80; and South Korea, which is ranked 12th in HDI and is 43 in CPI). Most of the African as well as Asian nations have a combination of low CPI and low HDI scores and most of the European and North American countries have the opposite; thus reflecting a direct bearing between the two indices! On hindsight, it may appear that there is no impact of corruption on GDP growth and investments. China and India, both scored quite low on CPI, yet have been riding on decent economic growth and FDI inflow. Vietnam and Indonesia are even lower in ranks in CPI (2.9 and 3.0 respectively) are recipient of quantum investments with their economy kicking!
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Now, The Americans want to shamefully ruin Iran through sanctions

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000+05:30

Woodrow Wilson once said that, “A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.” Rebutting the same, decades later, Omar Bongo, former President of Gabon, argued against the use sanctions, commenting, “...It is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually millions of people end up being directly punished.” With time, the very objective of sanctions has undergone a full transformation – today, sanctions are used mostly for strategic gains than anything else.

The United States and its allies (particularly Israel) are closing in on Iran! With a thumping majority (100-0), the US Senate last month approved sanctions prohibiting foreign financial institutions from undertaking any business with the Central Bank of Iran. After a series of sanctions that have been regularly imposed on and off, the US government’s latest sanctions against Iran (signed into law by US President Obama on December 31, 2011, as a part of the act titled H.R. 1540, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012”) are clearly the strictest ever. In his official statement on H.R. 1540, available at the White House website, Obama uses the word ‘military’ 14 times, with ‘defense’ being used only 9 times – this makes the aim of the law very evident! For records, more than 15 sanctions have been imposed on Iran till date!

Post the latest set of sanctions, the Iranian national currency – Rial – immediately lost its value by almost 15-20 per cent and is currently being exchanged at its lowest-ever rate of around 17,000-17,500 Rials to a dollar. The sanctions curtail other countries too from buying Iranian crude oil. The US through the latest sanctions can also debar parties that are trading with the Central Bank of Iran from having correspondent banking operations in the United States.
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THIS IS THE PATHETIC REALITY OF THE CHINESE JUDICIARY!

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000+05:30

Indian diplomat collapses inside a Chinese court

In November 2011, Wang Sixin, a law professor in the Communication University of China, opined, “In India, the common law tradition allows judges to begin litigation just based on a news report or a letter from a petitioner, whether [the petitioner is] a lawyer or not. China needs to adopt this practice.” This suggestion of his sounds quite ostensible considering a nation where freedom of speech and expression is highly censored and the judiciary has been used to further this dictatorship of the State. The same was the cruel case in Yiwu city with the Indian diplomat, S Balachandran, who was denied food and medicine despite his repeated requests that he was a diabetes patient; this went on till he actually collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Balachandran was trying to present the case for the release of two Indians who had been kidnapped by Chinese traders because their Yemeni firm had not yet paid some dues. This blatantly ruthless and inhumane attitude displayed by the Chinese judiciary almost in connivance with the Chinese businessmen defines the attitude of the Chinese administration. Till a few years back, if you were a Chinese villager having more than one child, the government tractors would have mowed down your residence – an act that defines the Chinese sense of cruelty, or should I say Chinese torture. Needless to say, the poor villagers never got any support from the judiciary.

The Chinese judiciary has never been independent! In fact, it was in a muddle especially during the Cultural Revolution that curbed its functionality completely between 1966 and 1976. The jurisprudence was revived after 1976 and thence, a new legislation came into being by the end of 1980 under the purview of Organic Law of People’s Courts. Consequently, a new era began, marked by a paradigm shift in the country’s legal system! On the brighter side, the system was made very strong in order to encompass the entire nation under the judiciary system. The number of judges and associate judges, which was at meagre 50,000 in the 1980s was increased to 131,460 in the 1990s, and then again augmented to 258,000 in 2000s – an increase of 416 per cent! This means that the judges-to-population ratio of China is now around 1 to 8,600, which is in close range to the US ratio of 1 to 8,826 – something that we in India are attempting to dream about since the last 64 years!
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Eleven things that can transform education in India

2011-12-23T06:00:00.000+05:30

I have often said that the future of India depends largely upon the future of education in our country. The demographic dividend that so many of us so proudly talk about, will actually be a mirage and also be counterproductive, if we continue with the kind of education system that we currently have in India. Along with eradication of needless delays in the judicial system and a the required massive investment in health, I would rate reforms in education as the most important vision that we need to implement in order to reap dividends out of this young demographic. And we really don’t have much time left.

After six long decades, India finally realised the importance of declaring education as our fundamental right, which was waiting its materialisation since Independence. This, I believe is not only very critical in revamping the entire education system of the nation, but also acts as the stepping stone towards education reforms. Starting with the Sarva Skhisha Abhiyaan program launched in 2001, this process has culminated in a policy that mandates free and compulsory education for all Indian children under the age of 14.

Fundamental right to education also ensures that all schools (be it private or public) have some seats reserved for the underprivileged class of society. This will ensure that all children born in India are more or less assured of at least basic education. However, we need to make sure that school under SSA should have basic infrastructure along with dedicated service providers (read: teachers). Even today there is a shortage of around 3 lakh classrooms at elementary level and 1.70 lakh classroom at secondary school level with more than half of all schools lacking basic sanitary and water facilities.

However, the above steps would reap partial results and would only benefit a single class of society if we fail to bridge gender discrimination in education. Thus, the second critical step that we need to consciously take is to invest massively in education of girls and women. Worldwide, study after study has proven that when the women are educated, the social and economic benefits that accrue to a country are enormous-including the minimization of social evils. One of the key reasons behind the state of Kerala having such envious indicators of Human Development is the high literacy rates for females.
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The Winning Losers

2011-12-16T06:00:00.003+05:30

I am always proud of everything we do, for we do things with a lot of passion! And when it’s about a book that had been a long cherished dream, I am all the prouder! Yes, my next book CULT is now available in stores. I have co-authored it with my most cherished friend of 22 years, A. Sandeep, the Group Editor of Planman Media. The book was launched in London on the 12th of December by management icon, Guy Kawasaki, a man who has also held the enviable post of "The Chief Evangelist” at the $353.07 billion-worth Apple Inc. (m-cap as of December 14, 2011; making it the world’s second largest company by m-cap) in the past. And when he says that if Steve Jobs would have been alive, he would have been proud of this book, I have reasons to be very very proud. Here I present excerpts from one of the 36 chapters of the book! The chapter’s name is: "The Winning Losers” (Section I, Chapter 10).

HELLO LOSERS!

If you describe yourself as the bankrupt also-ran, the sure-to-lose stooge, the dud that always flops, then welcome our dearest iconic failures, join the club of losers who will rule this century.

Loser! If that word stings you to the core of your heart, yet is the exact word that describes you completely, in every aspect, then this chapter is for you. Hello losers! You’ve reached this far – congratulations! Now allow us to usher you into this chapter hoping that you never forget the feeling of being a loser, and that you always hate every moment of it.

Before you start cursing our ten generations and beyond, let us quickly take you through the story of a few losers who, for us, embody the spirit of despondent losers.

This boy from Syracuse (New York), was labelled a dyslexic when he was just seven. His friends would harass him, and his school teachers would humiliate him. This is how he describes his early days, “I’d try to concentrate on what I was reading, then I’d get to the end of the page and have very little memory of anything I’d read. I would go blank, feel anxious, nervous, bored, frustrated, dumb. I would get angry. My legs would actually hurt when I was studying. My head ached.” He went to three different high-schools and each time, he would try to hide his disability. Soon it would be discovered, and he would be sent off to remedial reading. He raised his hands very often in class, only to ensure that his teachers noticed him and gave him extra points so that he could just about make the passing grades. Even when he had to complete his homework, he would first dictate it to his elder sister, make her write it down, and then copy it word to word.

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The 7 Winning Virtues of Political Leadership!

2011-12-09T06:00:00.003+05:30

As I sit down on the eve of my 40th birthday to write this editorial, I couldn’t have thought of writing on a more important aspect – as great political leadership is what India requires more than anything else today. And though I have written considerably on leadership, it has mainly been about corporate leadership. Leadership in corporations is massively different from political leadership, and therefore it requires a special model and a special line of thinking. While in corporations the final aim is profit maximization in most cases, in politics the final objective is necessarily social welfare maximization. While in corporations the best leaders are often the best marketing guys, in politics the best leaders necessarily have to be the people who are the sincerest and most hard working. While in business you can make do without the knowledge of economics, in politics that can be suicidal. While in business being unethical can harm you and at most your stake holders, in politics the lack of ethics ruins an entire nation’s future. And most importantly, while in corporations leadership is about commitment to the strongest and survival of the fittest, in political leadership, the focus always is about commitment to the weakest and survival of the weakest – concepts about which I wrote a few issues back in Business & Economy (a Planman Media group publication), when I wrote about responsible leadership (please do log on to our website and check out the link for the same: http://www.businessandeconomy.org/27102011/storyd.asp?sid=6462&pageno=1). Thus, for me, political leadership is not just about having certain qualities but also simultaneously about not having various qualities. Rather, what is important is to ensure that one does not possess certain specific qualities first; if that is taken care of, the rest would then automatically fall in place.

Keeping all the above in mind, I believe the model of the 7 winning virtues of political leadership (viz Credibility, Compassion, Clairvoyance, Camaraderie, Commitment, Charisma and Competence) that I have developed is most suited for Politicians in general and Indian politicians in particular, keeping in mind the spate of massive corruption scandals of late! So what is so special about these 7 Cs of leadership that has not been read before? After all, is it not just another word play?

Well, the difference in this model and any other such model is that in this model, each element or virtue is actually the opposite of one of the 7 sins of life – the seven deadly sins that we are supposed to avoid; to a large extent, as normal human beings and to an almost extreme extent, as a political leader! The seven sins originally are Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Envy, Lust, Pride and Wrath! So how are these related, you must be wondering! Let’s go one by one!

The first sin that a leader must avoid is that of greed. This is what seems to be the biggest problem with political leaders in India. Greed. The reason behind all the lack of development in India at the cost of swelling Swiss bank accounts. Every politician looks at politics as a source of making quick money at the cost of the nation. And thus, instead of looking at the Commonwealth Games as a brilliant chance to develop the nation and its sports facilities – the way China looked at Olympics – they looked at the games as an opportunity to create a massive scam and looted the nation shamefully. So instead of looking at telecommunications as a big chance of taking the country towards better development, our leaders looked at it as a chance to loot and plunder. And this is where my first C of leadership gains importance. The virtue of credibility! Instead of greed, and dishonesty, political leadership is about credibility. That’s what defines a political leader’s true character. Once you lose credibility, you can still continue thanks to various reasons, but with no respect. That’s what most Indian politicians today suffer: the problem of credibility.

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Go the Korean way… Make world-class products and campaign for national pride instead of against FDI in retail!

2011-12-02T06:00:00.000+05:30

This editorial comes at this crucial juncture when the ruling government and the opposition (that includes some Congress allies in the government too) have locked horns over the entry of foreign private players in the retail segment. The debate was imperative as the retail industry has always been considered as the nervous system of any nation, and this industry has in most of the cases even helped nations revive themselves during bad times. So it was interesting to evaluate the entire debate from an analytical dimension as well. Currently, the organized retail in India is only 2 per cent of the retail industry; clearly, a huge opportunity is waiting to be unleashed. The opportunity can be gauged from the fact that the American organized retail market is 80 per cent of the overall retail market, Thailand is at 40 per cent and China at 20 per cent! If on one hand organised retail is a global reality, then on the other, the Indian middle class has the given power to splurge, making the proposition viable. Then why is there a protest? The fact is that the ongoing nationwide protests against foreign entry in retail are a bit too late, too baseless and based more on a campaign by emotionally charged political parties which lack pragmatism. After allowing FDI everywhere else, why at all these recent dramatics against retail? Every government in the past has made deals and allowed FDI to enter systematically into India without a plan in place to make Indian firms competitive beforehand. We systematically ruined Indian competitiveness; yet, now for publicity, are creating a hullaballoo against the opening up of retail. The fact is, FDI in retail is inevitable. And not that there are no benefits.

If things go right, then the entry of foreign firms in the long run should benefit the overall economy by subsuming farmers, producers of finished goods, creating mass scale employment, increasing government revenue and hopefully cleansing the muck that lies in our storage and distribution. If all falls into place, then organized retail market is then expected to reach approximately $260 billion by 2020. It would augment income levels of all stakeholders to the tune of $35-45 billion a year, new employment generation to the tune of 3-4 million directly and 4-6 million indirectly. With foreign multinationals setting up shop across the country, the government exchequer would likely bloat up by $25-30 billion per year. The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are likely to prosper too and learn the concepts of enhanced production, higher productivity, assured supply, quick payment and better quality. It will further boost the organized sector growth – a sector that is already growing at an impressive 24 per cent in the last 3 years. The retail sector would also increase the farmers’ income – who at the current stage are on the threshold of marginal living at best or on the verge of committing suicides at the worst. So, of course, it is inevitable for India to allow FDI in retail and the writing on the wall is also very clear. But amongst all this, almost everyone is missing out one moot question, which is fundamental to the success of the Indian retail story.

Amongst other clauses that the government has put, one interesting clause is that these large retailers have to essentially source their supplies from the small and medium enterprises to the tune of 30 percent. But then, this is a universal clause and does not essentially mean that it is the Indian SME segment that is going to benefit from the same. And this is where we have our biggest threat. The question is: would Indians take pride to pick up Indian brands from these stores? The bigger question is: do we have enough Indian brands which can stock the shelves of these monstrous giant outlets? In fact the entire debate of organized retail short-changing the farmers and producers is all baseless, simply because retail survives finally on what sells. And if Indian producers and manufacturers are able to produce brands which are in demand, then they definitely would get shelf space. It is no secret that more than 60 per cent of what Walmart sells in the US is sourced from China. The same holds true for the Tescos and the Carrefours of the world.

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20 years of the last century's greatest tragedy!

2011-11-25T06:00:00.002+05:30

Growing up in a Bengali neighborhood, in Delhi's C.R.Park, meant even at an early age of ten, there were friends who knew the basic difference between capitalism and communism, and had clear-cut preferences! Of course, these preferences would be heavily influenced by their parents! And my father is perhaps the only Indian who did a full fledged Master’s Degree in National Economic Planning from an erstwhile communist nation, the erstwhile East Germany. Needless to say, my first story books were on Lenin's life and I had been totally charmed by him into believing in the positive aspects of communism, and till date remain so. And on the giant world map that hung in front of his study table, the country that I heard and studied most about till I passed out of my school in 1989 was a country many of my readers today aren't even aware of! A country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics! Ruled by leaders who followed and most importantly understood to a large extent the ideology of Karl Marx – voted by the BBC as the world’s greatest intellectual of the last millennium – USSR on the world map looked like half of the world; and for Indians then, they were the nation which was there to protect us finally in the eventuality of any real war.

They had given us steel plants, military aircraft and were our biggest friends. And for those of us who used to hate the Americans for their military aid to Pakistan, celebrating every success of USSR was a must! Actually, India still was a distant ally, if one were to take a look at the East European countries that USSR protected and developed like their own nation. Those who have visited the East European regions in those days, would swear that the benevolence of USSR was such that they gave those countries invariably a better standard of living than that enjoyed by the Soviet people. To understand what USSR was in all its glory and magnanimity, one really needed to compare its development with that of USA till 1989! From CIA to topmost economists and historians of that time, all used to agree then that USSR had become 40% of the Americans in terms of standards of living. What it meant in essence was that despite bearing the biggest brunt of the second world war, thereafter investing about 33% of their GDP on defense, taking care of the entire Eastern Europe – from East Germany to Poland – USSR, in a short span of 45 years, had reached the enviable position of being 40% of the American per capita income; but more importantly, absolutely equal, if not superior, as far as military might and space war were concerned. It also meant that it was technologically extremely advanced, just that it had not yet started using that ability to make the consumer’s life more luxurious. But on the streets of USSR you could never spot a malnutritioned child, someone without full access to education or healthcare! That was USSR, the saviour of the world from greedy capitalist aggression, humane in terms of its development priorities and a country that was reason why the world spent 45 years in complete peace; compare that with the next 20 years that we have seen of unbridled capitalist greed driven aggression.

This difference between the far, far more peaceful time post the second world war and now, is a direct result of what happened exactly twenty years back! History was literally rewritten on December 25, 1991, at 7:20 pm when Mikhail Gorbachev – doubted by many as an ideological spy of CIA, if not an actual one – aired his speech announcing his resignation as President of the Soviet Union. A couple of minutes later, the flag of the Soviet Union from Kremlin was replaced with a new tricoloured flag of Russia. And thus, the whole world map was reconstructed with a demise of not only a union, but the demise of a political ideology in itself. The massive Soviet Union that had stood tall for seventy four years acting as a bulwark to the hegemony of United States and its allies, was broken to pieces as Mikhail Gorbachev (the General Secretary or the first secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Union) could not handle a pro-democratic wave in the streets of Moscow and elsewhere led by Boris Yeltsin – later clearly branded as a fun-loving drunkard devoid of any ideology. Boris Yeltsin aspired to become the President of independent Russia, a country which till then was ruled by a spate of extremely ideologically driven leaders, who, albeit authoritarianism, were committed to not just their country but the globe on the whole.

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The beginning of a massive European collapse and the Italian case!

2011-11-18T06:00:00.001+05:30

The cracks are already visible all across Europe. It was first Greece, then Portugal and Italy, with Spain waiting in the queue. The current situation of Europe reminds me of the situation post World War II – wherein most European economies and societies were in complete anarchy! Since the last five years, European nations have been facing major economic setbacks, which have been triggered by political mismanagement and have impacted their entire social structure to a large extent. Today, fallouts of erstwhile strong economies are leading to a cascading effect and sending tremors across the continent!

Amongst all of them, Italy makes an interesting case because as a nation, it has been ranked among the top 25 most developed nations, has one of the best quality-of-life (features among the top ten in the quality-of-life index) and has a per capita GDP at par with other developed nations of the world. This fourth largest European economy is today struggling with a $2.2 trillion debt which is more than 120 per cent of its GDP. In spite of being one of the major manufacturing hubs of the region and boasting of big labels in the fashion and automobile industry, it has miserably failed to keep a balance between expenditure and income. UniCredit SpA (UCG) and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP) – two of Italy’s biggest banks – recently collapsed while five other large Italian banks have lost around 30 per cent of their share value since the beginning of 2011. Today, 20 per cent of their GDP is made up by the parallel economy and corruption ails the system. So much so that investors too are now shying away, which is evident from the fact that today Italy ranks lowest among OECD countries in the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ index; for that matter, Italy has seen a fall in all attributes since the last year’s ranking, with a drop of 10 points. The overpaid bureaucracy and corrupt political system have been instrumental in systematically destroying the nation, bit by bit!

The situation in Italy has been worsening with every passing day. More than 500,000 youths (aged less than 30 years) lost jobs between 2009 and 2010, in a nation that once had the lowest unemployment rate (around 8.5 per cent) in the entire Europe. Among this, the worst hit were pregnant women (around 800,000 pregnant women left the job as they were denied medical leaves) and low-cost skilled labourers. This not only led to a drop in family incomes, but also prevented hundreds of parents from sending their children to school. As a result, in the last year, the average school drop-out rate was around 20 per cent! And mind you, in Italy, the first six years of primary education are free.
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If we want a poverty-free India, every Indian politician must begin their career with a trip to China!

2011-11-11T06:00:00.000+05:30

When I went to China a decade back, what I saw hit me very hard. I felt that if all of us in Delhi were to work 24x7 for 25 years, it would still be tough to convert Delhi into Beijing. That’s the China I was expecting to see when I went there again last month. What I saw instead was an extra 25 years of growth in the last 10 years!!! If ten years back, there were gigantic roads but less cars, this time the roads were filled with American cars; brands which American companies haven’t even cared to launch in India! If the last time I saw high-rise buildings, then this time I saw ten times more of them! If the last time I was amazed with Beijing, then this time I realized that we couldn’t even become Guangzhou if we worked 24x7 for the next 50 years. I believe that every Indian politician must have a visit to China as a mandatory part of his induction process into the Parliament (especially the Communists of India who have also so shamefully cheated their respective states year after year), so that they are firstly aware of how they and their predecessors have cheated this country and secondly to know where a country can reach in no time!

They say now that the Chinese economy has caught up with the American economy. In our book The Great Indian Dream, we had written ten years back about the same concept; and today I write that the Chinese economy has left the American economy far behind. Their products are so undervalued that no kind of calculation can show the real value of their humongous economy! And come to think of it, even a few decades back, China was seen with lot of scepticism owing to their political structure and a gargantuan population which was increasing by the day! But when we look at the nation today we realize that it took China just a few years’ time to give this huge population a purchasing power and lifestyle that even many in the West are deprived of and to create an unfathomable miracle! What China did and is doing now is beyond the imagination of many nations; they created this gigantic economy by systematically planning at every micro level – and most importantly, taking its citizen along this growth path! Today, an average Chinese living in Beijing, or Shanghai is almost as well off as an average American living in New York or an average British living in London! So what exactly did China do?
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7 billion people and the resource crunch! Who is the real culprit?

2011-11-04T06:00:00.000+05:30

A few days back, the world population touched the 7 billion mark. No wonder the debate has gained momentum about how this growing population would put unprecedented pressure on already scare resources. The riots over food (in Egypt), water crisis and deaths due to curable diseases in developing countries have raised concerns over the population explosion. With the 7 billionth living child hailing from a country like India (and some other nations, symbolically chosen by the UN), the blame of populating the world and causing the global crisis is being shifted back to the developing nations and citizens of the Third World! But then, the moot question is – is the earth really not ready for 7 billion people and is nature really stretched for generating resources for all? Are the citizens of developing nations consuming more and is the population expansion in these countries the real reason behind the growing resource crunch?

Last year in August, Obama blamed India and China for the global food prices hike and commented, “As you see more and more demand placed on our food supplies around the world; as folks in China and folks in India start wanting to eat more meat and commodity prices start going up...” In 2008, a Wall Street Journal article concluded how human population growth will get limited with “the rising consumption trends of large developing nations such as China and India.” On hindsight, the answers to the questions I asked one paragraph above are – as often touted by heads of developed states – yes! But then, the analysis reveals a completely different picture.

The stark truth is that the total food grain consumption of an average American is more than 5 times that of an Indian (per capita Indian consumption of food grain is 178 kg per year, while it is 1,046 kg for an American) – this was revealed by the US Department of Agriculture in 2007. According to the same source, an American’s grain consumption per capita per day is thrice as much as an average Chinese’s!

According to WHO, the per capita per day grain consumption figure for the developing countries is a measly 2681 kcal in 1997-99; estimated to be slightly better in 2015 at 2850 kcal – while the developed countries were way ahead with 3380 kcal as far back as in 1997-99, a figure that’s expected to be 3440 kcal in 2015. The most repugnant situation is in sub-Saharan Africa which has a per capita food consumption as low as 2195 kcal; South Asia has a slightly better figure of 2403 kcal per capita per day! With a per capita per year food grain consumption of only 162 kg, Africa is a land of the hungry and destitute, and a showcase for the world to see the plight of the hungry in harsh contrast to the luxury of the developed world!

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Do the Americans want complete anarchy in the Middle East to justify their massive defence budgets?

2011-10-28T06:00:00.000+05:30

After seven odd assassination attempts over the last four decades, it was on October 20, 2011, that one of the most successful Libyan leaders Muammar Gaddafi kissed the most brutal and disgraceful death. Libyan fighters snapped him out of his ‘hole’ and shot him to death. His body, half naked, completely wounded, shambled hairs and bloodied was then delivered as prized possession to Misrata (a city near Sirte) where it was put on public display as a token of victory for the rebels. And with it came an end of the era, which Gaddafi built over 40 years. And with his end, the US again proved its double standards to the world!

Yes Gaddafi was a ruler who made a lot of personal wealth the way perhaps many other rulers in India and many other countries try to do. He ruled with an iron fist but then many other rulers across the world do the same. But here are some facts about Gaddafi. Under his rule and his economic policies, Libya’s human development indicators improved so much that it was ranked as a nation that had highest per capita GDP in Africa, best education index and also an exceptional human development index.

During his rule, women had the best of access to equality in the whole of Arab world. Yes, many people did revolt against him due to his iron fist rule, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the kind of evil that the western media has been trying to portray in the last few months. The ire of the west lies actually in the fact that Gaddafi was the real mastermind behind OPEC that virtually transferred billions of petro dollars from the western coffers to the Arab world. And that is something that the west hasn’t been able to forget or forgive.

Let me state clearly that this is no way an attempt to defend Gaddafi or his iron fist policies. The attempt is to bring forth the American double standards by taking a simple look at the three regimes which have been overthrown in Libya, Egypt and Iraq because there can be nothing more shameful than what US is doing to the entire Middle East and Africa. Not only they have been supporting the dictators with arms but with this act, they have overthrown three most successful regimes of the region to quench their lust for oil.

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SURVIVAL OF THE WEAKEST : The new mantra that the world needs to adopt to avoid the end of Capitalism

2011-10-21T06:00:00.001+05:30

United States’ finely tuned images of ‘land of opportunity’, ‘land of the free’ and ‘home of the brave’ – all have in recent time received a major jolt with protestors pouring in from all over the country in thousands. It is probably the biggest protest since anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations in the 70s! Finally their police are finding it tough to control their own people. This time they are failing to smoke them out, because the enemy lies in every other house. I wrote about the coming end of capitalism – the way we know it – in 2008 itself as an aftermath of the latest recession that has hit the world due to its blind belief in free market profiteering and was surprised why (despite people around the world, from countries in the Middle East to a laid back country like India, showing a tendency to come out on the streets to press for their rights) people in the western world were delaying coming out in the streets to press for what was their right – the right to stable and dignified living. But finally the streets in the western world are slowly starting to look like streets of Egypt, with thousands out on the streets, protesting against the shameless profiteering of the Wall Street – the symbol of capitalism at its greediest best. It is a movement of the working class – which forms overwhelming majority of the American population – being deprived, ignored and cheated by the greedy corporations, which forms the top one per cent of the population. The growing protests that have spread its tentacles all across the nation indicate a serious problem in the financial districts of the American cities. The conservatism that has put unchecked and deep crony capitalism to almost heavenly pedestal is the root cause for such economic injustice, which has literally forced thousands to come out on the streets to protest. No wonder, the gradual transition of American capitalism to crony capitalism is a result of inherent shortcomings that the financial system and capitalism on the whole has been experiencing since decades.

For the last 30 years, the United States is suffering from erosion of jobs and corporate big shots renouncing the values and spirit that once made America as great as it is perceived today because of short term profits – a classic case of uncontrolled deregulation practised in this crony capitalist system. This system has made a class of minuscule super rich even richer, driven by the Wall Street, but has marginalised the vast majority who faced the albatross of dead end jobs, lay-offs, lack of future and other destruction of the very tenets of any functional democracy!

One of the reasons that led to this out-cry is irresponsible lending by the banks and very high consumer debt. It has eroded the purchasing power of the common man. Lack of consumer demand is halting new investments and preventing new job creation. Obama’s steps to steer the economy to safer ground – mortgage refinancing, healthcare overhaul, student’s loan minimisation programmes – have not seen any breakthrough so far. The reasons are Republican’s opposition and consequent blocking of government’s intervention in the economy.

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An entire continent without worthwhile access to education!

2011-10-14T06:00:00.000+05:30

This December, I am supposed to be speaking on education in a summit in Africa. As I was researching on what to speak, I realized that while the entire world is leapfrogging to state-of-art technology to impart education to their children, there are a few unfortunate countries – rather, almost an entire continent – still struggling with blackboards and chalk pieces. On the one hand, developed nations are all set to impart knowledge through varied technology platforms, and are modernizing their syllabi to suit the new learning curves; on the other, we have Africa, a continent that has still not been able to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic to its children. The continent is still lagging behind the rest of the world in school enrollment – evidence to the fact that dramatic global improvements in education haven’t touched the continent yet. In the last 40 years, while most of the world improved its enrolment trends by leaps and bounds, Africa could only showcase discomforting educational profiles – only about half of Africa’s children are enrolled in primary schools, most drop out; and more than 60 per cent of the adults and over 50 per cent of women are rank illiterates!

With these kinds of figures, Africa doesn’t stand a chance to harness its human capital, leave aside meeting the challenges of the 21st century. There are 15 countries (Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and Somalia) with less than 50 per cent school enrolment rates – these have been targeted by the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, by providing educational support for a ten year period. The focus on these 15 countries has become an imperative as their performance in education has been appalling. Enrolment of boys in these nations ranges from 23 per cent to 49 per cent and for girls the figure ranges from a pathetic 13 per cent to 31 per cent! The plan of action is being prepared separately for each country taking into account the fundamental problems of educational access for each of them. The mesh of problems includes very poor students-to-teacher ratio, unqualified teachers and poor provision of text books. This has engendered poor learning methods and poor learning accomplishments. Further, the apathetic governments are doing little to bridge the rural-urban divide and the gender gap (In a set of 19 African countries, female literacy was found to be below 30 per cent). The penetration of educational institutions in rural areas has been a major blotch – with figures suggesting that more than 80 per cent of children without the access of education live in the rural areas. The widespread HIV (even amongst children) epidemic in mostly rural belts has spelled its curse on education too. Western and Central Africa is the worst hit with food crisis, epidemics, violent conflicts, and natural disasters – all have a cascading effect on enrolment rates. On top of that various social taboos and ills, like early marriages, sexual aggression on women and early pregnancies have contributed to gender disparity on education. The little rise in enrolment rates among children is often offset by poor retention rates and early dropouts.

Yes, rising enrolment in higher education lately has been a silver lining for Africa. At present, there are 4 million students pursuing higher education in the continent – that figure can’t be compared when viewed relative to other developing regions in Asia and Latin America. But even among the students pursuing higher education in Africa, there is a low Students’ Course Completion Rate as pursuing education becomes unaffordable to many and hence they drop out. The dropouts are becoming more common because of budget constraints – because unlike in the past, the impoverished African states cannot finance the educational programs anymore; as a result of which, they are increasingly getting dependant on IMF, which puts forward the capitalistic conditions of cost sharing. This is increasing the number of students who need to self-finance themselves! Sensing the opportunity, private players have started mushrooming; with more than 450 ‘private’ colleges and universities in the continent today. In spite of this progress, the millions in need cannot avail of this opportunity as the cost for such programs is beyond their affordability. Besides the high cost of private education, ‘donations’ are also rampant across Africa. Around 90 per cent of parents in Morocco for example pay extra money to get their children admitted to schools.

