Meaning of a poll verdict

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s stunning landslide victory in the Hindu heartland state of Uttar Pradesh has boosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image, raising high hopes in the Hindutva camp and deep despair in its foes.

The BJP’s return to power in the state, home of one-sixth of all Indians, after a 15-year gap, confirms its status as the country’s largest party and sets it ahead of rivals in the run-up for the national elections due in 2019.

The BJP’s tally of 312 (not counting 13 seats won by its two small allies) in the new 403-member assembly marks electoral triumph of a magnitude witnessed only rarely – as when the Congress won 388 out of 430 seats in the first assembly elections of 1951-52 and when the people gave 352 out of 425 seats to the Janata Party in 1977 after the end of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime.

The UP verdict breaks the spell of electoral drought Modi and the BJP experienced after the sensational 2014 Lok Sabha victory. Delhi state had rebuffed them in 2015 and Bihar, the second largest heartland state, in 2016.

The hopes and fears aroused by it must be moderated with the outcome of the elections in four other states which too went to the polls. Of them, only Uttarakhand, which was part of UP until 2000, gave the BJP a resounding victory.

In Punjab, where the BJP is a junior partner of the Sikh party Akali Dal, the ruling pair lost ignominiously to the Congress, which returned to power after a decade, with 77 of the 117 assembly seats. The Akali Dal’s strength fell from 56 in the last house to 15 and the BJP’s from 12 to three.

The BJP, which was in power in Goa, suffered a setback, its strength in the 40-member assembly falling from 21 to 13. The Congress nearly doubled its strength to 17 and emerged as the largest party.

In the northeastern state of Manipur, the Congress lost power but remained the largest party in the 60-member assembly with 27 seats, against the BJP’s 22.

Acting fast, the BJP managers secured enough support from small parties and independents in both Goa and Manipur to beat the Congress in the race to power.

A conclusion that can be drawn from the electoral verdict is that the people voted against the ruling dispensation in all the states. The BJP’s big win in UP and Uttarakhand is attributable to the communal polarisation promoted by Sangh Parivar associates and Modi’s uncanny ability to derive electoral profit from it, using binaries like graveyard-cremation and Eid-Holi.

There was not even one Muslim among the 403 candidates of the BJP and its allies although the community accounts for one-fifth of UP’s population and BJP vice-president and minority poster boy Mukthar Abbas Naqvi hails from the state. The BJP nominees included Somnath Som, a hate-speech case accused, and Suchi Chaudhury, wife of a riot case accused.

The Samajwadi Party, which draws support primarily from the backward Yadav community, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the standard bearer of the Dalits, had alternated in power in UP in the last 15 years. This time the SP fought in alliance with the Congress but a rift between party chief Mulayam Singh and his son and Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav botched its chances.

The decline of the SP and the BSP suggests that identity politics is losing its edge.

BSP chief Mayawati has alleged that the BJP engineered the UP victory by tampering with the electronic voting machines. The possibility of hacking of EVMs was first suggested by BJP veteran LK Advani in 2009 and a technician demonstrated how it could be done. A year later University of Michigan researchers claimed they were able to change the results on an Indian EVM by sending messages from a mobile phone.

Many countries have abandoned electronic voting in view of the potential for mischief. Given the Hindutva camp’s poor record as a respecter of laws, Mayawati’s allegation cannot be rejected outright. While not endorsing her charge, the Congress has urged the Election Commission to look into it and dispel misgivings.

Having improved its position in three of the five states which went to the polls, the BJP can now raise its strength in the Rajya Sabha by increasing its representation from these states in the next biennial elections to the house. It can also try to get one from the Sangh Parivar elected as India’s next President. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, March 14, 2017

Doubts over GDP growth claim

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

Economists and opposition politicians have voiced deep scepticism over the government’s claim that India’s gross domestic product registered seven per cent growth during the third quarter of the current financial year, as against 7.3 per cent during the previous quarter.

The figure suggests that the demonetisation of high-value currency notes, announced on November 8, did not hit the economy as badly as was anticipated. As much as 86 per cent of the currency in circulation had ceased to be legal tender on that date. This resulted in disruption of economic activity in many sectors for several weeks.

The Central Statistics Office put the GDP for the quarter ending on December 31, 2016 at Rs 30,280 billion, as against Rs 28,310 billion for the corresponding period of FY 2015-16. On the basis of these figures, it estimated that the GDP growth for the year ending on March 31, 2017 will be 7.1 per cent as against 7.9 per cent for the previous year.

The Reserve Bank of India and the International Monetary Fund had reckoned that demonetisation would reduce the current year’s GDP growth rate by one per cent.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing an election meeting in Uttar Pradesh, said the CSO data proved that the people of India did not allow demonetisation to hamper the country’s development.

The opposition Congress party’s spokesman debunked the claim, citing figures of decline in bank credit to industry and contraction in industrial production.

Former Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor of Economics Arun Kumar said CSO’s GDP calculation was invalid as it did not take into account data relating to the informal sector which bore the brunt of demonetisation. This sector, he pointed out, accounted for 45 to 50 per cent of the output of the Indian economy.

Some economists expressed doubts over CSO’s finding that private consumption had increased by 10 per cent during the quarter. They said the cash crunch in the wake of demonetisation had actually brought consumption down.

Surveys done by the State Bank of India and trade bodies had indicated that demonetisation had hit the growth of the unorganised sector to the extent of 30 to 40 per cent.

Chief Statistician TCA Anant, while releasing the CSO data, had admitted that in the absence of sufficient data it was difficult to assess the impact of demonetisation. “Policies such as demonetisation are difficult to assess without a lot of data, which is still to come in,” he said.

India calculates GDP primarily on the basis of activity in the formal sector which accounts for only about 15 per cent of the economy. The CSO surveys the grey areas of the economy periodically. Often it interpolates data from old surveys into the GDP calculation.

India has attracted the charge of fudging GDP figures from time to time. In 2015, the government modified the way GDP is counted. As a result that year the GDP growth shot up to 7.3 per cent from 5.5 per cent, and the government declared the economy had turned the corner.

The then RBI Governor, Raghuram Rajan, likened the new methodology to two mothers babysitting each other’s child and paying for the service. “There is a rise in economic activity as each pays the other, but the net effect on the economy is questionable,” he said.

The US State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs said that while India’s economy was one of the fastest growing the depressed investor sentiment suggested that the approximately 7.5 per cent growth rate might be an overstatement.

Since the new methodology for calculating GDP was adopted India had appeared to be the world’s fastest growing big economy, outpacing China, “but scepticism about the data is growing even faster,” the Economist wrote. It added, “A cottage industry has sprung up to cater to the sceptics, bending various indicators of economic activity to produce new gauges of growth.”

Reliability of GDP data is a global issue. Two years ago, World Economics, a research firm in London, developed a data quality index to make people aware that GDP means different things in different countries. In its 2016 index, two Asian countries, Hong Kong and Singapore, figure among the 10 countries with the most reliable GDP figures. India is at the 53rd place and China at the 63rd.

Many observers are inclined to wait for the revised GDP estimates, which may come in about six months, to get a correct picture of the state of the economy. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, March 7, 2017.

