Opinion

A daughter’s pledge for reform of youth

Asian Age — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:11:54 GMT

By Farrukh Dhondy

Nov 21 : "…friendship, love, infatuation, fascination,

arrangement, blackmail, bondage, coercion, boredom, habit, nemesis… ‘relationship’…"

From Bachchoo’s Thesaurus

My brave daughter works in London’s badlands as a "youth-worker" and insists that the cynical thugs she deals with, whom I have learnt from the media to regard as the nemesis of urban society, are actually misguided children. She may be right.

Her job in the London Borough of Haringey, where many immigrant communities, the Somalis, Albanians, Turks, Algerians, Nigerians, Afghans, Pakistanis etc. reside (but where don’t they in the entirety of London which is 35 per cent "ethnic"?) is to get the knife and gun gangs off the streets and into activity. This could be simply coming into a youth club and being introduced to pastimes and challenges more productive or at least safer for their fellow-burghers than hanging around the streets looking for people to mug or members of a rival gang to stab or shoot.

Further than that, she and her team aim to put these boys and girls to useful activity acquiring a skill they can professionally use and it’s part of the job to put the waifs and strays in touch with an agency that can solve their drug/mental, health/social welfare problems.

Daughterji was going away last weekend with a group of these recalcitrants — her "clients" — to some part of the country for a four-day sojourn in a state-funded outdoor camp where the lumpen youth volunteer to go to be taught canoeing or diving or some other challenging activity which will take their minds off crime and the depression of the ghetto and perhaps instil in them interests and ambitions beyond it. It’s an extended and vastly more costly Baden Powell programme for the bad ’uns, but without the pseudo-religious promises that Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have to make.

They do make promises, however. My daughter, before she went, was working on the computer, growling frustrations with its tendencies and shouting out words for which she wanted the spellings. I asked her why she needed to spell "statutory".

"I am typing out forms for the clients to sign", she said.

"What forms?"

"Oh, just to say that they are not carrying any guns or knives on them or in their luggage. They have to give us that undertaking before they get on the coach."

This is the sort of cool answer that turns my stomach. I suppose the parents of young men and women who work in the active wings of a police force or as soldiers in a war zone constantly get this feeling. I have had to get used to the idea that my beautiful and dedicated daughter is in one of the "front-line" services of this society. Nevertheless, it gives me pause.

She presses the "PRINT" button and turns to me with a grin, reading my frown.

"It’s better than searching them and going through their baggage like security guards because that doesn’t give out the same message does it? Here we are handing them a form to sign and asking them to take responsibility for not carrying harmful weapons and demonstrating to some degree that we trust them."

"They may not be trustworthy! If stabbing and shooting is their game, signing a false guarantee is not going to seem a terribly dishonest thing to do."

"Well, put it this way, dad, if they are carrying knives or guns they are hardly likely to use them on us, are they? They use them on each other."

She was quite cheerful about it. Off she went carrying her forms. The same evening, picking up the London Evening Standard, I read the headline which said a 16-year-old boy had been stabbed at a bus stop by a gang of youths. Not, however, in the Borough of Haringey. The report says that the police claim to have reduced knife crime in the capital by a quarter. Which simply means that instead of 400 incidents brought to court, there have only been 300, which is three hundred too many.

A sinister sounding statistic now emerges. The Metropolitan Police have made it their policy to stop and search children as young as 10 and 11 for knives. They claim they confiscate a large number, one which they won’t disclose. They report the children to their families and to the social services who may take up the thread of prevention from there. The police also claim that this stop-and-search operation is responsible for the fall in the stab-rate. They don’t ask the suspects whom they stop to sign any forms. They search them from curly locks to boots and I don’t suppose it inspires great affection for the police patrols who do it or great respect for the uniform. There is enough evidence to indicate that it does exactly the opposite.

The civil rights lobby in the country wants the police to take a less suspicious approach and stop the stop-and-search and instead try and win the hearts and minds of youth. They protest that it’s a suspension of civil liberties. But like being searched before getting on a flight, it is a very annoying but necessary evil and won’t lead to more people carrying knives on the street. It may alienate hearts and minds, but if it’s contributing to safety on the streets, bring on the alienation!

One borough of London, Croydon and not Haringey, more harassed by youth crime on the streets, has trebled its placements of CCTV cameras. These are the snoop cameras that watch the streets and public spaces in the borough and are strategically placed where youths tend to congregate. The move has inevitably brought about complaints against the surveillance society and protests from the same lobby of civil rights watchers.

British cities are, square foot for square foot, the most surveyed cities in the world. The Croydon spokesman was convinced that the cameras would capture "anti-social" behaviour and would act as a deterrent. I can see that it would deter burglars without balaclavas smashing shop windows in the high street, but would it stop desperadoes carrying knives in their trousers or guns in their cars? Perhaps my daughter’s solution is as effective as police searches or surveillance cameras. Get everyone to sign forms.

Build trust, build an honest society? Perhaps not.

A day of reckoning for the Marxists

Asian Age — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:36:31 GMT

Balbir K. Punj

Nov.20 : After reading reports about the discussion that took place in the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) politburo following the Left’s defeat in October, close on the heels of its poor show in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, it seems that the CPI(M) is refusing to accept the reality.

The party leadership seems convinced that the wipe-out it faced in two of its three states of influence (West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura) in the October bypolls was due to peripheral reasons, and not a fallout of the irrelevance of Communism in a fast-changing world.

The CPI(M) in West Bengal is challenged by the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and Mamata Banerjee on the one hand and armed Maoists on the other. Also, it is well known that small landholders and farmers of West Bengal perceive a threat to their land and livelihood in chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s rapid industrialisation programme.

It was farmers’ support on a massive scale, symbolised by what happened in Singur, that enabled Ms Banerjee to resist the onslaught of the Marxist cadres who had kept the countryside under their grip for a long time.

The armed Maoists on the other side are seeing the Marxists weakening in the face of this shift of the countryside’s loyalty, from the CPI(M) to the TMC, and are striking using their armed cadres to telling effect.

Between Ms Banerjee and Maoist leader Koteswara Rao, alias Kishenji, the Marxists found their red shirt stolen and were made victims of their own age-old slogan of proletarian revolution.

The Communists have also lost the support of the urban middle class on which they were banking heavily.

MR BHATTACHARJEE confessed to the mistake the Left made of driving out entrepreneurs and enterprise from West Bengal even as the people of Bengal watched projects after projects going to states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

In Kerala — the other pocket of Left’s influence — a similar story is being played out. The Marxists, who are leading the ruling Left Front, have been routed in all the three byelections to the state Assembly, repeating what happened to them in the 2009 general elections.

More galling was the bypoll in Kannur where Marxist renegade P.K. Abdullakutty, a former Marxist member of Parliament, won as a Congress candidate defeating the Marxists in the land of the birth of Communism. Kannur was the native place of several Communist leaders, including A.K. Gopalan. This is a place where the Marxists had imposed their diktat using armed cadres, and where a murder every day and that too in broad daylight is a common occurrence.

Mr Abdullakutty’s victory in Kannur is to be read in the background of key defeats for the Marxists in several local body elections, in some of which their own dissidents have scored over the official party candidates.

The Kerala pattern of downfall for the Communists closely follows what is happening to the comrades in West Bengal.

THIS YEAR marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that signalled the end of Communism in Europe, including the former Soviet Union. The symbolism of the doubly fortified Wall, that prevented many people from reaching out to their brethren, falling down one fine evening has been played out in a plethora of articles on the 20th anniversary of the event.

When the then US President Ronald Reagan stood in West Berlin in 1987 and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to pull down the Wall, most people dismissed it as a mere Cold War rhetoric. Two years later, the Wall did fall. East Berliners virtually brought down the Wall as a demonstration of their pent-up anger. The Berlin Wall was the Communist prison that was sought to be sold to them as a utopia.

It was a similar imprisonment of lies that the Marxist government in West Bengal sought to feed the people of West Bengal.

Historically, West Bengal was at the top of India’s industrialisation. The Tata Steel Co, Imperial Tobacco Company (now ITC), Garden Reach Workshop, Dunlop, Braithwaite & Co, several engineering firms and jute companies had their headquarters in Calcutta (now Kolkata).

While the industrial climate was vitiated by gheraos, educational institutions were debased by politics. Communist cadres sat over school principals and commanded them how to run their schools. The unionised teachers played truant from their spot of duty. Most industries fell sick.

In the 32 years of the Left Front rule, West Bengal’s ranking in human development index among Indian states has slipped and is now just above Bihar.

This is no surprise. The impoverishment of the people under Communist dispensation was one of the main reasons why overnight the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe collapsed without a shot being fired.

The Indian Communists were seeking to mislead people by claiming that in the Soviet Union food was the cheapest and food prices had remained constant for decades. The fact was that food was quite scarce and people had to queue for even ordinary items like eggs. With shop fronts empty, wages became worthless wads of notes. "They pretended to pay and we pretended to work", was the joke that was going round in the Communist heaven.

After 75 years under the Communist network of lies, the Russian people liberated themselves in 1991, and the people of Eastern Europe even earlier. The time it seems has now come for the people of West Bengal to do a "Berlin Wall" on their 32 year rulers.

If the Left Front is ousted from power, as it is most likely to happen in 2011 or even earlier, for the Indian Communists it would be political nemesis catching up with them.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com

Lebanon: A two-act tragedy in West Asia

Asian Age — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:31:41 GMT

By S. Nihal Singh

Nov 19 : If Lebanon is the weathervane of the Middle East (what we call West Asia), does the formation of a government after five months of post-election wrangling portend a hopeful sign despite the gloom induced by President Barack Obama’s failure to move Israel? Hazarding a guess in a region littered with landmines is a risky business, but the Opposition Hezbollah movement’s agreement to join the government of Saad Hariri and accepting two Cabinet berths, is an indication that the Opposition is prepared to mark time while it awaits what the future brings.

By seeking to tackle the seminal Israeli-Palestinian confrontation head-on at the beginning of his term, President Obama’s rude rebuff by Israel on freezing settlements has essentially resulted in an impasse. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has had to offer resignation from the Palestinian Authority because he was placed in an impossible situation. The pretence of a peace process that has not existed for years rings hollow. And Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to draw attention away from the consequences of snubbing his benefactor and protector by casting around for a lifeline from Syria on the occupied Golan Heights.

Lebanon has always been buffeted by its neighbours and more distant powers as they settle scores among themselves. The Hezbollah movement was born out of Israel’s invasion of the country in the 80s, and the 34-day Israeli offensive in 2006 flattening south Lebanon, resulting in 1,000 Lebanese deaths, mostly of civilians, led to a stalemate and made heroes of the movement. Arabs have always lost the wars they have fought with Israel, and for a supposedly ragtag guerrilla movement to fight the mighty Israeli war machine to a standstill was a signal achievement.

One consequence of the 2006 war was that Hezbollah secured a veto over government decisions in Beirut. And the five months of wrangling to form a national unity government by Mr Hariri was really a struggle over the terms Hezbollah would agree to coexist with the pro-US and pro-Saudi March 14 alliance, named after the Cedar revolution, for the time being. Mr Hariri’s father Rafiq, the long-time Prime Minister and father of rebuilding Beirut on the ruins of the 1975-90 civil war, was assassinated in 2005 leading to the marshalling of pro and anti-Syrian demonstrations. The latter won, Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon after 29 years and son Hariri’s alliance of Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians won 71 seats to the Opposition’s 57. Hezbollah was allied with the Shia Amal movement and the Christian faction led by former General Michel Aoun.

Government positions are carefully parcelled out to the different factions based on religious persuasion. The President must be a Maronite Christian and the process of honing in on Michel Suleiman, the former Chief of Army staff, took much time. The Prime Minister is a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of the National Assembly is a Shia. The percentages have been shuffled once in favour of Sunni Muslims to reflect the changing demography, but nobody is talking about another exercise in apportioning power by downgrading Christians further because the issue is too explosive.

