Swachch Bharat's Mothers, Babies In Peril: 343 Hospitals In 6 States Struggle With Hygiene, Toilets

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

Swachch Bharat Abhiyaan is acheived by Modi's government but the reality is quite different,  as many as 19% of the facilities did not have wash basins near toilets and patient-care areas.

Half the post-natal wards of primary healthcare centres lacked toilets, as did 60% of larger community health centres in Madhya Pradesh, which has a higher maternal mortality rate than war-torn Syria.Open defecation was allowed within 38% and open urination in 60% of health facilities (PHCs, CHCs, area and district hospitals) in Odisha’s Ganjam district, which has the same maternal mortality rate as the impoverished African country of Gabon.

Women lag in India's polls

By Neeta Lal

It is a sad reflection on the world's largest democracy - the one that gave the world its second female prime minister, Indira Gandhi - that despite 14 general elections and six decades of independence, Indian women still have an abysmal representation in parliament.

In other words, a demographic that constitutes over 50% of India's 1.1 billion population - or 340 million voters out of a total electorate of 710 million in 2009 - constitutes a lowly 9% of the total strength of the Lok Sabha (Lower House). Voters will head to the polls for this year's national election in phases from April 16 to May 13.

The lack of women's representation in India is all the more ironic considering it currently has a woman president, Pratibha Patil and the capital, New Delhi, has a female chief minister well into her third term, Sheila Dixit, and a female mayor, Arti Mehra.

Even at the national level, the head of the ruling Congress coalition - the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) - is Sonia Gandhi.

Regional politics has several women in leadership. Tamil Nadu has the chief minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram - leader of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party - while in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, there is Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati - a likely prime minister candidate. In West Bengal there is the leader of the Trinamool Congress Party, Mamata Banerjee.

However, this is more or less where female supremacy ends in India. Because when it comes to actual power - say the berths in council of central ministers - barely 9% of the people at ministerial rank are women. Surveys have repeatedly highlighted that in the councils of ministers - both at national and state levels - Indian women are under-represented, with the country never having had more than one female cabinet minister at one time.

Furthermore, none of the major portfolios (External Affairs, Home or Finance) have ever been in the hands of women. If they have been, this has been due to makeshift arrangements. Similarly, in the Rajya Sabha (Upper House), where members are appointed and therefore can be more easily chosen to represent a wide spectrum of India, only 28 of the 242 seats currently are held by women.

The recent list of candidates for the upcoming general elections announced by major Indian political parties contain disproportionately low numbers of the fairer sex. In the Communist Party of India list, for instance, only three out of the 60 contesting candidates are women. The Congress Party's list of 24 candidates for Uttar Pradesh features only five women, while the main opposition party - the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party - has only 26 women among its 166 candidates. The Samajwadi Party has just six women candidates out of a total of 71 standing for election.

This unequal representation of Indian women in national and regional politics is all the more disquieting given that the Indian constitution guarantees gender equality in the Articles 325 and 326.

The Women's Reservation Bill, which seeks to reserve 33% of seats for women in parliament, has stalled in the absence of political consensus. Although in the recent past heated debate has been raised over the bill by women activists and different sections of Indian society, support for it has not gathered enough momentum to ensure its passage.

Women's organizations sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in May 2008 demanding that the bill is voted on urgently, arguing that election year is a good opportunity for the government to ensure its passage. But there's been no action on this front. The incumbent UPA government has often been accused of betraying the commitments made in its programs to bring more women into the legislative process.

Repeated attempts to ensure places for women in parliament have invariably invoked stiff resistance amongst parliamentarians, mostly male, who feel threatened by the move. No sooner is the issue raised than pejorative terms like "caste" and "gender-based reservation" are deliberately raised to inflame tempers and prevent its passage.

This is concerning as most countries across the globe - including India's neighbors - provide a fair quota for women. Nepal has 33% reservation for women, Pakistan 22% and Bangladesh 14%. In March 2007, statistics released by the Inter-Parliamentary Union revealed that India ranked very low - 108 - among 189 countries so far as the percentage of women lawmakers in its Lower House was concerned.

