Sex, sting and videotapes

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

Sex crimes have emerged as a major challenge in India. Varied as the social landscape is, the nature of crimes against women and the attitudes of the authorities and the public also differ vastly. The death of a young paramedical student following gangrape in a moving bus in New Delhi last December made headlines around the world. The protests that followed in the capital and elsewhere in the country received extensive media coverage but that has not helped to reduce the crime rate. Against a total of 706 sex crimes in Delhi in the whole of 2012, as many as 806 were reported in the first six months of this year.

Currently public attention is focused on a complaint by a young journalist of Tehelka that her powerful editor-in-chief, Tarun Tejpal, had sexually assaulted her when they were both in Goa recently for an event hosted by the magazine. The case has raised questions about goings-on in the corporate world in general and the media in particular.

In the absence of a specific law to deal with sexual harassment at the workplace, the Supreme Court, in a 1997 judgment, had laid down certain guidelines based on the provisions of the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international document India had signed and ratified. These guidelines required all authorities, public and private, to set up committees, which include women and representatives of non-government organisations, to receive and investigate complaints of sexual harassment.

Early this year Parliament enacted a law incorporating the court’s guidelines. It defines sexual harassment so widely as to include any unwelcome act or behaviour towards a woman like physical contact or advance, seeking sexual favours, showing pornography and creating hostile work environment or posing a threat to her employment status.

When a young law intern, in a blog, revealed that a Supreme Court judge had sexually harassed her about a year ago, it came to light that the apex court itself had failed to set up a complaints committee.

Tehelka took the first step towards the formation of a complaints committee immediately after the Goa incident in an obvious attempt to settle the matter internally with Tejpal tendering an apology to the woman for his conduct and stepping down from the top post for six months. The Editors Guild of India frowned upon the move, saying Tejpal could not be his own judge.

The in-house settlement plan has collapsed with the Goa police launching an investigation, invoking the new law which makes sexual assault a cognisable offence, and dispatching a team to New Delhi to interrogate Tejpal and possibly arrest him. During the weekend it took the testimony of Managing Director Shoma Chaudhuri, to whom Tejpal had handed over charge of the magazine. The police is also said to be examining whether she attempted to cover up the scandal.

Since the cause of action took place in Goa, the state police is the competent authority to handle the case. However, since the Bharatiya Janata Party rules the state there is ground to suspect political motivation. The BJP was the target of two major sting operations conducted by Tehelka, which has a firm reputation for investigative journalism.

In 2001, soon after its launch as a portal, Tehelka came out with videotapes showing Bangaru Laxman, then BJP president, and Jaya Jaitley, president of Samata Party, the BJP’s partner in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government, accepting money from its reporters, who, posing as arms dealers, had offered them bribes to secure defence contracts. Laxman had to resign the party post. Last year a trial court sentenced him to four years in jail.

In 2007, Tehelka released secretly recorded conversations in which some leaders of the BJP and other Hindutva outfits spoke of their role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.

“Fallen Heroes: the Betrayal of a Nation” was the title under which Tehelka published its very first investigative story, which exposed a cricket match-fixing scandal. It led to then Indian captain Mohammad Azharuddin’s lifetime ban from the game. In 2009, Azharuddin was elected to the Lok Sabha on the Congress ticket from Uttar Pradesh. Last year the Andhra Pradesh high court quashed the ban imposed on him.

Tejpal, whom The Guardian once identified as a member of India’s new elite, has now joined the ranks of fallen heroes. He had worked with India Today and Outlook before founding Tehelka, with Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan and writer Khushwant Singh as non-executive members of the board of directors. Three years ago the India chapter of the International Press Institute presented him with an award for excellence in journalism.

The possibility of a just resolution of the matter appears to be slim. The complainant has already resigned her job. Some of her colleagues too have quit in protest against Tejpal’s conduct. Whether or not the scandal ruins the magazine and draws the curtain on Tejpal’s journalistic career, he may have a future as a writer. He is the author of three novels, one of which was nominated for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award given for “the worst description of sex scene”. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 26, 2013.

The Mujahideen story

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

The Indian Mujahideen story is getting curiouser and curiouser. Five years after its name surfaced and three years after the government banned it, the outfit remains somewhat enigmatic.

The name appeared first in e-mails which some media houses received in 2008 owning responsibility for serial blasts that had rocked Jaipur two days earlier. Across the country there were several more blasts that year, and similar e-mails followed. Investigating agencies now say the outfit came into being five years earlier.

According to Ashish Khetan, an investigative journalist with a creditable record, there is an overwhelming body of evidence in the records of official agencies to show that a group of Muslim extremists, who styled themselves as Indian Mujahideen, had bombed temples, trains and marketplaces in different places between 2003 and 2008 and that the police implicated innocent Muslims in the incidents.

Soon after the IM’s existence became known, official agencies identified its leaders as former cadres of the Students Islamic Movement of India, which had once attracted critical attention by raising the slogan “India’s liberation through Islam”. They were active in the protests against the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.

SIMI was among several organisations banned in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.

Writing in 2008, Praveen Swami, a journalist who has extensively purveyed material furnished by intelligence agencies, said SIMI’s preparations for IM activities began with two jihad training camps, one in Kerala in December 2007 and the other in Gujarat in January 2008.

In a background paper prepared for the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses in 2009, Namrata Goswami said the IM leadership was mainly traced to Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi with the code name Kasim or Al Arbi, who had sent e-mails to the media about blasts. However, officials later identified Mohammad Ahmad Zarar Siddibapa alias Yasin Bhatkal as one of its founders and the mastermind behind its bombings.

Yasin Bhatkal was arrested last August as he arrived from Pakistan via Kathmandu. After his interrogation, official agencies fed to the media more material on the IM’s origin and activities.

Swami now pushed back the IM’s formation to the period immediately after the Gujarat riots and identified a building in Mumbai as its birthplace. He summed up the mood of its founders in these words: “They were all angry, very angry, about the 2002 communal violence — and swore vengeance.”

His report also said the IM members met for the first time at Jolly Beach at Bhatkal in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, hometown of Yasin Bhatkal, and conducted experiments with explosives. “Many of the men at Jolly Beach have since been arrested and some killed,” he added, but, all the top commanders, barring Muhammad Atif Amin, whom the Delhi police killed in the controversial 2008 Batla House encounter, are still at their stations.

According to Swami’s account, in the post-Gujarat period the group mobilised small communal flare-ups in and around Bhatkal, leading to the murder of Thimmappa Naik, Bharatiya Janata Party MLA, in 2004. Local reports of the period, however, had blamed the killing on the Congress. When the BJP was in power in the state, its members staged demonstrations demanding the arrest of Naik’s killers.

The contradictions in the published material about the IM point to lack of clarity in the assessments of official agencies. Information provided by them has given the IM a larger-than-life image. Many people have voiced doubts over their accounts and some have insinuated that the IM is a phantom created by intelligence agencies.

