By Kajol Singh
Lok Sabha polls will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13, the Election Commission announced on Monday.
The five phased polls will be held in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh while Bihar will have four-phased elections, Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami told a press conference in New Delhi.
Maharashtra and West Bengal will witness three phased polls while Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Punjab will have elections in two phases.
Remaining 15 states and seven union territories will have one-day polling.
The counting of votes will take place on May 16 and the 15th Lok Sabha will be constituted by June two.
In the first phase, 124 constituencies will go to polls on April 16. 141 constituencies will witness balloting in the second phase on April 23, 107 seats in third phase on April 30, 85 seats in fourth phase on May 7 and 86 constituencies in the last phase on May 13.
Elections to Assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.
Photo electoral rolls will be used for the first time in 522 out of the 543 constituencies, Gopalaswami said.
499 constituencies have been redrawn in the delimitation exercise.
Delimitation could not be undertaken in Andhra, Assam, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, Gopalaswami said.
At least 71.4 crore will be the number of eligible voters, an increase of 4.3 crore over the 2004 figure of 67.1
The Commission will be using around 11 lakh electronic voting machines for the exercise to be held in eight lakh polling stations.
Around 40 lakh civil staff and 21 lakh security personnel will be deployed for the smooth conduct of elections, Gopalaswami said.
The dates were finalised taking into account aspects like school board examinations, local holidays, festivals and harvest, said Gopalaswami, who was flanked by Election Commissioners Naveen Chawla, whose removal he had sought for alleged "misconduct", and MY Qureishi.
On government's advice, President Pratibha Patil rejected the CEC's recommendation paving the way for Chawla to become the next head of the poll panel. Gopalaswami retires on April 20.
The poll schedule was worked out after series of meetings with political parties, Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police and Railway Board officials starting from February three, the CEC said.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Nagaland. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Nagaland. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, March 02, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
INDIA'S RICHEST POLITICIANS
Editor Speaks: There’s an old saying that money is the mother’s milk of politics. In the Indian context, it’s more a question of milking the state. We have reached a level of cohabitation where money, corruption and unethical deal-making occupy the same bed. Increasingly, people are joining politics to make money or stay out of jail. Money power is the dominant factor in today’s electoral politics. Back in the mid-90s when HNN was launched, I remember meeting politicians who were struggling to make ends meet. When we featured them next, they had become overnight millionaires. The point is not that we can’t have wealthy politicians but the question of how they earned their wealth. I am sure there are many legitimately rich politicians but politics increasingly resembles a profitable business rather than a public service today.
It wasn’t always so. Money power has played a positive role in politics: Industrialist G.D. Birla bankrolled Gandhi’s campaigns and along with other businessmen entered politics inspired by the freedom movement. It was in the late ’60s, when ‘Aya Ram Gaya Ram’ entered the political vocabulary, that money became a major factor. Since then the situation has only worsened with the dawn of coalition governments in the late ’80s.
With the likelihood of not being returned for the next term, they make hay while the sun shines and quite blatantly. No wonder many of these governments have been termed as ‘cash and carry’ ones. These days, it’s almost impossible to find a poor politician except among the Left parties. Adding to the scenario is the fact that a large number of businessmen have joined politics in recent years, either elected or nominated by various parties.
So who are India’s richest politicians? Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in 2002, the filing of assets data is mandatory by anyone contesting an election. In order to establish exactly who are India’s rich politicians, we undertook a study along with EmpoweringIndia, an initiative of the Liberty Institute led by Barun Mitra. It took three months of exhaustive research at the Election Commission and Rajya Sabha Secretariat by staffers Swati Reddy and Kajol Singh under the supervision of Editor in Chief M H Ahssan to list the richest politicians whose submissions are open to debate.
The filing of assets data is mandatory but not verified. Some legislators have shown an increase in wealth of over 500 per cent in four years. Yet, the statistics are revealing. Of the 215 Rajya Sabha members for which we have data, 105 are crorepatis. Of the 522 Lok Sabha members, 135 are crorepatis.
Members of legislative assemblies seem wealthier than many of the MPs. The top five MLAs across the 30 states are worth Rs 2,042 crore. Uttar Pradesh has the richest chief minister and 113 crorepati MLAs. One indication of how this money has been accumulated is that of 150 wealthiest MLAs, 59 don’t even have a PAN card! Our cover story looks at India’s richest politicians across various categories. A handful are legitimate businessmen, the rest only serve to reinforce the dubious nexus between power and money.
Richest politicians
A lean bare man on the banks of a river near Champaran, his eyes moist with sadness, letting go of his shawl for a poor woman downstream to cover herself and her child. This poignant moment from Richard Attenborough’s biopic on Gandhi is perhaps the most eloquent image of selfless politics.
The gentle giant—loved as Bapu and revered as the Mahatma—epitomised the philosophy of public service as one who gave up everything to be one among the huddled millions. Nearly a century later there is little evidence—in reel or real life—of the high moral ground once straddled by that generation.
The brazen parade of the Prada Prado set zipping across cities in cavalcades, appropriating security funded by public money is evidence that politics has since morphed into a largely self-serving enterprise. The pretense of khadi and Gandhian values went out of vogue with the Gandhi cap long before the Gucci generation stormed the political arena in the 1980s.
The transition is best described by Rajiv Gandhi who said at the Congress Centenary in Mumbai in 1985 that politics has been reduced to “brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert mass movement into feudal oligarchy”. Yes there are those who enter politics to serve the public cause but they are exceptions rather than the rule. Entering public life is now an investment of time and effort for dividends to be earned from political entrepreneurship. A joint study by HNN and EmpoweringIndia (an initiative of the Liberty Institute) of the reported assets of our elected representatives reveals a startling contrast between the rulers and the ruled.
In a country where over 77 per cent of the populace, or an estimated 836 million people, earn an income of Rs 20 per day and over 300 million are living below the poverty line, nearly half the Rajya Sabha members and nearly a third of those from the Lok Sabha are worth a crore and more. Just the top ten Rajya Sabha members and the top ten Lok Sabha members have reported a cumulative net asset worth Rs 1,500 crore. The 10 top losers in the last Lok Sabha polls—including Nyimthungo of Nagaland who reported total assets of Rs 9,005 crore —is Rs 9,329 crore. Members of legislative assemblies seem wealthier than many MPs. The top five MLAs across the 30 states are worth Rs 2,042 crore. Of these 150 crorepati MLAs, 59 don’t even have a PAN card.
And don’t look for a correlation between the state of the state and the wealth of the legislators. Uttar Pradesh boasts of the largest number of people—59 million or over a third of its population—living below the poverty line. Not only is Mayawati the richest chief minister in 30 states, the state also boasts of 113 crorepati MLAs. Similarly, Madhya Pradesh which has over 25 million of the 60 million people living below the poverty line boasts of 80 crorepati MLAs. The Marxists are the stark exception in this study too. The CPI(M) has 301 MLAs across 10 states but has only two MLAs with declared assets of over Rs 1 crore. Of the 537 candidates who contested on a CPI(M) ticket, only seven had assets of over Rs 1 crore, of which five lost in the elections.
As the old maxim goes, power begets power and money attracts riches. Clearly, it pays to be in power. Take the last round of Assembly elections which afforded the study an opportunity to compare the increase in wealth. In Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where the BJP was in power, the average assets of candidates increased by five times.
In Karnataka too where the Congress ruled in rotation with Deve Gowda’s JD(S), Congress candidates reported a fivefold rise in their assets. Mercifully, wealth doesn’t always ensure success. In all, 365 crorepatis contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2004; 88 lost their deposits, and 114 came second.
Last December in Delhi the Congress learnt this important lesson again when they found that Congress candidates who lost in Delhi were on an average richer than those who won. But wealth clearly does matter, all other things being constant.
The caveat emptor here, as with all matters concerning transparency in public life, is that we are going by what the political class has chosen to declare. After all, the statement of assets filed by candidates is at best a confession of sorts mandated by two Supreme Court judgements of May 2002 and March 2003.
There are several gaps in the information available. Of the 542 Lok Sabha members, details of assets are available for only 522. Similarly in the Rajya Sabha, only 215 members have filed details of assets.
