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Entry for Jan 24, 2011

From Mtribe!

Apology

Sincere apologies for having vanished into thin air - so to speak - for a while. Will recount my adventures of this period soon. :-)

The Curious case of four CMs!!!

Nothing can be more bizarre than having four chief ministers in a state. By elevating his adviser Lyngdoh to the rank of a chief minister, the constitutionally sworn CM, D.D.Lapang has created history for the wrong reasons. Two others had been functioning in the same rank for close to a year and if one goes by the status, there are in all four chief ministers in this hill state.We had so far heard only of Haryana for the flip-flops of its MLAs which led to the coinage of the term “Aya Ram Gaya Ram’. But Haryana has never had this kind of dubious distinction of having four CMs or for that matter even two. There have been states with two deputy CMs as was the case under Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan during his first tenure. But this beats every thing in Indian politics.

One really wonders how the Congress, the oldest national party in the country could have allowed this to happen. If this has been done to address the question of political stability in the sensitive state, there were other ways also that were available. The state could have been put under President’s rule instead of making a spectacle of the worst in Indian politics.

Many argue that there is no provision of having even a deputy Prime Minister under the constitution but there have been at least five deputy PMs starting from Sardar Patel to Charan Singh, Jagjiwan Ram, Y.B.Chavan and L.K.Advani. The case of Sardar Patel falls in a different category since even without holding a position, he always enjoyed an elevated status in the party because of his contributions. Yes, every deputy PM is sworn only as a minister and the status given to him is not reflected in the constitution and is more to honour his political stature.

There is also a question of political compulsions, which lead to such an action. In 2006, a move was started by some in the Congress party to get a senior leader appointed as the deputy PM. The matter had reached a decisive stage but Congress President Sonia Gandhi realizing that the consequences of such an action could have disastrous impact on the future of Dr Manmohan Singh shot it down. Replying to my question at the Congress Chief Minister’s conclave in Nainital, she ruled out that any such decision was likely to be taken and said that the entire party was with Dr Manmohan Siugh.

Various CMs have found ways of going around the rule of having prescribed number of ministers related to the strength of their legislatures by appointing Parliamentary secretaries who are administered oath of office by the CMs and not by the Governor. Obviously, this is illegal and against the spirit of the constitution but this has been happening in virtually every state. As per the Parliament’s definition of a Parliamentary Secretary, he or she is equivalent to that of a deputy minister. Therefore if along with the parliamentary secretaries, the strength of the ministry exceeds the quota based on ten percent of the total strength of the legislature, it is an illegal act.

But the four CM formula takes the cake. It is perhaps derived from the new practice of giving Cabinet or MoS status to individuals functioning outside the ministries. For instance the NSA has a MoS status and the Chairman of the Minorities Commission has a Cabinet status. Similarly many functionaries of various commissions also enjoy similar facilities.

The official explanation as given by the Congress spokesman on is that there is only one CM but others have the rank of the CM. I do not know whether there is any point countering such an absurd thesis. Tomorrow it may be said that there is only one PM but three others who have his rank. I only hope this does not degenerate to that level.

Thackrey the Fascist!

Two interesting things about Bal Thackeray that you may not know. One: in 1966 when the Shiv Sena first exploded on the scene, Indira Gandhi had only just become the Prime Minister of India and Rajiv Gandhi was yet to marry Sonia Maino. Of today’s senior leaders, Pranab Mukherjee was a young academic who had not even joined the Congress. Sharad Pawar had not yet been elected to the state assembly. In that sense, Bal Thackeray is probably the most senior of all active politicians in India today.

The second interesting thing: though he has been around for over four decades, Thackeray has never once propounded a progressive agenda for Maharashtra or laid out his vision of how the state can flourish. All of his politics have been essentially negative: hate this community, beat up another ethnic group and burn the homes of a third.

When Thackeray launched the Shiv Sena, he did so with the support and blessings of such Congress strongmen of that era as V.P . Naik and S.K. Patil. In the mid-60s, the Congress worried that the Communists were gaining a foothold in the industrial units of north Bombay. The Shiv Sena’s job was to fight the Communists (by any means necessary) and to protect the Congress bastion.

