Loose mouthed ministers

The UPA government has been running into rough weather due to incoherent opinion airing ministers and members. In the name of free speech, the UPA representatives have been foul mouthing about their own establishment. Of course, free speech is the hallmark of the Indian democracy. But most of the responsible people misuse their freedom and damage the government and the nation. In the cabinet system, members are entitled to differ, oppose and object to the policies and programmes proposed. Once the discussions are over and the proposal gets the cabinet nod then there is no question of difference of opinion coming from the cabinet members. This is like sleeping while on duty and shouting after the job is over. Immediately this kind of duty sleeping people should be kicked out of the government.

Antara Dev Sen writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 28 May 2011

The damage control has begun. Three days after the minister of state for environment and Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) alumnus, Mr Jairam Ramesh, said that IITs and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) were not world-class institutions because their faculty and quality of research were not good enough, the government has protested. Yes, the IITs are world class, says Mr Kapil Sibal, Union minister for human resources development. Well, er, at least 25 per cent of the faculty is, anyway, since they are IIT alumni and Mr Ramesh says that the students are world class. And if their research work was not top international quality, it is because of the “ecosystem” — where the US spends $250 billion on research, India spends merely $8 billion.

So while Mr Sibal declares that IITs are world class, his logic implies the reverse. Sure, we understand the constraints of the “ecosystem”. Though we may not accept that a quarter of their faculty is world class because they were once world-class students (which has no direct bearing on their quality as teachers). But what could the government do when the image of their top educational brand is trashed? The nation is paying an education cess, remember?

This muddled, half-hearted, sarkari response characterises the attitude of the government in education. There are two issues here: the quality of our centres of excellence and the quality of education in India. First, the obvious. Are the IITs, apparently the crowning glory of our education system, world class? Depends. These are certainly excellent institutes. As Mr Ramesh said, they have some of our best students. And contrary to what he said, they do produce some remarkable research. But if the faculty is not “world class” it is because no one can fly high if tied to the apron strings of a stern yet callous government. Unless IITs — and other government-funded institutions — have the freedom to hire and fire teachers at their discretion and at better salaries, and the liberty to operate as they see fit, the best minds will escape to greener, freer pastures. Institutions may need regulation, but not crushing control. Also, the government has launched new IITs without hiring faculty, further pressuring existing IIT teachers.

Besides, no government-linked institution in today’s India is truly world class, is it? Except for our institutionalised corruption, of course. According to Transparency International, India has an integrity score of 3.3, which makes it one of the most corrupt nations of the world. Happiness!
A close second would be our institutionalised callousness. Take our home ministry dealing with top terror suspects from Pakistan — not exactly a low priority field. The error attacks in our attempts at cornering Pakistan with hard evidence are almost as terrifying as the terror attacks themselves. First we sent the wrong DNA sample, claiming it to be Ajmal Kasab’s. “A minor clerical error”, shrugged home minister P. Chidambaram. Then it transpired that two men on India’s list of most wanted terrorists allegedly hiding in Pakistan were in India — one in jail and the other out on bail. “An oversight”, said the minister. “A genuine human error.” Meanwhile, our investigative institution of excellence, the Central Bureau of Investigation, had reached Copenhagen to extradite Kim Davy, prime accused in the Purulia arms drop, with an expired warrant. Naturally, the Danish court refused. Yes, we are world toppers in institutional callousness.

Anyway, returning to the IIT issue, it’s possible that the students make these institutes centres of excellence. Among 1.21 billion citizens, millions may be born with world-class intellect — then put into a system that meticulously constrains, limits, erodes and smothers talent and imagination. Naturally IIT students are brilliant — that’s why they are selected. And they have had less exposure to the harsh Indian social, political and cultural environment. The poor teachers have been dented, blunted, clipped and chipped by the system.

This smothering of natural capabilities begins even before birth. We are killing more daughters than ever before through foeticide and infanticide. At 914 girls for 1,000 boys, this year’s census shows the worst child sex ratio ever. And criminal neglect of women also affects babies allowed to live. The mother’s health determines the health and development of the unborn child — and our pregnant and new mothers are so neglected that our future generations are born less healthy and already disadvantaged for learning. Poorer Indians grow up with less nutrition and fewer options for education, sometimes with no access to education at all. Worst off are girls and the lower castes, who face the double whammy of poverty and social discrimination.