There is no institutional mechanism to cross-check facts, nor is there a requirement for candidates to declare the source of wealth, or the increase in wealth of candidates in subsequent declarations. In Mizoram for instance, none of the 10 top candidates have reported possessing a PAN card even though their wealth is in excess of Rs 1 crore.
What is worse is that although MPs who are ministers file annual statements of their assets, the information is not available to the public. This virtually negates the concept of scrutiny that would prevent misuse of position of power and enrichment. Indeed, what should be openly available is denied even under the Right to Information Act.
It is tragic that the Office of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—who has been described as integrity personified—has been made party to this decision to deny the information. Again, while Central ministers are required to file a statement of assets, there is no such requirement for ministers in states.
The adulterous cohabitation of power and pelf is conspicuous across the political spectrum. The chasm between the declared and perceived reality is all too obvious to be missed. Contrast the wealth reported and wealthy lifestyles of those elected to high office.
Clearly the tip of the benami iceberg has not even been touched. In a country with a stark asymmetry in opportunities and ability, political power enables bending and twisting of policy, converting politics into the elevator politicians ride to reach the pot of gold. Living room conversations in middle and upper middle class homes are dotted with whose son, daughter or son-in-law is raking it in using the benami route to accumulate property and assets.
Television footage of currency notes being waved in Parliament during the last trust vote, the airborne campaigns witnessed during the polls in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, money spent in fielding dummy candidates, funding of party offices, travel in Toyota SUVs costing over Rs 75 lakh each and private charters that politicians avail of to fly within the country are all pointers that are hard to ignore.
Bankers and brokers talk in not so hushed tones about the role of politicians in corporate scams. There is also speculation about the real beneficiary and benami ownership of at least two airlines, several real estate ventures, pharmaceutical units and infrastructure companies. The corporate concept of ‘sleeping partner’ has a whole new connotation in the political world. As long as the real incomes, wealth and funding of politicians remain opaque, governance will continue to suffer and democracy will be rendered more often on the liability side in the balance sheet of development.
Television footage of currency notes being waved in Parliament during the last trust vote, the airborne campaigns witnessed during the polls in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, money spent in fielding dummy candidates, funding of party offices, travel in Toyota SUVs costing over Rs 75 lakh each and private charters that politicians avail of to fly within the country are all pointers that are hard to ignore.
Bankers and brokers talk in not so hushed tones about the role of politicians in corporate scams. There is also speculation about the real beneficiary and benami ownership of at least two airlines, several real estate ventures, pharmaceutical units and infrastructure companies. The corporate concept of ‘sleeping partner’ has a whole new connotation in the political world. As long as the real incomes, wealth and funding of politicians remain opaque, governance will continue to suffer and democracy will be rendered more often on the liability side in the balance sheet of development.
Wealth leadership
1. T. Subbarami Reddy
Indian National Congress
Rajya Sabha, Andhra Pradesh
Total Assets: Rs 239.6 cr
2. Jaya Bachchan
Samajwadi Party
Rajya Sabha, Uttar Pradesh
Total Assets: Rs 214.3 cr
3. Rahul Bajaj
Independent
Rajya Sabha, Maharashtra
Total Assets: Rs 190. 6 cr
4. Anil H. Lad
Indian National Congress
Rajya Sabha, Karnataka
Total Assets: Rs 175 cr
5. M. Krishnappa
Indian National Congress
MLA, Vijay Nagar, Karnataka
Total Assets: Rs 136 cr
6. MAM Ramaswamy
Janata Dal (Secular)
Rajya Sabha, Karnataka
Total Assets Rs 107.7 cr
7. Anand Singh
BJP
MLA, Vijayanagara, Karnataka
Total Assets: Rs 239 cr
8. Anil V. Salgaocar
Independent
MLA, Sanvordem, Goa
Total Assets: Rs 91.4 cr
9. N.A. Haris
Indian National Congress
MLA, Shanti Nagar, Karnataka
Total Assets: Rs 85.3 cr
10. Mahendra Mohan
Samajwadi Party
Rajya Sabha, Uttar Pradesh
Total Assets: Rs 85 cr
Thursday, September 05, 2013
A Must See Place: Mishmi Hills's Flying Colours In AP
By Rajan Bala / Itanagar
INN takes in Arunachal Pradesh’s remote and unsurpassed beauty on a birding trip to the Mishmi Hills. These are a beautiful world of jaw-dropping landscapes—tropical forests, alpine meadows, shrubby woods, bamboo groves and sloping grasslands so deeply hued that verdant would be an understatement for this high rainfall biodiversity hotspot. The setting is simply other-worldly. Cerulean skies seem to reach out for the rolling hills. Trees wear giant creepers, elegantly draped. Orchids flower profusely on the forest floor as well as high up on trees.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Exclusive: Bizarre UPA-Era Figures Revealed 70% Of Delhi Used For Organic Farming In 2012 And Records Can't Explain Where 100 Crore Subsidies Gone?
While the total geographical area of Delhi is 1.48 lakh hectares, NPOF data shows 100238.74 hectares (almost twice the size of Mumbai) was used for organic farming during that period.
What smacks of data fudging and a gigantic scam took place between 2009 and 2012 when the Sheila Dikshit government was in power in Delhi and the Congress-led UPA ruled at the Centre.
Monday, March 02, 2009
INDIA GENERAL ELECTIONS 2009 NOTIFICATION ANNOUNCED
By Kajol Singh
Lok Sabha polls will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13, the Election Commission announced on Monday.
The five phased polls will be held in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh while Bihar will have four-phased elections, Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami told a press conference in New Delhi.
Maharashtra and West Bengal will witness three phased polls while Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Punjab will have elections in two phases.
Remaining 15 states and seven union territories will have one-day polling.
The counting of votes will take place on May 16 and the 15th Lok Sabha will be constituted by June two.
In the first phase, 124 constituencies will go to polls on April 16. 141 constituencies will witness balloting in the second phase on April 23, 107 seats in third phase on April 30, 85 seats in fourth phase on May 7 and 86 constituencies in the last phase on May 13.
Elections to Assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.
Photo electoral rolls will be used for the first time in 522 out of the 543 constituencies, Gopalaswami said.
499 constituencies have been redrawn in the delimitation exercise.
Delimitation could not be undertaken in Andhra, Assam, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, Gopalaswami said.
At least 71.4 crore will be the number of eligible voters, an increase of 4.3 crore over the 2004 figure of 67.1
The Commission will be using around 11 lakh electronic voting machines for the exercise to be held in eight lakh polling stations.
Around 40 lakh civil staff and 21 lakh security personnel will be deployed for the smooth conduct of elections, Gopalaswami said.
The dates were finalised taking into account aspects like school board examinations, local holidays, festivals and harvest, said Gopalaswami, who was flanked by Election Commissioners Naveen Chawla, whose removal he had sought for alleged "misconduct", and MY Qureishi.
On government's advice, President Pratibha Patil rejected the CEC's recommendation paving the way for Chawla to become the next head of the poll panel. Gopalaswami retires on April 20.
The poll schedule was worked out after series of meetings with political parties, Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police and Railway Board officials starting from February three, the CEC said.
Lok Sabha polls will be held in five phases from April 16 to May 13, the Election Commission announced on Monday.
The five phased polls will be held in Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh while Bihar will have four-phased elections, Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami told a press conference in New Delhi.
Maharashtra and West Bengal will witness three phased polls while Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Punjab will have elections in two phases.
Remaining 15 states and seven union territories will have one-day polling.
The counting of votes will take place on May 16 and the 15th Lok Sabha will be constituted by June two.
In the first phase, 124 constituencies will go to polls on April 16. 141 constituencies will witness balloting in the second phase on April 23, 107 seats in third phase on April 30, 85 seats in fourth phase on May 7 and 86 constituencies in the last phase on May 13.
Elections to Assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh will be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.
Photo electoral rolls will be used for the first time in 522 out of the 543 constituencies, Gopalaswami said.
499 constituencies have been redrawn in the delimitation exercise.
Delimitation could not be undertaken in Andhra, Assam, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, Gopalaswami said.
At least 71.4 crore will be the number of eligible voters, an increase of 4.3 crore over the 2004 figure of 67.1
The Commission will be using around 11 lakh electronic voting machines for the exercise to be held in eight lakh polling stations.
