Being loyal is different from being a Prime Minister of a billion plus population. Dr. Manmohan Singh has got unfortunately the dummy P.M tag from every corner of the society. On the one hand, powerful leader starved world looks Indian P.M as the powerful among the powerless alot on the other hand, Indian public feels betrayed by his experience and eminence. Running a puppet government for the past 7 years, Manmohan has alot of clean up job. First is to clean up his polluted image as the puppet prime minister. Second to get his act together and reform the economy. Third walk away from the sycophants and lead an independent decision maker life. Unless and untill these are done, India will continue to watch helplessly the helpless P.M.

 

Bharat  Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 18 August 2011

It is curious that India and the United States — the two most important democracies in the world today, have in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama, chief executives who, it turns out, share traits that the Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., identified as Mr Obama’s hallmark, namely, being at once risk-averse and competitive. In the three weeks this writer recently spent in America, it was impossible to escape the incessant drumbeat in the media about the economy on the skids, raising of the national debt ceiling amidst rancorous partisanship, the loss of “Triple A” credit rating, and an ascendant China, fearing its huge investment in some 13 per cent of the US Treasury bonds issued being reduced to waste paper, furiously wagging a finger at Washington, demanding Americans live within their means. (In all this gloom, amusement was afforded visiting Indians and NRIs, at least, by the website of a major Indian newspaper heralding an Indian as having “downgraded the United States”!) Meanwhile, at the centre of the hubbub, Mr Obama stayed on the sidelines, mostly disengaged, even as Republican Party Right-wingers called him names. It felt like home. With scams and scandals of all kinds coming home to roost within the Congress Party portals, bad economic news dogging his every step, Dr Singh, other than sleep-talking through much the same Red Fort speech he has made the last seven years on Independence Day, has stayed mum, barricading himself in 7 Race Course Road, a mute spectator to things going horribly wrong for his government and for him personally. Except, unlike Mr Obama, the Indian Prime Minister is no mass leader nor a political visionary; even less is he an orator able to turn around a disbelieving public. His public speeches actually set many a teeth on edge. Dr Singh hopes to keep warbling the same old song without taking any of the follow-up actions he has been promising these many years to implement the second-generation economic reforms desperately needed to shift the economy to a higher plane. But transforming India into a powerful growth engine, at a minimum, requires overhauling archaic labour laws and instituting new land acquisition norms in order to give fillip to industry, and boosting the rural economy by freeing the agricultural sector from export and other restrictions, none of which is being done because of fear of the faux socialists — Messrs Mulayam Singh, Amar Singh, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Company, and the unpredictable politics of Mayawati. It is another matter that these worthies have, so far, been held in check by the ruling party manipulating the CBI corruption cases against them. But general economic up-gearing and CBI threats nevertheless entail risks because, overdone, these measures may persuade these leaders to join with the BJP-led Opposition to bring down the Congress-led coalition government. And risk-taking of any kind, especially with so much at stake, goes against Dr Singh’s over-cautious nature and party chief Sonia Gandhi’s plans. After all he is a career bureaucrat hoisted, for reasons of zero-threat to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and his personal malleability, to the top post in government, an arrangement that permits Mrs Gandhi to keep her hand on the steering wheel, a control now reinforced by her chosen civil servant, Pulok Chatterji, replacing T.K.A Nair as principal secretary to the Prime Minister. The corporate bosses’ understanding of the turgid pace of economic reforms is limited by the automotive metaphor they have used. Y.C. Deveshwar of Indian Tobacco Company in the August 2 meeting with finance minister Pranab Mukherjee reportedly ventured that the problem lay with two drivers — one pressing the accelerator, the other the brake. It’s a view similar to the Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy’s that the government’s “culture of taking slow decisions” is attributable to “two leaders in the set-up”. While such takes on reality seem reasonable at first glance, they are wrong in their essentials, in the main, because they assume that Dr Singh is driven by the desire for systemic change. The fact is he never had his foot on the accelerator, even as Mrs Gandhi never lifted hers from the brake pedal for fear that any forward movement would undermine the ruling party’s pseudo-Leftist moorings. Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao-brand of crude populism masquerading as socialism is the true ideological lodestar of the Congress Party, not the quaint Fabian socialist tenets that animated Jawaharlal Nehru’s policies. Dr Singh, the ultimate apparatchik and beneficiary of the system, in the event, has a disincentive to burnish his reformist credentials, such as they are, if that involves crossing the party line. Mrs Gandhi, on her part, may understand little about socialism other than that it has kept her family in the clover for a very long time. But it is sufficient reason for her to stay with the socialist rhetoric, statist solutions, and a horrendous state apparatus, which together have turned corrupt practices and mis-governance into a thriving cottage industry. Where corruption is concerned, Dr Singh and Mr Obama are somewhat similarly placed. Personally clean, Mr Obama owes his meteoric rise from a grassroots organiser in Chicago to the corrupt Democratic Party political machine ruthlessly run, gangster style, first by mayor Richard J. Daley, who bequeathed the machine to his son, the even longer serving Richard Michael Daley, whose brother, William J. Daley, incidentally, is Mr Obama’s White House Chief of Staff. Dr Singh may not be corrupt himself, but that is small consolation considering he is presiding over a government that, going by the sheer extent, scale and magnitude of the loot indulged in by his party members and Cabinet colleagues, is patently the most corrupt in independent India’s history, and one that may be headed for a downfall. The muck has long ago stuck to the Prime Minister’s escutcheon. So, when he repeatedly declares that the corrupt will face punishment, who takes him seriously?

Reaching the pinnacle of power triggers good work in the minds and hearts of elected rulers of the world. This happens double delight way to those who are in the democratic setup. The democratically elected rulers wanted to repay the debt to the voters. Hence there is rush of adrenalin to do something immediate and getting into the good books of public. Mamata Banerjee entered public life three decades ago by doing this kind of stunt politics and catching the eyes of the public. There is no surprise in her doing the same methodological stunt after taking over as the first woman chief minister of West Bengal. The Land Acquisition Bill, beautification of Kolkata, Howrah river cleaning, pro poor schemes are few of the many miracles she is waiting to anvil for the people of Bengal. One has to keep fingers crossed and watch her plans getting realised in next five years..