Successive governments have addressed these problems, though the education budget has rarely crossed three per cent of the gross domestic product. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan helped. The new Right to Education Act promising free and compulsory education to all children between six and 14 years offers huge hope. Integrated Child Development Schemes (ICDS) and Mid-Day Meal (MDM) Schemes certainly help in giving nutritional support and incentives for educating the future generations. And starting hundreds of new schools may indeed offer new opportunities. But these are not enough.

We need to look not only at quantity, but also the quality of school education. More than a quarter of schools do not have proper buildings or drinking water. Half do not have girls’ toilets. Most do not have proper teachers. Teacher absenteeism rages. Allotments for ICDS and MDM schemes are inadequate and do not always reach students. And endemic class, caste and gender discriminations spawn systematic deprivation of large sections of society, institutionalising disparity in educational achievements.

Sadly, our attitude towards excellence is to neglect schools for the masses and focus on elite institutions of higher education. Sure, we need centres of excellence, but we can’t be proud of tiny islands of well-funded distinction in a sea of hopeless, life-sapping neglect and illiteracy. If we really want to debate our educational excellence, we should stop this elitist navel gazing. And focus on good primary and secondary education for all. That social vision could change our collective future. And make us truly world class.

Wikidanger Assange

With switches under its control every Government tries to make right things wrong and vice versa. Easily it whitewashes its crimes. Conventional tools and people were not able to break this monopoly of the Governments. But Wikileaks is an unconventional tool. Information and dirty secrets of the Governments may be brought out. The final impact becomes disastrous for every one including its founder Julian Assange. Too much of leak is dangerous for the very survival of the global society.

Shiv Vishwanathan writes in The Deccan Chronicle on 17th December 2010

Wikileaks has become a modern fable. Its founder Julius Assange faces charges of rape and years of harassment. Mr Assange is seen as that loathsome creature, the hacker. The hacker threatens the security systems of foreign policy. But more than security Mr Assange, the hacker has exposed the hypocrisy of governments.

The leaks have exposed the arrogance of US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her sense of pomposity of India as a self-appointed member of the United Nations Security Council. Wikileaks has provided an everyday X-ray of how the American ambassador reads the weakness of India as a soft state, too invertebrate to take on Pakistan. The disclosures reveal the contempt of the ordinary foreign service bureaucrats for politicians and political processes.

The general reactions everywhere have been a sense of outrage first at the temerity of the act of disclosure and secondly at what the disclosures reveal. It reveals the hypocrisy of bureaucrats and politicians and it also exposes the fragility of the power to information.
The leaks almost seem to suggest that power exposed is power weakened. The sanctity of secrecy creates a halo around power which it does not deserve.
The leaks also expose the ambivalent figure of the hacker. The hacker is half outlaw, half dissenter. He is like the Levellers and the Dissenters were in Oliver Cromwell’s time. He embodies a different idea of power and responsibility.
The hacker as dissenter is a moral figure. He is an early warning system of the pathologies of power. The hacker is a liminal, ambivalent figure, anarchic enough to threaten power, an outlaw challenging the sanctity of rules and redefining them.
What I want to argue is that the hacker must be seen as homeostatic to the system. Every information system needs a hacker. It threatens power but guarantees the limits of power by creating an epidemic of accountability. To control the hacker beyond the norms of democracy is futile.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has argued that phone tapping is essential because security demands and terror legitimises it. My counter argument is that if phone tapping is necessary for security, hacking is necessary for freedom.
One admits the problem resides in the sense of proportion. If an excess of phone tapping creates the paranoid world of surveillance, an excess of hacking can destabilise norms.
The hacker is seen as a bohemian. In fact, someone like Mr Assange is seen as bohemian in his sexuality and in his attitude to information. The hacker personalises excess. Given his liminality, the hacker must be allowed his way of life. This holds as long as the hacker is a dissenter. In that sense Mr Assange is a prisoner of conscience and must be adopted by Amnesty International as one. It is illiterate to compare him to a Cyber bin Laden. Mr Assange is a dissenter not a fundamentalist. He wants to save lives not to eliminate people. It only frightens power. Hacking is a part of the power of the powerless.
The responsibility does not end with the hacker. The information the hacker revels is an invitation to citizenship. Hacking cannot end as a scandal. The scandal is a ritual that initiates deeper understanding of power. Where hacking stops, the citizen takes over — asking for accountability and transparency from power. The journalist as investigator, the dissenter as researcher finds a new sibling in the hacker as a subventor of power. The tuning fork for judgment is motive and the consequences of the hacking act. The hacker is an essential purgative to the system.
mr Assange in a historical sense stands on par with Daniel Goldberg of the Pentagon tapes or the journalists Woodward and Bernstien who exposed Watergate and ended the strange career of Richard Nixon.
The hacker is a special kind of whistleblower. Whistleblowing is usually an individual act of courage, an exemplary act of dissent. Hacking is more communitarian. It is a network of dissent which operates on power.
I want to emphasise that I am not creating a hagiography of the hacker. I think his ambivalence is what provides a sense of limits of power. The hacker carries both the marks of a trickster and a martyr, and we need to recognise his mixed, mixed-up nature.
The hacker in homoeopathic doses is necessary to prevent the arrogance of power. He is an antidote but should not become purgative. In excess he is an epidemic, in aesthetic limits he is a democratic necessity. Think of it, the right to information will be a feeble promise without the culture of hacking. If the right to information creates access to information, hacking breaks the secrecy that prevents information from going public.
One might ask what the difference between wire-tapping and hacking is. Wire-tapping as an instrument is used by the structure of surveillance. Wire-tapping invades privacy.
There is a final point one must emphasise in this ode to hacking. Hacking emerged like IT, out of the beat cultures that made Silicon Valley. Hacking was a dissenting cult which understood the spirit of the network and kept it alive. Hackers are not luddites. They are experts in technological folklore. As tricksters they understand that technology cannot be a servant of power. This much the Wikileaks proved and for this much Mr Assange must be seen as a force of freedom, a dissenter, a whistleblower, whose “noise” is always the unwelcome music that power cannot tolerate.