This is not to say that India has not witnessed some growth in the participation of women in politics. In 1952, there was only 22 (4.4%) in the Lower House, but this reached 34 (6.7%) after the next general election. However, the trend reversed in the next three elections with women representing a meager 19 (3.4%) in the sixth Lower House in 1977, the lowest ever. Subsequent elections witnessed some growth, except in 1989 when the number of women in parliament plummeted to 27 from 44 . From 1991, the number has been on an upward trajectory, reaching 44 in 1998 and 49 in 1999.

Interestingly, poorer states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan seem to have elected a higher number of women members of parliament than more developed and urbanized states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.

Brinda Karat, a Rajya Sabha member of parliament and a politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), recently told Indian media that the low presence of women in the Indian legislature stems from the perception that they will be unable to mobilize adequate funds and, hence, are not considered "winnable".

"The Indian system has repeatedly sent out a message that unless there is a legal mandate on political parties, we will continue with this dismal picture," said Karat. "It is a shame on our democracy that even after 60 years of independence less than 10% of women get elected in state elections across five states and that we haven't been able to pass the Women's Reservation Bill. This will continue unless there is a change in the mindset of political parties," she added.

It would be a good idea for Karat to begin by changing the "mindset" of her own party, which didn't field even a single woman candidate out of the 34 seats it contested in Rajasthan. However, she raises a valid point, that the Indian "system" will have to politically empower its women if it is to one day achieve holistic national development.

Why Banking On Hindu-Muslim Polarisation Is A Folly?

By M H Ahssan / INN Bureau

It is often said that there are no new ideas; there are only new ways of making them felt and understood. It is certainly true of the most persistent and vexing issue of our times. The Hindu-Muslim faultline—marker of historical traumas, prejudices and contemporary hatred—all too often seems to determine our national identity, foreign policy and electoral strategy. A most warped thought process governs it, but that’s part of the dynamic that is modern India. 

Indeed, if there were not such a dark dimension to communal divisions, we could mock ourselves and ask: where have we landed 66 years after Partition and Independence? For many ordinary Indians, Pakistanis are the permanent enemies, once the blood brothers of India, now engaged in generations of a feud that some of them wage as a holy war.

The 'Deep Crisis' In The 'Great Indian Education Bazaar'!

From asking students to resolve matters through ‘other means’ to convincing naive aspirants with false promises, private educational institutions have earned themselves the adage of ‘scamsters’.

Anil Sadagopal, a well-known educationist calls it the ‘Kumbhakarna-like sleep’. Even after years and years of hoarse chants from activists, policy-makers, children, youth and adults — quality education that is supposed to be a fundamental right to all, is still a dream in India. It is perhaps for this very reason that Sadagopal had demanded the Indian state to wake up from its slumber.

Genetic Isolation in Casteist India Could Could Render Some People More Vulnerable to Disease

There is reduced genetic variation among the people of some subpopulations because they have been genetically isolated due to various factors – such as caste.

The occurrence of genetic diseases in certain subpopulations in India and other countries in South Asia is well known. Indian scientists now suspect that this could be due to genetic isolation caused by endogamous marriages over generations.

Elections Level 2: Money talks, democracy walks

By Sobha Naidu

With the first round of balloting accounting for 124 of the 543 seats over, the shrill campaign rhetoric, that had even turned personal, subsided considerably Friday with the attention shifting to spending of government funds and spiriting away of black money abroad.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked the people of Uttar Pradesh to find what the state government had done with central funds. Her son and party general secretary Rahul Gandhi did the same in Karnataka, while Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani promised to get back all the black money stashed abroad, a major campaign plank of the party.

Speaking in Domariaganj, Uttar Pradesh, Sonia Gandhi said: "The state government (run by the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati) is not using properly the funds being released by the central government. So, you must ask the state government where it has spent the central funds meant for carrying out developmental schemes in the state...

"If you give our party a second term, we would be in a position to take our development schemes on a larger scale to help people across the country."

Echoing his mother in Gulbarga, north Karnataka, a state run by the BJP, Rahul Gandhi said, "Thousands of crores of rupees have been given to Karnataka by the central government but the money has not reached the intended beneficiaries.