 

 

Indranil Banerjie writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 8 August 2011

 

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee might well be the political paradigm of our times. Last week, she stood by the River Hooghly and announced amidst much fanfare and media attention a multi-crore rupee riverside beautification programme, in accordance with her pre-poll promise to make Kolkata another London. Like a modern-day Victoria, Ms Banerjee promised to reward the city mayor if he could complete the project in four instead of the projected six months. She either omitted to mention or did not know that the municipality was facing an acute cash crunch and had been instructed to slash development expenditure on sewage works, roads, health schemes, slum development and water supply. The reality is that Kolkata’s finances are in dire straits and although the honourable chief minister has decreed that Kolkata will be another London she really has no means to effect that transformation.

Ms Banerjee’s method of producing a public good through the waving of a make-believe magic wand is not her invention. Successive railway ministers, herself included, have shown the way by announcing new trains to woo politically important constituencies without bothering to first increase capacities in the railways. But that is not the concern of the modern-day Indian politician, who believes that public goods, public capacities and public revenues are nothing but means to further political aims.

The workings of the decree and be damned attitude are evident in two crucial pieces of legislation that are in the works. The first is the Land Acquisition Bill, vital for both development and social justice, and greatly overdue. The problem is not so much the provisions of the bill but the attempt to make it effective in retrospect. This means all the land acquired in the past decades to build townships all over the country would be affected. This would plunge the country into a frenzy of litigation and social turmoil.

This would not merely affect the middle classes who have bought houses in towns such as Noida and Gurgaon but would also bring down the fortunes of states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana which depend on new urban clusters for economic development. Any sensible government would not have considered passing such a sensitive piece of legislation with retrospective effect; unfortunately, the bigger concern here appears to be the need for a regime change in a state ruled by a political rival.

The Food Security Act is another conjuror’s trick. Unexceptionable in intent, the legislation is completely unaffordable and impossible to implement fairly. As it is, the government is having a hard time paying subsidy on the existing Public Distribution System (PDS), the bill for which is climbing exponentially; it jumped 65 per cent in 2010-11 to over Rs 74,000 crore from Rs 58,228 crore in the previous year.

While the food subsidy bill is skyrocketing, much of the food meant for the poor continues to be stolen. The World Bank has warned that 60 per cent of food subsidies do not reach the poor and that it would be folly to push more money into a putrefying system without first fixing it.

The Right to Education (RTE) Act passed in 2009 is another example of how little can be achieved by mere legislation and budgetary allocations. A New Delhi-based NGO, Accountability Initiative, has pointed out that currently only an estimated 11 per cent of government schools have the necessary infrastructure as per the act and several thousand crores would have to be pumped in to bring them to minimum standards.

It is not as if the government is being miserly; it has in fact upped expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan from Rs 15,000 crore in 2010-11 to Rs 21,000 crore for this fiscal year. This money is to be transferred to state governments for implementing the scheme. Problem is there are no mechanisms to enforce basic performance parameters in government schools; absent teachers, broken-down school buildings and abysmal academic standards have become the norm. Even in rural India more and more parents are sending their children to private school if they can afford it. India still has the largest number of illiterates in the world.

No one can dispute that the country needs more prosperity but little can be achieved by pompous promulgations and financial allocations read out in Parliament. In the past, politicians relied on strategising, long-term planning, gradual accretion of assets and building capacities to implement public development initiatives. They scoured the world for appropriate technology, expertise and finances; managers and workers were trained for the new enterprises; and it was through this process that the country was built up.

It would be a wonderful world if poverty, hunger and ignorance could be removed by decree; but this has not happened anywhere in the world, not in the erstwhile Soviet Union or China, and will not happen in India either. What will happen instead is that the government would fast become insolvent, paying out the bulk of its earnings on subsidies and interest payments, borrowing funds it cannot afford, slashing expenditure on new investments and infrastructure, and gradually but surely running the country into the ground. Already, in fiscal 2010-11, interest payments and subsidies accounted for 49 per cent of the Central government’s non-plan expenditure.

Given the country’s severely eroded mechanisms for implementing development projects, enforcing laws, adjudicating disputes coupled with the enormous corruption machinery that drains the financial allocation system, the politics of decrees translates to very little on the ground. Yet politicians continue to wave their mythical wands and hope the electorate will remain enthralled.

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Despite having a renowned economist as the Prime Minister and several stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjhee, P.Chidambaram, etal the Union Government is sinking ship every moment.  The common perception is that the government works for the rich and ignores the poor. Some one aptly captured UPA as the reverse Robinhood - robbing the poor and paying the rich. Oh! the helpless UPA government for the sake a billion Indians do something to change your helpless state.

 

Bharat Karnad writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 20 July 2011

 

On June 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with the editors of a few newspapers.

When asked about whether he had been putting pressure on the environment ministry (then headed by Jairam Ramesh) to overlook environmental violations of several projects, Dr Singh said yes, and justified his action thus: “As Gandhiji said, ‘Poverty is the biggest polluter’.

We need to have a balance.” The Prime Minister was probably referring to what Indira Gandhi had said at the first UN Environment Conference in Stockholm in 1972: “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” In that same speech, she had also quoted from the Atharva Veda:

“What of thee I dig out, let that quickly grow over,
Let me not hit thy vitals, or thy heart.”

Dr Singh conveniently ignored the more significant quote. The Prime Minister’s duty is to uphold the Constitution and nation’s laws, including environmental laws, not subvert them. By admitting that he has been putting pressure on the environment ministry, Dr Singh admitted that he was, indeed, subverting the law. Most commentators view the removal of Mr Ramesh from the environment ministry during the July 12 Cabinet reshuffle as a further step in environmental deregulation.

