Missed chance in Kashmir
B RP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi can take credit for bringing his Bharatiya Janata Party to power in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir for the first time, albeit as the junior partner of a coalition, but his term appears set to close as one of missed opportunities.

The Peoples Democratic Party’s alliance with the BJP after the Assembly elections of 2014 was dictated by the composition of the 87-member house.

Despite calls by hardline members of the All-Party Hurriyat Leaders Conference to boycott the elections, there was a record turnout of 65 per cent voters when polling was held in the harsh winter months.

The PDP emerged as the largest party in the Assembly with 28 seats. The BJP bagged 25 seats, the National Conference 15 and the Congress 12. Three small parties picked up four seats and Independents three.

The BJP’s best ever performance was the result of a big sweep in the Jammu province, aided by the party’s sensational victory in the parliamentary elections a few months earlier under Modi’s leadership.  Jammu has a 62.5% Hindu population.

Mutual animosities prevented the PDP, the NC and the Congress from coming together to form the government. After two months of talks with the PDP on government formation, BJP President Amit Shah announced that the ideological differences had been ironed out.

The alliance between the two parties was actually a marriage of convenience. It was made possible by putting in cold storage two contentious issues: the BJP’s lifelong opposition to Article 370 of the Constitution which gives Jammu and Kashmir a special status and the PDP’s demand for withdrawal of  the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which provides impunity to security personnel deployed in disturbed areas.

On PDP founder and Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s death in 2016, doubts arose about the coalition’s future and the state came under Governor’s rule. However, within three months, a new government with his daughter and PDP President Mehbooba Mufti as the Chief Minister took office.

Political stability in the state is inevitably mixed up with India-Pakistan relations. Modi’s tête-à-tête with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawas Sharif had raised hopes of an improvement in relations between the two countries but they faded fast in the absence of any follow-up measures. There has been no initiative from either side to resume the dialogue process since Prime Minister Imran Khan came to office.

Differing perceptions on the handling of security issues cast a shadow on the PDP-BJP coalition after militant leader Burhan Wani was killed in an operation and security personnel faced rain of stones in the valley.

At Mehbooba Mufti’s instance the Centre agreed to a temporary halt in security operations for Ramadan but it did not evoke a response from the other side.

When two BJP members of her Cabinet openly joined their party’s efforts to save the persons accused in the kidnap, gang-rape and murder of a young girl in Jammu’s Kathua district, Mehbooba Mufti was able to get the party to replace them. Soon, however, the BJP pulled out of the government, bringing it down, and the state came under Governor’s rule again.

The Assembly was in suspended animation, and there were reports that the BJP was trying to float an alternative government with Peoples Conference leader Sajad Lone as the Chief Minister. Since Lone’s party had only two members, the BJP needed to poach a large number of MLAs from the PDP and other parties to cobble up a majority in the house.

Mehbooba Mufti, NC  leader Omar Abdullah and the Congress leaders did not feel quite confident about their party men’s ability to resist inducements. That prompted them to forget animosities and come together to form a new government.

Governor Sat Pal Malik foiled their plan by dissolving the Assembly as soon as he received a letter faxed by Mehbooba Mufti advancing a claim to form the government with the support of 56 members.

Malik and BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav offered specious arguments to justify dissolution of the house without giving Mehbooba Mufti an opportunity to prove her claim of majority support on the floor of the house.

Conveniently forgetting the PDP-BJP partnership which lasted three and a half years, Malik cited ideological differences among the coalition partners as the reason for his action.

Madhav said in a tweet that the three parties probably had “instructions from across the border”. When Omar Abdullah challenged him to prove the charge, he beat a hasty retreat.

There is a bright side to the current situation. Dissolution of the Assembly makes fresh elections inevitable. That will give the people an opportunity to express their will. There is, however, no knowing when elections will take place and whether the verdict will be any different this time. --Gulf Today, November 27, 2018

Countering divisive politics

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Delhi Chief Minister, Arwind Kejriwal, took the Hindutva establishment head on last weekend when he arranged a concert by well-known exponent of Carnatic music TM Krishna at the national capital after a Central government outfit,  yielding to social media pressure, cancelled an event in which he was to participate.

Krishna has raised his voice against caste prejudices in the world of art and culture and endeavoured to broaden the base of classical music by introducing non-Hindu themes.  He received the prestigious Magsayay Award in 2016 for his “forceful commitment as artist and advocate of art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions”.

The Hindutva school was enraged by Krishna’s criticism of its intolerant ways.  When the Airports Authority of India announced a programme, which included a concert by him, trolls dubbed him an anti-national and mounted a campaign against him. The AAI then dropped the programme.

Kejriwal, whose Aam Admi Party seized power in the National Capital Territory of Delhi after pulverising both the BJP and the Congress party in the 2016 elections, immediately offered him an alternative venue.