The tragedy of the Middle East, being played out every day, is marked by two Lebanese events, the suicidal 15-year civil war and the murder of Rafiq Hariri. The latter led to the crystallisation of two opposing forces, the pro-Western and status quo movement and the Hezbollah seeking a new regional order, and a United Nations investigation into the assassination, culminating in the hearings at The Hague. In fact, the court’s order to release four pro-Syrian generals because of insufficient evidence is a morale boost for Damascus, widely blamed in Lebanon for the Rafiq killing.

Indeed, the assassination of Rafiq Hariri was a body blow at Lebanon for a weighty reason. A self-made billionaire, he was close to Saudi Arabia and had the credibility and heft to marshal substantial funds for rebuilding Beirut. The gleaming and modern city centre, which I saw during my last visit, is a monument to a unique leader. It was his vision to restore Beirut to its pre-civil war glory of the acclaimed Paris of the East. And before the last turmoil caused by the Israeli invasion, Lebanon was returning to find favour with Arab potentates and common folk for its spectacular charms of sea and mountains.

How Lebanon’s latest attempt at unity will work depends, in large part, on regional currents. Despite Syria’s withdrawal of troops from Lebanon, it continues to exercise considerable influence on Lebanese affairs. Both Syria and Iran support Hezbollah in different ways although the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has developed a cult following in the Arab world after frustrating the aims of the Israeli military offensive of 2006.

In a sense, Israel is now fighting with its back to the wall because it simply cannot afford publicly to insult the US President and prosper in the region. Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad has thrown a morsel in the French way in seeking a greater French role in the region. But it is unlikely that Damascus will fall for the Israeli bait of negotiations without preconditions, without securing all of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

How Prime Minister Saad Hariri steers Lebanon through these treacherous waters remains to be seen, but much will depend upon the future American role. The Obama administration has now to rebuild its regional strategy between the ruins of its policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and foundering hopes on a deal with Iran on its nuclear programme. Both the US and Israel have been seeking to wean away Syria from Iran without paying the price of Israel leaving the occupied Golan Heights. Despite its domestic turmoil, Tehran feels it is sitting pretty, with the majority Shias in command in neighbouring Iraq and the failure of President Obama’s charm offensive in Israel, in the latter case the tail wagging the dog.

Left alone, Lebanon can reclaim its lost glory as a tourist haven for repressed Arab societies. But that is a precious condition the country cannot aspire to. The best Mr Hariri can achieve is to balance opposing forces in a manner that leaves him some room to take his nation forward. Lebanon can never be a Switzerland because the Middle East is not Europe.

When politicians mock the voter

Asian Age — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:04:41 GMT

By P.C. Alexander

Nov 18 : The political developments in some of the advanced states in the country, especially Karnataka, in the last few weeks have so badly dented the image of the parliamentary system of democracy that people have started having serious doubts about whether this system is suitable at all for us.

Britain’s parliamentary system is based partly on statutory provisions and partly on unwritten laws and conventions. But political morality in that country is so high that the type of bargaining for seats and portfolios that has become common in India rarely affects the primacy of the Prime Minister in the selection of his Cabinet colleagues or the smooth working of the principle of collective responsibility.

But after what we have witnessed in Karnataka, one even wonders whether the prefix "chief", which is part of the title "chief minister" as mentioned in our Constitution, has any significance at all.

Referring to the immense power and influence exercised by the Prime Minister in Britain during war and other crisis situations, Sir William Ivor Jennings had observed that "given a solid party backing and confidence among party leaders, a British Prime Minister wields an authority that a Roman emperor might envy or a modern dictator strives in vain to emulate".

However, with the decline of influence of national parties during the last two decades, the offices of the Indian Prime Minister and chief ministers have become so greatly devalued in our country that it is doubtful whether the great expectations of the framers of the Constitution about the holders of these offices still hold good as guidelines for our democracy.

The treatment which B.S. Yeddyurappa, chief minister of Karnataka, had to endure from his own partymen has exposed the utter helplessness of this functionary against a few influential partymen. The rate at which concessions were being demanded from the chief minister and the way he granted them showed that no price was too high to keep his chair.

The irony in Mr Yeddyurappa’s case was that even the party high command could not salvage the prestige of the office of the chief minister, but instead was keen for a settlement between the chief minister and his rivals by making him yield to almost all the demands of his rivals. The sight of the chief minister breaking down in anguish in front of television cameras will forever remain etched in people’s memory as marking the level to which a chief minister’s office was reduced by his own party.

The way the chief minister expressed disappointment at his own helplessness said it all. In a self-condemnatory mood, he lamented, "For my selfish ends I was forced to ditch those who were my trusted people… Even God will not forgive me for this". The tears which rolled down his cheeks were indeed tears for parliamentary democracy itself in our country. An "amicable settlement" was eventually reached between the chief minister and his rivals, but one has to wait and see how amicable this settlement is and how long it will last. The fear now is that such scenes will be enacted in other states as well by over-ambitious politicians to extract their share of power according to their own measure.

The situation regarding ministry-making in Maharashtra was not as bad as it was in Karnataka. But what surprised those who have known Maharashtra as one of the best administered states in India, based on healthy conventions of parliamentary democracy, was the long time taken by the two coalition parties, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), over every issue related to the elections and the state Assembly — allotment of constituencies, selection of candidates and later ministers, distribution of portfolios etc. If it took over 18 days after the election results were known to swear in a new Council of ministers, one begins to doubt whether there is really any common ground between the Congress and the NCP and whether this type of coalition arrangement can last long enough and deliver good governance to the people who have been waiting for it.

Ministry-making in Haryana did not encounter the problems which had appeared in Karnataka and Maharashtra. It became relatively easy for chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda to complete the formalities of cobbling up a coalition government as the anti-defection law now permits such fence-jumping by legislators without having to give up their Assembly seat. He could easily find the additional support required for a majority from a few MLAs for whom a ministerial seat is more important than loyalty to a party or ideology.

In our legislatures almost all members seem to think that they are well qualified to be ministers. In Western democracies members elected to Parliament consider it a great privilege to serve for long years as MPs. A ministerial office does not by itself enhance the social prestige or standing of an MP in those countries. In fact, many MPs in advanced democracies think that they can be more useful to the people without the additional leverage of ministerial offices.

The choice of ministers is a relatively easier task for Prime Ministers in Western democracies because of the "shadow Cabinet" system — the main Opposition parties have shadow Cabinets whose members are selected by the party based on experience, standing in the party, aptitude for ministerial work etc. It is time that political parties in India too start thinking of grooming at least a few leaders who could be first choices for the major portfolios in the Cabinet without having to spend several days in discussions.

If we have to take lessons from the experience of ministry-making over the last few weeks, we must seriously consider extending the scope of legislation on defection and splits in political parties and making it compulsory that a defector seeks re-election instead of creating artificial legal limits to convert a defection into a split. This may be considered an extreme remedy against the practice of defection, but if the parliamentary system is to develop on healthy lines in our country, such drastic steps are necessary.

P.C. Alexander is a former governor of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra

Fight Naxals the way US wages Taliban war

Asian Age — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:14:52 GMT

Shankar Roychowdhury

Nov.17 : Radical ideologies, whether political or theological, have much in common in their public manifestation. The beheadings by Naxalite cadres of inspector Francis Induwar of the Jharkhand Police and of a villager in Gadchiroli suspected to be a police informer have introduced a dimension of psychopathic savagery into Maoist Naxalism which was hitherto considered the exclusive preserve of jihadi militant organisations such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban. These gruesome murders have been casually dismissed by Naxal commander Bikash as stray incidents of little consequence, making it relevant to speculate whether Naxalites in India have begun to consider the Taliban in Pakistan as role exemplars?

The Naxal problem has acquired the same urgency for India as the war in Afghanistan for the United States. It is something to which the Prime Minister has referred repeatedly, making no secret about what he considers to be the "single greatest threat facing the nation". But his transparently genuine concerns have not aroused any adequately supportive responses from an apathetic political system or the politico-administrative machinery of governance. There seems no pervading sense of urgency in what is a race against a ticking time bomb to address and assuage a socio-economic problem which has metamorphosed through decades of sheer economic neglect and cynical political opportunism into a politico-military problem of major dimensions, an aspect which can no longer be wished away, especially at the functional level.

Logically, it is time for the country’s professional military to be inducted into the decision-making process, but ministerial personalities at the Centre are taking great pains to disclaim any likelihood at all of military involvement in the battle against the Naxalites. It is disconcerting to note that political ambiguities, like the fatal "last resort" phrase, are also occurring with increasing frequency which, we know from bitter experience, is often the prelude to the military being pitchforked at short notice into festering socio-political situations which indifferent civil administrations and their political mentors have let get beyond their control.

Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Naxal movement in India too is imperceptibly but definitely acquiring international dimensions and clientele. The Indian cadres (like their Maobadi counterparts in Nepal) appear in the visual media as trained light infantry, naturally raising questions regarding the sources for military training and also the identity of the instructors, and also about their channels for procurement of weapons, and perhaps more important, of ammunition, explosives and finances. In Nepal the instructors were mainly ex-servicemen of the Indian Army’s Gorkha Rifles, persuaded, tempted or coerced into providing assistance, and it must be admitted (with a perverse twinge of professional pride from an old hand!) that they did a fairly good job of it! Similar questions arise regarding the Naxals in India whose "main force" troops have proved definitely superior to the ramshackle state police forces fielded against them, and even Central paramilitary forces (including the much-awaited Cobra battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force) do not appear to have been successful to the degree expected. In this context, there are reports of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leftovers connecting with the Naxal leadership in the jungles of peninsular India at the southern end of the Red Corridor to impart the benefits of their experience against the Sri Lankan Army, while weapons are reported to be coming from Bangladesh as also from Nepal through the northern end of the corridor in the Nepal Terai, not overlooking the well-established potential for Inter-Services Intelligence/jihadi interface in both the adjoining countries.

Against this background, the national leadership has chosen to adopt the option of addressing an increasingly complex national problem with multi-state ramifications through sub-national executive machinery, performing at the level of individual states. Such an approach may undoubtedly provide an interesting academic perspective, but experience suggests such a decentralised pattern would be more appropriate for maintenance of law and order and crime fighting. Here too an increasing requirement is being felt for agencies at the all-India level, such as the recently-established National Investigation Agency. If insurgency is popularly described as a "people’s war", counter-insurgency is "war amongst the people". One is the obverse of the other and both are by nature long-drawn, long-term manpower and resource-intensive processes.

Counter-insurgency is a component of internal security and requires central coordination, direction and control. It is in a different category from maintenance of law and order, though with many overlapping aspects at the state level. Focused counter-insurgency is essentially an integrated process of reconstruction and protection of political, administrative, social and economic infrastructure which insurgency seeks to tear down and destroy. The reconstructive process of counter-insurgency has, therefore, to almost always incorporate a fairly sizeable military component of internal security and requires a comprehensive socio-economic-cum-politico-military analysis to establish its operational base.

Common knowledge based on experience indicates this to be a top-down process, and it is legitimate to query whether any such modality to establish a holistic framework at the national level for operations against Naxalites has been carried out by the Central government or any of its agencies, to be disseminated to state governments to formulate and implement sectoral plans by a similar process. But accounts emerging in the public domain, primarily through the media, still give the impression of each state carrying out what are in effect local and more or less private wars against Naxalites in their respective areas, without much coordination or oversight on any integrated basis.

Meanwhile, intensifying operational strikes by Naxalites in various states across the country, whether the Bihar police armoury at Aurangabad, the Nalco explosives store and Central Industrial Security Force post at Damanjodi, or the hijacking of the Bhubaneshwar Rajdhani near Jhargram, are warnings of a transition to the mobile warfare stage which may be repeated on a larger-scale as the Naxalites taste increasing successes against rickety state administrations. India thus stands doubly beleaguered, internally from Naxalites and externally from its hostile neighbours. This state of affairs augurs ill for the future.