Around 40 lakh civil staff and 21 lakh security personnel will be deployed for the smooth conduct of elections, Gopalaswami said.
The dates were finalised taking into account aspects like school board examinations, local holidays, festivals and harvest, said Gopalaswami, who was flanked by Election Commissioners Naveen Chawla, whose removal he had sought for alleged "misconduct", and MY Qureishi.
On government's advice, President Pratibha Patil rejected the CEC's recommendation paving the way for Chawla to become the next head of the poll panel. Gopalaswami retires on April 20.
The poll schedule was worked out after series of meetings with political parties, Chief Secretaries and Director Generals of Police and Railway Board officials starting from February three, the CEC said.
Friday, September 16, 2011
India's forgotten fast for years!
By M H Ahssan
Activists from India's northeast are up in arms against the "discriminatory treatment" being meted out to them by the Indian government, the mainstream media and the "mainland" public.
While a 13-day fast by anti-corruption crusader and social activist Anna Hazare got the Indian government to begin acting on his demand for setting up of a lokpal (ombudsman) institution mandated to independently probe corrupt public officials, an 11-year fast by Irom Sharmila, an activist from the northeastern state of Manipur, has evoked no response from Delhi.
"The Indian government responded to Hazare's 13-day-fast by discussing his demands in parliament but not once in the 11 years since Sharmila began her fast has the Indian parliament her demand for repeal of the AFSPA [Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958], Irom Singhajit, Sharmila's elder brother who heads the Just Peace Foundation, told Newsindia.
"This is evidence of India's racial discrimination against the people of the northeast," he said.
Thirty-nine-year old Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 4, 2000, to press for the repeal of the AFSPA. Two days earlier, she had witnessed the gunning down of 10 civilians waiting at a bus stop near Imphal in Manipur by personnel of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary counter-insurgency force in the northeast.
Convinced, like millions of others in the northeast that it is the AFSPA that enables and empowers the security forces to kill innocent civilians, she began a fast to draw attention to its draconian content and press for its repeal.
Within days of her embarking on the fast, Sharmila was arrested by police on charges of attempting suicide, an act that is illegal under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. In the 120 months since she began her protest, Sharmila has not eaten. A nasal drip administered to her by the Indian armed forces in a prison hospital keeps her alive.
In sharp contrast to the 24/7 coverage that India's television channels provided of Hazare's fast in Delhi's Ramlila Grounds, Irom's protest has been rarely covered in India's mainstream media over the past decade.
While tens of thousands of people from across the country participated and expressed solidarity with Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, few Indians living outside the country's conflict zones know that Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 2000. Few outside the insurgency-wracked northeast and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), where AFSPA is in force, are aware of this legislation or of the cause Sharmila so passionately champions.
First imposed in Nagaland in 1958 - the legislation comes into force once an area is declared "disturbed" by the federal or state government - AFSPA was supposed to be in operation for a year only. But 53 years on, the geographic area over which AFSPA's writ runs has grown exponentially. It was first imposed in parts of Manipur in 1961 and extended to the entire state in 1980. It is in effect in "disturbed areas" across all seven northeastern states. It has been in force in Kashmir since July 1990.
AFSPA confers wide powers to the armed forces to shoot at sight on mere suspicion or arrest people on flimsy grounds, conduct searches without warrants and demolish property where suspects are thought to be hiding. It provides the armed forces with immunity from prosecution. Section 6 says "no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted ... against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this act."
Human rights activists have pointed out that AFSPA is responsible for the killing and ‘disappearance' of thousands of innocent civilians in the northeast and J&K. If the aim of AFSPA was to curb insurgency, it has clearly failed. Not only have the number of insurgent groups multiplied manifold since the legislation was first introduced but also the geographic spread of armed conflict has grown. While the armed forces claim they need special powers like those in AFSPA to combat insurgency, it would not be an exaggeration to say that AFSPA has fueled insurgency and unrest in the northeast.
The campaign calling for AFSPA's repeal goes back several decades. It is spearheaded in Manipur by the Apunba Lup, an umbrella grouping of around 32 organizations, the Meira Paibi - a grassroots movement of Manipuri village women - and rights activists. When a person goes missing, the Meira Paibi, flaming torches in their hands, gather outside the camp of the security forces to protest the AFSPA. They have rallied behind Sharmila's fast as have thousands of others in the region.
But outside the Northeast, the campaign for AFSPA's repeal has little support. Few outside the northeast know of AFSPA, let alone its negative fallout or even of Sharmila's heroic protest. This isn't surprising given the Indian media's disinterest in issues in the distant troubled region.
Moreover, since AFSPA does not apply to "mainland" India, few here empathize with the northeast's suffering.
Not that the northeast hasn't tried to draw India's attention to the AFSPA. It has adopted dramatic strategies to shock India into stirring out of its slumber.
In July 2004, for instance, when 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi was raped and then shot dead by personnel of the Assam Rifles, 12 imas (mothers) of the Meira Paibi movement stripped in front of the Kangla Fort, then headquarters of the Assam Rifles, to demand the repeal of the AFSPA.
"Indian army come and rape us all," shouted the 12 naked women outside the Kangla Fort gate. Their dramatic protest was aimed at capturing the attention of the rest of India, indeed the world, regarding the brazen abuse of AFSPA by Indian security forces in the northeast.
In the face of mounting protests in Manipur, the Indian government appointed the Justice B P Jeevan Reddy Committee in 2004 to review the AFSPA. The committee recommended the AFSPA's repeal. Yet the AFSPA remains in force in Manipur and other "disturbed areas".
In the wake of Hazare's protest and the mass support Indians extended it, Manipuris have expressed distress over India's lack of response to their suffering and demands. "The people of the northeast have always been neglected and ignored by the rest of India," says Singhajit.
Indeed, the northeast rarely figures in India's history books, its media discourse or even national imagination.
The sharp contrast between the response of the Indian public and media to Hazare's fast and the government's ceding of several of his demands has underscored to the people of the northeast their existence at the periphery of India's consciousness and the low importance they are accorded by India's political class.
The contrast in India's treatment of Hazare and Sharmila was poignantly captured by an editorial in The Sangai Express, an English daily from Manipur, a week into Hazare's fast. Hazare "has managed to grab the attention of the country, send the political establishment into a huddle whenever he announces his intention to stop eating and he has been on a fast for the last seven days or so," it said. In contrast, Sharmila "has been on a fast since November 2000 without creating so much of a flutter in the corridors of power."
Unlike Anna's fast, which took place under the full glare of the media spotlight, with celebrities and high-profile activists flocking to the venue of his fast, Sharmila is not allowed to be with her family. "Even her family members are kept away from her," Singhajit said, pointing out that they need to get government permission to meet her at the prison hospital.
Indians are familiar with fasts and hunger strikes. Mahatma Gandhi undertook 17 fasts, of which three were major fasts-unto-death. Independent India has seen scores of hunger strikes by activists and politicians to press for demands. While some fasts are genuine, several are a farce, as was the post-breakfast, pre-lunch fast in 2009 by Tamil Nadu's former chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi to demand a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.
Fasting as conceived by Gandhi was an alternative to violence. Gandhi resorted to fasts to unite people against violence rather than to force concessions out of the British colonial rulers. In the words of his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, author of Mohandas, Gandhi's fasts "were to stir consciences, not create convulsions".
This is not the case with most present-day hunger strikers in India. There is an unmistakable coercive element to their fasts, with the threat of violence lurking behind their protests should their demands not be conceded. Sadly, it is to these violent fasts that the Indian government has responded.
Hazare's campaign - contrary to the non-violent Gandhian image it was given in the media - had a coercive element to it. His demands were framed in terms that reeked of intolerance, threat and blackmail.
Hazare's campaign drew on several resources. Indian corporate houses are reported to have bankrolled the latter's country-wide campaign. The country's increasingly powerful middle-class and the influential mainstream media stood by Hazare. Besides, his protest reportedly enjoyed the backing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fount of the Hindu right-wing Sangh Parivar.
It was the size of the crowds with Hazare, the powerful interests backing him and the possibility of his death triggering mass violence and unrest that pushed the government to pay attention to his protest and concede his demands.
