Why 'Tribal Mother Mary' Offends Jharkhand’s Adivasis?

By Niharika Mulle / Ranchi

Protests by Adivasis are not new to Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand. There have been numerous protests against displacement or atrocities by security forces engaged in anti-Maoist operations. On 25 August, however, the city saw a different kind of tribal agitation when hundreds of Adivasis raised their voice against the Catholic Church. They were protesting against what they see as an attempt by the Church to appropriate their indigenous cultural symbols.

At the heart of the controversy is a statue of Mother Mary dressed in a white saree with a red border, wearing bangles and ear studs, and holding Baby Jesus in a child sling — an image that makes the Christian icon resemble the local Adivasi women. The statue was unveiled in May by Ranchi Cardinal P Telesphor Toppo at a parish church in Kumba Toli village in Singhpur tehsil of Ranchi district. The Adivasi protesters allege that the statue hurts their sentiments. And it’s the saree that they find the most offensive.

New Telengana: Vote For Development Or Out Of Gratitude?

By M H Ahssan | INNLIVE

SPECIAL REPORT Perhaps, it far is more difficult to predict the poll outcome in the yet-to-be established state of Telengana, which goes to polls on April 30th, than in the Seemandhra region. In the residual state of Andhra Pradesh, it is a straight fight, a week later, between the TDP-BJP combine and the YSR Congress, with the other contenders, like the Jai Samaikandhra party of former chief minister, N. Kiran kumar Reddy, and his parent-party, the Congress, being also-rans.

Analysis: Failed Promises, UPA's Pool Of Lies In Jharkhand

By Sanjida Majid / Ranchi

“Baang,” she replies when asked if she drinks water from the handpump she’s standing next to. That’s ‘no’ in Lukhi Murmu’s native Santhali language. There is filthy water around the pump. A pig grunts nearby, stubborn enough to return when chased away, to forage on the rice left over from the washed utensils. “Water from all the handpumps in our village smells a lot,” she says. It’s the high iron content. “We can’t help but go to the pond twice daily to collect drinking water.

A Couple's Contraceptive Revolution

By Swapna Majumdar

For the last 10 years, Sunita and her husband, Shailendra Kumar Singh, have been working together in Anantkamtaul village, district Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in generating awareness about family planning. But it hasn't been easy. In a state where cultural taboos confine women to the home and hearth, Sunita has not only been able to break free of these shackles, she is also engaging with issues as sensitive and prickly as family planning.

All this may never have been possible had it not been for Janani, a Bihar-based NGO working on family planning in Bihar and Jharkhand. The uniqueness of Janani's programme in training and motivating rural health workers to work with communities and advise them about family planning services, is its insistence on couples only as motivators. By training the wife, it has been able to get women to step out of their traditional roles; and empowered them to be change agents.

Today, Sunita is a part of Janani's network of 32,000 rural health providers who are making a difference. No longer is it just men coming to ask for contraceptives, women too are seeking family planning services. "This change has come because of the presence of my wife. It has made a big difference in making women feel more comfortable," says Shailendra Singh, Sunita's husband.

Bihar and Jharkhand make up 10 per cent of India's population - a staggering 118 million. The fertility rate in Bihar is 4, the highest for any state in India, and in Jharkhand it is 3.31, as against 2.68 in the rest of the country. It is estimated that 11,200,000 people in the two states want to contain their family size but do not know how to access family planning services.

This is where Janani's strategy of making use of a husband-wife team has helped. The team works to address misconceptions about family planning. The roles and responsibilities of each partner is well defined. For instance, while Sunita looks after the women, her husband is in charge of advising the men.

But IUDs (intrauterine devices) and oral pills are not all the motivators speak about. The couple offers advice to pregnant women about nutrition and child spacing. More importantly, they stress on the importance of the health of the woman. They explain that a woman should not be the one to bear the burden of family planning and feel compelled to undergo tubal ligation. They must educate men about the option of no scalpel vasectomy (NSV), which is quicker than tubal ligation and requires no surgery.

Even though winds of change are blowing in her village, Sunita feels her work would have been far more effective if more women were educated. During the last 10 years, Sunita says that she has been able to convince many couples that it was the health of the child that is important, not its sex. "I tell them girls are as good as boys and they should not keep having children in the hope of a boy. I give them the example of the widow in the village, who has only one child, a daughter. Although married, the daughter looks after her. I contrast it with the case of another family where the son has thrown out his widowed mother. What good is the son if he doesn't look after his parents in their old age, I ask them. This argument has motivated many couples," Sunita contends.

However, it is not merely the couples who need motivation. They reach out to mothers-in-law as well for, more often than not, they have considerable influence on the size of the family. This is where Sunita scores. Not only is she able to gain access to the entire household because she is a woman, she is also able to take advantage of being a trained motivator and the wife of the rural medical practitioner (RMP).

But when she comes across some difficult 'cases' she has had to think out of the box. As she did in the case of Sitavi Devi, the mother-in-law of Geeta Devi, 25. Geeta already had four children including two sons when she became pregnant for the fifth time. After giving birth to premature twin daughters, Geeta was weak and anemic even four months after giving birth.

Geeta didn't want any more children but she did not have the courage to say so. Every time Sunita would talk about family planning, Geeta's mother-in-law would say that the family needed more children to increase its income. At present Geeta's husband, a rickshaw puller, is the only bread winner in the family.

But Sunita did not give up after hearing this argument. She took the support of Sitavi Devi's neighbors to reason with her. She motivated Anamika Kumar, 16, a student living next door and their combined efforts finally bore fruit. Although Sunita told them that a vasectomy for her son would be quicker and painless compared to a tubal ligation for her daughter-in-law, the mother-in-law agreed to Geeta getting sterilized. "I did not insist on the vasectomy because at least she agreed to allow her daughter-in-law to undergo a sterilization. This is also a big step and the beginning of a change in her mindset," says Sunita.

Change is also visible in village Abirpur, in the adjoining district of Vaishali, where the husband-wife team of Manoj Maharaj and Reena have been able to rope in husbands to talk about family planning. In fact, they managed to motivate local resident, Jyotish Kumar Sharma, to join hands with them to spread the message about keeping families small and healthy. He has even performed street plays propagating these messages in the five other villages of the district.

It was Reena who played a pivotal role in counseling Sharma's wife, Neerja, after she had a near fatal brush with death giving birth to their third child, to undergo a tubectomy. Neerja revealed that once she and her husband understood the importance of maternal and child health, the decision was quick.

Getting husbands on board has helped the Janani teams to raise awareness about family planning. While the wife motivates her counterparts to talk to their husbands about NSVs, the husbands explain the entire procedure and benefits in simple terms. Once the men agree, they are referred to Janani's Surya clinics where these services are provided. So far, Manoj and Reena have referred 50 cases. The beneficiaries are taken to the clinic and dropped back home by the motivator, free of charge.