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament

Mamata’s rise a ray of hope for Bengal

Asian Age — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:28:02 GMT

Arjun Sengupta

Nov.16 : Mamata Banerjee has emerged now as an extraordinary leader in West Bengal. The situation there is very precarious and without effective leadership controlling the developments, protecting democracy and law and order, it can degenerate into anarchy, mutual killing of cadres and the paralysis of all development activities. The people of West Bengal are now looking up to Ms Banerjee to provide that leadership. She has almost single-handedly brought out this wave against the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) rule. Now only she can steer the course of West Bengal history towards restoration of democracy and development. She cannot afford to be any longer a rabble-rouser confrontationist. She has to rise above that and arrest the spread of violence and restore development.

No other political force in West Bengal today is capable of providing the leadership. The Congress which has been a champion of democracy and development has lost all organisational base. It cannot afford to be seen as playing at cross purposes with Ms Banerjee even in areas of its influence.

The CPI(M) on the other hand is literally on the run. The wave that has come up in West Bengal will sweep it out of power in 2012 if not earlier. It has lost touch with people and is unable to enthuse its cadres to face the situation. The only consideration that the CPI(M) leadership should have today is how to resist the rise of fascism and its retribution on its cadre. In recent history in Indonesia, with the rise of Suharto's dictatorship millions of Communists were butchered not by the military but by organised people's squads, although the Communist Party of Indonesia at that time was one of the largest parties in the world.

I am putting all these in its starkness form because once fascist retribution starts it becomes almost uncontrollable and I am not sure if my CPI(M) friends are facing up to that situation. The reasons for this debacle of the CPI(M) have to be analysed carefully. The party has isolated itself from the people, the common man's aspirations, broke away from its alliance with the Congress and other democratic forces which had given them an enormous opportunity of influencing the course of Indian politics. It did so in the name of opposing the nuclear deal which was of practically no concern to the common man.

There were many issues which they themselves had championed such as rural employment, social security, tribal development and farmers welfare. The government had initiated measures under pressure but there were many gaps in their performance and practice which needed active intervention and campaign by the CPI(M) and other progressive forces. But instead the CPI(M) chose to snap its ties with the government, not on these issues but on something that in theory suited the leadership's anti-Americanism. A historical opportunity was lost and instead of influencing the government it became a marginal force which was trying its best to maintain some political toe-hold by aligning with all kinds of reactionary forces.

But more proximate reasons for the debacle of the CPI(M) in West Bengal is the way the party has organised its functions with the help of the Mastans, the so called Lumpens, who are footloose goons, wargon-breakers, smugglers and black-marketers, who hang around in all urban cities in the less developed countries as they did in West Bengal. They joined the CPI(M) when its influence was rising and have now started jumping the boat at the first sight of its possible loss of power. Mastans were always around but they were first systematically used by the Congress in the late '60s. But then the CPI(M) with its organised ideological cadre captured power with a massive support of the people. In the initial years, they had many achievements in land reforms, rights of landless labourers and the poor informal workers with the help of the dedicated and ideologically enthused party cadres. But quite soon they were overwhelmed by the Mastans who proved to be very useful to the party leadership for maintaining its votebanks, capturing booths, rigging elections and using strong-arm methods in suppressing the Opposition. The electoral politics took over from ideology with election at all levels, Parliament, state Assembly, panchayats and other local bodies. The Mastans threw up their leaders who became MPs and MLAs who knew how to retain power in electoral politics. They became a Frankenstein's monster for the CPI(M). As a result, in more than 30 years' rule, the CPI(M)'s principled politics were pushed aside very soon and the whole party machinery came to depend upon the Mastans and their strong-arm ways.

The people of West Bengal tolerated it as they had no option. But equitable and inclusive development came to a halt in the countryside and in the urban areas. There was of course some economic growth in terms of the state gross domestic product and in agriculture particularly during the last 20 years, following a purely capitalist path, with little human development. Huge public resentment built up in suppressed fury. Corruption was rampant at all levels of the government and at all levels of political organisations.

The credit must go to Ms Banerjee to change the situation when she took the path of confrontation with the CPI(M) where it could mobilise some strength.

At that time Singur and Nandigram happened. In one stroke the Trinamul Congress got an ideology of mass struggle which soon snow-balled into a major political movement supported by wide sections of the Bengali population.

As these Mastans realised that the CPI(M) power can be effectively challenged, they started changing sides. This spread over in fighting and killing of the CPI(M)'s cadre. Even the state police started prevaricating in fighting these elements.

Hopefully, Ms Banerjee will be able to control the situation. She must openly ask her cadres to stop taking revenge, even if the CPI(M) keeps attacking them. She must insist on the police administration to control the situation. At the same time, she has to build up a new movement of popular participation in development through formation of local groups and communities and open public discussions on all policy choices.

If she succeeds she would emerge as the most successful West Bengal politician after Dr B.C. Roy and take over the mantle of leadership that the Congress had inherited from its national movement. Ms Banerjee must measure up to this great historic challenge.

Dr Arjun Sengupta is a Member of Parliament and former economic adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi

Cong voters return, BJP almost invisible

Asian Age — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:55:02 GMT

Arun Nehru

Nov.15 : Political trends are setting in and, as I had forecast last week, these are now visible and not easy to reverse unless major realignments take place or "political" accidents occur. The most significant changes come in Uttar Pradesh where the Congress Party’s performance has been spectacular. The party is poised to win in excess of 50 seats in the next Lok Sabha elections. For the Assembly, the major contest will now be between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress with the Samajwadi Party (SP) a distant third. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has simply ceased to exist.

I think we have seen a "miracle" of sorts and clearly credit is due to Rahul Gandhi and the team he has created in the state. The persistent Raj Babbar winning in Firozabad by 85,343 votes signals the ultimate decline of the SP and after the Assembly results are analysed we may well see a major migration of votes from the SP to both the Congress and the BSP.

Mayawati’s BSP won nine out of 11 seats and whilst this is a remarkable achievement she will also note that the Congress comes second in five seats!

Trends have little time for statistics and past performance, but as things stand, the public sentiment is in favour of the Congress for the Lok Sabha elections and for Mayawati/BSP in the Assembly with the SP in the "shadows". All political parties have the whole of 2010 for changes and adjustments necessary till they go for elections in 2011.

The Congress votebanks have returned to the party and soon there will be an "exodus" of party workers which will test the selection system initiated by Mr Gandhi. The Uttar Pradesh trend will also spark off a Congress revival in many other parts of the country — Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh will see its immediate effects as the BJP continues to bleed with internal contradictions between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and individuals within the BJP.

The BJP will keep "shrinking" and keep blaming individuals instead of concentrating on the core issues. The interference of the RSS will reduce the BJP to less than 50 seats in the next Lok Sabha!

The internal revolt in Karnataka has been resolved for the moment but there will be serious problems in all the BJP states as the party loses support. Unless the current chief ministers in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh take charge they will go in the direction of Rajasthan, Haryana and Karnataka.

Vasundhara Raje was removed as the leader of the Opposition in Rajasthan; in Haryana "commercial considerations" prevailed and alliances did not take place; in Karnataka "mining" interests prevailed; and in Uttar Pradesh the party has practically vanished! Like the Left, the RSS and those in charge of the BJP are pursuing an outdated political ideology and continue their tirade which is damaging their own political citadels.

The Left has lost its relevance and has shrunk from 60-plus seats in 2004 to 25 seats in 2009. And looking at the current trends, they will be lucky to get 10-15 seats in 2014. No surprise that Mamata Banerjee will sweep West Bengal and the Congress will win Kerala in 2011. New political forces may well emerge as a political system needs a stable ruling party and a viable Opposition and the voting public may well create this situation. Chief ministers Narender Modi, Nitesh Kumar and Naveen Patnaik may well have to carefully consider their options and consider how they can sustain a political assault by the Congress, who will try everything in the book to retain their political space, and the regional parties. The current fluid situation will not last for long and is going to result in a realignment of political forces. So this may well be the time for the leadership of the future to emerge both at the Centre and in the states.

The byelection results will also help the Congress to consolidate new governments in Maharashtra where the new chief minister Ashok Chavan has to consolidate his position within the party and in Haryana where chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda splits the Haryana Janhit Congress and now has 50 MLAs and is free of the internal dissent within the Congress.

The current weakness in the Congress is Andhra Pradesh but with the passage of time possible solutions are beginning to take shape and the coming Hyderabad municipal elections will bring out the internal contradictions within the ruling party and the Opposition into focus. The Congress would be making a mistake if it succumbs to "business" interests over political considerations.

The Congress also has a positive situation in Assam where chief minister Tarun Gogoi continues his good work and won both the seats, in Dhekiajuli and South Salmara, by margins of 21,000 and 6,000 respectively. In Rajasthan the Congress won Salumbar by 3,000 votes but lost Todabhim by 8,000 votes to the BJP. And in Himachal Pradesh the Congress lost Rohru to the BJP and this will dent the political image of former chief minister Virbhadra Singh who had won from this seat on five occasions.

Every election is important. Every election has a message and for those in governance there is little time to express joy or sorrow as politics never takes a vacation and public opinion can never be taken for granted.

Political accidents continue and the media brings home the reality to the public with a clear message to those in governance. We see the lawyer agitation in Karnataka against the high court chief justice. We watch with disgust the senseless violence in the Maharashtra Assembly and we witness another scuffle involving Manu Sharma and his friends with gun-toting bodyguards. Are we going to witness another murder?

26/11. The Mumbai attack’s first anniversary is fast approaching and we will witness once again the horror of terrorism and the sad tragedy of all those who have suffered personal loss and the fact that there has been no "justice" for them as the killers and planners still go about their business in Pakistan.

Arun Nehru is a former Union minister

Indian cricket and the killer instinct

Asian Age — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:58:49 GMT

Shiv Visvanathan

Nov.14 : A nation’s fears get frozen into stereotypes and have a long shelf life. The Punjabi, for example, is seen as fun-loving, the Tamilian is the perpetual nerd. Hindus are seen as weak and cunning; the Pathans have patented masculinity. Local proverbs and jokes testify to their power and validity. Stereotypes thrive through dialects, proving that fecund diversity as they rework the imagination of music, food, politics and the body.

Stereotypes are a folk sociology. They provide a map and help create self-fulfilling prophecies. Often lovable and obviously livable, they become a second skin, a crust we need to break-through. Colonialism, in fact, loved stereotypes. The frontier races made good soldiers. The Hindus were bred to be babus. The fact that the babu was created by Macaulay is often forgotten. Usually what we construct in the mind becomes a defining principle for reality.

One stereotype with a long life is the claim that Indians lack the killer instinct. The killer instinct is the Indian translation of the Darwinian survival of the fittest, of culture, red in tooth and claw. The killer as hero yields to none, knows that victory is complete when it is a zero-sum game.

Consider the Gita. Some commentators argue that Yudhisthira was a wimp. He loved negotiability. He avoided battle. He delayed revenge. The killer instinct sees goodness as fragile, the inability to stand up to the inventiveness and ruthlessness of evil. Goodness is seen as gentle and, therefore, effete. Krishna’s advice to Arjun is seen as a summon to the killer instinct. But the killer instinct goes beyond the warrior’s code to seeing life itself as a battle. Only the killer survives or, to use the title of a recent book on management, Only the Paranoid Survive. Paranoia is seen as a gene that filters those who deserve to survive. Management of war, sport and politics demand the killer gene, the ability to stand pressure and the pressure of killing, the need to win at all costs.

Think of tennis. In the 60s, Sports Illustrated published an article on the ABC of tennis, featuring Amritraj, Borg and Connors as the future maestros. Later, observers wondered what happened to the A in the alphabet of tennis. Borg went on to become the ice cool legend, five-time winner at Wimbledon. Connors also won once, defeating Ken Rosewall. Connors’ pugnacity was legendary. The A in tennis became M, as McEnroe became a legend. The super brat’s behaviour almost became his brand name. When people discussed why Amritraj with his physique and his talent never reached the top, they began often by saying that he was too much of a gentleman. It was a prelude to calling him a softie, a Tamil without a killer instinct.

