Small States A 'Political Stunt' Without Decentralisation

By Shankkar Aiyar (Guest Writer)

India seems to produce a political paradox almost every week. Indians were told that overall poverty levels fell from 37 per cent in 2004-05 to 21.9 per cent in 2011-12. This did not trigger any review of the idea to give 67 per cent of the population subsidised grains. The chasm between statistics and political arithmetic persists.

Hidden in the reams of data on poverty reduction is an interesting fact. United Andhra Pradesh is among those states which brought down poverty the most. Since 2004, when K Chandrashekar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti was promised Telangana, poverty in united Andhra Pradesh dropped from 29.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent in 2011-12. And the absolute number of those below poverty line has come down from 235 lakh to 78 lakh. World over, poverty reduction is an accepted indicator of growth and governance.

Saradha Redux: Why Rose Valley Is A 'Ponzi Scheme'?

By Vivek Kaul (Guest Writer)

The Securities and Exchange Board of India(Sebi) in a significant order yesterday directed Rose Valley Hotels and Entertainments Limited (RVHEL) and its directors to stop raising deposits through any of its existing investment schemes.

Sebi also directed RVHEL and its directors not to launch any new schemes, not to dispose of any of the properties or alienate any of the assets of the schemes and not to divert any funds raised from public at large which are kept in bank account(s) and/or in the custody of the company.

WHY INDIA IS LOSING ITS WAR AGAINST NAXALITES?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

Five decades ago, the special forces officer Roger Trinquier set about understanding why his nation losing to enemies it outgunned and outmanned. France, he wrote, was  “in studying a type of warfare that no longer exists and that we shall never fight again, while we pay only passing attention to the war we lost in Indochina and the one we are about to lose in Algeria.  The result of this shortcoming is that the army is not prepared to confront an adversary employing arms and methods the army itself ignores. It has, therefore, no chance of winning”.

WHY CHHATTISGARH CAUGHT IN 'NAXAL NAPPING'?

By Mithilesh Mishra / Raipur

“This period of peace,” Mahendra Karma had warned, “is dangerous for us.” The founder of the Salwa Judum anti-Maoist militia was shot dead on Saturday night, two years after the Supreme Court disbanded it; he was dragged out of his bullet-proof car as the commandos tasked with protecting him fled.

Former chief minister Vidya Charan Shukla was critically injured in the ambush, which claimed Karma’s life, along with Sukma MLA Kawasai Lakma. Nandkumar Patel, the state’s Congress chief, is missing—feared kidnapped, along with members of his family.

A MISERABLE LIFE, WHEN PROTECTOR BECOMES PREDATOR

By M H Ahssan & Kajol Singh

A tailor. A farmer. A bootlegger. Often just young men going about their day. brutally tortured, then acquitted. INN captures the impunity with which this happens. And why society needs to react.

If the protector becomes (the) predator, civilised society will cease to exist… Policemen who commit criminal acts deserve harsher punishment than other persons who commit such acts, because it is the duty of the policemen to protect the people and not break the law themselves. - Supreme Court of India, 2010

On 14 May, police rounded up four men in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, 260 km west of the state capital, Lucknow, in connection with a month-old case of murder. Three days later, one of them, a 33-year-old farmer named Balbir Singh, lay dead in a hospital in Lucknow. “The police gave him electric shocks and injected acid and petrol in his body,” says his brother- in-law, Sunul Kumar. “They forced him to sit on an electric heater that burnt his body horribly.” According to Kumar, Singh told him before dying that the police wanted him to confess his involvement in the murder.

CADBURY TO PAY 30K TO MAN FOUND 'PIN IN CHOCHOLATE'

INN News Desk

A consumer court in Tripura has ordered Cadbury India Ltd to pay a compensation of Rs.30,000 to a complainant who found an iron pin inside a chocolate bar made by the company, an official said.

“A man purchased a Cadbury chocolate on Dec 16, 2011, for his three-year-old daughter and found an iron pin inside the bar when the girl tried to eat it. Subsequently, he filed a complaint before a consumer forum,” a food department official told here.

“After conducting a hearing, the west Tripura district consumer disputes redressal forum last week ordered Cadbury India Ltd to pay a compensation of Rs.30,000 to the complainant within a month.” The forum, which in its judgment said the chocolate was hazardous, also asked the chocolate company to pay Rs.1,000 to the complainant towards the cost of litigation.

HORRIFYING INCIDENTS OF RAMPANT SEXUAL ABUSES

By M H Ahssan, Kajol Singh, Ashol Rai

Shocking statistics. Devastating stories. Our dirty national secret. INN bring you a horrifying report on the rampant sexual abuse of children in India. 

To begin with, hear the story of one child. On 17 December 2012 — just one day after the gangrape of a young paramedic in New Delhi shook the world — a three-and-a-half-year old baby girl returned from school with her clothes streaked with vomit and blood.

Her father, Gagan Sharma (name changed), had moved from Kolkata to a slum in west Delhi in 2003 in search of a better life. The little girl had been listless and reluctant to go to school for weeks. Now, when her mother asked her what had happened, she told the story haltingly, riven by fear.

GRIM FACTS: WHAT'S BEHIND A GLASS OF MILK?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

INN throws light on some grim details about the cow in India, the world’s largest producer of milk.