In rural Jharkhand,too, Janani motivators inspire men to opt for NSVs. Local RMP and motivator Rajesh Kumar of village Murtu, district Ranchi, is young and energetic. In fact, the newly-married Kumar has vowed that he would undergo NSV after two children. "If I don't look after my wife's health, who will? More importantly, if we are to motivate others, we must lead by example," he says.

In these two states where primary health centres are few and far and family planning a tabooed topic, Janani teams have opened the doors to winds of change.

IS JHARKHAND NEXT ON CHIT FUND PONZI SCHEMES?

By Sumit Rajan / Ranchi

West Bengal and neighbouring Odisha and Assam might be bearing the maximum brunt of the recent chit fund scams, but Jharkhand is not far behind. The deadly tentacles of the ponzi scheme have also gripped several people in the state. As usual, the people bearing the brunt are the lower middle class and the poor who trusted their life’s savings with these companies.

Disowned By Their Own: The Disturbing Pattern About The Murders Of Independent Journalist

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

When stringers are attacked or killed, the struggle for justice begins with determining whether they are journalists at all.

Last week, television journalist Akhilesh Pratap Singh was shot dead in Chhatra, Jharkhand. Barely than 24 hours later, in neighbouring Bihar, Hindustan journalist Rajdeo Ranjan was gunned down in Siwan.

The murders have exposed the faultlines in the media, not least the most basic, which is the ability to access and swiftly disseminate authentic information.

Journalists scrambled to get information on the two incidents. In the absence of independent information, political parties quickly stepped in and traded allegations on the breakdown of law and order in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Jharkhand and Bihar, where the Rashtriya Janata Dal is part of the coalition government.

Meanwhile, five days on, no clear motives have emerged with regard to either of the killings.

Political games:
Three journalists have been murdered in India this year. On February 13, Karun Mishra, the bureau chief of newspaperJan Sandesh was shot dead by unidentified persons in Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Five days after the incident, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav ordered a probe and police arrested five persons from the mining mafia.

Akhilesh Singh, locally known as Indradev Yadav, was a journalist with a news channel. Unidentified persons gunned him down at Dewaria in Chatra district of Jharkhand that borders Bihar and where a faction of a Maoist group called the Tritiya Prastuti Committee is active. The group, police said, indulges in extortion of money for petty contractors and local businessmen.

On Monday, police claimed a breakthrough in the case, arresting two persons. On Tuesday, a third person – Suraj Sao, the aide of BJP MLA Ganesh Ganjhu – was detained. The police said the journalist also took up civic works on contract and was killed over a dispute with members of the TMC and the MLA’s aide over the levy of money to be paid in exchange for a contract awarded to him. The police have discounted the involvement of the MLA in the killing.

But less than a day later, when news came in of the murder of Rajdeo Ranjan, the BJP were quick to denounce the “Jungle Raj” in Bihar.

In March, a photograph of jailed RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin sharing snacks with Bihar minister Abdul Ghafoor inside Siwan jail went viral. Rajdeo Ranjan was reportedly behind the leak. According to BJP leader and former Bihar chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, Ranjan’s murder was revenge.

While police are still investigating the charge, Ranjan’s wife Asha Yadav has gone on record to say that her husband was killed for a series of news reports against Shahabuddin's interests. She further claimed that Ranjan figured on Shahabuddin’s “hit list”, which police were privy to at least two years ago. Fellow journalists were divided on these claims, but said there was definitely more to the murder than meets the eye.

On Monday, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar announced a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into Ranjan’s death, even as the motive for his murder remains unclear.

Existing gulf:
Almost every time a journalist is murdered in India – 29 since media watch website The Hoot began tracking free speech violations in 2010 – there is the involvement of politicians or local business people or the oil, timber and sand mafias, or those involved in illegal felling of forests, land grabbing, exploiting child labour, chit fund scams, or even cases of medical negligence.

By now, that’s a given.

It’s after the killing that a pattern quickly emerges. When journalists are attacked or killed, the struggle for justice begins with determining whether they are journalists at all, whether they died for their journalism and not owing to any “personal” dispute or business links. Before the crucial questions of who killed them and why can be asked, the case is over.

There currently exists a gulf between the journalists employed on contract in mainstream media and journalists such as Ranjan, who work independently or are associated as stringers with local or national newspapers and broadcast channels. Unprotected and unorganised, the plight of journalists in the regional media is much more precarious.

While the nexus between local politicians and business interests is hardly surprising, what is disturbing is the role of media houses in refusing to acknowledge these footsoldiers. Often, the mainstream media publications they may work for or contribute regularly to, may wash their hands of them, denying completely – even in the face of incontrovertible evidence – their employment, that they worked for them or had anything to do with them.

The dirty secret in the media is the manner in which journalists are constrained to work as advertising agents too. Often, the commissions they earn from advertising may be more than their salaries, points out senior journalist and media analyst Anil Chamadia, who worked for years in Bihar before he shifted to Delhi to set up a media watch organisation, People’s Media Group.

Discredited as journalists for working as advertising agents, they occupy a grey zone in an already fractured mediascape. It becomes far easier to isolate and target them when their journalistic reports ruffle the feathers of local power centres, politicians and businessfolk. Shooting these messengers of unsavoury and unflattering information, who refuse to remain plaint and push invisible boundaries, also serves another purpose – it will silence others as well.

Those responsible also know that they can get away with it. They can easily prevail upon local police and administration to drag their feet in the investigation. Is it any wonder that demands are now routinely made for a CBI probe in almost every instance? Invariably, the poor investigation, compounded by interminable trials, end up in acquittals. In all the killings of journalists so far, there has not been a single conviction.

And the struggle to secure some justice for their killings, left to family members or colleagues, becomes a long and solitary battle.

Two Tier Series 10 - The Broken Black Diamond

Aeman Nishat finds India’s coal capital low on supplies and struggling against cheap Australian imports.

India coal capital is getting a facelift it does not want. For years, sorry, decades, Dhanbad drove much of India's industrial revolution and helped trade boom in eastern India. But today, despite green, overhead welcome signboards set up by the Jharkhand government welcoming visitors, not many are keen to have Dhanbad as the site for their new ventures. No one, at this point of time, is saying Dhanbad is unimportant to India. But the coal capital is surely in the throes of a continuing exodus of industrialists shifting their manufacturing facilities to greener pastures available in coastal states. Why won’t they? Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), the subsidiary of the stateowned Coal India Limited (CIL) is struggling to increase production and meet growing demands. Worse, it has routinely drawn flak for providing sub-standard coal (read with high ash content), prompting many to opt for gas-fired plants outside the state.