Cleasing Azharuddin's Crime

Crime committed in society is short lived in the memory of people. Taking advantage of this situation, politicos play their game endlessly. A party which promises to provide life and hope to all Indians is violating its code of ethics. Mohammad Azharuddin the tainted cricketer who once redeemed the lost status of India in the international cricket and then sold the status of the nation for few million dollars has been patronized by India's first political party. After TDP refused his entry, Congress embraced him with open arms. To his luck, Moradabad people validated his candidature and gave him the victory with 48,000 words margin. Today the party is seriously considering him to be the Muslim mascot to be paraded in the U.P assembly election in 2012. If Congress is good in popping up criminals and saying its nature as political diplomacy to win the electoral war why it is not using the same to win the terrorist battles and international games.

As the electoral victory level of Congress looks better it must abandon these kinds of criminal patronizing games. The same card has been played in Maharashtra where the goons of Shiv Sena and MNS are allowed to clash and keep the Congress in power. Is this is the contribution of the Congress party for the development of the nation? It is destroying the political culture and forward movement of the nation.

The Times of India writes on 22 November 2009

Mohammad Azharuddin may be cleansed of the match-fixing taint for good, with BCCI willing to reconsider the lifetime ban on the former India skipper, in a development which can potentially add to the lustre of Congress' new Muslim mascot. ( Watch Video )

The fresh bid to extricate the Moradabad MP from disgrace comes from a Congress eager to pitchfork the ex-cricketer as a key campaigner, having launched him politically with a massive win from the minority-dominated Moradabad constituency in Uttar Pradesh. The move is being facilitated by the dual roles of UPA members as politicians and cricket managers.

Hectic lobbying in this direction took a Congress delegation led by AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh - that included Congress MP and BCCI vice-president Rajiv Shukla - to NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Friday. Pawar, who is ICC vice-chairman, directed the delegation to BCCI chief and close associate Shashank Manohar who has succeeded Pawar in BCCI. Rajiv Shukla told TOI, "I spoke to the BCCI president. He said if Azhar files a petition, it would be taken up in the next AGM."

There is an all-round eagerness to bail out Azhar, be it the player himself or his political home or even the present cricketing setup. It was under Pawar's helmsmanship that the hallowed doors of the cricketing world were opened for him in 2006 after they were slammed in 2000, with the Punjab Cricket Association inviting him to witness the Champions Trophy semifinals in Mohali.

Congress's eagerness to lift the lifetime ban on Azhar stems from its strategy to unveil him as the new Muslim mascot. Its revival plans in UP require glamorous minority faces to take on "secular rivals" SP and BSP even though the party's own secular credentials and the leadership of the Gandhi family scion seems persuasive enough to woo the community.

The recent party win in Firozabad bypolls where it trounced Mulayam Singh Yadav's daughter-in-law has been attributed to largescale shift in Muslim votes from SP. Alive to the threat posed by shifting minorities and a resurgent Congress, SP was quick to act, snapping its relationship with once Hindutva mascot Kalyan Singh and raising the pitch on minority agenda.