"Yesterday (Thursday) I was in Andhra Pradesh (which borders Karnataka). There is a Congress government and central funds have been properly utilised." While in Andhra Pradesh, Rahul Gandhi prayed at the famous Lord Venkateshwara temple at Tirupati at midnight.

Having addressed over 40 campaign rallies so far, Rahul Gandhi is gradually emerging as one of the principal campaigners for the Congress. His scheduled visit to Madhya Pradesh's Maoist-affected Balaghat district had to be called off after an intelligence warning that his life could be in danger, said party sources.

Andhra Pradesh Tops In 'Crimes Against Women'

At a time when Andhra Pradesh, and Hyderabad in particular, is drawing hundreds of women software professionals from all over the country, the state has earned the dubious distinction for crimes against the fair sex.

The latest statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2012 reveals a telling tale of increasing crimes against women in the state, much more than any other part of the country. Of the 1,85,312 crimes against women in the entire country in 20012, 24,738 cases, or 13.3 percent, were reported from Andhra Pradesh. 

Even more disturbing is the statistics pertaining to Hyderabad and its outskirts. A comparison of crimes against women in 35 cities across the country shows that Hyderabad stands second, next only to Delhi. While 4,331 cases (17.5 per cent) were registered in Delhi, Hyderabad came second with 1,931 cases (7.8 per cent). Vijayawada topped in the number of eve-teasing cases by accounting for 11.3 per cent of the total cases in the country. 

“If the police is strict in dealing with the offenders, things would not have come to such a pass. One of the reasons why there are more crimes against women is that law enforcers do not deal with the offenders firmly,” says G Sucharitha, joint director, gender programming, Centre for World Solidarity. 

Interestingly, Andhra Pradesh, which has 7.2 per cent of the country’s population, has reported 13.3 per cent of cases of crimes against women while Uttar Pradesh, which has 16.6 per cent of the country’s population, reported 11.3 per cent or 20,993 cases. According to NCRB figures, crimes against women in general in the country have been increasing every year. In 2009, there were 1,40,601 cases, in 2010 1,54,333 cases, in 2011 1,55,553 cases and in 2012 there were 1,64,765 cases. 

Another disturbing trend is that the rate of crime has increased against women. While the overall, rate of crimes against women increased marginally from 14.7 per cent in 2011 to 16.3 per cent in 2012, for Andhra Pradesh in particular, it has been bad. 

The crime rate against women increased by 30.3 in Andhra Pradesh, which is almost that of Tripura at 30.7 per cent which is at the top. “Women in Andhra Pradesh feel unsafe because the government is also not sincere in ensuring their protection,” said women’s rights activist Noorjehan Siddiqui. 

What is also alarming is the number of torture cases in the state. Of the 75,930 cases registered in the country under section 498A IPC (dowry harassment), as many as 11,335 cases (14.9%) are from Andhra Pradesh. Only Tripura is slightly ahead with 15.7 per cent. 

“There are two reasons why such cases are more in AP. There is an insatiable desire for dowry here. Even people who go abroad demand dowry,” an IG in the CID said. 

That is not all. AP with 3,316 cases has the most number of sexual harassment cases in the country. This is 30.3 per cent of the total number of cases. Even in cases pertaining to the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, in Andhra Pradesh, the most number of cases have been registered. In all, 1005 cases were registered, which is 83.8 per cent of cases registered in the entire country.

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Is Most Wanted Don 'Dawood Ibrahim' Is Behind The 4,000 Cr Lottery Scam Backed By Pak Based Crime Syndicate?

As confidence tricks go, this one is not novel. But the sheer amount of money involved and the trail leading to Pakistan - possibly to a certain Dawood Ibrahim - make it a thriller. 

The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has alerted the government about fraudulent lottery schemes run across India by an organised syndicate in Pakistan, which employs Indian agents to suck huge amounts of money from the gullible.

Why Telangana Does Not Justify Gorkhaland, Bodoland?

By Swati Reddy / INN Bureau

A day after the Congress Working Committee acceded to the demand to divide Andhra Pradesh, experts say that Telangana is a unique case and does not offer justification for others seeking a separate state.

