'Bahu Lao, Beti Bachao': RSS Launches New 'Love Jihad'

That's the 'bahu lao' bit. The 'beti bachao' initiative includes to Bajrang Dal's plan to conduct 'awareness programmes' at girls' schools and colleges in Uttar Pradesh, to hold debates and bring in 'intellectuals' to talk about the dangers of  'love jihad -- of the Muslim kind.

"I was for the war before I was against it," said US senator John Kerry in an infamous gaffe that cost him the US presidential election in 2004. The saffron right seems to have taken a similar line on love jihad, except with a twist:

Party Time For Rahul's Super-6 On UP's Rough Roads

By M H Ahssan / INN Bureau

The poll drums are booming in Congress election campaign chief Rahul Gandhi’s War Room at 13, Gurdwara Rakabganj Road. As part of his strategy for the 2014 general elections, the Gandhi scion has decided to involve Union ministers in revitalizing the party in their respective states. He is starting with his home state, Uttar Pradesh. Six ministers, Salman Khurshid, Shriprakash Jaiswal, Beni Prasad Verma, RPN Singh, Pradip Jain Aditya and Jitin Prasada—all from UP—have been asked to hit the road immediately after having been allotted a new territory each.

Focus: Power Scam Of Rs 32,700 Crore In Uttar Pradesh

By Sanjay Yadav / Lucknow

Uttar Pradesh is choking under heap of problems including power supply, unemployment, water supply etc. But when it comes to scams, this state of India surpasses the rest.

There is not a definite way to carry out scams in the administration but they are also not possible without the help and shelter of our ministers, bureaucrats and senior officials. None of the scam in Uttar Pradesh have been small scale. 

Muslim Vote: Not Swept Up In Modi Wave Or Rahul Mania

By Sanjay Malik | INNLIVE

In an election where the most prominent prime ministerial candidate is the starkly polarising Narendra Modi, it follows that the behaviour of the Muslim voter could have a telling impact on the eventual outcome. 

Whether the Muslim vote consolidates clearly against the BJP, whether Muslim voters in constituency after constituency vote carefully and tactically with the only objective of denying a victory to the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate, this could be key to how far the NDA finds itself from its the magic number of 272 MPs on May 16. 

Rajnath Singh – Best Man For The Parivar?

In 2009, he led the BJP to a bitter defeat in the Lok Sabha polls. Four years later, the party’s new chief has a tougher task at hand.

Both friends and foes of Rajnath Singh are astonished at his fortune. For someone who so believes in destiny that his closest political assistant is also his astrologer, the stars have certainly proved auspicious. On 23 January, Rajnath came back to the presidency of the BJP that he had lost following the defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha election. As the opposition to Nitin Gadkari proved too much for the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, to stave off, Rajnath was the beneficiary — the candidate the Sangh and the political dissidents within the BJP could agree on.

To those who know Rajnath, a former lecturer of physics from Gorakhpur University who served as agriculture minister under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and was the BJP’s last chief minister in Uttar Pradesh between 2000 and 2002, the events of 22-23 January may not have seemed as much of a surprise.

As HNN has tracked in its stories Rajnath had been diligently working towards a comeback in recent months. This was a culmination of a process of silent trading with leaders across the RSS and the BJP.

In 2009, when Rajnath relinquished office, he seemed to have burnt bridges with just about every senior BJP leader — including LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley. Yet, if he is back today, it is precisely because these players, as well as the RSS, neutralised each other enough to ensure no one person or faction — and there are at least three major factions in the BJP — would win the internal battle and manage to impose its choice as party president.

As the war intensified through the winter, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi used his proxies to campaign against a second term for Gadkari, with Ram Jethmalani adding to the pressure. The Advani camp saw Sushma, M Venkaiah Naidu and HN Ananth Kumar prodding Yashwant Sinha to file his nomination against Gadkari. If RSS sources are to be believed, Advani proposed Sushma as an alternative but her name was shot down and she stepped back, realising the Sangh wasn’t with her. Advani then suggested Naidu, who seemed set to file his nomination papers. At this point, Jaitley and Balbir Punj — both part of the Modi group — came in the way.

Meanwhile, Gadkari, who till the morning of 22 January was convinced of a second term — having had a chat with RSS leaders, including general secretary Suresh ‘Bhaiyyaji’ Joshi, in Mumbai — was in for a shock. News of income tax raids and surveys against him and his companies went viral. A desperate Bhaiyyaji Joshi called Advani to convince him to back Gadkari but found the patriarch unmoved.

The ball was in the Sangh’s court. It had to find a candidate who would toe its line as well as find acceptance among BJP leaders. Gadkari himself suggested Rajnath, having seen him as an ally and mentor in his stint in Delhi. This is where Rajnath’s years of hard work and cultivation came of use. The man shunted out of the presidency in a manner little different from Gadkari’s removal this time — and accused of allowing the RSS to micromanage BJP affairs in his term — was in the saddle again.

At the official election of Rajnath, the BJP put up a show of togetherness. Advani made a few ambiguous remarks about the need to guard against corruption and about Gadkari working nights while the rest of the party leadership worked days, but otherwise everybody praised each other. Rajnath acknowledged his predecessor generously.

Asked about the entire episode, BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar insisted, “Everyone wanted Gadkari to continue, but he was reluctant from day one and said since the Congress is targeting me and putting false charges against me, I will fight it out as I have nothing to hide.” Javadekar also called the income tax investigations against the Purti Group, which Gadkari founded, an example of “Congress vendetta politics”: “It was not even a raid. There were searches carried out without any basis. It was done for photo-ops.”