Krishna made the event a celebration of India’s diversity. From his vast repertoire, he chose for the occasion a Malayalam song on Jesus, a Tamil song on Allah, some Kannada verses of reformer Basava and Hindi bhajans, besides popular classical items.

It was a more powerful statement against hate politics than what one hears at party rallies.

Even as Kejriwal set the stage for a cultural drive against hate politics, the BJP was building up a campaign, in the southern State of Kerala, against a recent Supreme Court ruling that the ancient Sabarimala temple’s practice of barring women of menstruating age violates the Constitutional principle of gender equality.

Both the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, had welcomed the court ruling but quickly changed their stance, sensing an opportunity to strengthen their foothold in Kerala.  

The BJP has not been able to win a single parliamentary seat from Kerala so far. It hopes to make a breakthrough by alleging interference in Hindu religious practices.

The State’s government, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has said it has a Constitutional obligation to enforce the court verdict. However, as of now, it remains unimplemented as the police is either unable or unwilling to provide safe passage to women devotees along the hill path lined by Hindutva protesters. 

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been striving to counter the Hindutva challenge with calls to recapture the mood of the Kerala renaissance which had helped create a secular atmosphere and enabled the State to achieve social progress, which, the United Nations noted five decades back, was comparable to that of the industrialised West.

Both Kejrival and Vijayan are seeking, in disparate ways, to counter the Hindutva agenda of polarising the country to make electoral gains. 

Since the BJP came to power at the Centre four and a half years ago, there has been a two-pronged drive to promote the Hindutva ideology.

At the highest level, there has been a campaign, led by Narendra Modi himself, to denigrate the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had held Hindutva forces at bay during the Partition riots and laid the foundations of a secular state. Modi views the Nehru legacy as a stumbling block in the way of realising the BJP’s goal of a Hindu nation in which non-Hindus will be relegated to second position.

In several States, Hindutva vigilante groups have indulged in violence against Muslims and Dalits in the name of cow protection. Police were slow to respond, and when they did they generally sought to pin the blame on the victims and save the culprits.

The demand for a Ram temple at Ayodhya, which has been on the BJP’s election manifesto since 1989, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid by RSS volunteers in 2002 to clear the ground for its construction were milestones in Hindutva’s march to power. Modi’s slogan of development did not lead to a change in the political agenda.

Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, has in a recent report noted that BJP leaders have been making inflammatory remarks against minorities and contributing to vigilantism targeted against Muslims and Dalits.  

With parliamentary elections only six months away and the economic outlook not as rosy as the government makes out, the BJP is becoming increasingly reliant on divisive politics. --Gulf Today, November 20, 2018.

Pressure on RBI to part with funds

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

The Reserve Bank of India, which is banker to the Central and State governments and regulator and supervisor of the country’s monetary system, is under pressure from the Modi administration to pass on to it a big chunk of its reserves.

According to media reports, the Finance Ministry wants the RBI to transfer to the Centre Rs 3,600 billion out of its reserves of Rs 9,590 billion, and it says no.

More ominously, the Ministry wants joint management of the reserves by the Centre and the RBI. This will not only destroy the RBI’s autonomy and inhibit its ability to perform its functions well but also allow the government easy access to the central bank’s reserves which play a critical role in ensuring the nation’s financial security.

Initially, the government did not deny reports about its differences with the RBI. On the contrary, it virtually confirmed them and offered palpable justifications for threatening the RBI’s autonomy.

It argued that the RBI had overestimated its requirements of reserves, and could do with much less than what it holds now.

It also claimed the RBI’s existing economic capital framework was determined by its board of directors at a meeting at which two government nominees were not present.

As the Opposition parties and financial experts criticised the government for attempting to erode the RBI’s autonomy and reports circulated that RBI Governor Urjit Patel was preparing to quit, the government began a damage control exercise.

Subhash Chandra Garg, a Secretary in the Finance Ministry, in a tweet, described the reports as “misinformed speculation” and said there was no proposal to ask the RBI to transfer Rs 3,600 billion or even Rs 1,000 billion.

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said nothing that could reassure critics.

One of the two directors nominated to the RBI board by the government recently is S. Gurumurthy, a chartered accountant better known as an ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s mentor.

Reacting to the media reports, the RSS said the Governor should cooperate with the government or quit.

Set up by the colonial administration in 1935, the Reserve Bank of India’s functions include formulation, implementation and monitoring of monetary policy and laying down the broad parameters within which commercial banks must operate.

Successive Central governments have respected its autonomy, recognising the need for it to be free from political control to discharge its onerous responsibilities.

The RBI has an equity capital of only Rs 50 million but pays the Centre a handsome dividend each year. The dividend for the current fiscal is Rs 500 billion.

The RBI is one of the few central banks of the world which regularly updates its history. It has so far published four volumes which cover its working from 1935 to 1997.