A push to Africa outreach

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Vice-President Hamid Ansari’s visits to Rwanda and Uganda last week marked another step forward in India’s Africa Outreach initiative, designed to place its ties with the countries of the continent on a firm footing after two decades of neglect.

The third India-Africa Summit, held in New Delhi in 2015, was attended by a record number of heads of states and governments, and convinced Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the need to revitalise ties with the continent which is a vast treasure-house of natural resources and is set to emerge as a big market. With its numbers in the United Nations it also has the potential to provide many valuable allies in global affairs.

In the 16 months since the summit, President Pranab Mukherjee, the Vice-President and the Prime Minister have visited more than a dozen countries in the continent. Many Central ministers have also undertaken missions to the continent.

On emerging as a free country, India, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, had taken a keen interest in the liberation movements of Africa and vigorously supported them in international forums. Africa had a special place in the minds of India’s freedom-fighters as it was there that Mahatma Gandhi had evolved his unconventional political strategies. Many African leaders who participated in the New Delhi summit acknowledged their debt of gratitude to Gandhi and Nehru.

After Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s time, ties with Africa became a lower priority in foreign policy. But China, as the world’s fastest-growing economy, made much headway in the continent. In 2009 it displaced the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner. India’s current trade turnover of $70 billion is way below China’s $220 billion.

Since 2000 China has provided more than $30 billion in aid to African countries. Its state-owned companies have invested in the energy, mining and infrastructure sectors.

A 745-kilometre-long electric railway line connecting the capitals of Djibouti and Ethiopia, built by Chinese engineers, was opened to traffic earlier this month. It cost $4 billion, and half the money was put up by Chinese banks. “This line will change the social and economic landscape of the two countries,” Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn said.

People-to-people contacts have played a big part in Indo-African relations. During the colonial period, Britain had taken Indians to the continent to work. Today there are about 2.5 million people of Indian origin in 46 of the 54 countries of the continent.

Barring the expulsion of Indians by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, there was no major hostile action against Indian immigrants. That phase is now forgotten and Uganda’s Indian community, which numbers about 30,000, has invested more than $1 billion in its economy.

A scholarship programme for African students, initiated by Nehru, helped the continent’s newly independent countries to find personnel to run the administration. Two years ago 25,000 young Africans were studying in Indian universities, and India decided to push the number up to 50,000. Stray racial attacks in some Indian cities damaged the goodwill generated by this decision. Narendra Modi disappointed the Africans by failing to condemn the attacks.

Some Africa watchers have noted that while China is involved in huge, high-profile projects, India is pursuing a soft-power approach. It is providing essential medicines to African countries by selling generic drugs, ignoring US assertion that such action violates its intellectual property laws.

The India-Rwanda Innovation Growth Programme launched during Ansari’s visit exemplifies the soft-power approach. It envisages the adoption of 20 Indian technologies and innovation in the next two years by joint ventures set up with Rwandan partners.

Ansari said it was a pilot project and would be extended later to seven countries of East Africa and still later to seven other economic zones across the continent.

Talking to Indian correspondents who accompanied him on the African tour, Ansari discounted suggestions by the western media that India and China are involved in a scramble in the continent.

The continent is so big and the current Indian and Chinese engagement so diverse that there is no need for them to step on each other’s toes. India’s main concern is to ensure that China’s pet projects like the “One Belt One Road” initiative do not hurt its interests. -- Gulf Today, February 28, 2017.

Twists and turns of blast probes

BRP BHASKAR

Gulf Today

A Delhi court’s acquittal of two men who spent more than 11 years in jail, implicated in terror cases, has revealed how shoddy investigation and prosecution are ruining the lives of young people.

Mohammed Rafiq Shah, a MA final year student, was attending classes at the Shah-i-Hamadan Institute of Islamic Studies in Srinagar when a series of bombs exploded in Delhi on October 29, 2005, killing 67 persons. Members of a special cell of the Delhi police and a task force of the Kashmir police picked him up from his home some days later. The Delhi cops said he had planted a bomb in a bus.

The police had two eyewitnesses who gave differing descriptions of the man who planted the bomb. Neither account matched Rafiq Shah’s appearance. The cops got a barber to trim his beard to correspond to one of the accounts.

Three of Shah’s teachers testified before the Delhi court that he had attended classes in the Srinagar campus on the day of the blast.

The judge found several infirmities in the police version and acquitted him and the other two accused, Mohammed Hussain Fazli and Tariq Ahmed Dar, of charges related to the blasts.

Dar was found guilty of having links with a Pakistan-based terrorist group and sentenced to 10 years in jail. But all three had been in prison for a longer period already. Their repeated attempts to secure bail had failed as courts labour under pressure from the state and presumed public opinion in cases linked to terrorism.

In sending Afzal Guru to the gallows in the Parliament attack case, the Supreme Court had famously said, “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties, had shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to this offender.”

The Chhattisgarh police had accused Binayak Sen, reputed paediatric surgeon and human rights defender, only of maintaining contacts with leaders of the banned Maoist party and not of any act of crime. Yet even the apex court refused him bail when he was facing trial. After his conviction, it granted him bail, pending disposal of bail. Its approach changed presumably because a different kind of pressure worked on it with more than 30 Nobel laureates from different lands deploring the action against Sen.

“It seems I am being victimised only because I am a Kashmiri Muslim,” Rafiq Shah had told the court when charges were being framed against him. But, then, young men in other states, too, have been through such bizarre experience. Nine persons implicated in the Malegaon blast case in Maharashtra and five in the Mecca Masjid blast case were acquitted by courts after trials that went on for several years.

Muthiyur Rahman Siddiqui, a Bangalore journalist, who was picked up with 10 others for plotting terror, was lucky to regain freedom in a few months as the investigating agency admitted it had found no evidence against him. He said later media reports of the arrest had denied him the presumption of innocence and many had assumed he was guilty.

The most famous victim of vexatious prosecution is Abdul Naser Mahdani, founder of the People’s Democratic Party in Kerala, who was acquitted after he had spent nearly 10 years in a Tamil Nadu jail as an accused in the Coimbatore blast case. Later the Karnataka police arrested him in connection with a blast in Bangalore. Police in Gujarat and Rajasthan are ready with reports implicating him in blasts in those states.

Muslims are not the only victims, as Binayak Sen’s experience shows. Kobad Ghandy, a 68-year-old Parsi, whom the police describe as a Maoist ideologue, was acquitted by a Delhi court last year in a case under the dreaded Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. He is still behind bars as 14 cases against him are pending in different states.

Some bomb blasts in which Muslim youths were implicated were later found to be the work of Hindu extremists. Thereafter investigation slowed down, indicating political considerations are at play.

The twists and turns of the blast probes have damaged the credibility of the investigating agencies. The government needs to initiate measures to strengthen them professionally to ensure that they do not target innocent people. It must also take steps to rehabilitate the young people whose lives have been wrecked by wrongful prosecution on terror charges and consequent stigmatisation. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 21, 2017.

A chilling message to litigants

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

The Supreme Court sent a chilling message to public interest litigants last week by imposing fines on two persons for filing frivolous petitions and asking a third one to establish his bona fides or face similar action.

Ravindra Singh, a member of the Bihar Assembly, had approached the apex court with a petition questioning the veracity of an article published in a Hindi publication in the 1990’s after being turned down by the Patna High Court. It threw out the petition and asked him to pay a fine of Rs 1 million.

