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EDITORIAL There is interesting news from Amritsar. As many as 16 Vigilance Officers who nabbed the corrupt red-handed have been handsomely rewarded. Those nabbed include two gazetted officers and others are from departments that have large inter-action with public. The bribe money thus received by them varies between Rs 200 to Rs 3200. Interestingly, reward money is Rs 25000 to each of those who 'honestly' performed their duties in catching the corrupt officials. This is very attractive incentive to catch the small fries for the big reward. District administration in collaboration with the Rotary Club and Anti-Corruption Board also honoured civilians who had helped the Vigilance to nab the corrupt, Unspecified amount has been paid to them as token of their services to eradicate the menace of corruption. As if all this is not enough, during the week special seminars and painting competitions were also organised in schools, colleges, youth clubs and gram panchayats to create mass awareness amongst the people. To motivate the people to do their part of the job in removing the stigma of corruption, cash rewards have been announced by the Deputy Commissioner. Any person helping to nab a corrupt gazetted officer will be paid Rs 50,000/- and for nabbing Class III babus Rs 25,000/- each irrespective of the bribe money thus involved. This is indeed something happening in the Holy City of Amritsar. One really does not know whether similar incentives are on in other districts of Punjab as well. If that be so, results could be substantial. It would indeed make the corrupt scare of accepting any bribe. That exactly is the time when touts would come to play significant role. But tout-turn-informer could be dangerous proposition......more |
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" Not a
Martial Law ?" K.N. Pandita ACADEMIC
PULSE By Prof. S.K Bhalla In these days of click and mouse and couple of novel policy initiatives by the Central Govt. envisage restructuring of the existing......more Military
implications of By Avinash Shirodkar Tibet, which China occupied by use of force 50-year ago, has become a staging base for military operations against India.....more By Sondip Bhattacharya By O.P. Tripathi Tales
of Travesty By Dr.
Jitendra Singh |
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EDITORIAL There is interesting news from Amritsar. As many as 16 Vigilance Officers who nabbed the corrupt red-handed have been handsomely rewarded. Those nabbed include two gazetted officers and others are from departments that have large inter-action with public. The bribe money thus received by them varies between Rs 200 to Rs 3200. Interestingly, reward money is Rs 25000 to each of those who 'honestly' performed their duties in catching the corrupt officials. This is very attractive incentive to catch the small fries for the big reward. District administration in collaboration with the Rotary Club and Anti-Corruption Board also honoured civilians who had helped the Vigilance to nab the corrupt, Unspecified amount has been paid to them as token of their services to eradicate the menace of corruption. As if all this is not enough, during the week special seminars and painting competitions were also organised in schools, colleges, youth clubs and gram panchayats to create mass awareness amongst the people. To motivate the people to do their part of the job in removing the stigma of corruption, cash rewards have been announced by the Deputy Commissioner. Any person helping to nab a corrupt gazetted officer will be paid Rs 50,000/- and for nabbing Class III babus Rs 25,000/- each irrespective of the bribe money thus involved. This is indeed something happening in the Holy City of Amritsar. One really does not know whether similar incentives are on in other districts of Punjab as well. If that be so, results could be substantial. It would indeed make the corrupt scare of accepting any bribe. That exactly is the time when touts would come to play significant role. But tout-turn-informer could be dangerous proposition. As tout he may get 10 to 50% commission of the bribe money thus received by the corrupt. As informer, he can be sure of richer by Rs 25000 for each case. But the impact on the corrupt would be quite a deterrent although old habits seldom die and if they are dirty habits they never die. The commendable part of it is that some beginning has been made at least in one district of the country out of a total 588 districts in India. Now comes the news of an exit poll on corruption conducted by Centre of Media Studies. CMS has interviewed 2576 visitors to various offices in five big cities namely Pune, Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad and Chennai. The findings are quite mind-boggling. Half of those who go to public service departments experience 'first hand bribe'. Two third of visitors to these offices feel 'corruption is real'. The consolation is that one -third do think that corruption is more often exaggerated. Another finding is that only 20% complained about corruption (they were contacted by special teams when they were coming out of the offices after the corruption-ritual) while the remaining 80% opted to remain silent conveying that it is just one of those things that has become part and parcel of life. They also have apprehensions that the bribe thus paid by them for a particular task could go waste if they open their mouth prematurely. By far the greatest conclusion is that businessmen and self-employed pay more bribes than others and that forty percent of the Government employees themselves have also paid bribes at one point or the other! It shows the mass affliction. Amongst the five cities thus exposed to Exit poll, Hyderabad tops the list. If such be the exit poll results in so-called good cities of good-governance, one shudders to think of the results of Jammu or Srinagar if exposed to exit poll. Meanwhile, Maharaja Ranjit Singh Award for Honesty announced by Badal Government in 1997 has found no suitable candidate. Will Badal Government redefine what is exactly meant by honesty ? |