India remains unshaken and unmoved by Sharmila's decade-long hunger strike because the cause she champions is too distant to strike a chord with India's upwardly mobile middle class. Her attempt to stir India's conscience goes unheard because the media denies her a voice.
Thus Delhi finds it expedient to violently keep her alive by force-feeding her through painful nasal drip.
Activists from India's northeast are up in arms against the "discriminatory treatment" being meted out to them by the Indian government, the mainstream media and the "mainland" public. While a 13-day fast by anti-corruption crusader and social activist Anna Hazare got the Indian government to begin acting on his demand for setting up of a lokpal (ombudsman) institution mandated to independently probe corrupt public officials, an 11-year fast by Irom Sharmila, an activist from the northeastern state of Manipur, has evoked no response from Delhi.
"The Indian government responded to Hazare's 13-day-fast by discussing his demands in parliament but not once in the 11 years since Sharmila began her fast has the Indian parliament her demand for repeal of the AFSPA [Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958], Irom Singhajit, Sharmila's elder brother who heads the Just Peace Foundation, told Newsindia.
"This is evidence of India's racial discrimination against the people of the northeast," he said.
Thirty-nine-year old Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 4, 2000, to press for the repeal of the AFSPA. Two days earlier, she had witnessed the gunning down of 10 civilians waiting at a bus stop near Imphal in Manipur by personnel of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary counter-insurgency force in the northeast.
Convinced, like millions of others in the northeast that it is the AFSPA that enables and empowers the security forces to kill innocent civilians, she began a fast to draw attention to its draconian content and press for its repeal.
Within days of her embarking on the fast, Sharmila was arrested by police on charges of attempting suicide, an act that is illegal under section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. In the 120 months since she began her protest, Sharmila has not eaten. A nasal drip administered to her by the Indian armed forces in a prison hospital keeps her alive.
In sharp contrast to the 24/7 coverage that India's television channels provided of Hazare's fast in Delhi's Ramlila Grounds, Irom's protest has been rarely covered in India's mainstream media over the past decade.
While tens of thousands of people from across the country participated and expressed solidarity with Hazare's anti-corruption campaign, few Indians living outside the country's conflict zones know that Sharmila has been on a hunger strike since November 2000. Few outside the insurgency-wracked northeast and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), where AFSPA is in force, are aware of this legislation or of the cause Sharmila so passionately champions.
First imposed in Nagaland in 1958 - the legislation comes into force once an area is declared "disturbed" by the federal or state government - AFSPA was supposed to be in operation for a year only. But 53 years on, the geographic area over which AFSPA's writ runs has grown exponentially. It was first imposed in parts of Manipur in 1961 and extended to the entire state in 1980. It is in effect in "disturbed areas" across all seven northeastern states. It has been in force in Kashmir since July 1990.
AFSPA confers wide powers to the armed forces to shoot at sight on mere suspicion or arrest people on flimsy grounds, conduct searches without warrants and demolish property where suspects are thought to be hiding. It provides the armed forces with immunity from prosecution. Section 6 says "no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted ... against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this act."
Human rights activists have pointed out that AFSPA is responsible for the killing and ‘disappearance' of thousands of innocent civilians in the northeast and J&K. If the aim of AFSPA was to curb insurgency, it has clearly failed. Not only have the number of insurgent groups multiplied manifold since the legislation was first introduced but also the geographic spread of armed conflict has grown. While the armed forces claim they need special powers like those in AFSPA to combat insurgency, it would not be an exaggeration to say that AFSPA has fueled insurgency and unrest in the northeast.
The campaign calling for AFSPA's repeal goes back several decades. It is spearheaded in Manipur by the Apunba Lup, an umbrella grouping of around 32 organizations, the Meira Paibi - a grassroots movement of Manipuri village women - and rights activists. When a person goes missing, the Meira Paibi, flaming torches in their hands, gather outside the camp of the security forces to protest the AFSPA. They have rallied behind Sharmila's fast as have thousands of others in the region.
But outside the Northeast, the campaign for AFSPA's repeal has little support. Few outside the northeast know of AFSPA, let alone its negative fallout or even of Sharmila's heroic protest. This isn't surprising given the Indian media's disinterest in issues in the distant troubled region.
Moreover, since AFSPA does not apply to "mainland" India, few here empathize with the northeast's suffering.
Not that the northeast hasn't tried to draw India's attention to the AFSPA. It has adopted dramatic strategies to shock India into stirring out of its slumber.
In July 2004, for instance, when 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi was raped and then shot dead by personnel of the Assam Rifles, 12 imas (mothers) of the Meira Paibi movement stripped in front of the Kangla Fort, then headquarters of the Assam Rifles, to demand the repeal of the AFSPA.
"Indian army come and rape us all," shouted the 12 naked women outside the Kangla Fort gate. Their dramatic protest was aimed at capturing the attention of the rest of India, indeed the world, regarding the brazen abuse of AFSPA by Indian security forces in the northeast.
In the face of mounting protests in Manipur, the Indian government appointed the Justice B P Jeevan Reddy Committee in 2004 to review the AFSPA. The committee recommended the AFSPA's repeal. Yet the AFSPA remains in force in Manipur and other "disturbed areas".
In the wake of Hazare's protest and the mass support Indians extended it, Manipuris have expressed distress over India's lack of response to their suffering and demands. "The people of the northeast have always been neglected and ignored by the rest of India," says Singhajit.
Indeed, the northeast rarely figures in India's history books, its media discourse or even national imagination.
The sharp contrast between the response of the Indian public and media to Hazare's fast and the government's ceding of several of his demands has underscored to the people of the northeast their existence at the periphery of India's consciousness and the low importance they are accorded by India's political class.
The contrast in India's treatment of Hazare and Sharmila was poignantly captured by an editorial in The Sangai Express, an English daily from Manipur, a week into Hazare's fast. Hazare "has managed to grab the attention of the country, send the political establishment into a huddle whenever he announces his intention to stop eating and he has been on a fast for the last seven days or so," it said. In contrast, Sharmila "has been on a fast since November 2000 without creating so much of a flutter in the corridors of power."
Unlike Anna's fast, which took place under the full glare of the media spotlight, with celebrities and high-profile activists flocking to the venue of his fast, Sharmila is not allowed to be with her family. "Even her family members are kept away from her," Singhajit said, pointing out that they need to get government permission to meet her at the prison hospital.
Indians are familiar with fasts and hunger strikes. Mahatma Gandhi undertook 17 fasts, of which three were major fasts-unto-death. Independent India has seen scores of hunger strikes by activists and politicians to press for demands. While some fasts are genuine, several are a farce, as was the post-breakfast, pre-lunch fast in 2009 by Tamil Nadu's former chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi to demand a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.
Fasting as conceived by Gandhi was an alternative to violence. Gandhi resorted to fasts to unite people against violence rather than to force concessions out of the British colonial rulers. In the words of his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi, author of Mohandas, Gandhi's fasts "were to stir consciences, not create convulsions".
This is not the case with most present-day hunger strikers in India. There is an unmistakable coercive element to their fasts, with the threat of violence lurking behind their protests should their demands not be conceded. Sadly, it is to these violent fasts that the Indian government has responded.
Hazare's campaign - contrary to the non-violent Gandhian image it was given in the media - had a coercive element to it. His demands were framed in terms that reeked of intolerance, threat and blackmail.
Hazare's campaign drew on several resources. Indian corporate houses are reported to have bankrolled the latter's country-wide campaign. The country's increasingly powerful middle-class and the influential mainstream media stood by Hazare. Besides, his protest reportedly enjoyed the backing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological fount of the Hindu right-wing Sangh Parivar.
It was the size of the crowds with Hazare, the powerful interests backing him and the possibility of his death triggering mass violence and unrest that pushed the government to pay attention to his protest and concede his demands.
India remains unshaken and unmoved by Sharmila's decade-long hunger strike because the cause she champions is too distant to strike a chord with India's upwardly mobile middle class. Her attempt to stir India's conscience goes unheard because the media denies her a voice.
Thus Delhi finds it expedient to violently keep her alive by force-feeding her through painful nasal drip.
Friday, June 30, 2017
What Cow-Loving India Should Focus On: Making More Fodder Available To Starving Cattle
With forests overrun by weed and other unwanted growth, free-grazing lifestock face a grim situation.