Chief Justice JS Khehar who pronounced the judgment apparently took into account the fact that Ravindra Singh had declared assets of more than Rs 9.34 million when he filed nomination papers in the 2015 Assembly election.

Justice Khehar imposed a smaller fine on a retired teacher from Maharashtra who had challenged a Gujarat government circular on reservation in school jobs. A car mechanic of Madurai, who filed a petition about a hospital in Thanjavur building an additional floor, was told to establish his locus standi in the matter at the next hearing to avoid penal costs.

“Every day we waste precious judicial time by going through voluminous frivolous petitions. These busybodies must be stopped,” the Chef Justice said.

The Supreme Court has on its roster about 61,000 pending cases and Justice Khehar is keen to bring the number down. Elimination of frivolous petitions will surely help to achieve the goal. But the court must take care not to scare away those who approach it genuinely concerned about a bad situation.

Under the system left behind by the British, only an aggrieved person had the right to approach the courts for a legal remedy. This limitation was overcome four decades ago when the Supreme Court allowed Kapila Hingorani, a lawyer, to take up the case of Hussaianara Khatoon and other undertrial prisoners rotting in jails in Bihar. Her effort resulted in the release of not only Hussaianara Khatoon but about 40,000 undertrial prisoners across the country, and a grateful society hailed her as the Mother of Public Interest Litigation.

The Supreme Court witnessed a phase of judicial activism when VR Krishna Iyer, who was a judge in the 1970s, and PN Bhagwati, who was the Chief Justice in the 1980’s, widened the scope of PIL to render justice to the poor who lacked the resources to approach the court directly.

There were occasions when courts treated complaints received on postcards as writ petitions or took suo motu action on the basis of newspaper reports.

Over a period a large body of non-governmental organisations and individuals specialising in PILs arose all over the country. Not all of them were actuated by considerations of public good. Some were seeking personal glory through the publicity they could attract. This prompted some judges to argue that judicial activism had gone too far.

The Supreme Court should take care to avoid throwing the baby with the bathwater. A fair assessment of the working of PIL will show that it has had a salubrious effect on the working of the democratic system.

A PIL by Sheela Barse, a freelance journalist, who took up the issue of custodial violence against women in prisons led to a court order for setting up of separate lock-ups for women. The first court directive on cleaning up of the Ganga came on a PIL filed by MC Mehta, a lawyer, who raised the issue of contamination of the river by tanneries located on its banks in Kanpur. The 2G scam cases in which politicians and bureaucrats figure as accused were also the result of a PIL.

When the court fines a petitioner for wasting its time it may actually be punishing him for its own failing. Take, for instance, the case of the MLA who has been slapped with the fine of Rs1 million. He had approached the Supreme Court after losing in the high court. Why was his petition entertained when its frivolous character was so evident?

Under the Constitution the Supreme Court need entertain an appeal only if the case involves a substantial question of law relating to interpretation of its provisions. The court can reduce its burden by strictly applying this criterion instead of entertaining every matter brought before it in the form of an appeal or special leave application.

In this matter, it can profit from the example of the US Supreme Court which only takes up as much as it can handle. That court receives each year 7,000 to 8,000 petitions. It grants and hears oral arguments only in about 80 of them. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 14, 2017

Steps to limit poll expenses: a cosmetic exercise

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which now heads the government at the Centre and in many states, has been for long an advocate of state funding of election expenses. Since the idea has not found favour with other political parties, it is not in a position to initiate any measures in this regard.

The enormous cost which the contesting parties and candidates have to bear is one of the factors responsible for rampant political corruption. There is no limit on the amount a party can raise and spend. However, there is a ceiling of Rs 7 million on the expenses of a Lok Sabha candidate and of Rs 2.8 million on those of an Assembly candidate in all but nine very small states where the limits are lower.

In the big states a parliamentary constituency may have more than two million voters. Many candidates are believed to exceed the set expenditure limit and falsify the statement of accounts given to the Election Commission to hide the breach of the law.

The political parties can accept donations from individuals as well as private companies. Until now they were required to file statements every financial year giving details of contributions of more than Rs 20,000 which they have received from individuals and companies. To qualify for tax exemption they had to provide names and addresses of those who donated more than Rs 20,000 but most of them are lax in following this rule.

There is no scrutiny of the accounts submitted by the political parties. Although the Election Commission has the power to de-recognise a party if it is not in full compliance with the rule, it has never invoked it.

The Association for Democratic Reforms, a reputed non-government organisation, which studied available data, found that as much as 63 per cent of the donations received by the seven national parties during the 11-year period from 2004 to 2015 were in the form of cash.

It is said that during the last financial year they received Rs 1.02 billion from 1,744 donations of more than Rs 20,000. The BJP which received Rs 760 million from 613 donors was the major beneficiary. The Congress which received Rs 200 million from 918 donors was a distant second.

The ADR concluded that the relatively small number of donations above Rs 20,000 disclosed by the parties indicated that they got most of their funds from unknown sources.

In last week’s budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced reduction of the limit on anonymous donations from Rs 20,000 to Rs 2,000 and introduction of electoral bonds for the benefit of those who wished to make large donations anonymously.

Under the new scheme, donors can buy bonds from designated banks and present them to parties of their choice, which can redeem them through the Election Commission or a regulatory body set up for the purpose. This will not make for transparency, as the government claims.

If the government is serious about ensuring transparency in political donations it should evolve a foolproof scheme after discussions with the major parties on the basis of the recommendations the Law Commission made two years ago.

The Commission did not consider state funding feasible. It proposed amendment of the Companies Act to vest the power to decide on political donations in the annual general meeting of shareholders instead of the board of directors.

At present, candidates are required to furnish information on expenditure incurred by them after filing of nomination papers. The Commission suggested that they should be made to account for all expenses incurred from the date of notification of the elections.

To ensure transparency it asked the Election Commission to make available at its website or on file for public inspection all contribution reports submitted by the political parties. In the same way the election officer of each district should make available to the public the expenditure reports submitted by the contesting candidates.

The ADR has proposed bringing party finances under the purview of the Right to Information Act so that the members of the public can seek information about the donors and the amounts donated. This will make it possible for the voters to find out who are financing a party and ascertain if the party is returning the favour in any form.

Unfortunately, political parties wish to operate in secrecy. They are, therefore, unlikely to go beyond cosmetic measures. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 7, 2017

Billionaire Newspapers Go Under The Knife To Make Up For Being Late Bloomers In Adopting Technology

Just a few days ago HT Media, publishers of The Hindustan Times, closed down four editions and three bureaus.  Some websites reported that the Anand Bazar Patrika group was planning shutdown of some units too.  Are these early intimations that the print media in India, like its Western counterparts, is entering the twilight zone?

Let us not rush to a conclusion. Indian media owners and their managers have made many erratic movements in the past.  They have closed and reopened editions for a variety of reasons. In the early 1950's the Times of India ventured into Kolkata only to make a hasty retreat on the 31st day, realizing that city was not ready yet to welcome it. In the late 1980's it launched an edition in Jaipur, abandoned it a few years later and revived it still later. The Indian Express once closed down the edition in its birthplace, Chennai, and served its readers there from the Andhra Pradesh town of Chittoor, 160 km away.  That was done to teach the employees who had gone on strike a hard lesson.