The blasts at the famed Buddha shrine at Gaya last July and at the venue of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s Patna meeting last month are the latest bombings attributed to the IM.

Last week the IM story took a queer turn with the arrest of half a dozen Hindu youths of Bihar and Jharkhand, some of whom allegedly maintained contacts with Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence through mobile phones. A Bihar police official suggested the IM may be using Hindu youths but the National Investigation Agency said the arrests were related to terror financing and not to the Patna blasts.

Reported confessions by arrested IM operatives that they organised the 2003 Mumbai train blasts and the 2010 German Bakery blast in Pune indicate that those who were or are being prosecuted in connection with them may have had only a minor role in them, if at all.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 19, 2013.

Supreme Court fails to follow the law it laid down

Sixteen years ago the Supreme Court of India, observing that it is necessary and expedient for employers in work places as well as other responsible persons or institutions to observe certain guidelines to ensure the prevention of sexual harassment of women, laid down certain norms and procedures in a landmark judgment.

The court said, “It shall be the duty of the employer or other responsible persons in work places or other institutions to prevent or deter the commission of acts of sexual harassment and to provide the procedures for the resolution, settlement or prosecution of acts, of sexual harassment by taking all steps required.”

It mentioned five acts – physical contact and advances, a demand or request for sexual favours, sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography, any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of sexual nature – and added that where any of them is committed in circumstances whereunder the victim has a reasonable apprehension that in relation to her employment or work, whether she is drawing salary, or honorarium or voluntary, whether in government, public or private enterprise, such conduct can be humiliating and may constitute a health and safety problem.

It proposed the creation of an appropriate complaint mechanism in the organization for redress of the complaint made by the victim on a time-bound basis.   

Specifically, it suggested the formation of a Complaints Committee which will be headed by a woman and of which not less than half the members should be women. To prevent the possibility of any undue pressure or influence from senior levels, such Complaints Committee should also involve a third party, either NGO or other body who is familiar with the issue of sexual harassment.

The sexual harassment incident disclosed recently by a young woman in the Journal of Indian Law and Society shows that the Supreme Court itself has failed to establish a mechanism of the kind outlined in the celebrated judgment.

A hyped poll exercise

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Assembly elections in five states, which the media has described as a semi-final or dress rehearsal for the 2014 parliamentary polls, have just begun.

Figuring in the four-week poll calendar are the Hindi-speaking heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi and the tribal northeastern state of Mizoram. Voting, which takes place in five phases, began on Monday and will end on December 4. Counting of votes in all the states is scheduled for December 8.

The four Hindi states have traditionally witnessed virtual direct fights between the Congress, which heads the present government at the centre, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, its main challenger in the coming parliamentary elections. However, the description of these elections as a semi-final or dress rehearsal for the Lok Sabha elections is far-fetched.

For one, only five of the 25 states are involved in the current exercise. Although on a few occasions — as, for instance, in the 1977 elections in which Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime was ousted and the 1980 elections in which the first non-Congress government at the centre was thrown out — the people have voted like one man, the political landscape differs widely even among the Hindi states.

For another, voters often approach national and state elections differently. They take into account the fact that in the parliamentary elections they are deciding who should rule at the centre and in the assembly elections they are deciding who should rule the state.

The BJP had retained control of Chhattisgarh in 2008 with a convincing majority in the assembly. However, its vote share was only 40.39 per cent, and the Congress was close on its heels with 39.88 per cent. In MP, it had a comfortable lead with 38.09 per cent of the votes as against the Congress party’s 32.85 per cent.

The Congress was the winner in Delhi state and Rajasthan in 2008. In Delhi, the Congress polled 40.31 per cent of the votes and the BJP 36.84 per cent. In Rajasthan, they polled 36.92 per cent and 35.60 per cent respectively.

In all the four, the BSP was a small but significant factor, with its share of votes ranging from 6.12 per cent in Chhattisgarh to 14.05 per cent in Delhi. Whether that party has registered any growth in these states since then and, if so, at whose cost are questions for which answers are not readily available.

With corruption charges seriously denting the image of the central government, the Congress is finding the going tough in all the states. In Delhi state, where it has been in power continuously since 1998, and in Rajasthan, where it is completing a five-year term, it has also to contend with the anti-incumbency factor. The BJP expects the whirlwind campaign by its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, and the Congress party’s image problem to help it overcome the anti-incumbency factor in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where it has been in power for a decade.

Opinion polls have forecast BJP victory in all states except Delhi, where a hung assembly may give the fledgling Aam Admi Party of anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal the opportunity to decide who should form the government. While this has raised the BJP’s morale, Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s decision to contest from two constituencies indicates that the party is not as confident as is assumed.

Both the Congress and the BJP are facing dissensions with leaders dissatisfied with allocation of party tickets raising the banner of revolt. Judging by experience, rebels who win the elections may help the parent party if it falls short of a majority.

A good performance by the BJP in the four states is sure to give Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial candidature a boost. Yet, it will be foolhardy to assume that the outcome of these assembly elections is a reliable indicator of the shape of the next national government.

The four states together have only 62 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha. The largest Hindi states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, which together command 120 seats in the house, present a totally different picture from these states. In UP, the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party were way ahead of both the Congress and the BJP in the last parliamentary and state elections, and in Bihar the Janata Dal (United) led all the rest.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 12, 2013.

CHOGM dilemma

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

To go or not to go, that is the question before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo approaches. 

India has been an active participant in the Commonwealth of Nations, a grouping of Britain and its former colonies, since its formation in 1949. In fact, it was India’s readiness to be associated with the former colonial power which made the grouping possible.

Since 1971, CHOGM has become institutionalised as a summit held once in two years in the different member countries by turns. Beginning 1977 the host country has set a theme for each meeting.  The theme selected by Sri Lanka for this year’s meeting is “Growth with Equity; Inclusive Development,” a subject of great relevance to India.

Manmohan Singh’s dilemma arises from the vociferous opposition of the government and major political parties of Tamil Nadu to his visiting Sri Lanka when the island’s Sinhalese-dominated government pursues a discriminative policy towards the Tamil minority.

Last month the Tamil Nadu state assembly passed a resolution, moved by Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, demanding that India boycott CHOGM and seek Sri Lanka’s suspension from the group until it grants equal status to the Tamils.  All parties, including the Congress, which heads the government at the Centre, voted for the resolution.

With parliamentary elections due early next year, the state’s parties are engaged in a competition to emerge as the greatest champions of Tamil interests. Jayalalithaa has been pursuing the issue with the Centre since March when she wrote to Manmohan Singh asking that he work for shifting the CHOGM venue.

State legislatures have no role in matters of foreign policy. Yet the Tamil Nadu Assembly has passed resolutions on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue on three occasions. Although the problem has not generated much interest outside the state successive central governments have taken note of Tamil sentiments and intervened on behalf of the island’s ethnic minority.