Much passion is now generated in our country on the subject of protecting cattle. However, a dispassionate narration of the reality about the fodder situation for them seems to be largely missing. There are 108 million adult female cows in a cattle population of 200 million, according to the National Dairy Development Board. In addition, there are about 100 million buffaloes in the country.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
‘Pakistan Is Not In Danger Of Being A Failed State’
By M H Ahssan
Terror attacks in Pakistan. Mutiny in Bangladesh. Ethnic war in Sri Lanka. Mani Shankar Aiyar unravels the subcontinent with HNN.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is widely known as the political wit perennially out of political favour. But that is reductive of his encyclopaedic knowledge and keen insight. Over a 27-year career in the Indian Foreign Service, and later in his role both in Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO and now, as a Minister for the North East Region and Panchayati Raj, Aiyar has had a deep involvement with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Over a four-hour conversation, full of lively anecdote, he goes beyond the alarm calls to paint a more measured picture of the subcontinent. Some excerpts.
How would you read the terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team?
It is a manifestation of the growing menace of terrorism the entire subcontinent is facing. There is absolutely no doubt Pakistan is a manufacturing centre of this terrorism, but we must understand this terrorism is of such a nature, it is attacking its Frankenstein creator as much as anybody else. And now that Frankenstein is as interested as other victims in keeping safe from its own monster, a solution, in a long-term sense, might lie in building a kind of cooperative venture among all the victims of terrorism, rather than in pointing fingers. The problem for us is that because some elements in the Pakistan establishment are among the key manufacturers of terror, if we start cooperating with them, there is a fear that the information might get leaked to the terrorists themselves. Still, at the end of the day, I believe a South Asia-wide cooperative against terrorism is what we really need.
Wouldn’t this parallel America’s unsuccessful war on terror, and engender more subcontinental tension?
There was no co-operation there, the victims were never coopted into the process we are talking about. The Americans just declared a unilateral war on terror and resorted to multi-military machinery. The rats just ran away, and not all the king’s men, nor all the king’s horses, could ferret them out. I am advocating something quite different.
Do you believe Pakistan is facing a new danger mark in its history? Is it under threat of being balkanised?
It is true Pakistan is facing a very dangerous moment in its history. There is a large body of opinion in India that thinks it is a failed state or a failing state. But I do not think so. The country is, indeed, reaping the wages of both what it has done and what has been done to it. For too long, it has allowed itself to become an international pawn and lent itself to foreign policy goals based on short-term pragmatism rather than any long-term vision or ethics. After all, Osama bin Laden may have still been a playboy in Saudi Arabia or America if he had not been transplanted to Afghanistan and propped up with arms and money by the international community. That apart, the Pakistani establishment itself has focused on building its idea of nationhood based on projecting India as its enemy, and by stoking trouble in Kashmir. Much of what is happening in Pakistan today is the blowback of all this.
Having said that, I don’t think it is in any danger of being balkanised. In 1964, when I joined the foreign service, Shishir Ghosh gave us a lecture in which he said Pakistan’s only expression of nationality was on anti-Indian terms. Even if this were true then, four decades later it isn’t. Postpartition generations constitute 70 to 80 percent of their population; they have no memory of being Indian. Sixty-two years after independence, I am convinced there is a very strong bonding adhesive that holds Pakistan together. Their sense of being Pakistani is as strong as being Sindhi or Baloch. So I do not see the country splintering. You must also remember Islamist forces in Pakistan have never had more than two percent of the vote.
That is true, but the people in Swat voted for a liberal party and it still caved in to the Taliban and the Sharia. Should Pakistan — and by extension India — worry about an increasing Taliban dominance?
I certainly think a growing Taliban influence is a cause for worry, but we need to be realistic about what happened in Swat. There is an extraordinary set of circumstances there that is not replicable elsewhere in Pakistan. There are no American drones bombing villages and killing innocent people elsewhere in Pakistan as they are in Swat. Swat has had a long history of struggle between extremists. I think the political party there is using a kind of homeopathic approach to the problem: it is trying to use one kind of poison to destroy another. Use moderate extremism to fight extreme extremism. I am not sure this will work, and it may certainly help the worse kind of poison gain strength, but to move from that worry to an assumption that the rest of Pakistan is under threat of a Taliban takeover is too big a leap. You must remember, like India, Pakistan is a very populous, vast and diverse society. It is not Kandahar. It has many competing ethnicities and a very westernised, sophisticated elite. Pakistanis have also displayed a huge commitment to democracy each time an opportunity has presented itself. So, to say yesterday Swat, tomorrow Rawalpindi, and then Karachi, is just too alarmist a position.
Why are our neighbours — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — prone to such convulsions? Why are they more precarious democracies than India?
The answer to this lies in the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru — who was Prime Minister for the first 17 crucial years of our upbringing as a modern nation — was dedicated to five very important principles of nation-building that our neighbours have not been equally committed to. The first of these is the idea of plurality and secularism. Under Nehru’s stewardship, India has, almost uniquely in the world, not only expressed its nationhood as a belief in diversity, but a celebration of it. Unity in diversity is the great subcontinental truth we all have to live with, if we want to survive as a democracy. It is not merely an ideal; it is pragmatic. All our neighbours who are in trouble are nations that have deviated from this to express nationhood in dangerously exclusivist ways.
The second thing is, Nehru was not only committed to the concept of democracy, but also to building the institutions of democracy. That bulwark has almost never been changed in our existence as a nation in 62 years. In Pakistan — under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan — there was the same dedication to democracy, but their stewardship did not last as long, and their institutions were far less robust. So, despite an aching yearning for democracy among Pakistanis, they missed the bus by not having a Nehru among their midst in their formative years. The same thing happened in Bang - ladesh. At the beginning, there wasn’t the same commitment to building democratic institutions; soon after, with the brutal coup in 1975 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family were killed, whatever had been built up was brushed aside.
Sri Lanka’s record of democratic institutions was far superior to India. So why did they fail? With Solomon Bandar - anaike’s victory in 1956, Sri Lanka jettisoned the secular ethos with which it had fought its freedom movement and opted for sectarianism and an exclusivist Sinhala identity. Over the last 30 years, Sri Lanka has suffered such a setback because of this, it is almost impossible to remember that Sri Lanka was once poised to be the Singapore of this region.
Finally, the other Nehruvian principle that has kept our democracy robust is Nehru’s commitment to a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. He accepted the Gandhian ethic that the purpose of the state‘s economic policy was welfare of the poor. In Pakistan, on the other hand, there was a blatant and blanket adoption of the capitalist model. In 1965, it was the secondmost industrialised country in Asia, after Japan. But this was concentrated in the hands of 22 feudal families and the notorious ‘303’ — the civil servants in collusion with these families. All of this came crashing down when Ayub Khan undertook his coup. The other factor in the instability Pakistan faces today is the fact that they also happily allied themselves to the Americans. Pakistan was also founded on the principle that religion constitutes nationality. This is an almost untenable premise. If being a Muslim makes you belong to Pakistan, then why is there a border between Muslim Afghanistan and Muslim Iran? And why would some of its most bitter disputes have been with its Muslim neighbours? Religion is a very poor basis for organising a nation. For all these reasons, these nation states did not become as strong in absorbing the buffeting that all nation-building involves. But while we may be stronger and more stable than our neighbours today, we have to remember that the same potential for stability and democracy exists in our neighbours. And if we move away from these ideals of plurality and secularism, we have the same potential for being torn apart.
Is there a danger of Indian Muslims being affected by the Taliban?
Its spreading influence is certainly a cause for concern, but the answer, as far as Indian Muslims go, does not lie in standing on the border of Pakistan and, like King Canute, ordering the waves to go back. What we have to do is address all the issues facing the Indian Muslim six decades after independence. These issues are meti culously documented in Justice Sachar’s report. We just have to act on them to integrate the Indian Muslim into the larger Indian family. Having said that, there will always be the individual grievance that is vulnerable to the terrorist project, and you can’t stop that. You just have to ensure there is no generic grievance. What many Indians don’t know or have forgotten is that given the restrictive franchise of 1946-47, only about five to 13 percent of the Muslim population voted for the creation of Pakistan. So, there is always the danger of exaggerating the Indian Muslim’s susceptibility to Pakistan.