Till a decade and a half ago, the portion of the Grand Trunk Road passing through Dhanbad used to be dotted with coke factories – the region’s backbone — between Gobindpur and Nirsa right outside Dhanbad. But today, this very patch is home to ghostly factories whose high metal gates sport rusty padlocks and chimneys home to hundreds of pigeons. The workers have all gone. For the records, the number of coal-based factories in this belt is just 200 as against a little over 500 just 15 years back.

In nearby Nirsa, the most industrialized zone in Dhanbad and once home to hundreds of hard coke factories, the scene is equally grim. Aparna Sen Gupta, the local Forward Block legislator wants to implement a game plan that will revive Nirsa's increasing number of sick industries but has little support from the state government. What’s the core issue that’s bugging Dhanbad? It’s primarily the insurmountable crisis in coal linkage that has forced many of Dhanbad's hard coke plants to down shutters and shift base. Why would you stay if you do not get enough coal from BCCL? You are always short in supplies and worse, over 50 percent of the coal offered by BCCL is of low grade and cannot be converted into hard coke.

“I do not want to open any new venture in Dhanbad, not even in Jharkhand. This place is fraught with hundreds of problems,” says S K Sinha, a prominent local industrialist and head of the B.D. Sinha group of companies. He shifted one of his hard coke plants to the port town of Mundra in Gujarat in 1994 and transferred over 1,000 workers from Dhanbad. This plant, run by Sinha's Rs 3,500-crore Saurashtra Fuels Pvt Ltd, has a production capacity of 1.5 million tones and is the largest private sector coke plant in India. Sinha also shifted another 1,000 s. He also shifted 1,000 workers to Kutch when he set up his second plant in Gujarat in 2003.

A quintessential hard coke entrepreneur, Sinha recently acquired a coal mine in New Zealand and runs two in Dhanbad — Brahmdev Sinha & Company with a monthly capacity of 5,000 MT and Rajganj Coke Producers with a monthly capacity of 2,500 MT and a few refractory plants. "Jharkhand does not have comprehensive industrial policy seven long years after its bifurcation from Bihar," adds Sinha. Dhanbad Chamber of Commerce and Industries (DCCI) president B.N. Singh laments hard coke units with monthly quota of 10,000 MT have been getting only between 2,500 MT and 3,000 MT a month for the last eight years. “The crisis renders thousands idle before they inevitably get retrenched,” says Singh.

There are other regions for Dhanbad's coal-based industries losing their sheen. Indian coal is now increasingly been seen as a costlier option as compared to the imported variety from Australia. The price is cheap and the quality world class. So why seek Indian coal? “BCCL’s coal’s ash percentage is between 20 to 30 percent and, when converted, grows to 40 percent,” says Rajesh Ritolia of the BD Sinha and Group. Imported coal does not give you such tensions.

Dhanbad has other tensions. Those currently in operation do not want to shift base despite low supplies. “The norms for investment are too inflexible and there is this suffocating red tape," says a senior functionary of the Bank More Chamber of Commerce and Industries (BMCCI), one of Dhanbad's over 20 industry bodies. Problems in land acquisition – complicated by the mafia-driven spiraling prices — have also discouraged many entrepreneurs.

Once hard coke manufacturing units in Dhanbad district numbered over 150. Today, the number now is less than 100, bulk of them closing operations because of continued failures in coal linkage. Among those who will down shutter any day are Foundry Fuels Products, Akash Coke Industries and Aroma Coke. The total annual turnover here has stagnated at Rs 500 crore for over five years despite a nearly three-fold hike in the price of hard coke and countrywide increase in its demand. Similar is the case with the refractories, which produce high-alumina and fire bricks used for construction of high-temperature zones inside steel plants, coke plants and the glass-making units. Once, they Dhanbad had over 60 operational refractories. Today, there are only 35.

In nearby Jharia's coalfields, there are huge reserves of quality coal — considered India's best quality — with lower ash content. But who will mine it? You first need to evacuate hundreds of thousands living in the region that has the world’s largest underground mine fires that rages till date. "Getting coal from Jharia through open cast mining seems impossible due to this herculean task of evacuation,” says a veteran industrialist requesting anonymity.

Agree Diptendu Mukherjee, a noted Dhanbad-based labour lawyer with definite Leftist leanings: “Once there were over two lakh workers in Dhanbad's coal-based industries, now the number has come down to less than a lakh. It is indeed a matter of concern.” In fact, the low number game is the new face of Dhanbad. And the city does not want it.

IAS, IPS Cadre Crunch Hits Governance

The severe shortage of IAS and IPS officers in states across India has begun to adversely impact governance everywhere. There’s a deficit of over 3000 IAS and IPS officers – about 30% -- in the country and that may continue for some more years. As of now, though, key seats are empty, officers are holding multiple assignments and police officers missing in troubled districts. It’s a wonder how official work is getting done, if at all, in large swathes of India. 
    
With fewer bureaucrats in place, many senior officers in a number of states are burdened with multiple responsibilities. For instance, “a junior IAS officer who is posted as director in one department in Jharkhand is also the secretary in another. Similarly, an IAS officer is posted in the secretariat and also has to take care of outdoor work which creates problems in the execution of work in offices,” said a source in Ranchi. The state, with an IAS cadre strength of 208, has only 114 currently. Of these 16 are on central deputation. 
    
Former Jharkhand DGP V D Ram, who had asked the Centre to return IPS officers on central deputation, added that the police face insurmountable problems due to shortage of officers. “At times we know that a particular officer is not capable enough to be posted as SP of a district, but due to shortage of IPS officers we have no option. Most of the time this deprives us of the cutting-edge that we need to maintain law and order,” said Ram. In a Naxal-affected state, that’s not good news. 
    
In MP, the shortage of police officers is probably affecting morale, too, over problems of getting leave. There are only 238 IPS officers against a strength of 291. “The shortage may look small but it’s a huge gap,” said Arvind Kumar, IG, administration, police headquarters. “The scarcity is generally at the level of SP and SSP and we don’t have a choice of officers to be posted in districts. A minimum of 10% of leave reserve is also required and this creates problems,” added a senior IPS officer. 
    
Such shortfall can lead to inefficiency and delays at work. Punjab chief secretary Rakesh Singh said it puts undue pressure on the rest of the serving officers and officials. “If you have too many portfolios with you, it gets difficult to devote as much time as you would like to in order to do full justice to each subject,” he said. The sanctioned cadre strength for Punjab is 221 IAS and 172 IPS officers. 
    
As of now, the state has 180 IAS and 142 IPS officers. Most of the IAS officers are holding multiple charges and shuttling between different offices to keep appointments. Anirudh Tewari is secretary in three departments - power, personnel and non-conventional energy. 
    
In the Chandigarh UT administration, too, certain posts like that of finance secretary are saddled with 10-12 departments. Since the UT gets officers on deputation from Punjab and Haryana and the entire process of getting a new officer’s name cleared takes months, the functioning of the administration suffers. 
    