Nevertheless, the fact is party insiders were worried Gadkari’s re-election — the Purti Group faces accusations of funding and equity ownership by dubious shell companies — would cripple the anti-corruption campaign against the UPA government. Speaking on television, Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh had welcomed Gadkari’s possible second term and implied it would give his party lots to talk about. By exiting the arena, the political-businessman from Nagpur has denied the Congress that opportunity.

What does Rajnath bring to the table? In a party that is still largely urban in its profile, he is the standout rural face, having projected himself as a politician who understands concerns of farmers. As Shahnawaz Husain, the BJP MP from Bhagalpur (Bihar), put it, “Rajnathji is well recognised in rural areas by farmers. Apart from being the leader of the party, he is also the leader of farmers … We would get the benefit of that.”

Unlike Gadkari, Rajnath has experience of grassroots electoral politics. He took a big gamble in 2009 when he contested Lok Sabha elections from Ghaziabad. It was a tough seat but he worked hard and won. This won him respect and has given him an advantage over peers in the BJP who have thus far shied away from direct elections or preferred safe, Sangh-nurtured constituencies.

Yet, Rajnath’s previous term saw intense factionalism and infighting peak. His proximity to controversial businessman Sudhanshu Mittal, particularly before the Haryana state elections of 2009, when the BJP mysteriously decided to go it alone and eschew alliances, has raised eyebrows. When Rajanth appointed Mittal in charge of BJP state units in the Northeast, Jaitley began boycotting meetings to which Mittal was invited.

Rajnath has also presided over the BJP’s decline in Uttar Pradesh. Earlier this week, he was instrumental in welcoming Kalyan Singh back into the party and there was some irony to this. It was Kalyan’s removal as chief minister in 1999, as part of a campaign Rajnath orchestrated, that began the BJP’s slide in the state. In 2007, when Rajnath was party president, the BJP collapsed to 51 seats in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly of 403 members, its worst performance in two decades. In 2012, it did even more poorly.

A good performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha election is contingent upon Uttar Pradesh delivering seats to the BJP. This will be Rajnath’s principal challenge, as he is the party’s top leader from the heartland state. There are those who argue that not only will Rajanth bring his fellow Rajputs into the BJP fold but that he will work with his friend Kalraj Mishra, senior BJP politician in Uttar Pradesh, to weld together the different groups in the local party unit.

For the BJP, the road to New Delhi lies through not just Uttar Pradesh but a clutch of other states. At least two of these will pose questions to Rajnath, albeit in different ways. He has work to do in both Karnataka and Gujarat. In the former, the BJP government, the first the party formed in southern India, is in danger of being unseated following the rebellion of BS Yeddyurappa.

Even as Rajnath was settling into his new job, trouble was brewing in Bengaluru. Two ministers in the Karnataka government — Public Works Minister CM Udasi and Energy Minister Shobha Karandlaje — and 11 MLAs announced their decision to resign from the Assembly. This group of 13 is loyal to Yeddyurappa. Their departure would seem to have reduced the government of Jagadish Shettar — the BJP’s third chief minister in its 4.5 years in office — to a minority.

“The MLAs have no confidence in this government,” said Dhananjay Kumar, publicity head of Yeddyurappa’s newly formed Karnataka Janata Paksha, “it is all the BJP’s doing. This government cannot last. They ousted our leader who the people trusted …” Just how deep the wound goes is apparent from the fact that Dhananjay is a BJP and RSS veteran who was a minister in Vajpayee’s 13-day government in 1996, the first time the BJP tasted power in the national capital.

There are rumours that at least two other MLAs and one more minister may resign in the coming days. On 23 January, events acquired some hilarity as the breakaway legislators went around Bengaluru looking for Assembly Speaker KG Bopaiah. Only he was authorised to accept their resignation letters.

While Karandlaje had informed the Speaker in advance about the likelihood of resignations, Bopaiah simply disappeared, obviously to win time for the Shettar government. There were claims that Bopaiah was in his native village in the Coorg region or in Nepal or, as it appears, in Dubai. He is expected to return on 29 January. In that sense, Rajnath’s first crisis management operation has begun.

The new BJP president has some experience of Karnataka. Gadkari had used him and Jaitley as trouble-shooters when the corruption charges against Yeddyurappa had become untenable and the two emissaries from New Delhi had been tasked with getting the Karnataka strongman to quit as chief minister. Now, of course, the distance with Yeddyurappa may prove too wide to bridge.

The other state strongman who will have implications on Rajnath’s second term is Modi, just re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat. Rajnath had his differences with Modi in his earlier tenure but has mended ties of late. In 2012, he flagged off Modi’s Vivekananda Yatra. While Rajnath is now running the party organisation and commands the bureaucracy at 11 Ashoka Road, the BJP headquarters in New Delhi, Modi is expected to head the campaign committee for the 2014 polls and emerge as the face of the election.

The dynamic between the two — with the RSS banking on Rajnath to present a united front but also keep Modi’s personality and individualism within the framework of group identity — could determine the BJP’s prospects in the general election. That apart, Rajnath is expected to sort out differences in Rajasthan between Vasundhara Raje, the former chief minister, and a cabal of Sangh loyalists who do not want her to be nominated chief ministerial candidate in the run up to the November state election. How he resolves this, along with the composition of his team of officebearers, will give an early indication of his plans.

Rajnath Singh will be mindful that this is his last chance as well. As party president, he led the party to defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. He wasn’t to blame on his own. That verdict was in large measure a rejection of Advani, the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee. Even so, Rajnath would not want to carry the can for a second successive defeat in 2014. That remains his greatest fear. It could also become his greatest motivation.