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Five successful years of being Passionate About India!

2011-09-30T06:00:00.005+05:30

A magazine in 14 languages? Everyone even slightly serious about media – the seniors in the fraternity included – had genuinely laughed when we had bounced the idea off them! They gave tens of reasons why the idea was not worth it and why the same would not be successful. The reasons given were very logical ones though. We don’t want to undermine anyone’s intelligence or reasoning; but they were totally right in their own ways and were not trying to pull me down. They were trying to be helpful... it was just that our definition of success differed from their definition. As our magazine The Sunday Indian completes five years, I can say that financially, we haven’t yet become successful – so all of them were right. We started breaking even as a media house only one month ago, after about seven years of struggle. It has not been an easy journey.

But financial success was never our benchmark of success. For me, personally, success is always a competition with self-imposed standards of excellence. And if I am convinced that excellence has been achieved, then I go into the market and fight it out against all odds. Thus, we have always believed in striving for world class and then going all out to market it. We have failed when the product failed to live up to the expected standards; but then, we’ve reworked and bounced back. Our institute fought out and won against the biggest of established names despite being tagged rank outsiders! Our movies did the same! And now our media house is doing the same!

Losing or winning is not success. Success is the courage to undertake great journeys. And this has been our toughest, and therefore greatest journey! Personally, I loved being called a guy who knew nothing about media; even being told that our media venture was a joke! And all this by very senior people I respect a lot, even today. Again, the gentlemen who said these things didn’t know what we had set out to achieve. So they were right in their own ways. We did know less about media – especially the dirt in it. Truthfully, I didn’t know anything about media the way others knew. For me, media has always been a vehicle to take a message to the larger masses – something that is not told by those who want to maintain status quo in the name of media. The discussions and debates in accented English that we were having inside the walls of IIPM classrooms, we wanted to take to those who were outside the classrooms in their mother tongue languages. Inside the classrooms, we teach around sixty students in one go; through media, we could reach out to six lakhs! And hopefully one day, sixty crores.

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Chinese Olympics versus the Indian Commonwealth Games – a tale of two attitudes!

2011-09-23T06:00:00.000+05:30

The saga of shame of the Indian Commonwealth Games continues as more and more shameful skeletons tumble out of the cupboard. And it only makes my heart cringe. More so because I believe that sports is literally one of the key routes to a healthy nation. From child health to adult health – both physical and mental – sports has a great role to play, especially in today’s day and time where children are getting addicted to videogames and to the internet. To me, personally, the Commonwealth Games event – good or bad – was in reality a great opportunity for India to develop the Indian sports scene. Instead, we found it a great opportunity to plunder more and more money. And that’s what forces me to take a look at how the Chinese used the Olympics as a great leap forward and how they have over years made sports a way of life.

Compared to the Indian games, the 2008 Beijing Olympics actually spoke volumes about China’s commitment to sports. Not only did China refurbish the entire host city to welcome the game and honour the sport at large, but it also set a new record in its medals’ tally. But what was most noteworthy was the leap that China has taken in sports over the years. This unprecedented transition in Chinese sports gets largely visible when one compares the first ever entry of the Chinese to Olympics, vis-à-vis the way they stole the show at the 2008 Olympics. In 1932, during the Los Angeles Olympics, the Chinese representation was just a lone athlete who represented 450 million Chinese and came back home empty handed. Their tryst with the first gold medal happened 52 years later, again in the same venue; and from there on, there was no turning back. And finally, in 2008, a nation which was considered an underdog in many events previously, shocked the world by topping the medals’ tally with 51 gold medals (a jump from 32 gold medals in 2004 Athens Olympics and 28 gold medals in 2000 Sydney Olympics); they were followed by the US which had just 36 gold medals! But then, this jump in the medal tally didn’t happen overnight.

China started preparing its athletes for this event even before they started their infrastructural development (unlike our preparation, where during the CWG, neither was the infrastructure ready, nor did the sportsmen have space and facilities for training). As soon as the nation won the bid for hosting the 2008 Olympics, the government announced its most ambitious sports plan called “Winning pride at the Olympics”, which defined the number of gold medals China could possibly win in different events – after analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of their athletes. The government laid down clear cut policies and strategies to target sports and the number of gold medals that China needed to win in every sports event! The country also launched Project 119 and Plan for Olympics Glory – something that is very unique and equally strategic. The project defined how China could win 119 gold medals (a figure that was later increased to 122) based on their performance in the 2000 Olympics (as the bid for 2008 was won by China in 2001). The flow of funds was never a constraint. During the Olympics, the sports budget was increased to $700 million (an increase by $300 million) along with building specialized sports infrastructure at the Qingdao City costing $30 million. Interestingly, all women sports events received huge funding and got special attention (this is rare even in the West). No wonder, China won 46 gold medals in the ladies’ events (including team and doubles) in the 2008 Olympics!

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Poverty and death amidst diamonds – the story of Western exploitation of Africa and its links with 9/11

2011-09-16T09:39:00.004+05:30

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 was different for the Americans. The decade-long wait is over and even the perpetrator of 9/11 is dead. This 9/11 was also the first anniversary when Americans felt contented by the very fact that their revenge is over and they have again proved their supremacy over the world. But then, this very celebration amidst sorrow is far from complete. Perhaps the chief operative of 9/11 is dead, but the modus operandi is still active and running. Neutralizing Osama is just half the task done, but the very system that allowed Osama to execute the entire 9/11 episode, still thrives. Amidst the entire hullabaloo, what got swept under was the manner in which the entire operation was funded. It is a lesser known fact that the funding for 9/11 had its roots in Africa, and it was all possible because millions of Westerners bought stones that had been (since the last four decades or so) hyped up as the most precious gifts for women. Yes, I’m here talking about diamonds, or rather conflict diamonds – to be more precise, those that with time have earned the title of being ‘blood diamonds’. Several investigative reports post 9/11, including UN war crime reports, have revealed that the Al Qaeda joined Liberian President Charles Taylor in the African diamond trade, which was used for terrorist activities. The terrorists used illicit diamonds as currency for funding their operations, as the demand for illicit diamonds remains high, while tracking the movement of the same is extremely tedious.

If one goes back in time, the entire episode of conflict diamonds started post World War II, when natives of Sierra Leone, working for the British army, returned home to find that their nation was still being looted by the British. Although diamond mining was not just confined to Sierra Leone, what was unusual particularly in Sierra Leone was that unlike other parts of Africa where diamonds were found in specific zones only, diamonds in Sierra Leone were spread all across its geographic expanse, which made the loot easier and plentiful. Gradually, the natives (early 1950-60s) started mining these diamonds illegally and then selling them in the local market. Since the mining was in open fields (alluvial zones), security and protection became virtually impossible. The British used a police force to deter these natives from mining; but then, eventually, the natives learnt the art of warfare (thanks to the soldiers who returned home) and with time, illegal mining started to flourish. Moreover, Lebanon gave the natives of Sierra Leone the market they needed. Along with trade facilities and a thriving market, Lebanon provided the natives with mining equipments and tools as well. These diamonds also made their way to Liberia, since Liberia was a dollar-based economy and had flexible laws – selling and purchasing these diamonds became easier and in due course, they started getting traded internationally.
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Lessons for India from the magic of overseas Chinese!

2011-09-09T06:00:00.000+05:30

The strength of the Chinese population can be gauged by the very fact that today around 19.3 per cent of world population is Chinese.

But then, such a figure based on the law of averages hides more than what it reveals. The figure that talks volumes about the Chinese sphere of influence, at least with respect to human capital, is that of 50 million plus overseas Chinese who are settled in various parts of the world and playing their bit in accelerating the fast-paced Chinese economy. Today, overseas Chinese not only pump money into the Chinese economy but also facilitate Chinese ambitions of global cultural and political colonisation. Overseas Chinese have made themselves inimitable in almost all spheres of influences – from heading many hard power areas by chairing vital positions in global forums, military and political institutions of many nations to being the face of various soft power areas of influence. One may not be well versed with the Chinese powers-that-be, but at the same time, very few would be not well versed with the likes of Jackie Chan!

The emigration of Chinese dates back to the Ming dynasty, but the real wave of Chinese diaspora started in 1840s when thousands of Chinese left China and made their way to the United States, especially after the discovery of gold in California. Initially, uneducated and unemployed Chinese labourers left their homes and moved to the US (for mining and railroad jobs); but then, during the late nineteenth century, the scenario changed. Instead of labourers, those were skilled and educated Chinese who moved out to avoid the ill effects of poverty and famine – which were haunting China in the late nineteenth century. However, this time the destination was not confined to the US or the West; many Asian nations suddenly made it to the destination list of Chinese. Among all the nations, Southeast Asia and Australia (apart from US) attracted the most Chinese. With more and more Chinese moving out of China, most of the big cities across the world saw a huge inflow of Chinese.

Gradually, these people moved and settled down in a more organised manner and formed strong communities across the globe. So much so that most of the renowned cities (in almost all nations) have a China located somewhere – which today we call ‘Chinatown.’

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I’m the best How Shahrukh Khan gives 'Thorns to Competition'

2011-09-02T06:00:00.007+05:30

I'm the best! That's one line he is known by, said Shahrukh Khan at the launch of my latest book, Thorns to Competition, which I coauthored with my wife Rajita. It was supposed to be a normal book launch with Shahrukh Khan – the man I personally think is the most intelligent, educated, witty and charming superstar the country has. But it turned out to be something else. Not just did Shahrukh launch the book, he also spoke in detail about how he had applied every concept of the book in his life. And his speech became a journey of his life. It sure was special, more so since he is known to be shy and rarely to open up like this in public. I have experienced this special side of him at least a couple of times in the past as well during our events. This time, I felt I must write on it. It’s pure inspiration for one and all to know of this side of his life and it sure will help the masses know this iconic man and his amazing journey better. I thought of writing this piece more so because today morning, when I made a Facebook entry on how I thought Shahrukh was so intelligent, I was instantly barraged by messages asking me to write more on the same.

However, before I write more about what he spoke, let me admit that like a majority of people in this country, I am a huge fan of Shahrukh, and that I feel I have been extremely lucky (it’s my pure luck that I had the opportunity to know Shahrukh from relatively closer quarters, much before he became this iconic superstar, through a very dear common friend of ours, Sabiena) that in every event of IIPM which he has come to, he has spoken about something that people later insisted that they had never heard before. Yes, I know he feels quite relaxed here due to his past links, but I don't think that is what makes him share so much. I believe that when he comes to IIPM, he sees students looking up to him. And he knows he shouldn’t just be entertaining them. Rather, he should leave a message to make a difference to their lives. And the messages have mostly been very, very meaningful, honest and drawn straight from his life’s experiences, as expected out of a man of immense intelligence and education like him. Similarly, when he comes to a book launch, he sees a totally different class of very learned people sitting across the stage, and I believe he gets into a totally different world of ideas and philosophies just to live up to their expectations.

I believe his tremendous habit of reading is what makes him totally different from most others. I have always believed that you can't be a great leader if you aren't a great reader! In fact, I tell my friends – just like in the case of Mr. Amitabh Bachchan – reading Shahrukh's social media entries is a great lesson on how to look at various facets of life and express them through absolutely brilliantly words. Come to think of it, both Shahrukh and Mr. Bachchan are known for their education, extremely brilliant communication skills, their unique way of expressing themselves, and of course, above all else, both of them made it to the top through their sheer sincere hard work and perseverance despite not being traditional good-lookers!

In this book, Rajita and I used ‘T-H-O-R-N-S’ as an acronym for six competition beating strategies! They are: Target it right | Hit where it hurts | Obsess with it | Reinvent it | Nail it | Sell it |

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It’s important for Anna to become more flexible and respectful towards the democratic process, to give a bigger thrust to his movement

2011-08-19T06:00:00.005+05:30

I was too young then to really remember it all; but I have heard from many people that the mass protests generated by the arrest of Anna Hazare are similar to the uprising called Total Revolution led by the late Jaiprakash Narayan in the early 1970s. In fact, it was the Total Revolution and the chaos that followed – and a historic blunder by Indira Gandhi – that led to the imposition of the Emergency in India in 1975. Many people are comparing today’s situation to the Emergency days.

The people of India are so fed up and so disgusted with corruption and our rotten and corrupt system that the wave of protests we see is hardly surprising. I have often publicly called India not a democracy but a demonocracy where crooked politicians and their criminal cohorts are openly plundering the nation; well aware that a dysfunctional judicial system will allow them to get away. In almost all cases, they have actually got away and have hence acquired the arrogance and swagger of pirates who know they are above and beyond the law. To that extent, the waves of protests, demonstrations, candle lit vigils and passionate slogans that are being witnessed across the nation were inevitable. And there is little doubt that the simplicity and stark clarity of the message being delivered by Anna Hazare has convinced thousands and thousands of Indians that Anna Hazare is a modern day messiah. I still remember the Jantar Mantar fast of April when even I was moved to write very strongly in favour of Anna Hazare and even bring out a special supplement on the power of civil society protests. I still think that there is enormous power and truth in the anti-corruption message that Anna Hazare is delivering.

And yet, I must confess that I do find some things a little disturbing. I know, passions and emotions are running so high at the moment that I run the risk of being vilified as a government stooge if I dare criticize Anna Hazare and his methods (Anyone who has been reading my editorials and columns over the years will, I am sure, laugh at the suggestion that I am a pro-establishment man!) . But just as I have often gone against the tide and slammed the government for many policies and actions, I feel strongly enough about this issue to point out to all passionate and emotionally charged Indians some basic home truths about this controversy.
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Chinese investments in Africa, a lesson for the world!

2011-08-12T06:00:00.002+05:30

As London burns and USA is downgraded with fears of another recessionary wave hitting the world, there is one thing that becomes amply clear. You can’t have a world full of inequity and live in peace. Never before in its history has the gap between the rich and the poor widened as it has in the last 40 years in America. And every right wing party has only worked hard to enrich the rich. Every time the Democrats have come back and tried to increase even half a percent of tax on the rich to use it for those marginalized by the markets, the Republicans have screamed hoarse. No doubt, Obama has knowledge about economics, but what is happening in America right now is a shame, especially the way right wing fanatics are making the scene look worse than it is. The problem in UK is however another side of the same coin. The whites were sitting happily claiming that the blacks and other minorities live better in UK than they would have in their country of origin. However, happiness is a comparative phenomenon, and when the gap between the rich and the poor grows, the poor hit back. It has happened in France and now it’s happening in London and around. The lesson is clear – if we don't focus on decreasing this gap and have a global policy for the same, the world won’t see peace. And it has to happen at a global level with richer countries investing in the poorer nations. There is no other nation which is showing the way better than the Chinese are, by investing in Africa and helping it develop – no doubt with their own long run gains in mind. A look at the way they are going about it has huge lessons for Western nations as well as countries like India.

The Sino-African relationship dates back to beginning of 200 BC, when an explorer named Du Huan, during Tang dynasty, visited African countries (Sudan, Egypt and a few others) in pursuit of trade and commerce. The legacy that was initiated by Huan has never stopped. And particularly over the last few decades, the Chinese tilt towards Africa has been seemingly visible. Chinese premiers have been visiting Africa regularly since 1979 with Vice-premier Qian Qichen paying visits to more than 35 African countries between 1990 and 1998. If not this, what else could indicate Chinese intentions more but the fact that President Hu Jiantao made more than 17 visits to African nations during 2006-07 and then again, a four African countries’ tour in 2009 compared to just one visit to the US in the last 13 years! In all these years, the Chinese have consolidated their African engagement through their support to Africa during their liberation movements, which eventually took the shape of strategic partnerships in resource exploitation. Of course, most of the modern Sino-African ties have a shade of resource-grabbing rather than resource sharing.
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The Chinese answer to the West – “Made in China” to “Made by China”

2011-08-05T09:00:00.005+05:30

There is this flippant yet popular joke that goes like this: if you clone yourself four times, one will be Chinese! That says it all about the manner in which the world perceives the ubiquitous Chinese – populated and copycats. There’s no doubt, China has become numinously overpowering and has integrated itself into the lives of people all across the globe by their sheer human power and the power to produce goods and services at a prodigiously unprecedented pace and volume.

So much so that from Greenland to Antarctica, and from Middle East to Europe, if one were to try and search the origin of the products used in these countries on a daily basis, in all probability the ‘origin’ would turn out to be China. Be it your cell phone or the laptop, or even the engine of your car, everything turns out to be made in China. An original iPhone or even its look-a-like (with similar or more features), both are made in China. In fact, all this is known. But what is mostly unknown is the infrangible might that the Chinese have garnered today with their home-grown products and brands.

Not only is China manufacturing almost all goods for Western companies, but it also has gained a huge impelling momentum with its own domestic production. Today, stellar Chinese companies are topping various global lists in terms of revenue, market share, size and scale; but more than that, their sterling products are also acting as alternatives – or even better replacements – for Western products within and outside China. Today, the Chinese have a “Made by China” option with similar features and quality for almost every known Western brand, which are also anyway made in China.
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A tale of two cities: How Bangalore is losing out

2011-07-29T10:35:00.004+05:30

When two nations started upgrading one of their cities, one nation aimed to make it an industrial & manufacturing hub, the other aimed to upgrade it to be their only and biggest IT hub. Coincidently, both these cities are located at the south of the respective nations. But then, one nation chose a port city (to exploit the sea trade), while the other ignored the very economy of sea and chose a landlocked city. One has a land size of 7,434.4 sq km with a population of 9.94 million while the other has an expanse of 741 sq km but has a population of 5.7 million. These two nations are none other than the favourite choices of economic critics – China and India. While China went ahead with Guangzhou on their industrial spree, India settled down for Bangalore to make it India’s biggest IT hub. Both Bangalore and Guangzhou laid their founding stones in the early 90s, and by the end of 20th century, had established themselves as an IT and industrial hub respectively. But then, the differences between and effective output by both these hubs now are more startling than their similarities.

China has always been of high interest to me since my childhood due to the books on Mao Tse Tung that I had read. However, the surge in interest came when I went to China for the first time. The way the nation hits you is stupendous! If you were not to know which country you had come to – and if you were not even shown how the people looked – then looking at the roads and buildings, you could easily mistake it for any Western developed nation, quite unlike India or its best cities like Bangalore. And Guangzhou has been at the very centre of this mind numbing development. To put the difference between the two cities into a better perspective, in the 2010 Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s Global GDP City Ranking Index, Bangalore ranks 84th with a GDP of $69 billion while Guangzhou ranks 44th with a GDP of $143 billion – almost twice that of Bangalore. Let’s take a look into the journey of these two cities on the basis of some key parameters to bring about the key differences.

China developed Guangzhou into its most efficient and dynamic industrial hub with a GDP of $143 billion and a per capita income of $13,111. Women’s employment rate in Guangzhou was 70.84% in 2010 (which increased by three fold since the last one decade) and around 2.5 million urban women are working in the city. Women constitute 40 percent of the total workforce. Better lifestyle and financial freedom also escalated the social fabric of the city. The most important factor, when it comes to women development, was that the life expectancy rate is now pegged to have reached 81.33 years (again, an increase by 4.5 years in the last one decade). Even the education rate has seen a major surge; more than 49 per cent of total graduates are women and can be seen actively working in the health, science, technology and education sectors.
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Ever wondered why, while attacks in Mumbai keep happening, another 9/11 has not happened in the US?

2011-07-22T06:00:00.002+05:30

Mumbai has become a living example of how terrorists can come at their will, kill hundreds of innocents, destroy property worth hundreds of crores, instill a state of perpetual fear in those who manage to survive and thereby blatantly spit on the face of Indian sovereignty, time and again. And the best that we can do is offer condolences for the aggrieved, and wait for the next blast to happen. No doubt, we have attained a state of shameless vulnerability and have almost epitomised it. And that is the reason why since the last few years, the incidence of terror attacks has not only seen an unprecedented surge, but has become increasingly blatant, gory and on the face. It is as if a blast or two a year has almost become an annual ritual. And every such blast also blows away into pieces the resolve that our government had taken during the previous attack – calling it a bold step against terror. And the saga continues...

The matter of the fact is that today, not only do we lack political will and stringent comprehensive laws to counter terrorism, our law enforcement agencies don’t even have a proper clue about the same. So much so, the terrorists are better versed about the loopholes in the existing anti-terror laws and abuse it to the hilt. And why shouldn’t they – not only are our laws old and crying to be updated, but they are also laden with loopholes. In spite of trapping the actual culprits, these laws have been used more to settle political and personal scores. Take for instance the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act, better known as POTA, which was used by law enforcement agencies more to arrest people who were innocent rather than actual terrorists. The abuse and misuse of the law was so rampant that the law, for sometime, had to be repealed. For the uninitiated, this law was on the lines of UK’s Prevention of Terrorism Act and America’s PATRIOT Act. However, unlike our law, their laws strengthened the anti-terror operations and aided the counter-terrorism cell.
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FOR SALMAN KHURSHID, IT IS A BIG CHALLENGE AHEAD; AND I PERSONALLY LOOK FORWARD TO A REVOLUTIONARY COUPLE OF YEARS AHEAD!

2011-07-15T06:00:00.001+05:30

As a media house, from the very beginning, we have been extremely vocal about the Indian judiciary – and that’s why we have also started our bimonthly supplement of Governance Watch with a special focus on the judiciary. We strongly believe that a poor justice delivery mechanism has been the root cause of most of our problems. It goes without saying that India has a weak, or rather a limping justice delivery system, which makes sure that justice is denied in most cases; and even if delivered, it does not hold any value, thanks to the time (read lifetime) it takes to be delivered. By the Centre’s own admission, there is a staggering number of nearly three crore court cases pending at several stages in different courts of India. This situation is a deliberate creation of our successive governments. If criminals were to be punished, how would they rule? Thus, to make the rule of criminals easy, the governments in India over the years have deliberately kept the judicial system in our country dysfunctional. It serves the purpose of the legal fraternity as well. Thanks to the years or decades that it takes to execute a case and to take it to its culmination, the legal fraternity invariably ends up making a windfall profit. And thanks to the absence of a time-bound justice delivery mechanism, making moolah is not at all a challenge for our legal fraternity, as they are quite adept at purposefully making cases hang on for years. The only thing that we nowadays talk about is corruption. And the one and only solution for solving this issue of corruption is a functional judicial system. Corruption and greed are globally prevalent; yet these touch far less lives in the USA than in India simply because the American judicial system is functional while ours is dysfunctional. In America, they have ten times more judges per million people than in India; so there is a fear of immediate punishment – while in India, there is no such fear of punishment.
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This is how we are shamefully losing out on the next generation of Kashmiris

2011-07-08T06:00:00.000+05:30

A few years back, I had written an editorial on why Kashmir should be given independence. That article of mine invited a huge debate and a lot of ire from people who felt that I was being unpatriotic. If one just bases one’s responses on emotions, yes, it is hard to accept this independence proposition; but for all practical purposes, we would probably do more good to the region and its people by leaving it free, than by holding on to it forcefully. It is not that the government has not made an attempt, but all its attempts have backfired. As a result of all this, Kashmir has long back lost its charm of being the heaven on earth. Unfortunately, those are its people who have been perpetually at the receiving end and have actually experienced a near hell-like situation in the region. And it is not just that they have been living under constant fear and surveillance, but also that basic freedom has become a thing of the past. From laws that prohibit prepaid cell phones connections to ban on ownership of land, almost all democratic rights have ceased in the region. So much so that every other month, a couple of cases of police or governmental brutality make the headlines; and the very next week get swept under the carpet.

The ban on prepaid cell phones and land acquisition is still fine, owing to the kind of turbulence the region has been experiencing, but the biggest damage has been Kashmir’s juvenile justice law, which is causing unprecedented ramifications for the future. What more, not only is this law against Indian and even international human rights conventions, but is actually against the law of nature too!
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The Mamata Banerjee Leadership Theory of Aggressive Action with Commitment for Change

2011-06-24T06:00:00.002+05:30

Is Mamata the best Indian Political leader ever? Also, the challenges ahead!

Writing today’s editorial gives me immense pleasure! My professional area of interest, where I take all my workshops and seminars, is leadership. But with so much rotten occurring around with our leaders, when it came to writing, I have mainly been writing about the pathetic deeds of our leaders instead of what makes a good leader! After a long time, I have got this wonderful opportunity to write on leadership! All thanks to one lady who has finally emerged as a symbol of magnificent leadership in this country! Yes, it’s too soon to be talked about perhaps! But what the heck! I have never been too late to criticize; then why be afraid of praising great work, even if it might be too soon!

So let me start with a brief background. Having personally interacted with a considerable number of senior leaders who were taking keen interest in Bengal, I know there was one key speculation that was happening around Mamata Banerjee before she threw the CPM out of power recently; that too after a 34 year CPM rule – out of which, barring a great first ten years, the rest can be easily termed as the greatest demonic and Stalinist rule in the history of independent India (in our TSI cover story dated June 19, 2011, we told you how skeletons are being dug out from the close vicinity of CPM leaders’ residences). The speculation was that in world history, whenever such Stalinist rule of repression has ended, it has ended with a massive revenge mission with thousands of lives being lost, since those who have been oppressed and exploited for so long almost logically seek their pound of flesh! In the case of Bengal, there is not one intellectual – including the strongest of supporters of Mamata – that I met who did not forecast a massive series of bloodshed post Mamata’s win. I was in a Statesman forum sometime back with Mamata Banerjee, where panelists were openly telling her about this fear of theirs! And they had a massive point. Apart from past global history to support their point, they had one more huge reason. Those grassroots workers who were working now for Trinamool comprised a huge number of ex CPM goons who had recently changed sides, yet not necessarily their murderous character traits. At the forum, when such speculation was being paraded, Mamata had a look of disdain; and quite rightly so. Here, she was almost on the verge of creating history with her life of struggle and sacrifice, and there were these people who were questioning her even before she had arrived – almost negating the import of her humongous effort!

Why the 100% cut-off at SRCC is a national shame!

2011-06-17T06:00:00.000+05:30

Finally, it has happened! After the ridiculous 95% and 96% cut-offs for the last few years, the cut-offs this year have finally touched 100% and exposing the joke of these cut-offs in totality. The ‘first list’ cut-off for science students at Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), University of Delhi, has been declared at 100 %, Hindu College is at 99% and Lady Shri Ram College is at 97%. What people were failing to understand all these days – the ridiculousness of it all – they have suddenly understood in one stroke; that education is no more a matter of choice for Indians, its just a matter of chance.

First, let me get into the logic of the SRCC cut-off! Well, the principal of SRCC of course thought it was a natural progression, and he was playing to the market demand and supply. As the number of people getting 96% plus in commerce rose ridiculously, he realized that SRCC seats could possibly get filled by declaring a 96% cut-off for commerce students. For science students, traditionally, the cut-off has been about 4% higher – since it’s easier to score marks in sciences than in commerce and humanities. So naturally, the cut-off for science became 100%. Now, of course, he could have kept it at 99% and avoided all the ridicule; but he obviously had thought that this could also turn out to be a good publicity gimmick for SRCC, and to show how top-grade SRCC is. The other logic was also that it’s a commerce college and science students who fail to get into the likes of IITs typically join colleges like SRCC taking advantage of their high percentage – such students keep appearing for IIT exams for the next couple of years and leave the college midway through the course. So why give science students an unfair advantage when there are so many commerce students, who intentionally chose the commerce stream, work hard and are more deserving?
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Dictatorship of the sycophants

2011-06-10T06:00:00.002+05:30

The modern day Jalianwala Bagh at Ramlila Grounds shows the demonic attitude of the government, the weak spine of the opposition and the hypocrisy of the media towards Bharat!

My question is, are we living in a democracy or in a shamelessly unapologetic dictatorial regime? Has the government finally lost it totally? Or do they believe that the people of the country are so foolish that they will quietly accept any amount of dictatorship and vote them to power again in 2014? Is there absolutely no learning from DMK’s huge loss in Tamil Nadu where it virtually controlled the media and yet people kicked them out? What happened on June 4th, 2011, is an absolute blot on the Indian democracy. There is absolutely no exaggeration when people compare the incidents of the day to Emergency or the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre. June 4th is the 2011 equivalent of both. Today, one doesn’t need to shove people inside a well and fire. Going in the midst of sleeping protesters – men, women and children – beating them up and taking the huge risk of a possible stampede and fire that could have killed thousands, is Jalianwala Bagh. And this stinks of the thought process that went behind the Emergency.

Baba Ramdev has mostly raised very, very pertinent issues of national concern. From asking the government to ban the thousand rupee note (since that makes it ten times easier to hoard black money than hundred rupee notes; a reason why countries like the USA or UK have the hundred dollar bill as the highest denominator for their currency) to asking the government to bring back the 1.4 trillion dollars stashed away in Swiss banks (India is the country with the largest pile of black money stashed abroad, the second being Russia with $400 billion, followed by UK, Ukraine and China at the fifth place with $96 billion), the man is perhaps the only mass leader of the nation with a nationwide followership and someone whose remedies have benefited millions of Indians for real – and they literally swear by him. There have also been murmurs about RSS’ growing proximity with the Baba in the wake of its dissatisfaction with the BJP. Naturally, the government had reasons to be scared. Mighty scared; especially with the civil societies around the world in a mood for uprisings. So, to crush the mass movement that he was creating, they did what was unthinkable in Indian democracy, and that too in the capital of the country. The government actions are now a clear indication that this government has turned demonic and is losing legitimacy to run the country with every passing day.
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How the Communal Violence Bill can be a disaster for India, the Congress and the Gandhi family

2011-06-03T06:00:00.001+05:30

The road to hell is almost always paved with noble intentions. In the Indian democracy, this has been proven true a countless number of times. I am afraid we shall be headed yet again towards hellish times if a new policy that is being currently debated manages to become law, thanks to the super secular denizens of India whose intensity and range of noble intentions usually matches the mayhem that the same noble intentions often trigger.