In those days, Thackeray’s agenda was to rid Bombay of the communities that he claimed were oppressing the Maharashtrian people: South Indians and Gujaratis. What the Shiv Sena rarely reminds us is that, till 1960, there was no such state as Maharashtra. The state was called Bombay and included much of what is now Gujarat. Maharashtra was created in 1960 and naturally, Bombay still had a largely non-Maharashtrian ethos. As Maharashtrians from other parts of the state came flooding into the city (contrary to what he may claim, even Thackeray’s own family is not from Bombay), the Shiv Sena treated them as its natural constituency.

Since those early beginnings, Thackeray’s agenda has hardly wavered. It has been based on telling Maharashtrians that they are being discriminated against and that only the Shiv Sena will fight for their rights. All that changes are the targets of Thackeray’s ire. He forgave Gujaratis fairly early on but till the late-70s was still aggressively anti-South Indian. In the 80s, he sensed the makings of a Hindu backlash and promptly shifted to an anti-Muslim agenda. That drove the Sena closer to the BJP but in recent years as diminishing returns have set in on that agenda, Thackeray has decided to pick on people from UP and Bihar who, he claims, are stealing the jobs meant for Maharashtrians.

It is instructive that at the end of over four decades in existence, all of them with Thackeray as its supreme leader (no other Indian party has been led for so long by a single individual), the Shiv Sena still has no positive agenda or dreams of glory to inspire Maharashtrians. The most that Thackeray can offer his people is this: I can get you jobs as taxi drivers if we stop these Biharis from coming to Bombay. In 21st century India, that is hardly an inspiring or glorious dream to sell.

Despite 40-plus years of hatred, the Shiv Sena has only won office for a single term and that too, as part of an alliance with the BJP. And now, no matter how much Thackeray raves and rants, political power seems far away. Worse still, as his age catches up with him, his legacy (such as it is) also seems in danger of slipping away. When Thackeray does ultimately ascend to that shakha in the sky, the Sena will wither and die. Its place will be taken by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, the breakaway organisation founded by Thackeray’s nephew Raj.

We need to understand all of this to make sense of the events of the last fortnight. What we are seeing are the last desperate power plays of a fading patriarch who seeks to use violence and intimidation to fool himself into believing that he is still relevant even as his party suffers electoral reverses and his political clout sinks to a new low.

One reason why Raj succeeded in making a relatively strong showing at the last election was because he adopted his uncle’s old strategy. He appealed to unemployed Marathi youth and capitalised on the frustrations of the Maharashtrian middle class. Had Maharashtra been left behind? Were Maharashtrians being marginalised in Bombay? Had North Indians taken all the jobs? And so on. All this was accompanied with a certain level of media-friendly violence (his cadres timed their assaults depending on the availability of TV crews to film them) and such a devastating impersonation of his uncle in his younger days that often Raj came across as Mini Me, the midget clone of Dr Evil from the Austin Powers movies.

Stung by his nephew’s success and dismayed by the failure of his son and heir apparent, the generally soft-spoken Uddhav, to mobilise the Marathi masses, Thackeray decided that the Shiv Sena needed to return to the intimidation of old. Just as it had in 1966, the Congress rode to its rescue. The genesis of the current crisis lies in Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s moronic decision to demand that all taxi drivers speak Marathi. When Chavan was told off by Delhi, he appeared on television to reverse his stand and to claim that he had been misunderstood.

This was the opening that Thackeray needed. Even the state government was not allowed to stand up for Maharashtrians by Delhi, he suggested. Maharashtrians were being ignored in their own city. Once he had commanded the attention of the media with this stand, Thackeray followed his practice of the last four decades and looked for a situation he could exploit with the threat of mob violence. He found it in some innocuous statement made by Shah Rukh Khan about Pakistani players and the Indian Premier League. Khan has a movie coming up for release. So what better way of intimidating him than by threatening violence in the cinemas where the film will be showing?

There is only one way to deal with a bully. The state government needs to protect the cinema halls and turn the screws on Thackeray, arresting his cadres and rigidly imposing the rule of law. Sadly, the current CM has shown no inclination to do so. Perhaps Rahul Gandhi’s visit will force him to finally pull Bombay out of the mess that he created with his taxi-driver statement.