Entrepreneur's campaign targets 2 MPs, 42 MLAs accused of crimes against women

Ever since people of the country came out on the streets, lit candles, held protest marches and clashed with the police, many had made direct and oblique references to the political culture of parties turning a blind eye towards giving tickets to candidates accused under different sections of Indian Penal Code for crimes against women including rape. The clamour for the clean-up of the political class seems to be only getting stronger.

With help from his friends and associates, Srikant Sastri, a Delhi-based entrepreneur and angel investor, has started a campaign called 'Save The Republic - Resign Before Jan 26th' on Facebook and Twitter to ask two MPs and 42 MLAs, accused of crimes against women including rape, to voluntarily tender their resignations before Republic Day. The data has been culled together from the affidavits submitted by candidates to the Election Commission of India and the various state election commissions.

Of these accused, six MLAs are accused of rape. As many as three of them are from Samajwadi Party (SP): Sribhagwan Sharma, Anoop Sanda and Manoj Kumar, all from Uttar Pradesh. Mohd Aleem Khan from BSP is another such accused from the same state. The BJP's Jethabhai G Ahir from Gujarat and TDP's Kandikunta Venkata Prasad from Andhra Pradesh are the other two.

Thirty six other MLAs have declared that they have other charges of crimes against women such as outraging the modesty of a woman, assault, insulting the modesty of a woman etc. Of these, six MLAs are from the Congress, five from the BJP and three are from SP.

UP has the maximum number of MLAs (eight) who have declared that they have charges of crimes against women, followed by Orissa and West Bengal with seven MLAs each.

Two MPs, namely Semmalai S of ADMK from Salem constituency in Tamil Nadu and Suvendu Adhikari of the Trinamool Congress (AITC) from Tamluk constituency in West Bengal, have declared that they have charges of crimes against women, such as cruelty and intent to outrage a woman's modesty etc.

Speaking to HNN, Sastri said, "While we understand that being accused for a crime and being convicted are not the same, given the level of public outrage, the lengthy judicial process and the haplessly low conviction rates, we believe it's time for the political parties of the country to try to reclaim the higher ground."

The campaign, launched in the first day of the new year at 12 midnight, seeks voluntary tendering of resignations on part of the elected representatives. "We do not want confrontation, we want dialogue with the parties, we want them to take this step out of self-realisation. As part of the build-up plan, we are also trying to reach out to the youth of our country by directly campaigning in colleges apart from running the e-campaigns," Sastri told HNN.

"We wanted to fix the date for January 26 not just because it is our Republic Day but also because a lot of people believe that attitudinal changes towards women is a time-taking process and are bogged down by a sense of helplessness. We wanted to put a time-frame to this to also let the political parties have a chance to show the people that they could act swiftly and decisively," Sastri added.

Incidentally, political parties gave tickets to 260 such other contesting candidates in the Legislative Assembly elections held in the last five years who have declared that they have charges of crimes against women such as outraging the modesty of a woman, assault, insulting the modesty of a woman etc.

Out of the 260 candidates who declared that they have been charged with crimes against women, 72 are/were independent candidates, 24 have been given tickets by the BJP, 26 by the Congress, 16 by the SP and 18 by the BSP.

Maharasthra has the maximum number of such candidates (41), followed by Uttar Pradesh (37) and West Bengal (22).

In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, political parties gave tickets to six candidates who declared that they have been charged with rape. Out of these six, three are from Bihar, one from Delhi, one from Uttar Pradesh and one from Andhra Pradesh.

Thirty four other contesting candidates from the 2009 Lok Sabha elections declared that they have charges of crimes against women.

Maximum cases of crimes against women are against candidates from Bihar (9), followed by Maharashtra (6), and Uttar Pradesh (5).

Sunday Interview: 'Confident To Expand MIM's National Footprint To Become A 'National Party': Asaduddin Owaisi

All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen chief insists that he isn't a 'coolie of secularism' either.

As the leader of a small Hyderabad-based party, Asaduddin Owaisi has been punching above his weight. He is the sole representative in the Lok Sabha of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen, better known as MIM, but that hasn't stopped him from presuming to speak on behalf of Indian Muslims both within and outside Parliament.

Over the last year, Owaisi has risen in prominence, partly due to his combative opposition to Hindutva rhetoric, but also because of electoral victories in Maharashtra.

Will This Election See Higher Turnout After 'Poll Tamasha'?

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

ANALYSIS While an increased turnout in Assembly elections is not an indicator of the same in Lok Sabha elections, aggressive campaigning points toward a higher turnout in this poll.

If the pattern of turnout in the Assembly elections held over the last couple of years are of any indication, the turnout in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections should significantly increase. Almost all the Assembly elections held in different States between 2012-13 witnessed a higher turnout compared to those held in previous years. 

Small States Syndrome: An India Divided Into 50 States On Economic Lines Will Ensure A True Shining Nation

By Prabhu Chawla (Star Guest Writer)

OPINION  Expediency is the mot juste for the Congress credo. The party founded by Alan Octavian Hume exactly 129 years ago swears by its imperial inheritance from the Union Jack—the British policy of divide and rule. For a party that advertises inclusive economics and politics, its policies and actions have always been aimed at polarising the nation along casteist, regional and religious lines. 

It chooses to divide when it fails to unite through pressure, persuasion and power. For example, after stonewalling the creation of a Telangana state for over five decades, it has suddenly discovered that dividing Andhra Pradesh is its only option to capture a small sliver of the stormy state. It is rare that a new state is created, not for economic and administrative reasons but purely to improve the political prospects of a party. 

The Doctor Only Knows Economics

This could be the UPA’s worst cut to its beloved aam admi. Healthcare has virtually been handed over to privateers. Govt seems to have abandoned healthcare to the private sector.