Video recordings which surfaced recently have yielded conclusive evidence of gross human rights violations by the Sri Lankan army during its successful campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which had posed a violent challenge for three decades. Apart from LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, his teenage son and several mediapersons, at least one of them, a woman, were murdered in cold blood after being caught alive.

In a report to the UN Human Rights Council five weeks ago, High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay noted that the Sri Lankan government was evading an international inquiry into the rights violations and stressed the need for an independent investigation of the alleged war crimes.

Several human rights groups and Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in foreign lands have called upon Commonwealth members to boycott the Colombo CHOGM. So far only Canada has responded favourably. Its prime minister, Stephen Harper, has decided to stay away and send a representative instead.

Jayalalithaa has said it is unfortunate that India with 80 million Tamils has not acted with the same determination as Canada which has only a small Tamil population. She deliberately glosses over the fact that, unlike Canada, India has much at stake in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka received tactical support from India and weapons from China in the last stages of the war against LTTE. Coinciding with the cooling in the relations with India, which had been pressuring it since the end of the war to take political measures to meet Tamil aspirations, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has expanded ties with China. 

So far China has committed about $4 billion for infrastructure development in Sri Lanka. Its contributions include a $500 million container terminal which was commissioned in August and a $292 million airport highway which was opened last week. Work on a $272 million railway project has just begun. 

After India voted against Sri Lanka on a US-sponsored resolution in the Human Rights Council, the Rajapaksa administration announced it would renegotiate the 2003 agreement with India with regard to the use of oil storage tanks.

Yielding to Indian pressure, Sri Lanka held elections in the Tamil regions, and a provincial government headed by CV Vigneswaran, a former judge, has taken office. He finds himself in the unenviable position of being disliked by both the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. Manmohan Singh still has more than a week to make up his mind as the actual meeting of heads of government will begin only on November 15. Such influence as New Delhi has over Colombo will be in jeopardy if he stays away from CHOGM. -- Gulf Today, November 5, 2013.

 

Sardar Statue not for Unity but for Polity of Falsehood, says NAPM

The following is a statement issued by the National Alliance of People's Movements:

Mr. Narendra Modi’s speech at the Sardar Patel Statue, next to Sardar Sarovar Dam in the downstream today was a piece as much of fully false claims as there have always been over the Sardar Sarovar Project. Mr. Modi did not care to speak on Sardar Patel’s heritage and contribution to the freedom and farmers’ movements and this was obvious from the fact that he referred to this day, not as the birth but death anniversary of the Sardar! May one call it a lie or a lapse, it indicates how much important was and is Sardar Patel in Modi’s politics, based on opportunist strategy, illegally pushing the Dam ahead in an utterly filmy and heroic way.

• Modi made a number of claims related to the Project, however, every one of it is false as is known to those following the history to the present, as also the anticipated future of this Project. First and foremost the claim that rehabilitation of all the affected families is completed and that the Grievance Redressal Authorities in all the three states headed by Retired Judges have given ‘clearance’ is an utter lie, since there are not less than 50,000 families yet to be rehabilitated, as anyone visiting the densely populated village communities, or even the resettlement sites in Maharashtra and M.P can realize.

• Hundreds of families in Gujarat too are awaiting declaration as ‘oustees’ and allotment or change of allotted land. Without having visited the affected villages in the valley, he would not know about the illegal submergence of thousands of hecatres of land, standing crop and a few thousand houses, and 1,000 crore worth corruption in rehabilitation in his own party led state of Madhya Pradesh, which is under inquiry by a High Court appointed Justice Jha Commission, since 5 years.

• Will the Gujarat Government have guts to pressurize the UPA Govt. to give ‘clearance’ by law and Supreme Court’s judgements and drowning not less than 2.5 lakh people in their houses, farms and villages, best of agriculture and horticulture, hundreds of temples, mosques, cultural monuments, schools, dispensaries, shops and markets, millions of trees etc. turning the Narmada Valley into another Uttarakhand ?

• The people from the resettlement sites in Gujarat are more upright and honest, to ask, when they have given ‘lahu’ (blood), why should they give ‘loha’ (steel)? They almost boycotted the statue inauguration function and the reports indicate that free vehicles that were sent to get the villages had to return empty to the programme site! Mr. Modi’s claim that clearance has been granted by the R&R Sub Group (of Narmada Control Authority), which no one else but he and us would understand is also not true, as we are told by the concerned officials of the Central Ministry of Social Justice recently..The Gujarat - M.P. political nexus is no doubt trying to pressurize and cull out such a clearance, which no authority with a legal mandate can subject itself to. If they do, not Mr. Modi, but they would be liable to legal action, for committing an offence, which they very well know. The Centre has, in fact, both a duty and opportunity to initiate a comprehensive cost-benefit review by the Planning Commission and other stakeholders.

• Modi’s claim for credit, for maximum investment into the Project during his 10 year tenure than any other Govt. is an attempt to conceal the fact that the Central Govt. gave, unfortunately, without the Ministries and Planning Commission playing their monitoring role, under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme, maximum assistance to SSP (almost Rs. 5700 crore rupees) between 1996 and 2008, amounting to almost 20% of the total country level release of funds. CAG’s Reports have also brought out diversion of central funds granted for drought prone areas to the canals, which were covered under not one, but different assistance projects, leading to double accounting and false reporting.

• Mr. Modi boasted of Kutchis weighing him with silver, with a great hope that Kutch would get its share in Narmada waters. However, he did not reveal to the ignorant masses that the Kutchi’s who had to approach the Supreme Court for their rightful share in Narmada waters, which they haven’t got, in spite of the legal battle. Neither Saurashtra nor Rajasthan is satisfied with miniscule of water allocation, not satiating their thirst, but allocated to the industries with primacy. They are indeed being cheated, as the dam is being built in their name, while more than the allocated share of water is diverted to the corporates, along with land in Gujarat.

• Mr. Modi is actually shedding crocodile tears, while claiming that more water is required for the parched earth, cattle and trees affected by drought in Gujarat and Rajasthan, since his government has de-notified any where upto 4 lakh hectares of the command area land that is excluded from irrigation and reserved for the corporates. Gujarat has also not built minor and sub-minor canal network and field channels beyond 30%, resulting in non-utilization of the available capacity, upto few lakh hecatres. It has, on the other hand, allocated to the industries, a much larger share that what is given for the rural area and townships, while the first preference is given to the non-drought prone cities of Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad and Vadodara. The Chief Ministers’ hollow sympathy to the cattle grazers in Gujarat does not get vindicated when one sees the intense agitation of the grazers community going on in Gujarat.

• This time, changing his own earlier statement, Mr. Modi claimed that Maharashtra (not M.P. this time) is to get power from Sardar sarovar at a cheaper rate, which would save Rs. 400 crores. This too is untrue since both Maharashtra and M.P. are paying due share of capital investment and unit cost of power as decided by the Central Electricity Regulatory Authority. The tarrif as on date is Rs. 2.10 per unit and is likely to go anywhere upto Rs. 4 per unit. With 30,000 + hectares of land and Narmada river itself being sacrificed with the lives of and livelihoods of lakhs of adivasis, farmers and other oustees, a lie repeated cannot turn into truth.