Amritraj, who still has an interesting career as a commentator, once claimed that he would rather not win the Wimbledon than be like B, C and M. He suggested that it was not that he did not hunger to win, or that he collapsed under pressure. It was merely that victory under any terms was not what he looked for. He wanted to enjoy tennis and the fruits of tennis. Tennis was a way of being, not a reason for being. The killer instinct as a pervasive sociology marks the difference between North and South. The Punjabi as a stereotype of the North is tough, domineering and exuberant. The Tamil appears meek, thin, a nerd who needs two bodyguards to survive. The stereotype broke as the LTTE infected its code of masculinity on the South, destroying the mindset of a generation. The South attained its killer gene at genocidal cost.

The fable of the killer gene acquired a professional veneer in cricket in the 70s and 80s. Gavaskar stood up to the legendary West Indian bowling proving some Indians were vertebrate. Ganguly gave Indians a sense of that bravura waving his shirt like a flag, celebrating a great victory. Aggression was the new style of the day. One needed to be six-pack in brawn and mentality.

But now the narrative changed. Some Indians wanted to be aggressive as the Australians and our spinner Bhajji represented that. Harbhajan and Dhoni were seen as new exemplars of aggression. Media-friendly critics turned them into pre-mature legends. I remember when Bhajji missed an opportunity to score a century. While others acclaimed his aggressive knock, Tendulkar reprimanded him quietly for not staying on. Bhajji might be aggressive but there was no doubt about who the warrior was.

The story changes. Now we had a recessive killer gene — Indians as a team wilted under pressure. The whole was less than the sum of the parts. Every time we lost or lost closely, this theory of "the weak Indian" was hung out like dirty linen. The litany was complete.

We lost in hockey because we lacked the killer instinct. Questions of astro-turf, tactics, speed were irrelevant. We lose in cricket because of weakness under pressure. We succumb before the other man blinks. Our need for success makes the killer gene a patriotic requirement. Lack of it creates a Mcarthyite regime of spectators.

In fact, it is the spectator not the player we have to understand. Our players are healthy and competitive enough. They still have a sense of fun and exuberance. It is the ruthlessness of the spectator and his demands that we need to sense. I have known fans who switch off the TV once Sachin is out. The legend of Indians succumbing under pressure reveals insights not of the player but of the consumer, who wants incessant excitement and constant victory. He demands on the playing field what is denied to him in real life. He is the crowd in the Roman arena asking for blood. He is the mob beating a small thief to death. We need to abandon such theories that demand of play, not playfulness but sacrifice.

Bad sociology is always a spectators sport. I hope the virus does not extend to the players. Tendulkar, Dravid, Vishwanathan Anand are the answer to such idiocy — gentlemen who can show a true toughness of spirit. One hopes India does not succumb to this reverse racism that masquerades as current management theory.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist

Pak’s Taliban war is a chess game

Asian Age — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:02:11 GMT

By Srinath Raghavan

Nov 13 : Four weeks into the Army’s offensive in South Waziristan, Pakistan has been hit by a string of audacious and murderous terror attacks. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its affiliates have shown that they are still a force to reckon with. The Army has admitted that TTP fighters are putting up strong resistance on the ground, though it claims to have captured key areas held by the militants. Given the smokescreen of propaganda put out by both sides, it is difficult to be certain about the progress of the operations. But the outlines of the strategic picture are becoming clear.

For a start, the objectives being pursued by the Pakistan Army are rather more limited than those suggested by official rhetoric. This is certainly the largest military operation undertaken in South Waziristan. But the difference is of scale rather than scope. Contrary to expectations in many quarters, the current operations do not presage a move against other militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), let alone those in other parts of the country. Pakistani officials have acknowledged that militants from Punjab are fighting alongside the TTP. But this does not imply that the Army will go after the Punjabi outfits that have played a major role in Kashmir. A move against the Afghan Taliban is not on the cards either.

Indeed, the Army’s current strategy is continuous with its approach to the Pakistan Taliban in the past. The Pakistan Taliban came into existence after the American attack on Afghanistan in late 2001. The core of the movement comprised Pakistani fighters attached to Mullah Omar’s regime, pupils of local madrasas, and tribal veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad. They worked with the tribes of Fata to provide logistical support for the fleeing Afghan Taliban and other Al Qaeda-affiliated foreign militants. It was only in mid-2003 that this loose grouping evolved into an organisation aimed at imposing the Taliban ideology in the Tribal Areas. Yet it was the operations undertaken by the Pakistan Army in pursuit of Al Qaeda that sparked off the insurgency in 2004.

The Army was well aware that the Pakistan Taliban was an ideological and operational offshoot of the Afghan Taliban, but it refrained from taking any steps against the latter for Omar and his cohorts were their most valuable strategic tool in Afghanistan. From the outset, the Army sought to contain the insurgency by playing on the tribal divisions and strategic differences within the Pakistan Taliban movement.

For instance, in dealing with Nek Mohammed, the Yargulkhel Ahmadzai Wazir who emerged as the first leader of the Pakistan Taliban, the Army quietly propped up Maulvi Nazir, a Kakakhel Ahmedzai Wazir. In 2006, Nazir’s position was bolstered by an inflow of militants from Punjabi groups hitherto employed in Kashmir. These fighters also undertook not to harm Pakistani interests. Nazir was subsequently assisted by the Army in his operations against a common, lethal enemy — the Uzbek fighters led by Tahir Yuldashev.

By 2005, the locus of the insurgency had shifted to the northern parts of South Waziristan dominated by the Mehsud tribes. Following a peace deal between the Army and the insurgents, Baitullah Mehsud emerged as the main leader of the Pakistan Taliban. In the following years, the Army periodically took on Baitullah only to retreat with fragile agreements negotiated from a position of weakness. Prior to each such effort, the Army sought to wean away certain sections of the Pakistan Taliban. In fact, it was to prevent attrition along tribal lines that Baitullah moved in December 2007 to create an umbrella organisation (the TTP) capable of operating as a united front.

Although the TTP emerged as the most formidable opponent of the Pakistani state, especially with its well-trained cadre of suicide attackers, the Inter-Services Intelligence did manage to create and exploit chinks in the organisation. The most important of these was the departure of Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a key militant leader in North Waziristan.

By mid-2008, Pakistani intelligence operatives succeeded in aligning him with Maulvi Nazir and creating a new alliance called the Taliban Ittehad. In so doing, they sought to drive a wedge between the Wazirs and Mehsuds. The alliance also received the patronage of the Haqqani clan, a prominent group linked to the Afghan Taliban. More importantly, it was geared solely to waging jihad against outside forces in Afghanistan.

Subsequently, Mullah Omar sought to persuade Baitullah, Gul Bahadur and Nazir to unite and contribute to the war in Afghanistan and to give up attacks in Pakistan. On the Taliban supremo’s urging, they formed the Council of United Mujahideen. The TTP, however, continued to be embroiled in fighting against the Pakistan forces. Besides, the older differences persisted. Following Baitullah’s death the council proved unworkable.

In its current operations against the TTP in South Waziristan, the Army has stuck to its earlier approach. Pakistani officials have stated that they have struck deals with Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir in order to isolate the TTP fighters both strategically and geographically. The ongoing effort is aimed narrowly at the core of the TTP — the Mehsuds. By doing so, the Army hopes at once to contain the main anti-Pakistan component of the Pakistan Taliban and to maintain its links with the other groups willing to work with the Afghan Taliban inside Afghanistan. Similarly, action against the Punjabi groups in Fata is also limited to those operating with the TTP. A greater number, linked to Maulvi Nazar and others, will get a free pass.

Whether or not the Army manages to rout the TTP, the ongoing operations do not bode well for Afghanistan. India, too, will have to watch the situation closely. After all, attacks on Indian establishments in Afghanistan have been carried out by the nexus between the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence apparatus.

If the operations go well, the people of Pakistan will have good reason to cheer. But given the assortment of militant outfits in the tribal areas, a collective sigh of relief would be premature.

Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

The Wall’s gone, but divisions remain

Asian Age — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:09:21 GMT

By S. Nihal Singh

Nov 12 : The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall leading to the reunification of two Germanys gave the main actors in the drama the opportunity to reminisce about a climactic event which changed Europe’s, and the world’s, post-World War II future. No one had expected the denouement to happen as quickly as it did, and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his long-serving foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, were caught partaking of an official dinner in Warsaw on that fateful night.

But 20 years on, there is the beginning of recognition in the Western camp that if the United States in particular had not been so triumphalist in its mood in declaring that it had won the Cold War, Europe and the world would be a far happier place today. More than President George Bush senior, it was President Bill Clinton and his administration that laid the bricks of a new division of the European continent by prolonging the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and expanding it, thereby keeping the diminished successor state to the Soviet Union on the other side.

It was the almost lone voice of the wise father of modern American diplomacy, George Kennan, who warned his countrymen and the world about the consequences of what they were about to do. But Russia lay supine and disoriented after the fall of the Communist state and in Boris Yeltsin the United States found a perfect match to help demolish the Russian Federation, hemming it with its former satellites, newly baptised as the military allies of Washington.

Remember those were the days best symbolised by an American author trumpeting the end of history. There was only one way for the world to live, by the rules of American capitalism and free enterprise, and Americans were implying that if Russia behaved like a good boy who knows his place in class as a diligent pupil of American capitalism, forgetting its past status, it could find a place in the new order of things.

It is only now being recognised by the West that it was Mikhail Gorbachev who really set the scene for the Berlin Wall to fall. He might be an unpopular man at home for bringing down the edifice of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but he realised that the only way to revive Soviet Communism — he then thought it could be revived — was through glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). It was his decision not to lend support to ossified rulers of the satellite states by refusing to send Soviet troops to help suppress their peoples.

The fall of the Berlin Wall anniversary has, of course, come at an awkward moment in the progress of American capitalism. The world is just seeking to dig itself out of the US-induced economic meltdown, the most serious since the Great Depression of the 30’s.

Besides, America is fighting two wars and is grappling with a US-pampered Israel refusing to vacate its occupation, and the crises relating to Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions. Demands that the US should move away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the two parties ask it to mediate is as ludicrous as it is tragic because Israel exists on account of Washington’s military, economic, political and moral support. President Barack Obama is only the latest American President to discover that he has had to eat his words in seeking to enforce a settlement freeze. He blinked, not Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, if President Obama does not score some successes in the field of foreign policy, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to him would become a greater embarrassment with each passing day. The truth is that the new President changed the rhetoric of US foreign policy, rather than its substance, and his efforts to engage, rather than stigmatise, the Iranian and North Korean regimes have yet to yield results. In fact, his policy of reaching out to the Muslim world has embittered the Palestinians more because he could not make his first initiative in stopping new illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land stick.

It is, of course, impossible to retrace the steps to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nato is now an expanding organisation, with the accession of Ukraine and Georgia put off, but not rejected. Russia will always remain the other, but given the depredations of the economic crisis, the West is no longer in a position to demand that Russia become an adept pupil of US-style capitalism.

The redeeming feature thus far has been President Obama’s decision to do away with the anti-missile installations on Russia’s doorstep, which amounted to a gratuitous provocation.

Chancellor Kohl’s decision to go for a shotgun wedding with East Germany was not the best method for reunification, but perhaps that was the only way to get it in the foreseeable future, and then the momentum of the mass movement of imprisoned east Europeans bursting out of walls and wire fences was too great to stop. West Germany had, in fact, to mount a Herculean effort in money and material to pull the eastern part out of its old ways. It is only now that the east is beginning to catch up with the western part and is reminding its western part that the latter has to learn things from the east as well.

Mr Kohl’s promise to Mr Gorbachev, buttressed by James Baker of the US, not to move Nato eastward to Moscow’s disadvantage was blithely ignored as President Clinton went on a Nato expansion spree. It was left to a former Russian Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, to recollect ruefully that promises, until signed and sealed, become worthless commodities.