Likewise, in Haryana, governance is now largely dependent on state cadres of civil and police officers as it has just 163 IAS officers – with 20 on deputation to the Centre – and 102 IPS officers against the sanctioned strength of 205 IAS and 137 IPS officers. The state’s additional chief secretary, home, Samir Mathur, admitted the shortage of IPS officer, adding, “We have very efficient senior officers of state cadres who have been posted as additional SP in districts as well as in the field.” 
    
With increase in fresh intake of IAS/IPS officers a distant prospect, one way forward for the states could be former Jharkhand chief secretary AK Singh’s suggestion that regular appointments of junior officers be made through the state public service commissions, so that they get timely promotions.

Exclusive: 'Rotten Politics' of India

By M H Ahssan

Nearly Every State Has Religious Leaders Telling Their Flock Which Way To Vote

The church and state have assiduously been kept apart in India, but a similar firewall between religion and politics has been repeatedly breached to the point where using the religion card is now accepted as part of the desi system of vote garnering.

Gurus, mahants and maulvis existed around the periphery of power structures during the Nehru era. But the growth of Congress’s perceived minorityism under Indira Gandhi, when the term ‘vote-block’ (read Muslim votes) first gained currency, probably triggered the mushrooming of similar mechanisms across religious platforms.

Hindu religious organisations got a fillip with the dilution of the Supreme Court’s secular judgement in 1985 on Shah Bano when Parliament — under a brute Congress majority — overturned the SC verdict by passing the Muslim Women’s Bill that made it legally tenable for Muslim men to skip paying alimony to their divorced wives.

Today, whether it’s Gujarat with its dominant Hindu sects, or Punjab, home to hundreds of ‘Deras’ of localised gurus, or UP with its mahants and madrassas, or even Jharkhand, Orissa and Northeast with their Christian evangelists, nearly every state in the country has religious organisations and sects exhorting their flock to go out and vote. At times, they tell them who to vote for and, at others, make the choice implicit.

In Kerala, the Muslim League, which is a critical ally of the Congress-led LDF, has at its helm Syed Mohammedali Shihab Thangal, a spiritual leader with a following of his own. ‘Thangal’ is an honorific title that traces its lineage to the Prophet no less. Kerala Muslims flock to his meetings.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, with Uttar Pradesh seeing a spurt in madrassas which has taken Muslims away from modern education towards fundamentalism, Hindu ‘sansthan’ and ‘dharma raksha manch’ sprouted. Gorakhpur, which has Azamgarh in its neighbourhood, became a militant Hindu hub. The mahants and acharyas led by Yogi Adityanath, who calls for strident Hindutva, regularly clash with Muslim activists who they accuse of being ISI agents and worse. In 2005, riots broke out in Mau between supporters of Yogi and SP’s Mukhtar Ansari. But Hindu sects at times cut both ways: Just before the 2002 assembly elections in Gujarat in the aftermath of the riots, a high priest from Puri, Swami Adhoksjanand, camped with Congress’s CM candidate Shankersinh Vaghela and ran a surrogate anti-Narendra Modi campaign by telling religious gatherings to defeat the forces of Hindutva.

Mufti Shabbir Alam of Ahmedabad’s Jama Masjid issued a fatwa on the day of the Assembly elections in 2002, urging Muslims to come out and vote. Congress leaders believe the fatwa helped BJP because Hindu organisations decided to counter it. Mufti’s subsequent denials about never having issued the fatwa were of no use. In Punjab, the Dera followers, who number more than a crore, are an important consideration for non-Akali politicians. In the last assembly election, the Dera Sacha Sauda of Gurmeet Singh Ram Raheem, who faces multiple criminal charges (trumped up by Akalis, according to his followers), helped Congress get 25 out of 65 seats in Malwa, a traditional Akali stronghold.

In Jharkhand, Orissa and Northeast, Christian missions play a significant role in mobilising voters. But while in Mizoram the Christian missions involve the people in the democratic process — former CEC J M Lyngdoh once described Mizoram as a model state for elections — the ones in Jharkhand are known to harbour political preferences towards which they egg their supporters on. Christian missions in Orissa are unlikely to remain impervious to taking a pro-Congress and anti-BJP/BJD stand.

In Goa, Joaquim Loiola, secretary to Archbishop, said, ‘‘The Archbishop will be signing and publicising the message of Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on the elections.’’ While it’s unlikely to be a direct endorsement of any political party, the circular will tell its flock ‘‘how to vote’’. Though it’s anybody’s guess which way the religious heads will ask their flocks to vote.

Even the Reds seek blessings in Kerala
Given Kerala’s large minority votebank, both the Church and Muslim leaders have traditionally exerted considerable influence on the state’s politics, so much so that atheist Communists and ‘secular’ Congress leading the two coalitions have courted them with abandon.

Apart from Kerala Muslim League’s spiritual leader Syed Mohammedali Shihab Thangal, another Muslim leader who has carved out space for himself is the general secretary of Sunni Jum Iyyathul Ulema, Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musliyar. He attracts the state’s Sunni Muslims in droves.

The influence of the Church on Kerala’s politics is no less significant. Although fewer in number than the Muslims, the Church has the advantage of its followers spread evenly and backed by numerous institutions. The influential Catholic Church makes no secret of its political stakes. ‘‘We have discussed our position for Kerala and will soon declare it,’’ says Stephen Aalathara of the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council. Asked what would be the moving factor, Aalathara said, ‘‘There are a lot of problems we face from the Communist government especially in the social and educational sectors.’’

‘‘The Church has always been an invisible factor in determining candidates in at least seven LS seats in Central Kerala,’’ says C P John, a veteran political commentator.

In UP, parties petition mahants and maulvis
For two years now, the army of mahants and dharmacharyas in Ayodhya has stood silent. Last fortnight things changed when the mighty mahant of Hanuman Garhi, Gyan Das, launched the ‘dharma raksha manch’ for Hindu re-awakening. Around the same time, former CM Mulayam Singh Yadav met the 102-year-old rector of Deoband’s Darulul Uoom seeking to explain his party’s cosying up to Kalyan Singh, who was at UP’s helm when Babri Masjid was razed.

Polls have galvanised the akharas and madrassas as much as political parties. The bigshot maulvis and mahants will be petitioned, and they will then condescend to ‘bless’ this party and that candidate.

Das made headlines in 2003 when he went door-to-door to ensure participation of Ayodhya’s Muslims. Mahant Aditya Nath accused him of polluting the mandir and demanded his ouster.

The matter was settled after Faizabad civil court stayed all such future events. Meanwhile, Maulana Amir Rashdi Madni, who founded the Ulema Council, is in politics after the arrest of his son, Talha Amir.

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 Story: India Tops In 'Child Brides' On World Chart

INN News Bureau

Jhumki’s (name changed) red and white sakhapola (wedding bangles) and sindoor jar sharply with her starched uniform. She was forced by her father to marry when she was barely 11 but she feels lucky to be allowed to attend school. 
    