• While making a mockery of the legal procedure that everyone including the Modi Govt. is bound to follow, before claiming its right to build the dam from the present 122 mts to the final height of 138.68 mts or even to raise the pillars and erect the gates (17 mts high). Mr. Modi did not show any honesty that was the tradition of all the patriotic politicians he referred to, Sardar Patel, Baba Saheb Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, in the same sequence.

• The facts are dispersed in umpteen number of reports of various official Committees and Commissions that have assessed the Dam Project, concluding violation of conditions in the environmental clearance granted in the 1987, Planning Commission clearance granted in 1988, violation of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award and multiple Judgements of the Hon’ble Supreme Court. The ground reality confirms the same and hence, in spite of megalomaniac strategies of the Modi Government, the clearance cannot be granted unless every family is rehabilitated with alternative land or livelihood and every tree is compensated for.

• Forgetting the adivasis in the 6 villages of Gujarat, whose land were grabbed for the Project and its colony, yet to be rehabilitated, Modi Govt. has tried to push in the Kevadia Area Development Authority, on the lands belonging to 70 villages, around the Dam for the sake of tourism and urbanization. It is the determination of the adivasi Panchayats, following the PESA Act, which his Government violated in toto that seems to have made the Modi Govt. submit or bow down and not bow down, as apparent from the fact that he did not refer to KADA, but rather declared the decision to form a new Tehsil, Garudeshwar, in the district of Narmada.

• The CM, also announced few sops including water to the tribal areas around the Dam, as speaking orders that are baseless without change in the Plans and necessary clearances. However, by not permitting a peaceful fast by the representatives of adivasi villages, along with senior activists, Rohit Prajapati, Lakhan Musafir, Trupti Shah and others, with the local leaders, the Government has, do doubt, expressed its cowardice even in the face of a peaceful protest.

• ‘Sardar Patel’, if and when, it will be completed, will look beyond the Dam, as the statue is to be at least 80 metres higher than the Dam. No doubt, Sardar will see the destruction and devastation caused by the Dam and borne by the farmers, whom he loved and organized, against paying the unjust tax, during the British rule. The Project, to be pushed in the name of the farmer leader that could once abolish the princely states, only to benefit the present vote bank politics, supporting the new princely states of the Ambanis and Adanis will no doubt be historic, but not in support of either the destructive SSP or Modi-mode of development.

People of the valley, beyond party lines and truly united beyond caste and religious diversity who have fought the Dam and its destruction for 28 years will challenge the parties and their candidates in the upcoming elections and continue to struggle for their right to life and no unconstitutional push to the Dam, with the statue of Mr. Modi’s dream.

Medha Patkar,   Devram Kanera,   Meera

Ph: 09423965153 / 09179148973

To Russia, China with love

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The outcome of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visits to China and Russia last week testifies to the maturing of India’s relationship with the two countries, which, with Brazil and South Africa are its partners in the BRICS grouping. He was able to deepen ties with China, thanks to the spadework done by officials.

At an earlier phase in India’s diplomatic history, personal equations had played a major part in defining its relations with these countries. Ties with the Soviet Union were extremely formal until Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev established warm personal relations with Jawaharlal Nehru. The camaraderie that Nehru established with prime minister Zhou Enlai at Bandung kept Sino-Indian relations on an even keel until the 1962 border war drove the countries apart.

There has been a shift in the relative position of these countries in the global context since then. The Soviet Union has disappeared and its successor, Russia, does not possess the clout that it had. China, which the United States forcibly kept out of the world stage for a quarter century, has catapulted itself into the Number 2 position and is aiming for the top slot. Leaders still try to cultivate personal friendship but they know it cannot override political, economic and strategic factors.

At the end of the tour, Manmohan Singh said the visits had served their purpose and he was satisfied with the results.

His meeting with Vladimir Putin was the 14th successive annual Indo-Russian summit. A joint statement issued later referred to the cooperation between them in varied spheres such as space, energy, investment, high-tech trade, science, education, culture and tourism.

While Manmohan Singh was in Russia, the Indian government announced the commissioning of the first of two units of the Koodankulam nuclear project supplied by that country but the planned agreement for the supply of two more units did not materialise as the terms could not be settled in time.

The China visit yielded many agreements, some of which represent a significant advance. The most important of them aims at ensuring peace along the 4,000-kilometre long disputed border, which was the scene of a bloody conflict in the early 1960s. Beijing’s official assessment was that the visit sent a positive and powerful message that the two countries are committed to working together.

During the half-century that has elapsed since the war, the two countries have been in talks on the border issue with little progress. China has been arguing for some time that since the issue is highly complex a quick resolution cannot be expected and a framework should be established to prevent border incidents.

According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the border defence cooperation agreement has codified the good practices evolved in the handling of developments along the line of control. It also provides for the establishment of a hotline between the two military headquarters and increased contacts between the military commands.

On the contentious trans-border rivers issue, the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding which expands the scope of the existing expert-level mechanism beyond providing hydrological data on the Brahmaputra during the flood season.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party invited Manmohan Singh to address its Party School, which nurtures the country’s future leaders. He took the opportunity to stress that the Chinese and Indian economies can be complementary and outlined certain specific areas where they can cooperate for mutual benefit.

“We both know that the benefits of cooperation far outweigh any presumed gains from containment,” he told China’s emerging young leaders. “Therefore we should engage with each other in a spirit of equality and friendship and with confidence that neither country is a threat to the other.”

Reciprocating the sentiments he expressed, Wang Yi said there are unprecedented opportunities for cooperation and the leaders of the two countries have agreed on deepening strategic partnership. The national television quoted a Party School student as saying Manmohan Singh made many useful suggestions and he would “try to advance bilateral cooperation from my position”.

Looking beyond the prism of bilateral relations, Manmohan Singh and Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang decided to work on the proposed BCIM economic corridor project, which will bring Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar together and link up with the Asean, China-Asean and India-Asean free trade areas to create the world’s largest free trade area. Tantalising as its prospects are India is inclined to hasten slowly, pending detailed examination of its implications for the northeastern states.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 29, 2013.

Law proposes, politics disposes

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

 

Eager to help rapacious business interests for their own reasons, central and state governments are preparing to throw open the surviving rainforests of the Western Ghats, known for their rich biodiversity, to continued exploitation.

The Western Ghats extend from the Gujarat-Maharashtra border to the southern tip of the subcontinent, covering a linear distance of 1,600 kilometres. Thirty-nine areas identified by Unesco for preservation as world heritage sites under its Man and Biosphere programme are located there.

Like other forest areas across the country, this region too has witnessed large-scale encroachments and destruction in six-and-a-half decades of Independence. At the instance of prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had attended the Stockholm environment summit of 1972, Parliament enacted laws to protect the forests and the environment but depredations have gone on with the connivance of politicians and officials.