I am talking about the well intentioned economists, sociologists, activists and assorted jholawala types who are convinced that it is their divine right to advice the UPA regime on all sorts of policy issues. Right at the top of this pyramid of do-gooders is the National Advisory Council (NAC) which is headed by Sonia Gandhi. Virtually all the members of NAC have impeccable records and reputations when it comes to their commitment towards the aam aadmi of India. Let me also be very clear in stating that a lot of credit for path breaking policy changes like the Right to Information Act, the NREGA and the Right to Education Act should go to the NAC. It is also wonderful to see members of the NAC valiantly battle it out against a callous, insensitive and cruel government when it comes to implementing the Right to Food Act.
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NOW, EVEN JAIRAM RAMESH SAYS DARE TO THINK BEYOND THE IIMS AND THE IITS!

2011-05-27T06:00:00.000+05:30

So what is wrong with India’s most guarded and hyped institutions of higher education, the IITs and the IIMs? Well, if you ask me, it’s difficult to find what is right! Apart from the acres of land at their disposal and the good PR machinery that they have (thanks to the half-educated and complex-ridden journalists infesting the print media, who are ready to write any illogical thing at their behest due to their lack of understanding on the issue)... Now, before anyone accuses me of competitive bitching, without wasting words, let me proceed systematically!

The first question we must ask is what makes a great institution? The answer to that is actually very simple! Great course content and great faculty! Course content, however, is copyable and quite standardised – at least amongst the world’s finest institutions! Faculty, therefore, becomes the most important distinguishing factor. Different streams of education require different kinds of faculty expertise. Management education requires faculty members, for example, to have great communication skills, great consulting and industry interface, and of course, regular research and writing. Similarly, engineering requires faculty to undertake research first as a key aspect apart from other things like the ability to teach and communicate. And this is where the IITs and the IIMs have a massive problem (apart from many other huge problems, for example, the lack of global exposure or the rank bad selection criteria of students at IIMs where primarily male engineers get through to their management programmes instead of commerce and arts graduates who have relatively higher EQ – a far more important criteria to become a better manager than simply having a high IQ).
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INTERNET HOOLIGANISM

2011-05-20T10:26:00.003+05:30

Why internet vandals and slander supporting entities like Google must be criminally prosecuted and made to pay for promoting defamatory links and suggestions, and how the new IT act is a step in the right direction and gives Indians the right to get justice against such vandalism.

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” So wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in a classic Forbes cover story titled 'Attack of the Blogs'. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seemed to have a super-majority of calumnious commentators, who thrived on the faceless protection that the net provided in order to leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments left, right and center.

Cut to the present, and the situation has sickeningly worsened. Not just globally, but perhaps more so in the Indian perspective. Take a quick ‘surf’ across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and companies posted by untraceable, incognito and spiteful writers. From four-letter words to bigoted slanders to sexist comments to racist attacks to clearly inflammatory and libelous material, the net is now so completely full of criminally damnable statements that one starts wondering why the authorities haven't woken up to act on this issue with the greatest speed. In case of profiles of meritorious organisations or individuals, this ratio of deprecating content put up by abusive users often shoots up to almost every second page. Internet hooliganism, as I describe it, is the most contemptible character of the modern technology era, where it doesn't matter how respectable you are or what your organisation is, or how you sincerely worked throughout the past many decades – irrespective of all that, you will be attacked anonymously with false statements that will make you cringe for a lifetime and with almost no hope for any recourse.
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It’s the end of the rape of Marxism in Bengal! Long live paribartan!

2011-05-11T06:00:00.004+05:30

Yes, it’s 20 years since Rajiv Gandhi’s death. And all my readers are very well aware that if there was one prime minister in my adult lifetime who ever made me feel proud as an Indian, it was him. I wish I could write this edit only on him, but I think many brilliant people, in Rajiv’s memory, have written on him in this issue; so my writing on him is of lesser importance – especially given the most likely fact that by the time this magazine reaches your hands, a huge and significant chapter in Indian politics would have come to an end. Yes, I am talking about the rule of CPM in Bengal. As far as all exit polls are concerned – except for some ludicrous CPM channel polls – it’s Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool party which is all set to sweep the polls in Bengal. In fact, if the leading channel is to be believed, then the current chief minister Budhdhadeb Bhattacharya is expected to lose too! So I think I can safely say it’s the end of CPM in Bengal. Or should I say the end of Stalinism in Bengal? Read more

Pakistan : The real rogue nation and why India should not trust America at all

2011-05-06T06:00:00.014+05:30

Lest we forget, not very long back, Pervez Musharraf, former president of Pakistan told in an interview to CNN, “I think now, frankly, he [Osama bin Laden]

Osama Bin Laden

is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. I don’t know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan.”

Cut to 2011, Osama bin Laden was hunted, and killed, not in any remote hideout in any tribal area of Pakistan but in Abbottabad, which is just a few kilometres away from the Pakistan Military Academy and merely 60 miles from Islamabad. So much so, the entire region is known to be a hotspot and boiling epicentre of terrorists, particularly al-Qaeda. This March, an Indonesian terrorist, Umar Patek, having links with al-Qaeda, was captured from this region. He was the one behind the Bali bombings and was an important agent of Jemaah Islamiya Tahir Shehzad (an al-Qaeda facilitator) who was also spotted in the same region.

The series of incidences and the proximity to Islamabad and Pakistan Military Academy suggest nothing else but how the Pakistan government always knew about the whereabouts of Osama and also provided him a safe haven. Otherwise, how else could have Osama stayed safely right under their nose? In spite of his members being found and killed, he never got spotted. It is normal military and anti-terror routine to sanitize the vicinity of such strategically sensitive locations and check for other such terror elements, even after a single capture. Moreover, the military academy near Osama’s hideout was visited just a month back by the Pakistani military chief General Asfaq Parvez Kayani. All these clearly indicate the fact that the Pakistani government always knew about Osama, and similarly they know about all such other such extremist leaders and groups, about whom they habitually and perpetually feign ignorance.

And it is not just about al-Qaeda or Osama, but even masterminds like Abu Zubaydah (found in safe house in Faisalabad), Ramzi bin Al Shibh (key facilitator of 9/11, caught in Karachi) and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (cornered in Rawalpindi) were all hunted down in Pakistan. Call it coincidence, but all these terrorists were found not in any remote locations of the Afghanistan- Pakistan border, but in urban cities of Pakistan. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar was captured on February 8, 2010, from Karachi while so many more were captured in Quetta, a prominent city in Pakistan. Not just this, WikiLeaks has time and again provided information in terms of how Pakistan has gone about harbouring terrorists! It has pointed out that a Pakistani general Hamid Gul was linked with al-Qaeda operatives. And to hit the final nail on the coffin, on May 4, 2011, WikiLeaks revealed how Pakistan’s security services tipped Osama whenever US troops approached and “smuggled al-Qaeda terrorists through airport security” to ensure they escaped capture.

When it comes to India, even the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), known for their terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008, are still active in Pakistan. Almost a decade back, the TIME magazine reported that the Pakistan Army through its 12th Infantry Division aids and funds members of LeT and also provides fire cover during infiltration. In December 2001, the Indian Parliament was attacked by a well trained set of terrorists, funded by agencies within Pakistan. Later, it was confirmed that the Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was the one funding the attack. The July 2006 terror strikes in Mumbai local trains were executed by SIMI, Lashkar-e-Taiba and ISI. Even the July 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed 58, had ISI involvement as per a New York Times report and WikiLeaks. The terror group SIMI, also called the Indian Mujahideen, which was banned in 2001, has been active with the support from al-Qaeda and other extremist outfits based out of Pakistan. The icing was when Ajmal Kasab was captured alive in the November 2008 attack (which killed 130 people), that confirmed Pakistan’s complete involvement. Even after all this, Pakistan has maintained their hypocritical lip service towards handing over Dawood Ibrahim and terrorist leader Masood Azhar to India.

Lines about Osama bin Laden are seen at the new World Trade Center. Laden was killed by US special troops in Abbottabad

All of this clearly indicates that Pakistan has outgrown into a real rogue nation and is increasingly becoming a threat to global security, and India in particular. And this is exactly where we need to realize that the enemy is not just Pakistan but America as well. They have killed Osama because Osama dared to attack them only. Otherwise, one must never forget that Osama was created by the Americans to destroy the former USSR. It is common American practice to use such elements to destabilize countries.

From using Osama against the USSR to killing presidents of neighbouring countries to putting ruthless dictators in countries of strategic importance for their own gains to bombing countries shamelessly for oil, the American establishment has done it all. What they are doing right now in Libya is the worst possible act. They are taking revenge on a 40-year-old issue and settling scores with Gaddafi for having united the OPEC nations then and for having raised the oil price – something which resulted in the massive transfer of wealth from the Western nations to the Middle East. Today, in a totally undemocratic manner, America is bombing that nation and killing people for no reason but oil. The heights of it is that all this while, they knew Pakistan is the nation which is hiding Osama and supporting his terror activities; yet, since they need to use Pakistan against India, they have not been acting against the nation. They have just been cleansing it of those terrorist elements who are potentially dangerous to US – but still not declaring it a terrorist nation, at a point when the reality is very clear now. Pakistan is the terrorist nation number 1 in the world today. Such is the sham that even during the presidential address, Obama maintained that Pakistan was cooperative – while the truth is that the US didn’t even inform Pakistan of the operations, knowing fully well that they would then shift Osama away.

No doubt, the Americans have done a great job in killing Osama – for their personal interests – but getting too carried away about their deed will be only too foolish. The Osama killing has revealed only two key things. One, Pakistan is without doubt a rogue state harbouring terrorists and the most dangerous country in the world – for no country can be more dangerous than a country that could provide shelter to Osama for more than five years while acting as an ally of America. And two, America – that still supports such a rogue state and pampers them only for use against India – can’t be trusted any more. From nuclear plants to defence deals, India needs to stop selling itself to Americans and take a clear stance against Pakistan and against any country that provides direct and indirect support to Pakistan – America being at the top of that list.

IT IS THE ELECTRONIC MEDIA THAT INDIA MUST THANK FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE ANNA MOVEMENT. AND YES, IT SURE WAS DEMOCRATIC

2011-04-29T06:00:00.001+05:30

A seventy-three year old unassuming man by the name of Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare is again set to give sleepless nights to the Government of India. More popularly known as Anna Hazare, this isn’t his first endeavour to take the putrescent establishment head on. He earned his due recognition when he tirelessly fought to develop a model village in the district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. As it happens to most in our country, for all the good work, Dr. Hazare was also factitiously arrested in 1998 and was released on account of a huge public uproar. Incidentally, the Government of India also recognized his efforts by bestowing him with the Padma Bhushan. But amongst all his mini revolutions which have advantaged the smaller sections of society, this time Hazare is taking up such an issue which is probably the biggest malaise of our democracy and is a cause which affects every living Indian in some way or the other.

Our governments time and again have been most deleteriously corrupt and demonocratic! But in all these respects, the current reprobate government takes the cake! The biggest of scams have surfaced under this execrable leadership. And it's not big simply because times have changed. Even if one accounts for inflation, these are gigantic scams, which only goes on to show that the people in power are knavishly corrupt and greedy like never before. Thus, 2010 can safely be called the year of unparalleled and historic corruption. The year of shame, in which media – especially the electronic media – had a field year and ended up making a lot of people from the civil society very vocal. Amongst them were some people with honest backgrounds and with a spotless record of serving this nation and having a great following in this country – people like Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal and the grand old man of India's now famous India-against-corruption movement, Anna Hazare. They decided that enough was enough with the flagitious government's lip service. It was time for the honest man to show his powers, and if necessary, arm-twist the government a little. They came out on the streets. And Anna took to fasting. Fasting to get a people's bill introduced which will give people and their representatives the power to prosecute the quisling corrupt in the government and bureaucracy! On a normal day, a man fasting at Jantar Mantar wouldn't bother many. But it was not a normal day. It was after a year of corruption being exposed one after the other – and a huge role in that too had been played by the much often criticized electronic media of India. Yes, with the need to sustain themselves in the 24x7 format, the media often shows eyeball grabbing programmes; but that does not mean they do not show real news when there is any. The Indian electronic media is full of people and TV hosts who want to see a real change in this country’s cankered economic and political system – and a majority of these media channels are in Hindi and other regional channels. For eyeballs as well as genuine frustration with corruption, the electronic media had seen to it over the entire year that every Indian was not just aware of the peccant corruption but had also seen stammering representatives of the current government unable to defend the very straightforward and scathing attack of the new age Indian TV – which is no more ruled by just one Prannoy Roy but by tens of mini Prannoy Roys who are exceptional in their own ways and often connect more with the common man and not just the elite.

In this day and time, when Anna took to fasting, a different breed of people – more awakened and angrier than ever before – came out in hundreds first and thousands soon after to support this man. The entire show was again covered very well by TV and propagated around the country. In contrast to Anna, my heart does go out for Irom Sharmila, the lady who has been fasting for ten long years without any success and with the government turning a blind eye to her existence. On any other day, Anna could have also spent a few years fasting with the government not budging a bit. Who after all cares if 4000 people come together and demonstrate? A good lathi charge, an arrest of the leaders including Anna and a few hours later, all could have been over. But in the new India, under the scathing eye and leadership of the electronic media more than Anna, all this was not possible. On the contrary, with every given hour, masses only increased. And the government – given its indictable track record in recent times in terms of corruption – had no other choice but to budge and accept Anna's demands to avoid the possibility of a much larger scale uprising. At the end, it's true that Anna led from the front and was ready to put his life at stake. It's true that for every conscientious movement, you need a spotless leader with unblemished credibility. But the fact is that the real support of this leader did not come from the few men who went to Jantar Mantar.. It came from the much criticized newsrooms of India's electronic media, which didn't care about their party alliances but came out all supporting the movement. And anything that makes the elected representatives of India – the politicians – budge is democratic. Every time governments across the world have taken their people for a ride, a people's movement has taken shape. And in modern days, it gets huge support by the online media in developed countries. But in India's case, that being ridiculously insignificant, it was the electronic media showing the way all through. Every people's movement that shakes up the government is most democratic because it shows the general feelings amongst the masses. Calling it undemocratic smacks of unfanciful jealousies, allegiance to status quo and ulterior motives. Masses can't be brought out on the streets – that too without payment – with any frivolous reason. The fact is that the government is surely elected by the masses... But when the same masses see that it is taking the nation for a ride, people have the democratic right to protest and apply pressure. And anyone who leads that movement needn't be an elected representative.

Gandhi was not an elected representative of the Indian masses when he was leading India’s freedom struggle. Thus, the leader is and can be the one around whom the masses rally. And just being elected is not the proof of being democratic. In our country, a host of criminals get elected through shady ways by manipulating our system. Just because they are elected and Anna is not, doesn't make them the pillars of democracy in India. I want to sum up by saying that Anna's movement had the people's support from all over India and it was hugely democratic. It's a success of not just Anna but our country's electronic media. They might be taking a u-turn right now due to various pressures; but the fact is that they can't be kept silent forever. Every time the government goes wrong, the electronic media is today there to awaken the people more than individual leaders. Of course, we need the right kind of individual leaders to snatch such opportunities and bring the people together. Despite attempts after attempts by the government to discredit the people associated with the movement and change public opinion, the fact is that the Anna movement is just the beginning of many such movements to come till we have true democracy in this country. And every time such a movement is successful, the electronic media will play a huge role. Not just because they are greedy for eyeballs, but also because they are committed to a better India and are becoming more and more fearless by the day, ably supported by the online community.

India needs to be led by a man like Anna Hazare – whose heart is in the right place – than by a Ph.D in economics who allows corruption!

2011-04-15T06:00:00.001+05:30

When I wrote my previous editorial, “Anna, my Prime Minister,” many people pounced on me accusing me of writing it a bit too soon and getting carried away. It is true that I had written that piece on the second day of Anna's fast. But to us, Anna was not a new phenomenon. Twelve years ago, the IIPM Think Tank had initiated visits to Anna’s villages and had undertaken a study. For us, he has been a great icon since then and before too. And therefore, when he decided to come to Delhi, I instantly knew we needed to be behind him. Dr Kiran Bedi, whom I personally respect very much, had already come to our institute during the Bharatiya Manavata Vikas Puraskar ceremony – where she had also received an award for her longstanding commitment to changing India – and had given a passionate speech to support the cause. Arvind Kejriwal, to whom not just me but the entire nation also should be thankful (for fighting selflessly for the RTI Act) was also there with Anna; and so was Swami Agnivesh – a swami with a very balanced outlook to social causes. That's a group that, for the first time in my life, I could feel proud of. And yes, these are the people I want our country to be led by. That is why even in this issue, instead of doing a story in our magazine, we decided to do a special supplement on this great movement initiated by this great man Anna Hazare – for the first time ever in our magazine’s four and a half year history.

So, if the question is whether I still stand by my initial proclamation, the answer is yes; I do stand by it – and more so after meeting the man himself in person. India is the country of people who barely live around the globally defined standard of poverty line of 2 dollars a day. And Anna is one their true representatives. India is a land where the common man has not been allowed to get great education. And Anna is one of them, and yet someone whose life education is worth many Ph.Ds. India lives in its villages and so does Anna. India still has a heart of gold and so does this man. When we suggested to him that we wished to institute the Anna Hazare rural leadership fellowship, he had such wonderful thoughts on the same and explained why we needed leaders in rural India more than w did in urban India if we really wanted to change the nation as a whole. The man, his selflessness, his down-to-earth ways, his simple yet honest and powerful thoughts... everything made me personally respect him far more than I had imagined.

Sitting next to him in the most unassuming and simple manner was Arvind Kejriwal – another inspiration and solid example of selflessness, the man who had given an entire nation hope through the RTI Act and made the government much more responsible in many ways. And every word he spoke added to the belief with which I went to them – the belief that we needed to bring them to mainstream politics. Although they both vehemently disagreed on coming to mainstream vote-politics, I was more than convinced that these are the leaders we needed; because if we can't respect our current leaders, then the current ones are of no good. Anna and his people, on the contrary, are those that every Indian can easily respect.

I just want to say that it is time that we don't breathe easy just with this one small win that Anna and his group of committed Indians have achieved. I was happy to know that even they don't plan to leave it here. Up on their agenda are judicial and electoral reforms – two subjects extremely close to our hearts at the IIPM Think Tank and Planman Media. Anna and his people plan to bring forth each of these issues and continue their struggle till things change. I wonder why they are ready to be called unelected people’s representatives, when they can win with votes and do much more than they can do now by staying out of politics. Politics is not the last resort of scoundrels. It’s the first resort of every committed soul. They need to show us the way. And I, for one would rather have a man like Anna Hazare as my Prime Minister – simply because his heart is in the right place – than having a Ph.D in economics as my Prime Minister who breeds corruption and keeps his eyes closed to all the filth around him.

Yes, it is one man who won us the Cup! And it is worth 25 Olympic gold medals!

2011-04-13T10:33:00.004+05:30

Yes, it’s just one man who has won us the Cup! And it’s not Sachin Tendulkar or Yuvraj Singh... The man is Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who won us the World Cup despite everyone else putting in their bit! Just before the India-Pakistan match, I was called by IBN7 for a discussion on India's chances. There, I had said that I personally believed that the 2003 team that reached the final was more talented than the current team. But I also said that it is this team that will win the Cup, and just due to one factor – not Sachin or anyone else; but for the great leadership of Dhoni! That's the kind of importance I attach to leadership – be it in a country, or in a game; especially like cricket.

The 2003 Indian cricket team had a better bowling lineup. And an equally good, if not better, batting lineup due to the sheer presence of one of the best one-day batsmen of the world and the captain who started the great Indian march forward – Sourav Ganguly! But then, Sourav failed to win us the Cup while Dhoni did. And why? The reason is that on the day of the finals of something like a World Cup, what matters more than individual talent is leadership. Every great leader has got their country a Cup, while talented teams minus a good leader have remained at best runners up. While Ganguly was a great captain, yet under him, there was a lot of politics happening in the team all the time; and the team was never playing as a unit the way Dhoni has made them play. In 1983, we won the Cup defeating West Indies and come back home elated. Immediately after that, the West Indies toured India, and whitewashed us 5 to nil! We were surely an inferior team when compared to the then West Indies, even when we won the World Cup. But the Cup then too came to the country which had a team with a better, larger-than-life, lionhearted leadership and team spirit. And it came to Kapil Dev simply because he was able to create a camaraderie that lifted the spirits up; up enough to win the Cup on that crucial day! In league matches, leadership is as important as the team. But as you near the final of a Cup of a massively team-game like cricket, leadership becomes far more important than how good your team is. A below-par India of ‘83 did the magic. And a team today in 2011 with a certainly below-par bowling lineup did the magic again! In both the cases, the full credit goes to leadership.

As a management teacher, I know that what Dhoni did was straight out of a leadership book! When Sachin and Sehwag got out, I didn't think of anyone else like Yuvraj; for me, the result depended on just one man. That man was Dhoni. Just as I was hoping, he entered at the fall of the next wicket. Rest, as they say, is history. Without leading from the front – in terms of personal performance as well as creating a team spirit – you can't have a winning team. And Dhoni led from the front, and like how! Hats off to him! Hats off to the great leadership! After winning the cup, it was beautiful the way he was hardly seen anywhere in the limelight. He had done his job and allowed his team to take the limelight! What was better was how everyone in the team spoke post the victory. They all kept mentioning the same point: “We won it for Sachin!” That's what great leaders like Dhoni do. They give the team a bigger purpose to fight for. And Dhoni had given Team India a much greater purpose to fight for. Not the Cup, not personal glory, but a tribute to the nation’s greatest cricketer and an equally great human being – Sachin Tendulkar. And did it work? You bet it did! Hats off once more. Before I end, I must write that yes, I feel very angry when as a nation we fail to win enough medals at the Olympics. It’s poor leadership at the top in the country. The few medals we win are due to individual brilliance and not because of a national scheme or plan. And it’s very disappointing to have not even won 5 Olympic gold medals in the last 25 years... But having played cricket a lot, I can say one thing – if there is one game that requires the most varied amount of skills in the world, its cricket. There is no other game which has so many dimensions – from batting to bowling to fielding to wicket keeping. And so many further variations in each of those areas, not to mention the further variations at the international level. It is one hell of a tough game of very high skills and extremely high team spirit. And a World Cup in this game of cricket, to me, is equivalent to 25 gold medals in the Olympics at the least. Hats off to Dhoni, and of course, to Team India for getting it to us!

Anna Hazare: My Prime Minister

2011-04-07T12:21:00.000+05:30

India needs one more victory. This time against corruption.

A seventy-three year old unassuming man by the name of Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare is again set out to give sleepless nights to the Government of India. More popularly known as Anna Hazare, this isn’t his first endeavour to take the establishment head on. He earned his due recognition when he tirelessly fought to develop a model village in the district of Ahmednagar in Maharashtra. As it happens to most in our country, for all the good work, Dr. Hazare was also arrested in 1998 and was released on account of a huge public uproar. Incidentally, the Government of India also recognized his efforts by bestowing him with the Padma Bhushan. But amongst all his mini revolutions which have advantaged the smaller sections of society, this time Hazare is taking up such an issue which is probably the biggest malaise of our democracy and is a cause which affects every living Indian in some way or the other.

Hazare is one amongst those few who have dared to raise their voices against corruption in our system, by voicing his concerns over the Lokpal Bill. The Bill currently is nothing but a politically jaundiced version of the anti-corruption bill. In order to assert his arguments, which manifests into a more meaningful and logical conclusion to the Bill, he has declared a fast unto death at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi; a fast that started on April 5, 2011 amidst massive support. His arguments stem from the manner in which the current bill has shaped up; the current bill is not just illogical but also nothing more than a mere tokenism with respect to the fight against corruption! On the one hand, while Hazare is asking the government to give powers to Lokpal to receive complaints of corruption directly from the victims (and declare their decision suo moto), then on the other hand, our government wishes to confine such powers to those that can be politically influenced. In simple words, in its current form, Lokpal can only probe complaints forwarded by heads of either the lower house or the upper house. The fact is that in its current form, the Bill is purely a tool for political gaming and one-upmanship. Unfortunately, the government – quoting hilariously that it cannot be blackmailed by Anna Hazare – has conveniently turned down Hazare’s logical argument of involving representatives from civil society. Owing to the fact that the biggest victim of corruption is the common man, Hazare also rightfully is demanding extending the ambit of the Bill to a level where the Lokpal can register FIRs and act as an independent body (along with the CBI) to punish corrupt officials with sentences ranging from a minimum of 5 years to a maximum of life imprisonment. Expectably, and shamelessly, the government doesn’t want any such powers to be given to the Lokpal and instead wants corrupt officials, if convicted, to serve a punishment ranging from only six months to a maximum of 7 years. In a nation where every second official is corrupt, the quickest and strictest of punishment should have been the recourse! The government apparently thinks otherwise.

As the affairs stand today, when a civilian has to bribe any and every police official for raising an FIR, a Lokpal would be of great social benefit. Furthermore, making this body independent of political intervention would ensure its smooth functioning. It is so very unfortunate that first, our government is not willing to adopt a tool which can uproot corruption from our system; on top of it, like a habitual offender, the government is trying to find a scapegoat in Dr. Hazare and is even conspiring to punish him! I am amazed by the audacity of the government to not only turn down such logical and meaningful arguments but also criticize him! These are the heights of double standards when the same government, which awards a person with the highest state honour, after sometime tries to find avenues for charging the very same person with criminal offences. We have seen such a situation happen with Dr. Binayak sen as well!

At a point in time when the entire world is witnessing the fury of civil societies which are toppling governments left, right and middle, at a point in time where we are seeing global governments increasingly allowing public intervention in political decision making, our own government is going back in time and is trying to adapt a dictatorial model – and that too in its worst form! There is no doubt that just like the Right to Information Bill, the Lokpal Bill will not only give Indians the voice that had got suppressed over the years under the huge debris of corruption, but it would also increase public participation at large, which is an imperative in any functional democracy. Perhaps that is the very reason why Dr Hazare has been getting every support from media, celebrities and common people who understand the significance of his argument. Such is his support that while writing this article some time past midnight, when I uploaded his picture on my Facebook profile as a gesture of my support towards him, in 15 minutes flat, his photograph had received as many as 200 comments and 750 likes!

All in all, it is visibly clear that through this Bill, the government is trying to do nothing else but save their own skin and the skins of their own corrupt officials. In its current form, the Bill is similar to CVC initiatives, which are good for nothing and have no tooth to bite. The current situation is a matter of utter disgrace for the Indian government – especially when it has failed to bring back the Swiss black money, punish CWG officials and arrest 2G scamsters. In a country where the same government has failed to provide their citizens with even two meals a day and instead has allowed corruption to flourish, what more could one expect?

Anna Hazare is increasingly becoming a phenomenon in himself, if not already one, and rightly so. It is the duty of every non-corrupt, patriotic and sensible Indian to provide every form of support to this one man who is selflessly fighting for everyone’s cause. India needs one more victory and this time against corruption! Along with stalwarts like Kiran Bedi – a great icon of honesty – and the great RTI activist Arvind Kejrival, Anna Hazare is showing the way to Indians. We all need to unite to get him right to the top, because finally Indians have seen an honest man who is also leading from the front. Irrespective of who is holding the position officially, Anna Hazare is my Prime Minister!

OUR PARLIAMENTARIANS MUST BE MADE TO BEHAVE IN A CIVILIZED MANNER BY PASSING A LAW, AS IS THE PRACTICE IN MOST DEVELOPED NATIONS

2011-04-01T06:00:00.000+05:30

Our live Parliament sessions can make a Hollywood sci-fi director feel ill at ease. One can find virtually everything flying in our Parliament – ranging from bottles to microphones to footwear... and perhaps human beings too in the near future! A glance through Lok Sabha TV or even YouTube footage of our Parliament sessions would be enough to provide evidence of the extent of lack of basic culture and education that our honorable members of Parliaments possess. What comes as an utter shame and embarrassment, especially for the electorate, is the manner in which their elected leaders represent their cause! Starting from holding footwear in their hands, to throwing abusive words, and resorting to physical violence, this is how Parliamentarians resolve their concerns in the temples of the world’s largest democracy!

Last year, the Women’s Reservation Bill was disrupted to such a level that seven of our MPs had to be suspended for the remaining sessions. So much so that the MPs went to an extent of snatching and tearing the bill into pieces – the MPs then uprooted the Chairman’s mike and climbed on the table to mark their protest! And mind you, all this our publicly elected representatives did for the women of our country! In another case, the Parliament was not allowed to function for seven days at a stretch, as both the houses witnessed huge chaos. Congress members were found rushing to the aisles and chanting slogans than discussing and sorting the issues in question. In 2008, the Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee adjourned the house when MPs went into a verbal clash which was so severe that even the speaker stated the situation as follows: “The Parliament has become a public street. I can only express my agony. It is a murder of democracy” Amidst all these, how can one forget the shameful incident of the cash-for-votes scam; or the session in 2008 where MPs went absolutely berserk and threw microphones and chairs at each other! The disruptions and adjournments during the 2010 budget session cost the taxpayer about Rs 180,000,000 and wasted 115 working hours – Lok Sabha lost 36 per cent of its time and Rajya Sabha lost 28 per cent.

Such incidents of blatant barbarism and disgraceful behavior not only speak volumes about our ill educated political class but also bring a huge disgrace to the house. Disrespecting the houses and colleagues is not only unwarranted behavior but also indicates that our elected representatives are bereft of any sensible and logical discussions! And given the fact that our sessions are aired live on national TV and covered by global media, such acts are not just insulting and shameful for us as Indians, but also highlight our third-grade value systems and the way we solve issues that are of national importance.

There is no doubt in the fact that this should stop; and that too immediately. And for that, the Indian Constitution should make provisions and ban such Members of Parliament and assemblies and further criminalise such offences. If required, the Election Commission should not only temporarily suspend their political career but also should prosecute them legally. Any act of violence, use of non parliamentary (read: abusive) words and irrational walkouts should be brought under the ambit of legislation and further should be criminalized. We should urgently introduce laws regarding contempt of Parliament and censure (serious steps taken against misconduct or negligence of duty) in order to tighten the noose of these wild horses. Such laws will not only make them behave properly in the house but would also put the much required cap to the unlimited immunity they enjoy. Most of democratic and developed nations take such issues seriously and have legislation for the same. These laws are enforced when a member deliberately misleads the Parliament (presenting false information to the Parliament knowingly) or influences a Member of Parliament by bribery or threats. In Canada, under censure, sanctions can be imposed on Parliamentarians, including imprisonment; at the same time, in Australia, under the contempt of Parliament rule, a fine of $5,000 and six months’ imprisonment can be imposed. Similarly in Hong Kong, contempt of the Legislative Council is seen a criminal offence; in the United Kingdom, it leads to arrest of a Member of Parliament who may be suspended or expelled. Similar is the case in Latin American countries and other mature democracies. Even usage of words that offend the dignity of the houses leads to prosecution and civil action in many countries like Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, United Kingdom and many others.

