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EDITORIAL Government's attitude towards employees demands and the consequent strike reflects unconcern for the citizens who are the major victims of any strike. At stake is not only the condition of the employees due to non-fulfilment of legitimate demands but......more Once again Congress and some other opposition parties have indulged in wasteful pursuits by raking up highly emotive issues bringing the proceedings in Lok Sabha to grinding halt. Congress in particular should behave......more |
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Honey on the
blade of knife By Kedar Nath Pandey Islamic
radicalism on By Igor
Rotar Airbus dominates By D K
Arora |
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EDITORIAL Government's attitude towards employees demands and the consequent strike reflects unconcern for the citizens who are the major victims of any strike. At stake is not only the condition of the employees due to non-fulfilment of legitimate demands but also the hapless people who are made to suffer many humiliations, indignities and deprivations. The strike has paralysed work in all the offices, including essential services. The sick humanity's plight is miserable with even medicare having gone helter-skelter. In many areas transformers are burnt and there are other defects which have not been attended to. So, unfortunate residents of such areas are made to spend third consecutive day in darkness. This is totally unacceptable in democratic regime given massive mandate by the people to take care of their interests. Same is true of other departments. The only consolation is that so far strike is peaceful. The credit for maintaining peace naturally goes to the employees who have shown tremendous restraint in the face of consistent and regular provocations from the administration. The apathy of the Government needs no further proof in that there is no initiative from the Government side to defuse the situation which might take an ugly turn if the strike is prolonged. On the face of it all demands of the employees are not only genuine but government is committed to honour the same. It has been the consistent wont of popular Government to wriggle out of its pledges and written commitments and negotiations entered into with the employees unions. This time round, administration takes the plea of virtual empty coffers. That is something. But why the coffers are empty is not employees problem. It is not their job to fill the coffers. It is the job of the Government to govern meaningfully and cut its coat according to length of the cloth. The fact remains those at the helm continue to outgrow even as they expect employees to undergrow. That is simply ridiculous. There is no denying the fact that there has been bad financial management with least accountability. Even now there is nothing to suggest any financial discipline. Large amounts continue to be spent by ministers on renovation of their residential premises. There is nothing on record to suggest implementation of austerity measures already announced. Blaming 5th Pay Commission for the woes of the State is quite off-course. If this is true then Central Government should also have become bankrupt. Same would have been the case of all State Governments. It is to be noted that only those States which have not managed the financial regime properly are in the red. In any case no State Government has denied its employees dearness allowance installments irrespective of whether they are in the red or gone totally bankrupt. The worst part of the entire scenario is the confrontationist attitude adopted by the Government. Even assuming Government has real difficulties, it should talk to the employees in the language of responsible administration. It can meet them half way and see how best some demands can be accepted immediately while some can wait. This has unfortunately not happened. The Government stand reflects rigidity and stubbornness. This must swap places with wisdom and sanity. At stake is not only the lives and careers of employees but also stomachs of their wards, families, kith and kins and other obligations. Much more than that these are the citizens that become proxy victims of this proxy war going. The administration continues to parrot that to plus two is five while employees believe in correct arithmetic and insist that two plus two is four. It is so simple. Administration must give up adamant and intransigent attitude and talk with flexibility across the table. This strife torn State can ill afford to open another front. The people have already been the victims of Government ham-handedness exposing them to long power curtailments and other indignities. At least it should be business like with the employees. With all ministers kept on tenterhooks coupled with employees strike and people let down badly, it is high time that Government starts functioning meaningfully keeping in view everyones interests. It should also immediately cease issuing provocative statements like reduction in employees strength by half and caring three hoots for the 5th Pay Commission recommendations duly accepted by the Government but implemented shabbily. Chief Minister Dr Farooq Abdullah must appreciate the gravity of the situation and ought to move in the matter to apply the balm before his departure for Umra. A non-functional Government is no Government. It can become functional only with whole-hearted and willing cooperation of the employees and goodwill of the people besides team spirit in the cabinet. It is ironical that all the three have been given shocks and short shrift. Once again Congress and some other opposition parties have indulged in wasteful pursuits by raking up highly emotive issues bringing the proceedings in Lok Sabha to grinding halt. Congress in particular should behave like responsible