We also have to ask ourselves, how many people really cleave to violence and radical views? After all, when the Hindutva wave was at its height, many Hindus might have felt it was a just cause. But with the ugly demolition of the Babri Masjid, I can bet you millions of Hindus were filled with self-disgust. To the extent that even LK Advani later distanced himself from the demolition. A few days ago, I was in Orissa at a massive gathering of Muslims. It was heartwarming to see how strongly they endorsed the Deoband fatwa against terrorism.
President Barack Obama was suppo - sed to herald a policy change in the region. But he is also focussing on the military option in Afghanistan, although no one has ever won a fight there. Conversely, is it possible to hold talks with forces like the Taliban?
A part of statecraft is the use of force against people as wedded to force as the Taliban is. But alongside, there has to be a cooption of the local population in order to make it a popular resistance rather than an imposed victory by foreign forces — especially a ‘victory’ by unmanned planes that are killing indiscriminately. Obama’s strategy is geared to fail unless it works in these other components. Seven-eights of the money being spent by the West in Afghanistan is on military hardware and software, only one-eight on development. Obama needs to change that. I am proud that as a Minister for Panchayati Raj, my own involvement in Afghanistan, requested by President Karzai, has been about empowering their local governance.
Let’s shift focus. As Minister for the North East, you are well-placed to talk about Bangladesh’s impact on India.
I was there as an Under Secretary at the very minute that the surrender document was being signed in Dhaka in 1971. So it’s a big disappointment when I look back 40 years that this wildly exciting event — the liberation of Bangladesh, and Mrs Gandhi actually withdrawing our troops within three months of its liberation — did not lead to better relations between us. We showed ourselves to be a noble nation, willing to sacrifice our own for the sake of others, and yet, respect the sovereignty of a small neighbour. So, looking back, why is Bangladesh denying us transit facilities that East Pakistan extended to us through 18 of the most tense years of the India- Pakistan relationship? And why is Indian diplomacy not able to get around this? As Minister for the North East, I have realised how much this has harmed the region and its relationship with India itself.
So yes, I do think we need to reorient our foreign policy vis-a-vis Bangladesh in a way that will help the North East realise its immense potential. India’s recent decision to open up to Bangladeshi investment gives me hope. Given Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s massive majority and her attitude towards us, notwithstanding the very serious setback we’ve seen in the last few days, I believe the India-Bangladesh relationship can be improved.
Isn’t Bangladesh beset by the same liberal polity versus army-and-Islamist forces axis? Is it as precarious as Pakistan, but less on our radar?
I think it’s much less precarious and that is because Bangladesh internally is a much more plural society than Pakistan ever aspired to be. Pakistan is, in fact, a very plural society, but its ideology forces it to present itself as a more unitary entity than it really is.
The average Indian thinks of Bang - ladesh in terms of the HUJI or the problem of Bangladeshi immigrants. How would you rate these concerns?
The HUJI is definitely a problem area. How many proxy soldiers are there in the Kashmir valley? Estimates range from about 2,000 to 6,000. Yet we need an army a hundred times its size to contain it. The numbers are always small, but the capacity for havoc is huge. The HUJI also has definite links with ULFA. Many of these groups, in fact, seem to be forging links with each other. But you have to abstract this from Islam. Terror and its allies in India, or elsewhere, has nothing to do with any religion. In Nagaland and Manipur, terrorist groups are Christian, the ULFA is Hindu, the Naxals have no religion, the Sinhalese outfits are Buddhist, you had Sikh terrorism, and, of course, there is LeT or the Indian Mujahideen that are Islamic.
I believe panchayati raj is the ultimate solution to all of this. There was an excellent Planning Commission report about using panchayati raj as an instrument to deal with extremist affected areas in central India. How has terrorism been pushed back in Nagaland? I think the village development boards and councils have had more to do with that than any amount of army action. Giving people a sense of participation in their own governance is much more effective than shooting or imprisoning, or Salwa Judum. Maybe all anti-terrorist initiatives should be placed under the Minister of Panchayati Raj.
What is the problem area we should be focusing on then in Bangladesh?
The problem area is the relationship between the military and the liberal polity. The relationship between those who have the banduk and those who have the ballot. It is heartening that the army has been disciplined enough not to go on a rampage against the mutineers. Sheikh Hasina has been able to be very stern, and at the same time rein in a lynching mentality that could easily have been stoked in the army in response to what happened.
How is it that the army has never fallen foul of democracy in India?
As I said earlier, what saved India was Nehru’s unflinching commitment to the democratic process. As a college boy, I remember sitting in the Visitor’s Gallery in Parliament. Nehru had just dismissed EMS Namboodiripad’s government in Kerala. We sat transfixed as Comrade Dange tore into Nehru. At the climax of his oration, he pointed at Nehru and said, “You are like Yudhistir. When he lied about Aswathama, his chariot immediately fell to the ground. Your chariot too has fallen today.” Did Nehru call in the army? No, he listened to the indictment, then stood up and gave his answer.
Moving to Sri Lanka, do you think this is really endgame for the LTTE? And how will it affect India?
I’m not 100 percent sure it’s the endgame, because the LTTE still has 58 square kilometers to operate from. I don’t quite accept the complacent statements coming out of Colombo. But even if this war were over, the LTTE is not over. They could continue being a destructive force in the Sri Lankan, and possibly even the Indian, polity. There has to be a political solution which addresses the grievances of the people. Panchayati raj is the solution to everything. I am not being facetious when I say this. It is the only way to wean people away from violent protest. Now Mahindra Rajapaksa who, curiously, I first met at a panchayati raj workshop in Dehradun, says he really believes in grassroots democratic institutions. What people wonder is that, is his idea of panchayati raj in Sri Lanka the same as basic democracy under Ayub Khan or the lazim system under Musharraf — institutions of local democracy designed to undermine democracy at higher levels — or is it a Rajiv Gandhi concept of local government? That is the question that Rajapaksa and history will have to answer once the peace process begins.
Terror attacks in Pakistan. Mutiny in Bangladesh. Ethnic war in Sri Lanka. Mani Shankar Aiyar unravels the subcontinent with HNN.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is widely known as the political wit perennially out of political favour. But that is reductive of his encyclopaedic knowledge and keen insight. Over a 27-year career in the Indian Foreign Service, and later in his role both in Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO and now, as a Minister for the North East Region and Panchayati Raj, Aiyar has had a deep involvement with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Over a four-hour conversation, full of lively anecdote, he goes beyond the alarm calls to paint a more measured picture of the subcontinent. Some excerpts.
How would you read the terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team?
It is a manifestation of the growing menace of terrorism the entire subcontinent is facing. There is absolutely no doubt Pakistan is a manufacturing centre of this terrorism, but we must understand this terrorism is of such a nature, it is attacking its Frankenstein creator as much as anybody else. And now that Frankenstein is as interested as other victims in keeping safe from its own monster, a solution, in a long-term sense, might lie in building a kind of cooperative venture among all the victims of terrorism, rather than in pointing fingers. The problem for us is that because some elements in the Pakistan establishment are among the key manufacturers of terror, if we start cooperating with them, there is a fear that the information might get leaked to the terrorists themselves. Still, at the end of the day, I believe a South Asia-wide cooperative against terrorism is what we really need.
Wouldn’t this parallel America’s unsuccessful war on terror, and engender more subcontinental tension?
There was no co-operation there, the victims were never coopted into the process we are talking about. The Americans just declared a unilateral war on terror and resorted to multi-military machinery. The rats just ran away, and not all the king’s men, nor all the king’s horses, could ferret them out. I am advocating something quite different.
Do you believe Pakistan is facing a new danger mark in its history? Is it under threat of being balkanised?
It is true Pakistan is facing a very dangerous moment in its history. There is a large body of opinion in India that thinks it is a failed state or a failing state. But I do not think so. The country is, indeed, reaping the wages of both what it has done and what has been done to it. For too long, it has allowed itself to become an international pawn and lent itself to foreign policy goals based on short-term pragmatism rather than any long-term vision or ethics. After all, Osama bin Laden may have still been a playboy in Saudi Arabia or America if he had not been transplanted to Afghanistan and propped up with arms and money by the international community. That apart, the Pakistani establishment itself has focused on building its idea of nationhood based on projecting India as its enemy, and by stoking trouble in Kashmir. Much of what is happening in Pakistan today is the blowback of all this.