You know that child who throws a terrible tantrum over a glass of milk. How he kicks and screams and refuses to touch the stuff? Haven’t you wondered what the fuss is all about? After all, it’s just a glass of milk.

It turns out the child may just have the right idea. The business of producing milk — indeed, the multi-crore rupee cattle industry it’s a part of — is sustained by a process of relentless cruelty towards animals, from birth till death, with little letup. Cruelty compounded by poorly defined, poorly implemented methods and gross violations.

SUMMER VISIT, AT INDIA’S UNKNOWN 'LAKE PALACE'

By M H Ahssan / Agartala

A blend of Hindu and Muslim architecture, Neermahal gets to see over three lakh people every year. Somen Sengupta visits Tripura’s now endangered lake palace to tell us more about it.

In India there are only two lake palaces which, by their size, shape and history, can make your jaw drop in awe. The first one is the well-known lake palace of Udaipur, which has now been converted into a luxury hotel. While many people would easily tell you about the Rajasthan lake palace, the one which remains lost in our collective consciousness is Tripura’s Neermahal. Thankfully, I saw this palace for the first time in a poster of Tripura tourism at Calcutta Airport. Captivated by its majestic presence over a huge water body, I got excited to explore this place.

'ARUNACHAL' TOPS IN HANDLING 'CHILD NUTRITION'

By M H Ahssan / New Delhi

The problem is likely to be less severe than UN statistics indicate, given faulty yardsticks. If asked to name the state with the lowest incidence of child malnutrition in India, readers will overwhelmingly pick one of Kerala, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Punjab or West Bengal. But they will all be wrong by a wide margin: none of these states appears among even the top five performers. 

'PUBLIC FUNDS AND PONZY GAMES' OF SARADHA SCAM

By M H Ahssan & Richa Rai / Kolkata

‘Son of holy mother Sarada’, Sudipta Sen gives his interrogators a tough time as he spouts ideology about helping the poor.

Police detectives had a tough time interrogating Saradha Group chairman Sudipta Sen, who proved to be a hard nut to crack. In the face of sustained grilling, the scamster kept spouting his ideologies throughout on Friday.

Sen was interrogated by a number of detectives of Bidhannagar police led by deputy commissioner Arnab Ghosh. The grilling started at 10.30 am on Friday and continued till late at night in separate sessions.

Sen and his associates Debjani Mukherjee and Arvind Singh Chauhan, who were arrested along with him in Jammu and Kashmir, were quizzed by several police officers separately in three different rooms of the New Town police station.

TERROR HAVEN: THE NASTY AND THE NORTHEAST

By M H Ahssan / Shillong

Manir Khan's 'operational area' was Assam. The sub-inspector with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence had executed two 'assignments' in the state. But he was third time unlucky, as Indian sleuths nabbed him from west Tripura in July 2010. 

Khan told interrogators that his duty was to ferry back “quality information” for better “tactical appreciation” of cross-national issues to his masters in Pakistan. In his initial visits, Khan had carried out “feasibility recces” of the Tripura corridor connecting Bangladesh-Tripura and Assam, says an interrogation report. 

FROG WEDDING TO APPEASE 'RAIN GOD' IN NORTHEAST INDIA

By CJ Sandeep Hazarika in Itanagar

In a ritual to appease the rain god, villagers in Tripura and Assam married off frogs hoping that it would end their sufferings arising out of a protracted dry spell in India’s northeastern region. Frog weddings are traditionally performed in northeastern India during drought-like situations before the onset of monsoon. “It is believed that the rain god is pleased when a frog wedding is performed. Since there has been no rain for the past couple of months, we have conducted a frog wedding to appease ‘Barun Devata’ (rain god),” said Sandhya Chakraborty, a resident of Fatikroy village, 115 km north of here.

GUEST COLUMN: Manipur And Its Demand For Internal Autonomy

By Rangja Samerkez (Guest Writer)

Reviewing the fraught political situation in Manipur with the diverging demands for autonomy, which revived after apparent progress and near closure of the talks with the Nagas, this article assesses those demands and traces their origins. Arguing that the government has now an opportunity to force a compromise solution on all parties, it calls for a proactive role of the government to bring about lasting peace in the region.

Recent days have seen much commentary on the festering turmoil in Manipur where different ethnic groups are making competing autonomy demands. These demands were always there, but they were given a fresh lease of life by the ongoing Indo-Naga political talks. The Indo-Naga talks are actually more about Manipur than about Nagaland, as the issues discussed impinge directly on Manipur and its territorial integrity. The proverbial sword of Damocles hangs over Manipur’s head. These talks have meandered for the last 15 years, still with no solution in sight. 

India Is Asia’s Dharamshala – Why Not Learn To Love It?

The benevolence of politicians and bureaucrats is sometimes no benevolence at all. For some time now, there has been a trickle of Hindus from Pakistan coming to India on short-term visas, but their real purpose has never been in doubt: to flee discrimination and violence against Hindus in Pakistan.

Earlier this week, the home ministry granted a one-month visa extension to 480 Pakistani Hindus who have been seeking permanent resident status here.  An Indian Express report quoted a ministry official thus: “They will not be deported. Since it takes time to take any decision on their appeals, we have extended their visas for a month.”