Forty-six per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 29 years in India were married before the age of 18, according to the National Family Health Survey-3. 

Fodder Scam: Lalu Yadav Political Career Hangs In Balance

By Anita Prasad / Patna

When a Jharkhand court delivers its verdict on the multi-crore ‘fodder’ scam of 1996, and found guilty and imposed a jail term of four years, former Bihar chief minister and president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Lalu Prasad Yadav, but also for his party. Following Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s outburst, there is every indication that the UPA will discard its ordinance aiming to allow convicted politicians to continue in office and continue to contest elections. 

HOW COAL MAFIAS FUEL INDIA'S POWER CRISIS?

By Arvind Behl & Kajol Singh

Seven shots rang out at a wedding reception in this sooty city in eastern India, and Suresh Singh, India’s “Coal King”, fell fatally wounded.

He was a wealthy coal trader, a politician and, police say, a crime boss. At the time of the shooting, Singh had 14 criminal charges against him, including one for homicide. His career and murder are emblematic of one of India’s most nagging economic problems: the corruption that cripples the crucial coal industry.

What Made Ranchi Famous Before Dhoni Came Along?

Bill Bryson, probably the best travel writer of this age, once wrote “You can never make a waiter see you before he’s ready to see you, you can never beat the phone company, and you can never go home again.”

The flourish of the statement notwithstanding, it clearly isn’t a law of physics. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is going home again today and playing an international cricket match in a city where it all began for him. Life has come a full circle for Dhoni.

Dhoni put Ranchi, a city of around 10 lakh people, and no heroes other than freedom fighter Birsa Munda and Param Veer Chakra winner Albert Ekka, on the map of India and the rest of the world. He explains it best when he says: “When I started my international career, people during the overseas tours used to ask me where I came from. I would first say India, then Jharkhand and then Ranchi. The next question invariably was, ‘Where is Ranchi?’ I had to explain in different ways by saying, ‘It’s near Calcutta, near Jamshedpur, from where Tata originated. It’s India richest state in terms of minerals.”

Having been born and brought up in Ranchi I can totally relate to what Dhoni is trying to say here. My childhood retort to the question ‘Where is Ranchi?’, used to be that its the city through which the Tropic of Cancer passes, not knowing that the Tropic of Cancer was an imaginary line passing through a lot of other places in India as well.

Also Ranchi was Agra’s less famous cousin. In popular speak, “Agra jaana hai kya” has never meant visiting the Taj Mahal, but the famous mental hospital in the city. Along similar lines, Ranchi was famous, at least in parts of Eastern India, for its Kanke Mental Hospital, with the phrase “Kanke jaana hai kya” being seen as an insult on anyone it was used.

After Dhoni burst onto the cricketing scene in 2004, questions about the geographical whereabouts of Ranchi were confined to the dustbins of history. Having said that, the question I try and answer in this piece is what was Ranchi before it became that city from which Dhoni comes from?

One of the surprising facts that I learnt from my social studies textbook in the third standard was that Ranchi is also called the hill station of Bihar (since 2000, Ranchi has been the capital of Jharkhand, before that it was a part of Bihar).

A few years later I understood that the textbook had not been updated since the 1960s when Ranchi actually was a hill station where the Bengali bhadralok came to visit and stay during the summer months. The story goes that the industrialist Aditya Birla and his wife Rajasree honeymooned in Ranchi. What would have given the city the tag of a hill station was the fact that it rained a lot even during the summer months.

But as the city expanded and the forests and the greenery cut down, the temperatures rose, crossing 40 degree Celsius during the summer months, and it could no longer be called a hill station.

The next big thing to happen in the city was the setting up of a large number of public sector enterprises. This included the Heavy Engineering Corporation (HEC), Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL), Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL), Mecon Ltd, formerly known as (Metallurgical & Engineering Consultants (India) etc. This was primarily because the area around Ranchi was richly endowed in minerals.

Dhoni’s father Pan Singh was an employee at Mecon Ltd. The setting up of public sector enterprises brought people from all over India to Ranchi, and this included Pan Singh as well, who originally belonged to the Almora district in Uttarkhand.

Jawahar Lal Nehru’s big decision of setting up public sector enterprises and not encouraging entrepreneurship and private business may have cost the country dearly, but it did give us a Mahendra Singh Dhoni. It is unlikely that Dhoni would have become what he has if his father would have continued living in his village in Almora. If it was not for Nehru’s vision which screwed up India, Dhoni might have been a humble farmer in Uttarkhand. Even unintended consequences can be healthy at times.

The other interesting thing that happened starting in the 1980s was that Ranchi started sending an astonishing number of students to the IITs for a city of its size. In the mid 1980s, St Xavier’s College, Ranchi, sent in 73 students to the IITs in a single year. And this was before coaching became the norm. What cities like Kota are doing now, Ranchi did in the 1980s.

The year 1983 also saw Ranchi fall to the Hip Hip Hurray phenomenon. Hip Hip Hurray was the first film directed by the now famous director Prakash Jha. And he shot the movie in two schools in Ranchi, Vikas Vidyalaya and the Bishop Westcott. I remember seeing posters of the film being plastered all over the city and the elders being quite excited about a full Hindi film having been shot in the city.

So that was as exciting as the city got while I was growing up there. Another important landmark for Ranchi was in the early 1990s when the entire city did not have power during the peak of summer for a period of 15 days. Rumour mills were abuzz that Lalu Yadav had got the entire thing done, so that power could be transmitted to Patna and other parts of North Bihar, which were reeling under a heat wave. This was the last nail in the coffin for Lalu Yadav and his party when it came to winning elections in Jharkhand.

Dear reader, if you have managed to read this far, you will realise that Ranchi, the city where Dhoni and I grew up, was a city where nothing much happened. The modern sense of the term being, it was boring. It did have its odd ironies though, like the fact that the most famous shopping complex in the city was owned by the Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church.

But to me Ranchi will remain the city of dark clouds and rain. And red gulmohar in all its glory. And power cuts. And studying under a kerosene lamp with the hope that power would come back by the time Doordarshan’s  Chitrahar programme started. And listening to the brilliant Ameen Sayani host the Binaca Geet Maala with me making notes of the song rankings. All this before it got that man called Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

The trouble with nostalgia is that if it gets too nostalgic, there is a danger of creating a time and a place, which did not exist. So let me stop here.

Exclusive: How ULFA Strongholds Are Falling To The Reds?

By Akshaye Mahapatro / Guwahati

Maoists in Assam tap ethnic discontent to make inroads into an already volatile region. n April, Assam Governor JB Patnaik summoned all top officials of the state’s insurgency-hit Tinsukia district to the Raj Bhawan in Guwahati. He was keen to know about the development work in the state’s eastern-most sub-division, which is part of the district. Cut off from the rest of the district by the Brahmaputra, Sadiya, 60 km from Tinsukia, has turned into a cradle for the Maoists who are trying to make inroads into the Northeast. That is why the governor wants to keep an eye on this remote area.