The question is: can Ashok Chavan guarantee law and order in Bombay? Can he stand up to the sort of bullying that we have come to know so well over the last 40 years? History shows us that each time Thackeray has found an opponent who fights back, the Sena backs down. The only language Thackeray understands is strength.

Sadly, that is not a language that Ashok Chavan speaks. And Bombay pays the price.

Yet again.

Defending the General

The controversy after the directive of Union Defence Minister AK Antony to Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor to institute court-martial proceedings against his military secretary Lieutenant General Avadhesh Prakash for his alleged role in the Sukhna land scam has several dimensions to it.

First, Antony by his action has, perhaps, inadvertently given the issue an element of civilian authority over military authority. The army chief had sought his military secretary’s explanation through a show cause notice. Until that avenue had been explored, the intervention of a senior authority was not required. The minister could have acted before the chief had sought the show cause notice and not while the process was still on.

An authority as senior as the army chief cannot be seen consulting or acting through intervention in a case already before him. The intervention is seeking to pre-judge an issue and would create controversies between the civil and military administrations.

Lt Gen Prakash is the senior-most army officer who will now face court-martial proceedings. Two days before his retirement, he has been asked to be attached to the Eastern Command for the purpose. The court-martial can be seen both as an opportunity by the officer to clear his name and for those who insist he is guilty to prove their charges. This could become a landmark case in the annals of military files and could even go up to the apex court after the court-martial proceedings reach a conclusion.

There are several curious turns in the case which are being portrayed as an example of a trial by media. It is possible that serious rivalry between top Army generals could be behind the case being reported as a major scandal. First, the land in question does not belong to the Army but to the West Bengal government. It is not covered under the Defence Act as Sukhna is not a cantonment but a military station. Third, no money has changed hands.

The MoU signed by the Army with four parties to which the land was leased by the state government was a fall-out of a meeting that took place in the secretariat of the West Bengal government. The MoU was cancelled on the orders of the Eastern Command Commander Lt Gen V.K. Singh in March last year.

By some coincidence, the inquiry ordered into the dealings was six months later soon after Lt Gen PK Rath — in-charge of Sukhna — was named as the Deputy Chief of Army Staff. Prior to him, Lt Gen PC Bhardwaj was named as the Vice-Chief. Bhardwaj and VK Singh are course mates (June 1970) though the latter is senior. The inquiry, which was conducted, did not fulfil the mandatory requirement since it had one Lt General and two officers junior to him in place of all the three Lt Generals since it was an inquiry against a sitting Lt General. The Indian Army could have surely spared two out of the 70 Lt Generals on its rolls or two out of the five in the Eastern Command. Therefore, the recommendations could be challenged.

The military secretary’s role also was made part of the recommendations, which led to Rath being taken off from the line-up to the deputy’s position. Meanwhile, Lt Gen VK Singh has been named as the next Chief of Army Staff to take over on March 31 when General Kapoor retires.

The defence minister’s intervention has made both his position and that of General Kapoor untenable. There is a view that the chief should step down after this but his detractors feel that he is not going to do so since he is eyeing a top assignment like his predecessor J.J. Singh, now a Governor.

But the controversy is perhaps beginning to show that the fight among the generals is only a tip of the iceberg. :-)

Dynasty Politics In India: The Rahul Gandhi Gamble

During the first general election of 1952, a candidate of the Rama Rajya Parishad who was standing against Pandit Nehru asked him asked him why he did not support a ban on cow slaughter. “Don’t you love cows?” he asked. Nehru replied with his British sense of humour, “I love horses too.” That was his way of putting the distance between loving an animal and deifying it.

Rama Rajya is again in the news with the BJP claiming that this is the one ideal of good governance that all Indians have always cherished. So it will be Rama Rajya, Rama Setu and Rama Mandir for the BJP? It shows how out of touch with India the party has become.

The Dalits cannot have much love for Rama Rajya after what happened to Sambuka in the Ramayana. Even the OBCs may object to the upper caste bias of the epic and modern women may not want a husband who treats them so badly as the hero of Ramayana treated his wife.