Sorry, sir, this is no longer about 480 people. For the last 65 years, India has been facing an influx of people fleeing either religious persecution or ethnic strife or economic conditions in all our neighbouring countries. But we have simply refused to evolve a policy to address all these issues. We want to do everything on a case-by-case basis, or, better still, ignore the problem till it gets resolved illegally: by people acquiring Indian residency by stealth.

Given the numbers of illegal migrants – perhaps running into millions now – we have probably become the world’s biggest dharamshala, but that is something to be proud of. It validates the idea of inclusive India. What we cannot be proud of is that we have allowed this to happen by accident and exception, rather than by a clear-sighted policy.

Our inward immigration policy is a mess. We have separate policies (or default approaches) for Tibetans, for Nepalese, for Sri Lankan Tamils, for Bangladeshis, for Pakistani Hindus and for the rest. Then there are Muslim Rohingyas from Myanmar and Afghans (a motley group comprising Sikhs, Hindus and even Muslims) and what not – and we don’t have a clue what to do with them.

For a country that was artificially partitioned in 1947, it should have been obvious that people will migrate here and there. As a secular alternative to all our less-than-secular neighbours, we have always known that immigration will be more inward and less outward. As a democratic oasis in a largely undemocratic or autocratic south Asian region, we should have had policies to accept refugees fleeing persecution.

As a rapidly globalising country, we have known since 1991 that Indian companies need to recruit foreign professionals to work here just as we expect foreign governments to allow Indians to work in their countries.

But what we have now is a patchwork and illogical system that has been adapted to exigencies of specific situations at specific times.

The Tibetans were allowed in in Nehru’s time. But do we have a policy in case it finally becomes clear that they will never get an autonomous state inside China and can’t return? What if they have to stay here permanently? Will they be given full Indian citizenship?

The Nepalese, under the 1950 India-Nepal Friendship Treaty, are allowed almost free access inside India – almost like Indian citizens. This is the most liberal policy we have with our neighbours, and has remained on the statute book even though our political relationship with Nepal has gone from good to uncertain after the Communists entered government and ended the Hindu monarchy.

When it comes to Bangladesh, we have three policies – or non-policies: one for Assam, another for some north-eastern states, and yet another for the rest.

Under the Assam Accord of 1985, anyone who came to Assam before 1 January 1966 will be allowed to stay and become Indian citizens. Those who came between this date and 24 March 1971 were to be detected but not deported. They would be deleted from electoral rolls, but could get back after 10 years. The rest were to be detected and deported.

The accord has more or less been a dead letter, since politicians in need of immigrant votes refused to implement it. As for the remaining north-eastern states, migration is either fully illegal and politically accepted, or we have restrictions that apply even to Indian citizens.

In Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, Indians need inner line permits to visit those states even as tourists. The Bangladeshis who enter India traipse around tribal Meghalaya, but have found an easy perch in Tripura. Together with pre-1947 migration, they have relegated the locals to minority status. As for Kashmir, Indians can tour the state but can’t buy property or settle there. Even if they marry Kashmiris, they can’t acquire property there.

As for potential workers and immigrants from the rest of the world, we have the most restrictive policy on board, where the intention is to debar foreigners from working here – unless they earn more than $25,000 per annum. This rules out any kind of work visa for foreigners in India beyond highly qualified technical personnel or short-term consultants – so forget about allowing for easy migration.

As a liberal, democratic country, India has an obligation to run a truly liberal and open immigration policy that does not discriminate. This is a country that took in persecuted people from ancient times to the modern era (Zoroastrians, Jews, Tibetans). We have even accepted invaders as our own.

This should be the broad backdrop against which we should frame a unified immigration and work permit policy. The policy should include the following:

First, we must have a clear policy for taking in refugees from persecution. It does not matter which religion or ethnic group the person belongs to. It is ironic that political parties are willing to plead the case of Bangladeshi Muslims, who can only be chasing economic opportunities here, but not Hindu refugees from Pakistan. At a later stage, we should be willing to take in even Muslim refugees from Pakistan – for who knows what will happen if the Taliban takes over Pakistan? Obviously, this policy needs safeguards, but if there is a will, we can put one in place.

Second, we must have a system of regularising long-term migrants who are settled here. The Assam accord specifically provided for that, but we didn’t implement it. We neither put in place an impenetrable fence to keep future immigrants out nor a system of formally recognising the Bangladeshis’ need to find work here – through a system of work permits or guest workers with no citizenship rights.

Third, India needs to work out a free-movement agreement (especially for tourism and work) with all its neighbours barring Pakistan. Setting a high salary limit of $25,000 for work permits may be all right for westerners, but not for our neighbours in South Asia. The threshold needs to be much lower.

Fourth, residency permits and citizenship norms need to be easier. Currently, it takes 12 years for a foreigner to get citizenship by naturalisation, and seven years if they are married to an Indian citizen. One wonders why this waiting period needs to be so long. Seven years is too long a wait for a marriage to be seen as legitimate enough to warrant grant of citizenship to the foreign spouse.

Isn’t it high time we opened our front doors to the world instead of winking at their entry through the back door?