Diagnosing An Ailing Republic

• 70 per cent of India still lives in the villages, where only two per cent of qualified allopathic doctors are available
• Due to lack of access to medical care, rural India relies on homoeopathy, Ayurveda, nature cure, and village doctors
• While the world trend is to move towards public health systems, India is moving in the opposite direction: 80 per cent of healthcare is now in private sector
• India faces a shortage of 65 lakh allied health workers. This is apart from the nurse-doctor shortage.
• According to World Health Statistics,  2011, the density of doctors in India is 6 for a population of 10,000, while that of nurses and midwives is 13 per 10,000
• India has a doctor: population ratio of 0.5: 1000 in comparison to 0.3 in Thailand, 0.4 in Sri Lanka, 1.6 in China, 5.4 in the UK, and 5.5 in the United States of America
• Fifty-six per cent of all newborn deaths occur in five states: UP, Rajasthan, Orissa, MP and Andhra Pradesh
• Forty-nine per cent of pregnant women still do not have three ante-natal visits to a doctor during pregnancy
• An estimated 60,000 to 100,000 child deaths occur annually due to measles, a treatable disease
• Uttar Pradesh, the most populated state in the country, does not have a single speciality hospital for cancer
• The top three causes of death in India are malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea, all treatable
• The WHO ranked India’s public healthcare system 112th on a roster of 190 countries
• Post-independence India’s most noteworthy achievement in the public health arena has been the eradication of polio and smallpox
• Affair of the states
• Best Public Health Kerala, Tamil Nadu,  Maharashtra, West Bengal
• Worst Public Health Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa

India is taking firm steps to a certain health disaster. All of 80 per cent of healthcare is now privatised and caters to a minuscule, privileged section. The metros are better off: they have at least a few excellent public health facilities,  crowded though they might be. Tier II and III towns mostly have no public healthcare to speak of. As the government sector retreats, the private booms. In villages, if you are poor and sick, no one really cares, even if the government pretends to. 

You go to the untrained village “doctor”; you pray, you get better perhaps; all too often, you die of something curable. “India is the only country in the world that’s trying to have a health transition on the basis of a private healthcare that does not exist,” Amartya Sen said recently in Calcutta. “It doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. We have an out-of-the-pocket system, occasionally supplemented by government hospitals, but the whole trend in the world is towards public health systems. Even the US has come partly under the so-called Obamacare.”

Sadly, even the few initiatives the Indian state takes are badly implemented. Hear the story of Suresh, 45, who lost his younger sister to cancer, eight months ago. He’s a guard at the guesthouse of a pharmaceutical company in Mumbai and could not afford her treatment, so he sold some ancestral farmland in Gujarat. That money covered but a few months of bills from a private hospital. He then turned to a government hospital, but it didn’t have cancer care. It didn’t help in any way for Suresh that he worked for a pharmaceutical company: his job didn’t come with medical benefits. “We brought her back home, hoping that if we saved on the hospital bills, we would be able to buy her medication. Finally, the money I had was too little to provide her basic help. Maybe if I had been able to buy her medicines, she would have been alive today.”

But the state could have ensured that Suresh’s sister lived had he been able to utilise the ambitious health insurance scheme announced in Maharashtra in 1997. The Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana (RGJAY) is on paper supposed to provide for 972 surgeries, therapies or procedures, along with 121 follow-up packages in 30 specialised categories. It provides each family coverage of up to Rs 1.5 lakh in hospitalisation charges at empanelled hospitals. It even allows for treatment at private hospitals. But poor implementation has ensured Suresh and hundreds of families like his do not know of such a scheme. This is true of other schemes across the country too.

Meanwhile, health statistics are terrifying. More than 40,000 people die every year of mosquito-borne diseases, which are easily preventable; a maternity death takes place every 10 minutes; every year, 1.8 million children (below 5 years of age) die of preventable diseases. “We are the only country in the world with such a huge percentage of privatised healthcare. Recent estimates suggest that approximately 39 million people are being pushed into poverty because of high out-of-pocket expenses on healthcare. In 1993-94, the figure was 26 million people,” says Dr Shakhtivel Selvaraj, a health economist.

So the state’s pretence of reaching out to the poor is really quite a farce. Consider what’s been happening between the Planning Commission and health ministry. In November, the battle between then health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and the Planning Commission came to light: Azad had pressed for increased spending on the public sector while the commission was intent on increasing private participation. This was a telling comment on the priorities of the UPA government. But with the 2014 elections in view, the government would like to present “health reforms” as a political tool. A framework for “universal health for all” is expected by April this year.

According to the draft of the 12th Plan, the government will increase spending on health from 1.2 per cent of the GDP to 1.9 per cent, with greater emphasis on public-private partnership. While the expert group asked for scaling up public funding from the current 1.2 per cent of GDP to roughly 2.5 per cent by the 12th Plan-end (2017-18) and to roughly 3 per cent by the 13th Plan-end (2023-24), the government only relented a bit—enough to give it room to announce more populous aam admi schemes. D. Raja of the CPI believes that “through PPP (public-private-partnership), floated in the 12th Plan, the government is working as facilitator for private sector”, something that goes against the constitutional mandate of a welfare state. 

Former health secretary Sujata Rao says the state “cannot co-opt the private sector to provide healthcare for which government is paying money without framing stringent rules and norms.” More than 70 per cent of expenditure on health in the past five years has come from households. In its nine years in power, the UPA has overseen the shrinking of the public sector and the boom in the private. 

All the while, it has paid lip service to aam admi causes—even as it pushes people from the margins into the wilderness. In those five years, the well-to-do have obtained better healthcare than ever before. Both the Congress and the BJP have said in their party manifestos that they want to make India a “health tourism” destination. That has already happened. Would the UPA, champion of the aam admi’s interests, pat itself on the back for that? 