Also has the BJP learned nothing from the Rama Setu debate with DMK chief M Karunanidhi? The Ramayana is a different text in North India from what it is in the South. The anti-Brahman movement in the South was virulently against the North Indian version of Hinduism. The BJP has a long way to go before it realises that Hindu society lives on division and sub-division. It has survived for centuries without a single political authority precisely because of its ability to prevent any single group to get so large as to dominate. Hinduism is not a unifying creed.

Now after sixty years of sovereignty, we are once again seeing the same fragmenting tendencies rule the party structure. Like some ancient dynasty, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty ruled over all of India for 42 years till 1989 with only an occasional usurper. Since 1989, the dynasty has never been in full power. It has to adjust to the demands of many regional subahdars and local nawabs.

Luckily for India, democracy thrives without single party dominance. Indeed, one way to admire what India has achieved is its ability to stay united without a strong central authority. Any exclusive powerful authority would have to exclude many or at least treat the core elite better than the periphery. That was what Congress did for its first 42 years. It looked after the upper crust and fed crumbs to the Dalits and the OBCs. When they revolted, the Congress edifice fell apart.

Now each group has its own party and wants a piece of the cake. The old vertical hierarchical caste society is becoming horizontal, though it is still as divided as it was before. There are occasional small unifying movements as with the Yadavs and Paswan in Bihar/UP. But they are local, not national. Nor does the BSP, despite the charisma of its leader, unite all Dalits

The Third Front is an acceptance of this cellular character of Indian society. Class is not reliable as a unifying factor as the Left should know by now. So a double negative factor —anti-BJPism plus anti-Congressism—is the unifying platform. Yet this has to compete against each separate negative. Anti-BJPism is called secularism and can combine many fragments as it did under the UPA. Anti-Congressism is not as strong as it used to be in the Seventies. So the NDA is fragile.

The Congress sensed this asymmetry. So it went it alone and contested as many seats as it could. It is trying to become truly national again. So, rather than accept three or four seats from Lalu Prasad whose star was sinking in any case, it contested almost 30 seats out of 40 in Bihar and similarly in UP as well.

The fisrt UPA has died; a new UPA arose from its ashes. This is the Rahul Gandhi gamble.

Resurgent Fascism

Measures designed to protect and promote the rights and interests of the local inhabitants of the State are unobjectionable. The criterion should be the economic condition of the persons sought to be benefitted and not the language spoken in the State. Besides the means for achieving these ends should be lawful and legitimate. The ultimatum issued by MNS supremo Raj Thackeray to taxi drivers to speak and write in Marathi coupled with the threat of they not being allowed carry on their lawful occupation if they do not comply, is tantamount to criminal intimidation. It smacks of fascism. It is patently unconstitutional because it unreasonably restricts the fundamental rights of taxi drivers to carry on their occupation. This fascist trend, if not uprooted, can extend to other areas and will lead to divisiveness which is anathema to the culture and spirit of a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai.

Inaction of the Maharashtra government, verging on acquiescence, is distressing. If unconstitutional activities by extra-constitutional authorities are not curbed stringently, the authority of the State will be undermined and Rule of Law will be subverted. Electoral considerations should not prevent the State government from acting swiftly before it is too late.

Attack on Jyoti Basu: In Bad Taste...

Came across this 'attack' on the late Jyoti Basu by one Biswa Prasun Chatterji. I do not hold any strong political views, but I have never had a problem in appreciating what's good. As such, I liked Jyoti Basu - no, I never even met him - and admired him for several innate qualities. I find this estimate of Basu to be in bad taste and in need of rebuttal.

My rebuttal will shortly follow!

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Now that Jyoti Basu has passed away media is abuzz with paying tributes. Tributes for what? Converting West Bengal to Waste Bengal? Operation Barga (distribution of land to landless farmers by taking land from landed people)? Overall gloom and doom in present-day Bengal?