All in all, to clean up the dirt from the Parliament and bring back some basic decorum, we have to ensure that these ‘kind’ of people never get elected. And knowing that it is almost animpossible task as politics is getting increasingly criminalized, it is imperative that we reduce the immunity given to our MPs and bring in stricter codes of conduct enforceable by law! Unfortunately, our houses look nothing less than a circus. It is time to show them their real place!

SUPREME COURT SHOULD BAN THE SEDITION LAW WHICH IS NOT ONLY ARCHAIC BUT ALSO DISCRIMINATORY AND ANTIDEMOCRATIC!

2011-03-25T06:00:00.001+05:30

Very rarely, I do realise the significance to write frequently on a particular issue, until and unless it is of national importance and requires national attention! But then Dr Binayak Sen’s case is unique and hence I decided to write once again for him! It is no secret that Dr Binayak Sen has been deliberately made a victim of an archaic law! The way this law has been used to suppress the voice of Sen and that of his likes is what prompted me to write this particular editorial. It is a matter of utter shame that even today how we clutch to our colonial past and their discriminatory laws which were crafted to boot-lick a select few who ran the government.

We all know that Dr Binayak Sen was arrested for the first time on May 14, 2007 on the charges of allegedly helping jailed Maoist Narayan Sanyal under the garb of providing medical aid. Not to forget that the entire series of his meetings with Sanyal was being supervised by the jail authorities themselves. Despite that, on December 24, 2010, the court sentenced Dr Binayak Sen - a vocal critic of the Chhattisgarh government's counter-insurgency actions against Maoists - to life in prison for sedition under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code. The sentence was passed without finding any substantial evidence that could have proved Dr Sen’s association with Maoist group(s) or his assistance to them in any form for their actions. In fact it is the same law that was used against Mahatma Gandhi by the British to curb his non-violent Freedom movement. During his sedition trial in 1922, Gandhiji described sedition law as the “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen” and further stated that it was important to provide a citizen with freedom to display his “fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence.”

The charges of sedition against Dr Sen has brought to light this prevailing archaic law whose legitimacy can only be comprehended after going into its historical milieu and the reason why it was drafted. In the Indian context, sedition dates back to the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, wherein the objective was to forcefully suppress the democratic aspirations of a particular section of society. The skeleton of this section was derived from the common law of seditious libel, meant to control press and publications during that time. This law regardless of being touted as curbing resistance is nothing but a rotten remnant of the colonial past with the sole intent of suppressing potential paradigm change-makers. In its current state, the yardstick that gauges the amplitude of disaffection and the resultant violence is very vaguely defined and is highly subjective.

Raising its voice against such inhuman law, especially during times where people around the world are being made free in terms of expressing their views, the International Human Rights Watch requested the Indian Parliament to immediately repeal the sedition law which local authorities are using to silence peaceful political dissent. The biggest irony is how the High Courts have gone against the Supreme Court’s ruling that clearly demarcates sedition from other acts by stating that “prosecution under the sedition law requires incitement to violence,” and at no given point of time did Dr Sen resort to violence or propagate any such activity. This dates backs to 1962 when the Supreme Court in the Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar case ruled that the charge of sedition can only be slapped if the accused incited violence through his speech. Or else it would violate freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by the Constitution under Article 19, the Apex Court added. More so, such archaic law even jeopardises the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ratified by India in 1979 which ensures full freedom of expression and prohibits any kind of restrictions. Unfortunately, this law is in the discretion of those illiterate power holders who ‘mis’use it to victimise those who raise their voice against our prejudiced and discriminatory system and corrupt practices!!

Last year in September, the Ugandan judiciary ruled that the sedition law was inconsistent with the principles of freedom of speech and ruled in favour of press freedom by declaring the criminal sedition offence unconstitutional. Similarly, this law in Malaysia is used to curb criticism of the state by non-Malays to protect political elitism! However, this law is being criticised a lot in that nation and is under review. In Singapore, the maximum jail term for distributing a seditious publication is three years and not a life time. While in developed countries like the UK, the last prosecution for sedition occurred in 1972 and by 1977, the common law offence of sedition was abolished. The Sedition Act of 1798 in US that was used by the powers-that-be and the elite class of society for political and other benefits was abolished by Thomas Jefferson after he came to power. Similarly, it was repealed in New Zealand in 2007. On the contrary, the sedition law, in our context, is indicative of our insane penchant for our colonial past! It also speaks volumes about how we are still following laws that have either been annulled or abolished in most other countries. It is a matter of utter disgrace that how the world’s largest democracy is having laws which were once hurdles in the path of its own freedom struggle and which is blatantly against the very definition of democratic rights in today’s context.

Going by this, the Supreme Court should immediately release Dr Binayak Sen and also ensure that no innocent individual gets victimised in the future. For that, it needs to be assertive and come down heavily on this draconian law and, needless to mention, abolish it outright.

INDIA CAN’T AFFORD A JAPAN TYPE DISASTER...

2011-03-18T06:00:00.000+05:30

WE MUST STOP SELLING OURSELVES TO RECESSION-STRUCK WESTERN COUNTRIES WHO ARE IN SEARCH OF PROFITS FROM INDIA AND WE SHOULD STOP OUR QUEST FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY. BY ARINDAM CHAUDHURI

I have heard that in African countries, hunters find it tough to catch monkeys and in order to do so successfully, they place a jar with a small opening filled with nuts near the trees. The jar is so designed that it allows a monkey’s hand to go inside, but once in, the monkey finds it difficult to take it out. Most of the time, the monkey stays there as it is unwilling to let go of the nuts. These peanuts which trap a monkey are actually unrealistic desires of this animal! This is what brings me to the point I want to write on. There is no secret that we evolved from apes and thus few actions of ours closely relate to similar behaviour. Our penchant for having nuclear energy is quite similar, wherein we have no idea where it is going to lead us to. And unfortunately, right now we are unable to see beyond the nut!

The recent heart paining earthquake and tsunami in Japan that has led to a nuclear disaster that is still unfolding in Japan as an aftermath, speaks volumes of how fragile nuclear plants are and how dangerous such leakages can be. Any case of nuclear meltdown would cause leakage of radiations which not only can lead to a high death toll and permanent physical and mental disorders but in the long run can make the vicinity uninhabitable for tens of decades. India, which is blindly following a dream of going the nuclear way, is largely ignoring the threats that these reactors bring with themselves! The Three Mile and Chernobyl disasters during the eighties are testimonies to catastrophes that can be caused by such plants. And it is not that this is something new for India – in August 2010, the Journal of Contemporary Asia reported that between 1993 and 1995, more than 120 hazardous nuclear accidents took place in India. And then, there are protests which are already being organised in Jaitapur in Maharashtra after adverse effect of nuclear plants were seen on the ecology. Even if one ignores the Jaitapur protests, what comes as a surprise is how our government seems to have forgotten the biggest disaster of all time in Indian history. People have not even come out of the Bhopal Gas tragedy and mind you, there was nothing nuclear in that disaster!

The whole nuclear saga began in the October of 2008, when we signed the controversial and much criticised 1-2-3 deal with the US. This deal opened a $250 billion nuclear reactor market for India and today we are finding companies (mostly American and European) waiting for their contracts. This brings me to the biggest contract we signed with Areva that furthered our dream of becoming nuclear powered nation by adding a 9,000-MW plant at Jaitapur in the Konkan region in Maharashtra. As it is said that the devil is in the details, interestingly the Konkan coast is located in the seismic belt of the nation and is categorised under the high damage risk zone. For the record, in the last two decades, this zone has experienced a whopping number of 92 earthquakes, of which three were major, with the highest being measured at 6.3 on the Richter scale in 1993. And on the top of this, we are using a very controversial and unapproved nuclear reactor for this plant. As of now, we’ve more than 20 nuclear reactors dotted along the coastal areas of the nation that may be either exposed to quakes or tsunamis.

Taking a cue from Japan, Germany has suspended contracts and agreements that would have else ensured an extension of their nuclear facilities while Switzerland have, for the time being, kept aside all files meant for approval of nuclear plants. What we are repeatedly ignoring is the magnitude of the disaster that can occur. God forbid a Japan-like disaster occurs in our nation. With no earthquake-resistant buildings and literally no public awareness on such issues, a Japan-like incident can literally wipe out a major pie of our population leaving behind equal numbers of Indians crippled and physically and mentally handicapped. In case of India, the problem is just not one of fragile plants but also about the way we dispose our nuclear waste. A year back, radioactive substances were found in a Delhi market and what is the guarantee that tomorrow Indian roads will not be littered with radioactive substance with garbage collectors and ragpickers merrily collecting them without realising what they are holding?

Rather than going gung-ho over nuclear power, we should tap our renewable sources of energy and especially bank on solar power plants, given the fact that India is blessed with ample sunlight round the year. It would not be just economical, safe and green but would also reduce chances of future irreversible damages in case any disaster becomes an unfortunate reality!! Studies show that the average daily solar energy incident over our country is around 7 kWh/m2 (equivalent to 2000 solar hours per year) – any day more than the current total energy consumption of the entire nation and yet solar energy comprise less than one per cent of the total energy produced in India – while it is 35 per cent in developed nations. What is of most importance is the fact that now technology makes it possible to produce solar power at a lesser cost than nuclear power. It is therefore a huge question why the government is hell-bent on opting for nuclear energy when it very well knows that solar energy is now more cost-effective as well as safer. Alternatively of course, there is another thing we can do. Why we are keeping quiet about it is beyond my understanding. We can opt for thorium-based plants, owing to the fact that thorium is found in abundance in our country as we have 25 per cent of the world’s thorium reserve. Topmost, energy scientists have confirmed that it can be a very easy alternative for our energy problems. However, not a single media entity writes about it properly and the common man has no clue about it... Also the fact that thorium produces hundred times the power of that of uranium and leaves essentially no waste. And as per research, if thorium acquires scale in mining, it would cost lesser than uranium! Given such potential power generation resources, it is foolish to suffer from a nuclear complex!

All in all, there is not a single reason as to why India should take part in this rat race to become a nuclear-powered nation. Instead, we should learn from Japan and switch to much safer and cleaner energy sources like solar, hydro and thorium. Needless to say, a single nuclear reactor is equal to hundred atom bombs and in a country like India with high population density, a single explosion would lead to hundred Hiroshimas! And if such a huge disaster can occur in a country like Japan which is known for its zero defect attitude and stringent quality control, then in this country where short cuts, corruption, fraudulent practices are more of a rule than exception, it will definitely happen. And God forbid if a disaster of this magnitude happens in India, we would be shattered completely. Unfortunately, the Indian government is unable to see things beyond the peanuts as of now!! I hope though it does so and takes the corrective measures as soon as possible and openly declares that India does not need nuclear energy.

Making private entrepreneurs billionaires by grabbing public land

2011-03-11T06:00:00.000+05:30

I have often said that we are a strange economy wherein the number of billionaires is increasing by the day, but we hardly have any worthwhile billion dollar global product. And this weird, inexplicable phenomenon – where billions are being made without having commensurate global products – is only prevalent in India. One wonders how these billionaires manage to make their billions without a supporting product? Well, of all the inexplicable means that are being adopted, one of the most fashionable has been the act of blatant land grabbing! In fact, land acquisition in India has been always the most ignored legislation, and obviously for understandable reasons! Not even three months have passed and 2011 has already seen its share of illegal transactions of land meant for public purposes. Among these innumerable and mostly untraceable public land deals, there are three deals that caught my fancy mostly due to the sheer nature of the deals! The first one being that of the Tamil Nadu government – in January this year, they attempted to divert a stretch of land reserved for slum redevelopment and low-income housing to private players (against the Tamil Nadu Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act of 1971), a move which could have made nearly 7,000 families homeless! In January again, it was found out how Maharashtra and Housing Area Development Authority (MHADA) sold a 3-acre plot worth Rs 300 crore to a private developer; the plot had been originally allotted for developing 900 flats for low and middle-income groups. Similarly, in February 2011, bodies like HUDA and HSIIDC acquired almost 350 acres of panchayat land in Wazirabad village under the reasoning of providing public utilities and then later sold it to a private player for Rs 1,700 crores for residential and commercial development.

From politicians to bureaucrats to industrialists, all eye various developmental projects to grab a share of prime land. And the process is simplified further as the law governing land purchases in India is over 110 years old (the Land Acquisition Act dates back to 1894). In spite of this law having been amended a few times, the amendments have only strengthened the government’s land grabbing powers. As per the act, the government – both at the state and at the Centre – is absolutely free to acquire any land anywhere in India for public purposes. This means that the government has all the rights to acquire private land even without the consent of the land owners, if the acquisition is done for “public purpose.” In most of such acquisitions, the land owners manage to get token money as compensation, which is far below the market price! Most of the times, the land acquired by the government is developed under the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model where, eventually, the private component in this partnership corners every benefit, caring two hoots about any public convenience or need! Take for instance the Uttar Pradesh government’s initiatives of building the Greater Noida expressway, where the initial owners – the farmers – were paid as less as Rs 50 per square meter for an area which is being sold currently for a minimum of Rs 1500 per square meter – a staggering 3000 per cent markup. Similar have been the cases with the much-touted Vedanta and Posco! A few weeks back, the Supreme Court had to itself direct the Haryana state government to evict encroachers from the land belonging to village communities; much of this land was unofficially transferred to private players for commercial use. In the past, the courts have had to intervene in many such matters, especially in Gurgaon, where panchayat land meant for public utilities was sold and leased out to private players. Among all these various cases, the one which needs a special mention is the one that got exposed in November 2010.The High Court of Punjab and Haryana criticized the Haryana government for acquiring 19 acres of panchayat land in Nathupur and selling the land to DLF – consequently, making a profit of Rs 47 crore. In 2009, BMC redirected acres of land meant for public development to private players for commercial development – this primarily filled the coffers of civic officials. And the saga continues. It requires no audit or surveys to comprehend that a large sum of money is transacted, from all sides of the table under such arrangements.

Further, when it comes to development projects involving huge acres of land meant for public usage, most of the time, unprecedented amounts of money change hands within the unholy nexus of politicians and corporations. And it is this nexus and its misdeeds that are being forced down the throats of the poor, who are at the receiving end perpetually. What is worse is the bigger monster in the making – and that is with respect to realty prices, which defy any economic rationality! This is bound to happen again and again as more and more prime land is siphoned off to fewer hands, creating an all round artificial scarcity! What is even worse is the fact that all this happens in a country where there are around 80 million people who do not have a basic shelter for themselves – and for those who have them, almost a third do not own them!

After all, in a dysfunctional nation like India, it is always pelf before people! Land grabbing and making billions is just one of the means!

DEAR PRANAB DA, YOU SHOULD HAVE FIRST GIVEN A WAY FOR INDIANS TO LIVE TILL 80 BEFORE DECLARING TAX CONCESSIONS FOR THEM!

2011-03-04T06:00:00.000+05:30

At a point in time where not just India, but the entire world is grappling with the issue of food shortage and escalating food prices, especially owing to the worst drought that has recently hit China (affecting eight major wheat-growing provinces that account for around 80 per cent of the country’s total wheat output), and at a point in time wherein black money and corruption have taken up gigantic proportions, the least that was expected of our honourable Finance Minister was a few bold steps to arrest both the issues. To tackle the impending food crisis, most governments across the world are planning and drafting policies to control the expected food shortage and the anticipated food price hike. West Asian countries are stocking up grains, while countries like Iraq have already placed orders for 400,000 tonnes of wheat grain from the US. Following the trend, even Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia are exporting grains and Russia has even announced a complete ban on food grain exports. In this light, whatever our Finance Minister announced in his Union Budget 2011-12 had no meat with respect to restoration of food grain stock; neither was any attempt made to address the expected inflation that may creep in within the next few months. Leave aside announcing new plans to enhance food production and modernizing the dilapidated godowns, the FM didn’t even announce any concrete plans for speedy implementation of those agriculture development initiatives that were announced in the previous budget!

What he did instead was to call for Lord Indra to shower his blessing to ensure that agriculture productivity is not hampered due to inadequate rainfall. Of course, other than praying for Lord Indra, he also committed a few hundred crores towards pulses, milk, eggs, vegetables and other agri-commodities, but then provided no support system to boost their productivity and irrigation. And it is not that this is fact is unknown to him that China has dramatically improved its irrigation systems since the last couple of decades and is investing $2 billion annually to upkeep the standards. Additionally, this year, the Chinese government is planning to invest another 20 billion yuan ($293 million) for improving water irrigation and safety projects. And all this when around 50 per cent of China’s arable land is now irrigated – in comparison to just 30 per cent of total arable land in India. No wonder, our gross agriculture output is still a mere 40 percent of that of China! That apart, in his address, there was not even a single occasion where our FM announced any concrete plans to bring a second round of green revolution, an issue has almost become a national imperative now.

Moving from agriculture to the second issue that has been haunting the country all-year round – corruption and black money. It requires no statistical analysis to establish that corruption and scams can only be addressed by a strong judiciary and judicial reforms. Again, in this budget, as a sign of mere tokenism, Rs 1500 crores has been allocated for the judiciary, which includes setting up of rural and e-courts. No announcements were made to provide courts with special powers or creating special courts to fasten the judicial process. Same goes for black money. To address the whole issue on black money, the FM announced a five-fold strategy, but no strategy to get back the money already stashed abroad. For records, it’s primarily due to corruption and a perforated judicial system that our country has managed to stash an obscene figure of 1.4 trillion dollars in various tax havens. In fact, a brief glance through the budget speech indicates that Pranabda spoke six paragraphs on black money but found it inadequate to draft a single para to contain it, or to bring back the money from tax havens.

Amidst this entire half-backed and gloomy policies announcement, what came as silver lining was the noble move of direct cash subsidy. Disbursing subsidy in the form of cash will not only reduce leakages in the chain but will also allow the subsidy to reach the right target audience. This should act as a strong foundation for clean pilferage-free future. The next announcement that brought in some sign of relief was the access of one lakh crore rupees’ credit facilities to farmers at just 4 per cent interest. But then, as it happened during the previous farm loan waiver scheme, there is high probability that this gain will get cornered by the rich and big farmers and the poor farmers will remain marginalized. As such, the fact is that a poor farmer is subject to northwards of 12 per cent for his loan, whereas in cities, we’re able to get car loans at 8-9 per cent. What a dichotomy and what a shame!

Finally, there has been an intense debate that this budget has been biased towards the male community as tax exemptions have been provided only to them. It is unfortunate that the popular media focused on tax concessions as a key component of the entire budget, while such concessions help only the top 2% of the population. Incidentally, this is the very same population which also forms a majority of the television audience, and also are the potential tax payers. By doing this, the key issues which affect the nation as a whole got conveniently sidelined!

And at the end, what came as a shocker was the FM’s announcement of the creation of a new very-senior citizen category to provide them with exemption and concession. The fact is that there are very few fortunate Indians who would live up to the 80s leave alone the 90s as most Indians either die well before reaching this age bracket or spend their entire lives on hospital beds waiting for death. For records, we have around 17 per cent of people who die before the age of 45; any Indian’s average life expectancy is just 64 years. Also, we are a nation where the majority constitute the working class and thus retire at the age of 60 with hardly any scope for further income. Thus, such concessions would only benefit the super rich class, where people manage to live longer and have wealth and income that comes under the tax bracket.

Dear Pranabda, in a budget where you provisioned less than 0.5 per cent of the entire budget on health, how can you expect people to live till 80 to avail of those benefits? You should have first given a way for Indians to live till the age of 80, before declaring tax concessions for them.

DO DOONI CHAAR BUDGET WHY AND HOW WE MUST SAVE FARMERS AND AGRICULTURE TO SAVE INDIA

2011-02-22T13:11:00.003+05:30

The movie Do Duni Chaar higlighted the power of simple truths & facts. This Alternative Budget based on agriculture is dedicated to Indians who deserve a less catchy & more simple theme

Often, the most profound and transformational changes can be achieved by taking simple and easy decisions that are usually very hard to take. Those simple decisions become hard to take because we – particularly more so in India – have this inexplicable and inexcusable habit of trying our best to avoid reality; to blink and look the other way even when harsh realities stare at us unblinkingly. While brainstorming for the multiple award winning movie Do Dooni Chaar, we were very clear that the lead characters must be confronted with choices that are gut wrenching even though they appear simple. I personally think the movie touched a chord with people across India because it highlighted the power of simple truths and simple facts; and because it enabled ordinary Indians to transcend obstacles by sticking to simplicity, honesty and integrity; and most importantly because the characters had the guts to face facts and reality as they are and call a spade a spade. We could have loaded Do Dooni Chaar with liberal doses of jargon, semantics, polemics, clichés, grandstanding and dissembling. I am proud that our team didn’t succumb to such temptations.

I have spent days reliving the Do Dooni Chaar experience as I struggle to think of a theme that will become the highlight of my eleventh consecutive Alternative Budget; the sixth time in as many years that this magazine will showcase it on its cover. The three previous themes of my Alternative Budget proved to be a major hit with thousands of readers and opinion makers. All three had a touch of ‘naughty’ in them. In 2008, we had asked the Finance Minister to ‘Ban the Budget’. In 2009, we showcased India’s seeming helplessness in fighting corruption by requesting the Finance Minister to present a ‘Khao Aur Khilao Budget’. And in 2010, I do admit we decided to ride on the immense popularity of that blockbuster – and yet eye opening movie – by presenting ‘A Budget for Three Idiots’. This time around, some colleagues suggested that we ride the Cricket World Cup fever and call my 2011 Alternative Budget the ‘De Ghoomake Budget’. There is little doubt that the theme would have been catchy, and even rib tickling. Eventually, what persuaded me not to opt for the obviously popular and catchy theme is the kind of Indians this Alternative Budget is dedicated to. And the realization that those Indians deserve a less catchy and more simple, yet powerful theme. Hence the decision to call my 11th Alternative Budget the Do Dooni Chaar Budget. (Of course, some colleagues were insisting I call it the Do Dooni Paanch Budget as a tribute to Indian politicians!).

REVISITING LAL BAHADUR SHASTRI: JAI JAWAAN JAI KISAAN
Before I go any further, let me add here that this Alternative Budget is dedicated to that most unsung and unheralded of Indian politicians who personified the power of simplicity – Lal Bahadur Shastri. Yes, it is dedicated to the man who coined the term ‘Jai Jawaan, Jai Kisaan’ and made it immortal. Sadly – like most things in India – even this immortal term has been systematically degraded down into a tired cliché that people spout more out of indifferent rote than any conviction...

The simple fact is that India has degraded the Indian farmer into a comic book cliché at best and a disgustingly treated step child at worst. The simpler, and more glaring fact is that unless the Indian farmer and Indian agriculture participate in economic well being and prosperity, India doesn’t have much of a future, either as an economy or as a nation. In fact, along with education and health, the most neglected area for every single Finance Minister since 1947 has been agriculture. The disgraceful neglect of the three is the most important reason why India ranks near the bottom in virtually all indicators of human development. My alternative budgets in the last few years have repeatedly pointed out and suggested innovative ways in which India can improve its dismal record on health and education. This year, the Alternative Budget will focus on the Indian farmer and Indian agriculture.

Of course, if you go by recent media reports, I might just have picked up the wrong topic to highlight this year. After all, statistics reveal that the agriculture sector will grow at about 5.5% in the current year; one of the best performances in recent years. In fact, it is the unusually high rate of growth of the agriculture sector that will ensure that the GDP of India grows at a healthy 8.6% in the current year. Then again, the media has been filled for months with screaming headlines about high and persistently rising prices of food and vegetables. Who can forget the shock – both to the psyche and family budgets – caused by onion prices shooting up to Rs.90 a kg in recent times? If you do go to the market to buy vegetables, you must have realized that prices of every item have virtually gone through the roof. Add to this the jingoistic claims made by our policy makers that India ranks in the top 5 globally when it comes to the production of food, vegetables, milk, poultry, cotton, tea and what not.

But as many of you know, the reality is starkly different, and shocking. Let me start with data compiled by the Na- tional Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The latest year for which data is available is 2009. In that one year, 17,638 farmers committed suicide – one almost every half hour. The state that took the lead – as always – in the numbers of farmer suicides was Maharashtra, the state to which our Union Agriculture Minister and current cricket Czar proudly belongs (See Chart). The top three states in terms of farmer suicides are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – one ruled by Congress in alliance with the Pawar led NCP, the second ruled by Congress and the third ruled by the BJP. In less than 15 years since official NCRB records were kept (state governments never bothered to keep proper records of farmer suicides till 1997), more than 2,50,000 farmers have committed suicide. You can be sure that the figure for 2010 will be higher, and that for 2011 even higher. Worse, everybody involved in this dirty and shocking numbers game knows that state governments routinely ignore or under report cases of farmer suicides. The actual figure is bound to be much higher. There can be no more damning indictment of our economic policy making and successive union budgets than this simple, stark and shocking fact about the extent of farmer suicides.

There would be little doubt that a large reason for this is the extent of indebtedness of farm households across India. ‘Reliable’ data for the same are available only from the National Sample Survey No. 59 of 2003. In that survey, Andhra topped the charts with more than 80% of farm households being indebted (Around that time, Andhra had also acquired the dubious reputation as the number one farmer suicide state of India). In the same period, 61% of farm households in Kerala, 65% in Karnataka, 51% in Madhya Pradesh, 74% in Tamil Nadu and 55% in Maharashtra were found to be indebted. Things and times have changed since then and independent research now suggests that Maharashtra, Andhra and Karnataka now lead the table in indebtedness of farmers. They also happen to be the top states when it comes to farmer suicides.

BEYOND FARMER SUICIDES
There is a larger picture that is hidden behind these numbers; and that is the shameful neglect of the agriculture sector by the Government of India, and by successive finance ministers of the country, though they all regularly pay lip service to the cause of the farmer. The most telling indicator of this is shockingly declining levels of investment in this crucial sector. One particular set of data shows how pathetic the situation is. During 1980-81, the share of Gross Capital Formation (GCF) in agriculture out of total GCF was just about 18%. Now, 18% for a sector on which close to two thirds of the total population depend on livelihoods is bad enough. What happens subsequently is worse. The percentage keeps falling steadily since then and by the end of the 20th century, it is a pathetic 5.8% (See Chart). Even as the Indian farmer has suffered ignominy after ignominy, the government has kept on reducing investments in agriculture. By the time, the UPA came to power in 2004, there was a lot of talk of turning things around. And, during the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007- 12), there was talk of a substantial increase in investments in agriculture. The two finance ministers since 2004, P. Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee have used every Budget speech they have given to announce more and more fancy schemes for the farmer and the agriculture sector. In fact, it was proudly announced that the allocation for agriculture and allied sectors in the 11th Five Year Plan was raised to Rs.50,924 crores, up from Rs.21,068 crore during the 10th Five Year Plan. Yet, the mid term review of the 11th Five Year Plan officially admits that the share of agriculture and allied sectors in total plan allocation has not budged a millimeter from the 2.4% it was in earlier five year plans. So much for the government claims about really caring for the farmer and trying its best to bring about a transformation in Indian agriculture.

There are some more shocking facts that I would like to highlight about agriculture. The first is the abysmal performance of India as compared to other countries when it comes to productivity. Even the top states of the country in terms of productivity, Punjab and Haryana, perform very badly when compared to China and quite pathetically when it comes to countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia and the United States, to name just a few countries (See Chart). But let’s not confine ourselves to the usual comparisons and go on a spree of belittling India by merely comparing it with other countries that have delivered performances that should make our politicians and policy makers hang their heads in shame. Let us look only at statistics from within India to understand why agriculture is facing such an unprecedented crisis.

We all knew that the Green Revolution was a reality by the 1970s and India had finally broken out of the famine trap by then. We also know how politicians, policy makers and analysts keep reminding us of the wonders of Green Revolution and how it made India self sufficient when it comes to food. That much is true. But what is hardly ever talked about in policy circles and the media – barring some honorable exceptions – is how Green Revolution is history and how all the fruits of that endeavour have already been frittered away. Between 1980 and 1990, the average annual growth in the per hectare yield of wheat was a commendable – if not spectacular – 3.1%. During the period from 1990 to 1999, the growth rate in yield declined heavily to 1.83 %. Worse, between 2000 and 2009, the average annual yield growth rate in wheat crashed to a meager 0.68%. Everybody knows that spectacular growth in wheat production and yield was one of the highlights of the Green Revolution. Even official data now clearly indicates that growth has almost completely tapered off . Rice has not performed much better. During the 1980 to 1990 decade, average annual growth rate in yield was 3.19%; it crashed to 1.34% during the next decade before recovering marginally to 1.61% during 2000-2009. This steady and consistent decline in the growth rate of yields is the principal reason why India lags so miserably behind other major nations when it comes to farm productivity. And it is also the major reason why farm incomes have not been going up in a manner they should.

Look at it another way. In the 60 years between 1950 and 2010, food grain production went up by a factor of 4.5. In the same period, production of steel went up by 65 times; the output of cement soared by about 60 times and the generation of electricity went up by more than 140 times (Just for your information, agriculture accounted for 31% of total electricity consumed in India in 1995. By 2008, the share had crashed to 24%). Interestingly, even the consumption of fertilizers – used only in agriculture – went up by more than 70 times in 50 years between 1960 and 2010 (See Chart).

THE IRRIGATION SCAM: WILL THE CAG PLEASE TAKE NOTE?
The obvious question we would ask is: Why are yields in agriculture stagnating even though there is such a massive increase in fertilizer consumption? The blame lies entirely with the government and successive finance ministers. And we can dig up numerous instances of how policy makers in India have neglected, ignored and degraded agriculture in India. But just one example will suffice. I will take the liberty of quoting former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram when he presented the first UPA budget back in 2004. He said, “The Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP) was introduced in 1996- 97 and was allotted large funds year after year. Yet, out of 178 large and medium irrigation projects that were identified, only 28 have been completed.” Chidambaram went on to announce how irrigation and the completion of stalled irrigation projects would become the top priority for his government. The fact is, his government has done nothing to change this pathetic situation and was in fact not revealing even more embarrassing statistics about the state of irrigation in India. Recently disclosed official data reveal the following: the government spent more than Rs.1,30,000 crore between 1993 and 1998 on major and medium irrigation projects. In the same duration, the area irrigated by canals (supposed to be fed by major and medium projects) declined from 17.6 million hectares to 15.3 million hectares. Just look at the shocking numbers: successive governments have spent more than Rs.1,30,000 crore on irrigation projects and the actual area under irrigation has fallen (See Chart). We all know where the money must have gone! It’s another scam! More shocking, ‘official’ data indicates that farm area fed by tube wells has gone up by more than 70% in the same period. We all know where the money meant to dig tube wells goes to! Even more shocking, the actual use of groundwater – where farmers use natural ponds, lakes and techniques like water harvesting – has increased by less than 10% in the same period. The simple fact is: there is no money to be made from natural ground water sources!