What of the future? President Obama has changed the accent of his country’s foreign policy in giving primacy to diplomacy, rather than force, and a multilateral approach in the pursuit of national interests. He is seeking a new basis of relations with Russia without giving up the basic American policy of prevailing in the world till as far into the future as possible. Perhaps President Obama realises more clearly than his predecessor that while America remains the indispensable power, it cannot resolve major problems on its own or with ad hoc coalitions of the willing.

A bad beginning in Maharashtra

Asian Age — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:31:39 GMT

By Inder Malhotra

Nov 11 : TIME was when today’s Maharashtra, then the multi-lingual state of Bombay, was one of the two best-administrated states, the other being the state of Madras, now called Tamil Nadu. Let us leave the southern state out of this discussion. But sadly, Maharashtra today is one of the worst administered, often rivalling Bihar, with which it has a special relationship of total hostility.

In all fairness it must be said that things in the state whose capital is also the nation’s "financial hub" have been degenerating for a long time, but never so precipitately as of late. The Congress split of 1969, the Emergency followed by Indira Gandhi’s defeat in the 1977 general election, and the birth of the Shiv Sena in the late 60s took their toll, as did the burgeoning building boom in a metropolis desperately short of land. This laid the foundations of the nexus between rapacious builders, politicians in power and their bureaucratic henchmen that has now assumed frightening dimensions.

The watershed was reached when, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, there were the 1993 "Bombay blasts". The Karachi-based Dawood Ibrahim was able to land one-and-a-half tons of RDX on the Maharashtra coast with the full cooperation of senior customs officers who believed that he was bringing in his usual contraband of gold!

It was in 1995 that, for the first time in Maharashtra’s history, a coalition of the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a combination of rabid Marathi chauvinism and strident communalism, came to power. I distinctly remember the then Pakistani high commissioner’s comment: "The key to India’s tijori (cash box) has passed to the Hindutva forces".

However, the Maratha strongman, Sharad Pawar, always retained his strong power base in western Maharashtra and great influence in the Congress power structure in New Delhi. In 1991, after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and Sonia Gandhi’s firm refusal to be his successor, Mr Pawar was a candidate for the top job. But the prize went to P.V. Naraimha Rao. Before the 1996 general election — in which the Congress lost power for the next eight years and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance ruled for six of these eight years — Mr Pawar threw his bombshell, raised the issue of Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, and under the slogan Raj kare ga Hindustani, formed the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). For all his fulmination against the "foreigners", however, he had no compunction in becoming the Congress’ junior partner — in Maharashtra in 1999 and in New Delhi five years later.

The main point about all this is that the Congress-NCP alliance has always been uneasy, to put it no more strongly than that. Working at cross-purposes and motivated primarily by greed, the two coalition partners have brought governance in Maharashtra to a very low depth indeed. Towards the end of their second tenure, especially after the horrific terrorist attacks on 26/11, there was a glimmer of hope. Congress leaders started admitting that things had been allowed to get out of hand, and if the electorate gave them a third chance they would make a fresh beginning and make up for the past, giving the state a bright future.

It is already crystal clear that these promises were not only insincere but downright false. In the first place, the new Maharashtra government is really old wine in old bottles. Secondly, the beginning it has made, after celebrating elaborately its "hat-trick", is shocking beyond words. In saying this I do refer to the infamy inside the state legislature on the first day of its session when followers of Raj Thackeray, entering the Assembly for the first time, assaulted a member, Abu Asim Azmi of the Samajwadi Party, for his temerity to take his oath in Hindi when under Mr Raj Thackeray’s dictate, Marathi is the only language to use, and hell with the Constitution that gives every citizen the right to speak and take oath in any of the recognised national languages. All this is abominable, especially in view of the culprits’ declaration that they would mete out the same treatment to anyone "who insults Maharashtra", whatever that might mean.

By my reckoning the worse act of the Congress-NCP leaders is to have brought back NCP’s R.R. Patil as the state’s home minister. In the midst of the 26/11 traumatic events this worthy had the audacity of making the buffoonish statement that "such minor incidents do take place in big cities". He was rightly asked to resign. Now he has been appointed to the same crucial job despite widespread public protests.

Mr Pawar, whose single-point agenda is to transfer the NCP leadership to his daughter Supriya Sule, must have had compulsions. But what made the Congress president and the Prime Minister succumb to his pressure?

Union home minister P. Chidambaram has said repeatedly that another terrorist attack from Pakistani soil can take place though this country is better prepared to deal with it. Can Mr Patil be depended upon to deal with such a situation, especially after the government to which he belongs has willfully suppressed portions of Ram Pradhan’s inquiry report on 26/11 and not done enough to act on its recommendations?

The most chilling implication of the unending outrages — on the day after the hooliganism within the Assembly chamber, the Shiv Sena gheraoed Mr Azmi (whose own political record won’t bear scrutiny) outside the legislature — is different.

Mr Raj Thackeray is politically very useful to the Congress-NCP combine. One and all admitted after the Assembly election that he made a material contribution to the defeat of Shiv Sena-BJP coalition, largely because of his feud with his uncle Bal Thackeray and cousin Uddhav Thackeray. It is no secret that the Congress got 13 additional seats because of him.

In the past, irrespective of what his goons did under his unpardonable instructions he was treated with kid gloves. At a time when he should have been behind bars, he was feted by, of all people, Mumbai’s police chief. A show arrest of him was made but it was allowed to fizzle out. Today he is virtually above the law because for the Congress-NCP government political expediency seems to take precedence over national interest.

A cloudy anniversary at the White House

Asian Age — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:56:15 GMT

Govind Talwalkar

Nov.10 : Last year, on November 4, Barack Obama won the presidential race by an overwhelming majority. But on the first anniversary itself he has received a setback. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, recently said that though last year he did not vote for Mr Obama, he was happy at his victory. November 4, 2008, according to him, was the day of redemption for white Americans.

But in the last one year, a number of Americans have had second thoughts about their President — the job market hasn’t recovered and there is uncertainty about the prospects of the war on terror. Though Mr Obama’s popular rating are high, these factors are taking the shine off him.

This was evident on November 3, 2009, when the fate of the two gubernatorial races — Virginia and New Jersey— and to the House of Representatives was decided. Virginia is traditionally a Republican state while New Jersey is Democratic. Mr Obama scored in both the states, last. Voters said they love him but can’t love his candidates. In upstate New York, the ultra-conservatives could not bring victory to the candidate of their choice. Thus voters showed that the country is neither totally to the Left nor to the Right; it is in the middle.

In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republican candidates got 60 per cent of independent votes and 67 per cent of white male votes. The turnout of the blacks as well as young people was low. This means that the much talked about demographical change in America has no solid foundation. There is no doubt that in the next presidential election Mr Obama would not be forsaken by the "independents", the whites and the blacks, but their number might not be as large as before.

The Opposition and the disillusionment of the "independents" is serious. And if this trend continues, next year’s mid-term election to the House of Representatives might reduce the strength of the Democratic Party, if not reduce it to a minority.

Since Me Obama inherited an economic meltdown and is facing other extraordinary challenges, he should have concentrated on reviving the market and creating jobs. Instead, he and other leading Democrats were obsessed with healthcare reforms. This infuriated the Republicans who did not do anything to solve the problems when in power, but instead indulged in scare mongering.

But even the moderate Democrats are opposed to bringing in a government-run institution to manage healthcare. And, moreover, the administration made the confusion worse by not giving the exact cost of the new bill.

The stimulus plan helped the banks, who did not help create jobs but made huge profits themselves. Hence, the American people are rightly worried about their future and apprehend tax increase.

Candidate Obama was all the while hammering the established political culture which, he said, was divisive. But today one finds there is much more bickering and bitterness. In his campaign Mr Obama enjoyed rousing the masses and encouraging their expectations. Even after assuming power he has not come out of the campaign mode. In a democracy, when a party is elected, the Prime Minister/President and the Cabinet have to be responsive towards people, but they have to govern as well.

Rabble-rousing can be practiced by all and the Republicans have shown that they can play this game very well.

Mr Obama thinks otherwise, and that is why he is always on the move. His constant appearances on international platforms and before the camera have lost relevance. He has taken initiatives in so many fields at the same time that it has resulted in stagnation. Mr Obama claimed that the stimulus plan would create millions of jobs. Now he has realised that job creation must be a priority. It is true that the economy has turned the corner and even manufacturing is on the rise; but this is happening the world over. America is not special, or alone.

Mr Obama has changed the tone of America’s foreign policy quite distinctly. But he believes too much in the power of his own rhetoric and charisma. In domestic as well as foreign affairs one has to go into details and at times there’s need to be specific. But in his political life, Mr Obama has never bothered to go into details. As soon as he entered the Illinois Senate, he aspired to go to Washington. After being elected to the Senate he started preparing for the presidential race. He had no substantial legislative achievements to his credit or administrative experience.

Therefore, most of the world’s statesmen are not sure as to where he stands. He thought that a few speeches would bring changes in West Asia and his personality would put an end to the hostile attitude of the Muslim world. To bring West Asia and Pakistan-Afghanistan under his direct supervision, Mr Obama appointed special envoys. This was also done to undercut Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state. But both the envoys failed. Iran is not persuaded and North Korea is giving mixed signals. Ultimately, Ms Clinton had to take the initiative and assert herself.

Time and again Mr Obama has said that while the Iraq war was by choice, Afghanistan was a war of necessity. But his strategy is unclear. General Stanley McChrystal has asked for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan but the administration is yet to come up with an alternative. Mr Obama, of course, would not know which of the two is more dubious — Afghan President Hamid Karzai or former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Pakistan is always a doubtful factor, especially since its civil and military authorities are suspicious of each other. The recent demonstrations against the Kerry-Lugar Bill were inspired by the Army and Inter-Services Intelligence as the bill demanded civil control. In addition, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) chief Nawaz Sharif and his brother are reported to have supported the recalcitrant elements.

Writer, columnist Ahmed Rashid has doubts about the will of the Pakistani Army to wage a fight to the finish. He thinks that the Army might be fighting the Taliban in South Wazaristan, but might not to do so in the north. So many suicide bombings in the cantonment areas and even at the Army training schools would not have happened without accomplices inside.

Americans are obviously worried. That is why the Democrats lost their traditional stronghold New Jersey and Mr Obama had to celebrate a cloudy anniversary.

Karnataka crisis: A lesson in governance

Asian Age — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:47:57 GMT

Jayanthi Natarajan

Nov.09 : The last month has been traumatic for the people of Karnataka. Fierce floods have inundated over 15 districts of the state, and nearly 200 people have lost their lives as a result. The damage to crops and cattle has been mammoth, and the process of rehabilitation is bound to be long, arduous, and difficult. However, in this most difficult of times for Karnataka, the government of the state, which is the most important player, in terms of providing relief and rehabilitation to the people, is nowhere to be seen. Half the elected Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs are holed up in five-star hotels in Hyderabad, and the remaining are floating around other five-star hotels, or in Delhi. Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa emerges from negotiations from time to time, to announce defiantly that he will not quit as chief minister, and at equally periodic intervals, the other protagonists, the famous Reddy brothers emerge to announce that they have not agreed to any formula, and Mr Yeddyurappa must go. The hapless "high command" of the BJP, watches helplessly from Delhi, unable to even predict the next move, leave alone, crack the whip.

The Yedyurappa government, was a tainted one, to start with. It did not have a proper majority, and no sooner than the Assembly elections were over, Mr Yeddyurappa, swung into the unholy task of horsetrading, and barter, lured away MLAs, encouraged and formented defection, and created a wholly artificial majority with the help of money power, and the lure of office. However, notoriously forgetful, and forgiving, public memory may be, it would be difficult to forget what happened, just a short while ago, when Mr Yeddyurappa used every move, in the dirty tricks department to bribe MLAs, foster defection, and somehow cling to power. Today, those very tactics have turned back to bite the Yeddyurappa government, in what must be a perfect illustration of poetic justice. However, this poetic justice is cold comfort to the suffering people of Karnataka, and a dismayed nation.