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K.N. Pandita In his first address to the nation on October 17, 2000, General Pervez Musharraf, the Chief Executive said, "this is not a martial law". Masses of people believed, veterans of Pakistan politics laughed in their sleeves, and the Generals winked. Lt. Gen. Aziz, then Chief of the General Staff GHQ played the crucial role in reversing the dismissal order of the Prime Minister. In post – coup period, he became the centre of power. No major appointment was made without his consent. Ministers and senior bureaucrats could not do without calling at his office. He gave the direction to Pakistan’s policy on Kashmir, Afghanistan and CTBT issue. In fact, General Pervez did indicate that Pakistan could think of signing CTBT but, being a hard-liner, Gen. Aziz succeeded in roping in some more top brass in the forces and obstructed the signing of the treaty. In the case of Kashmir and Afghanistan, the five - member military junta, of which he is a part, opposed any change or relaxation in ISI’s support to the mercenaries. In doing so, Lt. Gen. Aziz and the other four members of the military junta have come very close to Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami. This has won them the sobriquet of ‘jehadi Generals’ They are Lt. Gen. Ghulam Ahmad, Chief of the Staff to the Chief Executive, Maj. Gen. Ahsan, chief of military intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI, and Lt. En, Aziz. In a shuffle affected for the second time in last few months, Lt. Gen. Aziz has been posted as Corps Commander of Lahore. This shifting has taken place on the insistence of General Aziz himself. Since he is eyeing the top most post of Chief of the Armed Staff, he needs to fulfil the requirement of commanding a Corps for at least two years. This means that General Musharraf is mentally prepared to move out and make room for Gen. Aziz after two years. The question is whether he will be able to keep the situation in control in the Army and let power pass on smoothly to the prospective successor? It will be remembered that Lt. Gen. Aziz, who headed the ISI before he took over as Chief of the General Staff, was the real brain behind Kargil incursion. As ISI chief, he remained closely associated with the religious fundamentalist-terrorist groups of Pakistan. How far is the military government non-martial? It is an interesting question. In the first order of the CE, 190 Lt. Colonels were appointing in the district of monitoring team – the mechanism of the ‘non-martial law military government. They are required to oversee the working of civil administration at every tier of governance. The number of majors, captains and other commissioned and non-commissioned officers and jawans in the army monitoring setup runs into thousands. There is a monitoring team virtually in every government department and agency. A fall out of this arrangement is the exacerbation of civilian-military relationship. More sensitive organisations like National Accountability Bureau have also been stuffed with retired and serving members from armed forces. The Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) had already and entirely been given in the control of theArmy. Educational institutions – the University of Punjab – have also the officer in olive green to supervise their functioning. Add to all this civil service on the military quota introduced by Ziau’l-Haq and those engaged in the rather tough job of accompanying the tax-survey teams. In the research centres like Institute of Regional Studies, down the line to the Sports Federations, the presence of militarymen is all too pervasive and imposing. A detailed scrutiny of the establishment division’s record shows that presently one chief of army staff, 15 serving and retired Lt. Generals, in-service and retired Maj. Generals, one retired Lt. Colonel, two retired majors, one retired captain, one retired air marshal, two serving air vice marshals, one retired air commodore, one serving commodore, one retire vice admiral and three serving rear admirals are holding important positions in various government department. Of the 15 Lt. Generals occupying vital official slots, seven are serving while eight are retired. Of the 16 Major. Generals currently in government departments, 12 are serving while four are retired. And of the 39 Brigadiers, 32 are serving while seven have retired. Two retired Lt. Generals are Governors of the Punjab and Frontier respectively6 while another two are vice – chancellors of the University of Engi9neering and Technology and the University of the Punjab. One Lt. Gen. happens to be the interior minister; another retired General is Chairman WAPDA. Two serving Lt. Generals, apart from holding the Mangla and Lahore Corps, are serving as Chairmen of the