The HT editions that have closed down are the ones at Kolkata, Bhopal, Indore and Ranchi and the bureaus those at Allahabad, Kanpur and Varanasi.  Media managements rarely tell their readers or even the staff the reasons for closures. HT Media has reportedly mentioned two reasons for the latest closures.  One is the massive investments it has made in its digitization programme and the other is the impact of demonetization. 

On the digital front, too, HT Media has an erratic record. It entered the dotcom business early with a website go4i.com dedicated to the south, which was beyond the reach of its newspapers. Unable to sustain it, the company pulled out quickly.

If demonetization has impacted the media adversely, it should have hurt the less resourceful newspapers more than HT Media, a listed media company which had an income of over Rs 24.57 billion in 2015, the last financial year for which data is available.  But there is no report of any small or medium newspaper closing down as a result of the currency curbs.

Election time is a good time for all media.  Newspaper circulations keep rising as the political scene hots up and the trend continues until the votes are counted and a new government is installed. Yet HT Media has chosen to close three bureaus in UP when the state goes to the polls, along with neighbouring Uttarakhand which was its part not too long ago.

All these call into question the rationale behind the HT Group’s move. But, then, in the current phase of technology-driven changes our newspapers, especially those in the big league, have not exactly crowned themselves with glory.  They have been slow in taking to new technology.

While in the US to attend a seminar organized by the American Press Institute in 1970, this writer spent a week at the Associated Press’s newly computerized Atlanta bureau and the Minneapolis Tribune which had switched over from hot metal and rotary printing to cold metal and offset printing. On my return I tried to impress upon the management of United News of India, with which I was then associated, the need to go in for computerization.  “Who will put in the money?” asked G.G. Mirchandani, the Editor and General Manager. “No newspaper will pay us a penny more because we have computerized,” he added. He was right. I could only tell him, “If we fail to upgrade technologically, we will become a back number”.

I assumed the Government’s highly restrictive import policy was the main stumbling block in the way of modernization of newspaper production. The Registrar of Newspapers for India was the designated officer on whose recommendation the Commerce Ministry gave licences for import of newspaper machinery.  I told the RNI, who was a personal friend, about the changes taking place in the newspaper industry elsewhere.  “You are killing our newspapers by not letting them get new machinery,” I said. He laughed off the allegation and narrated his experience. The Commerce Ministry referred to him two applications for licences to import phototypesetting machines. Both were from commercial printers, not newspaper companies. He held on to those applications and contacted the managements of The Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Statesman and The Indian Express and asked whether they did not want these machines. None of them wanted them.

 He explained his understanding of why they were not interested in new technology. They were chains with many units. Simultaneous switch-over at all centres would mean a huge investment.  They felt no compelling need to embrace new technology at a heavy cost.

 K.P.P. Nambiar, who headed the Kerala State Electronic Corporation in the 1970's, learnt about the work on newspaper pagination in the West and toyed with the idea of developing a system for Indian newspapers at a much lower cost than the imported product. He placed the idea with great enthusiasm before the leading newspapers. There were no takers.

 The Electronic Corporation of India, Hyderabad, developed a machine which can transmit photos over telephone lines. The big newspapers showed no interest in it. The Rajasthan Patrika bought a set and used it to transmit photographs from its New Delhi bureau to the newsroom in Jaipur.

 If the media had evinced an interest in the offerings of ECIL and Keltron and the Government had the vision to support them on the research and development side, the newspaper industry, the electronics industry and the country may well have benefited.

 The big newspapers adopted the new technology only when they found that small and medium newspapers had taken to it and improved their competitive ability. Udayavani, a new Kannada daily launched by the Pais of Manipal in the early 1970's, was the first Indian newspaper to typeset matter using phototypesetting machines and print by offset process.

In the next stage, that of computerization, too, small and medium enterprises took the first steps. All newspapers, big and small, have now got on to the digital platform but a close study will show that they are not making optimum use of the immense possibilities the new technology has opened up. And the technology is still evolving.

 According to published reports, the HT Media closures have rendered about 1,000 persons, journalists and non-journalists, jobless. There are reports that the Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd, publishers of The Times of India – with a reported income of Rs 87.78 billion in FY2015 it is the country’s largest media company – has frozen recruitment and is planning salary cuts.  In 2009 it had effected salary cuts in the name of the global meltdown. Now there is a handy excuse in demonetization.   

 HT Media’s website statement on career prospects adds insult to the injury caused to those who have been thrown out of job. “Media is the sunrise sector and is poised for growth,” it says. “The brand HT Media is a force to reckon with. With a growth rate of 39 per cent, HT Media is the place to avail opportunities and add dimensions to one’s career spectrum.”

Deepening strategic relations

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India’s relations with the United Arab Emirates are evolving into a wide-ranging strategic partnership which, if nurtured carefully, can have a salutary effect on a region which has the potential to play a decisive role in the global economy.

The joint statement issued at the end of the visit of Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed forces, who was the chief guest at India’s 68th Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi last week, laid emphasis on the deepening of the relationship between the two countries in the past two years.
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India’s ties with the Gulf region go back to a remote past. “We knew India and Indians long before we knew anyone else,” a leading functionary of a Gulf state had told this writer while on a tour of the region 36 years ago.

Colonial intervention disrupted the ties. We are now witnessing their re-establishment on a new basis in the light of current realities. Within five years of the founding of the UAE, the first President, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan visited India and had talks with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Among the agreements the two governments signed on that occasion was one to foster the age-old cultural relations between the peoples of the two countries.

India’s President Fakhruddin Ahmed visited the UAE the following year and Indira Gandhi in 1981. At that stage, bilateral relations were defined largely by India’s need for oil and the Gulf States’ need for labour. Indians, skilled and unskilled, made their contribution to the phenomenal growth of the region after the oil boom, and remittances from expatriates boosted India’s economy.

Two years ago the United Nations estimated that about 2.8 million Indians working in the UAE send home $13 billion in a year.

Vastly altered conditions in the two countries and in the region and the world as a whole have dictated a qualitative change in India-UAE relations in recent years. An investment protection agreement, signed in 2013, paved the way for infusion of Dh7.34 billion in India’s infrastructure project.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the UAE in 2015 and Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s visit to India last year underscored the two countries’ determination to carry forward the good work of their predecessors and redefine bilateral relations in keeping with the needs of the time.

India is now the UAE’s third largest trading partner after China and the US, and the two countries are committed to increase bilateral trade, which stood close to $50 billion last year, by 60 per cent by 2020, when Dubai is due to host World Expo.

During 2015-16 India received foreign direct investment of $1 billion from the UAE. Investment by Indian companies in the UAE also increased. The UAE is now a favourite destination of Indian start-ups.

During Modi’s visit the two countries signed agreements to set up the UAE-India Infrastructure Development Fund of $75 billion and to establish petroleum reserves in India as part of a strategic partnership in the energy sector.

The Crown Prince’s visit saw an expansion of the area of strategic partnership. One of the 14 bilateral agreements signed on the occasion specifically mentions a comprehensive strategic partnership. The others envisage, among other things, cooperation in varied fields such as defence industry, cyberspace, energy efficiency services, maritime transport and road transport and highways as also partnership in agriculture and allied sectors.