Meanwhile, most private facilities ignore a Supreme Court directive to reserve a certain percentage of their beds and treatment for the poor because they were given land at concessional rates.

Barely 100 km from the national capital, the Kosi Kalan district of Uttar Pradesh, near Mathura, presents a pathetic picture of community health care. Four months ago, the primary health centre, which caters to more than 50,000 patients with two trained nurses and two doctors, was upgraded into a community health centre with a new building. However, doctors haven’t been posted at the new centre. Says Rajkumar, a doctor at the primary health centre, “We got the new building about four months ago. We are waiting for administrative sanctions”.

It’s a familiar tale of rural India. But what is also significant is that in the post-liberalisation era, the government health sector has virtually vanished from Tier II and III urban centres. Subedar Gupta, 32-year-old commercial vehicle driver from Gurgaon, has discovered that the government sector is an empty shell. It’s the private sector that has fleeced him. His wife Chanda Devi has been complaining of severe bodyache, itching and weakness for the last five years and no one knows why. Gupta spent about Rs 30,000 last month at private hospitals. He is now broke. “They ask us for same tests—blood test, X-rays and ecg. She is continuously on medicines. They are sucking all the money out of us.”

Millions of Indians living in small towns go through the same agony--not knowing where to turn to in the absence of a good health system. Because of that, thousands travel to Delhi’s overburdened AIIMS and Safdarjung Hospital, which are staffed with excellent doctors. The rest just pay for a private system designed to extract the maximum from each patient. “Public health is a big question in small cities. They have government hospitals, which are not well-equipped—in terms of infrastructure or adequate numbers of doctors and other staff.  There is also a shortage of woman doctors,” says Dr Rajesh Shukla, a consultant who has evaluated icds programmes in rural areas and studied medical care in small towns.

A large number of swanky hospitals and clinics have come up in urban India. But that does not ensure good care. There is also the issue of all this being loaded in favour of a profit-seeking system. Take the Rashtriya Swastha Bima Yojna, a government-supported health insurance scheme that rides on the private sector to provide medical care and surgical procedures at predetermined rates. Experts point to the dangers of induced demand and the prescription of unnecessary procedures to claim insurance benefits. Besides, the technology at private centres is often used to fleece patients rather than help them.

Dr Subhash Salunke, former director-general of health services, Goa, and currently director of the Public Health Federation of India, says the private sector is very scattered and unregulated, leading to lot of malpractices. This could have been checked to some extent had rules of the Clinical Establishment Act, 2010, been framed and implemented. Two years after the legislation was passed by Parliament, it hasn’t been implemented. The problem lies with the “stiff resistance from the private sector to the laying down of guidelines”.

The health sector is also crippled by a shortage of doctors and nurses (see graphic). So when the government says it is serious about training more doctors and nurses, by setting up six new AIIMSes, it makes for sound planning. But politics quickly shows up: one of the AIIMSes is planned in Sonia Gandhi’s constituency, Rae Bareli. Many doctors trained in excellent government medical colleges swiftly move to the private sector; they are even reluctant to take up rural jobs or postings. 

“Of the 1,400 doctors appointed after a proper selection process, only 900 joined the service,” disclosed a spokesman of the Uttar Pradesh health directorate. Because of the shortage of doctors in government hospitals, the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) had started to recruit those trained in the Ayurvedic, Unani, Siddha and homoeopathic streams, but the process was stalled by a Rs 5,000 crore scam.

So the poor continue to suffer. In a general ward of Krishnanagar Hospital in Nandia District, West Bengal, members of a patient’s family say that not a single doctor checked their ward for 24 hours after he was admitted with a cerebral condition. The doctor assigned to the hospital, who was in his chambers some 10 km away, had this to say when tracked down by Outlook, “I’m the only doctor for close to 500 patients. Is it possible for me to visit each and every patient? You have to understand my constraints. There is very little monetary incentive for doctors working in the rural areas. These are punishment postings. No one wants to come here. They want to work with rich patients and earn big money.”

As he spoke, there were close to 100 patients waiting in the visiting room to see him. They were all from the villages and small towns in Nandia district. Krishnanagar Hospital is the main district hospital and patients from all over Nadia are referred to this hospital. In Uttar Pradesh, modern private health services have yet to reach beyond a dozen key cities. The rest of the state has to depend on these 12 cities, a handful of which have facilities for tertiary care. 

Some facilities are available only in Lucknow, where the government has concentrated all the healthcare while the rest of the sprawling state—75 districts—goes without even secondary care. According to the NRHM’s fourth common review mission report, of the 515 community health centres in Uttar Pradesh, 308 were below norms laid down in the Indian Public Health Standards.

Even in states that are economically better off, such as Andhra Pradesh, it is an abject tale. Right from Seetampeta in north Srikakulam district to Utnoor in Adilabad, the public healthcare system is in a shambles. Adivasis simply have no access to potable drinking water and succumb easily to totally preventable diseases. If it’s gastroenteritis in Adilabad, it’s malaria in Paderu Agency of Visakhapatnam district. 

Anti-larval spraying operations are late and haphazard. Community health workers are badly trained. Human rights teams which visit these areas say the medicines provided are sometimes past the expiry date. “Deaths due to malaria are sought to be passed off as due to other diseases like cancer, heart stroke, old age or TB,” says V.S. Krishna of the Human Rights Foundation. 