Chicago University professor Raghuram Rajan, who, while serving as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund in 2005, had forecast the 2008 crisis in the US financial system, was the RBI’s Governor when Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014. His monetary policy helped check inflation and raise foreign exchange reserves.

When Modi consulted the RBI on his demonetisation plan of 2016, Rajan advised against it and warned of potential negative effects. Although he was ready to serve another term, Modi decided to look for someone amenable. Rajan returned to his Chicago University job.

Last week, on the second anniversary of demonetisation, Rajan said the world economy had picked up last year but India could not do as well as it should have done because of the disruption caused by the note ban and the hastily introduced Goods and Services Tax.

While the government’s publicly advanced argument for seeking RBI funds is that the central bank has more reserves than it needs, the real reason maybe something else. Either it is experiencing a cash crunch, which it is unwilling to acknowledge publicly, or it is looking for funds to launch populist schemes ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.

Another indication of its urgent need to raise money is the reported decision to sell company shares which were declared “enemy property” after the shareholders left for Pakistan or China following the wars with these countries. Their current worth is estimated at more than $400 million.

Whether the government will press ahead with the plan to squeeze money out of the RBI or pull back will be known when the bank’s board of directors meets next Monday. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 13, 2018

A ghost that refuses to go away

BRP Bhaskae
Gulf Todayhttp://gulftoday.ae/portal/838cf8e2-ab6a-40f0-bfbd-42b9fd087e6c.aspx

The Supreme Court last week rebuffed a belated attempt by the Central Bureau of Investigation to breathe new life into the three-decade-old Bofors scandal.

The scandal broke in 1987 when a Swedish radio reported that arms maker AB Bofors had bribed Indian politicians and officials to get the Rs 14.37 billion contract for the supply of 35 mm field guns the previous year. It had cast a shadow over Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Mr Clean image.

The government conceded the Opposition’s demand for a parliamentary probe. The joint parliamentary committee in which the ruling Congress had a majority cleared the Prime Minister’s name but an Opposition member appended a strong dissenting report.

A sustained Opposition campaign built around the scandal did immense damage to Rajiv Gandhi and to his party. When a little boy, participating in a children’s programme broadcast live from an All India Radio station, was asked to sing a song he broke into a ditty in Hindi which ran like this: “In every lane, they are screaming Rajiv Gandhi is a thief!” 

The names of some friends of Rajiv Gandhi cropped up in media speculation on the middlemen who got the kickback but there was no material with which to pin anything on them.   

Later Indian mediapersons, following up the Swedish radio report, obtained documents which helped track the flow of funds from Bofors to suspected beneficiaries.  They won laurels for their labours but the material they unearthed was not sufficient to drag anyone to court.

The government had claimed that no Indian or foreign middlemen were involved in the deal. This turned out to be untrue.

Win Chadda, who had worked earlier for Bofors and some other arms manufacturers, was apparently involved in this deal too.

Bofors documents showed that in the closing stages of the negotiations, a London-based company AE Services Ltd suddenly entered the picture. It was not clear what role it played but Bofors rewarded it handsomely.

The money paid to AE Services travelled swiftly through several bank accounts before disappearing without leaving a trace.

The identities of those behind AE Services were never established but media reports linked it to Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian who came to India as a representative of Snam Pragotti, a fertiliser firm, and became a family friend of Rajiv Gandhi and his Italian-born wife Sonia.

Presuming that the kickback may have gone to Sonia Gandhi’s parents, a Delhi newspaper sent a reporter to Italy. Its hopes of finding signs of her parents living in opulence did not materialise. It found them living middle class lives.

The Bofors scandal played a part in the Congress party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections of 1989. A coalition government headed by VP Singh and supported from outside by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) took office.

Singh, who was Defence Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, had fallen out with him over a probe into kickbacks in the purchase of submarines from Germany. In his time, the CBI registered a complaint on the Bofors payoffs but the agency could make little headway in the investigation.

On a plea by one of the persons named in the complaint the Delhi High Court quashed it. However, the Supreme Court overruled the decision and restored the complaint.  

In 1997 after Swiss authorities furnished some secret documents relating to bank accounts of suspected Bofors payoff beneficiaries the CBI constituted a special investigative term for the probe.

While the investigations were on, Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber sent by the Sri Lankan outfit, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and a few other accused died of natural causes.

The CBI’s sporadic efforts collapsed when the Delhi High Court quashed the charges against Rajiv Gandhi in 2004 and acquitted all the other accused the following year.

The agency’s readiness to act in the interests of the government of the day in politically sensitive matters is well-known. But, then, even during the six years under BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee it could not conduct a successful prosecution.

The High Court verdict came early in the first term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. However, the CBI appealed to the Supreme Court only this year at the instance of the Modi government, against the advice of Attorney General KK Venugopal.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the appeal does not mean the ghost of Bofors has been finally laid to rest. The apex court still has before it a partly-heard appeal filed by Anil Agarwal, a BJP leader. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 6, 2016.