Pakistan Cricket Board and President of the Pakistan Hockey Federation respectively. In its report on the Bangladesh debacle, Hamoodur Rahman Commission had categorically stated that one of the main reasons for the defeat of Pakistan Army in East Pakistan was the tradition of asking the Army to perform civilian duties. This had not only given rise to corruption an incompetence but had also adversely affected the professional skills and ability of the men in olive green. Evidently, the military regime of General Musharraf would not be disposed to listen to this comment. It is also a fact that the Army in Pakistan has more than once lost the ‘charisma’, which the people of Pakistan say it once carried. It is an irony that in the history of Pakistan, civil society has never reacted defiantly to the imposition of martial law regimes. There has hardly been any political challenge to these regimes. One of the few challenges, however, that have risen against the authority of the oligarchy led by the military, has come from ethnic movements and ethnic politics. The MRD campaign against Zia was very localised and negligible in terms of its impact on the Zia government. |
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Military implications of china's annexation of tibet By Avinash Shirodkar Tibet, which China occupied by use of force 50-year ago, has become a staging base for military operations against India. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has stationed missile batteries targeting Indian cities. More often than not the PLA resorts to incursions in Indian territories to probe our defence preparedness. Defence experts feel that the next war between the two Asian giants will be bloodier one as compared to the meek surrender by Indian forces in 1962. When 40,000 Chinese troops invaded central Tibet from eight different directions and quickly captured Lhasa in October 1950, they eliminated what had been a 2,000-year-old buffer between the Indian and Chinese civilisations. No single event has so profoundly affected India's security as Tibet's annexation. That brought Chinese forces and created a land corridor (and nexus) between China and Pakistan. As Sardar Patel put it, "for the first time after centuries, India's defence has to concentrate itself on two fronts simultaneously". The two-front defence has acutely burdened India and kept it under pressure. A country with one-sixth of the global population has been boxed in, struggling still to emerge as a major power. The destabilisation of its northeast is also linked to China's gobbling up of Tibet. When the invasion of Tibet occurred, Jawaharlal Nehru, misled by China's professions of peaceful intent, woke up to the event's profound ramifications. "It is not right for any country to talk about its sovereignty or suzerainty over an area outside its immediate range," Nehru was quick to tell Parliament. But by 1954, he sacrificed Tibet's historical status to befriend Beijing on grounds that India was in no position to undo the annexation. By surrendering whatever leverage India had, he opened the way to more Chinese betrayals - first the surreptitious encroachments on Indian territory, and then open aggression in 1962. The occupation of Tibet, a unique State ruled by priests that was as large as West Europe, surprised Nehru but not Patel. Even before the communists seized power in Beijing in 1949, Patel wrote to Nehru that once they had consolidated their political hold, they would turn on Tibet and "destroy its autonomous existence". India must, therefore, "prepare from now for that eventuality". Patel proved prophetic: By late 1949, the communists were already nibbling at Tibet. Half a century of Chinese communist rule has changed the face of what Frank Capra, in his 1937 movie classic, Lost Horizon, had idealised as Shangri-La, an Eden-like haven from the looming hostilities of World War II. Culturally ravaged and economically swamped by Han Chinese, Tibet today has been abandoned by rest of the world as a lost Shangri-La. Tibetans, however, have kept up their non-violent resistance. The Han nationalism that Mao Zedong kindled in the countryside to win the long war against ruler Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party was afterwards used to expand the frontiers of China. The early fall of Tibet whetted the desire of the communists to create a China whose geographical extent would epitomise the high point in Han history. China's capture of Indian Himalayan tracts and its present aggressive posture on Taiwan and creeping assertiveness in the South China Sea are rooted in the same nationalism that has helped the communists stay in power. With 60 per cent of its present territory comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, China has come a long way in history when the Great Wall represented the outer security perimeter of the Han empire. Yet, the redrawing of frontiers has not ended, as is evident from China's iredentist territorial claims and maritime ambitions. Its maps show Arunachal Pradesh, Spratlys, Paracels, Senkakus and Taiwan as Chinese territory. China also covets Sikkim, which it shows as independent. Tibet's easy annexation helped foster Chinese aggressiveness. The occupation's larger strategic implications will continue to reverberate in Asia for decades to come. The method of Tibet's absorption - aggressive claims presented as facts, steady but quiet encroachment, and creation of new realities - was replicated