Once touted as a model state for implementation of health insurance, Andhra Pradesh today faces a problem where the scheme is being misused by the rich. A qualified doctor himself, the late YSR, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, launched the Rajiv Aarogyasri Scheme in 2006, providing medical cover of up to Rs 2 lakh for bpl families. Since corporate hospitals handle a bulk of the procedures, the scheme is misused. Says a cardiac surgeon at a leading Hyderabad hospital, “The rich come and seek heart procedures under Aarogyasri, casually whipping out white cards meant for bpl families. There are no checks.”

The ailments of the poor often have nothing to do with the agendas of rich and powerful pharma companies. Are there lessons India can learn from the world? Experts say that the US has one of the worst public healthcare systems in the developed world. But in most countries, in Latin America or Europe, universal healthcare been achieved through governments. 

In Asia, Sri Lanka and Thailand can teach India some lessons on the health front. So India may be a powerful nation simply by dint of its size and market. But it is also a ‘sick’ nation, where there’s no help for the poor when they fall sick. It’s a country where a poor man can die on the pavement outside a gleaming state-of-the-art hospital with the best medical technology in the world.

So far so good in Indian Elections 2009

By M H Ahssan

As India enters the crucial round three of its month-long, five-phase parliamentary elections on Thursday, the electoral fate of the ruling Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the opposition and the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) prime ministerial candidate Lal Krishna Advani and 1,565 other candidates will be sealed by over 140 million voters.

While Gandhi looks comfortably positioned in her Rae Bareli constituency in Uttar Pradesh, a traditional Nehru-Gandhi dynasty stronghold for over five decades, the Hindu nationalist BJP premier hopeful Advani isn't badly off either in Gandhinagar (Gujarat) where he has trounced his opponents in each election since 1991.

Other prominent political leaders in the fray in this phase include erstwhile prime minister H D Deve Gowda, Sharad Yadav (Madhepura), Shahnawaz Hussein (Bhagalpur), Jyotiraditya Scindia (Guna) and Yashodhara Raje Scindia (Gwalior).

The third round of the polling will cover a swathe of 107 constituencies across 11 states and two union territories. Ballots will be cast for 26 seats in Gujarat, 16 in Madhya Pradesh, 15 in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in West Bengal, 11 each in Bihar and Karnataka, 10 in Maharashtra and one each in Jammu and Kashmir, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. This important polling phase will also witness the election of a new 32-member legislature in India's northeastern border state of Sikkim.

In the wake of this phase, polling will be wrapped up for 372 of the total 543 Lok Sabha (Lower House) seats. Observers point out that by this stage in the 2004 general elections, the National Democratic Alliance combine had bagged 45 seats while the now ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had scooped 30 and the left parties 19.

However, despite the evidence of past arithmetic, poll analysts assert that voter turnout could still swing things either way.

It's quite another matter though that India's egregious heat (43 degrees Celsius plus) and an overall disenchantment with the political class have acted as a dampener for much of the electorate this year. As a result, voter turnout has been a modest 55% across the 12 states in the first two phases of the elections. However, there have been a few surprises, like Andhra Pradesh, which has recorded a turnout of over 68%. Analysts feel that Andhra Pradesh, with a population of more than 70 million, may well turn out to be a key determinant in deciding who India's next ruler could be.

Orissa comes in a notch lower with a 62% turnout. However, the biggest surprise was Amethi (Uttar Pradesh), Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi's constituency. Despite the Congress machinery being pressed into full service to garner support for him, including his sister Priyanka Vadra's vigorous canvassing, the area recorded a tepid 40% turnout.

Interestingly, according to poll pundits, the lowest turnout for any Lok Sabha election in India was in 1952 (45.7%), while the highest - 64.1% - was witnessed in 1985. The last elections in 2004 saw 58.1% of the electorate turn up to cast their ballots.

Another unusual trend witnessed in this election has been the relatively better (58%) voter turnout of middle and upper class voters in urban areas. This is in direct contrast to past electoral traditions in India where it is usually the economically weaker sections which come out in droves to vote while the rich register abysmal turnouts of 40% or less.

Over the past four general elections since 1977, the trend has been that the poor have invariably voted in greater numbers than the country's upper classes with rural areas recording greater turnout than the urban pockets. This trend, concede poll analysts, contrasts starkly with Western nations where political participation - especially one's franchise - is taken very seriously by the educated and the empowered sections of society.

High turnout or not, election 2009 has also been significant for another reason: an unprecedented level of security with the deployment of over 3 million personnel to keep a strict eye on electoral proceedings. As a result, elections have more or less been peaceful, with only a few sporadic cases of violence. The only major trouble spots have been the Naxalite-affected areas of Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, which witnessed the killing of 19 people across 86 polling stations. Here, Maoists had called for a boycott of the elections and carried out a series of attacks in mid-May.

Be that as it may, all eyes are now focused on May 16, when the poll results will start trickling in after two more rounds of polling. As a single-party government in India looks unlikely in the current scenario - with both the BJP and the Congress likely to fall short of the requisite magic numbers to form a government at the center - at least half a dozen smaller political parties, representing India's multifarious regions, castes and sub-castes, are set to lobby hard for key government positions. There is even a chance that one of their leaders may become next prime minister. And as is entirely expected, vigorous horse-trading will then commence for candidates who carry maximum political weight.

But significantly, unlike past coalitions, this time political alliances will be cobbled together only after all results have been announced. This will further heighten the uncertainty about what kind of political permutation will rule in Delhi. New alliances will need to be forged, and what cannot be entirely ruled out is a third front - a conglomerate of non-BJP and non-Congress parties - forming the government, leaving the two major national parties wringing their hands.

But more than the power-broking, what will be of most concern to the Indian electorate ultimately is the type of coalition government that will emerge out of the current chaos and alphabetical soup of regional parties. The more delicately poised the coalition, analysts say, the more cumbersome it will be for it to make politically contentious choices.