Sinkhole Assemblies in India

Despite enjoying enormous powers, pillars of democracy have failed to live up to people's expectations.

India, as its constitution states, is a union of states. Enormous powers are vested in the states that make up the country - law and order, education, health, agriculture, water and transport, to name a few of their key responsibilities. Many other important duties like resource mobilisation and expenditure are shared with the Union government. Some Indian states are huge, indeed they match many countries in terms of their geographical expanse and population. Each of them governed by democratically elected governments which zealously guard their power and authority.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the governance of our states is the performance of their legislatures . Most sit for two or three weeks at the longest, with one or two shorter sessions. Just what kind of legislative business they can conduct thereafter is obvious. In comparison to the state legislatures, the Parliament of India actually manages to conduct some business, even though in recent years its record has been somewhat blemished.

The Parliamentary Committee system, which is kept away from the glare of the media, does a great deal of the leg-work on legislation and this compensates for the spotty performance of the two houses of Parliament.

To a great extent, here, the responsibility in the states lies with the executive, which does not give due importance to legislative processes. But blame must be shared with the legislators who participate in the functioning of their respective assemblies. In a few states with stable polities, legislators have been returned to the assembly in several successive elections. But others see massive turnovers and the result is that the people's representatives remain inexperienced and raw.

Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the political parties themselves. One of the major challenges before them is to maintain a high level of ethical conduct that is expected from legislators. While Parliament and some states have ethics committees, some state legislatures do not even have this minimal institutional check. As for the parties, they simply don't care, winning the seat is everything.

Andhra Pradesh: The assembly met for 37 days in 2012 over two sessions - budget and monsoon, and a three-day special session. The winter session has not been held. An assembly secretariat official failed to identify any particular reason for the few sittings. Each MLA earns a salary of Rs. 1,07,000 per month, including perks. The assembly spends, on average, Rs. 8,500 per minute during a session.

Delhi: Of the 245 working days last year, Delhi MLAs met only for 22. In 2011, 'business was transacted' only on 17 days, which included the 10-day budget session. Each day of the session costs Rs. 6.12 lakh, excluding the expenditure incurred on ministers and on collecting and preparing replies to questions. The last session of the assembly - held from December 11 to December 14 - was supposed to run for 14 hours. It lasted only 12 hours 35 minutes. According to official records, each hour wasted cost the secretariat Rs. 1.85 lakh. MLAs are paid Rs. 1,000 per sitting.

Jammu & Kashmir: In 2012, the budget-cum-winter session of the assembly, held in the state's winter capital Jammu, witnessed 33 sittings with nearly 10 meetings during the summer session in Srinagar. A ccording to assembly secretary Muhammad Ramzan, the MLAs are paid the air fare to attend the sessinos in Srinagar and Jammu, beside a Rs. 500 allowance per session. The salary for MLAs comes to about Rs. 80,300 per month. While the government says the two sessions are adequate, they have come under the fire from the opposition for being insufficient.

Punjab: For the Budget session, the newly constituted assembly met over 10 days. The winter session, before it was adjourned sine die, saw five sittings in December. An MLA in Punjab gets about `80,000 including their monthly salary and constituency allowance.

Rajasthan: The present house will go down in history as that with the fewest sittings. Since 2008, when the House was elected, it has met 97 times, averaging 24 days per calendar year. According to the Rules of Business and Conduct of the House, the total number of sittings in the three sessions - budget, winter and monsoon - should not be less than 60. Over the past two decades, the number of sittings has whittled down considerably. An MLA earns Rs. 62,500 per month and an allowance of Rs. 1,000 for each meeting attended.

West Bengal: Assemblies in large states such as West Bengal should meet for 90 days each year. But in 2012, West Bengal only managed 41. In 2011 and 2010, there were 34 and 48 sittings respectively. The key reason behind this is the government's alleged urge to avoid debate. MLAs here are paid Rs. 1,000 per sitting.

Uttar Pradesh: In its maiden year after the polls, the UP assembly met for all of 26 days, with a 21-day budget and five-day winter session. The monsoon session was not convened. Each MLA or MLC earns about Rs. 40,000 - Rs. 50,000. Over the past years, one has observed that the government mostly calls the assembly session either for the annual or supplementary budget, supplementary demand for funds or to get a Bill of its interest passed.

Tamil Nadu: In 2012, the assembly met for about 39 days, including the 32-day budget session. Disruptions are rare, but since 1989, a lot of time is wasted paying obeisance to the CM under the alternating DMK and AIADMK governments. If the House is in session for 120 days a year, it is considered a good thing. Under the DMK, there were more sessions but over time, the opposition's voice has been silenced. MLAs earn more than Rs. 70,000 per month, with a Rs. 500 daily allowance when the House is in session.

Jharkhand: Jharkhand is notorious for convening the minimum number of meetings, with 2012 witnessing just about 28. The assembly operates from rented premises and met 26 and 23 times in 2011 and 2010, respectively. It was decided at a Presiding Officers Conference during Somnath Chatterjee's tenure as Lok Sabha Speaker that small houses, such as Jharkhand's with its 81 members, ought to convene at least 50 sittings. But consecutive governments have failed to achieve this. MLAs in the state earn a Rs. 700-allowance per sitting.

Bihar: Back in 1960, the budget session of the Bihar assembly was held over 76 sittings in a span of 139 days. This year, the budget session year saw 28 sittings. The winter session had only five, as did the monsoon session. The shorter sessions started becoming a norm in the post-1980 era, and it has continued under the RJD as well as JD(U)-BJP regimes. MLAs get a Rs. 1,000 allowance per sitting.

Orissa: The winter session of the House had 21 working days, but a lot of time was lost thanks to the walkouts staged by the main Opposition party, the Congress. The 2012 budget session started on February 21 and went on till the first week of April, about 40 days. Then came the monsoon session, which saw 10 sittings. An MLA here earns Rs. 60,000 per month, with a Rs. 500 allowance per sitting.

Tamil Nadu: In 2012, the assembly met for about 39 days, including the 32-day budget session. Disruptions are rare, but since 1989, a lot of time is wasted paying obeisance to the CM under the alternating DMK and AIADMK governments. If the House is in session for 120 days a year, it is considered a good thing. Under the DMK, there were more sessions but over time, the opposition's voice has been silenced. MLAs earn more than Rs. 70,000 per month, with a Rs. 500 daily allowance when the House is in session.

'Why The Midday Meal Should Be Rescued In Bihar?'