While quoting Indira Gandhi to justify his subversion of environmental law, the Prime Minister forgot that it was Indira Gandhi who created the country’s environmental governance structure; he forgot that it was Indira Gandhi’s intervention that strengthened the call of movements and scientists not to build a hydro-electric project in Silent Valley in Kerala, thereby saving a biodiversity rich ecosystem. And it was Indira Gandhi’s concern that Mussorie, the Queen of Hills, was being stripped naked by limestone mining that led to the Supreme Court order that shut down the mines in 1983.

In pre-liberalisation days, it was accepted that if commerce undermines ecosystems which support life, then commercial activity must stop, because life must carry on. Article 21 of the Constitution makes it the duty of the state to protect life. Since ecological processes support life, the state has a duty to protect ecology. Under Dr Singh’s leadership since the 1990s, based as it is on “growth fetishism”, all ecological devastation has been justified in the name of growth. But who is driving this ecological devastation and pollution? The rich and powerful corporations or the poor and powerless farmers, tribals and displaced rural communities who become urban slum dwellers?

The poor do not cause the pollution, but live in polluted places because they are displaced from their homes in rural areas where they lived sustainably for millennia. This is environmental injustice and it is an inevitable consequence of outsourcing of pollution from rich countries in the garb of FDI.

Coastal Orissa is a case in point. In the Jagatsingpur district, where Posco’s giant steel plant is planned with a massive FDI ($12 billion), farmers grow betel and paddy, coconut and cashew, fruits and fish. There is no pollution and no waste. There is a prosperity that the GDP does not count. This economy of sustenance is being uprooted violently to enable Posco to export our iron-ore and steel. Every law of the land, including the Forest Rights Act and the Coastal Zone Regulation Act, is being violated. But when the committees of the ministry of environment confirm the violations, the Prime Minister puts pressure on the environment minister to give approval to Posco. The women and children of Govindpur, Dhinkia and Nuagaon lay down under a scorching sun to stop the land grab in June. They know what the Posco project will bring: ecological destruction, pollution, displaced people and the destruction of our democracy.

In India, the major polluters are the giant coal-based power plants and industries, like the automobile. Emissions from the use of fossil fuel are driven by the economically powerful, not the poor. But it is the poor who are most vulnerable to the floods, droughts and cyclones that climate change intensifies.

The same applies to toxic pollution. A case in point is the pesticide, Endosulfan. The UN has banned it. Most countries in the world have banned it. The Supreme Court has ordered an interim ban after it was reported that over a thousand people have died and more than 9,000 crippled in Kasargod where Endosulfan was sprayed on cashew plantations for 20 years. The innocent victims did not cause the toxic pollution. It was caused by powerful corporations who influence decisions, who have blocked a ban on Endosulfan even as people die and children are born disabled.

Toxic agrichemicals harm all life. Synthetic fertilisers run into rivers and oceans, creating “dead zones”. Nitrogen oxide released from nitrogen fertilisers accumulates in the atmosphere as a green house gas that is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. These synthetic fertilisers also make bombs, as the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the Oklahoma bombings have shown.

We now have a new form of pollution in agriculture — genetic pollution from genetically engineered crops. Genetic pollution is destroying biodiversity and devastating farmers’ livelihoods. The chemical corporations are the gene giants who now control seed. Here too, instead of being the voice of poor and vulnerable farmers, the Prime Minister is the voice of powerful global corporations through his repeated reference to genetic engineering as the second Green Revolution.

Whether it is atmospheric pollution, toxic pollution, genetic pollution or urban waste pollution, all environmental pollution is an externality of a greed-based economy which privatises natural resources and socialises pollution. The rich accumulate the land, the biodiversity, the water, the air and the profits; the poor bear the burden of dispossession and accumulated pollution. We expect the Prime Minister to uphold the Constitution and environmental laws. We do not expect him to support and promote the polluters. We expect the Prime Minister to remember that he holds our precious natural heritage and natural capital in trust for future generations, not to be given away to greedy corporations and destroyed for short-term profits.

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A weak government with string of scandals attract strong troubles. this is clearly evident from the everyday happenings in the UPA government. Baba Ramdev who commands lakhs of followers through his yoga teachings and marketing strategies is the latest personality who challenged the weak kneed UPA. Coalition partners, opposition members, underworld dons, naxalities, external threats and other innumberable troubles keep attacking the government at the centre. Its inept handling is compounding the existing crisis. May be the UPA feels great after putting off Ramdev's fast at the Ramlila grounds at Delhi. But actually it is weakening its position day by day.

The Deccan Chronicle writes on 6th June 2011

 

 

 After both sides struck an initial stance of reasonableness, the government reckoned that yoga guru Ramdev was probably disinclined to end his protest campaign at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds, although he had agreed to do so in a letter submitted the previous day to the government ministers negotiating with him.

Sensing that the Ramdev movement had, in effect, been organised by the RSS, and then finding arch communal troublemaker Sadhvi Rithambara, known for spewing venom against the minorities, was sharing the Ramlila Ground stage with the yoga teacher, it was expected that concern and alarm would follow in official circles, not to say among a broad swathe of public opinion.

The eviction of the saffron-wrapped yoga teacher and his followers by the Delhi police from the Ramlila Grounds past midnight on Saturday thus occasions little surprise. It transpires that Baba Ramdev had sought official permission to hold a “yoga camp” there but instead he nourished a political jamboree seeking to instigate people against the government. This was unfortunate.

Baba Ramdev had told followers that 90 per cent of his demands had already been met. Some of the issues raised by the yoga guru are indeed reasonable. The corruption question finds an echo among all sections of citizens.

It is beyond considerations of party politics and ideology. The Centre, for instance, can without delay clear legislation — one of Ramdev’s key demands — intended to provide relief to ordinary people against petty harassment and bribe-extraction at service delivery points, for instance when picking up a ration card, a driving licence, a water connection or a death certificate.