by China in annexing one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir and is now being tried out in the South China Sea, where Beijing has sought to back its claims with increased military presence and capability. Chinese maps depict a territorial boundary claim that encloses much of the South China Sea. This clearly concerns other States in the region that depend on free and safe navigation for their oil and other trade. By constructing naval facilities in Myanmar and aiding Pakistan's and Iran's naval plans, China is positioning itself along important trade routes from West Asia to East Asia via the Indian Ocean. The 'Tibetisation' of the South China Sea, if it succeeds, will give Beijing a stranglehold over vital sea-lanes. Today China is clearly a colonial power in Tibet at a time when next-door Central Asia has freed itself from the yoke of Russian rule. Its dubious claim to historical sovereignty over Tibet, based on a map from the Yuan dynasty which lasted from 1271 to 1368, cannot hide the fact that the devoutly Buddhist Tibetans constitute a distinct culture and nationality. For centuries, they were independent, with the relationship between China and Tibet the same as between a patron and priest. Under Mao, the patron turned the priest into a vassal. It is obvious that conventional approaches can hardly be effective in dealing with China. With its Sun Tzu thinking, China can only be dealt with strategically and ingeniously. But India has never had a consistent strategy on China. So it has erred repeatedly. It was India that persuaded the UN General Assembly not to take up the Chinese invasion of Tibet lest prospects of a peaceful compromise be lost! India's naivete was at its worst when it sanctified Tibet's annexation in the 1954 Panchsheel accord, characterised by B.R. Ambedkar as a pass to "the Chinese to bring their armies on the Indian borders". Such is China's confidence today about its continued hold over Tibet (eastern parts of which were incorporated in Chinese provinces) that it has rejected the Dalai Lama's repeated offers to hold unconditional talks on autonomy, not independence. Although the situation now gives comfort to Beijing, the future may bring major changes. If Tibetans go by Han history, with its series of rapid rise and rapid fall of power, there is certainly hope. While the world debates whether a rising China is a nation of promise or peril, China's future depends on how it manages its growing contradiction between market capitalism and political autocracy. A powerful, prosperous, united China will certainly challenge the status quo in Asia and elsewhere, while a weak, unstable but unified China will be prone to acts of adventurism. Whatever its future, the communists' legacy of nationalism and Han pride has ensured that China will not be a sleeping dragon again. A head-on clash between forces of capitalism and autocracy could loosen central authority in Beijing and create a situation where the traditional ethnic homelands begin to assert themselves. The continuing flight of Russian settlers from Central Asia suggests that in a fundamentally changed situation, the large numbers of Han Chinese now residing in Tibet may be forced to gradually leave. There is hope for Tibet as long as Tibetans keep up their fight for separate identity. Nothing can crush Tibetan nationalism more than Tibetans giving up hope. INAV |
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By Sondip Bhattacharya Mr. Jyoti Basu is gone. Saifuddin Chowdhury has left the party. It is a symptom of the beginning of the end of communism in India. There have been any number of splits and sub-divisions before. The first one dates back to 1917 when the Bolsheviks separated from the Mensheviks. Then the Trotskyites quarrelled with the Stalinists. Their successor in India is the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) which, as a part of the Left Front, still has a few MLAs and MPs in Kerala and West Bengal. In India the first split occurred in 1964 when the CPM was formed. Those who felt that the Chinese aggression of 1962 was legitimate left the Communist Party of India established in 1924. Those who agreed with Moscow about the Sino-India war remained in the CPI. In 1967, the dyed in the red Maoists quit the CPM to become the Naxalites. And so on. All these divisions were provoked by ideological differences and survived in their separation. They did not signal the end of any movement. Look, however, at the many circumstances under which the current intra-party disputes are taking place. Not only Saifuddin Chowdhury but also Subhas Chakrabarty, the West Bengal Transport Minister, is unhappy. Then there are Manab Mukherjee (Environment Minister), Tarit Topdar (MP from Barackpore), and Samir Putatunda and Amitava Nandy (secretaries of the two districts of 24 Paraganas). They have no alternative ideology to offer. They want more inner party democracy and less democratic centralism, a euphemism for the autocracy of the party caucus which is dominated by stalwarts like Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury. Voices of dissent should be heard and respected. The party should be prepared to ally with other parties to form a government at the Centre if an opportunity arises, is yet another demand. The grievances are of an operational or a tactical nature. None of the dissidents has come forward with a new agenda or a programme to bring the CPM in step with the times. This