For Congress, planning to use the favourable mood to rejuvenate itself in the fallen fort of UP, SP's vulnerability has heightened expectations. The unveiling of the onetime cricketing idol in identity politics seems an intoxicating prospect for strategists. It's not a coincidence that rival SP too brought in this week its Maharashtra legislator Abu Azmi as the new minority face to cash in on his "defiance" of Sena outfits. Azmi fills the void left by Azam Khan's expulsion following his high-voltage rebellion.

Congressmen feel the Hyderabadi's election victory in far-removed Moradabad has proved his appeal among the community.

While the ban is seen as academic in nature given that Azhar is past the age to make a comeback, it would still come in handy in buffering him from a future assault on the issue of "integrity". On the poll trail, the opposition targeted him for match-fixing, citing his excommunication from cricket, to question Congress's commitment to probity. The question of ban keeps popping up every time Azhar is mentioned in social circles. It is hoped that he would be free from embarrassing queries once BCCI overturns its order.

Digvijay Singh said, "We want the lifetime ban to go from the man who brought laurels to the country with his skills. There were many players in the match-fixing case but they are all free of the ban. Why should the one on Azhar continue?"

Royal Titles and Future of Congress

Most of the times policies and directives are mere eyewash. The recent announcement of AICC to drop royal titles may be go in the same direction. Despite fifty years of privy purse ban still people carry their royal aura. In fact this aura only clicked Congress many extra seats. Without this royal connections many may not have got elected. From Rajkumari Ratna Singh to Kunwar Jitin Prasada all carry their royal feeling with them. If this is to be implemented genuinely and all the congress leaders respect their cadre then there is a future for the party.

Times of India reports (17 June 2009)


`Kunwar', `Raja', `Rani', `Begum', `Srimant' will soon stand deleted from the AICC's listings and records some 40 years after Indira
Gandhi did away with privy purses in what was then meant to signal the arrival of a post-colonial egalitarian age.

While the titles of maharajas and ranis were abolished, habits did not die out and rather showed a capacity to not only survive but flourish in the Congress's own lexicon. Not only did the royal references linger in conversations but the royal and feudal honorifics remained prefixed to names of leaders in party records.

Now the order seems to have finally changed as the party has also advised members not use royal and feudal flourishes in personal lives. The advice would strike at the root of what often sounds as boastful and pompous appellations among bluebloods, while rudely jolting an older crop now famous by their titles.

If names of feudals and bluebloods are shorn of prefixes which mark them from ordinary men and women in official records, it may be a big step towards the deglamorization of royals while also striking at their world view of a social hierarchy that sets them apart from the hoi-polloi.

When contacted, AICC general secretary Janardan Dwivedi confirmed the decision to get rid of royal epithets. If it is somewhat surprising that Congress has only now woken up to the elitism, it remains a fact that royals have political utility in some parts of the country largely by dint of their lineage.

This might explain how nomenclatures survived even though royalty and privy purses were disbanded as part of the `garibi hatao' campaign decades ago. A senior leader argued the decision was not new but its reiteration was aimed to ensure implementation which has been lax.

Sources said the Congress decision, taken at the highest level, may be to cast itself differently from BJP. The view gains ground after the Rajasthan regime recently issued an advisory that people should not use such titles, after `maharani' being used for former CM Vasundhara Raje.

But in the hullabaloo over the decision, the `royals' were left wondering what the fuss was all about. Begum Noor Bano, former MP from Rampur, was nonchalant. "The honorifics were struck off long ago with privy purses. So, there is no question of a title existing," she argued. About her name, she said `Begum' implies a married woman and not royalty. "I am called Noor," she said.

The name of Jitin Prasada has Kunwar prefixed to it. But the reason for it is that electoral rolls in Shahjahanpur so list his name, possibly an insertion by an employee managing the family work. An aide said Prasada was not one to be fascinated by titles.

Royalty and Congress have gone hand in hand, notwithstanding sore points like privy purses. If there was Kunwar Natwar Singh of Bharatpur, there was Raja Dinesh Singh of Pratapgarh, Karan Singh of the Kashmir kingdom, Scindias of Gwalior. All under Congress umbrella.

Some felt it could complement Congress's embrace of `aam aadmi' mascot. After all, the abolition of privy purses was accompanied by nationalisation of banks and followed by `garibi hatao' slogan.


Despite fifty years of governance still congress shouts garibi hatao. Its high time poverty is removed and the slogan is dumped forever.