Following the Telangana decision on Tuesday, politicians like Mayawati and groups like the Bodoland People’s Front and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) have revived their demand for separate states. While Mayawati has said that Uttar Pradesh should be split into four smaller states, Hagrama Mohilary of the Bodoland People’s Front met with home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, intensifying their demand for Bodoland.  The GJM has also called for a 72-hour ‘bandh’ in Darjeeling.

Crime Focus: Among top motives for murder in India: witchcraft

Personal vendetta, love affairs and property disputes are the other top reasons.

In an age in which India has sent a mission to Mars, witchcraft is still among the top 11 motives for murder in the nation, according to National Crime Records Bureau data for 2013.

Last year, the data says, there were 33,201 murders and another 3,380 cases of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Personal vendetta, love affairs and property disputes were the top reasons for the murders. Witchcraft was the motive for 160 deaths. In the last decade, 32,000-34,000 people on average were murdered every year.

Exclusive: How Muzaffarnagar Riots Tore A Village Apart?

By Anjali Mody | INNLIVE

EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE When the hindu jats of Kakra describe their village to INNLIVE, they most often use the adjective naram, or “soft,” to set it apart from the harshness of the surrounding region. The 1920 Muzaffarnagar Gazetteer described Kakra as an important village: “a flourishing place held by a large number of Jat proprietors, who are constantly quarrelling among themselves.”

Now a village of nearly 1,400 households 15 kilometres to the south-west of Muzaffarnagar town in western Uttar Pradesh, Kakra is still prosperous, but by their own telling, its Jats are no longer quarrelsome. They like to talk about their kabaddi stadium and their star kabaddi players, some of whom come from as far east as Chhattisgarh. 

Misled On RSS Conversion, Say Muslim Families In Agra

The 57 Muslim families in Uttar Pradesh's Agra district, who the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) claimed to have 'converted' to Hinduism, have said that they were misled by Dharma Jagran Samanvay Vibhag and Bajrang Dal activists into believing that the event was for BPL cards and not for religious conversion.

"We did not know anything about it. We were forced to convert our religion. We were promised that our IDs will be made. We were just asked to dress properly. The men were asked to wear skull caps," a woman at Madhunagar slum area of the city said.

A nightmare in the making?

The Third Front is shaped by sharply contradictory impulses. It is an inchoate cluster that pretends to act nationally but thinks locally, says Swapan Dasgupta.

All through the uncertain 1990s when India was coming to terms with the grim realities of fractured mandates and coalition governments at the Centre, a “national government” was frequently suggested as a way out of the mess. Promoted assiduously by former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, one of the few politicians with a cross-party appeal, it implicitly drew on the British experience during World War II when the Conservatives and Labour came together to forge a common front against Hitler.

Since India was not at war and felt no compelling need to shelve its rumbustious democracy the idea never really caught on. On the contrary, after the emergence of the BJP as an alternative pole to the Congress, regional parties and the Lohiaite rump decided that the way forward was link up with either of the two national parties. Initially the BJP was more accommodating towards the regional parties but after three consecutive electoral defeats the Congress too decided that it had to abandon its dream of reemerging as the dominant party. That both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh succeeded in completing full terms propelled politics in the direction of coalitional bipolarity.

The recent buzz around a possible Third Front that will exclude both the national parties is based on some key assumptions. First, it is felt by many that the combined tally of the Congress and BJP, which narrowly crossed the half-way mark in the Lok Sabha in 2004, may well fall below the magic 272 mark on May 16. In short, the 2009 verdict may open the theoretical possibility of all the smaller groups (including those nominally attached to the UPA and NDA) forging a non-Congress, non-BJP government.

Secondly, it is believed that both the Congress and BJP have experienced ideological dissipation in the past 10 years and declined in popularity. The BJP has shed its famed “distinctiveness” and the Congress flits uncomfortably between socialism and market economics. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the relative irrelevance of national parties — first experienced in Tamil Nadu after 1971 — has also become a feature of Uttar Pradesh which accounts for 80 MPs in the Lok Sabha.