When governments don’t take care of such basic needs of citizens, they lay themselves open to the charge of imperviousness, and typically fire middle and lower middle class angst, which generally drives protests in urban India.

Worse, in such situations, an absence of governmental initiative makes possible large-scale mobilisation of disgruntled elements — as we saw in the case of Ramdev and Anna Hazare. Such collectives can be exploited to irresponsible ends by demagogues of any hue — from Naxalites on the far left to the communal far right.

Popular concern and frustration with the official machinery has been exacerbated by instances of corruption in high places that have come to light in the last eight or nine months, detracting from the government’s moral authority. Even so, it would be foolish and dangerous if society permitted half-baked ideas of demagogues to take hold, and permit such elements an opportunity to overrun the system.

It cannot be overemphasised that, in particular, the issue of repatriation of black money in foreign tax havens is complex and not amenable to overnight solutions as it presupposes negotiations with foreign governments. The idea of declaring all Indian black money overseas a national asset is even more complicated.

After the police action at Ramlila Grounds, it is a pity that a national party like the BJP lost perspective and begun comparing it with the Emergency. It would be useful to remember that if it were indeed the Emergency once again, the party would not be free to belt out anti-government messages from the podium of its national executive in Lucknow.

gg on the face of Pakistan. Operation Geronimo had thrown foul egg kept secretly for the past one year. Now the evil state of Pakistan can’t deny that terrorists are staying on its soil. In fact it has been the breeding of terrorism for years. The ISI and political establishments although function divergently but convergences in terror matters. Especially the India matters unites all wings of Pakistan.

Without catching red handedly, USA can do little against Pakistan. At this stage it is wise to use Pakistan with all attractions including a liberal funding and then end the evil designs promoted by the state and non state actors in Pakistan.

Christina Lamb writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 5 May 2011

Even those of us who did not believe that Osama bin Laden was producing his videos from a cave in a remote tribal mountain would never have guessed that he was, in fact, living in a “Come and Get Me” three-storey house surrounded by cabbage fields just down the road from Pakistan’s top military academy.

To many in Washington, here was final proof — if any were needed — that its supposed ally has been playing a double game; that, for the past 10 years, Pakistan has been playing the role of US ally (and taking more than $18 billion of American aid) while all the time sheltering the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

“The game is up”, a senior Pentagon official told me the day after Bin Laden’s killing, admitting he felt “a darned idiot” for being played for so long.

Last year I went for lunch in Abbottabad, Bin Laden’s adopted hometown, which nestles in green hills about 90 minutes’ drive from Islamabad. It is one of those pleasant former British military cantonments that in colonial times were known as hill stations.

I didn’t notice a large compound behind 12ft-high white walls that never threw out its rubbish and had no phone or Internet connection. I did notice, though, that the town was crawling with military. It houses the Pakistan Military Academy, and is a favourite location for retired generals.

Little wonder that John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, says it was “inconceivable” that Bin Laden did not have a significant “support system” in Abbottabad. He did not need to say that the only organisation in Pakistan that could have supplied such support to Al Qaeda is its military intelligence, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Leon Panetta, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief, told congressmen in a closed-door briefing, “Either they (Pakistan) were involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be”.

So far, Pakistan’s establishment seems to have gone for the latter. An unnamed ISI officer said they were “embarrassed” at having missed Bin Laden. This from an agency that follows every movement of every journalist that comes into the country; that has thousands of agents in taxis and hotel lobbies, tracking every foreigner who arrives.

The problem with this defence is that Bin Laden’s choice of hideaway fits a pattern. Every top Al Qaeda operative arrested in Pakistan has been living in a city, often in military areas. First there was Abu Zubaidah, Bin Laden’s chief recruiter, picked up from a villa in Faisalabad in March 2002.

Then in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was arrested from a house in a military cantonment in Rawalpindi, a mile down the road from Pakistan’s General Headquarters.

Why should any jihadi settle for a cave when Pakistani military neighbourhoods are so accommodating?
The truth, which has now become harder to ignore, is that Pakistan is the destination of choice for would-be terrorists.

It is home to a tangle of jihadi groups, initially formed with the intention of fighting in Kashmir. It is a land of training camps and safe houses, and of madrasas with their pools of potential recruits. A study by terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank of the New America Foundation has found that, of the serious terrorism plots or attacks against the West over the past seven years, 42 per cent had direction from jihadist groups in Pakistan and 52 per cent had training in Pakistan.

From the beginning, Pakistan’s double game has slowed Western progress in Afghanistan. The Taliban would never have recovered from being ousted in 2001 without their safe haven in the Pakistani town of Quetta. Those of us who went there to report on how the Taliban were openly regrouping and training found ourselves picked up by ISI (in my case at 2 am from my hotel room) and unceremoniously kicked out of the country.

After my deportation, the head of consular services at the British foreign office called me to his grand office in Whitehall to apologise at not having done anything to help. But, he said, “You have to understand we need Pakistan”. For a decade, the West has decided it was too much trouble to confront the problem — that it was easier, diplomatically, to turn a blind eye.

After Bin Laden’s capture, this is harder than ever. “We have to either grit our teeth, declare victory and move on — or declare war on Pakistan”, said a US official.

It looks as if the West wishes to grit its teeth yet again. For his part, Mr Brennan is focusing on what progress Pakistan has made. “It has captured and killed more terrorists inside its borders than any other country”, he says. “By a long way.”

Washington’s problem is that it still needs Pakistan’s help. According to Mr Brennan, a dozen of the top 20 Al Qaeda figures are still believed to be in Pakistan. Not to mention co-operation on possible plots being launched on the West.

Without Pakistan’s cooperation it would be hard for the American military to supply 140,000 Nato forces in landlocked Afghanistan. And of course who wants to take on a country that is estimated to have around 200 nuclear warheads? “We have all the leverage”, grinned a Pakistani officer I talked to in Rawalpindi last month.