By Shweta Sharma (Guest Writer)

Ever weekday morning, I used to take the bus Kushmaha, twelve kilometres from the temple town of Deoghar in Jharkhand, and then hike two kilometres over a muddy, winding path. My journey used to end at at a small building that is the only hope children in the village have for an education—and a future.

Like other teachers, I’ve personally seen the Midday Meal Scheme succeed in convincing parents to send their children to school. Like other teachers, I’m anguished and angry to read of children dying because of the food they were given as part of that scheme. All concerned governments, departments, administration must wake up—because what has happened threatens the only chance children have.

Cash-For-Votes Scams Are Here To Stay – And The Election Commission Seems Unable To Deal

By RADHAKRISHNA | INNLIVE

The Rajya Sabha polls have put the focus back on the urgent need for electoral reforms.

The alleged horse trading in Karnataka, exposed by a sting operation in the run-up to the Rajya Sabha polls has once against brought the focus on whether the Election Commission, despite its best intentions, has the power to take any effective steps to curb the abuse of money power during elections.

“We are old friends of the Left. Our views are similar”

By M H Ahssan

Even before Orissa happened, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) hadn’t got the traction it needed, with alliances tottering in the south, east and west. NDA Convenor Sharad Yadav, 61, is not too happy with the ways things are in the alliance.

In an interview with HNN, Yadav speaks of friendships outside the NDA and how the alliance still hopes to regroup. Excerpts from the interview:

How badly has Orissa hurt the NDA?
The NDA has been weakened in Orissa by what happened, but I don’t think there will be damage in other states.

Why could you not anticipate the Orissa developments?
The BJP never involved us in it. The negotiations were going on between the BJP and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD). BJP President Rajnath Singh called me when it was over. That’s when I spoke to him. I was taken aback by the turn of events. I was under the impression that things would turn out fine. The BJP was dealing with this.

Does this affect the chances of your Prime Ministerial nominee?
The NDA has split in Orissa, but I don’t consider Naveen Patnaik as being out of the NDA. He will need us in the future. He has taken a big risk by choosing to fight the election on his own. His principal opponent is the Congress. The BJP-BJD combine would have got the anti-Congress vote. Now, the anti-Congress vote will be split. I am not updated about Orissa, but I know that the BJP had 18 percent of the vote there. The BJP-BJD combine was winning because the anti-Congress vote was consolidated in their favour. I can’t say if it will stay that way in the future.

Is the Janata Dal (United), the party you belong to, comfortable with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) choice of LK Advani as the prime ministerial nominee?
The announcement of Advani’s name as the prime ministerial nominee is not limited to the BJP. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had made a unanimous decision on this. First, the BJP arrived at the decision. Then, we were consulted and the final decision was taken to project Advani prime ministerial candidate.

The JD(U) is fine with it then?
I am telling you as the NDA Convenor. All NDA members have decided to support him (Advani).

Has the NDA lost momentum from the time it chose to project Advani for the top post?
The NDA hasn’t lost momentum. The NDA has won in big states in the recent assembly elections to five states. We won in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Before that, we won in Bihar, Punjab, Gujarat and Karnataka. The NDA has nine state governments. In Bihar, Punjab and Orissa, NDA constituents are running the governments. We also won in Jharkhand but the Congress manipulated its fall. The Congress has lost virtually all elections over five years, barring this time in Rajasthan and Delhi. In Rajasthan, the Congress managed to cobble a government. We have 82 MLAs there.

Are you in touch with parties that were once your friends, like Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK, for instance?
The alliances are not in shape in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, be it the NDA or the UPA. As far as the NDA is concerned, I can say that we discussed with some parties but the talks did not materialise into alliances. Barring these two states, there is an alliance everywhere. Recently, we have brought the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), headed by Om Prakash Chautala, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), headed by Ajit Singh, into our fold.

What about Babulal Marandi’s party in Jharkhand?
We are talking to him as well but it hasn’t materialised.

Are you still talking to Jayalalithaa?
No. I wouldn’t like to say anything more on this.

Is it possible that the JD(U) will have a prime ministerial nominee, given that things could change rapidly after the numbers are out?
JD(U) is in alliance with the BJP in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The JD(U) has no alliances in the other states. We will contest together in these four states and fight separately in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, for instance.

Have you made an assessment of the impact that Advani could have on the Muslim vote?
Ours is not a one-day alliance. And in Bihar, we are partners in the government. The BJP has not had a negative impact. We have conducted many pro-Muslim programmes in Bihar. No state government has done as much for Muslims in 60 years, be it for the madrasas or the teachers in madrasas. We punished the guilty in the Bhagalpur riots of 1998. We got life-long compensation for the victims. How could we have done all this without the cooperation of the BJP? They didn’t stop us. We do politics of the masses, not politics of religion.

Does the JD(U) consider itself bound to the NDA? Could this change after the election?
This is an era of coalition politics. There are two fronts. The NDA is 11 years old. We have contested four elections together. We are not in a position to form a government by ourselves. The BJP is not in a position to form its own government. No party can do it. So, we have the UPA on one side and the NDA on the other. The JD(U) and the BJP are separate parties. We have differences of thought. There are many issues on which we differ. We have various kinds of disagreements with many parties. But we are united under our common minimum programme, which we call the national agenda. The issues were settled in the time of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We ran a government for six years after that.

There are contradictions between the BJP and the JD(U). But the people of this country are not giving a majority to any single party. So, we have to keep our differences and contradictions aside. The JD(U) has demanded, for instance, reservation for dalit Muslims and dalit Christians. The BJP has not demanded it. It is not part of the national agenda. The JD(U) wants a quota within quota for women. The BJP doesn’t. They want a temple in Ayodhya. The JD(U) says that the Ayodhya dispute has to be resolved either by the courts or by a negotiated settlement. The BJP functions according to its ideology and issues. The JD(U) has its own issues. The JD(U) and the BJP are distinct parties, just as the JD(U) is distinct from the Akali Dal and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD).

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is a part of the NDA as well.
The JD(U) deals with the BJP as a party. The JD(U) doesn’t deal with individuals.

I’m talking of a situation where the BJP fields Modi in the election campaign, say, in Bihar. What impact would that have?
In an alliance, it doesn’t matter where an individual goes to campaign. We sit among ourselves and find solutions to such things. Politics differs from state to state. The JD(U) and the BJP are aware of this. Campaigns schedules are drawn up after consultations. For instance, the JD(U) had decided not to involve celebrities in the 2004 campaign. We know where to draw the line. We know who will help us and who will harm us.

Is it likely that the JD(U) responds to a Congress or UPA invitation to join a secular front?
We are in the NDA since 11 years. The UPA is four-and-a-half years old. Are they more secular than us?