By know, even these selected morsels of data related to the agriculture sector in India would have convinced even the most cynical that successive finance ministers have played a cruel joke on the Indian farmer. If you add to this tale of calumny the equally shocking neglect on the front of human development indicators like education, health, sanitation and basic infrastructure like roads and electricity, it is clear that Indian politicians, politicians – and even the media – don’t care a fig about the Indian farmer and Indian agriculture. I have given data on the pathetic access rural Indians have to education, health and infrastructure many number of times in the past to recount it again in detail. Suffice to say that 85% of Indians below the poverty line including about 45% below the destitution line (the government’s definition of the poverty line at 400 rupees per head per month) live in villages; that almost 60% of rural India is illiterate and more than 75% of rural households don’t have access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation.

This alleged concern for the poor and the aam aadmi would have been a joke were it not such a cruel travesty. And I think, it is now the historic duty of the Finance Minister to redress such wrongs as fast as possible. The honourable Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is well aware that the Marxists will be decisively thrown out of power from West Bengal in elections very soon after he presents his budget. He would also know that voters-mostly farmers and rural households-have got fed up of the lies and false promises of the Marxists who claimed to care for the poor and the downtrodden. So, I would think it makes even electoral sense for Pranabda to start doing simple Do Dooni Chaar kind of things in his budget, if the Congress is serious about its belief that Rahul Gandhi is destined to be the Prime Minister after Lok Sabha elections in 2014. Quite simply, his priorities should be simple and stark: lets rescue and revive the Indian farmer both from the trap of low productivity-low incomes and poor education & health and unemployability in the 21st century except as virtual bonded labour in NREGA programs.

SAVING THE INDIAN FARMER
In keeping with the Do Dooni Chaar theme, I would like to keep my suggestions simple, and short. My Alternative Budget would address two issues: raise productivity in agriculture so that incomes of farmers rise at least moderately, if not as fast as the denizens of Shining India; equally important, provide quality education and health care to children of farmers so that they can compete with other Indians for both jobs and entrepreneurship skills in the next decade. Both can be achieved with simple steps; all it needs is political vision, administrative integrity and that simple-but oft en tough-job of calling a spade a spade. And I can lay down those steps in just a few paragraphs that will follow.

Quite obviously, a lot of money is required for what I am proposing. The farmer and his world have been so badly neglected for so long that only a massive increase in resources can begin to make him catch up. And we don’t need or want the kind of false promises made earlier by previous governments and finance ministers – like the one about doubling Plan allocations for agriculture during the 11th Five Year Plan only to admit later that the sector still accounts for 2.4% of Plan allocations despite tall talk, grandstanding, polemics and clichés.

In the Union Budget presented for 2010-11, the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had allocated a total of Rs.12,836 crore; up from Rs.10,527 crore in 2009-10 for agriculture, allied activities and irrigation. Add that fancy term ‘rural development’ and you get a total Budget allocation of about Rs.67,000 crore. That is less than 15% of the total funds allocated by the Finance Minister in 2010-11. And this is despite the stated concern of the UPA government about the distress being faced by rural India – which is the real India.

In my Alternative Budget, firstly I would therefore increase the allocation for the Rural Indian – mainly farmers – by a straightforward Rs.100,000 crore a year. The obvious question is why? Well, everything has to be in some context. And the context here is that rural India needs 150 million jobs to be created. As a committed government our aim should be to do this in a span of 5 years and not 65 years. Thus, we have to create 30 million jobs a year. In rural India still a job can be created by investing about Rs.33,750 per job. This would mean the necessity for an additional I,00,000 crore per year. Half of the money would be invested every year towards improving physical infrastructure in rural India – including effective irrigation facilities, better and functional roads, a vast network of cold storages and regular supply of electricity. The other half would be every year towards improving social infrastructure in rural India – including much better access to education, health and sanitation. The first would lead to a dramatic improvement in productivity in rural India and result into vastly superior income levels for farmers. The second would lead to a dramatic improvement in human development indicators in rural India. And both will create jobs, removing the massive rural unemployment from India.

Do I care about the 5% top Indians and the corporate sector? Frankly speaking I don’t. With about 85% of Indians living in poverty its time we worked genuinely for them. So this alternate budget is for our farmers and poor. And poor live in cities too. So I would suggest another 1,20,000 crores to be allocated for 25 million jobs to be created for the urban unemployed. In urban India the cost of creating a job dramatically multiplies to about Rs.2,40,000 per head. Thus, to create 5 million jobs per year, we would require the amount I just mentioned.

The urban poor need another thing apart from employment. They need dignity of existence so that another Slumdog Millionaire is not made on India by western imperialists. For that we need to budget another additional Rs.24,000 crore per year for five years to create 15 million urban flats of minimum 250 sq. feet each.

Though I don’t want to care much about urban India in this budget, since Pranabda will in any case do enough; yet I want to focus on one burning issue of this year. Corruption. And the only and only solution for corruption is a functional judicial system. Corruption and greed are globally prevalent, yet it touches far less lives in the USA than in India simply because the American judicial system is functional and ours is dysfunctional. In America they have ten times more judges per million people than in India. If we are to try and achieve such standards we need to have about 1,00,000 more judges. It sounds huge but is surely achievable again in a span of five years. And to have 20,000 additional judges per year we have to budget for approx. Rs.6,000 crores per year additionally assuming that the expenses around a judge and his office assistants put together is definitely not more than Rs.30,00,000 per year.

Thus the total additional funds required is about Rs.2,50,000 crores. First and foremost, these funds should have been made available from our existing budget of more than 6,00,000 crores since it pertains to 85% Indians. Secondly, a huge amount of these funds will come from duplication of allocation in various schemes like NREGA etc. However, I will assume the government is not willing to do so and the entire fund has to be generated through new sources. So how do we do that?

HOW THE FUTURE WILL ARRIVE
In keeping with the simple is best philosophy of Do Dooni Chaar, I will firstly suggest just one very simple and long overdue revenue raising proposal – just do away with the subsidies on LPG, Kerosene and Diesel. They have led to huge distortions in the economy and have absolutely not benefited the so called beneficiaries for whom the subsidies were allegedly meant. Rather, you have cases where honest officials being burnt alive when they have tried to stop the theft of subsidized kerosene. In 2010- 11, the combined subsidy for all three would amount to a little less than Rs.100,000 crore. As simple as that. Just one decision from Pranabda after consultations with Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh could make it happen.

The second source, I will suggest, is legalizing all the black money stashed abroad by giving a simple 10% tax payable in five equal installments of a mere 2% each! With two key riders. First, that government will take genuine steps to recover the money stashed abroad and all black money recovered after one year will be nationalized. And second, that there will be measures in place to ensure that future generation of black money becomes almost impossible. And of course, with a functional judiciary, no one will go unpunished. With something as high as an estimated Rs.75,00,000 crores stashed abroad, this will lead us to a huge new revenuestream of a minimum of Rs.7,50,000 crore in five years – or Rs.1,50,000 crore per year, making up for the balance required to my proposals into action.
Of course, in the longer run, we will have to devise simple and innovative ways to ensure that the funds allocated for the farm sector are used properly and effectively. And the only way to do that is by truly empowering the beneficiaries. In my 2006 and 2010 alternative budgets, I had argued that the government must spend huge amounts of money on popularizing the use of the Right to Information Act so that Indian citizens can monitor the performance of programs and schemes that are meant to benefit them. More specifically, in my ‘Budget for Three Idiots’ in 2010, I had actually suggested a novel and innovative carrot and stick approach to ensure better performance of social welfare schemes. My logic was simple – even corrupt Indian officials are human beings and will respond to the right incentives. For example, I had suggested a Rs.1 lakh incentive per year for teachers who delivered the best ‘pass’ and ‘retention’ rates in village schools. The total annual expenditure for such a scheme would amount to just Rs.5,000 crores across India. Of course, the rider I had added was this: the Rs.1 Lakh incentive would be disbursed only after 5 years when it has been proven that the teacher has been genuinely successful. The prospect of an additional income of Rs.1 lakh per year, along with appreciation and admiration of peers, would be a great incentive for teachers to compete amongst themselves to deliver the best results. I had also suggested in that Budget that NREGA funds be used to construct schools and health care centers with labourers whose children would actually use them working on them.

I would extend the same logic to all projects, programs and schemes operating in rural India. For instance, engineers working on rural road construction would earn huge cash incentives if ‘their’ roads are good and remain functional even after a few monsoons. Of course, I would use the stick too: assets of all those teachers, engineers, doctors and other government officials who demonstrably fail to deliver results would be frozen. This might sound Utopian right now. But believe me, it will not be very difficult to implement once the UIAD project is completed in the near future. In the long run, the UIAD project and the right education policy would ensure that children from villages would emerge as teachers, doctors, engineers, supervisors, overseers and technicians who would look after cold storages, electricity lines, irrigation projects, road maintenance and repairs and the delivery of health, education and sanitation. I am utterly confident that this can all happen in just 10 years. Of course, it would take enormous political will to take these simple steps.

Some of you might feel a sense of anti-climax at this moment. But as I explained right at the beginning of this piece, the simplest and most powerful steps do not take lengthy arguments, clichés, jargon and polemics to be argued. Just think about it. No one can deny that the Indian farmer needs to share spoils of globalization. What happens if farm productivity in India touches the level of China? The annual income of the Indian farm sector would simply double very quickly. This would have a huge impact on the other sectors of the economy as well, and India’s GDP can actually grow at a rate much faster than 10% every year. The truth of it all is that, in the real sense, it is also going to benefit the corporate sector immensely. For once the poor have purchasing power, it is the corporate sector which will reap the benefits like the Chinese corporations are doing.

The real question is: will our system make an effort to go back to the Do Dooni Chaar ways or stick with the current obsession with Do Dooni Paanch?

HANG KASAB TILL DEATH. ON 21ST FEBRUARY 2011, THIS MUST BE THE VERDICT

2011-02-18T09:44:00.019+05:30

As I went through the shocking footages of the hotel cameras which reveal what went on inside the Taj on 26/11 (made public now for the first time as an exclusive by The Sunday Indian – read the cover story that follows), my blood boils once again in rage. Rage against Pakistan, rage against our spineless government which allowed it to happen and though there can be no justice at all for what happened, I demand that Kasab be hanged immediately.

Shocking and Exclusive from the The Sunday Indian:
26/11 snaps from hidden cameras inside Taj.
To check them out Log on now to
http://facebook.com/Chaudhuri.Arindam

I fail to understand what more does the Government of India need to punish Ajmal Kasab, who was caught red handed, causing mayhem in Mumbai on 26th of November 2008. More so, at a point in time where across the globe, governments have a zero tolerance policy towards terrorism! Such is the extent of intolerance that if on one extreme, the United States of America, under the guise of global terrorism, carried on their hidden agendas and devastated Afghanistan and Iraq, then on the other, Israel, without batting an eyelid, launches its offensive on the least instigation from Palestine. Why go so far? Look what the Sri Lankan government did to LTTE – an outfit which had earned the reputation of being the most dangerous terrorist outfit in the world was uprooted in a matter of days! And here, first we allow Ajmal Kasab and nine others to reach the shores of our country freely, we also allow them to mercilessly take invaluable innocent lives and destroy valuable property, we manage to kill nine of them, finally catch one of them and then keep him guarded for 646 days, without any punishment for reason that fails any sane mind! Specially as the memories of that unfortunate day gets revised through the following pages.

For the records, Ajmal Kasab’s trial ‘officially’ began on the April 15, 2009 and the final verdict is tentatively slated to be announced on February 21, 2011 - a total of 646 days. And mind you, if at all the verdict is passed, about which I have my doubts! What is most insane is that unlike other nations, where in similar cases no one bothers about witnesses or evidences and verdicts are straightaway passed with no consideration whatsoever, in our case, not only did we have enough evidence including the CCTV footages that caught Kasab live in action and live telecast of his movement across all news channels, but Kasab himself accepted all the charges brought against him in the court - and yet the Indian government chose to run a trial on him, instead of hanging him straight!! Furthermore, we have all circumstantial and forensic evidences to prove the same. Yet the Indian government manages to let him go unpunished for all these days!! And like every Indian, I ask: for what has he been kept alive? Is it to make his defence lawyer the most sought-aft er criminal lawyer of India? Or is it to create a poster boy image out of Kasab? And if this is the intention of the Indian government, then I must say that they have been fairly successful!!! Otherwise, where else on the earth does a terrorist, who shot down 166 innocent people and was part of a full-fledged terror attack plot against the Republic of India, not only go unpunished till date but is being served mutton biryani, is given access to newspaper and is provided with his choice of clothing - the latest fetish being wearing a Kurta Payjama. And mind you, it is from the same government who serves other inmates substandard food, two sets of black and white striped dresses and dump them in the middle of most inhumane conditions and that too on account of petty crimes! Also not to forget, that it is the same government, who in the name of bulletproof jackets, served death coffins to its forces, which went on to kill one of the few capable police officers in the same attack!

Honestly, keeping Kasab alive speaks volumes about the indecisive and spineless attitude of our government. And it is not that our government has proven this just to its own citizens. The message has, more dangerously, been conveyed to various terrorist outfits who, by now, know very well that the Indian Government does not have any spine, no matter what they do! And what is worse is that by keeping Kasab alive, the Indian Government has potentially increased the probability of another 26/11, or another IC-814 horror! With all my intention of reiterating, it was again owing to the let-go attitude of Indian Government that the Indian Airlines Airbus A300, en route to Indira Gandhi International Airport from Tribhuvan International Airport on December 24 of 1999, was hijacked to Kandahar with 178 people on board. Th at hijacking led to the release of terrorists like Maulana Masood Azhar (played an active role in the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and later was part of the 26/11 plot), Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (who went on to murder Daniel Pearl) and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar (upon release, he started recruiting and training terrorists in Pakistan-administered Kashmir), in lieu of the hostages! Contrast this to what happened during the Moscow theatre hostage crisis, also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege! And the way the Russian government’s no nonsense attitude towards terrorist demands set an example in front of their countrymen! Same was the case with the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis.

Keeping everything aside, it is needless to state that when it comes to national security, nothing else can be a priority for any government! But in this Kasab episode, it is also intriguing to analyse the economics of keeping Kasab alive for so long! It is estimated that the Maharashtra government has spent a whopping Rs 31 crore in the first one year of Kasab’s arrest. From creating a bullet-proof cell in the JJ Hospital premises (which was never used) to visits by around 24 doctors for his various ailments in the period of just one year - the Maharashtra government did it all! As if this was not enough, this celebrity-terrorist was provided with an imported van costing Rs 6 crore - which got stolen as soon as it reached India. Up and above all this, the Mumbaikars, who had already had enough on account of the 26/11 mayhem, had to bear the delay in newly proposed water pipelines near Arthur Road Jail, which cost BMC another Rs 12 crore while the rerouting of the monorail dented the government’s coffers by another Rs 44 crore – all this on account of security reasons! A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that around Rs 100 crore was spent in just one year on Kasab, who came in and destroyed public property worth Rs 41.72 crore! In short - Kasab made our government spend more than what he destroyed. In simple words, Kasab’s upkeep roughly equals to two 26/11s (and counting...).

In this entire Kasab saga which has gradually unfolded, it has been proven again that at best our government is good at condemning the assailants, facilitating the martyrs, compensating the victims, addressing the nation with a false hope and if by chance some terrorist gets arrested – holding him alive till another terror negotiation takes place. And if by chance the negotiation does not happen then there is red carpet waiting to be rolled out to join the Indian Parliament!!! It is just that Ajmal Kasab is from Pakistan. Otherwise, he had all requisite credentials to contest the next elections (just in case we are forgetting Abu Salem)!

I won't waste any more words. Just read the following pages and realise for yourself that a verdict to hang Kasab is the least we can do for those who lost their lives during 26/11. On February 21st the verdict must be “Hang Kasab till death”.

The government must bring back all the black money stashed abroad and stop corruption; else, Indian streets might soon look like those of Egypt

2011-02-11T06:00:00.000+05:30

Although it is popularly known as a global predicament and India’s biggest, yet nothing is being done about it. I am asked almost everyday, in particular by my online friends on Facebook and other online communities, to write on it. Yes, I am referring to black money and the black hole that our reprehensible politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen collectively have created of this nation. To an extent that there is no other nation which has been looted by its own unscrupulous countrymen, as much as India has been shamelessly looted; and this insidious saga continues on an everyday basis. As per very well researched reports, Indians have stashed away as black money abroad a total amount of money, which is more than our entire national income. The figures are to the tune of an unbelievably staggering $1450 billion of unaccounted money in various foreign banks! And India happens to be the largest account holder of black money abroad. At the second place is Russia with less than a third of the Indian amount at around $470 billion, with UK coming at the third place with $390 billion. The fourth country, Ukraine, has only $100 billion, while at the fifth place is China with $96 billion looking comparatively so clean and holy. That's the unbelievable comparative corruption that our political and business class have been a part of. But then, all of this did not and cannot happen overnight. In fact, for the past sixty years, we have successfully created a system which has allowed people with unending appetite for wealth to systematically siphon off money to closely-held secret accounts in Switzerland and various tax havens globally.

The inculpated seeds of this were sowed during the second five year plan and in such a flawed and inauthentic manner that corruption almost got institutionalized, and generation of black money became a natural extension. In an attempt to make an industrialized India which is self sufficient, the policy framework was drafted around industrial licensing, price controls and import barriers. Though the framework was logical on paper, and had great pedigree of success in erstwhile USSR in the 1920s under the leadership of Stalin – a similar model was simultaneously showing results in China as well under the aegis of Mao – what we forgot was that our pimply political setup was unlike that of the then USSR or China. As a result, though the vainglorious plan was to make India self sufficient, our scabbed policies heretically only went on to make select industrial houses, bureaucrats and politicians self-sufficient at the cost of and to the nation. Industrial licenses were doled out to industrial houses that did not have any track record or any other credibility, other than their proximity to the underhanded political leadership. Ergo, incompetent industrial houses were awarded licenses; and on account of lack of competition, they kept ruling through their quisling political connections and illicit black money. Political parties, in order to keep themselves in power, increasingly got criminalized; and this even got financially supported by funding from the industrial houses. With time, the criminalization in politics gained gigantic proportions and an evil nexus between business, criminalized politicians and the rentier class babus, ran mayhem across the country, making corruption a way of life in India and making national loot their personal obsession!

Amongst all the three classes mentioned above, it is the gangrened political class which has been the biggest offender as not only have flagitious politicians plundered for themselves but they have also created an enabling looting environment for the enterprise to thrive. Estimates published by various media groups reveal that in 1967-68, black money circulating in the country was Rs 3,034 crores, which increased to Rs 46,867 crores by 1979. In simple words, from 9 per cent of GDP in 1968, black money accounted for 49 per cent of GDP by the end of 1979. And mind you, that was thirty years back! And it is no secret that both the frequency and magnitude of scams have only multiplied with every passing year! Back in the 1980s there were just eight scams; this figure grew to 26 in 1990s, and now this has seen an exponential increase to touch a figure of 150! Such has been the abysmal and ulcerated level of ethics that the vice-laden political class has left no stone unturned to extract their pound of flesh from every possibility, so what if it is animal fodder, coffins of soldiers, or real estate meant for martyrs. So if on one hand there is this feloniously devious Chief Minister who sells the resources of our most mineral rich state as if the same were his own, then on the other another bootlegging Chief Minister goes about misappropriating residential flats which were meant for Kargil martyrs. And if this wasn’t enough, a double-dealing man who considered Indian sports as his personal fiefdom, through CWG, misappropriated tens of thousands of crores. And even if all this was not enough, a knavishly malfeasant politician at the national level, without caring for national security, sold telecom licenses as if he owned them, at an iniquitous price which cost the exchequer and the nation Rs. 1,70,000 crores – with no trace of this money yet. No wonder, when Global Financial Integrity (GFI) in its recent report concluded that around $19 billion is lost in India as black money each year, we all know where the money comes from.

Although as per Transparency International, a whopping 60 per cent of the total black money generated is routed into the electoral process, the obdurate politicians alone do not monopolise this obscene, unending appetite to plunder every bit for their personal gains – they have also systematically created a flaringly vitiated environment wherein even industrial houses can have their own pounds of flesh. Otherwise, knowing the blatantly debauched leakages that repeatedly occur, why would the Indian government still stick to a no-tax-for-long-term-capital-gains policy? Taking advantage of this, degenerate promoters have been raking in crores of rupees by offloading their stake in their own covinous companies and siphoning them off to various surreptitious tax havens across the world! It is almost a known fact that most of this money is getting parked in countries like Mauritius, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands or are stacked in banks of Scandinavian or European countries. And now, even a few Asian countries like Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau are emerging as new destinations for parking illicit funds for Indians. And why should they not – it is free money for them!

If this is not a reality, then how does one justify that Mauritius ranks first among all countries in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to India while its national income is just $8.7 billion, and its investment in the banking sector is just over $1.5 billion? More interestingly, Mauritius has more than 9,000 offshore corporate entities, many of them having roots connected to India. Under Indo-Mauritius treaty, a company resident in Mauritius can sell shares of an Indian company to escape taxes in India as there is no policy of capital gains tax (CGT) in Mauritius – the gain thus escapes tax altogether. Similar are the cases with almost all other nations that have differential taxation. In 2008, around $3,600 million was routed to Singapore and around $2,200 million to Cyprus from India. In April 2009, the Canadian High Commissioner to India acknowledged that against the official Canadian investment into India estimated to be around $239 million, the actual figure would not be less than $10 billion. India loses nothing less than a staggering $1.5 billion collectively, mainly due to individuals trying to dodge taxes back home. Many promoters of Indian companies exploit firms located in tax havens to fraudulently augment their share prices domestically, illegally channelise funds into tax havens and then later bring them back as FDIs and other forms of investments. And if all this is not true, then how do we justify that the total market capitalization of a handful of companies listed in BSE and NSE is more than the Indian GDP? And mind you, a couple of them in this list have market capitalization figures that are almost 25 percent of the Indian GDP!

This saga of blatant extortion and shameless plundering does not just stop here. Whatever is left in the form of putrefied morsels is also being scavenged, starting from the conscienceless babu to the amoral peon, and that too from the poorest of the poor! A study reveals that 50 million BPL (below the poverty line) households pay bribe worth Rs 9000 crores to get their work done. So be it the police, health education, employment in form of NREGA, land records etc – every possible avenue is exploited to extract money for personal gains and then siphoned off to offshore locations!

It is so unfortunate that nations like Switzerland are thriving on our money; and today, when they are ready to cooperate, the perfidious government is reluctant to get the black money back and disclose the names of the perpetrators! Understandably so! In fact, nations like Germany went to an extent of paying $6.3 million to LGT group in Liechtenstein for purchasing bank data to track down tax evasion. In 2009, US tied up with the Swiss government in a move that allowed US to access to 4,450 secret accounts in UBS. In spite of 18 years of long struggle, Nigeria managed to get back $700 million. Similarly, Philippines got back $700 million and Mexico $74 million!

It’s time now for India. The government has made a big statement that the black money lying abroad belongs to Indians; and that it will be brought back. Sadly, all this is nothing but mere suppurate lip service. If the government is serious about the issue, it should give a deadline and put an honest breed of people to work independently to get the money back. On one hand, the government claims that they say they will get it all back. On the other hand, while the Swiss government is ready to share the data of money kept in accounts there, the censurable Indian government is quite shamelessly not ready to ask for those details. Clearly, if the government had been serious about this, they could have easily got all the details by now. My question is, what is the reason why the government is not getting the money back? Are they aberrantly waiting for all black money-holders, including themselves, to shift the money to Dubai where the secrecy laws are still very stringent? Evidently, once they have successfully managed that, perhaps then they’ll display ubér haste in asking the Swiss government to reveal all – when the Swiss government will be left with nothing to reveal. The coming times will give the readers the answer. But one thing is for sure. If this jaundiced and venal government doesn’t take action soon, the time is not far away when an Egypt will happen in India. And I hope the peccant people in power are listening.

How the Arab uprising is a "Change of Civilisation" and how it brings an end to the American double standards. Also what India must learn

2011-02-04T06:00:00.002+05:30

The kind of double standards practiced by America for decades, even as it arrogantly talks about democracy and preaches the virtues of free speech, dissent and human rights to the world from a pulpit, is a shame to say the least. The fact is, be it Latin America, Asia or Africa, America has always supported brutal dictators who have tortured and killed their own citizens in the most horrific manner. Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua and Bolivia are classic examples from Latin America. South Korea and Indonesia were classic examples in Asia; and Pakistan, of course, is the ultimate showcase of American double standards. During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was the foe, American strategic cowboys used to argue that propping up unsavory dictators in strategic pockets was a necessary evil because America had to stop the march of Communism, which apparently was supposed to be far worse when it came to freedom, free speech, dissent and human rights. After the Soviet Union disappeared and Communism was no longer the enemy it was for decades, many had hoped that America would actually help other nations move away from dictatorships and authoritarian regimes to democracies. Sadly, those hopes were belied and crushed when America started citing the Global War on Terror as an excuse to encourage and prop up nasty dictators. Of course, most of these dictators happen to be now in the Arab world whose oil reserves are the real reasons for American interest rather than the mumbo jumbo and nonsense double speak about democracy and human rights.

Many readers of this magazine were not born in 1979 when the first people’s movement swept across a country in West Asia – better known by American strategic cowboys as the Middle East. I am talking about Iran, the country that America is trying very hard to isolate, punish and even pulverize if given half a chance. For decades prior to 1979, the ruler of Iran – the Shah – was a staunch ally of America, as well as of Israel. In fact, the Americans had installed the reign of the Shahs in Iran by happily encouraging a coup against a popular and democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, because that man had refused to bow down to the diktats of Uncle Sam. In comparison, the Shahs were deeply unpopular, extremely authoritarian and ruled Iran ruthlessly with an iron fist – using torture, detention and even murder by its secret service to smother dissent. All of a sudden in 1978, America was caught napping as popular protests by citizens swept through the cities of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini came back from exile and the Shah had to flee Iran in disgrace as the country became an Islamic Republic. Since then, the “staunch ally” Iran has become an implacable enemy of America.

There was a sense of ironic déjà vu as I read with excitement about citizens in Tunisia rising in popular revolt and throwing out the dictator – a staunch American ally who ruled that country ruthlessly for more than two decades. That sense was reinforced when reports started pouring in from other Arab nations about citizens marching on the streets demanding that their hated dictators give up power to the people. Egypt has become a symbol and icon of the suppressed aspirations of millions of Arabs finally finding an outlet. The President Hosni Mubarak – again an American plant – has ruled Egypt like a classic dictator for more than 30 years and. Mubarak was in the process of trying to install his son as the next ruler when the sudden wave of protests engulfed his country. More than the people’s revolt in Tunisia – which actually opened the doors and the floodgates for citizens in other Arab nations – it is Egypt which is causing more sleepless nights in Washington. As of now, Egypt, to use that familiar cliché again, is a staunch ally of America and even a de facto ally of Israel. It is the only major country in the Arab world to have formally diplomatic as well as outwardly cordial relations with Israel. It is also the acknowledged leading nation and leader of the Arab world. What happens in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria has a huge impact on the rest of the Arab world. Of course, citizens in Arab nations have been watching in helplessness, frustration and rage till now as Egypt repeatedly winked at the atrocities committed by Israeli troops against innocent Palestinians in the name of fighting terror. Cables released by WikiLeaks also show that the United States has had no illusions about the regime. Washington and its allies now stand thoroughly exposed for using aid of over $2 billion a year and silence over internal repression to turn Cairo into a crucial agent of their regional policy, particularly in suppressing demands for justice for the Palestinians. The Egyptian people's uprising is showing the world that this highly prized Western ally is utterly devoid of legitimacy. And without doubt, that message will echo through every other dictatorship in the region.

As of right now, a nightmare is haunting Tel Aviv and Washington over the nature of the regime that will take over eventually in Egypt. The best case scenario for the strategic and foreign policy cowboys in America and Israel is a situation in which Egypt evolves from a strong arm dictatorship to a country ruled by a moderate Islamic party like in Turkey. Incidentally, Turkey is yet another staunch ally of America and Israel in that region of the world awash with oil, which is increasingly taking a stand that goes against the stated strategic interests of America and Israel. In the recent past, Turkey even sent a ship on a humanitarian mission to help Palestinians whose life had become a living hell because of a blockade imposed by Israel. That ship was attacked and stormed by Israeli troops, killing Turkish as well as American citizens who were going to Palestine on a mission of peace and empathy. No wonder, relations between Turkey and Israel have soured dramatically after the event and many have even started nursing fond hopes that an ‘Islamic’ Turkey will become the new leader against an Imperial America and its ally Israel. Egypt becoming another Turkey will surely become a headache. But it will be a nightmare if the country falls into the hands of Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood – the organization that gave the Al Qaeda number two Al-Zawahari to the world – take control of the country and emerge as another Iran, implacably hostile to America and Israel. And don’t think for a moment that such a situation will never come to pass. Who had ever dreamt even in 1978 of Iran becoming what it is now in 2011?