is despite the estimate that some 92 per cent of the members are those who joined after 1977; only about 8 per cent are older veterans. Joseph Stalin died 47 years ago. His policies were condemned in 1956 at the 20th Congress of the CPSU by Nikita Khrushchev and others. Yet the CPM is proud to display his portrait not only at party fora but also along with random graffiti on the walls of private houses in Calcutta. This is symptomatic of the unchanging commitment to out-dated dogmas. At the recent party conference at Thiruvananthapuram, the galaxy of portraits was dominated by Joseph Stalin. Evidently, there was to be no ideological change. Even the question of internal democracy was reportedly not discussed. What was projected as a change was the CPM's willingness for an understanding with non-proletarian parties in order to fight the forces of communalism. The octogenarian leaders, once described as thakurdas or grandfathers by the dissident Subhas Chakrabarty, evidently forgot communist history. Forming a united front is an old practice among communist parties. After World War II, most of the east European satellite countries were captured by first linking up with the different parties, including the bourgeois ones, in UF governments. The CPM first tasted power in West Bengal during 1967 through a UF government headed by the late Ajoy Mukherjee, who along with his faction had been pushed out of the Congress only some months earlier. What is then new about this latest resolution? Except perhaps it is a signal to the Sonia Congress that the communist Barkis is willing in West Bengal and eventually in New Delhi. Little wonder that Subhas Chakrabarty has reportedly passed caustic comments on returning from Thiruvananthapuram. "The think tank, it seems, is still burdened with the weight of the Soviet Robot of 1917. They have forgotten that the Soviet ship has already sunk and they will fail to dig up the wreckage". The octogenarians have also slipped up on another aspect of the CPM track record. That they wish to form a third front in order to oppose the Bharatiya Janata Party is not illegitimate. But to talk of fighting the forces of communalism is hypocritical. What is the Muslim League if not a communal party. It is worse. Prior to 1947, it worked for the partition of the country. Yet the CPM has again and again had the League as a coalition partner in Kerala. The fact that the CPM persists with such senile leadership as well as obsolete dogmas is a symptom of its lack of an inner will to survive. Apart from Fidel Castro's Cuba and North Korea, there is no pretension to practise communism anywhere overseas. The days of the CPM must therefore be numbered. Communism is fundamentally an internationalist movement; "workers of the world unite" and all that. Its survival or demise the world over has therefore a contagious potential for every red party in India. Coming to performance, the Jyoti Basu led government has made West Bengal a graveyard of industries. Before long the great metropolis of Calcutta will be reduced to a mere trading centre. The cream of Bengali youth is migrating to other parts of India, if not also overseas, for jobs. The rest of the young people are languishing without employment. Kerala's is also a sad story. But for the Malayali diaspora in West Asia, Delhi and Gujarat, the state could also become an economic cemetery. Between the Left Front government and the communist trade unions, Kerala is an entrepreneur's nightmare. In short, the CPM has failed to govern well. Let not all the blame be heaped on the leaders of the CPM. Quite a part of the blame must be borne by the genes of their movement. Karl Marx was a prophet but with a blind spot. He grasped the thesis of bourgeois exploitation right. His anti-thesis contained in the call, "workers of the world unite" was also appealing. But he had no synthesis to offer despite his faith in the Hegelian equation of analysis. Lenin and his disciples eliminated the bourgeoisie from Russia but forgot to replace the management provided by the entrepreneurs. Probably because Marx had presumed that the capitalist contributed nothing except money. The communist trade unions, especially in the late sixties, successfully frightened the entrepreneurs in West Bengal. When the Left Front realised this folly it was too late to do much except to cajole multinationals who made pleasant sounds but, alas, did not come to invest.INAV |
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By O.P. Tripathi An extremely astounding statement of L K Advani that the 'people of India want governance that is largely ideologically neutral' deserves to be analysed in the light of fifty three years' experience of democratic governance of post-independent India. The claim made by Advani that 'de-ideologised' governance of India can deliver the goods and take the country forward in the context of new challenges of the Twenty-First century may be examined in the light of the larger issue of the role of ideologies in the making or unmaking of human societies. Incidentally, Mr L K Advani, himself is a product of a very rigid and puritanical school of ideology represented by the RSS. Mr Advani, Mr Vajpayee or others like them are at the centre-stage of politics because they are champions of the ideology of Hindutva and if they abandon the essence of Hindutva, they will disappear. This fact is testified by Advani and UP and Gujarat BJP Chief Ministers keep identifying themselves