Having said that, I don’t think it is in any danger of being balkanised. In 1964, when I joined the foreign service, Shishir Ghosh gave us a lecture in which he said Pakistan’s only expression of nationality was on anti-Indian terms. Even if this were true then, four decades later it isn’t. Postpartition generations constitute 70 to 80 percent of their population; they have no memory of being Indian. Sixty-two years after independence, I am convinced there is a very strong bonding adhesive that holds Pakistan together. Their sense of being Pakistani is as strong as being Sindhi or Baloch. So I do not see the country splintering. You must also remember Islamist forces in Pakistan have never had more than two percent of the vote.
That is true, but the people in Swat voted for a liberal party and it still caved in to the Taliban and the Sharia. Should Pakistan — and by extension India — worry about an increasing Taliban dominance?
I certainly think a growing Taliban influence is a cause for worry, but we need to be realistic about what happened in Swat. There is an extraordinary set of circumstances there that is not replicable elsewhere in Pakistan. There are no American drones bombing villages and killing innocent people elsewhere in Pakistan as they are in Swat. Swat has had a long history of struggle between extremists. I think the political party there is using a kind of homeopathic approach to the problem: it is trying to use one kind of poison to destroy another. Use moderate extremism to fight extreme extremism. I am not sure this will work, and it may certainly help the worse kind of poison gain strength, but to move from that worry to an assumption that the rest of Pakistan is under threat of a Taliban takeover is too big a leap. You must remember, like India, Pakistan is a very populous, vast and diverse society. It is not Kandahar. It has many competing ethnicities and a very westernised, sophisticated elite. Pakistanis have also displayed a huge commitment to democracy each time an opportunity has presented itself. So, to say yesterday Swat, tomorrow Rawalpindi, and then Karachi, is just too alarmist a position.
Why are our neighbours — Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — prone to such convulsions? Why are they more precarious democracies than India?
The answer to this lies in the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru — who was Prime Minister for the first 17 crucial years of our upbringing as a modern nation — was dedicated to five very important principles of nation-building that our neighbours have not been equally committed to. The first of these is the idea of plurality and secularism. Under Nehru’s stewardship, India has, almost uniquely in the world, not only expressed its nationhood as a belief in diversity, but a celebration of it. Unity in diversity is the great subcontinental truth we all have to live with, if we want to survive as a democracy. It is not merely an ideal; it is pragmatic. All our neighbours who are in trouble are nations that have deviated from this to express nationhood in dangerously exclusivist ways.
The second thing is, Nehru was not only committed to the concept of democracy, but also to building the institutions of democracy. That bulwark has almost never been changed in our existence as a nation in 62 years. In Pakistan — under Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan — there was the same dedication to democracy, but their stewardship did not last as long, and their institutions were far less robust. So, despite an aching yearning for democracy among Pakistanis, they missed the bus by not having a Nehru among their midst in their formative years. The same thing happened in Bang - ladesh. At the beginning, there wasn’t the same commitment to building democratic institutions; soon after, with the brutal coup in 1975 when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family were killed, whatever had been built up was brushed aside.
Sri Lanka’s record of democratic institutions was far superior to India. So why did they fail? With Solomon Bandar - anaike’s victory in 1956, Sri Lanka jettisoned the secular ethos with which it had fought its freedom movement and opted for sectarianism and an exclusivist Sinhala identity. Over the last 30 years, Sri Lanka has suffered such a setback because of this, it is almost impossible to remember that Sri Lanka was once poised to be the Singapore of this region.
Finally, the other Nehruvian principle that has kept our democracy robust is Nehru’s commitment to a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. He accepted the Gandhian ethic that the purpose of the state‘s economic policy was welfare of the poor. In Pakistan, on the other hand, there was a blatant and blanket adoption of the capitalist model. In 1965, it was the secondmost industrialised country in Asia, after Japan. But this was concentrated in the hands of 22 feudal families and the notorious ‘303’ — the civil servants in collusion with these families. All of this came crashing down when Ayub Khan undertook his coup. The other factor in the instability Pakistan faces today is the fact that they also happily allied themselves to the Americans. Pakistan was also founded on the principle that religion constitutes nationality. This is an almost untenable premise. If being a Muslim makes you belong to Pakistan, then why is there a border between Muslim Afghanistan and Muslim Iran? And why would some of its most bitter disputes have been with its Muslim neighbours? Religion is a very poor basis for organising a nation. For all these reasons, these nation states did not become as strong in absorbing the buffeting that all nation-building involves. But while we may be stronger and more stable than our neighbours today, we have to remember that the same potential for stability and democracy exists in our neighbours. And if we move away from these ideals of plurality and secularism, we have the same potential for being torn apart.
Is there a danger of Indian Muslims being affected by the Taliban?
Its spreading influence is certainly a cause for concern, but the answer, as far as Indian Muslims go, does not lie in standing on the border of Pakistan and, like King Canute, ordering the waves to go back. What we have to do is address all the issues facing the Indian Muslim six decades after independence. These issues are meti culously documented in Justice Sachar’s report. We just have to act on them to integrate the Indian Muslim into the larger Indian family. Having said that, there will always be the individual grievance that is vulnerable to the terrorist project, and you can’t stop that. You just have to ensure there is no generic grievance. What many Indians don’t know or have forgotten is that given the restrictive franchise of 1946-47, only about five to 13 percent of the Muslim population voted for the creation of Pakistan. So, there is always the danger of exaggerating the Indian Muslim’s susceptibility to Pakistan.
We also have to ask ourselves, how many people really cleave to violence and radical views? After all, when the Hindutva wave was at its height, many Hindus might have felt it was a just cause. But with the ugly demolition of the Babri Masjid, I can bet you millions of Hindus were filled with self-disgust. To the extent that even LK Advani later distanced himself from the demolition. A few days ago, I was in Orissa at a massive gathering of Muslims. It was heartwarming to see how strongly they endorsed the Deoband fatwa against terrorism.
President Barack Obama was suppo - sed to herald a policy change in the region. But he is also focussing on the military option in Afghanistan, although no one has ever won a fight there. Conversely, is it possible to hold talks with forces like the Taliban?
A part of statecraft is the use of force against people as wedded to force as the Taliban is. But alongside, there has to be a cooption of the local population in order to make it a popular resistance rather than an imposed victory by foreign forces — especially a ‘victory’ by unmanned planes that are killing indiscriminately. Obama’s strategy is geared to fail unless it works in these other components. Seven-eights of the money being spent by the West in Afghanistan is on military hardware and software, only one-eight on development. Obama needs to change that. I am proud that as a Minister for Panchayati Raj, my own involvement in Afghanistan, requested by President Karzai, has been about empowering their local governance.
Let’s shift focus. As Minister for the North East, you are well-placed to talk about Bangladesh’s impact on India.
I was there as an Under Secretary at the very minute that the surrender document was being signed in Dhaka in 1971. So it’s a big disappointment when I look back 40 years that this wildly exciting event — the liberation of Bangladesh, and Mrs Gandhi actually withdrawing our troops within three months of its liberation — did not lead to better relations between us. We showed ourselves to be a noble nation, willing to sacrifice our own for the sake of others, and yet, respect the sovereignty of a small neighbour. So, looking back, why is Bangladesh denying us transit facilities that East Pakistan extended to us through 18 of the most tense years of the India- Pakistan relationship? And why is Indian diplomacy not able to get around this? As Minister for the North East, I have realised how much this has harmed the region and its relationship with India itself.
So yes, I do think we need to reorient our foreign policy vis-a-vis Bangladesh in a way that will help the North East realise its immense potential. India’s recent decision to open up to Bangladeshi investment gives me hope. Given Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s massive majority and her attitude towards us, notwithstanding the very serious setback we’ve seen in the last few days, I believe the India-Bangladesh relationship can be improved.
Isn’t Bangladesh beset by the same liberal polity versus army-and-Islamist forces axis? Is it as precarious as Pakistan, but less on our radar?