Despite these opportunities, the Third Front hasn’t quite taken off. The many photo-ops have not been able to conceal the absence of a pre-eminent party and a coherent idea of the third way. With constant entries and departures, the Third Front has been ridiculed as a railway waiting room, a hallucination and worse.

The charge of incoherence is warranted. There appears to be two parallel versions of the third alternative jostling for prominence. The first is based on the assumption that the grouping of diverse groups from different backgrounds is a confederal partnership of equals.

For the Left, a confederal arrangement has involved an unhappy blend of two different ways of doing business with “bourgeois” parties — the United Front and the Popular Front, both dating back to the 1930s. The United Front approach involves Communists leading the fight with non-Communists in tow. The Popular Front involves Communists accepting the leadership of other classes.

In the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, the CPI(M) and CPI, despite having pretensions of being national parties, are confined to West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Having peaked in 2004, the Left parties are also aware that their parliamentary representation will see a sharp decline in 2009. Under the circumstances, the Communists are in no position to insist on a United Front approach. At the same time, the Popular Front approach involves ideological convulsions and a loss of ideological rigour. As a way out, the Left has attempted to forge a Third Front that is confederal in character but also bound together by a Left-dictated Common Minimum Programme that prioritises “secularism” and an “independent foreign policy”. It’s an attempt to preserve purity in a sea of contamination.

An alternative view of the Third Front is posited by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati. Unlike the others who attended her house-warming dinner last Sunday, Mayawati is not content to limit her influence to Uttar Pradesh. She perceives the BSP as third pole in a multipolar polity and believes that her projection as a prime ministerial candidate will electrify the Dalits and some backward castes.

On the shape of a Third Front, Mayawati’s most visible differences are with the Left. While professing equidistant opposition to the Congress and the BJP, the Left believes that the BJP is its Enemy Number One. Its hostility to the Congress is confined to the Indo-US nuclear agreement and some facets of economic policy. Like the CPI during the tenures of Jawaharlal Nehru and the early Indira Gandhi, a large section of the CPI(M) believes that the Congress has a “progressive” face. Even CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, widely perceived to be the unreconstructed face of his party, singled out Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram for the so-called aberrations of the UPA government, notably its pro-US and pro-free market tilt. At the same time, when push comes to shove, the CPI(M) is clear that the Congress, despite all its imperfections, is a better bet than the “fascist” BJP. After the rise of the BJP as the second national party, its view of the Congress is not fundamentally dissimilar to that of the CPI which traditionally had one foot in the “progressive” Congress camp.

Mayawati draws no such distinctions. She is willing to do business with either the Congress or the BJP as long as it promotes her larger objective of making the BSP a force throughout India. She is undeterred by the fact that the national ambitions may lead to the BSP first eating into the Congress’ Dalit votebank outside UP and thereby benefiting the BJP.

The Third Front is shaped by these sharply contradictory impulses. It is an inchoate cluster that pretends to act nationally but thinks locally. In opposition the Third Front enriches the mosaic of pluralism; in government at the Centre it provokes a nightmare.

This Ramzan, Muslims In UP Will Break Their Roza With A Glass Of Cow's Milk From RSS

The RSS's Muslim wing will organise iftars on Fridays in Uttar Pradesh this Ramzan and serve only cow milk and its products to drive home the message of 'save the cow' and that consumption of its meat invites diseases.

Mahiraj Dhwaj Singh, national co-convenor (organisation) of Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM) for Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, said it is for the "first time" that people who observe roza (fast), will be ending it with a glass of cow's milk.

The Divine Mayawati: Why Do Women Leaders Need To Be Goddesses?

By ARUN SHAH | INNLIVE

Or, at the very least, a friendly female relation who cannot be desired?

“To the backward classes, I am a devi. They are angry,” said Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Thursday.

A day before that, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dayashankar Singh had compared her to a “prostitute”, giving rise to demonstrations by activists and supporters in Lucknow.

Has Mulayam Singh Lost Support Of Azamgarh’s Muslims?