Andhra Pradesh Tops In 'Crimes Against Women'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://newshyd.blogspot.in/2013/03/inn-advertising-tarrif.html

Over 1,000 IAS Officers Fail To Submit Property Returns

Over 1,000 IAS officers have failed to submit their immovable property returns (IPRs) to the government within the stipulated time frame this year.

Of the total of 1,057 officers who did not submit their IPRs for 2012, a highest of 147 are from Uttar Pradesh cadre, 114 of Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram-Union Territories (AGMUT), 100 of Manipur-Tripura, 96 of Jammu and Kashmir and 88 of Madhya Pradesh cadre among others, according to Department of Personnel and Training data.

Suspended IAS couple Arvind and Tinoo Joshi of MP cadre are also among the list of erring officials. Joshis, both 1979 batch officers of Madhya Pradesh cadre, made headlines after Income Tax department raided their residence in February, 2010 and allegedly unearthed assets worth over Rs 350 crore.

58 IAS officers of Karnataka cadre, 53 of Andhra Pradesh, 48 of Punjab, 47 of Orissa, 45 of West Bengal, 40 of Himachal Pradesh, 35 of Haryana, 25 of Jharkhand, 23 of Assam-Meghalaya, 22 of Rajasthan, 20 of Tamil Nadu, 17 of Maharashtra, 16 of Nagaland, 14 of Gujarat, 13 of Bihar, 10 of Kerala, nine each of Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh and eight of Sikkim cadre have not given their IPRs, it said.

The total sanctioned strength of IAS is 6,217, including 1,339 promotion posts. Of these, 4,737 officers are in position.

An all-India service officer is bound to file property returns of a year by January end of the following year, failing which promotion and empanelment to senior level postings may be denied.

Besides, there are 107 IAS officers who have not submitted their IPRs for 2011. As many as 198 IAS officials did not give their property details for 2010. “A circular has already been sent to all cadre
controlling authorities to inform them about timely submission of their IPRs,” said an official of the DoPT, which acts as a nodal agency for administrative matters of the IAS officers.

UPA Anti-Terror ‘Strategy’: When Doing Nothing Looks Like Success

According to the South Asia Terrorism expertise database, terrorism and insurgency-related fatalities in India have fallen from a peak of 5,839 in 2001 to 804 in 2012. Indeed, the decline has been sustained in each year since 2001, with a significant reversal of the trend only in 2005, and a marginal reversal in 2008.

The most dramatic drop has, of course, been in Jammu and Kashmir, for long the country’s worst insurgency, which witnessed a collapse from 4,507 fatalities in 2001 to 117 in 2012 (down from 183 in 2011, and 375 in 2010).

For a while, it appeared that a rampaging Maoist rebellion would escalate to fill up the gap, as fatalities surged from 675 in 2005 to 1,180 in 2010. Worse, the Maoists appeared to be expanding their theatres of operation at an unprecedented pace, confronting India with the most widespread insurgency of its Independent history. By 2010, 223 districts (out of a total of 636) in 20 states were thought to be affected by varying levels of Maoist ‘activity’, though only some 65 of these witnessed any recurrent violence. But the Maoist insurgency also appears to be in retreat. Total fatalities in Maoist violence dropped to 367 in 2012, even as the number of afflicted districts shrank to 173.

The broad trends in the chronically-troubled North-east have also been salubrious, with total fatalities declining from a recent peak of 1,051 in 2005 to 317 in 2012. Disturbing proclivities, however, do persist. The Maoists have extended their presence into this unstable region and are creating new partnerships with its fractious and collapsing insurgencies.

Some states, most prominently including Manipur, see a cyclical trend in violence. So, while fatalities were down to 190 in 2002, they rose almost steadily thereafter, to 485 in 2008, dropping to just 65 in 2011, and rising, again, to 111 in 2012. Fratricidal turf wars between various rebel Naga factions have also seen a spike in killings in this state, from 15 in 2011, to 65 in 2012.

Attacks by Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorists across India recorded a remarkable decline, with just one incident in 2012 outside J&K – a low intensity blast in Pune. 2011 had registered three such attacks outside J&K, with at least 42 killed. 2008, of course, saw such incidents peaking, with seven attacks, and 364 fatalities, of which 195 (166 civilians, 20 SF personnel and nine terrorists) were accounted for by the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack alone.

It is natural, in the present circumstances, to attribute this broad trend towards internal security stabilisation – at least in part – to state policy. The argument, crudely put, is that the government must be doing something that is right if all our insurgencies are collapsing, and Pakistan-backed Islamist terrorists are in evident retreat, both in J&K and across the rest of the country. Such an assessment, the argument goes, cannot be undermined by an occasional attack, such as the 21 February 2013, twin blasts in Hyderabad, which killed 16.

Indeed, some supporters of the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime have sought to interpret the contrast between insurgency-terrorism-related fatalities under the preceding National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the current trend as evidence of the great sagacity of strategy and policy that the former has brought to internal security management.

Curiously, as an aside, it is interesting to notice that, on the one hand, the government and its supporters argue that declines in violence are the result of the ‘success’ of ‘policies’ and ‘strategies’ (neither of which appear to have been defined in any distinctive terms, or to have been implemented on any measurable parameters); on the other, at the first sign of trouble – the Hyderabad blasts, for instance – they insist that it is necessary to create the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) if terrorism has to be fought successfully.