I think it’s much less precarious and that is because Bangladesh internally is a much more plural society than Pakistan ever aspired to be. Pakistan is, in fact, a very plural society, but its ideology forces it to present itself as a more unitary entity than it really is.
The average Indian thinks of Bang - ladesh in terms of the HUJI or the problem of Bangladeshi immigrants. How would you rate these concerns?
The HUJI is definitely a problem area. How many proxy soldiers are there in the Kashmir valley? Estimates range from about 2,000 to 6,000. Yet we need an army a hundred times its size to contain it. The numbers are always small, but the capacity for havoc is huge. The HUJI also has definite links with ULFA. Many of these groups, in fact, seem to be forging links with each other. But you have to abstract this from Islam. Terror and its allies in India, or elsewhere, has nothing to do with any religion. In Nagaland and Manipur, terrorist groups are Christian, the ULFA is Hindu, the Naxals have no religion, the Sinhalese outfits are Buddhist, you had Sikh terrorism, and, of course, there is LeT or the Indian Mujahideen that are Islamic.
I believe panchayati raj is the ultimate solution to all of this. There was an excellent Planning Commission report about using panchayati raj as an instrument to deal with extremist affected areas in central India. How has terrorism been pushed back in Nagaland? I think the village development boards and councils have had more to do with that than any amount of army action. Giving people a sense of participation in their own governance is much more effective than shooting or imprisoning, or Salwa Judum. Maybe all anti-terrorist initiatives should be placed under the Minister of Panchayati Raj.
What is the problem area we should be focusing on then in Bangladesh?
The problem area is the relationship between the military and the liberal polity. The relationship between those who have the banduk and those who have the ballot. It is heartening that the army has been disciplined enough not to go on a rampage against the mutineers. Sheikh Hasina has been able to be very stern, and at the same time rein in a lynching mentality that could easily have been stoked in the army in response to what happened.
How is it that the army has never fallen foul of democracy in India?
As I said earlier, what saved India was Nehru’s unflinching commitment to the democratic process. As a college boy, I remember sitting in the Visitor’s Gallery in Parliament. Nehru had just dismissed EMS Namboodiripad’s government in Kerala. We sat transfixed as Comrade Dange tore into Nehru. At the climax of his oration, he pointed at Nehru and said, “You are like Yudhistir. When he lied about Aswathama, his chariot immediately fell to the ground. Your chariot too has fallen today.” Did Nehru call in the army? No, he listened to the indictment, then stood up and gave his answer.
Moving to Sri Lanka, do you think this is really endgame for the LTTE? And how will it affect India?
I’m not 100 percent sure it’s the endgame, because the LTTE still has 58 square kilometers to operate from. I don’t quite accept the complacent statements coming out of Colombo. But even if this war were over, the LTTE is not over. They could continue being a destructive force in the Sri Lankan, and possibly even the Indian, polity. There has to be a political solution which addresses the grievances of the people. Panchayati raj is the solution to everything. I am not being facetious when I say this. It is the only way to wean people away from violent protest. Now Mahindra Rajapaksa who, curiously, I first met at a panchayati raj workshop in Dehradun, says he really believes in grassroots democratic institutions. What people wonder is that, is his idea of panchayati raj in Sri Lanka the same as basic democracy under Ayub Khan or the lazim system under Musharraf — institutions of local democracy designed to undermine democracy at higher levels — or is it a Rajiv Gandhi concept of local government? That is the question that Rajapaksa and history will have to answer once the peace process begins.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Average Deposit In Accounts Under 'Jan Dhan Yojana' Scheme Doubled In 21 Months
The number of accounts opened under the Prime Minister's financial inclusion programme quadrupled between September 2014 and May 2016.
The average deposit per account under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana – a financial inclusion programme launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in August 2014 – increased 118%, from Rs 795 in September 2014 to Rs 1,735 in May 2016, according to IndiaSpend's analysis of government data.
Thursday, May 02, 2013
'ARUNACHAL' TOPS IN HANDLING 'CHILD NUTRITION'
The problem is likely to be less severe than UN statistics indicate, given faulty yardsticks. If asked to name the state with the lowest incidence of child malnutrition in India, readers will overwhelmingly pick one of Kerala, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab or West Bengal. But they will all be wrong by a wide margin: none of these states appears among even the top five performers.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Over 1,000 IAS Officers Fail To Submit Property Returns
Of the total of 1,057 officers who did not submit their IPRs for 2012, a highest of 147 are from Uttar Pradesh cadre, 114 of Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories (AGMUT), 100 of Manipur-Tripura, 96 of Jammu and Kashmir and 88 of Madhya Pradesh cadre among others, according to Department of Personnel and Training data.
Suspended IAS couple Arvind and Tinoo Joshi of MP cadre are also among the list of erring officials. Joshis, both 1979 batch officers of Madhya Pradesh cadre, made headlines after Income Tax department raided their residence in February, 2010 and allegedly unearthed assets worth over Rs 350 crore.
58 IAS officers of Karnataka cadre, 53 of Andhra Pradesh, 48 of Punjab, 47 of Orissa, 45 of West Bengal, 40 of Himachal Pradesh, 35 of Haryana, 25 of Jharkhand, 23 of Assam-Meghalaya, 22 of Rajasthan, 20 of Tamil Nadu, 17 of Maharashtra, 16 of Nagaland, 14 of Gujarat, 13 of Bihar, 10 of Kerala, nine each of Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh and eight of Sikkim cadre have not given their IPRs, it said.
The total sanctioned strength of IAS is 6,217, including 1,339 promotion posts. Of these, 4,737 officers are in position.
An all-India service officer is bound to file property returns of a year by January end of the following year, failing which promotion and empanelment to senior level postings may be denied.
Besides, there are 107 IAS officers who have not submitted their IPRs for 2011. As many as 198 IAS officials did not give their property details for 2010. “A circular has already been sent to all cadre
controlling authorities to inform them about timely submission of their IPRs,” said an official of the DoPT, which acts as a nodal agency for administrative matters of the IAS officers.
Saturday, August 28, 2021
New Norms With Self-Regulation For Fantasy And Online Gaming Industry in Telangana
Telangana was the first state to ban online and fantasy gaming alleging that it resorts to gambling.
The Telangana government is coming up with new rules for online and fantasy gaming which will encourage self-regulation and game development in the state, a senior state government official said.
Telangana was the first state to ban online and fantasy gaming alleging that it resorts to gambling.
Telangana principal secretary for industries and commerce and IT Jayesh Ranjan said that the present scenario around fantasy sports is "a bit muddied and complicated" at present but the state government is bringing new norms which will make the state a role model for other states.
"In Telangana also there has been push back in the past. I have taken this responsibility upon myself personally to get a very simple and industry-friendly piece of regulation in place of what already exists. I have consulted everyone who is involved in this domain,” he said.
"The draft regulation that we have prepared has been shared with everyone. I am preparing ground for this progressive piece of regulation to be introduced in our state," Ranjan said at a seminar organised by the Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS).
He said that the regulation which exists in Telangana as of now was largely driven by the police department because they had certain apprehensions about the way online gaming happens.
"The new piece of regulation that we have drafted has been shared with the police department. They are involved in every process. Only after their complete satisfaction, we will take it to the next level- before our minister, law department cabinet, etc.
"It is a matter of time but I can assure you will see regulation from Telangana where not only self-regulation but development will also be encouraged. I am very confident that this will be a role model for other states as well," Ranjan said.
Indiatech CEO Rameesh Kailasam said that multiple court rulings have given adequate clarity and accorded legitimacy to online gaming formats including fantasy sports, however, in certain states such as Telangana, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim and Nagaland such online formats are not allowed if they involve any money.
Retired IAS officer and FSRA chairman Bimal Jhulka said that fantasy sports is a sunrise sector in India and it has already overtaken the US with 12 crore users and contributed Rs 3,000 crore to the exchequer.
He said that the fantasy sports sector has the potential to contribute Rs 13,500 crore to the exchequer by means of taxes, create 12,000 additional jobs, and attract Rs 10,000 crore in foreign direct investments.
Invest India director and CEO Deepak Bagla said that online gaming is expected to see a huge push once 5G services are rolled out in India. #KhabarLive #hydnews
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