By Tareq Aziz | INNLIVE Bureau

SPECIAL REPORT “This is Azamgarh. Anything can happen,” says Tariq Shafique, a social activist from Sanjarpur, talking about Samajwadi party chief Mulayam Singh’s chances of winning the Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat. Sanjarpur village has come to be forever linked in the public mind with the controversial Batla House encounter. The two alleged terrorists that were killed in the 2008 shoot-out in Delhi belonged to this village.

Face the Elections: Power bigger than ideology

By M H Ahssan

As the race for the 15th Lok Sabha gains momentum, political posturing, too, is picking pace. Allies of the two major national parties – Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – have been bargaining hard and some of then have even walked out of the alliances.

While the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has shrunk from a 23-party coalition to just six now, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance is in no better shape. After the seat sharing fiasco in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Congress has decided to go alone in the two states even as the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Lok Jan Shakti Party and Samajwadi Party on Thursday decided fight the elections as one block.

In more bad news for the Congress, Union Health Minister Ambumani Ramadoss's party, the Pattali Makal Katchi (PMK) with six Lok Sabha seats, has switched sides once again. PMK will contest the elections in partnership with J Jayalalithaa's All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

With new alliance being formed every day, CNN-IBN’s Face the Elections debated: Alliance mela: Do the 2009 elections show an end of ideology?

The panelists included Congress leader and Minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal and BJP MP and Spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad and the debate was moderated by Senior Editor Sagarika Ghose.

At the start of the programme 81 per cent agreed while 19 per cent disagreed that the 2009 elections show an end of ideology

The Congress, which was sitting pretty just a few days ago, is now left with allies who are either fickle (Mamata Banerjee) or eyeing the top job (Shard Pawar) or are losing support (M Karunanidhi).

Kapil Sibal did not agree and instead claimed that it is the BJP which should be worried about allies deserting it.

“I think the Opposition should be more worried than us because at least those we are fighting in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have publicly stated that they will continue with the UPA. Ultimately they will be with us. So I don’t think we have lost anything. It is the NDA which has lost because from 23 coalition partners they have been reduced to six. We are not worried and frankly we have had an additional alliance with Mamata in West Bengal. So we have not lost anybody other than the PMK. I am sure the PMK is like a stream out of river and it will join the river back after the elections,” claimed Sibal.

Congress seems confident of getting the support of many parties who have left it as they have already backed Manmohan Singh’s candidature as for the post of prime minister. However, in the NDA not many want LK Advani as the prime minister. After Biju Janata Dal (BJD) walked out of the NDA in Orissa, the only major alliance partner is the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar. So Bihar must deliver for the NDA even as there have been miniscule gains in Haryana with the Om Prakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Lok Dal (NLD) and the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam.

Prasad began by giving a breakdown of the UPA partners claiming the Congress-led front was steadily losing ground.

“I can understand that Kapil has to undertake some self-consolation as it is a bad time for Congress. The UPA which was an opportunist amalgamation created in 2004 has disintegrated completely before the 2009 elections. Congress was give just nine seats in Uttar Pradesh (six) and Bihar (three) combined out of the 120 seats. In entire Eastern India they have just Mamata who is in alliance but not an ally. In North India they have no alliance; in West they have Sharad Pawar who is not an ally because of his prime ministerial ambition. In South except for Karunanidhi they have no alliance,” Prasad said

“As far as NDA is concerned, JD (U) is with us, Akali Dal is with us, Shiv Sena is with us, Chautala and AGP have joined us. UPA’s PM candidate is still uncertain but here it is Advani,” added Prasad.

The Congress has also been accused of not treating its alliance partners as equals. Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday in an election rally in Puducherry said that it would be “detrimental for Congress to fight elections with allies like RJD and Samajwadi Party in Bihar and UP”. So should words like detrimental be used for key allies like the RJD, and should not the Congress be more equal with its allies?

Sibal retorted by saying that the Congress is a national party and always cannot bow down to its alliance partners.

“It is misrepresentation of what Rahul said. In Bihar we fought four seats last time and won three. This time with any reference to us we were handed just three seats. If a regional party in Bihar wants to make sure that the national party has no presence in the state it means they want to pressurise the national party after the elections for many things. If we continue to accept what our allies are saying then we will become extinct in Bihar. Rahul Gandhi is absolutely right that to retain our presence as national party we need to fight more seats in Bihar,” argued Sibal.