Are you in touch with the Communists?
We are old friends of the Left parties. We are constantly in touch with them. We formed a government with the Left on two occasions. We have been with the Communists for 60 years. At times we have been together, and at others we have been separate. For some time now, we have been going our ways. Our views are similar to those of the Left on many issues. On other issues, our opinion is the same as that of the BJP. Our main issues are economic, the state of the farmers, unemployment, inflation, SEZs. The SEZs they created for real estate are now defunct. We opposed the creation of SEZs. The difference is in degree of opposition. We opposed SEZs seriously. The BJP did it mildly.

Should the NDA come to power, how will it deal with terrorism and Pakistan?
The JD(U) thinks that there must be people’s involvement in these issues. Let’s take the blasts in trains, for instance. At the top, we need to strengthen the bureaucracy and the intelligence. But it is the vendors and the coolies whose lives are entwined with trains. We have to take them into confidence and mobilise them. We must give licences to vendors and tell them: look we gave you the licence. You are responsible for this much area. Your licence will be cancelled if there’s any extremist or untoward activity in your area. We must offer incentives to the coolies and food vendors in the railways stations in Delhi and Mumbai.

For instance, recent blasts in Delhi and Guwahati have been in garbage bins. There are lakhs of safai karamcharis in India. Let’s take them into confidence. People like us are not going to peep into garbage bins. The karamcharis do it. Similarly, there are 50 lakh fishermen on our coasts. In the Mumbai attack, the terrorists came by sea from Karachi. So, we need to beef up the intelligence at the top and take the people on the streets into confidence. We have to create a network of informants on the ground. We can’t deal with terrorism unless we have the people who sweat it out on our side.

Should Afzal Guru be hanged, then?
This is a stupid issue. It is of concern only to the media. I don’t want to say anything on this. There are lakhs of people going to the gallows anyway in India. The Arjun Sengupta Committee report has said that 78 percent of Indians live on Rs 20 a day. This means that a person who ought to have lived to the age of 90, is dying at 60. Those who should have lived till 60 are dying at 30. These people are on the gallows because of hunger, poverty and unemployment. That is our big worry.

What will the NDA manifesto say on this? Will you have a common manifesto this time?
We haven’t made a decision yet on our manifesto. We haven’t talked yet. Though in the past in Bihar, the JD(U) and the BJP have had separate manifestos.

Joblessness has become a vast problem now. What would you do about it?
The people who went to English schools had jobs when the market expanded. If you hadn’t known English, you wouldn’t have got a job in Tehelka. Now, the global crisis has hit the English-speaking jobholders who are being sacked. Ninety-eight percent of Indians study in regional language schools, in Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Marathi, or Gujarati for instance. They had no jobs anyway.

What will the NDA do about it?
We must put big money into agriculture. And, instead of erecting barriers, let a representative of the union government go to backward states and directly give money for, say, a thousand roads, a thousand bridges. Cement and steel factories will function. People in the backward states will get employed. If we are able to form a government, my party will focus totally on the construction sector. You can’t imagine what a boost it would give to employment. This is what we would do.

What are the other NDA priorities, should it gain power?
The next most important thing is agriculture and irrigation. The condition of our farmers and our villages has improved where water has reached. Daily wages have risen to Rs 150-Rs 200. Where the farmer is dependent on rain, there is hunger, unemployment and poverty. We must shut out everything else and see that water reaches the farms, from the small lakes, big lakes, the land and the sky. We will see how the condition of our villages and our farmers will improve with water. Let’s take the Bhakra Nangal Dam in Punjab. Water came first to the farms, and then came the schools and the roads.

Where is the water now?
There’s no shortage of water in this country. Bihar has more water than it needs, which is going into the sea. Why can’t we tap and store the water we get from the monsoon?

The JD(U) is a regional party. Many regional parties say Article 356, which imposes Centre’s rule in a state, is misused. Has the time come to repeal Article 356?
No. Article 356 must not be done away with. Circumstances force the use of Article 356 many times. In Jharkhand, they had to implement President’s Rule recently, didn’t they? Anything can happen in the states, like in Punjab in the past. Everything can be sacrificed for the unity of the nation. Article 356 is necessary. People have begun debating it because of its misuse. Now, the Centre has to think many times before imposing President’s Rule.

The sensitivity of Centre-State relations has caused India’s structure to change periodically. The BJP has now promised to create the next state, Telangana, within 100 days of coming to power. Do you think India needs more states?
States like Uttar Pradesh are unmanageable. We must divide them scientifically. We must have a national commission to look into the issue of viable states.

Will this be in your manifesto?
There is no consensus on our manifesto yet. We don’t know whether we will have a common manifesto, or individual ones.

You’ve been in public life long enough to know the corrosive effect of corruption. What do you intend to do?
India would have progressed far more were it not for corruption in every field. People are looting all the way from Delhi to the villages. Take Satyam, for instance. It’s like a man has committed a murder and gone to the police station to confess. Ramalinga Raju was about to be arrested in the US. He knew he would be gone for life. Therefore, he chose to be in an Indian prison. He would never have confessed if he hadn’t been exposed in the US. Raju thought he would suffer like the Enron chiefs. We have the intelligence wing of the finance ministry, the sales tax and income tax wings, the SEBI, and the ministry of company affairs. Have all of them become useless?

The NDA has been in government as well. How come it didn’t look into these things?
We lost. If we were strong and perfect, we wouldn’t have been blamed forever. Why did people vote for the UPA? Because we made mistakes and they taught us a lesson. We have been punished. But is accountability only for the politicians? No one else is accountable in this country. Not the judiciary, not the bureaucracy. Not one bureaucrat has been punished for the Mumbai attack, for instance. Only the political system is accountable in this country. The media is free to do what it wants. They call themselves news channels and run fiction programmes on superstition the whole day. You should call them entertainment channels. Technology has given the media such a big tool, but it is not creating a scientific outlook. Nobody is censoring the Balika Badhu serial (on child marriage).

What about judicial accountability?
Is there any system in the world where the judges decide on themselves. The judges in our country recruit their own relatives and near and dear.

Why hasn’t the JD(U) raised this?
Sharad Yadav raised the issue of former chief justice YK Sabharwal and his sons. He got Delhi demolished. We make the laws in Parliament and we find that the judiciary is making 10 laws a day over what we say in Parliament.

Are you contesting this time?
The party will take a decision on that. There is democracy only in three parties in India: the Left parties, the BJP and the JD(U). Individual writ doesn’t run here.

Telangana: Birth Of A New State And Death Of Many Things

By Newscop | INNLIVE

ANALYSIS When labour pangs become insufferable, doctors suggest a Caesarean section. The baby is extracted out of the womb. Doctors in India are often accused of forcing Caesarean section on a mother, to earn a quick buck, and deny the child a natural birth, besides putting the mother at risk. 

The birth of India's 29th state is a case of precisely that. The time of Telangana's birth had come. The pain was at its peak. But spindoctors did not allow Telangana a natural birth. What happened in Lok Sabha was inevitable; the way it happened was totally avoidable.