But as the Bin Laden raid showed, the US does not always need Pakistan to go about its business. The mission was accomplished without informing Pakistani authorities, not even when Pakistan scrambled military jets to go after the intruder. This will encourage the powerful voices in Congress, who are arguing that support for Pakistan should stop.

Dana Rohrbacher, a Republican congressman from California who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told me, “Pakistan has literally been getting away with murder… We were snookered — for a long time we bought into this vision that Pakistan’s military was a moderate force and we were supporting moderates by supporting the military. In fact the military is in alliance with radical militants. Just because they shave their beards, drink whisky and look Western they fooled a lot of people”.

When Mr Panetta, the CIA chief, was interviewed by Time magazine this week, he said that “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission” because “they might alert the targets”. It is difficult to come any closer to accusing Pakistan of being in league with Al Qaeda. Opinion polls in Pakistan have long ranked America as a greater threat than Bin Laden.

Now the world’s most wanted terrorist has been found in Pakistani suburbia, it may indeed be the US that Pakistan has to fear.

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Muslims are en bloc vote bank in India. Muslims are not just a minority but considered as the good catchment area during election season and communal season. For ages Muslims are playing a potential role in the Indian society in these forms. Unfortunately there is no farsighted Muslims coming out. Using the limited vision of the Indian Muslim leadership, political figures of all hues are exploiting to the fullest extent. As long as Muslims are confined to the narrow mental territory there is no scope for the betterment.

 

Javed Anand writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 29 April 2011

Indian Muslims just got luckier. Already spoilt for choice, the Spring of 2011 has brought two fresh bonanzas for the country’s “second largest majority”. One comes gift-wrapped as a brand new political party; the other is a forum of Muslim advocates of Maharashtra. Many compliments of the season, Badhai ho badhai!

But hang on a moment. It perhaps is too early to exult. The Jamaat-e-Islami’s (JI) invitation to a party has met with more jeers than cheers. Not many Muslims, it appears, are keen on singing Happy Birthday to the new-born named Welfare Party of India. The Muslim advocates’ meet in Mumbai on a Friday (April 22) saw the enthusiastic participation of around 300 advocates from all over Maharashtra. The stars of the show were two retired Muslim judges from the Mumbai high court: Justice Bilal Nakzi and Justice Shafi Parkar. But outside the venue the reception was mixed.

Let’s take the second one first. What on earth is the meaning of a separate Muslim lawyers’ forum? What’s coming next: Muslim doctors’ forum, Muslim journalists’ forum, Muslim IAS/IPS officers’ forum, Muslim consumers’ forum? Thane city’s advocate Abdul Kalam explains the rationale for such a forum thus: “After the communal riots, it has been found that Hindu advocates are reluctant to fight cases of Muslim victims or accused. We don’t say that all non-Muslim advocates are biased, but during moments of crisis, many upright advocates have developed cold feet”.

Is that so? What about Kapil Sibal, Shanti Bhushan, Anil Divan, P.P. Rao, M.S. Ganesh, Kamini Jaiswal, Sanjay Parikh, Aspi Chinoy, Navroze Seervai, Gautam Patel, Mihir Desai, Aparna Bhatt and Ramesh Pukhrambam, all of whom have contributed time and talent pro bono, fighting for justice to the Muslim victims and punishment to the perpetrators of the state-sponsored 2002 Gujarat carnage? What about Teesta Setalvad and her non-religious organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), which for over nine years has led the Gujarat victims’ struggle for justice from the front? What about Mukul Sinha, the lawyer from Ahmedabad, and the hours and days that he has spent before the Nanavati-Shah-Mehta inquiry commission?

As for the JI and its new baby, the Welfare Party of India (WPI), if you’ve never heard of Syed Abu Ala Maududi, the maulana who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, here’s a crash course. Throughout his life Maududi preached that unlike other religions, Islam is not just about worship and religious rituals like prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. Instead, Islam is a revolutionary ideology; to be a Muslim is to be a revolutionary committed to debunking man-made ideas (democracy etc.), institutions (Parliament etc.) and laws (Constitution etc.) and striving by every means possible to establishing Allah’s rule (Islamic state etc.) and Allah’s laws (Sharia etc.).

This is what every Jamaati has fervently believed and preached for the last 70 years.

Among those who were deeply impressed by Maududi was a person named Syed Qutb of Egypt who proceeded to argue that striving by “every means possible” includes killing those who are Muslims only in name in the interest of ushering Allah’s sovereignty on earth.

Now that the same JI has chosen to place itself at the service of man-made laws, should we not welcome this change of mind and heart? We should if the JI were to publicly declare that Maududi’s views now belong to a library that houses outdated, intolerant, outrageous ideology. But that’s not what the JI is telling us. Instead, it wants us to believe that the WPI is a secular, democratic entity, never mind the fact that 11 out of its 16 office-bearers are Jamaati stalwarts.

That’s reason number one for the non-Jamaati Muslims’ lack of enthusiasm. To many of them, the JI-WPI relationship looks like a mirror image of the RSS-BJP equation. The goal is the same: infiltrating the institutions of democracy for subverting the constitutional spirit from within.

But the facade is all too transparent: How much cover can you expect from one of WPI’s several vice-presidents, including a Christian priest who chanted the Gayatri Mantra at the party’s launch, to provide? Some Muslims see him as the WPI’s Sikander Bakht!

Reason number two: Less than two years ago, in July 2009, we saw the Popular Front of India (home in south India to ex-Students Islamic Movement of India leaders and activists following the ban on the radical outfit) give birth to the Secular Democratic Party of India. Simi, remember, emerged from the womb of the JI in the early ’70s, and the PFI still draws inspiration from Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In its spare time, the PFI runs a moral police enforcing Islam on Muslims in a manner that might make the Bajrang Dal and the Ram Sene envious. Ask Kerala’s Muslims.