in public with the RSS. Every social-philosophical ideological framework is based on a value structure and a human beings define their social existential goals and values of life. Ideological value framework plays an important role, along with concrete experiences of social existence in detaining the level of social consciousness, and since social experiences of human beings differ from one another, they construct different world views and ideologies and this leads to ideological contests among different social groups. Hence we as humans are following different ideological paths to shape our society and multiple social groups are involved in the struggle to capture state power for the promotion of their cherished ideological goals for the building of social life. The BJP-led coalition government at the centre cannot be an exception to the rule that the Sangh Parivar has been involved in a serious struggle to capture power for the implementation of ideological goals cherished by the forces of Hindutva. Not only this, the Sangh Parivar and its political outfit, the BJP, has contested against many prevailing ideologies and world views and in this contest, it has not only offered a social critique of the ideologies pursued by other social groups, it has propounded its own specific ideology of Hindu Rashtra and Bhartiyata. If this is not the case, then Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani and others would not repeatedly claim that their "own" agenda of the abolition of Article 370 of the Constitution, or the formulation of the Uniform Civil Code or the construction of he Ramjanmabhoomi at Ayodhya cannot be implemented at present because the BJP has not secured a clear political mandate from the voters. A clear implication is that some issues can wait till the party gets a clear political mandate. If Mr Advani believes that de-ideologised government is the real preference of the Indian voter, the BJP-led state government of Gujarat, UP and Himachal Pradesh will have to be evaluated on this yardstick. Since these three state governments came to power on the basis of the electoral support extended by a large section of Hindus, the minorities in these states feel insecure because the state governments are the custodians of the interests of the Hindus. The governments led by the BJP have given enough evidence that they are promoting the ideology of Hindutva on the basis of governmental power. The economic policies pursued by the NDA government during its one year in office exposes its claim to ideologically neutral governance. The decade of 1990s has witnessed serious ideological competition and contest on the issues of caste-versus-class based politics, religion-versus-religion based politics, and self-reliance-versus-internationally dictated neo-classical economic policies of globalisation, privatisation and dismemberment of the public sector. The BJP-led government is pursuing an ideological oriented economic policy by accepting that the market-led and not the state-led path of economic development is suitable for resolving the problems of poverty and massive unemployment. It is an ideologically loaded fetish that "market" and not "state" can bring economic development for a country and that the large majority of the poor will be the beneficiaries of the market generated economic forces. The American economist Friedmann's prescriptions, or Reaganonomics of the US or Thatcherism of England or IMF-World Bank prescriptions for economic growth are based on the ideology of market. The BJP-led coalition government is encouraging private global and domestic capital play an active role in the economic growth of India. Is this economic policy of the Vajpayee government ideologically neutral? A powerful social constituency is supporting the BJP because it is pursuing the ideology of market-led economic growth. The foreign policy pursued by the NDA government has shown clear pro-US tilt and a bias in favour of western capitalist countries. This is because it is operating on the basis of an ideology of capitalist development of India in close alliance with developed capitalist countries of the West. The Vajpayee government has activised powerful associations of Indian capitalist classes like the FICCI, the ASSOCHAM, IIC and captains of industry to actively participate in the policy making and economic decision-making processes of government within the country, and also to establish institutional linkages with global capitalism. The Vajpayee government has not shown any ambiguity or doubts on the path of market-led capitalist development of India on the basis of close collaboration and association with global capitalism. The Vajpayee government is a facilitator and catalyser for the growth of market forces in the country, and its result is that the upwardly-seeking rent-seeking middle class, the surplus generating peasantry and every strata of the capitalist classes including the predatory capitalist groups are thriving under the ideological umbrella of the government. The Vajpayee government has assisted in the creation of an ideological nexus among the political and bureaucratic classes along with the other strata of society who are beneficiaries of economic policies and the whole governmental effort is focussed on the social needs and social welfare of 250 million Indians only. The poor of India have been socially ejected by the market-friendly policies of the Vajpayee government. The most important example