But if recent improvements in trends are the consequences of ‘good policies and strategies’ – obviously implemented by existing institutions – the NCTC is, evidently, not necessary. On the other hand, if the NCTC is, indeed, necessary, then the declines in terrorist violence would need to be attributed, not to any great strategic coherence or operational effectiveness, but to extraneous factors for which the government cannot claim credit.

The Hyderabad blasts, in fact, tell us precisely that our vulnerabilities remain undiminished, and that it is in a wide range of other factors – and not in any spectacular augmentation of state capacities and capabilities, or any impressive evolution of national strategy – that we would find explanations of the broad decline of insurgent and terrorist violence in India.

This is not to say that the state and its agencies have done nothing, or that there has been no capacity augmentation. Rather, what is being done does not constitute any radical departure from what was being done earlier – with very limited impact – and capacity augmentations have been far too modest to register any remarkable improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of CI-CT capabilities and responses.

To take one obvious and visible parameter, between 2008 (the year of the 26/11 attacks) and 2011 (the last year for which credible data is available) the police-population ratio rose from 128 to just 137; significant, of course, but nowhere near the strengths required even for peacetime policing – which, on international estimates, should range well above 220 per 100,000.

Various institutional innovations, prominently including the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI) in the IB, and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS), which were to provide the core of augmented CI-CT capabilities, remain mere shells, years after they were sanctioned, with no measurable impact on ground level capabilities of the state.

Of course, state and central agencies have made continuous arrests and have successfully identified and neutralised a wide range of the state’s enemies on a fairly regular basis. However, such preventive operations and arrests were also carried out when violence was rising, and there is no evidence to suggest that the plummeting trends in insurgent and terrorist violence are the consequence of extraordinary operational efficacy.

It is, indeed, safe to say that, in the main – though not in their entirety – the improvements in India’s internal security environment are consequences of factors extraneous to the strategies, policies and actions of the state and its agencies; unless, of course, an attitude of majestic indolence can be regarded as ‘strategy’, ‘policy’ or ‘action’. It would, in fact, not be far from the truth to say that India has, more often than not, simply worn out its enemies by its indifference, than defeated them by the vigour and sagacity of its responses.

There are, of course, exceptions to this broad observation – Punjab, Tripura and Andhra Pradesh provide dramatic examples of what the state and its agencies can do when they actually find the clarity of purpose and the determination. But the lessons of these theatres have largely been ignored in a muddled discourse on ‘developmental’ and ‘political’ solutions, and by those who have given vent to immature anti-Maoist fantasies on ‘clear, hold and develop’, or to theatrical institutional innovations such as the NCTC, to the abiding neglect of the nuts and bolts of capacities and capabilities of the country’s intelligence and policing apparatus on the ground.

It is not a coincidence that the sustained reversal in terrorism-insurgency trends commenced after 2001. The 9/11 attacks in the US signalled the beginning of a new age in which the opportunistic ‘tolerance of terrorism’ that had marked the attitudes of the West was brought to an end. The enveloping global environment became abruptly hostile to those who used extreme violence to secure their political ends, and to the states that sponsored them.

The attacks of 9/11 also brought the massive US-led Western intervention in Afghanistan, and its gradual impact on the wider AfPak region. The result was progressively rising pressure on the Pakistani covert establishment to end at least visible levels of support to terrorism on India soil, as well as the impact of escalating domestic destabilisation that came to afflict Pakistan as a result of the ‘blowback’ of its support to international terrorism and its campaigns in Afghanistan.

A shift in Pakistan’s strategic priorities, towards the more urgent imperatives of its campaigns in Afghanistan, and away from Kashmir and India, further weakened India-directed terrorist impulses, providing tremendous relief, particularly in J&K. It remains the case, however, that Pakistan has kept anti-India terrorist formations of various hues alive and in reserve, hoping that a Western withdrawal from the region will reopen opportunities for a renewal of its Indian campaign.

The collapse of the regime of ‘tolerance of terrorism’ had it wider impact on other insurgencies in India. It was in December 2003 that the multiple insurgencies of India’s North-east received their first body blow, when the groups – led by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) – were expelled from Bhutanese soil, where they had received safe haven for years. After 2007, the environment became hostile in Bangladesh as well, and after the Sheikh Hasina Wajed government came to power in 2009, Bangladesh intensified action against the North-east insurgent groups and even dismantled the structure of Islamist extremist and terrorist groupings that had crystallised on its soil.

Large proportions of the North-east insurgent leadership were simply handed over to Indian authorities. Others found surrender or negotiations with the state more attractive, against the now-rising uncertainties of a fugitive life. The degraded insurgencies of the North-east are now also afflicted by an exhaustion brought about by the protracted and ponderous insensitivities of the Indian state.

Significantly, as the West grew more intolerant of their antics, insurgent groupings have been finding it difficult to secure some measure of political and propaganda space abroad, even as many of their domestic apologists have started running out of enthusiasm in the face of rising criticism. This has certainly blunted recruitment potential and the political space for extremism, once again, eroding prospects of insurgent mobilisation.