Or his foiled leadership in the third front that never even took off properly (Devegouda stayed for 2 years; I.K.Gujral for another 3 years leading to no big changes in India which were subsequently happening under BJP or Congress-led government; remember the golden quadrilateral plan or Pokhran II or Kargil?)? As I look back I see a whole generation of Bengalis in West Bengal crippled with broken backbone since English was scrapped from Class 1 in schools.

No IAS or IIT toppers from Bengal can be heard of now. I am from a generation who never saw anything but communist rule in West Bengal. And I feel bad to say that millions of educated Bengalis had to migrate to other states (like migrant Biharis) and abroad since the militant trade unions shut down industries like Dunlop, Metal Box etc. All major jute mills got locked up. IISCO, which once used to be a barometer in London Stock Exchange, got sick and nationalized.

Calcutta stock exchange, a forerunner of Bombay stock exchange almost lost trading in recent past. Corporate headquarters shifted to Bombay. Only ITC or Britannia stayed back. Bengal, once known for financial glory, became an industrial desert. Medical service and educational system got infiltrated with mediocre party affiliated cadres who made a whole system decadent with cobwebbed syllabus and incompetent training which earlier used to be a role model for a nation.

India’s first post graduate medical institute IPGMER happened in Calcutta superseding AIIMS. There was something called brand Bengal before these commies took hold. If you were a successful Indian you probably studied in Calcutta (Presidency/Xaviers/ Calcutta Medial College/Calcutta University/ Bengal Engineering College etc). Owning an Ambassador (made in Bengal) was the ultimate status symbol in India.

And you probably wore a Bata shoe that too was made in Bengal. Park Street had probably the best nightlife to enjoy and celebrate your success in anglicized atmosphere outside the east of Suez. With Jyoti Basu’s misrule whole of Bengal became a wasteland (remember T.S.Eliot?). Bengal lost its brand sheen. So why cry so much for a man who upheld a failed ideology (forgot the Soviets and East Europe?) which ruined a state?

In my opinion his successor Buddhadev Bhattacharyya did much for Bengal. He single-handedly spearheaded industrial revival (Sector V of Salt lake became IT hub where more than 50,000 software engineers work, Durgapur-Asansol belt turned around, Dunlop reopened, Kolkata now politically rechristened version of Calcutta got some malls and flyovers and got back some business which left with Jyoti babu’s time!).

Had it not been Mamata di’s intervention Buddha babu almost got the Tatas in Singur wherefrom the first Nano would have rolled out! Actually Jyoti babu belonged to Ballygunge group of communists- rich, elite and English-speaking Bourgeois. In Calcutta there goes a saying that there are two kinds of Communists- Ballygunge and Tollygunge types. Ballygunge type communists ( e.g., Jyoti Basu, Indrajit Gupta, Mohit Sen, Somenath Chatterjee etc) would discuss communism over scotch on the rocks , nostalgically think of their time spent in London and send their children and grandchildren to English medium schools like St.Xavier’s or Loreto.

And Tollygunge types (e.g. Pramode Dasgupta, Biman Bose, or Buddhadev Bhattacharyya) will discuss communism over ‘muri’ (puffed rice) and ‘telebhaja’ (fried potatoes or brinjal) in refugee colony, sing IPTA songs and plan their next remonstration/ upheaval against the industry owners or rich zamindars and try to make Bengali the only medium of instruction in schools or colleges since they themselves are uncomfortable with the language due to lack of good schooling or poor social background.

This group had nothing to lose but their shackles. But both types had a similarity. They wanted a change. And now you see what change we got in Calcutta! Except the change in name nothing is changed. And that also in a city which brought change two hundred years ago by a movement Indians acknowledge as Bengal Renaissance! A city once known as cultural capital is dwindling and suffering by self-inflicted stupor. Financial prosperity patronizes culture.

Once flight of capital happen culture follows suit too. And the late Jyoti Basu, whose only claim to fame can be that our state was at least free from communal hatred, was the main architect of doom. It is interesting to note that he died before he could witness the expected and forecasted total ouster of communists from the Bengal government by the Trinamool congress party in next 2011 Assembly elections.

Wikipedia: How far can you rely on it?