Sibal continued saying the only way for Congress to rebuild itself was to contest more seats.

“If we fight just three seats if Bihar, there is no way we can build our party structure in Bihar. If we fight in only three seats and not in 37 or 40 seats, the Congress workers will be taken over by the RJD, Paswan’s party or to Nitish Kumar. Rahul Gandhi is absolutely right that we want to build in states where the regional parties want to throw us out,” said Sibal.

On the other hand the NDA , too, does not seem to be in better shape. The NDA was a 13-party alliance in 1998 and in 1999 it had 23 parties with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the leader. Now the BJP does not have a Vajpayee-like persona who can keep together ideologically disparate groups. BJP’s communal tag is driving away allies. The absence of a consensus–building figure like Vajpayee seems to the BJP’s biggest problem.

Prasad countered by arguing that Advani has the support of all NDA partners.

“Vajpayeeji’s blessings are always there and he has blessed Advaniji. Advaniji today is the declared and unquestionable prime ministerial candidate of the BJP and the NDA. NDA is intact and stands for new India. But Congress is being decimated. Congress is being marginalised and allies are deserting it. Congress is not a bankable cheque as far as allies are concerned. It is not in the DNA of the Congress to accommodate allies,” said Prasad.

Sibal shot back at Prasad saying it is the BJP that will struggle to keep its partners in days to come

“Prasad says Congress is not a bankable cheque. But look at the NDA. Out of 23 partners they are now left with just six. But he still calls the BJP bankable. The fact is even today Mulayam Singh, Amar Singh and Lok Jan Shakti Party say they have faith in the UPA and will continue to be with the Congress. Despite the fact that we are fighting against each other, they trust us. They are not leaving us. All secular parties will get together to fight communal forces. When the elections results come out, the six parties left with the BJP will also run away. Advaniji will continue to be the prime minister-in-waiting,” he said.

BJP built its alliance on the anti-Congress agenda. But it is proving to be a very weak force now. Perhaps only the Telugu Desam Party will never join the Congress but other parties may have no problems in supporting the UPA. Parties who have minority votes have problems with BJP. Only the Shiv Sena and the Akalis look like never leaving the BJP.

Prasad countered by saying, “AGP and Chautala’s party have joined us. The UPA came to power in 2004 and since then except for Assam, Rajasthan and Delhi the Congress has lost all state elections. Anti-Congress agenda is not dead. Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu and AIADMK are anti-Congress. If Kapil Sibal is so sure that they will fight against each other and come together after the elections then they are fooling the people of the country. Only NDA can deliver.”

Sibal concluded by taking a dig at the NDA.

“The NDA today has 172 seats. How they will deliver and when they will deliver? Maybe they will have to wait till 2018 if at all they have a chance,” he said.

India's Go-Favourite Holiday Destination 'Chambal' Valley

Gone thge days of Daaku Mangal Singh terror in Chambal Ghati, now the entire dacoity region has turned into tourist spot with green lushy atmosphere and good stay facilities. The story of dacoity terror to India's favourite holiday destination, where adventure, fun and good food is life.

Green mustard fields, stark landscape, a blue sky and loads of thrills, the road from Agra to Etawah was an introduction to the country’s most populated state—Uttar Pradesh. And this was the road that led to the once-dreaded Chambal valley.

Make voting compulsory

By A Surya Prakash

In the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election held in May 2007, just 1.10 lakh of the 2.42 lakh electors in the Govindnagar constituency exercised their franchise. A candidate of the Congress, who secured 29,993 votes (just 7.5 per cent of the total electorate) was declared elected in that multi-cornered contest. In the same election, in Deoria, just 40 per cent of the 3.49 lakh voters registered their votes. This, too, was a multi-cornered contest and the winner, a candidate of the Samajwadi Party, made it to the Assembly riding on the support of a mere 7.3 per cent of the electors. In Varanasi Cantonment, the Bharatiya Janata Party bagged the seat with the support of just 8.2 per cent of the total electors in that constituency.