In the joint statement, India and the UAE reiterated their strong condemnation of terrorism “in all its forms and manifestations, wherever committed and by whomever”. Earlier this month the UAE had lost five of its diplomats in a dastardly terrorist attack when they were at Kandahar in Afghanistan to open a slew of humanitarian, educational and development projects.

A UAE contingent of 149 personnel drawn from the land, navy and air forces led this year’s Republic Day parade, along with the President’s Bodyguard, and a UAE military band in attendance. Its participation is indicative of the importance India attaches to its expanding relationship with the UAE.

Bilateral defence interaction between the two countries has been on for some time with exchange of high-level visits and a meeting of National Security Advisers of the two countries every six months. Significantly, elevation of relations to the level of strategic partnership is taking place at a time when the UAE is playing an increasing role in regional affairs. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 31, 2017.

An empty political gesture

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today 

The Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly last week adopted, with a lone abstention, a resolution calling for the return of the Pandits who had fled the valley in 1990 after militants targeted members of the community.

The resolution was passed even as Pandits, living as refugees outside Kashmir, were marking the 27th anniversary of their forced exit from the valley. They had left as they felt insecure. In the absence of any steps to guarantee their safety, the resolution is an empty gesture.

Though a small minority in the population, Pandits, who form the Kashmiri cadre of the Brahmin order, wielded influence in many administrations by virtue of their educational attainments and ownership of land and faced hardship under rulers who promoted conversion to Islam.

When communal violence engulfed the northern parts of the subcontinent on the eve of Independence the state was calm and the slogan “Hindu Muslim Sikh unity” raised by Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah’s Jammu and Kashmir National Conference reverberated in the valley. Muslims and Pandits worked together in the resistance against the 1947 tribal attack to force the state’s accession to Pakistan.

The idyllic atmosphere was shattered when militants shot dead Tika Lal Taploo, a lawyer and vice-president of the state Bharatiya Janata Party unit, in September 1989. Migration of Pandits in search of security which began as a trickle after this incident turned into a flood four months later with militants ordering them, on pain of death, to convert or quit.

Chilling accounts of the night of January 19, 1990 when loudspeakers blared out threats and youths wielding Kalashnikovs roamed the streets of Srinagar have been provided by some who lived through the nightmare. “By morning,” Tej Kumar Tikoo, a retired colonel, wrote, “it became apparent to Pandits that Kashmiri Muslims had decided to throw them out from the Valley.” According to Rahul Pandita, a journalist, in the next few months hundreds of Pandits were tortured, killed and raped, and by the end of the year all but a few families had left the valley.

There is no authentic figure of the Pandit population in the valley at that time since there has been no mention of caste in the state census since 1941. Pandita put the number of migrants at about 350,000.

When the developments of the period are viewed in a wider perspective, it will be seen that the militants terrorised the Muslims too, targeting members of the community whose conduct they did not approve of.

VP Singh’s government at the Centre and Farooq Abdullah’s in the state also share the blame for the Pandit exodus. In the summer of 1989 militants had started serving notices asking prominent Pandits to quit Kashmir. On January 4, 1990, the Urdu daily Aftab published a press release of the militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen asking all Pandits to leave immediately. Neither the Centre nor the state acted to protect the threatened minority.

The VP Singh government, in which Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was the Home Minister, had a disastrous start with the J and K Liberation Front kidnapping his daughter Rubaiya in Srinagar, obliging the government to free five jailed militants to secure her release.

The fateful January 19 saw more ominous developments. The Centre sent Jagmohan, a former bureaucrat with a dubious Emergency rule record, to the state to serve a second term as Governor and he took over the administration following Farooq Abdullah’s resignation. Many Kashmiris suspect he facilitated the Pandit exodus.

There are 60,452 registered Kashmiri migrant families in the country, according to the Centre. Of them, 38,119 are in Jammu, 19,338 in Delhi and 1,996 in other states. The Jammu figure includes 2,168 Muslim and 1,749 Sikh families, who too left the valley following threats from militants.

The state government gives to each member of 17,428 “eligible” families in Jammu Rs 1,650 (subject to a maximum of Rs 6,600 per family) and specified quantities of rice, wheat flour and sugar. The Centre bears the cost of Rs 1.36 billion a year. Other states provide similar assistance to the Pandit refugees at their own cost.

This is not the first time that the Pandits fled to escape forced conversion. The last such migration occurred under an Afghan ruler in the 15th century. A later ruler allowed those who were forcibly converted to return to their original faith. He also sent emissaries as far away as Maharashtra to bring back those who had fled.

The return of the Pandits and ensuring their security cannot be divorced from the wider issue of restoration of normalcy in Kashmir and creation of conditions in which the entire population feels secure. That calls for a meaningful political process. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 24, 2017.

Conflicting pulls and pressures

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi is trying to fast-forward Indian society into the digital era, scattered groups across the country are striving to hold it back, if not drive it back to the medieval ages.

Ironically, in the forefront of the onward-to-the-past movement are numerous shadowy outfits set up by followers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the Hindutva ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

After Modi led the BJP to power following a sensational victory in the 2014 elections, these groups unleashed a wave of violence across the country raising divisive religious and cultural issues in a bid to recreate an imagined homogenous Hindu India. Arson and lynching have been part of their campaign, and most often Dalits, Adivasis and minorities were the victims.

Their activities adversely affected Modi’s developmental plans for the country. Yet he made no public condemnation of the acts of violence for fear of offending his supporters.

But misguided Hindutva foot soldiers are not the only ones trying to drag the country backward in the name of religious or cultural practices. Those who were most actively engaged in that effort last week were political parties of Tamil Nadu who have no affinity with the Hindutva school.

Under the leadership of these parties people in many parts of the state organised the ancient game of “jallikattu” in which able-bodied men strive to bring under control trained bulls, defying court decisions banning it. In some places the police intervened and foiled their plans.

References to jallikattu in ancient Tamil literature show that the game is at least 2,000 years old. Some scholars push its history back to 5,000 years ago on the strength of some images in the Indus Valley seals. There is increasing evidence that the Indus Valley civilisation was the work of the Dravidians who inhabited the northern region before the arrival of the Vedic Aryans.

However, the term jallikattu is only a few hundred years old. It is said to have originated during the time of the Madurai Nayak dynasty (16th to 18th century) when a small bag with gold coins (jalli) was tied (kattu) to the bull’s horn and the villager seeking the prize had to untie it even as he held on to the animal’s hump.

During the colonial period, some British officials tried to discourage the sport because of the danger involved but in keeping with the policy of not antagonising the people they avoided a formal ban.

Villagers organised jallikattu with great enthusiasm during the harvest festival of Pongal until 10 years ago when a woman judge of the Madras high court, R. Banumathi, who heard a petition seeking permission to hold the traditional “rekla” (bullock cart) race, banned oxen races and jallikattu, holding them violations of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.

An NGO, People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took the issue to the Supreme Court and it upheld the ban in 2014.

Both the Central and state governments framed rules to ensure safety in jallikattu, hoping they would help overcome opposition to the sport. But the critics were not mollified. PETA and the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations challenged the rules before the apex court.