of the ideological coherence of the Vajpayee government is provided by the social and ideological integration of the well-off Indians with western capitalist countries which is a logical result of government policies based on pro-domestic capitalism and their allies in the capitalist West. This integration is the result of the market-friendly ideology pursued by the Vajpayee government. An important ideological plank of the Vajpayee government has been based on the concept of "one country, one culture". Such ideological pursuits have brought into sharp focus the question of: what is India? What is the definition of India? Is it Brahmanical Hindu India? The BJP leadership pays lip service to the concept of "unity in diversity" of India. The Sangh Parivar demands that the Muslims should "Indianise" themselves". It has targeted the Christian community and is playing with fire in the north-east. The Parivar and the BJP have characterised the policy of the Congress as pseudo-secular. This is the essential ideological mindset of the Sangh Parivar.The BJP government is pursuing a clear-cut cultural-ideological agenda of Hindutva and this has alienated the minority communities in the country. Mr Advani's formulation of ideologically neutral government is flawed because he and the BJP are involved in deep ideological struggles and the goal of every ideological group in a democracy is to capture state power for the implementation of its ideology. During one year of the Vajpayee-led government, India has wittnessed ideologically committed government in every field of public life and every public discourse has been ideologically formulated whether in Parliament or outside the corridors of power. INAV Tales of Travesty By Dr. Jitendra Singh Close on the heels of acceptance of the demand for Statehood for Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand, there is resurgence of the demand for a separate Jammu State. The point that cannot be missed is that the entire sequence of events indicates a failure on the part of the Indian democratic system to offer equitable gratification to the people hailing from different regions within the same State. The popular discontent in Jammu which has resulted in some sections of population demanding a separate Jammu State bears similarly to, for example, the Jharkhand issue in that the people of this region also feel that they have been grossly discriminated against over the last five decades. And, while the fury of the people of Jharkhand was directed against the rashly indiscreet attitude of the Government of Bihar, the people of Jammu seem agitated by what they describe as step motherly treatment meted out to them both by the State Government as well as the Central Government because of an appeasement policy towards the Kashmir region. This is precisely the kind of feeling that eventually provokes assertion of regionalism against nationalism. Remember, way back in early 1940s, Winston Churchill had bitterly opposed the proposal to grant independence to India and had delivered a statement in the House of Commons which said, "To give the reigns of Government to the Indian National Congress is to hand over the destiny of hungry millions into the hands of rascals, rogues and free booters. India will be in political squabbles". Today, in hindsight, Churchill's words sound almost prophetic. The Indian politicians, whom Churchill described as "rogues and rascals," have richly lived upto this reputation. In the present context too, India today owes much of its strife and separatism to the doings and misdoings of its politicians who have from time to time played no mean role in raking up contentious issues for immediate or adhoc dividends. The common masses may bear with their deprivation as long as they are confident that they do not suffer from injustice. But, injustice prolonged over a period of time becomes a rallying point that brings the aggrieved together. This does not necessarily mean that carving out a new State is in itself a lasting solution. The basic problem is that decisions in this regard are invariably taken with an eye on the ensuing political returns. If only such decisions were based on broader considerations of ethnic, linguistic, historic and geographical realities, the results could be more enduring and gratifying too. It is no small coincidence that in the State of Jammu and Kashmir, none of the three comprising regions is contented with the present dispensation. While Jammu has launched a movement for a separate State, the Valley of Kashmir refuses to accept a Government elected by dismal polling percentage and meanwhile the Ladakh region has already staked its claim for a Union Territory status. Be that as it may, the ultimate truth is that for the common man what matters is that he be ensured a free, fair, dignified, peaceful, viable and just existence. That whether Umapathy is a subject of Jammu and Kashmir State or a subject of the proposed Jammu State is only secondary to this basic reality. States, big or small, too many or too few, can do little to improve the lot of the people as long as justice and equality continue to be a casualty at the altar of political opportunism, as long as the virtue of conscientious administration continues to be a victim of bureaucratic arrogance, as long as the System follows the bard's pervert dictum "--- Kah Do Ke Mohabbat Raks Kare Duniya Ke Siyaasat-Khaane Mein". |
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