The Maoists remained substantially insulated from these developments. Reinvigorated by the merger of the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre in September 2004, the newly formed Communist Party of India – Maoist (CPI-Maoist) embarked on an ambitious adventure to “extend the people’s war throughout the country”. Over the succeeding six years, they expanded into regions that were far from the population, geographical, administrative and developmental profile of the Red Corridor areas where they had found their natural habitat.

This was a tremendous strategic miscalculation, exposing them to the obvious risks of penetration during a phase of rapid expansion, compounded by the fact that these regions were much better connected, better serviced and (relatively) better administered. The result was that the Maoists suffered massive leadership losses – for instance, at least 18 members of the 39-member Central Committee of 2007 were arrested or killed during this phase. An overwhelming proportion of these losses were far afield, in urban centres and in states where the Maoists were making tentative forays to set up their networks, and not, with only occasion exception, as a result of the vaunting ‘clear, hold and develop’, or ‘cordon and search’ operations that the Centre launched in 2009 – and that came to a virtual and abrupt end with the Chintalnar massacre of April 2010.

Much of the Maoist escalation during the 2009-10 phase was, in fact, a retaliation against the Centre’s decision to challenge them in their areas of strength, though the pre-election mischief in West Bengal also gave them space for dramatic intensification in that state. Nevertheless, it is the leadership losses that have now forced the Maoists into a tactical retreat and an effort to reconsolidate their bases in their areas of strength – the Red Corridor.

Right to the end of his tenure as Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram had repeatedly stated that, despite the enormous investments and institutional transformations he took credit for, “all of India’s cities” remained vulnerable to terrorist attack. This would be a fairly correct assessment of the overall situation even now – we remain as vulnerable today as we were on 26/11, or as our forces were at Chintalnar.

It is true that our enemies have weakened – some temporarily, some more permanently; but it would be wrong to believe that we have become significantly stronger.

The Brooming 'English Vinglish' Culture

Dreams of jobs, social mobility and self-respect are all tied to knowing the language. For millions, not knowing it means being walled out. 

In 2003, James Tooley, a professor at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, completed and published the results of a year-long survey of private schools for children of low-income families in Hyderabad. ‘Private Schools for the Poor: A Case Study from India’, as the report was titled, found an astounding 61 percent of all pupils in Hyderabad district — much higher than official figures — were enrolled in private, unaided schools. This included, of course, the wealthy and the poor.

Narrowing down to 15 private schools in low-income and slum areas — “an arbitrary selection… to ensure a balance of neighbourhoods and fee ranges” — Tooley and his researchers concluded teacher truancy and school responsiveness rates here compared favourably with government schools. For this, parents — “daily paid labourers, market traders or rickshaw drivers” — were willing to pay fees “in the range of five to 10 percent of the father’s annual income”. The average tuition fee in the selected schools was Rs 116 per month.

The quest for the English language was a key motivation. All 15 schools ran from nursery to Class X and all offered English-medium education. One school also had an Urdu-medium section and three schools had some Telugu-medium classes. The schools followed a standard curriculum from Class VI onwards, in preparation for state board examinations at the end of Class VII and Class X. Till Class VI, however, the schools were free to innovate. Tooley wrote, “We found schools at this level replacing much of the specified curriculum with extra English lessons — because this is often what parental demand wanted.” “School choice was taken seriously by parents,” recorded Tooley, “… One illiterate father — who was far from unusual — told us that if the standard of education did not improve in the school his child attended, then he would take him away to another school. He said that the teaching was not up to the mark, and he was aware that other children were speaking English more effectively than his own child — even though he himself could not speak any English.”

It astonished the research team that a parent who did not know English would not only make learning the language a priority for the child, but also take what he considered an informed decision on his child’s proficiency with the English language, and how well or poorly it was being taught in the school.

What Tooley found was not atypical. The quest for English is not a phenomenon in India; it is an obsession, an epidemic and often a paranoiac fear. This is a language that opens doors; for those outside the magic portals, it is an absence that builds impregnable walls. Pradeep Kumar, 35, a garbage collector at the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, mirrors the anxiety, the nervousness and the sheer and searing ambition of some of the parents Tooley met in faraway Hyderabad.

Kumar never made it past Class V and doesn’t know a word of English. Three years ago, his first born, Abhishek, was enrolled in Class V of a government school in south Delhi’s Govindpuri area. Sensing the government school was inadequate, Kumar sought out an alternative: “I tried to move him to a private school for higher studies, but the teacher there assessed him and said his proficiency in English was that of a child in lower KG or upper KG, and that I should put him in Class I.”

This stunned Kumar. He came home, pushed some English language books towards his son and asked him to read. Consider the pathos of the moment; consider how it must have been: a father who knew no English asking his son to read so that he (the father) could assess his (the son’s) fluency in English. Abhishek tried to read, and faltered; he tried again, and faltered. In a few short wrenching minutes, the humble garbage collector’s little world came crashing down.

“I begged the teacher to take him into even Class I,” Kumar remembers, “and she said she’d try.” That’s when he decided to pull out his younger son and daughter from government schools and put them into private schools instead. “I want to make them successful,” he says, his voice almost a whisper in desperation. “In our time, you could get by. But today there are no jobs for illiterate people. They need to learn good English… I want them to have a better life than I did…”

Literacy, education, learning English: it is telling how easily Kumar conflates the three. To him, English is not just an important subject at school — it is the uber subject, the stairway to heaven, the elevator his children must take to a better life.