Adding to the Indian Muslim’s embarrassment of riches is the All-India United Democratic Front of India floated by the Assam-based Badruddin Ajmal of the Jamiatul-ulema-e-Hind in 2005. And let’s not forget the nearly half-a-dozen Muslim organisations in Uttar Pradesh that have sprouted in recent years.

What then should Indian Muslims expect from this abundance of Muslim-floated parties? Ideologically speaking, it means secularism by daylight, Sharia after dark. Politically speaking, at best they’ll cancel each other out; eat into votes of mainstream parties that swear by secularism. At worst, they’ll provide propaganda fodder to Hindutva, feed Islamophobia.

The increasing political disempowerment of India’s Muslims in Parliament and in the Assemblies, continuing discrimination and “red zoning” are no doubt problems crying to be addressed. But a cancer cell like proliferation of Muslim parties will, if anything, compound the malady.

 

Charity is flowing in the Indian blood for ages. It is being part of the life, philosophy, and culture, of the Indian society. There is no separation of charity from the everyday living of Indians. Before eating, rest of the world thanks the God for giving food but Indians offer food  to crows. Many more examples can be given for the top most charitable order of the Indian society. In these difficult circumstances, bottom of the society cares and shares their fellow poor people in a better way. They have large heart and offer immediate help when there is a need by anyone on the street. Only rich people differentiate between classes when there is an urgent need for intervention. Eye witnesses and experience galore in this regard. All these facts apart, no one can deny the contributions of Americans for charity. Especially Warren Buffet, the octagenerian American who is lucky and superb human being. May be because of his large heart he is garnering billions after billions.. Whatever it is, charity publicized is unchartiable.

 

 

Warren Buffett exhausts me.

I’m sure he exhausted several other people on his virgin trip to India.

At 80, he is still at the crease, batting away… and going by his energy levels, he’ll hit his century effortlessly. It is just not natural for an octogenarian to be jetting half way around the world at such a hectic speed. He described his quickie chakkar to India as a “better late than never” trip.

And came up with a booklet-full of quotable quotes, starting with philanthropy being much harder and riskier than business.

At around the same time, another American billionaire buddy of his, Bill Gates, was also floating around the countryside, telling us what to do with our money (earn it — and donate it!).

Why do I get the feeling India is being sent on a massive guilt trip by these two guys? And why do we need to take lessons in charity from anybody? Least of all super rich Americans who have made their pile. One of whom has an established business here, and the other wishes to establish business in India?

Declared the Oracle of Omaha in Bengaluru, “We want to be where the action is, and the action is here”. No kidding, buddy! Someone obviously forgot to tell these two guys our approach to philanthropy is different.

Daan has always been an intrinsic part of our culture. If the present generation has callously ignored the message from the shastras, that’s their business. The thought of being lectured to by people who represent the land of milk and honey and scolded that we are not doing enough is a bit much. I think it is condescending and patronising in the extreme for anybody to preach charity.

To each his own. And decision to give or not to give, or even how much to give and to whom, is a very individual one.

We keep hearing wonderful speeches on corporate social responsibility, and there are enough people cashing in on the glory attached to it. But give me a break. Mr Buffett is obviously a very, very generous chap (he has pledged 99 per cent of his fortune, mainly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

Well, good for him. And I am sure the angels in heaven (where his seat is guaranteed) will compose a special song for him when he gets to the pearly gates. But right now, what he is doing in India is scouting around for fresh opportunities to make still more money.

He has his “brother or son” Shri Ajit Jain to help him invest in the country via Berkshire Hathaway (more chewing gum, anyone?). We are cool with that. We are also cool with more fizzy drinks (thanda matlab…?) hitting our stores, what with summer around the corner and over a billion parched throats to quench.

Mr Buffett says he hasn’t come her with an “elephant gun” loaded for acquisitions, but hey, we are cool with that, too. India is original elephant country.

I am confused. Perhaps I am too “retarded” (Mr Buffett’s word to describe the delay in his coming to India) to get it. But the man is here to make even more money — right? And after he has made it, he will donate it, right? Meanwhile, his shareholders will be a happy lot, since Mr Buffett has assured them he is scaling up and looking at big markets like India, China and Brazil.

He also told overwhelmed, gushing reporters that he feels he has more money than he needs — he eats well, takes vacations, watches movies… the regular stuff lesser mortals indulge in even without those billions and trillions.

So, the logical question to ask him is this: “Why do you want to make more money, sir?” His answer will be: “The more money I make, the more I can give”. Noble.

Our Mr and Mrs Money Bags are being prodded into following the Gates-Buffett pattern of giving. They are being coerced into parting with large portions of their wealth because they are told it makes them look good. Heaven knows how convinced they are about all this giving-shiving of their paisa, and God knows what their children think about it (“Grrrrrr… Dad! Mom! Ab mera kya hoga?”).

But “giving” is the new a la mode statement to make. And all these “new” and “improved” charity drives amongst loaded desis have a lot to do with keeping up with the Buffetts. How can you hope to sit at the high table in Davos if you haven’t announced a humungous donation to a pet cause?

Without knocking these magnanimous gestures of our do-gooders, it is amusing to note the publicity machine that goes into overdrive when these grand donations are made. There’s nothing quiet or discreet about charity these days.

And perhaps Gates/Buffett will argue the more you talk about it, the more it inspires others to reach for their wallets. I dunno. I have seen some high-profile charity auctions at which dodgy millionaires have crept out of the woodwork for the all important photo-ops… only to creep right back again… zero follow-ups, zero money. Where does all that lolly go? Any answers?

The second and third richest men in the world doing zabardasti with the 55 desi co-billionaires featured on the Forbes 2011 list are definitely pushing their luck. Coaxing these guys to sign The Giving Pledge followed by a public statement and letter is really a bit much, as pressure tactics go. The Chinese are smarter.