No one had thought that citizens of the Arab world, suppressed for so long and denied both political and economic opportunities, would be in a position to rise in revolt against the dictators. But Tunisia showed the way and a firestorm is sweeping across the Arab world. In fact, many analysts are calling this the ‘Soviet Union’ moment for America as history turns full circle in a wickedly ironical way. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, it was at the peak of its military might – an undisputed and arrogant Imperial power that nurtured, nourished and supported the assorted dictators who ran Communist paradises in East Europe. But Afghanistan became a symbol of the limits of Soviet power. It is a known fact that the fiasco in Afghanistan triggered events that led to virtually all dictators being ousted in East Europe and even the Soviet Union eventually disintegrating. Now, America has invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands in a brutal manner using whimsical after whimsical excuse. And it is fighting a war against terrorism in Afghanistan that seems to kill more innocent civilians than actual terrorists. What has started in Tunisia could become the bellwether for America facing its Soviet moment in the Arab world. For too long, it has propped up dictators even as it preached the virtues of democracy and human rights. And now, the people of the Arab world are finally saying enough is enough. The multi-billion dollar question is: will America and Israel accept that it is inevitable for new regimes to emerge in the Arab world, those which would be no longer staunch allies and may actually take stands that would go against the strategic interests of America and Israel? If US and Israel don’t accept the inevitable and instead try once again to stifle the genuine aspirations of the Arab people, there is little doubt that America would earn the undying hatred and enmity of Arabs on the street.

There is a lesson here for India too. In past, by refusing to condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, India lost a huge amount of goodwill in the Arab and the Muslim world that Pakistan exploited brilliantly. Now, the pendulum is swinging the other way and India is taking a public stance against Iran just because the new strategic partner America is pressurizing it to do so. If India needs to earn brownie points in the global image race, there’s no better a chance than now. India must openly support the process that will throw out the dictators of the Arab world – sooner or later. If not, it would have lost many friends and friendships in the Arab world when new regimes inevitably take over.

To me, the uprising in Cairo is nothing short of a civil revolution! And it has the potential to not only transform the political scenario of the Middle East region but also every other region wherein anarchy and dictatorship have been the mainstays! Right now, for example, China's 457 million Internet users (and 180 million bloggers) can no longer use the Chinese word for "Egypt" in microblogs or search engines. Why is China worried about controlling the usage of the word ‘Egypt’ on the net? The government's goal is to pre-empt any contagion effect that popular uprisings against autocracy in the Middle East might have in China, which might inspire the country's ranks of discontented! Although India might not have gone to the extent of China, but our national media too – most certainly in silent conspiracy with the government’s wishes – had been conspicuously silent over the entire issue for a good 10 days. Even now, it is not giving the kind of importance that it should be to the behemoth socio-political upheaval in progress. On the other hand, if we were to benchmark media’s ideal role, then one should be looking up to the Arabic satellite TV channel Al Jazeera, which has been giving rock solid support to people's causes, inspiring Tunisia's brave people who ended Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's 23-year rule, and also going the full distance to support Egyptians. In fact, one needs to admire the overall influential role played by Al Jazeera – the standout voice of aggressive, independent journalism in the Arab world – in channeling popular discontent through the region. Egypt seems to have already shut down the operations of Al-Jazeera – blaming it for encouraging the country's uprising – clearly demonstrating that the repressive powers of the central government are still functioning.

What is important now is how Tunisia’s revolution and Egypt’s uprising are interpreted and implemented, within the country and outside it. Ben Ali’s fall may prove to be an isolated event – each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. Still, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all contain political and demographic ingredients at least as perilous as those that combusted in Tunisia: youthful populations, high unemployment, grotesque inequality, abusive police, reviled leaders, and authoritarian systems that stifle free expression. All I can conclude is that the Arab world has for far too long suffered from religious extremism and dictatorship. In today’s connected world, where every one has similar access to what’s happening across the world, it’s tough to have any repressive religious viewpoint or regime attempting to tie people down for too long! It’s time for the Arab world to accept this reality. This current wave of revolution will not only remove the American backed dictators, but hopefully replace religious extremism by much more moderate values of the kind that will help the Arab world to integrate in a far more democratic manner with the rest of the world – something similar to what Indonesia is attempting. And that, truly, would make it a change of a civilization.

We need a budget for the aam aadmi and not a budget that pleases the aam aadmi

2011-01-28T06:00:00.000+05:30

I am almost one hundred percent sure when I write this that the budget, which our honourable finance minister is going to present before the Parliament next month, is going to be a hugely populist one. Although nothing different from other previous budgets – which were more of political rhetoric than anything else – this time, it is different. This time, it is more of a compulsion for the UPA, which is finding itself cornered with respect to untamable inflation on the one hand, and equally unbeatable corruption cases and scams on the other. Ever since it has come to power in 2004, UPA has never been in such a position ever. A never-ending series of scams that eroded crores of rupees not only tainted the UPA’s political image, but also dented their performance ratings in a big way. If the CWG scam dented the global image of the government – where crores were siphoned-off and the infrastructure promised never came to shape – then the 2G scam broke all records of corruption. As per conservative estimates, the CWG scam was worth more than Rs. 8,000 crores and the 2G scam was to the tune of Rs 1.76 lakh crores. And then there is Wikileaks waiting, which is all set to declare a list of 2000 people, global names who have stashed their cash in Swiss banks. If reports are to be believed, then this exposé would put UPA in a very tight spot!

But even before corruption charges and scams ruled headlines, it has been the food inflation that has been sending tremors all across the nation, with prices of onions touching a historic-high of Rs. 100 per kilo. This was after a series of exorbitant price rises that were seen in commodities like sugar and wheat last year! Further, adding to the woes of the UPA, even the fuel price is experiencing a continuous northward trend.

In fact, it was not just scams and price rise; the last year has been the worst year as far as the performance of the UPA government is concerned. Taking about governance, by the end of August last year, the UPA was not even able to introduce half of the bills, which were due and for which they had made public announcements! In spite of having four parliamentary sessions, UPA was able to introduce only 77 out of promised 190 bills, in which bills like Judges Accountability Bill and the likes didn’t even reach the table. Even the over-hyped bill on food security is yet to see its fate. And to top it up, out of 77 bills introduced, around 50 per cent are yet to be passed! In fact, the PRS Legislative Research shows that around 61 bills introduced by the UPA government between 2004 and 2009 are still pending.

In the given scenario, and also going by precedence, UPA government would leave no stone unturned to exploit its budgetary skills to refurbish its battered and tainted image. In all possibility, the incumbent government would necessarily exploit the forthcoming budget to turn the tables in their favour again. Political history is testimony to the fact that political parties have gleefully abused union budgets to shower the aam-adami with all possible benefits in the veil of economic and social development, just to please him – not necessarily for his long run benefit since in reality, these policies that look impressive and promising at hindsight actually benefit none, and in most cases, get re-directed towards political benefits later. How can one forget the farmers’ loan waiver scheme that only helped a very small pocket of rich farmers?

There is no doubt that UPA would again declare a populist, aam-aadmi centric budget offering people a series of unwarranted sops and subsidies. Exploiting the short term memory of the so-called aam-aadmi (that comprises the great Indian middle class), this budget would definitely focus on pampering this pocket of population. It would be their attempt to corrupt the aam aadmi by pleasing him and by making him a party to the national loot! This is something that they have done in the past and this is something that they would definitely try upon this time as well.

What is worse is that they also know that by bringing in a soft and populist budget, they are in the process of creating a fiscal monster for the future. Particularly at a point in time wherein India needs some assertive and radical measures to consolidate its position at the global level! And the union budget is probably the best platform for the same. But then, who cares. As far as UPA is concerned, they would leave behind a distorted balance sheet of the nation, for its successive rule! And it would be the task of the next government, which comes to power, to manage this menace. Unfortunately in all this, it is the same aam aadmi who would be at the forefront of this budget, who has to bleed to make up for the very same budget in the future!
So Pranab da, here is hopin you deliver a budget for the aam aadmi and his real future; and not just to please him at the cost of the country and the aam aadmi himself!

Even in stampedes, those are our poor who lose their lives

2011-01-21T06:00:00.000+05:30

Sabarimala is considered one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations, so much so that it finds its place in the global list of top pilgrimage sites, sharing space with the Vatican and the Kumbh. Even Forbes Traveler features this destination among its list of the “World’s 10 most popular religious pilgrim centres”. Paradoxically, this pilgrimage destination that attracts around 60 million tourists (both domestic and foreign) annually, has failed to make the site safer for its pilgrims. The recent stampede incident that occurred on January 14, 2011 taking the lives of more than 100 people and injuring several more is not the first one. A similar incident occurred back in 1999, killing more than 50 people. In fact, both the unfortunate incidents occurred precisely on the same very date – January 14. For that matter, January 14 is considered the most auspicious day for visiting this destination; and obviously, that day witnesses the maximum number of footfalls of tourists. A conservative estimate shows that around 10 million people visit this site on this day, thus escalating the probability of such incidents. However, such a ‘probability’ can be completely avoided, considering that it is a well known fact! But then, I fail to understand how organizers could not keep the security and the system foolproof, especially on this particular day! What is more shocking is that in spite of a similar such incident taking the lives of many a decade back, no proper mechanism for safety protocols was established. Even after the past incident of a similar nature, no provisions of proper lighting, regulated traffic management or any form of security systems were put in place! The need for such protocols is an imperative in such sites, especially because the site is steep, quite grassy and sees the maximum movement just before dawn (to watch the Makara Jyothi). Given the timing of the visits and the topography of the site, there is also a crying requirement to study the tourist-carrying-capacity of this site.

Stampedes, for that matter, are neither a recent phenomenon nor only confined to this one site, but are frequent in almost all major pilgrimage destinations of India – ranging from Vaishno Devi to Maha Kumbh – both being the biggest and largest religious tourist hubs of the nation. Back in 2003, hundreds were killed and injured at the Kumbh Mela bathing festival in Maharashtra. Similarly, in 2005, the death toll crossed a few hundreds in Mandhra Devi temple in Maharashtra; in 2008, people died at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh, and at Mahadeva temple and Chamunda Devi temple in Rajasthan. Almost all major tourist destinations (especially pilgrimage sites) have experienced one or the other incident of stampede. Contrast this with the world’s biggest religious tourist hubs viz. the Mecca or the Vatican – such incidents of stampede are very rare in these hubs, and creditably because of proper and scientific implementation of security measures and traffic management protocols.

When it comes to revenues, Sabarimala alone in a period of just one month is able to generate anything between Rs. 60-75 crore; and on an average, its revenues easily cross the figure of Rs. 100 crore annually! For the year 2009, the state of Andhra Pradesh, which houses Tirupathi, alone generated revenue worth Rs. 400 crore! Amidst all these numbers and series of repeated incidents, what gets marginalized is the fact that the major pie of this money comes as a part of petty donations made by the poor and underprivileged. And a major pie of deaths in these stampedes is of these common men only. Simply because when it comes to VIPs and celebs, the whole procedure of security and safety is “re-customized” for their convenience, ensuring that they reach the site safely and faster. Even if an iota of such a system and facility is provided for all those thousands of poor devotees (who virtually ensure that pilgrimage sites sustain on their donations and are able to keep up to their reputations), the death toll would instantly see a southward trend.

In fact, it is not just the organisers who should be held responsible for such mass tragedies, even the state government is equally responsible for such incidents. To top it, even the mainstream media has been unusually silent over this particular incident. The bigger tragedy is that all such irresponsibility and lack of reporting stems from the fact that the people who met their untimely death are from the bottom strata of society! Neither are they significant for any political party, nor do they bring in large individual donations to religious institutions or make any news. So what follows post such tragedies is some meagre compensation, which hardly reaches the kin of the dead; and the news becomes stale! The irony is that the same media, especially the electronic media, goes for full coverage when celebrities visit such places. They shamelessly go to the extent of even covering the colour of the clothes these celebrities wear on such visits – now compare this to the abysmal coverage provided to stampede incidents that remain in headlines merely, if at all, for a few days, consuming only a few hours of electronic media!

To be factual, I did come across a few editorials post the recent incident where the writers’ stances were more towards pointing out the irresponsible behaviour of people. There is a lot of merit in one of their arguments, when they say that people in general become unruly whenever there is a crisis like this. But then, this is a fact which is not unknown to us. Then again, that does not mean that we can let people die. As I mentioned earlier, there are other global religious destinations which attract a similar number of pilgrims, but their traffic management and security systems are so formidable that there is no chance of any such tragedies there. There is only one reason as to why such tragedies do not happen there. And that is that their religious committees and governments do not suffer from social prejudices and have been successful in universalizing basic facilities for one and all! The day we achieve the same – even our tragedies would stop!

UNDERSTANDING AND SOLVING THE GREAT INDIAN ONION PRICE CRISIS!

2011-01-14T06:00:00.000+05:30

There seem to be two commodities that are all set to face each other in a combat mode. If on the one hand, bidding at IPL-4 is breaking and making newer records by offering otherwise affordable players, almost unaffordable bids and making them out of the reach of smaller teams, then on the other hand, an affordable and staple vegetable – the onion – is all set to make newer records with its price rise, again making it unaffordable to almost every consumer!

The prices of onions have been exponentially shooting up since December 2010, mercilessly burning the pockets of consumers at large! As per figures released by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the wholesale price index (WPI) for food climbed up by more than 12 per cent in the first week of December 2010. Comparatively, onion prices have shot up by anywhere between 80 to 150 percent during the same period across the country.

What has been intriguing is the manner in which the government has dealt with the entire crisis! It is not that the government is not aware that the onion is an integral component of its citizens’ food baskets, and more so for the ones below the poverty line who barely survive – still, the government maintained its lackadaisical attitude towards the crisis. It is also not that the government was unaware of the fact that climatic challenges had created havoc for the crop in Maharashtra – still, the government chose not to take preventive action. It is also not that the government was unaware of the fact that hoarders in our country await such opportunities and make a killing by further creating supply bottlenecks – still, it chose not to intervene adequately. It is also a fact that the government knows that onions have a legacy of bringing down governments – but it still chose to remain silent! So much so that in the month of November, when onions were taking more time than normal to reach the market from Nashik (due to untimely rain), the government and authorities didn’t put into place any measures to check the expected price rise. And what followed in December was bloodbath as onion shipments were reduced by almost 270 per cent, thus escalating the price by 150 per cent in a period of seven days. What is most paradoxical is that instead of tracking and acting upon real time information, the Minister for Agriculture was busy issuing export licenses, which had to be revoked immediately after the crisis! And mind you, such illogical issuing – and then cancelling – of export licenses is not new. The same was done for sugar and wheat sometime back.

It is not just about onions – the distortion in the prices of essential food commodities has been at a crisis point for a long time now. There have been numerous reports which document the kind of exponential gaps (at times, to the tune of 400 percent) that exist between the wholesale and the retail prices of essential food commodities – but no concrete action has been taken by the government. As a kneejerk reaction this time, what the ministry of agriculture did to contain the price rise of onions was to ban exports on one hand and to permit imports on the other. It did give a temporary relief, but clearly was a hasty and illogical call – as per reports, the onions that were exported to countries like Pakistan for Rs. 20 per kilo, had to be imported back at Rs. 45 per kilo! Not to forget that Pakistan too eventually had to put a ban on exporting to India.

The truth is that onions would keep burning the national pocket till the time structural changes are not made in the agriculture sector – and this is no secret, given the yawning gap that exists between production, storage and distribution! In the given environment, taking advantage of these gaps, those are the retailers who make merry perpetually, and the hoarders who wait for their pound of flesh in times of crisis! And the consumers, particularly the poor, are made to bleed at all times. Although people might debate that the production of food grains is subject to the vagaries of nature – and that nothing much can be done about it – the fact is that even after 63 years of Independence, our irrigation infrastructure is shameful! The truth is that by now, we should have created such an irrigation infrastructure, that our dependence on nature should have been negligible! But then, the same has been a monumental failure! And similar is the state of distribution and storage infrastructure! It needs no Einstein to realize this, that taking advantage of these bottlenecks, those are the middlemen who have been exploiting these inadequacies to the fullest! And the irony in the entire episode is that while prices of crops like onions are going up by 150 percent, it is the farmer and the consumer who is losing it all. And shamefully, the government allows this to happen not once, not twice, but repeatedly!

All in all, there are no shortcuts to solving such crises. In the first place, the government had adequate forewarning that the crisis was coming, as is the case with any food crisis – since rains, farming patterns etc clearly give an early warning about food production trends. And when the crisis is around something as essential like the onion, and given the fact that the structural changes from irrigation to distribution can't be brought about overnight, the government should have planned imports on time. With 300 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves lying with the government and with no creative use in their mind, the least that the government could have done was to plan on spending a meager 500 million dollars on giving its countrymen onions. And in case even imports were not available, then advance warning systems should have been put in place informing civilians about the impending onion crisis and advising them on planning their food intake accordingly.

But all this only after seeing to it that at least all the available stock is reaching the consumers. This time around, that itself didn't happen. The hoarders made merry; and the government – being hand in glove with them – did nothing. Many years back, Nehru had said that every hoarder and black marketer should be hanged from the nearest lamppost. That's exactly what the government needed to do. In the last twenty years or so, there has been no proper action against hoarders. Laws have to made and implemented where hoarders fear instant jail upon being caught hoarding essential food commodities. For hoarding, you don't need to have a court case that lasts fifteen years. When you hoard, it’s visible. One simply cannot hide tonnes of onions below one’s bed! There should be fear of punishment.

And with these four things in place – a totally reformed irrigation system to avoid dependence on nature, a direct access to farmers to take their produce to consumers (instead of going through layers of middlemen), a strong punishment system for all hoarders, and finally, a preplanned import structure just in case there still remains an impending crisis – we will perhaps never see another onion crisis or similar situation again.

BINAYAK SEN, A VICTIM OF STATE AND POLITICIAN-DRIVEN TERRORISM AGAINST THE COMMON MAN!

2011-01-07T06:00:00.002+05:30

Of late, other than the stink of onions, the only other news that has earned a lot of editorial space – and thankfully so – is that of the life sentence that has been awarded to Binayak Sen. However, the issue has taken up an intellectual tone; so the common man hasn’t quite gotten involved in a way he had gotten involved with the Jessica Lal case due to the glamour element. While that was a common rage-driven murder case of comparatively less significance – murders, however unfortunate, are common crimes – the Binayak Sen case is of far more significance to the society since it is about the common man’s predicament and every individual’s democratic rights in India. It is about our right to ideology and our right to work for a better society. And therefore, every Indian must get involved with this case and come out with a strong opinion against such injustice.

Before I discuss the whole debate around Binayak Sen, let me introduce him first. The reason why I want to introduce him is because his introduction would itself justify his predicament to a large extent. Binayak Sen is a paediatrician by profession, with MBBS and MD degrees. He is also the national Vice-President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). He extended his profession and galvanized it with social cause (which is a rare case in India – where most doctors in today’s generation are more concerned about making money from dying patients than engaging themselves for the society, especially for the poor!) and by providing health care to disadvantaged tribal families in the poor state of Chhattisgarh. He had also worked with the state government on health sector reforms and had expressed his views on human rights violations during the anti-Naxalite operations. And this last part, in short, is his only crime!

Sen has been arrested on the account of his meeting Narayan Sanyal 33 times in Raipur jail – and mind you, all his meetings were scheduled aft er prior police permission and were closely supervised too. On the face of it, the evidence on which Binayak Sen has been charged is highly prejudicial in nature. Even if he were planning some Naxal operation or was helping Sanyal with his motives, then why did it take 33 closely supervised meetings for the police to prove his crime? Why were the same allegations not charged just aft er the first few meetings? Sen has been sentenced based on a postcard written by Narayan Sanyal regarding his health issues, again duly signed by the jail authorities. Further, the evidence shown to prove Sen guilty has consisted of books, articles and letters sent to Binayak Sen by Sanyal, exchanging thoughts on Maoist and Naxalites. This, by no means, can be considered a criminal offence; rather, this is one of our fundamental rights. Sen has also been charged with reading Mao’s books and Marx’s Das Kapital – by those standards, by default, I too become a criminal, and even half of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students studying history; perhaps half of Bengal and also half of this world from China to Russia to Cuba to Latin America has now become criminal infested! It’s really a pity that uninitiated people today have an opinion on Mao – know his mistakes by all means, but know his political ideology as well that gave shape to China, before commenting on him or comparing him with Narendra Modi or anyone else who can never match Mao’s revolutionary fervour.

And Marx is a name that should be banned from the vocabulary of selfish, corrupt, unpatriotic, uncommitted politicians of the Indian variety including the CPM class.

Anyway, coming back to Binayak Sen, he not only carried on his work silently but also raised his voice against atrocities conducted by the state in the name of anti-Naxalite operations – be it for organizing and mobilizing people’s groups like Salwa Judum (for which even the Supreme Court had lashed out at the Chhattisgarh government) or for killing innocent people during combing operations. At a global level, organizations like Amnesty International, the British House of Commons, the British Medical Journal, The Global Health Council, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and individuals like Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen and many others have criticized this recent arrest of Sen by the Chattisgarh government. Sen, for that matter, has been charged under section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the same section that was used against Mahatma Gandhi in 1922 during “the Great Ahmedabad Trial” wherein Gandhi was charged with spreading disaffection against the British. The Act, in the words of Gandhi, is the “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizens.” What comes as a real shocker is that a person who has been felicitated with various awards for his work for society and medicine – including the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights (Sen was even not allowed to travel to US to receive this award, which is no different from the manner Liu Xiaobo got treated in China) – is now being convicted of crimes that have not even been proved properly.

Keeping this debate aside, the moot question here is that the court found an allegiance of Sen with Naxals and that’s why he has been dealt with such harshness. I have written in the past and I maintain – Naxals are no terrorists! Their means might be wrong, but their agenda is very clear, and that is to represent the oppressed sections of the society. Their fight is against the government and not the common man. And it is no secret that they have outgrown to such an extent that they have become one of the biggest internal security threats for the nation. And it is also no secret that they share such an unflinching support from the tribal poor spread across the nation, that till date all counter-operations of the government have failed to neutralize them. The Naxalite movement is a result of the state and politician-driven terrorism on the common man. First, our politicians are so insincere that they marginalize millions into sub-Saharan existence, giving them destitution level food and health, not to talk about pathetic education and employment. Then what does the state expect? To me, it’s a crime not to protest such terrorism by the state and politicians. And one such form of protest that our terrorist politicians have driven people into is Naxalism. Give them food, health, education and employment and let us see if the movement exists anymore. We have to think about finding ways to remove the root cause of Naxalism instead of condemning them. In such a scenario, a patriotic man like Dr. Sen has an uncompromising significance, simply because not only is he educated to appreciate the larger concerns of the nation, but his deep roots within the tribal communities also help him to sensitize with them. Ideally, instead of sentencing him, the state should have productively engaged Sen in bringing the tribals into the mainstream. It’s foolish to sentence him and extremely more foolish to lose an opportunity that could have been utilised in neutralizing Naxalism to some extent, at least in Chattisgarh!

Instead of putting the real corrupt thieves and terrorists – politicians who run this country – behind the bars, it is a shame that people like Binayak Sen are being given lifetime imprisonment by the country’s judicial system. Indeed, if Sen has gone beyond ideologically understanding the root cause behind Naxalism – as I and many others in this country have done – and gone to the extent of hobnobbing with Naxalites by passing a letter or two as a token of symbolism, he surely could have been given a six month sentence at the most. But using a shameful law, that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and sentencing a patriotic man like Binayak Sen to life imprisonment only shows how real terrorists are running the show in a country where – as his wife and equal partner in his good deeds, said – the common man has to fear for his free and democratic existence, if he is to ever raise his voice against the state’s atrocities.

Why Julian Assange is TSI’s man of the year!

2010-12-24T06:00:00.008+05:30

I am sure you all must be wondering what’s new or great about this – the entire world already is talking about it! Well, I promise I won’t write about Assange at all. Yet, I hope by the end of this article, you will realize what’s the big deal about this heading. After the overwhelming response to my previous to last editorial on media and lobbying, and combining it with my previous edit on democracy, I thought I should further my views – this time on media and democracy put together. When I had written elaborately on lobbying in my above mentioned editorial, I had only touched upon the perspective of the extent to which nations go to maintain their image. I had taken examples of how the History Channel, akin to slavish propagators of the capitalist dictate, distorted and promoted the image of the biggest global revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, as a global terrorist. I had also quoted how Michael Moore’s film Sicko was edited by an American channel and given a conclusion other than the one he had originally made (Moore had concluded that the Cuban health system was the best, while the channel in question – after doing a series on it without knowing the ending, and subsequently realising that the conclusion could be bad for America’s PR – changed the ending with a voiceover saying that the Canadian health system was the best). So, in any case, when the truth is not being crushed by the American government like in the case of Julian Assange, it is crushed by the media themselves. The problem is as much the media as the government.

In fact, in my book The Great Indian Dream, I had categorically stated that democracy in a capitalist economy tends to become an illusion since one of the biggest forces of a democracy is the media; and in a capitalist world, the media is mostly owned by private profiteers who promote news that will increase their profits, or those of its key stakeholders. Th us, invariably – barring news that’s on your face – the philosophy and lifestyle that gets propagated is too often than not, not conducive to well-being and happiness of human beings, but is rather focused towards the well-being of the markets. So media plays, for example, a huge role in propagating happiness linked to material well-being (because people who believe in that are those from whom you can earn profits by selling products which they believe will increase happiness in their lives) than happiness linked to human interactions and family values, which necessarily give a much deeper, more meaningful and a longer lasting sense of happiness. Th us, while individuals in America think that they are living in a great democracy (they indeed are amongst the best of the lot), the reality is that their thoughts and actions are non-stop being manipulated and often distorted by profiteers to suit their own goals. From hiding facts about nicotine being a proven harmful drug to promoting a lifestyle which has given rise to the biggest killer disease in America today – the McDonalds driven obesity – the American media has made its citizens product-dustbins who are like guinea pigs for business houses. Americans think they have brains; but the brains are being controlled by the profit driven media. The barrage of articles makes you start believing in things which need not necessarily be correct. For example, while I myself am a dedicated fan of Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyer’s articles, the fact is that (maybe due to his lack of understanding of impact of an economy on human well-being or deliberate sidelining of it) anyone reading his articles will believe as if capitalism was the end-all for human well-being; though itsurely is not the truth.

Add to this the fact that finally, governments themselves are non-democratic when it comes to protecting the image they want to propagate – like in the Julian Assange case – and resolve to extremes like murder and all kinds of illegal arrests to stop the media from functioning freely. The communities which have been at the receiving end are the investigative journalists and whistle blowers, who have perpetually struggled to bring facts in the forefront! How can one forget American journalist Daniel Pearl? Pearl – whom I personally remember as this lovely family loving man, since he had also come to meet me during early October 2000 to get a download on my views on India’s way forward – had uncovered dangerous secrets about the involvement of Pakistan’s ISI with Islamic extremists. Pearl was kidnapped and then murdered in Pakistan in the year 2002. The footage of Pearl’s beheading not only made the rounds of the Internet, but also popularized the concept of investigate journalism.

Even last year in February, Musa Khankhel, reporter for The News International and GEO TV, was kidnapped as he was reportedly working on a series of public events addressed by senior cleric Maulana Sufi Mohammad in Pakistan. Later, his bullet-ridden body was found. On July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, who worked for Forbes, was attacked and shot in Moscow. Even the Forbes’ Russian edition, after his death, acknowledged that the murder was “definitely linked to his professional activity”, especially due to the swirl he had created from his list of the 100 wealthiest Russians. Authorities in Iran have also detained an American freelance journalist Roxana Saberi (who once worked for NPR and BBC). In 2005, in Iraq, an American freelance journalist, Steven Vincent – who alleged in her New York Times column that Basra’s police was being infiltrated by Shiite militiamen – was shot dead in Iraq after being abducted. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 70 media persons had been killed while covering the Iraq war in Iraq between 2003 and 2005. Besides these popular names, many other journalists were murdered (add to this numerous other names who were illegally detained and arrested). From Steven Vincent (2005) to Brad Will (2006), Chauncey Bailey (2007), all were assassinated because of their nature of work. Moreover, who can forget the year 2009 assassination of the editor of Sri Lankan newspaper Sunday Leader, Lasantha Wickramatunga, for his whistle-blowing against the Rajapaksa government! The entire story – including the letter that Lasantha wrote before his assassination, anticipating that he would get eliminated – was elaborately covered by The Sunday Indian. But then, these are the rare cases where a journalist is able to at least try and do a story freely, which goes against the interest of the media owners or the government (their own or the country’s in which they are doing the story).

In this world of media – which is either being controlled tightly by governments even in so called great democracies like America, or constantly being influenced by lobbyists, or deliberately lobbying for wrong causes due to their own profit making structures – to me, the best way to have an unbiased media that is genuinely committed to human well-being is to have a media run by multiple journalist cooperatives, with the State even funding them partially, as well as funding a part of their annual budget – without of course being able to influence the media constitutionally. But since that’s in an ideal situation and less likely to happen soon, the Internet has come as a boon for such people (especially investigative journalists). That’s why, though TIME magazine has declared another Internet icon Mark Zuckerberg as the man of the year (and perhaps rightly so, from the point of view of impact on the masses), our man of the year is Julian Assange. This is the hope for journalism, and especially, as I said, for investigative journalism. Whatever my criticism, I believe the American democracy and the power of the word of the citizens and the netizens of the world is strong enough to very soon have laws that will know how to protect the genuine and true journalists on the net from being illegally framed and punished. Because when media caters to the profiteers, the true not-for-profit journalists make a huge impact on the net; and they must be protected – of course, the laws should be stringent enough so that imposters cannot pass off their crap as journalism on the net, as I had written in my edit on lobbying. For only when the media is unbiased and honest does a true democracy have a real chance to proper. This is The Sunday Indian’s little contribution to the cause.

JPC WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY GET NDA BACK TO POWER IN 2014

2010-12-17T06:00:00.002+05:30

Arindam Chaudhuri Analyses Why BJP should not and cannot afford to give up the demand for a JPC Probe

Rs. 1,76,000 crores and counting! The scam is the biggest in the country ever – or rather, the sum total of all the other scams (that have been exposed) put together, multiplied by two and more! If not a joint parliamentary committee probe now, then when? A great democracy is one with a thriving opposition. After the last elections, I had raised a question. Is this the end of the road for the BJP for long? It looked so. BJP was stuck on its Hindutva mantra, while the Congress promised youth, which looked progressive and could connect with the masses better! After all, the Hindus themselves are so coexistential that they don’t like any communal stress in their lives. But then, complacency is the mother of all failures. And failure is the mother of all successes! Congress did two big blunders. Firstly, in a haste to promote Rahul Gandhi as its future leader – and in its fear that charismatic speakers like Jyotiradiya or Sachin Pilot or Milind Deora may overshadow the son – the Congress started destroying its biggest trump card, the youth factor, which had made it look so bright. The Congress saw to it that none of them had the courage to hog any limelight or be in any platform of importance; so much so that the public has virtually forgotten Congress’ youth brigade. And the truth is whatever the slavish media in India writes (it praises every rare semi-meaningful word that Rahul says as if it’s straight from Julius Ceaser). Rahul Gandhi, unfortunately, is still not good enough to single-handedly lead the Congress yet. Like they have done with Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Congress could have made best use of Rahul as the silent guy, while the other better speakers managed the party.