Taking note of the Supreme Court’s observation that lack of expertise hampered its ability to adjudicate on environmental issues, the central government enacted a law in 2010 to set up the National Green Tribunal, a specialised judicial and technical body. The tribunal was constituted only after the court repeatedly directed the government to do so.

It is not unusual for the central and state governments to pass laws and not implement them. In the wake of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Centre, responding to popular demand, enacted the National Environment Tribunal Act in 1995 to punish polluters. The law was not enforced. Two years later a law to set up a National Environmental Appellate Authority was enacted. It too was not enforced. A Kerala law providing for a tribunal to award compensation to villagers for damage caused by the Coca-Cola company, which was referred to the Centre for approval, is in the limbo.

Jairam Ramesh, who piloted the National Green Tribunal Bill through Parliament as Minister of Forests and Environment, was shifted out soon afterwards, apparently to placate businessmen who found him too committed to ecology. Under the malleable Ms Jayanti Natarajan, who took his place, the ministry has been in continuous confrontation with the tribunal.

One of Jairam Ramesh’s positive initiatives was the constitution of an expert panel, headed by renowned ecologist Madhav Gadgil, to report on measures to save the Western Ghats. Jayanti Natarajan kept the panel’s report under wraps until forced by the Central Information Commission and the Delhi High Court to publish it.

In its 328-page report, the Gadgil committee proposed that a Western Ghats Ecology Authority be set up to ensure protection of ecologically fragile regions falling in six states. Commercial interests, backed by political parties in the states, raised a furore over its recommendations, which also included checks on construction of dams, mining activities and polluting chemical industries. In Kerala, the Syro-Malabar Church, whose members form a large chunk of the farmers in the hill region, also joined them.

The Centre then appointed a new panel, headed by Planning Commission member K. Kasturirangan, a space scientist with no expertise or experience in the field of ecology, to review the Gadgil report and make fresh recommendations. It watered down the Gadgil proposals but could not go so far as to satisfy the commercial and political interests fully.

Gadgil wanted 90 per cent of the Western Ghats to be a no-go area. He divided the ecologically fragile regions into three zones and proposed different sets of regulations for each. Kasturirangan asked that the entire area be treated alike. Gadgil wanted decisions on permitting mining and other activities in the protected area to be left to the village councils. Kasturirangan opposed it.

The Green Tribunal had directed the Ministry of Environment and Forests in April to implement the Gadgil recommendations within three weeks. The ministry did not act on the directive. Even after the Kasturirangan report was received it remained inactive. Early this month the tribunal fined the ministry Rs25,000 for its inaction which was holding up clearance of projects and asked it to clarify its position on the two reports by November 12.

Last week the ministry announced acceptance of the Kasturirangan report. Once again there was a hue and cry from the business class and the political parties. The loudest noises come from Goa, where the driving force against attempts to save the forest is the influential mining lobby, and from Kerala, where political parties in league with land grabbers and quarry owners are in the lead.

An open battle between environmentalists and commercial and political interests is on the cards with Gadgil exhorting the people to come forward to protect the forests. The last word may be that of the judiciary. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 22, 2013.

Elusive social justice

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A high court judgement acquitting 26 men, whom a lower court had sentenced to either death or life imprisonment for the murder of 58 Dalits, including 27 women and 16 children, has brought to the fore the question of social justice.

The case arose out of a massacre, allegedly by members of Ranvir Sena, a militia set up by Bhumihar Brahmin landlords to terrorise farmhands into submission, at Lakshmanpur Bathe, 100 kilometres from Patna, capital of Bihar state, in 1997. The victims included pregnant women and infants.

The Patna High Court freed the accused, saying they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt as the prosecution witnesses, most of them local Dalits, are not reliable. The state government has said it will go in appeal to the Supreme Court. The Dalits are afraid the killers will strike again.

Voicing the Dalits’ despair, a man who lost seven members of his family told a reporter: “After 58 murders, no one is guilty. The courts are theirs, the government is theirs, the lathi (police baton) is theirs. The poor have nothing. This is injustice.”

The Ranvir Sena, set up in 1994, was banned the following year but has continued to operate with the patronage of influential people.

The 2011 Census put the number of Dalits — members of erstwhile untouchable communities — at 201.4 million, or 16.6 per cent of the total population. Four states account for nearly half of the Dalits: Uttar Pradesh (20.5%), West Bengal (10.7%), Bihar (8.2%) and Tamil Nadu (7.2%). In UP, the Bahujan Samaj Party, which draws its support primarily from the Dalit community, is a major political player and its leader, Mayawati, has been its chief minister more than once. Dalits form 31.9% of Punjab’s population but the BSP has not been able to make much headway there.

Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi recently said Mayawati was preventing the emergence of other Dalit leaders. She hit back saying the Congress was anti-Dalit. However, she continues to support the Congress-led government at the Centre from outside.

Gandhi said the Congress would build up hundreds of thousands of Dalit leaders to carry forward the process of empowering the community. He gave no inkling of awareness of the flaw in his party’s efforts in this regard. It has helped to elevate individual Dalits to the high offices of the president, the chief justice, chief ministers and Speakers of legislative bodies. However, in the absence of determined efforts to ensure social justice, a primary objective of the Constitution, of which BR Ambedkar, a Dalit, was the chief architect, its contributions do not rise above the level of tokenism. 

Police often refuse to register complaints of atrocities against Dalits. Slackness of investigators and prosecutors results in extremely low rates of conviction.

Ambedkar had embarked upon his mission of emancipating the Dalits by burning the Code of Manu, a treatise dating back to the first or second century BCE, which provided ideological underpinning and religious sanction for the highly iniquitous caste system. The state apparatus, dominated by beneficiaries of the system, has been slack in translating the constitutional guarantee of equality and equal opportunity into reality. Manu figures, in approving terms, in more than 300 Supreme Court judgements of the past six decades.

Statistical data provides an appalling picture. Every 18 minutes a crime is committed against a Dalit. Every day at least two Dalits are murdered, 11 beaten up and two Dalit houses destroyed. More than 54% of the Dalit children are undernourished. As many as 83 out of 1,000 live-birth Dalit children die before their first birthday. Men belonging to so-called upper castes systematically subject Dalit women to sexual violence as a means of punishment, control and dominance.

Although manual scavenging is banned by law, about 1.3 million Dalits, mostly women, are still engaged in the demeaning activity. More than 10,000 of them are in the national capital. 

Untouchability, prohibited by the Constitution, is still practised in many villages. In an extension of the practice of this evil, cooperatives in Gujarat’s Mehsana district do not accept milk from cows owned by Dalits.

Recent migrants have carried the caste baggage with them to the West.  Last year the UN Human Rights Council, acting on representations by NGOs and findings of its own Rapporteurs, directed India and the United Kingdom to take certain specific steps against caste discrimination.

Significantly, the older Indian communities in the West Indies and Fiji were able to develop untroubled by caste and religious differences due to virtual absence of Brahminical elements among them. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 15, 2013.