One of the most well-known characters in the American TV show 30 Rock is the ditzy star of the fictional TGS programme that the comedy is about. Shattered at being sidelined by a black comedian who becomes the programme’s new star, she looks for other avenues for her creative impulses.

She finds one in a biopic of Janis Joplin. As the producers do not have the right to Joplin’s life story or the rights to her songs, the character has to change names (Janet Jimplin?) and song lyrics (the riff on Me and Bobby McGee is especially clever) have to be altered. None of this deters the star who looks for ways to get under Joplin’s skin.

Enter the show’s writers who, like all TV writers, are much cleverer than the stars. They tell her that Joplin had several interesting habits and that information about these habits is available on the internet.

The star turns to the web and discovers that Joplin was handicapped, speedwalked everywhere and ate cats. She tries very hard to live like Joplin (even attempting to bite into a cat) before the writers take pity on her and point out that all this stuff is made up.

But she had read it on the internet?

Indeed she had. She read it on Wikipedia.

All that the show’s writers had done was to alter Joplin’s Wikipedia entry to include all this nonsense about cat dinners. The unfortunate star, who trusted Wikipedia, took the line that if it was there in print, it must be true.

Welcome to the world of Wikipedia.

By now, all of us know, or should know, that Wikipedia is not the most reliable source of information. The idea of an encyclopaedia that the whole world would contribute to may be a brilliant concept but it is not one that is necessarily conducive to accuracy.

We’ve all heard horror stories of people logging on to Wikipedia to discover that they are dead. We’ve heard of the confusion caused by Wikipedia entries – one prematurely killed off Teddy Kennedy. And there have been celebrated cases of people who have been defamed by Wikipedia.

Almost anyone who has a Wikipedia page will tell you that for all the claims that Wikipedia’s founders may make about neutral umpires and guarantees against inaccuracy and defamation, any fool can vandalise your page and the damage will stay on Wikipedia for months unless you decide to take action.

So why do so many of us depend on a source of information that is so obviously inaccurate?

It’s not that we don’t know better. We’ve all heard of Wikipedia’s reputation for publishing dubious news.

But here’s the thing. Wikipedia has three huge advantages that other reference works lack.

The first is convenience. It is the easiest thing in the world to look something up on Wikipedia. And often the demands of convenience take precedence over other things, including accuracy.

The second is range. You can find almost anything on Wikipedia. Just take the references in this column: 30 Rock, Janis Joplin, Me and Bobby McGee etc. My guess is that Wikipedia will have something about all of them. How many other reference works can you say that about?

But the third, and most important, is relative accuracy. Let’s be honest.

If Wikipedia really told us that Janis Joplin was a speedwalking handicapped singer who lived on a diet of live cats, we would cease to take it seriously. In the case of some entries, Wikipedia can be hundred per cent accurate. Even when it is wrong, it can still be 70 per cent accurate.

The significance of Wikipedia lies in its standard of accuracy. Assume you were looking up L K Advani and the entry said that he was a dangerous man who functioned as an ISI double agent while simultaneously preaching Hindu communalism, you would laugh (or take offence) and not waste your time on Wikipedia again. But suppose you looked him up and every single detail of his life was accurate. But Wikipedia also carried the claim that Advani had been convicted in 1996 on corruption charges in the hawala scandal?

You and I might know that this was rubbish. All charges against Advani were thrown out. But would everyone be as aware? What about younger people who have no memories of the hawala scandal? My guess is that a significant proportion of Wikipedia users would believe that because everything else in the entry had the ring of truth about it, the bit about hawala must also be true.

Here's the real danger of Wikipedia. Because it allows every crank and every biased person with an axe to grind to spread lies and disseminate misinformation, it is the perfect medium for slander and defamation. And because most of the other information is accurate, the slander seems more credible than it would outside of the context of Wikipedia.

Is there a way out? Wikipedia’s founders said that they would prevent slander and lies from appearing on the site. Anyone who uses Wikipedia will know that they have failed. That means, I guess, that there really is no way out.

As long as Wikipedia is convenient to use, demonstrates its extraordinary range and is largely accurate, it will continue to be popular. And there, within the haystacks of truth, will lie the poisoned needles of defamation, slander and misinformation.