opposition on issues that are already settled or sub-judice or which owe their origin while they were in power. There is no doubt that December 6 events in Ayodhya have been shameful. None other than Prime Minister Vajpayee had expressed these feelings in December 1992 when he was on opposition benches in Parliament. Congress must bear in mind that it cannot escape the responsibility of that gory episode. It was the Congress Government at the Centre which was in power. There were enough of Central security forces present at the impact point but not used to prevent the tragic event obviously on orders from the Centre. It would have been in the fitness of things for Narasimha Rao to resign. One can go back to 1949 when gates of the worship place were thrown open at Ayodhya by Congress Government. Again, it was Rajiv Gandhi as the then Prime Minister who performed Shilyanas. These actions amply prove that Congress is not immune from blame and they cannot escape the charge of connivance. It is precisely because of this that Muslim voters distanced themselves from Congress Party in all subsequent elections. More than anybody else they know who is to blame. The Congress penchant for raking up this issue once again in Lok Sabha and seeking resignation of three Central ministers namely Advani, Joshi and Uma Bharati smacks of politicking. It is the prerogative of the Prime Minister to constitute his cabinet or remove anyone. In true democratic spirit both Advani and Joshi offered to resign but Prime Minister has rightly turned it down. His explanation is very clear. The matter is sub-judice and until Court convicts them they are not guilty. Further, entire Ayodhya issue is before the Apex Court. Let the law take its own course. Raking up the same issue over and over again year after year by Congress is an attempt to exploit the emotions of the minorities. This is quite destructive approach which could disturb communal harmony. Congress must give up its negative attitude for short term gains. |
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By Kedar Nath Pandey So long one thought that Congress leaders merely felt that members of the Nehru-Gandhi and Maino-Gandhi dynasties were above the rules and organisational principles applicable to others in the party. Their demand that Rajiv Gandhi's name should be deleted from the chargesheet in the Bofors case reveals that they hold dynasty members to be above the laws of the land as well. For the ground, that he is dead and, therefore, not in a position to defend himself, also applied to Beant Singh, an accused in the Indira Gandhi assassination case, and Dhanu, the principal accused in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case. Dhanu, the human bomb in the Rajiv Gandhi case, was killed at the moment of the crime; Beant Singh was shot shortly after Indira Gandhi's assassination. Yet, their names featured in column two of the respective chargesheets and not a squeak of protest was heard from Congress leaders who are now working themselves up to paroxysms of righteous indignation. The courts will clear his name if there is no evidence against him. Hence the more Ms. Sonia Gandhi and others in her party protest, the more the impression gains ground that they either have no confidence in the country's judicial system or know that Rajiv Gandhi is guilty and his defence will not stand judicial scrutiny. The embarrassment the Congress may suffer on account of the Bofors case, will be due to its bondage to the dynasty which makes defence of its members obligatory irrespective of circumstances. Those who fail to learn from their mistakes, continue to make and pay for them. The message is simple: The Congress has a bleak future unless it is able to liberate itself from the dynasty's grip. Ms. Sonia Gandhi who represents the dynasty may have become an Indian, soul and heart, body and spirit. But she would do well not to forget, if she has learnt them in the first place, all those great lessons the ancient Caesars _ her natives _ and others taught their subjects through their own costly experience. And one of the lessons is that he in position who builds a wall of self-seeking courtiers around him shall perish for want of sane advice and sage vision. In our own devalued times when honourable men have long become an extinct species, particularly in politics, and more particularly in Congress politics, Mrs. Gandhi may have been spared of worrying about the large souls languishing in small places; but as the head of a party where the crowd is more demonstrative of its loyalty at the royal windows than at the polling booths she has an urgent job on hand _ banish the mean souls lurking in large places. In everyday parlance this should mean that Mrs. Gandhi should jettison the fawning men around her and, instead, pay attention to the popular verdict handed down to her party in the latest elections. Who are the fawning men and what is the essence of the popular verdict? The fawning men are known to the world as coterie, and they are known as such even before a brilliant guy called Sitaram Kesri decided to blow the whistle on them. Kesri, like all politicians of his ilk, is only demonstrating an incurable habit of spitting in the air while lying on his back. The result is predictable. He collects his own scum all over him. That is what happened when he made the grandiloquent declaration that it was the coterie that was responsible for the dismal performance of the Congress party in the latest elections. Kesri, fortunately, has become too insignificant for anyone to ask him how he would explain all the other poor performances the Congress had to show thus far, including the ones he participated, both as the marionette president of the party and as an exalted member of the coterie. So forget about that. To get back to the coterie; they are the men who survived in