Stuck at a traffic signal this past week, Mann Singh, 76, a taxi driver in Mumbai, turned and asked his passenger what the word “infinity” meant. It was no abstract curiosity; he wanted to know what his city’s most popular mall was named after. His passenger explained the definition. What followed was a remarkable attempt at internalising “infinity”, almost making it a part of one’s consciousness. Singh began using the word over and over again, correctly, incorrectly, appropriately and otherwise, till he was sure he had more or less got it.

It’s a game the man has been playing for 60 years. Singh moved to Mumbai in 1956, having left his village in Punjab with a Class VIII education and not a word of English. He learnt the language in the big city, one word at a time, while doing odd jobs for businessmen, running chores, delivering parcels and, finally, some 40 years after he’d arrived in Mumbai, while driving a taxi.

Sitting behind that wheel gave Singh a luxury his four previous decades in Mumbai hadn’t allowed him: time. He bought himself a transistor and listened to cricket commentary in English. Interacting with his passengers, he moved to conversations, initially in Hindi, then in broken English. Gradually the few, isolated words he knew began forming themselves into sentences. Today, Singh knows enough of the English way to respond with a “You’re most welcome, Madam” to a passenger who runs off with a hurried “Thank you”.

If Singh can look back at his experiential learning of English with some humour, it is also because he is secure in the knowledge that he is the last of his kind in his family. All four of his children — the first a supervisor in a mall, the second a management student, the third a chauffeur for a big business corporation and the fourth a factory worker in South Africa — went to private schools and are proficient in English. In one generation, with one language, they have made the leap from working class to middle class.

The equation isn’t always that simple. English has had a complex and troubled engagement with India since Thomas Macaulay introduced it as the medium of instruction with his Minute on Education in 1835. He intended it not just as a communicative tool, but as a social enabler and part of the civilising mission of the East India Company. The condescension that carried with it notwithstanding, English proved to be an empowering force of quite another kind. In one quick move, it reduced Indians from a multiplicity of identities to just two castes — Macaulay’s Children and Macaulay’s Orphans.

The first to use and master the English were, of course, the privileged Indian communities — upper-caste Bengalis, Bombay Parsis, Poona Brahmins and so on. Yet as the decades passed, it became apparent to many that English was not just instructive; it was downright incendiary. It held the key to social disruption and the upturning of hierarchies. There is a school of Dalit scholarship that holds that knowledge of English has allowed privileged Dalits to make a leap and gain authority — with government jobs, for instance — in a manner unknown for millennia.

Chandrabhan Prasad, well-known Dalit writer, has in his articles contrasted the access to English with the historical denial of Sanskrit to the Dalit. In this framework, English is a goddess to be venerated — two years ago, a temple to English began to be constructed in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district — and Macaulay her prophet on Earth.

Inevitably, English became part of the colonial construct. With independence, its effacement became an auxiliary of the nationalist enterprise for some. The Socialists led by Ram Manohar Lohia mocked English, a legacy that lives on in parts in the politics of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party. The Communists abolished English at the primary level in West Bengal only to acknowledge their error a quarter century later. The Sangh Parivar saw English as representing a westernisation project.

It is worth noting that many of those debates are now settled, and those emotions spent. The first-generation learner of today is no aspiring Anglophile and does not even remotely see himself as a member of the Anglosphere. Neither does he consider Britain or even America as a natural cultural reference point. He sees English for what it is: a pathway to a better job, a better life and that intangible — social status.
Few native speakers of English can even comprehend what life must be on the other side of the tracks for the vast majority of their fellow Indians. Tridip Suhrud, Ahmedabad-based social scientist, calls “the desire to learn English the biggest aspiration for Indians today… like a passport to gain cultural confidence”. Yet, he acknowledges that in “the search of an elusive promise, we have devalued learning in other languages”.

It’s a vicious circle. There are too few technical manuals and textbooks in English. This ends up meaning there are too few who master technical manuals and textbooks in anything other than English, often making a hell-for-leather attempt to reach some familiarity with the language. The result: the incentive to produce more and better technical manuals and textbooks in English declines.

This is exactly the reasoning Girish Walimbe, the septuagenarian trustee of the Maharashtra Girls Education Society, Huzurpaga, Pune, offers. Founded by the social reformer Jyotiba Phule 127 years ago as a Marathi-medium institution that pioneered girls’ education in India, the school has an illustrious history.

Five years ago, the Huzurpaga school was forced to open an English-language affiliate as well. The demand was overwhelming. “I believe the medium of instruction should be one’s mother tongue,” says Walimbe, “but knowing English is the need of the hour. The world works that way. English is the key to acquiring technical education because there are no technical books available in regional languages.”

“Feed your child once a day if needed, but make sure he goes to an English school”: Ishtyaq Bhat, 27, seems to speak with a wisdom and cynicism beyond his age. Bhat owns a popular guest house and tour company in Srinagar called Lassa Bhat, named after his grandfather. The real-life Lassa Bhat ran a tea stall near the Dal Lake. His son, Shafi Bhat, opened two rooms of the family house to western tourists. However, that was as far he got; being illiterate, he could go no further in terms of communication.