Fodder scam lesson

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Politicians have blocked the passage of a tough law to deal with corruption in high places but two court verdicts of the past week show that the existing legal provisions are sufficient to bring offenders to book if only the authorities have the will to act.

In these cases trial courts convicted and jailed two former Bihar chief ministers, two members of Parliament and three senior Indian Administrative Service officers on corruption charges.

Lalu Prasad Yadav, who headed two governments between 1990 and 1997 and Jagannath Mishra, who was at the helm thrice before him, are the convicted former chief ministers. They, along with Lok Sabha member Jagdish Sharma, were convicted in one of about 50 cases registered in connection with the Bihar fodder scam.

In another case, Rajya Sabha member Rasheed Masood was convicted for allegedly selling seats in several medical colleges.

Yadav, Sharma and Masood became the first MPs to lose their seats in terms of the Supreme Court ruling disqualifying persons convicted and jailed for two years or more from seeking or holding elective posts.

If the tortuous course of the cases against these leaders indicates how systemic failures help the corrupt to get away, it also makes clear that if existing laws are implemented effectively the guilty can be brought to book.

The fodder scam cases arose out of continuous loot of the treasury for at least two decades. What began as a small-time activity of low-ranking officials gradually grew into a huge fraud of which top bureaucrats and political functionaries up to the level of the chief minister also became beneficiaries.

The modus operandi was to fabricate records of livestock in farms under the animal husbandry department and draw funds to buy equipment for the non-existent farms and fodder and medicine for the non-existent cattle. The loot was of the order of Rs9.40 billion.

The Comptroller and Auditor General, the constitutional authority who scrutinises government accounts, informed the Chief Minister of Bihar in 1985 that there was heavy delay in the submission of monthly accounts by the state treasury and this indicated the possibility of temporary embezzlement. Later chief ministers too were warned similarly but no one took remedial action, possibly because the high-up had been drawn into the scam by then.

In 1992, Bidhu Bhushan Dwivedi, a police inspector, stumbled upon the racket and submitted a report which hinted at chief ministerial level involvement in it. He was transferred and suspended. The high court later reinstated him and he became a key witness in the scam cases.

The fraudsters’ goose was cooked when Amit Khare, a young IAS officer serving as deputy commissioner, acting on information, raided animal husbandry offices in his district and seized records which contained clinching evidence of the scam. The media attention that followed made it impossible to sweep the dirt under the carpet. Khare is now a joint secretary in the central government.

Acting on a public interest petition, the Supreme Court entrusted the probe to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Yadav, who was chief minister at that time, had to step down. He later served as a minister in the central government but the cases against him continued. Those convicted with him include 13 government officials, three of them members of the IAS, and 20 fodder suppliers.

The case against Rasheed Masood dates back to 1990-91 when he was Health Minister in the VP Singh government. He had begun his parliamentary career as a Lok Dal member and was in the Samajwadi Party before joining the Congress.

According to Transparency International, 86 per cent of the participants in the survey it held to prepare the Global Corruption Barometer 2013 said Indian political parties were corrupt. Other institutions in the list, in descending order of perceived corruption, are: Police (75 per cent), Parliament/legislatures (65 per cent), Public officials (65 per cent), education system (61 per cent), Medical and health (56 per cent), Business/private sector (50 per cent), Judiciary (45 per cent), Religious bodies (44 per cent), Media (41 per cent), NGOs (30 per cent) and Military (20 per cent).

When corruption is so pervasive, tracking and jailing the offenders is a mammoth task. A stiff law cannot, by itself, take the country far if the political and bureaucratic machinery, which must implement it, is highly corrupt. The most important fodder scam lesson is that a few honest men can make a difference.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 8, 2013.

Suspect activities

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

There have been some disquieting revelations about the goings-on in the Indian army. To make things worse, major political parties are seizing the opportunity unabashedly to score debating points.

Last March the army sent to the government the report of a high-level inquiry which had found that Gen VK Singh, Chief of the Army Staff from March 2010 to May 2012, had set up a new unit called Technical Services Division (TSD) and funded it to destabilise the government of Jammu and Kashmir, spy on politicians and Defence ministry officials and influence the appointment of the next army chief.

The officers’ board, which conducted the inquiry, recommended that the government institute a criminal investigation in the matter. The government ordered no investigation. However, the new army chief, Gen Bikram Singh, shut TSD down.

The army inquiry board’s report was brought to light by the Indian Express last month. Responding to it, the Defence ministry said measures were in place to prevent undesirable activities. Since the matter involves national security, the government will take action after examining the report carefully, it added.

VK Singh said the newspaper report was false and motivated and seditious. However, he admitted the army had made payments to politicians in Kashmir. He claimed that this was done to ensure stability and that the army had been doing so since Independence.

Eight former army chiefs, in a joint statement, refuted his claim. They said no payments were made to any politicians, political party or NGO in their time. They asserted they would not have allowed such payments.

Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his father, Union minister Farooq Abdullah, demanded a probe into the reported activities of the TSD.

Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Mohammed Yasin Malik filed a petition in the state high court seeking a probe into the TSD’s role as well as the alleged killing of 117 civilians by the army in the state in 2010.

The newspaper report on the army inquiry board’s findings came immediately after VK Singh appeared with Bharatiya Janata Party’s presidential candidate Narendra Modi at an ex-servicemen’s rally in Haryana. Congress and BJP leaders issued public statements calculated to extract political mileage out of the development.

VK Singh’s term as army chief was marked by a series of controversies. He once said he had informed Defence Minister AK Antony about a bribe offer he had received from arms deal intermediaries but the government had not acted upon the complaint. Antony said he asked Singh to give a written report but he did not give one. Singh also dragged the government to court over a dispute relating to his age. If he had succeeded in the litigation he would have got more time in the top job.

Former J&K governor Gen SK Sinha said what VK Singh did was against the traditions of the army and he should have been sacked when he went to court. Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi said Singh, while heading the army’s eastern command, had given him some advice on counter-insurgency measures but he did not act upon it as he did not think it was in the national interest.

The army board’s report raises the question whether VK Singh’s actions were consistent with the army’s traditions. Under British rule, strong ties existed between the civil and military leadership — several Governors-General were in fact former army chiefs — but the military remained apolitical. With a view to ensuring civil supremacy over the military, India’s constitution has designated the president as the office of Commander-in-Chief of the defence forces.

Some experts have pointed out that the defence minister’s lack of interest in or knowledge of security matters has sometimes resulted in bureaucrats emerging as the effective civilian leadership, to the chagrin of the military brass.

In a book published in 2005, Gen S Padmanabhan, who was army chief during 2000-2002, says that the Defence Secretary, with his nearness to the Defence Minister, often exercised power on behalf of the minister and was regarded as the de facto minister. He adds, “The ‘supremacy of the civil over the military’ was thus effectively changed from supremacy of the political authority to that of the civilian bureaucracy.”