After a similar initiative in China last September, not a single Chinese billionaire who showed up for the banquet bothered to sign the pledge. That’s what is called the ultimate Oriental snub. Let’s see whether the multi-course Indian buffet piles on more on the table than the Chinese one.

Or else, the world’s most famous philanthropists may go home hungry and disappointed. No such thing as a free lunch… perhaps India is not the moveable feast Bill and Warren expected it to be!

The UPA government's efforts to whitewash 1.76 lakh crore scam got egged. With the vigilant media, judiciary and a hand full of proactive citizens, spectrum scam is on the top of the national surface today. If the dumb government missed the scam of the civilisation atleast it should have paid attention to others information. For the past many months the UPA has been finding all tricks to avoid the accusation. It refused to accept the mass charges of corruption. Instead of sending the gang of culprits to jail immediately it waited, watched and annoyed the entire nation and the whole world. Shame is the mild word to use the situational mess which the UPA has got in. The immediate task is to book all the real masterminds of all scams including spectrum, CWG, Adrash and other unearthed scandals and give them life imprisonment. Otherwise Indira Congress is going to oblivion forever.

 

he Indian government for the past 63 years have been blind and numb towards the construction of buildings. Without following its own rules the government has been blankly allowing any and every citizen to construct what he or she wants. All is done through few currency notes. This blindness of the government is going to infect the entire population and will paralyze the coming generations.

 

Gautam Bhatia writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 6 February 2010

 

Some years ago, a Delhi firm invested in a “smart” building for its new Gurgaon office. A 12-storey structure of beveled glass was designed by a Japanese architect, using American and French technologies and built under South Korean supervision. Surrounded by the dumb buildings of old India, this was supposedly user-friendly intelligent architecture at its best, technology’s answer to India’s future.

When I saw it on a sweltering June afternoon, a few days before its official opening, it stood shimmering silver grey in a black tar parking lot. Near the entrance, a remote sensor detected my approach and — through electronic identification — alerted the control centre inside, of my presence. Within seconds, the door opened. A complicated e-device worth `22 lakh had eliminated a Haryanvi guard at `6,000 per month. Further in, were more smart surprises. My weight on the lift lobby floor triggered six lifts into action; they all came racing down to pick me up. Activated by complicated circuitry that cost `28 lakh, the intelligent building had effectively done away with the need for a push button. Upstairs, the glass-shell of the building was surrounded by Japanese micro louvers and heat sensors at the ridiculously low summer discount rate of `2.8 crore. An elegant, electronically-activated “intelligent” device had happily eliminated the ordinary screen of reed chicks at `12 per square foot. Moreover, the smart structure, built at seven times the rate of a conventional building, had effectively done away with Indian skills and labour — still the cheapest in the world — and joined the ranks of world class architecture. Expensive, over-designed and completely oblivious to local conditions. But smart, nonetheless.

Like the intelligent building, can a smart city in the West be a stupid one in India? The Indian government’s sudden and erratic wish list for smart cities along the Delhi-Mumbai corridor is not only seriously misplaced, but is a harebrained view that cities can be produced on an assembly line, like cars and coke bottles. Certainly, taking Indian urban ideas to the next level should prompt the government to serious measures. But the proposal to build 24 cities when so far not a single new idea on urban living has been implemented is a despairing shot in the dark, a hope that extreme measures will yield results where smaller local initiatives have not even been tried.

Many perplexing questions need to be asked before the government embarks on a reckless real estate adventure. Does the physical structure of the city have any measurable impact on our lives? Can a city’s livability be measured like a gross national product? Can it be rated from one to 100 like an exam score? To say that Shanghai is better than Mumbai is as good as saying that an elm tree is better than neem. It is an entirely facile and inaccurate comparison. Certainly there are measurable barometers that can point to the health of towns; the quality and quantity of municipal services, provision of water, health care and sanitation, the availability of sidewalks, parks and roads, the proliferation of schools, institutes, places of recreation and commerce, all fall within the common understanding of daily human requirement. The nourishment needed to stay alive, like a daily vitamin pill. But at its core, the life breath of a town is a deeply guarded secret. Heard sometimes in sighs of its long time residents, but always hidden from those who seek only its cosmopolitan gratifications — the new French restaurant, the Formula One race track, the mall. Connection to places, links to family, past and present, and to some degree, future opportunity, the city’s physical environment has a direct correlation with personal lives.

In a country which offers a continually degrading form of life to its urban citizens, the importance of new and inventive solutions can hardly be underscored. Choked cities, grey murky rivers, brown skies, depleting energy, erratic services, the haves and the hope-to-haves are ready-to-wage battles over water, electricity, land and air rights. Before the present rage turns to all-out war, city living requires desperate resolution. Unfortunately, the thirst for a new idea in India almost always acts on hyperbolic dimensions: the highest building, the richest Indian, the second-largest dam — reducing public action to meaningless numbers and trivial hyped publicity rather than serious welfare. Somewhere on a foreign trip, a minister or a bureaucrat, sensed the possibility of an idea, and promoted the smart city as a quantum leap of faith.

In a country like China such leaps may be possible. The Chinese willingness to step outside of conventional urban thinking is prompted as much by its own rapid urbanisation, as its need to enlarge the scope of urban technology and experiment with new forms of city living. The new town of Dongtan, near Shanghai, is an altogether unprecedented mix of these lofty ideals. An eco-city of one million residents that promotes a lifestyle without cars, without streets, without conventional houses, is an optimistic sign that China is looking beyond the environmental and technical thresholds set by the West, to set a benchmark for itself. Though Dongtan is a quantum technological leap, its most generous attribute is its affinity to Chinese culture. And the insistence amongst its makers that future lies in promoting a Chinese way of life.