Ahead of last week’s Pongal celebrations, supporters of jallikattu made a vain bid to secure an interim ruling from the court but it refused to oblige. Even as political parties mounted campaigns in support of jallikattu in the name of tradition, the state government urged the Centre to promulgate an ordinance.

Reports from New Delhi said an ordinance was ready but it did not see the light of the day. Credit is due to Modi for resisting the temptation to go ahead with the ordinance which may have earned some political support for his party, which is extremely weak in Tamil Nadu.

Protests against the ban on jallikattu raged all over the state. The police arrested scores of people and used force in some places to disperse law-breakers.

All supporters of jallikattu do not base their arguments on tradition. According to some, the sport sustained people’s interest in livestock and its disappearance may lead to extinction of indigenous breeds. It is for the state to evolve scientific methods to protect local breeds and not fall back on archaic practices.

The role played by political parties in fanning the flames over this issue for electoral gains suggests that Indian society must witness many intense struggles before feudal-era practices become things of the past. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 18, 2017

Lack of democratic sensibility

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

When the Constitution of India was adopted its makers included in it, as an emergency measure, provisions to enact legislation through promulgation of an ordinance when Parliament or the state legislature is not in session. Governments at the Centre and in some states are now using these provisions to bypass legislative bodies.

The Constitution stipulates that the ordinance must be placed before Parliament or the state legislature, as the case maybe, when it reassembles. It lapses automatically if a law to replace it is not passed within six weeks of reassembling. There is no provision expressly prohibiting re-promulgation of a lapsed ordinance. The Centre and the states are taking advantage of this lacuna.

Bihar is the worst offender. Petitions challenging repeated re-promulgation of three ordinances in the state came up before the Supreme Court in the 1980s. It found that successive governments in the state had re-promulgated a total of 256 ordinances. One ordinance was kept alive through repeated re-promulgation for as long as 14 years and three others for more than 11 years.

Two of the three ordinances were enacted into law while the matter was before the court. Observing that courts could invalidate re-promulgated ordinances, it struck down the third.

The Supreme Court’s scathing remarks on Ordinance Raj had no effect on the Bihar government. Only two years after that judgment the state took over privately managed Sanskrit schools through an ordinance. Instead of regularising the takeover through a legislative enactment, the ordinance was kept alive for three years through re-promulgation. After the ordinance lapsed, the teachers of these schools approached the Patna high court seeking protection of their status and salaries as government teachers.

The high court held that re-promulgation of the ordinance was illegal and ruled that after the takeover the teachers are entitled to government pay scales.

The state appealed against the verdict. At the Supreme Court the appeal was first heard by a division bench in 1998. Since the two judges on the bench differed, it went to a five-judge bench, which wanted it to be heard by a still larger bench. The seven-judge constitution bench, which heard the matter eventually, last week declared that repeated re-promulgation of an ordinance was a fraud on the Constitution. For some reason, it left the question whether obligations and liabilities would survive on the lapse of an ordinance, which was pertinent to the issue raised by the school teachers, to be determined in a separate proceeding.

“The danger of re-promulgation lies in the threat which it poses to the sovereignty of Parliament and the state legislatures which have been constituted as primary law-givers under the Constitution,” the court said. “Open legislative debate and discussion provides sunshine which separates secrecy of ordinance-making from transparent and accountable governance through lawmaking.”

The majority judgment also ruled that it was mandatory for the government to place an ordinance before the legislature when it reassembled.

The Centre did not resort to re-promulgation of ordinances until 1986. But lately there has been an increasing tendency to do so. The first United Progressive Alliance government re-promulgated only one ordinance, but UPA II re-promulgated four. The present government, which is in its third year, has re-promulgated four ordinances already – two of them four times, one thrice and one twice.

While the court has condemned re-promulgation of ordinances in harsher language than before, it remains to be seen whether it will have a salutary effect on the governments at the Centre and in the states. If a government chooses to re-promulgate an ordinance instead of placing it before the appropriate legislative body, the only remedy open to an aggrieved citizen is to initiate contempt proceedings against it in the Supreme Court.

It is not an easy process. The first question that arises is who will be the opposite party. Customarily, the government is represented in legal proceedings by officers. It will be a travesty of justice to drag officers to court for failure to place an ordinance before the legislative body since they have no role in the process.

Contempt comes under both civil and criminal law. Action under the criminal law can be initiated only with the written consent of the Attorney General. There is no question of his granting permission for action against the Central government. If he grants permission for action against a state government, it can only be on political considerations.

In the final analysis, the issue is one of democratic sensibility, which is grossly lacking in the political system. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 10, 2017.

Banks rescued at cost of poor

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Was demonetisation of high-value currency notes, which inflicted much pain on honest citizens in the last days of 2016, intended to eliminate black money, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed on November 8? If so, it was a colossal failure.

Notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 worth more than Rs 14,000 billion were in circulation when they were demonetised. Out of this, the government expected about Rs 10,000 billion to come back. So it told the Supreme Court. The rest, it assumed, was black money and would go out of circulation.

By December 13, the Reserve Bank of India received demonetised notes worth Rs 12,440 billion and the deadline set for their surrender was still 17 days away. After that there has been no word from the RBI on the subject. Modi, who dwelt on the aftermath of demonetisation in an address to the nation on New Year’s eve, too avoided it.

Dashing the government’s fond hopes, smart criminals converted their black money into legal tender. Misuse of the Jan Dhan accounts which had come up under Modi’s scheme to give the poor access to banking services was one of the tactics they employed.

After demonetisation the number of Jan Dhan accounts went up from 255.1 million to 262.0 million. Deposits in these accounts swelled from Rs 456.37 billion on November 8 to Rs 746.09 billion on December 7 before falling to Rs 710.37 billion. The rise in deposits was 112 per cent in Karnataka and 111 per cent in Gujarat. Evidently crooks laundered black money using the poor as cover. The government has now ordered a scrutiny of the Jan Dhan accounts.

The demonetisation decision came immediately after the government received voluntary disclosure of concealed incomes to the tune of Rs 673.82 billion. It was followed by income-tax raids in several states in which Rs 30 billion in undisclosed incomes was detected. The cash seized included Rs 860 million in new notes issued since November 8.

Modi’s demonetisation differed from similar exercises undertaken by his predecessors. It amounted to virtual impounding of people’s money, at least for the time being, as there were severe curbs on withdrawals from bank accounts. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it organised loot.

With more money than anticipated coming in and withdrawals subject to restrictions, the commercial banks are flush with money. In his New Year’s eve speech, Modi said the situation represents a golden opportunity for the banking system. To understand the significance of that observation one has to look at the highly vulnerable state of government-owned banks.

The banking system has a large public sector created since Independence with the takeover of large private banks at different times. The largest one is the State Bank of India, created by nationalisation of the British-owned Imperial Bank of India in 1955. Seven banks of former princely states were made SBI’s associates in 1960. The 14 largest private banks of the time were nationalised in 1969. The next six big private banks were taken over in 1980.

Imprudent financial management under political influence endangered the health of most public sector banks during the past few years. RBI data shows that in the financial year ending March 2016, the country’s banks added Rs 4,400 billion of fresh non-performing assets (NPA), defined as “loans or advances of which principal or interest has been overdue for 90 days”. Public sector banks accounted for about 86 per cent of this – the SBI group 20 per cent, and others about 66 per cent.