The second mistake is perhaps bigger and more dangerous. Protecting a dynasty may ruin a party but abetting corruption ruins the nation. The Congress ruined its Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh’s personal image of crystal clear integrity by entering into a series of mega scams. A majority of population in India, being illiterate, doesn’t understand policies much; but they understand ‘chori’. I believe a conspiracy by V. P. Singh created a wave in India which made him the Prime Minister from a nobody, thanks only to an allegation of corruption that he could make the public believe in. Rajiv was a man of definite personal integrity and was highly progressive and had started an anti-corruption drive in India against Indian businessmen. V.P. Singh was a friend of the industry, being a past commerce minister, and catching the moment, he made the Bofors allegation. Rajiv – a man of great progressive thoughts, great charisma and a Gandhi who had earlier swept the elections on a massive sympathy wave – lost the elections. I would say for no reason but a wave around corruption that the masses were falsely made to believe. Rajiv Gandhi, I believe, was personally not corrupt (for party funds, even the most honest politician depends on sources; and Rajiv might have depended on a single alternative instead of a number of Indian businessmen). But can I say the same about the current Congress? Well, only a joker can. Everyone else knows what’s happening in the Congress. Yes, there is a Manmohan Singh who is clean. But he sits atop a pile of corrupt people. CWG, Adarsh, 2G, it goes on... personal wealth creation at its best; and wealth being stacked offshore. The Supreme Court rightly asked, was the Prime Minister sleeping? Being personally clean as a leader is only half the job done. You have to make a system that cleans up the whole system.

And in this failure of Congress to provide clean governance, comes the hope for BJP and NDA for 2014. Forget Hindutva; concentrate on the massive dacoity of India. In every sphere. The masses understand it and they are totally convinced today that the UPA has started rotting inside out. There seems to be a sudden wave in the Congress on why should Mukesh Ambani remain the only one with 3 lac crore rupees. Gone are the days of the ‘hundred crore’ ministers. If figures are to be believed, today the key ministers are raking in thousands of crores. The country is being looted and sold off to the highest bidder... Oops, I got it wrong here – the lowest bidder, to be precise, who gives the highest kickback. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to accept and tolerate this. And this is where the need of opposition in a democracy comes in. The BJP needs to keep up its demand for a JPC probe. Take to the streets but the JPC is a must. And the probe must be totally transparent with complete media access during hearings. That’s the way it happened in Watergate, the Iran Contra, the Clinton case. That’s how it happens in real democracies. With the Assange case, it’s clear that America is unfairly using ownership of web domains – controlled by America – to close down various websites in order to hound and shut off WikiLeaks. India could lead the way in showing what a democracy is about for a change.

The JPC is also the only way everyone can be brought to the questioning table. Every other agency can be manipulated and managed in this country by the party in power. As I wrote in my previous editorial on the Radia tapes, the Indian media is right now too busy doing what it does best: go behind glamourised cases and magnify them to grab eyeballs and totally mislead and misinform the public. The part which was leaked till then proved nothing. There are lobbyists everywhere. The real issue here is that the government is caught in a web of corruption – perhaps facilitated by a lobbyist. Here we are talking about the issue of Rs.1,76,000 crores; and there we are speaking of a few stories that were being attempted to be planted here and there... What a mind blowing diversion from the real issue. It’s hilarious the way the media is happily going on and on bashing individual journalists (glamourous, easy preys and perfect vent for pent up jealousies), who cannot hit back, instead of hitting out at the real people who are behind this scam. What the opposition and media need to do right now is demand for the JPC probe, for that’s what the Indian masses need and want. Of course, a few weeks back, I myself wrote that our Parliamentarians have no right to waste the taxpayers’ money due to non-functioning of the Parliament. But as the magnitude of the scam gets unearthed, it’s clear that there’s more of tax payers’ money at stake in the scam than in the non-functioning of the Parliament. The masses, the tax payers, they have a right to a clean regime and the opposition must help them get their rights. That’s what makes a functional propeople democracy. And why not? After all, this perhaps is the sure-shot route for the NDA to be back in power in 2014 – as I said, nothing works with the aam junta better than the corruption plank.

Let’s get in a little bit of analytics here. There are two ways in which Congress can hope that UPA comes to power in 2014 with Rahul Gandhi as PM: first, it takes the ekla chalo route and either gets 272 seats or gets very close to it. The second is through allies. The ekla chalo route looked very promising in 2009 when the Congress won 22 Lok Sabha seats in UP. But that magic figure of 272 now looks unattainable. Look at some numbers first. The Congress has 7 out of 7 seats in Delhi, 9 out of 10 in Haryana, 5 out of 5 in Uttarakhand, 8 out of 12 in Punjab, 33 out of 42 in Andhra Pradesh, 30 plus out of 48 along with NCP in Maharashtra, 11 out of 26 in Gujarat, 6 out of 26 in Karnataka, 13 out of 20 in Kerala, 12 out of 29 in Madhya Pradesh and 20 out of 25 in Rajasthan. The only states in which Congress can improve its tally is Bihar (now 2 out of 40), Jharkhand (now 1 out of 14), Orissa (now 6 out of 21). In West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, it will play second fiddle to allies.

The fact is, a resurgent NDA could actually lead to Congress losing seats in many states. Then, it has a virtually zero base in Bihar, Bengal and Tamil Nadu. It will suffer from a huge backlash in Andhra. In Orissa, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, it has been out of power for so long that it has forgotten how to win. Most importantly, in key states like Bihar, Chattisgarh, MP, Gujarat, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Jharkhand, it has absolutely no state level mass leader who can capture imagination and votes. YSR in Andhra, Amarinder Singh in Punjab, Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan and Sheila Dixit in Delhi did the trick in 2009. YSR is gone and the others can only do so much. In the event, it appears very unlikely that the Congress will get more than 200 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. So it has to depend on allies like Trinamool, DMK (or AIIDMK), JMM, NCP and assorted communal parties – all of whom have strained ties with the Congress.

In contrast, the NDA alliance looks formidable and could gain members by 2014. The Bihar election has been an eye-opener for parties who thought they will lose minority votes if they ally with the BJP – the stigma of the 2002 Gujarat riots. This had prompted allies like AGP, BJD, Trinamool and Telugu Desam to ditch the BJP. But Nitish Kumar has clearly demonstrated that Muslims can and will vote for the NDA. Why, even hundreds of Muslim candidates have won local elections in Gujarat on a BJP ticket! If the UPA 2 keeps getting mired in scandals and problems created by allies, a chastened BJP might just go back to rope in strong allies like Telugu Desam, BJD etc. If the BJP manages to do that, sheer arithmetic of vote percentages will also ensure that the NDA will head for a majority in 2014. A strong stance against corruption of the current government will only make the case stronger.

The key issue is: The Congress has two great nationwide vote catchers; and popular figures in Rahul and Sonia Gandhi at the centre. But barring isolated cases like Ashok Gehlot, they have hardly any charismatic state level leaders with a mass base. The reverse is true of the BJP – they have very popular mass leaders like Raman Singh, Prem Dhumal, Shivraj Chauhan, Narendra Modi etc at the state level but no Vajpayee-like charismatic leader at the centre. While for Congress, the job is far tougher (that is, of finding local leaders), for NDA, it’s just about coming to a consensus and rallying behind one leader like Narendra Modi or Nitish Kumar etc.

Then again, an NDA victory could be a blessing in disguise for Rahul Gandhi who is still very young by Indian standards – and as I have said in the past as well, he needs to learn a lot about communication techniques looking at videos of his father, grandmother and great grandfather. People will forgive an ageing Vajpayee or Manmohan Singh for their lack of powerful communication, but never a young man his age. A prolonged absence from power at the Centre has helped Sonia Gandhi rebuild the Congress step by step the hard way. If Rahul Gandhi gets the PM’s throne on a platter, there is a danger of him going further on the current waywith cronies abusing his personal repute and ultimately damaging him. A stint as opposition leader will give him time to finish the party rebuilding process that he has started.

All in all, given the massive corruption and scams that the UPA is getting drowned into, perhaps we should get used to the idea of an NDA government in 2014. And going by the performance of the earlier NDA government, there is nothing wrong with that. The only thing it has to do is grab the opportunities – like enforce the JPC – and of course, the magnitude of the scam being so big, they should not have some of their leaders sharing the booty and being bought off for a price; then the loot will continue in peace. Else, it could be NDA in 2014!

To change this ‘demonocracy’ to a democracy, we must all join hands and demand for a judiciary that is not rotting and rusting!

2010-12-10T06:00:00.002+05:30

Last week I was very fortunate to be a part of this wonderful, moving and inspirational seminar on the ‘Power of One’ (coverage of the same is there after my editorial)! The speakers included Tarun Tejpal, who so very inspirationally spoke about the founding fathers of our nation, their vision and saga of sacrifices. Indeed, hearing Tarun speak is always a pleasure, just as much as seeing him – a real life hero of public interest journalism in India – always is! His words had the power of making me forget for a while that the same Nehru, whose birthday is ironically celebrated as Children’s Day in India, founded an India where today, seven times more kids suffer from malnutrition than they do in China – something Tarun himself quoted. He spoke of how we shouldn’t forget where India resides – in the villages. And the onus was on us to fight for the right cause. He spoke of things that at least we never forget at The Sunday Indian. There was Neelem Katara who spoke next in the most moving manner on her battle to get justice for her son against the might of one of the biggest dons of north India. At one moment, she was confident; at another, she was hurt and tender; and yet, at all moments, she was brave! Sitting there, I was inspired and in tears – alternatively hoping that one day we could be instrumental in bringing an end to this demonocracy that prevails in India. Then of course spoke Rajinder Kachroo, the man who lost his son Aman Kachroo to the menace of ragging. He spoke how ragging was criminal – I couldn’t agree more. His journey to get stringent rulings passed against ragging was the story of sheer determination; and it made me more determined to keep our crusade to weed out the cause of ragging from its roots! Then came Binu Chandran, the real life hero who got Ghazi Baba, the dreaded Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist to his end. Binu did that through his saga of physical bravery, where the decision to be taken was clear – to send his people to fight or to lead from the front. He chose the latter and got this country glory. Hearing Binu was super inspirational but I knew it was beyond us to be a real part of any such battle. Yet, I kept reminding myself that the pen is surely no less mighty than grenades. Finally, of course, we had the water crusader of India Rajendra Singh speaking! His sense of humour floored all of us; yet, everyone got the simple message strong and clear – that we needed to give our children rivers and water instead of ‘gandaa nalaas’ and droughts – a cause our social wing the Great Indian Dream Foundation (GIDF) is very passionate about. The five speakers showed us the power of one in a country like India! Through their sheer grit, determination, bravery and commitment, they individually had indeed made a positive difference to this nation. The session was followed by a great round of questions and answers, mainly focusing around the issues of bravery versus fear and the need to be brave!

And then came the most difficult challenge, to get up and speak. Speak about the power of one; that is, about bravery versus fear and yet not spare the reasons behind the sheer requirement of these brave crusades. Listening to them had recharged my brain. While I was in total awe of these amazing people, I knew very well that forget taking the all-or-nothing risk of putting everything at stake for journalism of public interests that Tarun epitomized, I was not even sure whether I – if I had been a friend of Nitish Katara – wouldn’t have myself turned a hostile witness were I to face the threat of the underworld mafia. I didn’t know if I would have had enough determination to keep pursuing the courts to change ragging laws, had I been in the place of Rajinder Kachroo. Sixteen years back, my younger brother died in a road accident – the sorrow killed me – but I didn’t do anything at all to make the Indian roads safer or get laws enacted to make it compulsory for the pillion rider to wear a helmet – though fortunately the law got enacted on its own. Of course, I was candid enough to realize that I couldn’t have done anything remotely as brave as what Binu Chandran had done. Yet, I refused to believe that I was not brave; or that, given the right environment, I wouldn’t stand up for the right cause. I refused to accept that I was fearful. I knew there was something that was missing and was required to complete the story... some realities we must be aware of, and should take up as a serious cause to fight for! Perhaps only health, education and employment come ahead of the issue I’m going to discuss. And that is the demand for a judicial system that can alter the concept of India and bring us a huge lot closer to a real democracy rather than the ‘demonocracy’ that we live in.

The truth is that Nitish Katara’s friends backed out from standing by their dead friend, not necessarily because they were spineless, but because the society doesn’t provide a judicial system that is capable of punishing the criminals on time and decriminalizing the lives of the common masses. The same friends, if they had been in a society like the USA that has ten times more number of judges per capita than India, would have been at least ten times likelier to stand by their friend. The same Tarun Tejpal couldn’t have been harassed so badly, had the government not had the manipulative power to use the judiciary to suit itself by filing hundreds of cases against him. The same Nitish Katara and Aman Kachroo might have been alive today and Baba Ghazi dead much before Binu Chandran ever encountered him, had their been fear of punishment against crimes – a key activity that the judiciary has to necessarily propagate to make civil life more fearless, brave, decriminalized and democratic. Today, criminals literally rule us – officially from the Indian Parliament. Where is the fear of punishment? The government has deliberately kept the judiciary dysfunctional, because a dysfunctional judiciary benefits the criminals. When a typical case lasts for 15 to 20 years in a court, there is absolutely no fear of punishment amongst the criminals. We have about a lakh of criminals inside our jails while about five lakh are outside our jails. This is excluding those involved in bribery cases, which a staggering 23% of the Indian population suffers, compared to 0.2% of American population! Kumar Badal, a Tehelka journalist was imprisoned on charges he strongly denies. He wrote, “What I learnt from my stay inside the jail is that the real culprits are hardly ever imprisoned in India; and even if they are, they are released after a very short period.” There are quotas amongst police officials to crack a certain number of cases per month, to project the police as an effective law enforcing agency, resulting in many innocents getting picked – read poorest of poor – who keep languishing inside jails without anyone to even fight their cases. More than 80% of those inside jails are undertrials who have often remained in jail more than the maximum time they could have been punished if they had even been proven guilty. Past records show that in more than 82% cases whenever judgment has been delivered, these people were found to be innocent! Their only crime was being poor. The situation is clearly such that people with money to engage lawyers who can interpret our very many outdated laws have no fear of punishment!

The reason behind the moral bankruptcy in India is the lack of a really functional judicial system. The common man knows that seeking justice from the courts is almost a process of self harassment. If your 25 year old daughter is raped and murdered and the judgment comes twenty years later, by then probably you yourself are dead! And the beauty is that 20 years later, most often than not, the criminal goes away scot-free due to lack of evidence, and due to witnesses getting murdered or turning hostile; and so on. Except the page 3 hyped murder cases that make people stand with candles in a split second in front of India Gate, for the rest of India, it’s virtually a case of innocents inside (the jail) and criminals outside (the jail). In such a country, the police are fearless in asking for bribes since they know that no one goes to the court on such issues. In America, where justice delivery happens in a fraction of the time, people take bribe seekers to the court – and even the bribe seeker knows that even if he gets the benefit of doubt the first time when the case is decided over a maximum of just six months, that may not be the case the next time, when someone else takes him to court and in the next six months itself he could be convicted. So he has fear of punishment. Justice delayed is not only justice denied, but society criminalized.

And what does it take after all? India requires to plan the intake of a lakh more judges – say, over a period of five years – to bring down the average time of cases to a tenth of the current duration and to clear the past backlogs. It is something we must lobby for, if we want a society where the next Shayan Munshi doesn’t turn hostile. In fact, forget Shayan Munshi, where the next Manu Sharma fears like hell before taking out his gun; and where Jessicas and Nitish Kataras and Aman Kachroos don’t die in the first place. Where Kasabs are punished within a few months and not allowed to be traded against a plane hijack so that a Binu Chandran doesn’t have to go through the unnecessary ordeal of catching a terrorist all over again; and so that we get committed politicians ruling this country, who automatically bring clean water to our villages instead of illiterate criminals who siphon off all the money for such purposes, making the Rajendra Singhs of India spend entire lifetimes fighting for what is our minimum due, access to clean water! At TSI, we have been constantly fighting for improvement of our judiciary – and in my annual alternate budgets as well as in the book ‘The Great Indian Dream’, judiciary is a key focus. We are waiting for a Chief Justice of India who is serious about changing this country to take this issue up as a cause! After all, there are some judges still left whose morals are beyond compromise. Will one of them let my country awake, where the mind is without fear and the head is held high?

It’s totally ethical of media houses and journalists to lobby

2010-12-03T06:00:00.003+05:30

Arindam Chaudhuri argues why the Radia tapes prove nothing and why Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi remain two of India’s best journalists

When Barack Obama was running for the US presidency, the common joke in America was that win or lose, Obama was sure to get a job with MSNBC! And when he won, the joke was that “all the channels declared Barack Obama as the US President at 11 in the night; MSNBC declared him the winner six months back.” That’s representative of how blatantly MSNBC had lobbied to make Obama the US President. And every media house with an ideology and conviction does so. Yes, that’s the job of media houses and of journalists with character, ideology and convictions.

Wake up to reality, my friends! In UK and USA elections, newspapers rally behind individual parties till the very end – openly. And it’s not because the party owns the media house. During the very next elections, the media houses could support the opposition. That’s how it is in all true democracies where media doesn’t fear a backlash if the party they don’t support comes to power. India is, of course, not a democracy. Behind the illusion of democracy, demons – almost one and all – rule this country, making it a unique “demonocracy”. What the government of India does is that they create cases similar to what they did with Tehelka, and makes it clear that if you try to expose the government, they will get back at you. So, before elections, Indian media – one and all (unless in regional cases where parties themselves own media) – is always polite about the ruling party even if they per se support the opposition. And this, because they fear that in case the ruling party returns post elections, they’ll have to face the music! Even the largest media house, the Times of India, has not been spared in the past, with Ashok Jain being harassed to his literal death with cases being fabricated against him for trying to act smart with the government! Compare this with the nine page special feature that The Sun ran in 1992 on the day UK elections with the headlines commenting, “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?”

In 2010, while the Daily Mirror remained loyal to the Labour Party, The Sun withdrew its support for Labour – and Labour lost the elections. When Gordon Brown had shrugged off The Sun’s decision saying that The Sun doesn’t decide who wins the elections but voters do, the front page of The Sun next day read, “Labour’s lost it!” The Guardian and its Sunday sister paper, The Observer, were backing the Liberal Democrats, with the former saying it supported their stance on electoral reform. The Times and The Sunday Times had switched support to the Conservatives, and had said that David Cameron was ready to govern. That’s how Western media lobbies.

And it’s not just media houses, even individual journalists lobby depending on their convictions. Whether they are right or wrong is a totally different story – and that’s why different media houses exist, so that the public gets both sides of the story. For instance, Glenn Beck, the maverick rightwing superstar of Fox News, has even compared the Republicans’ difficulties with their own disaffected core supporters by comparing the party to a recovering alcoholic.

Before I come back to media and journalists, let’s talk about lobbying as an industry and worldwide practices!

When US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton introduced Richard Holbrooke as the special envoy for South Asia, both were expected to spout fire on Pakistan on the terrorism issue, and consequently, also were necessarily supposed to mention India and the Kashmir issue in their most important introductory press briefs in 2009. But India didn’t want the Kashmir issue to be discussed by Holbrooke, especially on the same platform as a discussion on Pakistan. Clearly, Indian government’s lobbying prowess won that day as India and Kashmir were as absent from Hillary and Holbrooke’s well decorated press briefs as a live turkey from the White House. According to Center for Congressional and Presidential studies, America spent around $2.13 billion on lobbying in 2004 alone; there currently are as many as 150,000 people involved in the industry. And the characteristic, if you can call it that, is not limited to corporations. The Center for Public Integrity reveals that over 300 universities have spent over $132 million in the last six years while 1,400 local governments have spent $357 million to seek favours from the government. Europe witnessed the emergence of lobbying as early as 1979 during the first European parliamentary election. In Brussels alone, there are 1,400 lobbyists and over 2,600 ‘special interest groups’.

In no unclear terms, lobbying is a legal and ethical business. The legal lobbying industry in UK is estimated to be worth $1.9 billion, employing over 14,000 people – in fact, a few MPs are often approached (read ‘physically spammed’) more than a hundred times per week by lobbyists. Researches show that Israel obtained popular US support in over 55% of ‘issues’ while Arabs or Palestinians have achieved support in less than 10% in the last 40 years, especially due to strong lobbying by Israeli think-tanks, activist organizations etc.

It is due to lobbying that notorious President Omar Bongo of the Gabon, who is criticised for committing some of the worst human rights violations in history, had a successful meeting with Bush. It is claimed that Bongo paid $9 million to Jack Abramoff, a famous lobbyist, to ‘fix’ the meeting. Since 2004, Equatorial Guinea have paid Cassidy and Associates – a government-relations firm – around $120,000 per month to create the right public image for itself and to win audience with American leaders. The result was that in May 2007, US officials, who would have never talked about their relationship with Guinea, saw Condoleezza Rice standing before a pack of reporters with one of Africa's most appalling dictators – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – by her side and addressing him as a ‘good friend’.

Hill & Knowlton, a lobbying firm, has had particular success in marketing the Gulf War and the Iraq War to the American people; while Sudan, famous for genocide, spent $530,000 to create an image that it was cooperating on the war on terrorism. It took three PR firms for Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev to make Bush announce that Aliyev “understands that democracy is the wave of the future”.

Developed nations like Russia and China are as embellished! Russia paid lobbying firm Ketchum $2.9 million (from August 2008 to January 2009). The firm secured a CNN interview for Vladimir Putin and facilitated Putin becoming TIME Magazine's “Person of the Year” for 2007. In 2005, China – to facilitate the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s (CNOOC) bid for Unocal – spent approximately $3 million to employ six US lobbying firms, which reportedly contacted US Congressmen and state representatives more than 250 times over a period of eight days.

The US capital alone is supposed to have around 20,000 registered lobbyists. So, when Malaysia intended to refurbish its tainted image, the then controversial PM Mahathir Mohamed paid $1.2 million to get a date with Bush. Pakistan spent $1.1 million in 2008 on lobbying for gaining trade support. India is also not behind in the league, paying almost $2.5 million to the famous lobbying firm BGR and $291,665 to Patton Boggs for influencing the nuclear deal.

Having given this background, let me now come to the recent cover stories of two magazines! Well, the truth is that these tapes were in the market in possession of most magazines and media houses for months now! Why didn’t anyone write about the same earlier? The answer is that they were afraid to offend the Congress in our system of ‘demonocracy’. The moment Congress fired Raja, all the bravery came rushing out! But did it serve any purpose whatsoever? The scam is totally nothing about what the tapes reveal. Well, the Supreme Court itself has questioned what the Prime Minister was doing all this while? One has to be living in a fool’s paradise to believe that the government didn’t gain out of all this. Or did they just wake up one fine morning!? However, the tapes have helped the government in one way indeed. The tapes have diverted attention from the real scam and the media is now busy discussing ‘RadiaGate’, as it’s being stupidly termed!

Nira Radia is a lobbyist by profession. Like a lawyer, it’s her duty to fight for her clients’ interests. If you are a lobbyist, you generally don’t have conversations with the local vegetable vendors on the phone. The only conversations will be with your clients and those who can influence decision making, viz bureaucrats, politicians and powerful media personalities. That’s why PR firms exist. In fact, The Times of India, fed up with PR firms trying to plant their clients in their Delhi/Bombay Times supplements, decided to convert these into “advertorial and features supplements” – as written clearly below the mastheads of these supplements – and do away with PR menace from the peepshow supplements of theirs, meant primarily to titillate and increase young readers. Nira Radia was only doing her job and if her phones were tapped, it was for income tax reasons etc, which should have been necessarily kept confidential. It’s absolutely criminal if private conversations tapped for official reasons have this kind of risk of getting into public domain; and Ratan Tata must take it up seriously and make the courts find out who was really responsible for these leaks, so that such cases don’t happen again. And in a country where the rich are more privileged to get justice, he has all the means to keep a battery of lawyers and win it for every individual in this country wishing to exercise the right to privacy.

Finally, let me come to the bigger issue that I started off with, that of the role of media and journalists – and in this case, Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt. Well, as I said, as a media house, you are worth nothing if you simply give staid viewpoints and are fence sitters – traits that Indian media specialize in. For example, as a media house, The Sunday Indian, amongst other issues – like health, education and judiciary – stands clearly for pro-Left thoughts and concerns for those marginalized by the market system; and we’re clearly anti bottomline-driven greedy capitalism. In a world where shameless media – owned by pro capitalism profit makers – like, say, the History channel, distorts the very history they claim to propagate, by branding the biggest global revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, as a global terrorist; where the increasingly America controlled UN, through its arm UNDP, has the audacity of dropping Cuba from its HDI rankings fearing the country would enter the top 30; where Michael Moore’s film Sicko is edited by an American channel and given a conclusion other than the one he had originally made (Moore had concluded that the Cuban health system was the best, while the channel in question – after doing a series on it without knowing the ending and subsequently realising that the conclusion will be bad for America’s PR – changed the ending with a voiceover saying that the Canadian health system was best!), The Sunday Indian stands to give the other more logical and humane side.

Thus, Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt have the right to their convictions and the right to talk to all kinds of people as journalists to get more research for their stories. Given human tendencies, 9 out of 10 human beings will brag about their connections at high places – and journalists often use this as a tool to dig out other persons’ perspectives. What is important is what they do finally. And finally, though not as original as Swaminathan Ankleseria Iyer, Vir sanghvi – who most likely loves to talk more about restaurants – is perhaps the most reader-friendly print columnist who, week after week for years, has given hard-hitting logical perspectives of general and political affairs of India. He has overcome his relative inability to think originally by becoming an outstanding presenter of a combined view of intellectuals – and with his sharp sense of logic, has most often than not been able to be on the more logical side of issues. One can rarely say that he has lobbied for wrong people through his columns. He might right now have more faith in Congress, that too as the better of the existing evils – and might even refer to Congress as “we” with a lobbyist friend in private conversations – but it would be donkey sense, even for Radia, to imagine that Sonia Gandhi acts as per Vir Sanghvi’s suggestions or that he lobbied through his columns to make Raja the telecom minister!

As for Barkha Dutt, she perhaps has the second highest number of enemies in the country – after me!!! And why not? She is young, she is mighty successful, she altered the journalism landscape single-handedly with her fearless firebrand image and became an icon not only for women in this country but also for men! People who criticize her are purely jealous and not initiated with ethics of journalism and the business of lobbying. Today, thanks to the social ‘media’ (as they love calling social networks without, of course, wanting to take the responsibility and liability that comes with becoming media), we have millions giving their often frivolous, uninitiated 140 charactered super expert comments – typically sitting and wasting their companies’ money during work hours. And when a negative wave starts on any topic, the intelligent word rarely gets any space in the world of vitriolic social media – because firstly, those who are logical don’t have that kind of free time to do Internet hooliganism; and secondly, when they do take out time, very few are initiated and educated enough to understand perspectives which often require a deeper understanding of the subject. So years of hard work and patriotism of Barkha Dutt are wiped off in a day by the social media 140 character experts – in this case, many driven by petty jealousies and many who are nothing but wannabe Barkhas who have failed to make it! After all, Internet spewing doesn’t require any effort. For that, you don’t need to make personal enemies, take life risks, go to war-torn areas, or scream literally against corruption and wrongdoers for years without having the time for your own personal life! Her tapes reveal nothing but pure journalistic ‘headline hunting’; and most non-jealous journalists who understand this profession will agree with me. Barkha is quite a hero for an entire generation and will remain so, because many of those who criticize her are the ones who would give their right arms to be in her place! As they say, jealousy is the sincerest form of flattery!

Evil is when you sell your convictions for money or lobby for money – as a journalist, not as a PR professional of course – and Vir Sanghvi or Barkha Dutt have no such track record nor do the tapes reveal that. On the contrary, they are known to be fearless and logic-driven people. I have read many a column of Vir Sanghvi criticizing issues with the Congress itself. Still, while in Vir’s case, people may not know much about his thoughts (because we hardly read beyond 140 characters nowadays; and research says only 2% of those who still read newspapers read the edit page!), as far as Barkha is concerned, I don’t need to tell anything; everyone has seen with their own eyes that she has stood for good journalism for years. When the same journalists and the entire media lobbies against a court verdict on Jessica Lal and Barkha hosts a We The People show, it is appreciated so much, isn’t it? Well, that’s also lobbying. They can be right or wrong, but ‘lobbying for their own convictions’ per se is what great journalism is all about! Just because someone lobbied – or worse, someone spoke to a lobbyist – one can’t consider them wrong. It’s a part of a journalist’s daily life! It’s time TSI readers at least get the right perspective and realize that we need to catch hold of the real scamsters instead of getting carried away by something that should have never come out at the first place – and once out, should have been ignored as a frivolous piece of useless page 3 type gossip.

Bulbs 1 - The legal lobbying industry in United Kingdom is estimated to be
worth $1.9 billion, employing over 14,000 people

Bulbs 2 - When Malaysia intended to refurbish its tainted image, the then PM mahathir Mohamed paid $1.2 million to get a date with Bush

Bulbs 3 - when a negative wave starts on any topic, the intelligent word rarely finds any space in the world of vitriolic social media

If our Parliamentarians cannot make productive use of Rs 530 crore that we pay to run the Parliament, they have no right to waste it as well!

2010-11-26T06:00:00.003+05:30

In my editorials, I have vividly written on our Parliament and Parliamentarians. From suggesting that our Parliament be outsourced (after 26/11), to asking political parties to pave the way for educated youth, to criticising the way our Parliament works, to how our Parliamentarians put their personal priorities above the national ones, I have often written about them. Be that as it may, the recent deadlock in our Parliament that lasted over eight long days made me come up with a few more urgently required and practicable measures. These eight successive days of adjournment cost the exchequer a staggering Rs 63 crores! In this whole winter session of Parliament, except for a couple of days, neither of the houses functioned normally for even one single session. For the uninitiated, as per official figures cited in various media, the total budget for the two houses for 2010-11 is estimated to be around a whopping Rs 530 crore!