Two former chiefs of the Indian navy, Admirals Vishnu Bhagwat (1996-98) and Arun Prakash (2004-06), have also recorded dissatisfaction with the relationship between the ministry and the service headquarters.

The systemic problems they have pointed out need to be addressed speedily to ensure proper management of national security affairs. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 1, 2013.

Playing for high stakes

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Soon after the Bharatiya Janata Party named Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, noted Indian writer and educationist UR Ananthamurthy said he wouldn’t live in a country ruled by him.

Ananthamurthy was voicing his concern over the nomination of Modi, who bears the stigma of facilitating the anti-Muslim riots of 2002, for the high office by the main opposition party. In an orchestrated response to his remark, Modi fans started sending him money orders to buy a one-way ticket to fly out of the country. Several other writers immediately rallied to his defence.

The episode is indicative of the secular sections’ misgivings over Modi’s emergence on the national scene and the Hindutva camp’s scant regard for their concerns as it plays for high stakes.

The BJP heads the National Democratic Alliance, which ruled the country from 1998 to 2004 and is the main opposition in Parliament. It is approaching next year’s elections with high hopes as the ruling United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress, will be facing the electorate with the burden of double incumbency and grave corruption charges. Having lost two successive elections, the BJP desperately needs a win.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Hindutva’s ideological powerhouse, had planned to declare Modi its prime ministerial nominee last June. It could not accomplish the mission then as Lal Kishen Advani, the party’s tallest leader after former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the chairman of the NDA, remonstrated. As a first step, it made Modi the party’s chief campaigner. This month, it proclaimed him prime ministerial nominee.

Criticism from outside the party notwithstanding, Modi appears to be the best candidature the BJP could find. Advani had led the party unsuccessfully in the elections of 2004 and 2009, and, at 85, age was clearly against him. None of the other leaders at the national level could claim to be his natural successor. Among the state-level leaders, Modi was the one with the most national exposure, even if he received attention for the wrong reasons.

The BJP has been declining continuously for years, and Modi faces an uphill task. Its popularity peaked in 1998 when, with a poll share of 25.59 per cent, it secured 182 seats in the Lok Sabha and emerged, for the first time, as the largest party in the House. This enabled it to attract a number of small parties and cobble up enough support to form the first NDA government.

The Congress party bagged 25.82 per cent of the votes polled in that election but got only 141 seats.

When fresh elections were called in 1999 following the collapse of the NDA government, the BJP’s vote share dropped to 23.75 per cent but it managed to maintain its strength of 182 seats and retained power. The Congress party’s vote share went up to 28.30 per cent but the vagaries of the electoral system restricted its strength in the House to 114 seats.

After the second NDA government completed its five-year term, the BJP went to the polls with the catchy slogan “India Shining” but was rebuffed by the electorate. Its vote share fell to 22.16 per cent and the number of seats dwindled to 138. The Congress party’s vote share fell too, to 26.53 per cent, but its Lok Sabha strength rose to 145, making it once again the largest single party in the house.

In 2009, the BJP’s poll share fell further to 18.80 per cent. Modi has to reverse the declining trend and push up the party’s vote share. A rise of five percentage points can take it back to the 1999 level and possibly once again make it the largest party in the Lok Sabha.

However, the party cannot expect a replication of the old scenario. During 1998-99 it could draw towards it many small parties since they disliked the Congress more than they disliked it. Besides, in Vajpayee it had a leader who had a wide measure of acceptability across the political spectrum.

The first thing Modi did on taking charge of the party’s election campaign was to dispatch his close associate, Amit Shah, to Uttar Pradesh, which has the largest bloc of 80 seats in the Lok Sabha. In 2009 the BJP won only 10 seats there, and was way behind the Samajwadi Party (23 seats), the Congress (20) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (20).

This month 48 persons were killed in communal riots in the Muzaffarnagar district of UP. The Congress and the Left parties have attributed the violence to the BJP strategy of communally polarising the society ahead of the election. Such a strategy may help win more seats but render the task of forging post-election alliances difficult by reviving memories of Gujarat 2002.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, September 24, 2013.

Flawed electoral system

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India’s democratic system has facilitated multi-party elections at regular intervals and changes of government at the Centre and in the states through the ballot. However, it has its flaws, which are crying for remedy.

The emergence of money and muscle power as elements that can influence the outcome of elections has led to a rise in the number of persons with criminal records in the two houses of parliament and in the state legislatures.

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and the National Election Watch (NEW), which studied affidavits filed by candidates who have sought elections since 2004, found that about 30 per cent of the members of the Lok Sabha and 17 per cent of the members of the Rajya Sabha had criminal cases pending against them when they filed their nomination papers. Some were charged with heinous crimes like murder, kidnapping and rape.

In an attempt to check the rise of criminal elements in elected bodies, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a member will forfeit his seat immediately if he or she is convicted on a charge that attracts a jail term of two years or more.

The law provides for such forfeiture but until now the court had, as a rule, suspended the sentence and allowed the convicted member to retain his seat pending a decision on his appeal.

The government considered amending the law to overcome the effect of the judgement, but gave up the idea after the apex court indicated that it is not inclined to revise its decision in the matter.

In another recent judgement, the Supreme Court ruled that a person in lawful custody cannot contest elections. While its intention was good, the ruling opened the way for a government which is not scrupulous in observing democratic niceties to vitiate the electoral process by throwing opposition leaders in jail on trumped-up charges on the eve of the elections.

While addressing the Kerala Assembly on the occasion of its 125th anniversary a few days ago (the state came into being only in 1956 but its legislature traces its history to the setting up of an assembly in the princely state of Travancore before Independence), Vice-President Hamid Ansari dwelt on another grave weakness of the country’s democratic system. He pointed out that the first-past-the-post system often results in candidates getting elected with the support of not more than a quarter or one-third of the voters.

The flawed electoral system, borrowed from the British, casts doubts on the representative capacity of not only individual legislators but also the elected bodies. The fact is that no government in the country’s history enjoyed the support of a majority of the electorate. The massive majority that the Congress won in the first three general elections, fought under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, arguably the most popular of all prime ministers, was secured with vote shares ranging from 44.72 per cent to 47.78 per cent.

The system allowed the undivided Communist Party of India with a vote share of only 3.79 per cent to win 16 seats and emerge as the largest opposition group in the first Lok Sabha, edging past the Socialist Party which could get only 12 seats with its 10.59 per cent votes. In 1984, a regional party, Telugu Desam of Andhra Pradesh, became the main opposition in Parliament winning 30 of the state’s 40 Lok Sabha seats.

Electoral systems designed to ensure that the government and individual legislators have the support of a majority of the electorate are now in force in many countries. The most popular one involves a runoff between the two candidates who receive the largest number of votes in the initial ballot.

While there have been cursory discussions on electoral reform from time to time, political parties in the country have little interest in improving the system as they have developed a vested interest in the present arrangement.