Between 2006 and 2016, the public sector banks wrote off loans totaling Rs 2,510 billion. As on December 3, 2015, the commercial banks listed more than 7,000 account holders who together owed them Rs 7,054 billion as wilful defaulters.

According to information the government provided to Parliament, in June 2016 the top 20 NPA accounts of the public sector banks stood at Rs 1,450 billion. They urgently needed funds to tide over the situation. The Centre infused Rs 229.15 billion by way of capital into 13 of them last July. They wanted more.

There is reason to suspect that the government went ahead with demonetisation, overlooking its limitations as a measure against black money, to channelise funds into the floundering banking system. It certainly had a duty to rescue the banks but it was immoral to do it at the cost of the honest poor. --Gulf Today, January 3, 2017

Disruption of Democracy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today
The winter session of Parliament which concluded earlier this month was one of the least productive in India’s 67 years as a democratic republic. Obstructive tactics employed, mainly but not exclusively, by the Opposition stalled the proceedings, and the two houses could transact little business.

The session began on November 16, eight days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation of notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 in a television address. It ended 31 days later, without discussing the government’s action which threw important segments of the economy into disarray and imposed misery on millions of poor.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress party blamed each other for the disruption. Modi complained that the opposition did not allow him to address the house, and Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi claimed the BJP prevented him from speaking.

The cost of the short session to the taxpayer is estimated at Rs 33 million. On the basis of the limited legislative business the houses transacted, officials put the Lok Sabha’s productivity 17.39 per cent and the Rajya Sabha’s at 20.61 per cent.

The last time such low productivity was registered was in 2010. The United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress, was in power at that time, and the BJP was the main opposition. Recent history testifies to the two parties’ readiness to disrupt the proceedings to make small and often illusory political gains.

The loss resulting from Parliament’s inability to transact business is actually much more than what the above-mentioned figures suggest. A law to usher in a goods and services tax (GST) regime was placed before Parliament by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2011. The BJP held it up. After the change of government, the BJP brought forward a revised bill and the Congress stalled it. Earlier this year the constitutional amendment required to bring GST into force was passed. However, the winter logjam prevented passage of some supporting measures. As a result, GST, which has the potential to boost the GDP by Rs 1,000 to 2,000 billion, may not become a reality for some more time.

Delay in passage of laws often entails social costs which cannot be expressed in monetary terms. Take the case of the Women’s Representation Bill, which seeks to set apart one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies for women who constitute nearly half of the population. It was brought before the Lok Sabha first by the United Front government headed by HD Deva Gowda in 1996. Parties wishing to perpetuate patriarchal ways blocked its consideration by creating a ruckus.

In 2008 the UPA government moved an alternative bill in the Rajya Sabha and the house passed it in 2010 amid unruly scenes. The UPA went out of office without bringing the measure before the upper house. Although the BJP enjoys absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has evinced no interest in it so far.

While Parliament was in logjam, in sheer exasperation, President Pranab Mukherjee told the MPs: “For God’s sake, do your job.” For good measure, he reminded them that their job was “debate, dissension and decision”, and the fourth D, disruption, was unacceptable.

Parliamentary institutions are vital limbs of democracy. They are the forums where governments outline their programmes and elected representatives ventilate the grievances of the people. Their becoming dysfunctional is a sure sign of corruption of the democratic system. The President’s warning was, therefore, timely.

However, Democracy – with a capital D – involves much more than holding elections every five years and elected bodies meeting at regular intervals, which happen under other systems too. Thanks to the Constitution, change of government takes place at the Centre and in the states periodically, but the real test of the democratic system is whether the administrations are able to render social, economic and political justice to all citizens.

While farmers unable to repay small loans are taking their own lives, the government has been allowing banks to write off huge sums owed by big businessmen. How can a state which puts the interests of one per cent above those of 99 per cent be called democratic?

Governments are spending billions of rupees on erecting statues of heroes of the past, whose memory has come down to the present on the strength of what they did in their lifetime, while millions are going without food, shelter, medicine and education. That is not the way a democracy functions. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, December 27, 2016.

Patriotism made to order

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

Are Indians so lacking in patriotism that the Judiciary has to step in and instruct them on how to honour national symbols like the Flag and the Anthem? Two Supreme Court judges think they are, and invoked their judicial power recently to set things right.

Justices Dipak Misra and Amitava Roy ordered that all cinema halls shut their doors and play the national anthem before the feature film starts. At that time the image of the national flag should be on the screen and all present should stand up to show respect. This would instil in them a sense of committed patriotism and nationalism, they said.

India’s Constituent Assembly adopted a modified version of the Tricolour, the standard of the freedom struggle, as the national flag on attainment of freedom in 1947. In 1950 it chose Jana GanaMana, the opening lines of a 1911 poem by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, as the national anthem.

Some leaders wanted Vande Mataram, which had served as a battle cry during the freedom struggle, to be the anthem. Orthodox Muslims opposed it on the ground it was in the nature of worship of Mother India, and Islam forbade worship of anyone but Allah.

With Jawaharlal Nehru’s stout support Jana GanaMana won the day but it too was not acceptable to all. Some pointed out that when Tagore sang it at a durbar during George V’s visit to the subcontinent British newspapers had said he was the one whom it hailed as the “dispenser of India’s destiny”. However, the poet’s choice of words suggests the reference is to the Almighty.

Some others pointed out that the poem mentions Sind, which is now part of Pakistan. Supporters of the anthem justified its retention, saying India is home to many people of Sindhi origin.

With myriad forces fuelled by regional and even religious sentiments competing for loyalty, fostering a sense of nationalism during the colonial period was no easy task. But the leaders of the freedom movement achieved remarkable success, guided by the ideals of democracy and secularism. They had faced the fiercest opposition from the proponents of Hindu nationalism, as distinct from Indian nationalism. Chief among them was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ideological mentor of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which now heads the central government.

The RSS wanted the saffron banner of Hinduism to be the national flag and Vande Mataram to be the anthem. Explicit acceptance of the Tricolour as the national flag was one of the conditions imposed by the government to lift the ban imposed on the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination.

Early this year RSS General Secretary Bhayyaji Joshi declared that Vande Mataram was India’s real national anthem, though Jana GanaMana was the constitutionally mandated one. He also claimed the saffron flag could be honoured as the national flag as the Tricolour was no different from it. It was a palpable attempt to blur the distinction between Hindu nationalism and the Indian nationalism fostered by the freedom movement, of which the RSS was not a part.

As Joshi’s statement attracted criticism, the RSS clarified that he had not demanded any change in the national flag or national anthem.

Ironically, RSS cadres, who are half-hearted converts to Indian nationalism, are the loudest champions of the judicial order, which has restored a practice the government had tried and given up on practical considerations.

From time to time the government has issued guidelines outlining when the anthem can be played or sung. Schools generally begin the day with collective singing of the anthem.

In the 1960s, after the disastrous China war, the government ordered that the anthem be played in theatres after the film show to strengthen national sentiments. The order was scrapped later to avoid disrespect to the anthem by movie-goers who were in a hurry to leave. The judges have ordered closure of doors to prevent people from leaving. This direction runs against the government’s stipulation that the anthem should not be played in a closed room.