In the 1990s, as the Valley was gripped by violence, the Bhats left for Goa where Shafi and his sister became the first in their family to go to school. Returning home, Shafi expanded the Lassa Bhat Guest House and built a new wing. His familiarity with English made it easy for him to win the trust of tourists from abroad and have them recommending the guest house. It wouldn’t have been possible without English. To Shafi’s mind, learning the language has been the game-changer in his life.

What if it hadn’t turned out this way? In his novel The Story of My Assassins, Tarun Tejpal, a senior journalist, has this percussive passage on a character’s unequal struggle with English:

“The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject — all of them taught in English — fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners. The first counter-attack Kabir M made on English was in Class IV when he learnt like the rest of his reeling mates to say, ‘Howdudo? Howdudo?’ The answer being: ‘Juslikeaduddoo! Juslikeaduddoo!’ It set the pattern for life for most of them. English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted. Its emissaries to be captured and tortured. The enemy of English came at them from every direction: in the guise of forms to be filled, exams to be taken, interviews to be given, marriage proposals to be evaluated. The enemy English had a dwarfing weapon: it made instant lilliputs of them.”

Where are the weapons to slay this enemy forged? The English coaching, tuition and informal education industry must be one of India’s largest and most underreported services-sector businesses. For Amod Kumar Bhardwaj, 45, and chief executive of the Meerut-based American Institute of English Learning (AIEL), imparting training in spoken English has proved a goldmine. “I qualified after the written exam for the Combined Defence Services,” he says, beginning his back-story. “I was confident of a good career in the army. My hopes crashed during the interview because of my poor spoken English.” That motivated him to not just improve his English-speaking skills but, in 1991, to set up AIEL.

Bhardwaj sees AIEL as a sort of finishing school. After graduating from school or college or a technical institution, the student comes here to learn to use the English language in a manner of speaking, literally, and go on to a job. Over two decades, AIEL has coached thousands of students. Today, it has a franchise running in every single one of Uttar Pradesh’s 70 districts. “We have close to 100 centres,” he says.

In ‘A Story of Falling Behind’, their 2009 study of West Bengal, economists Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari examined the private tuition boom that encompassed “80 percent of middle-school children in rural West Bengal”. Quoting a 2006 survey conducted by the Amartya Sen-founded Pratichi Trust, Debroy and Bhandari wrote: “Even among poor children, the average annual incremental expenditure because of private tuition was around 1,000. Private tuition is an endemic part of the West Bengal education system. This can partly be dated to 1983, when in an attempt to ensure equity, the West Bengal government abolished teaching of English in primary schools for the government education system. This triggered demand for private tuitions, even among the poor.”

Raj Kishan, 36, an autorickshaw driver in New Delhi with origins in Motihari, Bihar, would nod in agreement. His seven-year-old daughter studies in Class II in a government school, but she still goes to two coaching classes a day. “One coaching class is exclusively for English and the other is for all subjects,” Kishan explains, “I pay Rs 400 a month for each. English coaching is separate because that madam doesn’t teach anything else.”

Kostubh Vohra, a fellow of Teach for India, is in charge of Class II in a private school for underprivileged children in New Delhi. Illiterate or moderately educated parents push their children to learn at least English, and this has led Vohra to adopt innovative methods to expand reading, writing and comprehension skills. “I use various applications on the iPad,” he points out. “They help in teaching phonetics and increase the children’s interest. There is an app called Read Aloud, which shows a word on screen as it is pronounced.”

To his pupils, English is the basic ingredient of fantasy: “I tell them that if they want to become space travellers or scientists or doctors, it is necessary to learn English. It is important because all technology is in English. There is a direct co-relation between English and jobs…”

A life removed from English can be a burden, even a blow and a confidence corroder. Champa Roy, 34 from Agartala, Tripura, had it all — a loving husband, two children and a degree in science. In 2011, her husband died and she decided to look for a job as a teacher.

“I tried my luck,” she says, “and would eventually get rejected everywhere as my spoken English was weak. I had studied in a Bengali-medium school… In testing times, I understood how important it was to at least have good spoken English skills. It really helps, while being a science graduate was of no help.” To her mind, familiarity with English scores over academic or scholastic qualifications.

Is that Macaulay’s vindication or the tragedy of his legacy? One can debate that, but the fact is, it’s contemporary India’s hard, blistering reality.

Manik Sarkar: India’s Poorest Chief Minister?

Manik Sarkar, who has been the Tripura chief minister for 15 years and is leading the CPI-M in upcoming elections, is perhaps India’s poorest chief minister.

Keeping in line with his party policy, Sarkar gives away his salary and allowances to the Communist Party of India-Marxist, which pays him Rs.5,000 as subsistence allowance to run his family.

In 2008, Sarkar’s cash in hand and bank deposits totalled Rs.16,120. According to his latest election affidavit, this amount has come down to Rs.10,800.

Sarkar’s wife, a retired central government employee, has Rs.22,015 in hand. She has another Rs.24,52,395 in banks. Of this, Rs.18,930 and Rs.84,118 are in two savings accounts.

The rest of the money, mostly retirement benefits, is in the form of fixed deposits. The Sarkars have no children.

After the death of his mother Anjali Sarkar in 2009, Sarkar inherited a small house in Agartala. He donated it to a kin.