politics not by the will of the people but by the will of their own cockroach-like survival instincts, not by the popular base they ought to have commanded, but by the base qualities they demonstrated while serving the family as its stable keepers. Their interests always lied in propping up the family even in the name of somebody who joins it through matrimony and not through blood. Because the family is their creed and constituency. Thus it was that when Sonia Gandhi expressed reluctance to follow her late husband's footsteps to politics, the ones who pressed the panic button were not the average Congressmen and not even the bulk of the Congress leadership but these cockroach-men who realised that without the Gandhi totem, their survival is doomed. It was this collective survival instinct that forced them to shove Mrs. Gandhi into the whirlpool of Indian politics. This is not to belittle the political ambitions Mrs. Gandhi might have been heir to as the surviving adult of the Gandhi family. But it was obvious that from the day she became a four anna member of the party to the day she took over the party leadership in Parliament, she was being conducted on an inexorable downward spiral by a bunch of Medician monks whose only chance of survival is by using Mrs. Gandhi as a political cut out. The reference to Medician monks is not accidental and, if explained, would reveal some starting similarities between the Nehru-Gandhi family and the House of Medicis of middle age Rome, to be precise middle age Florence. A group of Catholic monks, said to be close to the Medici family and thus having developed a vested interest in perpetrating the family rule, is believed to have played the catalyst's role in first sustaining the family and later in destroying it. Now the comparison. The house of Medicis was an Italian bourgeois family, very much like the Nehru clan, that ruled Florence and later Tuscany for nearly 300-years. They enjoyed the status of the ruling family most of the period from 1434 1737 except for two brief intervals _ again almost like the Nehru-Gandhis. The family provided the Roman Catholic Church with four Popes and Sonia Gandhi's political prospects allowing, the comparison would fall right on dot _ four prime ministers to the nation. The Medicis, who, very much like the Gandhis, had an extraordinary propensity for hereditary traits also thrived on the plebian image of being the friends of the poor, just the way the Gandhis cultivated their socialist stripes. But there is another, more relevant, more ominous similarity between the two houses. The house of Medici was destroyed by a lethal brew made of unbridled political ambition, duplicity and an ever thriving crony culture. The house of Nehru-Gandhi, no matter how hard the 10-Janpath monks may try to deny it, is gradually being atrophied by the same disorder caused by the same brew as were the Medicis. It is for Mrs. Gandhi to revise her lessons of Roman history and save her family, that is by not doing anything that the Medicis did. Don't encourage the cronies, but more importantly, don't have unbridled political ambitions. A seat in Parliament is not unbridled ambition: but to covet the Prime Minister of India's chair certainly is. This is where the message of the latest people's verdict comes in. Far above the quibblings of the Congress managers about the party's increased vote percentage as against the decreased seats, there is the basic truth: The crown of India is not waiting to be picked up by just anyone; that it belongs to the truly deserving one and certainly Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is not that one. If anyone tries to tell her otherwise, he is, as a Tibetan saying goes, offering honey on the blade of a knife. And, unfortunately for Mrs. Gandhi, there are too many cronies offering too much honey on too many knives. It is nearly impossible to taste the honey without cutting one's tongue? INAV |
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Airbus dominates millennium scenario By D K Arora The A300-600ST "Beluga" Super Transporter is a derivative of one of the first Airbus aircraft, the A300-600R. It is nicknamed for its resemblance to the bulbous white whale, Beluga. The largest cargo aircraft in the world in terms of volume, the 341,713 lb-max-takeoff-weight, Beluga has found its niche primarily among customers that need cargo space more than load-carrying capacity. At the recent Dubai 2000, the last major international aerospace exhibition of the 20th century, besides the "Beluga" Britain's Red Arrows, E Petrouille de France, Mirage 2000 and Sukhoi S-29. The show, the sixth in the biennial series, featured over 500 exhibitors from 37 nations and 13 national/industrial pavilions. The Dubai air show is ranked third in the world alongside Singapore. The Emirates airlines used the air show as a launch pad for its new corporate livery. Commercial brokers envinced keen interest in the super transporter for its military applications. The Beluga's 49,440-cu-ft of cargo space allows the airframer to carry two transport helicopters at a time without removing their rotor heads and transmissions. Originally designed as a platform to transport airplane parts to and from Airbus Industrie's various manufacturing plants around Europe, the Beluga has since become a revenue maker for the consortium, carrying space station modules and satellites, chemical tanks, airplane parts etc. for various customers. All four of the Belugas in existence operate for Airbus Transport International (ATI), a subsidiary of Airbus Industries, created in 1996 specifically to offer the airplanes for public charter. The company expects to ready a fifth Beluga in production for rollout in early 2001. Airbus doesn't think it will draw much sales interest, primarily because of the airplane's highly specialised applications. Deals over $713 