Justice Misra first held forth on the national flag in a judgment he delivered as a judge of the Madhya Pradesh high court, which the Supreme Court overruled. Thirteen years later, as a judge of the apex court, he has in effect revalidated the views his predecessors had rejected.

Egged on by Hindu nationalists, the police have arrested about 20 persons in two states for not standing up when the anthem was played in theatres. Their conduct appears to be more a protest against what they consider an arbitrary court order than wilful display of disrespect to national symbols. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, December 19, 2016

A reform gone awry

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

The disruption of normal life caused by the abrupt cancellation of 86 per cent of the money in circulation, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi five weeks ago, continues to wreak havoc. What was presented as a cure for endemic corruption is proving to be worse than the disease.

Ground realities are compelling the government’s stoutest supporters to moderate their enthusiasm. Deepak Parekh, Chairman of HDFC, the country’s third largest bank, who had hailed demonetisation earlier as the biggest of all big-bang reforms, said last week it had derailed the economy in the short run.

Initially, there was wide support for the decision to withdraw high-denomination currency notes as people believed the government’s claim that it was directed against corrupt elements. Now, there is growing realisation that it acted without due diligence and that its actions are hurting honest citizens, particularly the poor, more than the corrupt.

Modi and a small team are said to have charted the demonetisation plan in utter secrecy. A sudden jump in term deposits in banks and large-scale acquisition of property by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in some states just before demonetisation suggest that some had prior knowledge of the decision.

Black money holders quickly found ways to beat the government plan. In the three and a half hours between the telecast in which Modi announced the decision to invalidate currency notes of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 and the time set for its implementation, jewellers in several cities did roaring business. A temple in Kerala reported record sale of gold lockets.

Religious institutions were allowed to accept donations in old notes. This concession enabled unscrupulous priests to help their rich patrons to launder black money.

The bank accounts the poor had opened under a scheme lunched by Modi in his first year as Prime Minister suddenly started swelling. Evidently the rich were taking the help of the poor to turn black into white.

The government found it necessary to issue new regulations almost daily to plug the loopholes ingenious black money holders were using to legitimise their hoard. But the crooks managed to remain one step ahead of the government at all times.

Following complaints that the limit on withdrawals from bank accounts affected planned weddings, the government directed that one member of a family may be allowed to withdraw up to Rs 250,000 to meet marriage expenses. Soon there were massive withdrawals on the strength of fake wedding invitations.

Amid the cash crunch, Modi’s Cabinet colleague Nitish Gadkari, mining king and former Karnataka minister G Janardhan Reddy and Kerala liquor baron Biju Ramesh reportedly spent tens of millions on daughters’ weddings.

Banks and ATMs often lacked enough cash to pay out even the small sums which account holders were entitled to draw. Yet many people were able to change their stock of old notes into new ones. Cash seized in stray raids in nine states during the past month included at least Rs 2.4 billion in newly introduced notes of Rs 2,000.

Fraudulent transactions of such high order would not have been possible without the cooperation of bank officials. Two managers of a leading private bank in Delhi were arrested on charges of helping crooks to open fake accounts using forged documents and launder about up to Rs 4.5 billion. Some public sector bank employees too are facing action.

Sensing that things were getting out of hand, Modi kept changing the narrative. A commentator, who analysed eight speeches he made between November 8 and November 27, said that during the period the objective of the demonetisation exercise shifted from elimination of black money to promotion of cashless economy.

According to the Reserve Bank of India, as much as Rs 11,500 billion out of Rs 14,500 billion which were in the hands of the people when demonetisation was announced have already reached the banks though the deadline for depositing old notes does not expire until December 30. The exercise is, therefore, unlikely to result in the extinction of an estimated Rs 4,000 billion of black money, as the authorities initially claimed.

Why did the government impose needless pain on the people, especially poor, in the name of eliminating black money? Ashish Nandy, well-known social theorist and political psychologist, has offered a plausible explanation. He says, “Modi has been pushed by his intense desire to do something but he does not have the imagination or wherewithal to do it.”

What the terror balance sheet says

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India has just missed consciously an opportunity to initiate steps to put its troubled relations with Pakistan on an even keel.

When Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz landed in Amritsar a day ahead of Sunday’s Heart of Asia conference on Afghanistan there was speculation that there might be informal talks to improve the relationship between the two countries which touched a new low after militants from across the line of control attacked an army base at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir and India retaliated with surgical strikes on terror launch pads on the other side. However, the Indian government said no talks were possible while acts of terrorism continued.

Terrorism figured prominently in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the delegates to the Amritsar conference, who included representatives of a score of countries including the United States, China and Russia. He said it was necessary to end terrorism to foster stability, security and development in Afghanistan and in the region as a whole.

The year witnessed an escalation of militant activity in Kashmir and a corresponding deterioration in the relations between the two neighbours. In the very first week there was a daring attack on an air force base at Pathankot.

In his Independence Day address, Modi raised the issue of Pakistani human rights violations in Baluchistan as a counter to Islamabad’s harping on Indian rights violations in Kashmir.

The killing of Burhan Wani, a young home-grown militant leader, by the security forces led to youth unrest which paralysed life in Kashmir valley for nearly four months.

Eighteen soldiers were killed in the Uri attack which took place during a rotation of units. The surgical strikes, which occurred a few days later, marked a departure from the policy of strategic restraint which the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governments had followed. It boosted Modi’s sagging macho image but failed to make any appreciable difference to infiltration across the LoC and terror attacks. The year appears set to end as one of the bloodiest in recent years.

The worst year of the decade was 2007. As many as 311 militants crossed into India that year and 121 uniformed personnel were killed and 336 injured in terrorist attacks. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), which collates information relating to terrorism, 164 civilians and 492 militants were also killed that year.

The following years saw a decline in militancy in Kashmir and infiltration across the LoC. Casualty figures of security personnel fell continuously and stood at only 17 in 2012 before starting to climb again.

This year, there has been only a marginal increase in the number of violent incidents but casualties among men in uniform have risen dramatically. On September 30, the toll stood at 63 security personnel killed and 181 injured. The latest available tally is 77 dead, as on November 27.

Parliament was told recently that 105 terrorists from across the LoC entered Kashmir until September 30 this year, as against only 33 last year. This, again, is the highest figure since 2007.

The security forces can perhaps draw some comfort from the fact that this year they have been able to impose heavier penalties on the terrorists than in the recent past. Their toll stood at 119 at the end of September.

Casualty figures at the SATP website show that since 1988 terrorism has taken a toll of 49,315 lives across India, 44,119 of them in Jammu and Kashmir. The number of terrorists killed was 24,101, including 23,121 in J&K. A total of 9,854 security personnel were killed. 7,688 of them in Kashmir. Civilians bore the brunt of the attacks: 17,526 killed, including 14,735 in Kashmir. 

The hope raised by the surgical strike was shattered when three terrorists, wearing police uniform, broke into the Nagrota base in Kashmir last week and launched an attack in which seven military personnel, including two Army majors, were killed. They are believed to have entered India through a tunnel and reached the base travelling 85 kilometres evading army checkpoints.

Retiring Northern Army Commander Lt-Gen DS Hooda said later the Kashmir conflict was a long war requiring a long-term approach. It is just another way of saying it is a problem that requires a political solution. The terror balance-sheet also says the same thing. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, December 6, 2016.