As a party, the BJP is obliged to immediately set its house in order, and render governance to the flood-affected and suffering people of Karnataka. If not, they should accept defeat, and face the consequences. The unseemly public wrangling between the powerful Reddy lobby and Mr Yeddyurappa brings no credit to our democracy, and although the blame is to be laid squarely at the door of the BJP, and its bankrupt policies, lack of integrity and utter inefficiency, the mud and slime, somehow taint the entire political class, and brings shame and discredit to our democracy.

The drama in Karnataka, equally, underlines the need to create zero tolerance for unprincipled politics. The best traditions of democratic governance, cannot be hijacked to serve the narrow and selfish ambitions of one party or one group of people. It is at times like this when the political class as a whole would do well to reflect upon the basics of good democracy. When we look around us, especially at states, where democracy has already failed, or is teetering on the brink of collapse, we feel proud that despite all our warts, Indian democracy has weathered the storms and travails of all the contradictions that beset us, and has remained a vibrant democracy, through the worst of times. We are the largest democracy in the world, with vastly different geography, language, religion and economic status. Yet, when tragedy befalls one part of India, every Indian’s heart beats as one, and the entire country rises to help the afflicted. Be it the Kargil war or the earthquake in Latur, Indians in the most remote village of our country contributed their mite to help and ameliorate to some extent the tragedy that had befallen their brothers and sisters, in far away states. Time, and time again, the Indian voter has voted out governments, and brought in new ones, sending each time an unmistakable message to the political class, even when the mandate was a fractured verdict.

However, it would be too facile to blame the political class alone, for the level to which our polity has sunk. Sections of the judiciary is equally to blame, as are corrupt bureaucrats, and corrupt industrialists. One of the most unfortunate trends in recent times has been the discovery that the judiciary, who were till now the heroes of the people-as opposed to politicians who were generally considered villainous, also have feet of clay. The enduring tragedy of our public life is the fact that politicians introduced the Right to Information Act, to make governance transparent and ensure accountability, and the judiciary, which should have been first in line to ensure compliance with the RTI Act, has found it so difficult to apply the act to itself.

The other great tragedy, especially at the time of elections, is the commercialisation of the media. During the last Parliament elections, we witnessed the emergence of "package journalism’ — an innocuous sounding term which describes one of the most dangerous trends in modern India, where that pillar of democracy, namely, a free press, goes on sale to the highest bidder. Intersted parties may buy a "package" which means they get, not an advertorial, which would have been the case in more honest times, but news coverage, slanted in their favour.

The issue of corrupt bureaucrats, of course, needs no further elaboration….from the poorest, most disadvantaged citizen, who does not get his benefits under NREGA, or flood relief, to huge industries who have to bribe their way to swing policy their way, it may or may not be the politician who gets the flak, but one may count on the fact that a couple of bureaucrats are back there, enjoying some of the benefits, but staying out of the limelight.

The Karnataka crisis is clearly not the beginning or end of corrupt administration. Nor is the Karnataka BJP solely responsible for the omissions and commissions of judges and bureaucrats. This is merely a particularly eloquent example, of why it is important for us, as a society, to collectively examine our conscience, and wake up to the reality, that our wonderful vibrant democracy will rot away from inside unless every single one of us wakes up and takes a stand. The first and most important step is to implement zero tolerance to corruption. Thereafter, we may reclaim our lost ideals and restore our democracy to its early glory.

Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson.The views expressed in this column are her own.

Hard poll facts will extract compromises

Asian Age — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:50:53 GMT

By Arun Nehru

Nov 08 : The political trend continues to be favourable to the Congress whereas the Opposition, both at the Centre and in the states, remains fragmented. I sometimes wonder if this weakness will lead to re-alignment of political forces.

The electoral battle for the Firozabad parliamentary seat in Uttar Pradesh is on. The Samajwadi Party (SP) will take on the Congress with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the third place. The SP — on its home turf — faces a serious challenge from the Congress and Rahul Gandhi. The general opinion is that the Congress is going to sweep Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls in 2011. Despite the Rajdhani fiasco, the trend in West Bengal is strongly in favour of coalition of the Trinamul Congress (TMC) and the Congress. The situation in Kerala is also in favour of the Congress. In Karnataka, as things stand, the Left will make little progress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will face problems. Soon, the same situation is going to arise in Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress cannot be blamed for the chaos in either the Left or the BJP. Also, it is not the responsibility of the ruling party to strengthen the Opposition. The only state where the Congress is in trouble is Andhra Pradesh where, if "financial power" negates political authority, then Chandrababu Naidu, the Telugu Desam Party and other regional parties will get an opportunity to return to power.

The Congress is static as the current chief minister K. Rosaiah is at best a temporary appointment and the Congress is yet to deal with Jagan Mohan Reddy and his group of MPs and MLAs. In Maharashtra and Haryana, the Assembly elections are over but the battle over portfolios continues. The situation in Maharashtra is complicated. I think the Congress, which has greater number of seats, is justified in demanding more portfolios.

Coalition politics is about power. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar may have fewer seats but he more than makes up for this with his political linkages. There are many who can rally around Mr Pawar in Maharashtra and other parts of the country. The Congress and the NCP need to arrive at a power-sharing agreement at the earliest, as one cannot predict political accidents in a surcharged situation.

The NCP will have to yield ground based on the political reality. Also, Mr Pawar faces a "succession" problem which cannot be wished away. Time and opportunity do not wait for anyone, especially in politics.

The Haryana Cabinet will no doubt be powered by the six independents (all will get ministerial berths). But can stability be achieved only after a compromise has been struck with Bhajan Lal, his sons and their team of six MLAs? Had chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda delayed the elections, he would not have secured even 40 seats in the 90-seat Assembly. It is no secret that all the three major groups in the Congress opposed him and had even put up "rebel" candidates.

The revival of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) surprised almost everyone and the Congress has much to think about in the immediate future.

Political priorities were ignored for real estate benefits, though the chief minister alone is not responsible for this. The Congress high command has much to do in dealing with the party’s internal politics in the state.

The 10 byelections in West Bengal in 2011 are another test, both for the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and Mamata Banerjee. Of the 10 seats going to the polls, the TMC holds Bongaon, Contai, Alipore, Eegra and Srirampore, the Congress won Sujapur and Malda whilst the Left in 2006 won in Kalchini, Rajgunj and Belgachia.

The Left seems to have conceded defeat even before the byelections are held. Various news reports suggest that there is a clear lack of effort in trying to retrieve lost ground in these constituencies. The CPI(M) cadres seem to have melted away as public is strongly in favour of the TMC. This is the first time we are witnessing a situation where the ruling party and the administration is conceding defeat even before a political battle has taken place!

Several NEWS reports giving details of events in Jharkhand, where former chief minister Madhu Koda and many ministers are being investigated for corruption, were extremely depressing. One can only hope that the Central Bureau of Investigation will be able to prosecute Mr Koda, his ministers and the bureaucrats who have made a mockery of governance and literally plundered the state.

The situation is equally grave as we go through the list of assets and the methods adopted by Karnataka high court Chief Justice P.D. Dinakaran. I wonder what would happen to an ordinary citizen of the country if s/he was found guilty of these indiscretions?

All credit must go to the lawyers as they battled the system. But, sadly, the entire judicial system has been put under a cloud by Justice Dinakaran.

Is there any reason why the law of the land should not apply to him? I am, in fact, surprised that he is yet to offer his resignation.

The Supreme Court judges have set a very good example for others by declaring their assets. I think it is time we took the "asset" declaration by all those in governance seriously and all assets beyond "normal" considerations must be subject to both internal and external probe. Because of a few corrupt people a very wrong signal is being sent to the public that all bureaucrats and babus are corrupt.

A small minority of the corrupt and tainted are holding the entire system to ransom and this must not be allowed at any cost.

Arun Nehru is a former Union minister

What’s your vice? Wine or ganja?

Asian Age — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:10:27 GMT

Farrukh Dhondy

"If centipedes wore shoes,

Shoe-makers would be rich".

From The Proverbs of

Bachchoo-ka-Adda

Nov.06 : "My name is Farrukh and I am a ganjeri!" - er... not really, but that's the way one would introduce oneself if, on the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, there was a parallel organisation called Ganjaheads Guiltridden, Stoners Unstoned or Charsis Incognito. There doesn't happen to be such an organisation and with the state of the law as it is, neither can there be. If I turn up at an AA meeting and confess to my addiction, I haven't put myself outside the law. Similarly, if I go to a Give-up-smoking-tobacco clinic to get nicotinised by therapy or whatever else, I am legal. But anyone who signs up to a group such as the above invented ones is liable to end up on a police list of "charsis charged with drug abuse".

It would be tantamount to admitting that you are the user of a drug which is today in Britain classified in the "C category". There is a proposal from the government and the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to reclassify cannabis as a more dangerous drug, up there with Ecstasy, LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), cocaine and heroin. Before he presents such an amendment of the drug act to Parliament, however, Mr Johnson has appointed a committee of scientists to supply justification for the move.

Unfortunately for him, Professor David Nutt, the scientist he appointed to head the commission of enquiry into cannabis and its use, came to the opposite conclusion from the one Mr Johnson thought was politically expedient. The good professor concluded that cannabis was less harmful in very many ways than cigarettes and had, head for head, less bad effects on users than alcohol. He also came to the conclusion that the drug Ecstasy, used by the young as a spirit booster on evenings-out, was as dangerous as taking a ride on a horse - yes, some people would fall off and break their necks, but by and large the riders would return home whole.

Professor Nutt made these views public just when Mr Johnson was about to announce to the nation that he was going to reclassify cannabis as a dangerous drug and make the penalties for its use, which the police and the courts hardly ever resort to, compulsory, widespread and more severe. Mr Johnson's political calculation is that most people don't use cannabis in any form - ganja, charas or bhang (respectively grass, hash and "fresh leaf of cannabis sativa crushed and incorporated into a milk drink only in India") and the majority of these would be in favour of getting more censorious about other people's pleasures. The votes from users are small in number if indeed the stoners can get themselves up on election day and be bothered enough to go to the polling booths.

Prof Nutt's considered and publicly-expressed scientific opinion got him sacked. Mr Johnson dismissed him. This a bit like sacking your doctor if you don't like the diagnosis. Or, perhaps, it's more like changing from palmistry to astrology to get a more pleasing prediction for the coming week because there are respectable scientists and doctors who disagree with Prof Nutt on scientific and statistical grounds and think the home secretary is acting in a socially responsible way.

The sacking of Prof Nutt has caused other members of the government's advisory board on the use of drugs to resign. They may or may not agree with the nutty analysis of cannabis, but that's not their point in resigning.

They contend that the government either appoints scientists to put a considered point of view and takes heed of the advice or it doesn't deserve the benefit of it.

In a more and more complex world, the information that scientists provide has huge political and financial impact. No government can make environmental policy without the advice of the various branches of science involved. The birth of nuclear armaments and power plants quintessentially required co-operation between politicians during the World War II and physicists. Politicians couldn't say that "e" was equal to "mc (cubed)" if that was what would yield more votes.

The most blatant example of politicians playing fast and loose with science was President Tabo Mbeki of South Africa refusing to acknowledge that the HIV virus was responsible for AIDS.

One wonders also about Indian politicians consulting astrologers for auspicious days on which to hold elections or launch nuclear tests, though a little thought would establish that meteorologists' predictions might be more useful in both contexts and astrologers' divinations in this respect would be perfectly neutral - the fact that Mars is in Pisces won't make a difference to the electoral or scientific outcome. Not so with Mr Mbeki and those dying of AIDS in South Africa.

With cannabis in the UK the matter is still in contention. In Sweden, which has strict laws against cannabis use, eight per cent of teenagers admit to using the drug. In Holland, which has legalised the use of cannabis, 28 per cent use the drug. In Britain the percentage of 16-year-olds using cannabis is 37. The figures indicate that the legalisation or otherwise of the drug is not the dominant factor in its appeal. The sub-cultures of the country dictate the attraction, availability and peer-respect for users.