Parties with narrow bases stand to benefit from the first-past-the-post principle. When votes in a constituency get widely splintered in a multi-cornered contest a small but significant caste, religious or class vote bank can help a party to win.

All national parties have suffered erosion in their geographical base in the past few years and regional parties have come to the fore. The support base of both national and regional parties is narrow and they are, therefore, heavily dependent upon vote banks.--Gulf Today, September 17, 2013.

Balancing act at G20

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India’s economic woes were uppermost in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s mind when he went to St Petersburg, Russia, for the G20 meet last week. His plea to the developed countries for calibration of their monetary policies to avoid adverse impact on the economies of the developing countries received support from many countries.

Heeding their voice, the United States and other advanced economies agreed in the summit declaration to carefully manage winding down of the monetary stimulus, brought in to deal with the situation created by the global economic slowdown.

At the root of the worry articulated by Manmohan Singh was the depreciation of the currencies of some developing countries as global investors started pulling out following reports that the US Federal Reserve may taper off its monthly $85 billion bonds purchase.

While committing itself to moderate the Fed’s quantitative easing programme, the US argued that the difficulties of the developing countries were the result of lack of economic reforms. This viewpoint, too, found expression in the declaration which said “sound macroeconomic policies, structural reforms and strong prudential frameworks will help address an increase in volatility”.

As was to be expected, the declaration represents a balancing act. The G20 nations undertook to co-operate to ensure that the policies they implemented to support domestic growth also supported global growth and financial stability and to manage their spillovers on other countries.

US officials claimed later that while China, India and Brazil raised the issue of quantitative easing, most G20 members agreed that what was good for the US was good for the global economy.

The G20 nations reiterated their commitment to free trade. At the same time, the target date for ending the moratorium on any new protectionist measures was moved from 2014 to 2016.

There was a consensus in favour of adoption of an action plan which focuses on economic growth and job creation. However, the details remain to be worked out. The member states have been asked to outline their respective positions on the subject at next year’s summit, to be held in Brisbane, Australia.

Another positive outcome of the summit was the agreement to create an international framework to fight cross-border tax evasion by 2015. The proposal requires financial institutions to ascertain the residential status of their customers for tax purposes and pass on the information to the authorities concerned.

The US and Britain were among the key promoters of the proposal. Apple, America’s most profitable technology company, is said to have avoided billions in taxes in the US as well as other countries by creating a web of subsidiaries. Another American company, Starbucks, which runs a global coffee house chain, had sales of nearly $630 million in Britain last year but paid no taxes. It has, however, offered to pay taxes from this year.

Curiously, the proposal to check tax evasion did not receive much attention in India though the country stands to benefit from the proposed international framework. Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit research organisation, had reported last year that Indians were holding an estimated $500 billion in secret accounts in foreign banks.

Manmohan Singh can derive some satisfaction from the fact that he could persuade the developed nations to take note of the adverse implications of the high volatility of financial flows and exchange rates for India’s economic stability. However, he obtained more tangible results from the discussions he had with some of the summit participants outside the conference hall.

In talks held on the sidelines of the summit, Japan agreed to raise the ceiling on the currency swap agreement with India from $15 billion to $50 billion. This will strengthen India’s effort to arrest the decline of the rupee.

The BRICS deliberations at St Petersburg resulted in agreement on the contributions members of the group must make towards the reserves of the 100-billion dollar development bank which they are to set up. China will provide $41 billion, Brazil, Russia and India $18 billion each and South Africa $5 billion.

The BRICS bank is designed to help finance infrastructure and development projects in the member nations. It will also pool foreign currencies to help meet any financial crisis in the future. Some see it as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund, where the US is in a position to veto any proposal.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, September 10, 2013.

Coping with economic ills

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

With the rupee in free fall, the stock market in violent fluctuation and inflation in two digits, last week threw up evidence that India’s economy is ailing.

While presenting the budget, Finance Minister P Chidambaram had held out hopes of a growth rate of 6.1 to 6.7 per cent during this year. Replying to a debate on the state of the currency in the upper house of Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lowered the target to 5.5 per cent. Data released by the Central Statistical Organisation later shows even this may be unrealistic.

The CSO report said growth in the first quarter of the fiscal was only 4.4 per cent, the lowest since the global meltdown of 2009. The growth rate fell in every sector of the economy except that of social and personal services, which registered an increase — from 8.9 per cent to 9.4 per cent.

Some foreign analysts and domestic critics cited the Food Security Bill, which provides for heavy subsidy on grains supplied to the poor, as one of the reasons for the decline of the rupee. The fact, however, is that the rupee began falling weeks before the bill was adopted by the lower house of Parliament, and it was caused primarily by global investors moving money out of foreign financial markets following the US move to tighten money policy in view of improvement in its economy.

The economies of many countries had suffered when the US experienced meltdown a few years ago. It is ironic that some of them now suffer because the US economy is improving.

The rupee is not the only currency affected by outflow of foreign investment. The currencies of many developing countries from Brazil to Indonesia have suffered erosion in recent weeks. However, the rupee happens to be the worst hit.

India received foreign institutional investment of $12 billion this year. About $1 billion went out in a fortnight as investors began pulling out.

The main cause of the plight of the rupee is the growth in the current account deficit — the gap between the value of imports and that of exports — which touched an all-time high of $88.2 billion during the last financial year. This was 4.8 per cent of the GDP. The government planned to reduce the CAD to $70 billion, or 3.7 per cent of the GDP, this year. High oil and gold imports foiled its efforts.

Appeals to the public to reduce oil and gold consumption having failed, the government is considering other remedial measures. Buying more oil from Iran paying rupees and keeping petrol outlets closed from 8pm to 8am are among the ideas mooted to reduce oil import bill. Austerity measures are also envisaged.

Some analysts have likened the current situation to what prevailed in the early 1990s when India borrowed heavily from the International Monetary Fund and suggested going back to the IMF. However the government says the situation does not warrant recourse to IMF aid.

Its optimism is based mainly on two factors. One is that the country has foreign exchange reserves of about $280 billion as against short-term debts of about $172 billion. The other is that since there was plentiful rain during the year the outlook on the farm front is bright.

However, Corporate India has cause for worry. Taking advantage of the economic reforms, many companies borrowed heavily from abroad and the falling rupee has pushed up their repayment burden.

A US website has quoted an official of the financial services firm Morgan Stanley as saying 25 per cent of Indian companies technically do not have enough money to make interest payments and 15 per cent have negative cash flows.

Manmohan Singh shares Corporate India’s view that the answer to the current economic problems lies in more reform. However, since general elections are approaching, he cannot overlook the fact economic reform, while benefiting big corporations, has added to the misery of the poor. The food security and land acquisition measures which the government is trying to push through are aimed at mitigating its impact on the vulnerable sections of the population.

Amid the gloom of the week the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation spread a bit of cheer by releasing a report of the global research firm Dun and Bradstreet, which said India is likely to achieve an average growth rate of over 8.3 per cent between 2014 and 2020 and realise its full potential. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, September 3, 2013.