There are hundreds of such examples from elections to Parliament and the State Assemblies over the last 10 years. They tell us how the system of representation has gone horribly wrong and how the very basic principle of democracy — that the opinion of the majority shall prevail — stands negated. The time has, therefore, come for us to re-evaluate the efficacy of the first-past-the-post system that has been in vogue since the first general election in 1952.

The defect in this system is not peculiar to Uttar Pradesh. A similar trend is visible in all States which are witnessing multi-cornered contests but an analysis of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Election held in 2007 only reinforces the argument that the present electoral system has failed us. Of the 403 constituencies in the State, winning candidates in just 14 constituencies secured more than 50 per cent of the votes polled, which means that 389 candidates made it to the Assembly on the support of a minority of the voters in their constituencies. In Karnataka, winning candidates in 175 of the 224 constituencies secured less than 50 per cent of the votes polled.

There are many reasons why this electoral system has proved to be a disaster in our country. Among the notable factors are voter lethargy and voter fatigue, growing cynicism about democracy and politics, atomisation of the polity consequent to the emergence of regional and caste-based political parties over the last 25 years and the consequential fragmentation of votes and lowering of the threshold for victory in elections. With almost every State witnessing a triangular or quadrangular contest among political parties, every election to an Assembly or the Lok Sabha is now resulting in a fractured mandate that virtually knocks the bottom out of the logic of representative democracy.

Election data from across the country since 1996 abounds with such examples of the disjunction between peoples’ will and electoral victories. Since only 40 to 50 per cent of the electors cast their votes and the loyalties of even this minority is torn between four or five political parties, the winner of an election to a State Assembly or the Lok Sabha usually ends up with the support of just 10 to 20 per cent of the total electors in the constituency.

As a result we do not have the faintest idea of what actually is the mandate of the majority of the electors in a given constituency. This remains a mystery forever. What we have before us is actually the preference of a minority of voters. However, despite mounting evidence that most legislators in India today enter democratic bodies riding on a minority vote, politicians, who are the major beneficiaries of this systemic defect, are unwilling to address the issue and search for remedies.

But all those who wish to see a truly representative democracy in India will have to press for legal measures to remedy the situation. Among the many solutions on offer, the one that I find most attractive is compulsory voting. This is the first step we need to take in order to lend depth and meaning to our democratic process.

There is nothing original or revolutionary in the idea of compulsory voting because this is already being implemented in one form or the other in 33 countries in the world and there are countries which enforced this over a century ago. According to the Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a number of countries across the world have made voting compulsory. Prominent among them are Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Argentina, Austria, Cyprus, Peru, Greece and Bolivia. Belgium set the ball rolling with the introduction of compulsory voting in 1892. Australia introduced it in 1924.

We need to look at the laws pertaining to compulsory voting in all these countries and draft a law that suits our country. The penalty that is imposed on violators of this law varies from nation to nation. For example, in Australia, those who fail to turn up for voting are fined 20 to 50 Australian dollars. Citizens who do not pay the fine could face a prison sentence. Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus and Peru also impose fines on absentee voters.

In Belgium, repeated abstention by a voter can lead to disenfranchisement. In Singapore a citizen who does not vote is removed from the list of electors. Getting your name back on the voters’ list can be cumbersome. In Bolivia, the penalty for not voting in an election is a salary cut, whereas in Greece the penalty could be harsher conditions for securing a passport or a driving licence.

We also need to incorporate this in the Article dealing with Fundamental Duties in the Constitution. Voting in elections must be made a fundamental duty. The right to vote must also become a duty to vote. The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution recommended something along these lines. It said in its report that “duty to vote at elections” and active participation in the democratic process of governance “should be included in Article 51 A”.

The splintering of political parties, combined with low voter turn-out, has reduced the democratic process to a complete farce. We can lend some authenticity to India’s democratic march by taking the difficult but inevitable decision to make voting compulsory. If we fail to do so and allow the citizens the luxury of treating elections with contempt, the day may not be far off when forces inimical to democracy will use these very arguments to put an end to the charade that is currently on and snuff out what little is left of representative democracy in India.

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