The Telangana Decision Can’t Be Left To The UPA’s Electoral Gambles

India deserves a debate and a broad template on the criteria for the creation of new states. Presuming the UPA government gives in to the demand for a separate Telangana state, three issues will merit pondering. First, the creation of India’s 29th state would follow a Congress assessment that it could persuade the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) into an alliance in the 2014 General Election. Second, the impact of an individual — or rather of his sudden death and absence — would have had astonishing and far-reaching consequences.

The current round of the decades-long Telangana movement began in November 2009 when K Chandrasekhar Rao, chief of the TRS, went on a fast. Just months earlier, the TRS had been drubbed in elections in Andhra Pradesh. Rao was elbowed out of reckoning by the Congress chief minister, YS Rajasekhara Reddy. When Reddy died in an air crash, the Congress lost its strongman and Rao smelt a chance. He went on a fast hoping to assuage his supporters, win back lost ground and embarrass the Congress. Instead, the tumult on the streets, and the new chief minister’s inability to tackle it, led the Union government to panic. A concurrence with the idea of Telangana was hurriedly announced.

In the three years since, the Congress has spent its time explaining away that panic attack and attempting to delay a decision. It appointed the Justice Srikrishna Committee to study the Telangana option. The committee’s report kept one chapter secret because it referred to possible national security challenges arising from a separate Telangana. A covert chapter was the last thing astute politicians would have recommended. It only served to make the atmosphere seem that much more suspicious.

Third, ideally a policy decision — any policy decision — should set a precedent and suggest normative benchmarks for the future. This has not and is not happening in the case of Telangana. There is no clarity as to parameters being considered for statehood. The first State Reorganisation Commission in the 1950s used the criterion of language, sometimes bunching together linguistically similar segments of different states. In the Northeast, especially following the breaking up of Assam in the 1970s, and in the case of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in 2000, the logic of ethnicity was used.

For better or worse, both these parameters — language and ethnicity — set a precedent. More recently, assessments of state creation and dismantling of gigantic provinces have focussed on administrative ease — as in the case of the proposal to create four daughter states from Uttar Pradesh. There has also been limited talk of economic viability.

Old postulates have sometimes been proved right and sometimes quite wrong. There is no uniform rule that small states do well. For every Haryana that is successful, there is a Goa that faces enormous challenges. Jharkhand was cut out of Bihar under the assumption that it was exploited and oppressed by Patna, but being mineral-rich was a likely front-ranker. In the past 13 years, Bihar has moved towards stable, responsible government and Jharkhand has rapidly become India’s basket case.

Taken together, this is a robust and varied experience to draw from. The astonishing thing is none of this has influenced or been used to guide political and public discourse about what to do with Telangana, one way or the other. What are the parameters for statehood in 21st century India? If Telangana is accepted, what are the operative reasons to deny, for instance, Vidarbha liberation from Maharashtra or Harit Pradesh an autonomous existence in what is today western Uttar Pradesh or even Bundelkhand a statehood comprising some of the poorest districts of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh? Would those seeking these new entities be turned away only because there is no power vacuum in the state capital in question and because no inept government has allowed a fast and a restive throng to overtake rational decision-making?

Should the UPA leadership announce the formation of Telanagana — or even if it doesn’t — what India surely deserves is a discussion and a broad agreement on the criteria for creation of new states: administrative or fiscal, related to infrastructure or population size, flowing from objective estimates of economic neglect and backwardness or otherwise. The UPA government may think it only owes Telangana a state. Actually, it owes India some answers.

Special Report: Rising AIMIM On India Map, Owaisi's Facing Undemocratic Attitude And 'Hinduvta Hurdles'

It is one thing to critique a political leader, quite another to endorse the denial of democratic rights to him or her. There is no denying that the democratic right of Owaisi has been trampled upon. 

You only have to look at the manner in which the Uttar Pradesh government of Akhilesh Yadav has been refusing permission to him to address the AIMIM rallies in the state.

Will Multi-Cornered Fights Cost BJP The Elections In 2014?

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

SPECIAL REPORT The most interesting aspect of the 2014 elections is that, despite the initial momentum gained by the BJP under Narendra Modi, its outcome is still unpredictable. This is largely because of two factors: the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, and its plans to spread elsewhere; and two, the fear of Modi, which may drive unusual partnerships in some states (Congress-BSP in UP and Congress-RJD-LJP in Bihar). 

This means straight fights between the Congress and BJP will be restricted to Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Rajasthan and Punjab. In a data-driven INNLIVE analysis of electoral outcomes in three- and four-horse races, has come to the conclusion that the BJP tends to do less well in such cases, and the Congress relatively better.

Will Multi-Cornered Fights Cost BJP The Elections In 2014?

By Shashi Kumar | INNLIVE

The most interesting aspect of the 2014 elections is that, despite the initial momentum gained by the BJP under Narendra Modi, its outcome is still unpredictable. This is largely because of two factors: the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, and its plans to spread elsewhere; and two, the fear of Modi, which may drive unusual partnerships in some states (Congress-BSP in UP and Congress-RJD-LJP in Bihar). 

Amar Singh: A Political Reality

By M H Ahssan

Amar Singh after months of careful discussion between his supporters in Uttar Pradesh and having taken an extensive tour of the province has finally declared of the formation of Lok Manch which would be a non political entity to begin with and might later end up contesting elections in Uttar Pradesh.

Having written a series of articles on Amar Singh from the time he fell sick, it is indeed interesting to follow the career of this much talked about politician. There are times I felt that he has been garrulous to an extent that doesn’t befits his stature of a prominent politician but then Amar Singh has always been like that. His intensive knowledge of Urdu poetry which he would quote at any given moment, his knowledge of the backward tribes of Uttar Pradesh and their special needs and his creativity within the political arena makes him a figure that can’t be forgotten or avoided.