For the first eight days of the Parliament in this season, only 47 minutes out of 2,880 minutes were spent on the question hour in the Lok Sabha, while in Rajya Sabha, out of a total 2,400 minutes, a jaw-dropping zero minutes were spent on the question hour. Worse, only 11 percent of total time in Lok Sabha and 2.25 percent of total time in Rajya Sabha was spent on productive work! And mind you, this is just a waste of one kind wherein the Parliament session is disrupted by our unruly Parliamentarians! The second variant of wastage comes in the form of absenteeism of our Parliamentarians. In the winter session last year, attendance in the Lok Sabha was between 56 percent and 75 percent with an average for the session at 66 percent. And the third variant of wastage is in the form of non-participation of any kind from our Parliamentarians. As per PRS Legislative Research, only 52 percent of the members in Lok Sabha participated in any debate in the last winter session. Of those who spoke, 25 percent restricted themselves to just a couple of debates while merely three percent MPs participated in more than 10 debates. Similar trends can be observed in both the houses since the last couple of years.

Such an irresponsible attitude by our Parliamentarians not just wastes colossal amounts of public funds, but also delays many important bills that are awaiting their approval – a few of them since many years. Nothing much can be expected from them as a majority of them are bereft of any education and a large number of them are hardened criminals who could make it to the Parliament by muscle and money power. But then, in the absence of any kind of refrain, these Parliamentarians are holding not just the Parliament, but the whole nation to ransom. It is high time that we set up a legally enforceable code of conduct, which makes it mandatory for these Parliamentarians to adhere to certain minimum expected standards. Non-adherence to the code could possibly result in penalties (monetary, non-monetary or both) and repetition of acts that go against the code could even result in legal action. As of now, Article 105(2) mentions that “no member of Parliament shall be liable to any proceeding in any court in respect of anything said or any vote given by him in Parliament or any committee thereof.” This needs immediate amendment! Secondly, attendance and participation should be made compulsory. Recently, the Russian Parliament passed a law to punish absent lawmakers. Even the German Bundestag (the national parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany) has made it obligatory that members participate when the sessions are on. Many other countries impose financial sanctions on absent MPs. Like in Israel, a member of Knesset is not allowed to miss a session without any valid reason. In Ghana, a member of parliament has to vacate his seat in the parliament if he is absent without permission. India should go further than that and put sanctions on irregular and absentee MPs to an extent that apart from plain deductions in salaries and allowances for the days they were absent, such MPs should not be allowed to file their nomination papers in the future if their absenteeism exceeds a set benchmark. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that in order to make the functioning more responsible, our Parliament should also make way for public opinion. The press and the public must be allowed to freely question any wrongdoing without being threatened under the law of parliamentary privileges.

But all this can happen only when we can keep a check at the nomination filing level. People, who ideally should be behind the bars, should not be permitted any ticket from any political party – and here, the Election Commission and the apex court have the most pivotal roles to play. If this is taken care of, then almost half of the nuisance that takes place inside our Parliament would be arrested! All in all, it is for our sake that our Parliamentarians meet for 100 days a year, for which we all pay up approximately Rs 5 crores each time they meet! If they cannot make productive use of this cost – which they hardly do or even bother to do – they have no right to waste it as well!

IT’S WE PARENTS AND TEACHERS WHO CREATE RAGGERS OUT OF OUR CHILDREN

2010-11-19T06:00:00.002+05:30

I am sure that after reading the heading, everyone must be restless to know how? But have some patience. It’s a story I repeat often. And I must repeat it again today. As a child, I remember having considerable friends in school. I am sure everyone has. But my friends’ circle from the very beginning had a specialty – it had only those people who were all very, very good in studies. If you are wondering how, the answer to that is in the place I used to stay, and still stay; a locality called Chittaranjan Park in New Delhi. This was originally that locality in Delhi where all those who had gotten displaced from Bangladesh during the partition were given a place to settle down. So, it used to be called the ‘EPDP colony’ i.e. East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ colony. This locality had its very special characteristics – maybe someday I will write about them all – including the one I referred to; i.e. it gave me, during my very early childhood, a group of friends who were all toppers! Being a locality of mostly lower middle class displaced people, the relatively well-to-do amongst them – that is, those who were middle class – managed to put their children in public schools like mine – the reputed Delhi Public School (DPS) – and believed the only way out of this lower middle class or middle class existence was to be exceptional in studies. Of course, coupled up with the Bengali orientation towards arts and literature, our locality produced some of the most brilliant students for our school. So, if our school had 15 buses and 150 scholar badge holders (the ones who excelled in studies), I believe more than a fifth of those students used to go in the bus that used to go through CR Park. My father being a teacher, he attracted friendship with all those parents whose children were toppers; and that’s how most of my friends were exceptional in studies!

It’s a different story – again to be told some other day – that as I grew up in life and started making friends of my choice, I changed this very friends’ circle. But for now, for this editorial, I will stay with the story of these friends. Lower middle/middle class. Very good in studies. From timid Bengali art and culture loving families. And typically weak built, as most Bengalis were and still are. If someone were to have told me then that these boys would go on to become partial murderers of the Aman Kachroos of this country, I would have shouted “impossible” at the top of my voice. They were/are from good families. Toppers of their respective schools and classes for heaven’s sake; and most importantly, of such weak built that they couldn’t even have harmed a fly! But as time unfolded, I saw just that happen in front of my eyes. They went on to become the topmost raggers of this country. Here is the story how.

I remember how these boys studied like crazy. Their aim was to top in the class. And being the son of a teacher, who knew something about education, I used to be surprised at what my friends were doing. My father had always told me that it was not important in life to get high marks. He told me to be good – again, the emphasis was not on high marks but on expansiveness of reading – in English and Maths as that was all that mattered in life. Rest, he asked me to do what I loved doing; and to develop passion. So luckily, I had a relaxed childhood and grew up really loving my father. His support for my endeavours was my biggest strength. And he was always questioning things himself. I remember when I was in class 1 or so – yes, some memories remain etched in your mind – when one night at 12 my father picked up the phone and gave a piece of his mind to our school principal. He was seething with anger that the school had given so much homework that I hadn’t been able to finish the same on time. I remember him criticising our schooling system, weighing my bag every now and then, and getting furious with anger seeing it weighing so heavily on my back. And while my father advised me not to run aft r marks, he did motivate me to read books. He once said, “Read so that those scholar badge holders feel ashamed of their lack of intellect when they talk to you.” And I spent my childhood reading and reading and reading more books. I didn’t get a scholar badge, still, I have no guilt because my parents never expected one. And today, I thank God that I didn’t get one. That’s why I know what education is about.

Coming back to my friends. I remember how even after my class 10th board exams, I wouldn’t find many of these friends of mine to play cricket with – because their coaching for the IIT entrance exams had already started. They studied hard. They did not play hard. In fact, they almost got locked up in their respective rooms for three to four years of their lives leading to the class 12th board examinations. The reason was that they had to make it to the IITs. Upon being asked why they wanted to go to an IIT, the standard response was, "Papa has said so; so I want to go to IIT." I would hear my neighbours shout at their kids that the neighbour’s kids had gotten into IIT – they were obviously referring to some other neighbour, not me – or that their relatives’ kids had gone to IIT. They would reprimand and rebuke their kids comparing them to donkeys who would put their parents to shame by not being able to make it…“Poor kids,” I would think. They missed out on the good tournaments we had, the new films which came and much more than that, they lost their individuality and personality. My friends never realised their over zealous parents were making them dwarfed forever.

And finally, after all that, most of them made it! Made it to some of the country’s brightest engineering and medical colleges. By then, most of them were just friends of mine. Not good friends. Because I had made up my set of good friends who had more to their character than mugged up knowledge of text book material. But nevertheless, I remained friends, so I kept a track of their lives. Something that interested me very much was how all my engineering friends ditched their parents and went on to stay in campus hostels even if they stayed a stone’s throw away from their institutions. The same reflected later in life when they all – one and all almost – decided to go abroad or at the least away from the town where their parents stayed... making CR Park today a place of old parents living in the false glory of their children going to IITs etc, while hiding the pain of the fact that actually they went away… at times, these parents are left behind with a semi-retarded second son who never made it to IIT; but never made it in life too because the parents thought nothing of him, so he indeed became nothing. You are but what your parents make of you after all! When parents say you are a winner, you become a winner. When they say you are a loser. You are destined to be a loser…

But what happened to the so called winners? Those who made it to the IITs? Well, their first months in IIT were traumatic to say the least. They would cry in front of me. They couldn’t take in the humiliation of ragging. The humiliation of being stripped totally naked and being made to run around the IIT Delhi campus. After all, after four years of exile and being locked up in their rooms while their commerce and arts friends made merry and socialised, my friends now wanted to socialise too. But alas, this is what they were getting in return! This is what their papas had put them into! The engineering and medical colleges of India are the havens of the worst possible ragging in this country. Why? Because these boys who went searching for socialisation got nothing. To socialise, they need to have normal people around. Unfortunately, those locked up in rooms for three or four years aren’t really normal. And most importantly, a healthy socialisation happens when there is a good ratio of the opposite sex. They keep men sane. But when you reach an institution where the girls’ ratio is ten to fifteen per cent and often less, you know your next four years are doomed. So then your socialisation takes perverted and sadistic forms.

And that’s when you call a junior and tell him, "This is my underwear. You will wash it for the next one year. And yes, before that, open your underwear and run around the campus first." And these were the set of seniors my friends encountered. They were aghast. I was aghast too. Not then; but next year. My friends – those weak, timid, book muggers – were now meeting me all excited. Why? Well, the new batch had just come in. And it was just awesome to make them run naked around in the IIT Delhi campus (in a mob those thin and weak looking Bengali boys were also heros). I protested, “Weren’t you crying last year, my friend, that it was so ugly and so humiliating? And today you are a part of this?” Pat came the reply, “Arindam, in this one year, we realised one thing... Ragging se personality banti hai boss...” I was studying management and behavioural science then. And I knew by then their personalities had become retarded forever. And by pushing them so much, their parents had not only lost them forever, they had also made them potential ragging killers too.

Their concepts of socialisation had become perverted because they never had a proper social life. They never found the joy of becoming passionate readers, sportsmen, friends and normal human beings. Their suppressed frustration and lack of guidance forced them unknowingly to take to ragging as a release – rather a volcanic eruption – against the years of suppression at home and forced-focus on a pathetic notion of education undertaken not to fulfill their own desires and wishes but to fulfill their parents’ inferiority complexes vis a vis their social circle. Last year alone, there were 19 ragging deaths in India and four attempted suicides according to a report by CURE – Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education – and needless to say, the incidence of perverted and inhuman ragging being highest in engineering and medical colleges of India.

The Supreme Court of India has passed orders against ragging; but education being a state subject, most states have failed to implement the orders properly. In the last six months itself, the ragging helpline has received more than 1.5 lac calls. Lack of fear of punishment is one reason why ragging prevails unchecked. But at one point of time, the parents must take a moment off and think. Did they give the right education to their children? Or while forcing them to study like maniacs, did they actually make them potential ragging killers? And teachers should also answer one question. Did they give the right lessons of life to their children or did they only concentrate on finishing their wretched course syllabus?

Oh yes, these same boys, upon realising that engineering was never something they wanted to do (and after wasting about fifteen to twenty lacs of taxpayers’ money, which subsidised their education), went ahead and made their lives on their own. Without their papa’s advice this time. Many of them cracked the CAT and went to the IIMs. It’s a place where the population has 85 to 90 per cent engineers (the girls there are also as less, keeping socialising dreams here too at bay). Great input, making a great environment indeed for the country’s premier business schools – thanks to the irrational admission system called CAT – which is supposed to make and host the country’s best personalities! The ‘personalities’ do learn all the mathematics and management formulas very well for sure. But people skills? Well, you can imagine how much of people skills can be imparted to those who bring to IIMs this superb learning, “Ragging se personality banti hai boss!”

THE GRAND OBAMA BEGGING GAME!

2010-11-12T06:00:00.000+05:30

Barack Obama came, he spoke and he conquered. At least that’s what some of the biggest media houses would have you believe. Nothing could be more misleading for the Indian public. Here are the reasons why the trip was only of feel-good value, that too for dumb people.

1. Obama had a clear cut mandate. And that mandate was to show Americans that he was taking back jobs for them. He took away business worth 10 billion dollars and 50,000 jobs. These 10 billion dollars could have been used in India to create 200 times more jobs, because for every American job we create in America, we can roughly create about 200 jobs in rural India. It was a classic game of begging that the new America is now seen playing in India and China. With India, it’s about access to its markets and deals with the government. And with China, it’s about the revaluation of the Chinese currency to reduce their foreign debt and make Chinese products uncompetitive in American markets! I would even say that it was indeed sad to see such a weak American President for the first time in history. An American President is expected to speak like a great statesman – whether he speaks to businessmen or to the Parliament. He is expected to talk about America’s role in global peacekeeping and poverty eradication, the latter more so since India has 65 percent of people below the globally defined poverty line of people earning less than 2 dollars a day. It was a shame that his talks never touched upon any of it.

2. He did speak of the need for Pakistan to bring 26/11 criminals to justice... But that is purely lip service. He never spoke of access to Headley. Just before coming to India, he doled out 2.2 billion dollars military aid to Pakistan. Talking about Pakistan supporting terrorism, yet giving them money to spread terrorism in India; both cannot go hand in hand. It’s typical American double speak. He did not utter a word about stopping aid to Pakistan. He only used cleverly worded stuff about Pakistan to gain brownie points in India without giving away anything.

3. He did not utter a word about China and its role in supporting Pakistan or its illegal occupation of Indian land. But a few months back, he did speak about the need for China to be the guardian of South Asia, including Kashmir.

4. It was really nice of Obama to be so appreciative of Gandhi. But as Americans prepare for a war on Iran – less for security issues and more to revive their economy – I doubt if Gandhi is what he really believes in... Loving Gandhi and bombing countries for financial gains don’t go hand in hand. As a person, I am very sure that he appreciates Gandhi, but as a world leader, he does not display the same in his actions. Signing a memorandum allowing poor African countries to use children for war certainly doesn’t speak greatly for a Gandhian.

5. The big Obama announcement is supposed to have been about his support to India for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. It might be noted that what he said has been said in the exact words by Bush before him and Clinton before that. It’s a shame that as a nation, we get so excited by such lip service. We deserve to be in the Security Council, and without us the Security Council is a sham. Obama’s mentioning the same is not a favour. And there is absolutely no reason to be excited about it. A permanent seat is our due and it is the Security Council’s job to call us and give us this due with appropriate apologies for the delay. And we should then proceed to rip them apart for the delay.

In fact, Obama said he welcomes a reformed United Nations Security Council with India in it. Th at means nothing. He knows that without the five nations’ support, India cannot be a permanent member; and China has not yet extended its support. Secondly, for India to be a permanent member of the Security Council, all these five nations will have to get the same approved in their respective parliaments with a majority vote! With heavy losses in the House of Representatives as well as in the Senate, Obama may not even succeed in getting this passed in his own country. For that matter, Obama never even mentioned that he would propose India’s candidature to his government and get the same passed. So, it’s still miles to go for something we thoroughly deserve. The second largest populated country in the world doesn’t yet have the right to decide on security issues of the world. India should actually boycott the United Nations till it is inducted into the Security Council as a permanent member; as it is, the United Nations is today nothing but an American tool to enforce its policies on the
world.

6. It’s a sham that he believed – and worse that Indians were made to believe the same by the Indian media – that India is a growing economic superpower and that America needs Indian markets. Obama had come here less for Indian markets and more for the money that the Indian government plans to spend on dual-use technology, nuclear and military programmes etc. And he wanted those deals. In essence, it was the Indian government’s money that he was eyeing, and not the consumer market. There is no consumer market in India that he cares about in real terms. For that, he goes to China. Th at’s where the consumer market lies. Compared to the American 18 trillion dollar GDP for a fourth of India’s population, India’s 3 trillion dollar GDP is of no meaning to America.

Obama knows best that the concept of the Indian middle class is a fantasy. What India terms as its middle class is below poverty line people for Americans. Americans sell ten times more in China where a real thriving middle class exists. DRDO head himself said that we don’t need American technology to advance our capabilities. The technology that we want, we already have access to the same through other countries. So the opening up of the dual-use technology was no favour. Rather, it was done again to get a pie of the Indian government’s spending power, where deal-making is easier.

7. Finally, the big business opportunity for India; outsourcing! Obama did not say a single word about diluting his anti outsourcing stance. Rather, he lobbied for more access to Indian markets – basically biotech, pharma, retail etc. And as Indians, we did not say a word about our lack of access to their agriculture products’ market, where we could make huge gains.

In a nutshell, one can conclude by saying that just like American typical standards, Obama’s current journey to India was a trip to get without giving; to talk about free markets while keeping their markets protected. That’s typical American doublespeak. Of course, in between we got to see glimpses of the great Obama charisma. His great speaking abilities; his great agility and friendly gestures and ways with ‘staged’ children.

Although I have to say that his answer to a staged question by a Mumbai student (something like how do we strike a balance between the material pressures of this world and the pursuit of happiness?) was so unintellectual that it raised questions about his intellectual ability to comprehend the deeper meaning of life.

The best part of the tour, for a change, was our Prime Minister Dr Singh’s assertive speech during the common address. It might not have been as eloquent as Obama’s speech was, or like those given by Dr Singh’s Chinese counterparts – who now treat America as their junior partner; of course, thanks to their hard earned real might – yet, it showed that Dr. Singh was in no mood to mince words when it came to India’s expectations out of America. It’s a different story that this visit of Obama fulfilled none of them.

IT IS A MATTER OF UTTER DISGRACE THAT AS A NATION, WE HAVE FODDER BILLIONAIRES, IPL BILLIONAIRES, CWG BILLIONAIRES,

2010-11-05T06:00:00.000+05:30

AND HUNDREDS OF ‘ADARSH’ MILLIONAIRES!

Amidst a long list of myriad scams and land grabbing acts, the recent Adarsh Cooperative Housing society scam appears to be one of the most unfortunate of all. The housing society, which was supposedly meant for Kargil martyrs’ families, ended up getting allotted to everyone but the actual beneficiaries. As if the scam pertaining to buying of coffins was not enough, the widows of the martyrs had to go through this ordeal too. In fact, the location of the society speaks volumes. Being located at one of the costliest areas of Mumbai, in Colaba, the political, defence and bureaucratic classes of India left no opportunity to illegally get their names registered in the list of beneficiaries – despite having no links with Kargil martyrs. What is most hilarious is the way our babus and politicians reacted after being exposed by the media. On the one hand, while the Maharashtra Chief Minister offered to quit, on the other, the former Indian Army Chief Gen N C Vij stated that he was not even aware that the Adarsh Society flats were meant for Kargil war widows; and so he purchased one! Now, if Gen Vij is honest, then I really wonder who would be the right person (except him) to know the truth? A similar answer was given by the recently retired Gen Deepak Kapoor! What’s more, in documents submitted by politicians to get flats in the infamous Adarsh Housing Society, some politicians even showed their monthly income to be less than Rs. 20,000. Among all, Suresh Prabhu, Kanhaiyalal Gidwani and family, former bureaucrat and NCP MP Shrinivas Patil, declared their income in the bracket of Rs.20,000 to Rs.40,000! Many of these politicians are reported to own multiple properties. And mind you, all of them got their allotments at a tenth of the prevailing prices in the market! What is even more unfortunate this time is that even the top brass of the forces are involved in this loot. And now it comes to the fore that the land on which the society is being built is situated on a sensitive area of Indian Navy – forcing the Navy to brand the society land a “security threat”!

But then, amongst the others, the armed forces are probably the cleanest! Th ere is no doubt in the fact that whether Indian businesses, or the political class, or the bureaucrats, most of them possess an unending appetite to grab land and that too at any cost! So what if these apartments were meant for the widows who have lost their husbands fighting for the same country, our corrupt classes have left no stone unturned to grab as much as they could. Thanks to media that this scam came to the limelight; otherwise, there are so many similar such scams, which do not even get reported! And the blatant and shameless loot continues. There are innumerable examples that corroborate the fact how the entire system stinks. Recently, a few more land scams have been unearthed in Mumbai itself – one involving the revenue minister and the other involving the top cops. Another land scam has been unearthed recently in Karnataka involving the top ministers of the state. Still another one has surfaced in Rishikesh, in the state of Uttarakhand. And each one of these scams runs into multiples of crores. Mind you, these are just a few land scams where, given the obscene appetite of the business, political and the bureaucratic classes, the magnitude of corruption has crossed all shameless benchmarks! In the past one decade, we have had the famous Ketan Parekh scam, the Satyam scam, the Barak missile scam, the oil for food scam, Madhu Koda scam, the fodder scam, the IPL scam, the CWG scam, and the list goes on and on...

Each one of them is a glaring testimony to the fact that national loot has been a perpetual national pastime! Billions of rupees get siphoned off into the pockets of a few. According to Late C K Prahlad, the cost of corruption to this country is a staggering Rs.2,50,000 crores! Though I feel that it is impossible to put the right value to the billions that are getting systematically siphoned, but then, keeping Prahlad’s figure as the basis, the per capita corruption for India through various scams comes to a whopping Rs.2500!

What is most unfortunate is the fact that as scams magnify, both in scope and scale, crony capitalism becomes the order of the day! That’s why as a nation, we might have a hundred billionaires, but not a single billion dollar value product! It is a matter of utter disgrace that as a nation, we have fodder billionaires, IPL billionaires, CWG billionaires, and hundreds of ‘Adarsh’ millionaires!

WHY OBAMA IS OF NO USE TO INDIA

2010-10-29T06:00:00.003+05:30

Praising American presidents has not been quite my forte! However, I celebrated Obama’s Presidential victory wholeheartedly (read my editorial in The Sunday Indian, issue dated November 9, 2008) because I almost believed that he held a promise that American presidents in the past have rarely held! He really could have been the change the world was waiting for. Recession had shown its ugly face once more in the greedy capitalist world and Bush had left a near criminal legacy behind. There was no better a time for Obama to prove his worth. But forget bringing the world out of recession, Obama has not even been able to do anything to bring the USA out of recession! Of course, if we were to believe the Nobel Committee and its choice for the Nobel Prize in Economics this year, then there is nothing wrong with the capitalist system and nothing much to be done at all but match the existing unemployment with the existing jobs vacant in various companies! Ludicrous... just like their Peace Prize to Obama was!

Obama’s campaign was all about “Yes, we can!” The truth is he hasn’t accomplished much of what he had promised – especially during his election campaign. Among his other failures, he has failed to keep one of his key promises – on closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and also on providing relief for illegal immigrants. Even after a year, Gitmo is still active; and no concrete steps have been crafted for illegal migrants. What is now a global joke is that his promises of closing Gitmo and solving other human rights issues were part of the parcel that won him the coveted Nobel Peace Prize!

It was Obama who initiated talks on global warming and announced his plans to organize a series of climate talks. Back in 2008, Obama had projected himself as a “citizen of the world”. But then, this same Obama, the perceived harbinger of optimism, now blames developing nations for global warming! This reminds me of President George W Bush who, during his tenure, discarded the Kyoto Protocol on similar grounds. In similar manner, during a State-of-the-Union speech on January 27, 2010, Obama promised something that is quite the opposite of what he had stood for in his campaign days. Instead of talking about green jobs and climate change policy, he discussed his plans on nuclear power, oil, gas, coal and bio-fuels! That’s change indeed!

Nobel laureate Obama’s biggest global failure has perhaps been regarding the Iraq and Afghan issue, where he had committed during a formal announcement of a new Iraq strategy at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on February 27, 2009, that “under the new plan, the US will remove all combat troops (from Iraq) by August 31, 2010.” Systematically delaying the troops’ withdrawal has been akin to breaking the promise. Similarly, Obama still is to remove his troops from Afghanistan – where there is blatant genocide being carried out under the garb of a peace process – and is finding all possible excuses to stay back. One wonders if the Nobel Peace Prize winner is actually unable to shift out of Afghanistan due to the $1 trillion worth mineral wealth in the land! The mother of all disasters in terms of doing the opposite of peace though is that, on October 25, 2010, the Obama administration ‘waived’ off sections of a law meant to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers in Africa, thus making iteasier for countries in the dark continent to make use of underage troops. In a memorandum to Hilary Clinton, he wrote, “I hereby determine that it is in the national interest of the United States to waive the application to Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, and Yemen of the prohibition in section 404(a) of the [Child Service Prevention Act]". And for records, recruiting underage soldiers is a human rights abuse in most of the nations. Even Noam Chomsky stated in an interview last month that President Obama “is involved in war crimes right now. For example, targeted assassinations are war crimes. That's escalated quite sharply under Obama. If you look at WikiLeaks, there are a lot of examples of attacks on civilians.” Yet, Obama retains the coveted tag of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace!

A couple of months back, PolitiFact found that Obama has kept around 91 of his promises out of 500! But then, this is not a peculiar phenomenon with Obama. Breaking promises is a trend with American presidents, and Obama is no different! Take for instance Woodrow Wilson who promised to keep the US out of World War I and ended up pushing the US into the same war. Then came Herbert Hoover in 1928, who, in his presidency speech, pledged to end poverty and promised “a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage” – but eventually gift ed the US ‘The Great Depression.’ On similar lines, Franklin D. Roosevelt graciously failed to fulfill his 1932 pledge to maintain balanced budgets and to keep the US out of World War II as he bombed Japan and his government’s spending increased from 8.0% of GNP to 10.2%. The national debt, in turn, doubled from 16% to 33.6%. Richard Nixon promised resolutely in 1968 to ‘quickly’ resolve the Vietnam War, but he didn’t! George H.W. Bush Senior promised in 1988, “Read my lips: No new taxes!” and then went on and increased taxes. And as far as his son George Bush is concerned, the least said the better!

Let me now come to Obama’s much hyped visit to India… If numbers speak volumes, then Obama’s recent approval ratings in India, just a few weeks before he lands in the country, should be enough to gauge his popularity and acceptability in India. The approval rating of Obama has dropped by 13 per cent – from 31 per cent in 2008 to 18 per cent in 2010 – as per the latest Gallup Poll. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, the approval rating of Obama has improved in Pakistan where the rating has almost doubled from 10 per cent in 2008 to 18 percent in 2010, all thanks to the $7.5 billion Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill and massive flood relief work. Obama’s current approval rating in India is one of the lowest in the 18 Asian countries, for all predictable reasons. Even the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a new report said that “most of what the US government can do for India lies in the broader global arena, and most of what India needs at home, it must do for itself.” The report further argued that “expectations for a partnership between the two countries in the near term are unrealistically high and overlook how their interests, policies, and diplomatic style will oft en diverge.” President Barack Obama recently made his stand very clear in India’s outsourcing business and announced that tax breaks should go to companies that create jobs in the US and not overseas. Furthering his anti-India stance, Obama in August this year signed into law a legislation to secure the US-Mexico border by massively hiking work visa fees, ignoring concerns over a “discriminatory” provision that will largely hit Indian IT firms.

But then, his stance against outsourcing to India is not good enough reason for why he is of no use to India. One need not look far though for the reasons. In spite of Wikileaks and other documents proving Pakistan’s perception about India, Obama contrarily is confident that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would remain secure and had said, “Primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” Obama’s pro-Pak and anti-India ideologies are clear from the way he has approved multi-billion dollar aid packages to Pakistan, in spite of the fact (which was actually revealed by Western media!) that a large pie of this money is redirected for funding terror plots against India. In 2009, Obama outrageously supported Pakistan and made statements regarding America’s huge strategic and national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable. If audacity has to re-defi ne itself, it should take a lesson or two from the US-Pak relationship. Even after a series of Wikileaks and other anti-Pak documents coming to the fore, America, as recently as on October 22, 2010 has announced a whopping $2.29 billion military aid to Pakistan to bolster its army's anti-terror capabilities, ignoring India's concerns about how Pakistan continues to divert a huge portion of such assistance for anti-India plans. To top this, Hillary Clinton applauded Pakistan’s role in fighting terror and said that she feels that there is “no stronger partner when it comes to counter terrorism than Islamabad”... And all this when just a few weeks are left for Obama to visit India.

If Obama’s Pakistan inclination is not good enough to explain that he is a man of double speak like all past American presidents – and perhaps his job is to blame for that – then let’s talk about China. Obama’s view seems to have tilted away clearly from democratic India and towards the dictatorial China; and all this because of obvious reasons. Recently, as on September 20, 2010, US President Barack Obama said that China's rapid economic development is in the interest of the US economy. He further commented, “It's good for us that China has done well.” No doubt that this statement is more to please China and fortifies the US-China trade ties. With more than 1.3 billion people and an economy that is predicted to surpass the American economy in a few years to come, China has become the US' fastest-growing major overseas market. As per the US International Trade Commission, US exports to China was worth $69.6 billion while imports was a whopping $296.4 billion in 2009 alone. Th us, a total trade volume of $366 billion is quite signifi cant. China’s indispensability for US has grown to an extent that, in order to appease and please Beijing, Obama transformed his Strategic Economic Dialogue into the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, thus silently taking off human rights issues from the bilateral agenda – which may have soured the budding affair. This is evident from the last Asia visit of Obama, where he appointed China as the official ‘monitor’ of Asia and asked the country to look into the Kashmir issue, knowing very well that China is supporting Pakistan in their anti-India plans and that China itself has still not returned back Indian territory it occupied decades back. In November 2009, while visiting Japan, Obama said the US was seeking “pragmatic cooperation with the emerging giant of China, noting Beijing's partnership in jump-starting global economic recovery, its support for stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan and its commitment to the de-nuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.” Obama further said, “The rise of a strong, prosperous China can be the source of strength for the community of nations.”

All I can conclude is that going by the precedence, India has no reasons to feel optimistic about his visit. And Indian policy makers have no reason to formulate policies in order to appease Obama during his visit just out of excitement. Already, organisations like WalMart have started to lobby for a 100% FDI in the Indian retail sector. And I am sure the likes of WalMart would try to push through their agendas during this visit of Obama. It is significant that the Indian policy makers see through this and take correct decisions which are more oriented towards the nation’s future than an American future in India.

I reiterate again that it is not that I have anything against Obama personally – and I admire his leadership qualities that made him win in a land that is known for its racial discriminations! But given all that is past, I know for sure that Obama’s visit would not benefit India in any way, just like his becoming the President of America has not benefitted Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Africa and even his own homeland the United States of America!