However, an incompetent government with barely a new urban idea to its name is hardly in a position to built 24 new cities from scratch. No one today has even defined in simple common terms a house that suits an Indian lifestyle. No builder has ever attempted — despite massive profits — to create self-sustaining neighborhoods, or clusters of housing that take on fresh ideas. No state or national housing programme has ventured outside the safety of building as anything but a form of fulfilling statistical requirements. A whole city needs to be carefully weighed in cultural terms for the value its residents attach to their lifestyle, and the potential for its growth as a living organism. A thoughtless, culturally unimaginative approach to the design of 24 new towns may yield another 24 Chandigarhs. The sheers numbers of such a disaster would be hard to dismiss as a bureaucratic folly, just another missing file in the ministry. But in 21st century India, so desperate to be counted as a world power, the smart city may just be another thrust to an expensive publicity venture.

 

On the Republic Day, every Indian vows to builds his or her motherland firmly and fastly. While looking for ways and means for the mission, the most important agenda is to find out the current maladies. Unfortunately the maladies are many and the route for implementation is impossible. One step up and ten steps down is the day to day Indian move. It is not a country where everything is horrible and great. Half problematic and half promising nation. When can India minimises its minus and maximises its plus?

 

Shiv Viswanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 26 January 2011

 

India is a strange country. We seem to be quarrelling all the time. We identify ourselves by the dislike we feel for other or smugness with which we say “we are not them”. Our identity is composed of divisions, of the memories of Partition, of linguistic re-ordering, of the populism of small states. Our national game is neither hockey nor cricket but factionalism. It adds to the perpetual instability of our system. Yet, long-range watchers studying this chaos wonder if our dividedness hides the logic of a different order. Is there a gene that prevents us from falling apart even as we quarrel with each other? What is the secret of unity which works beyond the magic of even Fevicol advertisements?

To say India is tied by identity and consensus would be naïve. Our differences are blatant. Yet in a way we are tied by our differences. Oddly, it is the logic of our difference that keeps us together. India is a country with the courage of its confusions.

Difference allows for varieties of behaviour. It allows for an interaction in the public domain but restricts communal ties or familial interaction. It is a different kind of wisdom, a different grammar.

We are a country of segmentary minds. Each segment is opposed to the other segment and the two segments confront together a third entity at a higher level. Checks and balances operate according to levels. Nukkad can fight nukkad but combine at a different level. Violence gets contained at the next level of unity. Beyond segmentariness, there is syncretism. Here difference is acknowledged and differences combine to reflect opposites. Sufism could combine Hindu/Muslim tenors, Sikhism, Hindu/Islam. Syrian Christianity uses the Hindu to sustain the Christian core. There is a transference taking place over time, where sharing is always possible over difference. It is almost as if taboos created around difference allow for playful reciprocities. Thirdly, difference in India does not always operate across hard territorialities. Boundaries are porous and choices do not have to be polarised. The People of India survey states that there are 300 communities in India that cannot be classified as primarily Muslim or Hindu. Our identities thrive on cross-connections.

There is a standard narrative of divisiveness that is invoked in every squabble. Indians love factionalism and factionalism seems to provide the dynamic of everyday power. There is the old adage that the English conquered us through a policy of divide and rule. But remember, Indian society like many other segmentary systems is easy to defeat but hard to conquer. In fact we expect the coloniser to be like us, settle down like one more caste and slowly merge into the system. Our news is all about squabbles. Party politics operates as factional politics. Everyone needs some one to differ with in order to be himself.

The Indian idea of unity is based on “I differ from you, therefore I am”, “I contradict myself, therefore I continue to be”. We are a society that believes that logic of some against others is better than the logic of all against one. We allow differences to create multiplicities rather than resort to extermism. Our self as a collection of contestations allows for tolerance and unity.

There are exceptions to the rule. The riots in 2002 in Gujarat are one example. Usually after a riot, there is a plethora of stories of how families of one ethnic group protected another. Stories of friendship, ethics, hospitability, solidarity create a compensatory universe which facilitates a return to normality. With Gujarat, one heard the language of exterminism, of wanting to eliminate a minority. Thankfully such a framework has not extended to other states. However, Kashmir was an example of a similar ruthlessness in another form as the Kashmiri pandits were driven from their homes to become refugees in their own land.

But the glue is not just structural idea of crosscutting differences. Accompanying this architectonic is the gum of folklore, the epidemic of dialects, the grammar of diversity. This unity exists in two forms. Firstly, it is civilisational, articulated as a sacred complex of spaces. The second is national. There is a sense that the flag and the constitution keep us together, providing a frame to negotiate differences. At a level of folklore, there is the cosmopolitanism of the common man, proud of our cultural hospitality, carrying with him a sense that India is a compost heap of differences. We constantly invent versions of unity from Vande Mataram, Jana gana mana to the unity songs of Bollywood from Raj Kapoor’s Mera Joota hai Japani and Made in India. There is a sanitised unity that creates sentiments of togetherness. Our myths always have places for the alien, the stranger, the marginal, the dwarf, and no matter how history sanitises myth, our minds carry the legends of hospitality and syncretism, making us cosmopolitan despite ourselves. We might quarrel with the local Bengali, but happily invite a million Bangladeshis to feel at home. The Tibetan senses our hospitality and Tibetans in turn add to our celebration of difference.

Bollywood captures the mindset of the difference. Bollywood, especially Bombay Talkies, was a miniature answer to the Partition, to the difference between Hindu and Muslim and their creative collaboration across differences. Bollywood has maintained that mindset, even sentimentally forging alliances between Hindu and Muslim at the moment of maximum collective rage. Only one other institution can match that sense of difference and unity — the Army. The Indian Army recognises the ethnicity of battalions — Jat, Sikh, Rajput, Gorkha and Maratha. Each has its own tradition and yet each adds to the collective unity of the Army. Bollywood and the Army are the stuff of legends and folklore. As institutions they provide the imaginative glue of a quarrelsome society proud of its diversity yet convinced there are logics beyond uniformity and homogeneity.

As long as our myths, our memories and our folklore rule the grammar of our lives, history can be as quarrelsome as it wants. If myths are elaborations of contradictions, our democracy is a resolution of the myth of difference.