Former Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh said that his newly formed Lok Manch was on the lines of the late V.P. Singh's Jan Morcha which the latter had formed after marching out of the Congress in the eighties.

"My Lok Manch is a non-political forum on the lines of V.P. Singh's Jan Morcha, but I do not deny that this body will eventually merge into the sea of politics," Singh told media persons here Monday.

Accompanied by his Bollywood entourage comprising Sanjay Dutt, Jaya Prada and Manoj Tiwari, he said: "I propose to launch a full scale movement with effect from December 1, for the creation of an independent state of Purvanchal to be carved out of the neglected backward Eastern Uttar Pradesh."

I do check on his blog regularly and there are times I felt that his judgement on certain party seats went wrong. Mulayam Singh’s daughter in law lost her seat at the Ferozabad constituency. Abu Azmi, a close confidante of Amar Singh vacated his seat for his son Farhan Azmi. Farhan lost the election in spite of hectic campaigning done by Amar Singh immediately after he came back from a kidney transplant surgery. This clearly indicates that family hierarchy in the absence of intellectual strata does not go down well with people who are aware now and would obviously choose for the best. I had suggested it earlier to Amar Singh.

But then my admiration goes for the way he has created a niche in politics in spite of being expelled from the Samajwadi party. I admire him for his excellent grasp on the English language which he studied under none other than the famous poet, Professor P. Lal at Presidency College, Kolkata.

As I write about him, my outlook express shows that he has posted another blog. His closeness to Subroto Mukherjee another creative politician has been mentioned in his latest blog and his entry into politics after being elected as the Secretary of the Burra Bazar Congress Committee, Kolkata.

The most surprising factor which he has revealed now is his being considered from the Bhind constituency during his days of closeness to Madhavrao Scindia. Being from Gwalior, I understand the politics of Bhind from where the journalist Udayan Sharma got elected. I had met Udayan a number of times during his visit to Gwalior during the eighties. Things would have been entirely different if he had succeeded in getting a ticket for Bhind and later winning it on a Congress I platform.

I had written about Amar Singh’s tryst with films in these columns. He had acted in a number of Bangla and Hindi films. Creativity within politics is a taboo factor and creative impulses have always been pushed down ruthlessly. Be it Kunwar Natwar Singh or Jaswant Singh, the party never promoted lateral thinking or intellectual outbursts. Amar Singh acted in the first week of May in a Malayalam film titled, ‘Mumbai Mittai’ opposite Dimple Kapadia. The film was shot in Kerala. He plays the role of a classical singer.

Earlier he had done a role in Devanand’s film, ‘Charge Sheet’.

Somebody in South Africa asked me the reason that the Minister of Art and Culture doesn’t have any idea of Art or Culture and why shouldn’t an artist, poet, musician or a politician who has an in-depth of knowledge of such disciplines, shouldn’t be chosen as the Minister. I had no reply and I refrain to talk on South African politics.

I remember in the seventies when Yamini Krishnamurti came to give a dance performance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University where I happened to be a frequent visitor. Stalwarts as Sitaram Yechury, Hemant Joshi and Purushottam Agarwal were there in the audience. The university was controlled by the Marxists. Somebody asked her, ‘What is the Marxist interpretation of your dance’. Pop came the answer, ‘I think politicians too can dance’.

Tactical Voting: Is Defeating Modi Really A Muslim Priority?

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

EDITORIAL It is received wisdom (or is it assumption?) that the Muslim vote will go against the BJP in most places. This might well happen in some constituencies and states, but there are now good reasons to question the assumption that the Muslim vote will be cast en bloc to stop the Narendra Modi bandwagon in its tracks. 

To be sure, voting against Modi, even if it were to happen, does not affect the BJP’s overall prospects, especially if the anti-Modi vote is distributed among two or more parties parties, as it could happen in Uttar Pradesh. But there are now straws in the wind indicating that the Muslim vote may not be monolithic anyway. It may not even be that enthusiastic about voting solidly against Modi. 

Missing Buffaloes Found, What About Missing Children?

By Shafia Nazeer | Lucknow

After a massive buffalo hunt operation, involving sniffer dogs and crime branch officials, Uttar Pradesh police has finally a reason to smile. Although 3 policemen have been punished, but this could have been worse had they failed to trace the buffaloes. Above all, this was a priority case and Superintendent of Police led the operation and delivered in time. Great job Uttar Pradesh police.

Muzzafarnagar riots victims can wait, nothing is going to happen to them now since they have managed to survive the severe winter period. Yes, some deaths have been reported, but you can't control everything. 

The Imponderables: Will Mayawati Be UP's Jill-In-The-Box?

By Sumair Ahluwalia | INNLIVE

UTTAR PRADESH ELECTIONS If Uttar Pradesh is the black box of this general election, Mayawati is the Jack in that box. Or rather Jill-in-the-box.

The fate of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats depend on four M’s – Modi, Mulayam, the Muslim and Mayawati. While everyone acknowledges the first three M’s, Mayawati tends to get underplayed.

Not without reason. Thanks to the widely reported trend of communal polarisation, it is assumed that the BJP and the Samajwadi Party (SP) will be the main beneficiaries from this.

Exclusive: Why India Needs More States And A Bigger Govt

By Kajol Singh / INN Bureau

Our states are bloated and this is one reason they are not manageable. If India’s states were nations, 10 of the world’s top 21 countries would come from India. Uttar Pradesh, with more people than Pakistan, would be the world’s fifth largest country. The chief minister of that state rules as many people as the Chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of France and Britain put together.