As a student in British universities, I found both ganja and charas easily available, though they were at the time listed as "Class B substances". As a political agitator in and around black and Asian groups in Britain, one found it even more readily available. (I am not saying whether I ever inhaled!) As a TV executive, I found that the world around me persisted in substance abuse, only the substance seemed to be white rather than black, brown or green in colour.

I can say very candidly that the change in the law of cannabis use/abuse won't affect me or anyone I know. My vices have moved on and consist largely of the fermented juice of the Sauvignon Blanc grape which the French, the New Zealanders and even our own Sula vineyards bottle and sell.

Maoists talk only to the power of a gun

Asian Age — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:53:29 GMT

Balbir K. Punj

Nov.06 : Normally, we would have welcomed home minister P. Chidambaram’s offer to the Maoists to discuss problems like land acquisition, forest rights of tribals, discrimination et cetera. However, our home minister — though quite intelligent and dynamic (especially when compared to his predecessor) — seems to have not read his full brief on the Maoists. He says that he is not asking them to give up arms but to only eschew violence as a means of redressing their grievances since the government is willing to talk to them.

Mr Chidambaram said at a press conference on October 30: "The Centre had never asked the Maoists to lay down arms since it was not a realistic expectation. We have always asked them to halt violence… They should come forward for talks if they consider themselves serious champions of the poor".

Such an approach presupposes that the Maoists are interested in solving the problems of the tribals and other neglected sections of society, and that they have taken up arms mainly because the democratic machinery refused to talk about these problems, much less solve them. But Mr Chidambaram errs. For all his tough talk and devising (at last) a national anti-Naxal strategy, he should be aware of what happened when the late Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy made a similar offer in 2004 and allowed Naxal leaders and cadres to go around freely, with their arms on display.

It is futile to ask the Maoists to give up their arms or engage them in talks. Maoists do not believe in dialogue. Lenin, who laid down the guidelines for the proletarian revolution, urged his cadres to use all types of deceit and arms to capture power. And once in power, they should eliminate their "class enemies", including other political parties. The state apparatus is to be used without mercy for this purpose. No other criteria for political morality exist in the Marxist-Maoist book.

The history of the Communist movement in the former Soviet Union, in China, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and elsewhere is replete with such instances. Lenin used violence, deception and treachery first to gain ascendance over the Mensheviks and then over his colleagues. Stalin used the state apparatus first to eliminate the Mensheviks and other Opposition political forces and then to finish his own colleagues one by one, starting with Trotsky. The Stalinist trials of the 1930s give a graphic insight into Communist tactics.

In eastern Europe just before the end of World War II, the Communists who were then in minority managed to come to power by collaborating with others. But soon they destroyed their allies from within, one by one, in a policy nicknamed "Salami tactics".

In China, Mao Zedong turned against his revolutionary colleague Liu Shao-chi and then Mao’s wife formed the "Gang of Four" that sent several Communist leaders, including the most famous among them, Deng Xiaoping, packing to hard labour.

In Cambodia, the most gruesome killing spree in human history took place under a maniacal Communist leader. Poor peasants who found their land taken away for the collectivisation died in all these countries. India, either under the Maoists or Marxists, will have no different fate.

The ideological paradigm of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the Maoists is one. Look at the Marxists who are in power in West Bengal and Kerala. They are no different from the Maoists in dealing with their political opponents. Having state power in their hand, the Marxists threaten and blackmail to smother political dissent. How the Communists succeeded in entrenching themselves in West Bengal over 30 long years has been exposed. Their unions hold several top-level Bengali newspapers under their thumb, so it is not easy to carry anti-Marxist news stories in prominent newspapers and television channels. The fearless among Bengal’s journalists have been publicly beaten up by Marxist goondas.

In Marxist-ruled Kerala complete dominance is not possible as the state has been governed by the Congress-led United Democratic Front and Communist-led Left Democratic Front with the non-Communist political forces also gaining strength. Yet the Marxists seek to make up for this weakness by targeting newspapers and journalists at every turn.

In effect, there is little to choose between the Marxists and the Maoists — the former use violence under the cover of the state government while the latter use armed violence in their attempt to seize power.

If the Marxists appear to be working within the constitutional framework, it is because they have tried and failed to seize the state apparatus through violence. Now they are working to wreck the system from within.

The Maoists are convinced that they can seize the state apparatus through armed attacks on the state. There is hardly any doubt that if the Maoists succeed, the bulk of the Communist cadre would shift their allegiance to the Maoist leadership.

Communists of all hues believe in a proletarian takeover of the state through whatever means available. Such a takeover, according to the Leninist-Maoist line, should be followed by imposing the dictatorship of the Communist Party and ruthless suppression of all dissent, even internal, among the Communist leadership.

In this framework of faith in violence and dictatorship, does it serve any purpose to ask the Maoists to give up violence and open talks with the government?

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com

Bt brinjal can awaken a sleeping poison

Asian Age — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:24:36 GMT

Suman Sahai

Nov.05 : What, you may ask, is common between potatoes, tomatoes, brinjal, chilli, datura, tobacco and the deadly nightshade (belladonna)? They all belong to a plant family called Solanaceae. The Solanaceae family contains a number of important agricultural plants as well as many psychoactive and toxic plants. Solanaceae species are rich in complex chemicals called alkaloids and contain some of the most poisonous plants known to mankind. They produce alkaloids in their roots, leaves and flowers. These alkaloids can be hallucinogens, stimulants or outright toxic. For example, when potatoes are exposed to light, a chemical called solanin is produced which appears as a green tinge. Green potatoes can be toxic, damage an unborn foetus and cause abortions. Other plants of this family known for their toxic qualities are belladonna, datura and tobacco.

Farmers have been working for thousands of years to domesticate wild plants like those of the Solanaceae family, to make them safe for eating. Much of this exercise involved breeding out the toxins contained in the wild plants. Scientists too have used careful, selective breeding to "clean up" crop varieties which had good qualities but contained toxins. Now brinjal, a member of this family, has been genetically engineered (GE) to produce a toxin to protect itself against a particular pest. This seems to be a process working to reverse several thousand years of efforts to detoxify natural plants to make them fit for human consumption!

Genetic engineering in plants has not been mastered enough to rule out the creation of dangerous new products in the cells when genes are muddled during the insertion of new, usually foreign genes. Several cases are known when new proteins and toxins were produced in plants which were genetically engineered. For example, when genetically modified (GM) peas were being developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia to protect peas from the pest pea weevil, it was found that newly-formed proteins in the GM peas repeatedly caused immunity problems and lung inflammation when fed to mice. The experiments had to be abandoned. In another case, when mice were fed the genetically engineered Flavr Savr tomato, seven out of 40 experimental animals died within 14 days and the others suffered stomach lesions.

Genetic engineering in plants of the Solanaceae family could be dangerous since disturbing their genetic material through the process of inserting new gene constructs containing a battery of genes - including the toxin producing Bt gene - may trigger off metabolic processes that have been lying dormant. There are apprehensions that not only could new toxins develop but that old toxins that were removed by selective breeding may reappear.

Disturbing the cell metabolism (by genetic engineering) of species that are naturally genetically hardwired to produce toxins, is likely to call up old plant toxins in these species.

Testing for food safety is key in genetically engineered plants; it becomes more so with the Solanaceae family. At present biotechnology companies rely on the concept of "substantial equivalence" to demonstrate the safety of genetically engineered foods. In this method, the overall chemical composition of the genetically engineered food is compared to an equivalent conventional food. If there is no significant difference between the two, the GE plant is considered to be safe.

The Mahyco seed company has also tested its Bt brinjal in the same way. However, substantial equivalence is a highly contested paradigm, favoured by the biotech industry but rejected by most countries. This is because there is no mechanism in such an approach to detect unexpected or unintended changes like new toxic compounds in the cell.

Apart from the critical safety issues, there are other questions that arise with the impending release of India's first genetically engineered food crop. There is no system in place for labelling these foods. Indeed, how can one in the Indian situation label a vegetable that will be sold from farmers' fields, laden into trucks and taken to wholesale mandis? How will the vegetables on the vendor's cart or the corner shop be labelled as GM? The Government of India recognises the need to label GE food, and its position in the meetings of the Codex Alimentarius has been consistently in favour of mandatory labelling.

Accordingly, the ministry of health has drafted rules under the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act to include labelling of GE food and food ingredients. But there is as yet no mechanism in place to label GE food, nor have any awareness programmes been conducted to explain the nature of GE foods and the need for labelling them. For most consumers, especially rural consumers, GE foods are a black box and unless they are made aware of the nature of GE foods, labelling would be meaningless. Despite these big gaps in preparedness, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has approved Mahyco's Bt brinjal for commercial production.

Does this mean that the consumer's right to informed choice about their food is about to be trashed? This right is enshrined in India's Consumer Protection Act and the GEAC approval will violate the provisions of this act. Further, labelling is not just about pasting a coloured sticker on a brinjal, it involves a rigorous process of segregation and identity preservation (IP) to keep Bt and non-Bt food segregated. IP is a complex and expensive process requiring separation of a GM food from non-GM food, starting from farmers' fields, all the way to vegetable shops. Without going through this process, labelling cannot be done. Or has the GEAC planned that all brinjals cultivated in this country henceforth will be genetically engineered?

And what about fixing liability for damage? There is no liability law in India. In the event of contamination of organic brinjal with Bt brinjal, what will be the process of recall? Who will be liable to the producers of organic brinjal? There are no provisions for monitoring the long-term impact of GE foods on the health of consumers. In case adverse health impacts are reported from eating Bt brinjal, who would be liable to pay compensation? How would the liability be fixed and what would be the quantum? In the absence of any kind of preparedness or safeguards, what would be the liability of the government for approving such food crops? And in the event of damage caused by Bt brinjal, will Mahyco be put in the dock?

Dr Suman Sahai, a genetic scientist who has served on the faculties of the Universities of Chicago and Heidelberg, is convenor of the

Gene Campaign

No Kashmir deal will work if US ‘helps’

Asian Age — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:39:45 GMT

Indranil Banerjie

Nov.04 : Something is afoot on Kashmir. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while inaugurating the Anantnag-Qazigund railway stretch last week, declared that he was open to talks with Kashmiris of all shades of opinion in order to achieve peace. He also announced a readiness to talk to Pakistan, albeit with the caveat that Islamabad first act against terrorists targeting India. Home minister P. Chidambaram was in Srinagar a little earlier, talking about "quiet diplomacy" that would bring about a "unique solution" in Kashmir. New Delhi clearly has restarted the political process — gently but surely. The motives are unexceptionable, for there can be no arguing that Kashmir needs peace. The question is why now? For nothing has changed on the ground. Talks with Kashmiri separatists have been frozen since 2006 on account of their intransigence and Pakistan has not done a jot to address Indian concerns on terrorism.

Some sections of the polity have questioned the United Progressive Alliance government’s moves and warned against any dilution of the Indian stance on Kashmir. While it would be absurd to assume that the Prime Minister would somehow compromise India’s stand on Kashmir, there is a subtext that needs to be recognised and assessed. New Delhi today is faced with quiet but growing pressure to act on Kashmir. It is doing the best it can in the circumstances.

Some clues on the subterranean processes at work could be picked up from a new book, The Limits of Influence: America’s role in Kashmir, written by a former US diplomat, Howard B. Schaffer, who once served in the American embassy in New Delhi and later in the state department. This insightful book, a must-read for Indian strategic analysts, argues for an American role in a Kashmir settlement. Schaffer points out President Barack Obama would like to see a resolution of the Kashmir problem: "Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign that he recognised that working with Pakistan and India to resolve (the) Kashmir crisis in a serious way would be among the critical tasks of his administration if he were elected... A Kashmir settlement has become even more important to American interests in South Asia and beyond... The traditional focus of the Pakistan armed forces on combating a perceived threat from India and the continued patronage that Pakistani intelligence agencies provide to Islamic extremists in Kashmir make it more difficult both politically and militarily for Islamabad to help the United States and its coalition partners combat these extremist forces in Afghanistan".