million were clinched at Dubai 2000. Both the military and commercial sectors were overshadowed in Dubai by the business jets, which as in the previous of 1997 show accounted for the bulk of orders. The show turned out to be slim pickings for the rest of the aviation industry, including commercial giants Airbus and Boeing. While the US manufacturer failed to make any addition to its order books, the European, consortium Airbus sold two A320s to a private Egyptian carrier, Midwest Airline, that are valued at US$50 million each. Asked to assess the success of the show, Mr David Velupillai, Regional Manager, Press Relations, Airbus Industrie, said, "We have signed a contract to sell two A230 aircraft to Egypt's Mid-west Airlines. But that is cold numbers. The show has gone much beyond that. It has been a great chance to meet with the chief executives of almost all the leading airline companies from the Middle East and South Asia." Airbus is again doing well in 1999, having booked firm orders for 404 aircraft in the first 10 months, or 65 per cent of all unit sales, compared with Boeing's 220. In the Arab world, Airbus Industrie won all of the new orders this year, which comprised three A318s for Egyptair and one A330-200 for Emirates. Egyptair is the first airline in the region to order the new A318, while Emirates is adding to its A330-200 fleet. Airbus delivered 236 aircraft in the first 10 months of 1999, including 21 for Arab world carriers, and is on target to deliver a total of over 290 during the year. Airbus Industrie's success is based on having the most modern airliner family, which offers attractive economic benefits to airlines and passenger pleasing cabins to travellers, plus unmatched operational commonality among its aircraft that ensures considerable savings. Airbus's A320 remains the cornerstone of the world's fastest-selling airliner family, regularly taking first place in passenger and invester polls. Likewise, the A330/A340 family leads in its class, with the most orders and customers. Mr Velupillai informed that a group of 20 major airlines, including Dubai-based Emirates, was working with Airbus Industrie to refine the design of the world's largest airliner, the A3XX, which would seat around 555 passengers when it entered service in 2005. An all-new, very large double-deck airliner, the A3XX is Airbus's response to the ever-growing pressure resulting from traffic growth and congestion, as well as from economic and environmental factors. Airbus forecasts a market of about 1,2000 passenger aircraft in the A3XX size category over the next 20 years, and expects to capture at least half of those orders. The European consortium plans to build the largest airliners to exploit a market now monopolised by the Boeing 747 (400 plus-seat) and this decision puts Airbus on a direct path of confrontation with its American rival. The Airbus decision to build a 550-passenger jet carries with it the prospect of a trade war in the aerospace sector. Airbus predicts that jumbos will account for 26 per cent of the estimated $1.2 trillion that airlines will spend on buying some 13,600 new planes over the next 20 years. With the doubling of passenger growth during the next 15 years, the need for large and long range aircraft would be much more pronounced. "These aircraft would be operated primarily on sectors which have very high traffic throughout the year. The need for large aircraft would increase and the A3XX would supplement the growing needs of the market", he said and claimed that it competing aircraft, code-named the A3XX, will be 20 per cent cheaper to operate than the 747, and will start with the benefit of modern design concepts rather than being an adaptation of an aircraft that began life in the 1960s on the basis of a military transport concept. The A3XX would be the starting point for a series of aircraft with different passenger and cargo configurations. The A3XX family will start from baseline A3XX-100, with a capacity of 555 passengers in three classes, and a range of 14,200 km. The family concept protects the ability to offer a variety of aircraft as the market evolves. Significant progress has been made on a number of technical and industrial fronts, including systems, suppliers and airline feedback, in keeping with the basic principles of the project design; reliability, lower seat-mile costs, and environmental considerations. The company was working with 20 major passenger and cargo carriers, including British Airways, Cathey Pacific, United Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Federal Express, on the project. Airbus engineers say that A3XX could be enlarged to carry up to 800 passengers while remaining within the constraints imposed by airport runways and terminal infra structures. Part of Airbus strategy has been to ensure that all its new aircraft handle similarly, use common parts, with fly-by-wire controls and identical computerised instrument displays. Such interchangeability enables airlines to hold down costs by reducing their inventories of spare parts, and by assigning pilots to different aircraft types with little or no additional training. Airbus argues that it cannot reap the full benefits of commonality until it can sell airlines an alternative for every lane that Boeing has no offer. This it can now do in every sector except the largest. Hence the importance of building-and selling - the A3XX to retain at least half of the market share, industry analysts say. Airbus needs to challenge Boeing's supremacy in jumbo jets. The 747 is indispensable to many airlines on heavily travelled routes, and is a cash cow for Boeing. The analysts say it is also a powerful marketing incentive, making it easier for Boeing to sell other aircraft in its range and to persuade airlines to operate all-Boeing fleets. - CNF |
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