The key to success, according to him, would be the absence of any overt US move. "American officials should work quietly", he writes. "But Americans should not sit on the negotiating table — a bad idea and one that the Indians will not accept. Keeping to an informal, unobtrusive role, US diplomats will want to discourage any public discussion of their activities". He also warns against the appointment of any US special envoy on Kashmir. Instead, he says, "A private visit by someone recognised to have the President’s confidence should be considered despite the obvious danger of leaks".

The very day the Prime Minister was in Kashmir, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad, where she was explicitly asked by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani to mediate on Kashmir. Mr Gilani got no public response from Ms Clinton. Earlier too, during a TV interview in Washington, when she was asked about a US initiative on the Kashmir issue, she had said: "But we believe that the most durable possible outcomes of any kind of resolution or normalisation can only come from the two countries themselves."

Schaffer’s book tries to contend that American intentions on Kashmir have always been honourable and correct. The problem, according to him, has been the negative attitude of India and Pakistan, which has prolonged this dispute for more than 60 years. Schaffer seems to forget about the Cold War. In that instance there was no question of a negotiated settlement — it was prolonged, and one side had to win. The India-Pakistan tension is different because it affects American interests.

To be sure, there are deep differences in US opinion too. Strategic analyst Ashley J. Tellis, in an October policy brief, stressed that "Pakistan’s continued refusal to comprehensively meet its counterterrorism obligations — despite all American inducements — will constantly tempt Washington to contemplate playing the midwife in resolving the Kashmir dispute in the hope that such a success might finally stimulate wholehearted Pakistani cooperation on counterterrorism. Yet such hopes are chimerical, because today the Pakistani military’s antipathy toward India goes beyond any particular issue". A report prepared by the US Congressional Research Service after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks warned that the US government’s focus on the Kashmir issue "would risk fuelling Pakistani expectations of a future settlement favouring Pakistan, thus in turn providing a motive for Islamabad to sustain pressure by ramping up support for Kashmiri separatists". The same report warned that "in the solution to the Kashmir conflict, a haven for Islamic extremist organisations not be created. As veteran South Asia observer Selig Harrison has argued, there is the real danger that an independent Kashmir, given the jihadi nature of some of the insurgent groups, could end up as another permanent sanctuary for Islamic extremist terrorist operations".

Pakistan today has two committed supporters — China and Saudi Arabia — and one reluctant ally, the United States. All three are deeply involved in Pakistan and for different reasons are committed to prop up this failing state. This presents Pakistan with more opportunities than India on the geopolitical level. Clearly, the big powers are aligned against India on Kashmir.

The moot point, however, is whether the latest initiative will work. The way things appear, a settlement on Kashmir at this juncture is doomed. Kashmir negotiations at a time of Pakistan’s choosing or in an environment which seems to favour Pakistan has never worked. Instead of suspecting the intentions of the Indian leadership, the US needs to appreciate the limits of Indian flexibility and the futility of giving sops to an establishment that is the root cause of instability in the region.

Indranil Banerjie is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi

Will US ignore Pak’s misuse of bounty?

Asian Age — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:56:12 GMT

Shankar Roychowdhury

Nov.03 : The Kerry-Lugar Bill, which was recently cleared by both Houses of the United States Congress, has been signed into law as the "The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act 2009". Its stated objective is "the development of an enhanced strategic partnership with Pakistan and its peoples", and under this law, the US has undertaken to provide economic and military aid to Pakistan of $1.5 billion every year for the next five financial years (2009-2013) — a total of $7.5 billion to be utilised for economic and social development, as well as military assistance and arms transfers for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism as part of the "war on terror". Provisions for oversight on expenditure by the donor have been extended to cover the additional Coalition Support Funds, which are separately provided to coalition partners for operations against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their respective countries, Pakistan being one of the major beneficiaries.

Disbursement has also been made subject to annual certification by the US secretary of state that such funds are being spent in accordance with the prescribed preconditions, which include ending sponsorship by the Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of terrorist groups such as the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and preventing the use of Pakistani territory for terrorist attacks on neighbouring countries, specifically India and Afghanistan. But there are also provisions for waiver of stipulations "if the secretary determines it is important to national security interests to provide such waiver". The founding ideology of Pakistan has always been based on permanent politico-military confrontation with India. Its strategic alliance with the US during the Cold War by posing as a certified "free world" enthusiast and enrolling as a member of American-sponsored mutual defence treaties like the Central Treaty Organisation and the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation, was directed solely towards building military capabilities against India and the modern weapons and equipment so acquired were extensively employed during Pakistan’s wars in 1965 and 1971 over Kashmir and Bangladesh. Later, in 1979-89, the US granted Pakistan the exclusive franchise for "Charlie Wilson’s War" against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, for which huge amounts of unaccounted weapons and ammunition were provided to the ISI by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including the then latest Stinger man-portable surface-to-air missiles. A large proportion of these were again diverted and stockpiled for use against India in Kashmir.

At present, the Pakistan Army and the Air Force are extensively employing heavy firepower against the Taliban in Federally Administered Tribal Areas and there is every likelihood that they will again try to blackmail the US to exploit the "national interest" clause for procuring similar weapons through the Kerry-Lugar provisions as well, for subsequent diversion against India. The US has repeatedly condoned such breaches of its own stipulations on the end-use of military aid by Pakistan, whenever it felt it served its own national interest, through US presidential decrees in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, based essentially on misrepresentation of facts.

The same charade was continued through the 1980s though hard intelligence had become available to the CIA by then of nuclear (and missile) proliferation by China (and North Korea) to Pakistan, which then further sold it through the A.Q. Khan "nuclear Wal-Mart" functioning under official patronage of the Pakistan Army to countries categorised as "rogue nations" by the US.

Even a series of legislative amendments introduced in the US Congress from 1987 to 1990 (Symington 1976, Glenn 1977, and most important, Pressler 1985) to stop American military and economic aid to countries engaging in illegal nuclear activity were sidestepped "in the national security interests" of the US, in respect of Pakistan in view of its role as a frontline state supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Events have now come full circle, and the situation in Afghanistan after the proclamation of the war on terror by the US post-9/11 is very similar to that prevalent earlier during the anti-Soviet Mujahideen war of 1979-89.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence hierarchy has always been accorded a special relationship of permissive non-accountability regarding American military aid by successive US administrations, and have been traditionally allowed to siphon off large portions from this largesse for private enrichment. Attempts by the new Obama administration to monitor and impose oversight and end-use restrictions on these funds have naturally touched a raw nerve of self-interest within the Pakistan Army. Orchestrated demonstrations of public anger have been organised at what is being proclaimed as insufferable interference by the US in the internal affairs of the country.

As the lead nation in the global war on terror, the US is handicapped by the compulsions of coalition in managing rogue allies like Pakistan. Former US President George W. Bush sought to mollify them with the accolade of "major non-Nato ally" notwithstanding the obvious reluctance and disinterest of the Pakistan Army in fighting against its co-religionists in the Taliban or Al Qaeda, which are considered strategic assets against India, and for re-establishing Pakistan’s control over its strategic depth area in Afghanistan.

US President Obama’s administration is attempting to cajole a recalcitrant Pakistan Army into a show of cooperation with the US, however superficial, with the socio-economic inducements in the Kerry-Lugar legislation. Neither approach seems to be working, and the Pakistan Army meanwhile continues to double cross its patron by selectively targeting only its own "bad Taliban", the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan of Hakimullah Mehsud which are directly attacking the Pakistan Army inside the country, but not its "good Taliban" of the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, and the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, which operate only against Western troops in Afghanistan.

India’s historical experiences naturally raise questions about American military aid. Will history be allowed to repeat itself and the weapons provided to Pakistan under the Kerry-Lugar Bill be diverted for use against India? And is the US again going to support the diversion by exploiting its "waiver" clause?

Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of Parliament

Left must push for a new united front

Asian Age — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:20:22 GMT

Arjun Sengupta

Oct.02 : The idea of the United Front extends much beyond the simple notion of electoral alliances of different political parties to form a government. The United Front means a combination of political forces to capture power to bring about a transformation of the society. A concrete meaning was given to this term by the Socialist in 1920s. It is the working class parties representing the toiling people who are supposed to lead such united fronts or exercise the hegemony to carry with them all other forces of social change in a set-up of democracy. This is because the working class does not live on exploitation and produces "surplus value", i.e. the value over and above what is needed to reproduce themselves. All other classes live on the surplus value produced by working classes and appropriate them because of their command over capital, through exploitation. That is why according to the Marxists the working class is the harbinger of social change, with all other classes dependent on extraction of surplus value from the production process.

The original idea of the United Front was articulated by Lenin in the 1920s, Second International, where he proposed that the working class needs the support of all other classes to bring about social changes. According to Lenin, this was necessary because such a majority is essential to win over state power as a first step towards social transformation and towards socialism. The working class party must earn their leadership of the social forces by formulating programmes, mobilising them and persuading them to join the national democratic movement leading up to eventual establishment of socialism.

This position of Lenin was not accepted by many Communist leaders at that time, who did not think it was necessary to ally with different sections of people to get power, as the Bolsheviks did for overthrowing capitalism. Left-wing Communist leaders such as Bela Kun, Thalheimer and Terracini believed that the Russian Revolution was an action of a minority party, disciplined and well organised, without trying to win the masses, ignoring the majority of the working class who were under the influence of the social democracy in Europe. Lenin's denunciation of this stand is very much worth quoting, "Terracini says that we were victorious in Russia although the party was very small. Comrade Terracini has understood very little of the Russian Revolution. In Russia we were a small party but we had with us in addition the majority of the Soviets' workers and peasants, deputies throughout the country. Do you have anything of this sort? We had with us almost half the army with their number at least 10 million men". Lenin spelt out further: "To win we must have the sympathy of the masses. An absolute majority is not always essential, but what is essential to win and retain power is not only the majority of working class (in the sense of the industrial proletariat) but also the majority of the working and exploited rural population".

In other words, the working class parties must not only unite themselves but also lead all other national forces of social change and must even be prepared to form United Front governments with social democrats.

The world today of course is quite different from the 1920s and the Communists are rarely able to lead a social movement on their own compared with vast number of other political groups having influence on workers, peasants and working groups. But the basic logic of social change brought about by the hegemony of the working class still remains valid because it is only the working class that can bring about changes without exploiting other classes, and even if socialism is difficult to establish, any change to bring about inclusive development would require the leadership of the non-exploitative working class movement. For this as, the 1920s experience taught us, we need a United Front of all the Left parties bringing within this the support of the national bourgeoisie in close alliance.

I am underlining this lesson of the Second International for at least the Communists to realise the need for a United Front with the nationalist parties even if the latter may prevaricate on that point. In India today that United Front is led by the main nationalist force of the Congress. They do that because of the compulsions for getting electoral power even if they are not fully supportive of the Communists' idea of social change trying to have a wide-based alliance of all forces calling for inclusive development. Secularism, anti-communalism, anti-casteism and all forces supporting social integration are the natural offshoot of that social movement. All these are natural allies of the Left and even if there may be periodic differences among them on peripheral issues, the basic unity of that class alliance remains fully intact. The Left cannot betray this alliance for gaining temporary electoral advantage or combining with very reactionary movements to get temporarily an upper hand in the electoral process. The Left and the Communists' must be on a constant vision to push forward a national movement but they cannot abandon the basic principle of United Front which was formulated by Lenin and developed by Gramsci in the 1920s' social movement.

It is important to remind us of this fundamental principle because India is now passing through a major social crisis. We have all the wherewithal to bring about inclusive social and economic development but the forces of vested interests are stubbornly opposing that trend because that means giving up some of their advantages of going through an unfettered capitalist economic development. But more than that there is an increasing danger of the rise of fascism in the form of either Naxalism or social divisiveness very much dominated by the so-called mastan politics of the footloose lumpen elements who move on from one party to another to dominate social interaction. We have to rebuild the United Front movement and strive for the united forces for social change based on principled politics without looking for tactical advantages.

Dr Arjun Sengupta is a Member of Parliament and former Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi