Crisis in Janata Dal
HISTORY would remember the Janata Dal as a party which promised much but delivered little. If the signals from Karnataka and Bihar are reliable, the party which was meant to turn the Congress into history has now reached the last leg of its inglorious political journey from nowhere to nowhere with a brief glimpse of having arrived.

Shiv Sena-BJP poll plunge
DECKS have been cleared for simultaneous election to the Maharashtra Assembly on September 4 and 11. A notification by the Election Commission is only a formality.

Patent problems
THE West is looking at various Indian medicinal plants with great interest. This admiration is driven by an urge to get patents. After neem and turmeric, it is the turn of lowly jamun, brinjal and karela to earn patents for three scientists in the USA.

MULTIVERSITY OF 21st CENTURY
Need for a bold break from the past
by Gurbhagat Singh
TWENTIETH century is just about to close, the end-of-century or fin de ciecle thought, vibrant with several revolutions, has made the present universities obsolete. To keep up with the futuristic developments, the present university is to be radically re-shaped.

More Kargils in Terai?
by Amar Chandel
IT is tempting to dismiss Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's assertion that "Today we have calmed down the volcano of Kargil but tomorrow the volcano can erupt somewhere else as the lava is boiling". After all, India has conclusively plugged the lava, made in Pakistan and channelled across the Line of Control to Kargil, Dras and Batalik. But there is an iota of real threat in what he says.

India’s dismal showing in UNDP report
by Tavleen Singh
THE annual release of the human development report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is usually a bleak moment for India. This year’s report, released last week provides a tiny glimmer of hope. For the first time in the 10 years the report has been coming out we have been counted as being in the moderate category of human development rather than low, and although we are still among the 50 poorest countries in the world (132 out of 174) we are up six ranks since last year.

What happens to kids after hostilities?
by Amita Malik
AT the time of writing, hostilities are drawing to an end, with Pakistan still playing fast and loose. But about one thing one can be sure. The Indian print and electronic media have played a major role in bringing both the glory and the tragedy of war face to face with the nation.

Book Bond
by Rajnish Wattas
RECENTLY when I acquired an autographed copy of An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, it was an unequalled joy. I love to collect books, and if able to afford, the first hard-bound editions to come out. To have them autographed by their celebrity writers is the crowning glory!

75 Years Ago

Weekly birth and death reports
DURING the week ending on the 17th there were in all 433 deaths of male and 188 of female. Of this, 211 were due to plague, 3 due to smallpox, 7 due to measles, 17 due to phthisis, 170 due to fevers, 13 due to bowel complaints, 7 due to asthma, 13 due to pneumonia and 6 in childbirth.

Crisis in Janata Dal

HISTORY would remember the Janata Dal as a party which promised much but delivered little. If the signals from Karnataka and Bihar are reliable, the party which was meant to turn the Congress into history has now reached the last leg of its inglorious political journey from nowhere to nowhere with a brief glimpse of having arrived. The problem with the Janata Dal was not the lack of political focus. It had the misfortune of having attracted too many out-of-job political cooks to its fold. Each had his own individual recipe for fashioning the promised new order. Now that the Janata experiment has virtually come unstuck the leaders who spoke with great passion on the need for spreading the base of social justice and strengthening the forces of secularism are finding the task of doing political business with the Bharatiya Janata Party far easier than keeping the battered dream of the Third Front alive. Karnataka Chief Minister J.H. Patel's meeting with Lok Shakthi leader Ramakrishna Hegde and Samata Party leader George Fernandes in Bangalore would in the good old days, when political integrity was not dispensable, have created the impression that the diehard socialists were at work as usual for strengthening the forces of social justice. But Mr Hegde and Mr Fernandes, through 15 months of uninterrupted association and power-sharing, have apparently become more BJPist than the BJP itself. The meeting was meant to explore the possibility of seeking from Mr Patel and his supporters election-eve political backing for the National Democratic Alliance. Of course, there is very little of the Janata Dal, in the national context, which remains to be split. However, if Mr Patel decides to throw his weight behind his former socialist colleagues it would not be because he too has begun to find the talk about the need for keeping the forces of communalism at bay irrelevant and irritating but because he considers former Prime Minister and Janata Dal leader H.D. Deve Gowda more politically irritating and irrelevant.

The news from Bihar is equally disturbing for those who believe in the validity of the original political agenda of the Janata Dal. Mr Ram Vilas Paswan's personal hatred for Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav and his Rashtriya Janata Dal has created an astounding political situation in Bihar — the last of the tottering bastions of the Janata Dal. If he has not been misquoted, the former close ally of Mr Laloo Yadav too is thinking in terms of having some kind of political adjustment with the BJP-Samata Party alliance in Bihar. Evidently, in his book, fighting political corruption gets precedence over eliminating the source of engineering communal strife in the country. Of course, both Mr Patel and Mr Paswan have said that the next course of action would be decided after the crucial Political Affairs Committee (of the Janata Dal) meeting on Saturday. The topic of discussion among the champions of social justice would evidently be whether to persist with the current policy of keeping both the Congress and the BJP in the category of political untouchables. Those in favour of continuing with the policy would obviously want Mr Patel and Mr Paswan not to try and destroy whatever remains of the Janata Dal by advocating some form of political alliance with the BJP- driven National Democratic Alliance. However, political pundits with the rare ability of being able to read the writing on the wall with accuracy see a dismal future for what was once seen as the political party of the future. They believe that the Janata Dal should brace itself for yet another split.

Shiv Sena-BJP poll plunge

DECKS have been cleared for simultaneous election to the Maharashtra Assembly on September 4 and 11. A notification by the Election Commission is only a formality. The decision to dissolve the House and recommend early election vindicates the long-held stand of the BJP that one way to minimise the damaging incumbency factor is to exploit the split in the Congress before the two factions get their act together. The Shiv Sena has been stalling the move fearing that the alliance partner will bolt after the poll to team up with the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress. So deep has been the mistrust, and once this led to the saffron party boycotting a Cabinet meeting. A new factor has helped the two parties to get over their inhibitions and plump for an early poll. That is the perceived popular tilt in favour of the BJP-led alliance in the wake of the Kargil “war”. How long this “Vajpayee wave” lasts and how powerful it indeed is are yet to be tested. But for an alliance with a lacklustre record in office and a marked erosion of its electoral base, the emerging situation offers the best hope and it has grabbed it with alacrity. Behind the public show of unity and harmony there clearly lurks a palpable degree of tension as seen in the unwillingness of the two parties to even review the old seat-sharing arrangement. As in the past, the BJP will contest a larger number of seats for the Lok Sabha (26 out of the 48) leaving the rest to the Sena, while the latter will fight from 171 Assembly seats out of the total of 288. It is almost certain that even the individual constituencies will not be disturbed lest the resultant change causes heartburn and much worse.

The simultaneous Assembly election poses a severe test to Mr Sharad Pawar and his senior colleagues in the new party. Selecting candidates for the 48 Lok Sabha seats so soon after the formation of the Nationalist Congress Party is a formidable task. But it has been made easier by the defection of about a dozen former MPs and the defeat of a similar number in last election. Then there are the district level leaders who sought party ticket last time but failed to secure one. But the Assembly throws up nearly insurmountable problems. Only about 50 sitting MLAs defected and another about 20 are independents ready to join the party. Which leaves 200 constituencies waiting for a winning candidate. Wrong selection will be as bad as selecting someone who can cause a split in the fledgling party. There is also the question of financing the campaign; an established party has in-built advantages which a new one does not have. Further, if there is indeed a Kargil backlash and as a result a consolidation of the anti-BJP and anti-Shiv Sena vote in favour of the Congress (it cannot be otherwise), Mr Pawar and his men will be stranded. It is going to be baptism by fire for the new party.

Patent problems

THE West is looking at various Indian medicinal plants with great interest. This admiration is driven by an urge to get patents. After neem and turmeric, it is the turn of lowly jamun, brinjal and karela to earn patents for three scientists in the USA. As it happened in the past, two of them are of Indian origin. Let this the clarified at the outset that the patents they have obtained are not on jamun and karela as such but for an edible herbal composition based on syzygium cumini (jamun), momordica charantia (karela), solanum melongena (brinjal) and gymnema sylvestre (gurmar) which has anti-diabetic properties. This is because not only in the USA but all over the world, patents or other forms of property protection are granted to inventions and not to discoveries. Still, the patent will cause serious problems for Indian manufacturers of anti-diabetic drugs based on these plants if they market them in the USA. Such problems arise because of a peculiar system of granting patents prevalent in the USA. While in India, the patents are granted only after conducting preliminary examinations and inviting third-party objections, these are granted only after preliminary examinations in the USA. These patents are temporary in nature and can be revoked after third-party objections are invited. As such, there is no cause for despair as yet. Just as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had managed to get the patent on turmeric drugs revoked by arguing that its healing properties were known for ages, there is a very good chance that a similar patent on a drug made from karela or jamun will be revoked. After all, the use of these in the treatment of diabetes has been reported in authoritative treatises like the "Wealth of India", the "Compendium of Indian Medicinal Plants" and the "Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants".

But there is need for taking several corrective measures. First of all, there has to be a regular mechanism for scanning the patents granted in various countries. This time it was the scientists of the Patent Facilitation Cell (PFC) of the Department of Science and Technology who stumbled on the information regarding the patent granted in the USA to Dr Kripanath Borah, Dr Onkar Singh Tomar and Dr Peter Glomski of the Cromac Research Inc. based in New Jersey. (The credit for bringing to light the patent granted to a group of researchers of the University of Mississippi Medical Centre for using turmeric as a wound-healing agent also goes to the same cell). This is necessary to ensure that no patent is granted by default. The mechanism to challenge spurious patents also has to be overhauled because such litigation is not only going to be very expensive but also more and more frequent. But most important, India must record its rich biodiversity before the foreign marauders start thriving on it. Australia has done it. So has Iceland.

MULTIVERSITY OF 21st CENTURY
Need for a bold break from the past
by Gurbhagat Singh

TWENTIETH century is just about to close, the end-of-century or fin de ciecle thought, vibrant with several revolutions, has made the present universities obsolete. To keep up with the futuristic developments, the present university is to be radically re-shaped.

The traditional university, according to Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is a body of scholars that confers degrees. The knowledge that it imparts is related to “the universe” or “whole.” In other words, the university in the accepted sense is a place where students are given universalist knowledge. But the most explosive thought of the eighties and nineties is that there is no universal paradigm. Even Michel Foucault, an influential philosopher following Nietzsche, has established that all “knowledges” are the truth-versions of certain power elites, intended to manipulate and govern.

Another vital group of thinkers, including Lyotard, Geertz and De Certeu, has further extended this idea by suggesting that knowledges are sign systems invented by local cultures according to their historical and other experiences. Knowledges, therefore, cannot be stable; they develop from migrant thoughts that keep moving in space and time. No spatiotemporally conditioned or migrant knowledge can be made valid for the entire world.

Migrant character of knowledge, its relativity and locally imagined constructs, have made thought systems as diverse universes in themselves. The present university aimed at propagating and perpetuating universally “valid” paradigms through unidirectional departments organised around traditional universalist disciplines, has become outdated.

The university of the 21st century will have to address to many universes. Not only to the thought systems and cultures as diverse universes but also to the multiple universes being discovered by scientists. David Deutsch, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, has told us that interference occurring for every photon and neutron leads us towards the possible reality of many universes. He says: “Reality is much bigger than it seems....The part we call the universe is the merest tip of iceberg.” If the whole of physical reality is multiversal and if all the universes are differently aged, then the knowledge generated by our universe is not valid for the other universes. Some of those universes may be our past and some our future. We will have to invent new modes of knowledge or knowledges that can travel through the past and future with a dynamic rooting in the present. A scholar who is competent to look into the diverse universes and can innovate paradigms to circumvent new problems, will have to be very complex and high-speed.

The university fired with this express aim of producing knowledges for this complex reality can be appropriately named as MULTIVERSITY.

The multiversity of the 21st century will not be constructed around a particular ideology. Althusser, a poststructuralist Marxist of France, has defined ideology as the images, symbols, myths and dreams through which a class or an individual experiences the world. If the reality around exceeds the world, then, no ideology remains adequate. Marx and Engles are already on record for calling “ideology” as “false consciousness.” The multiversity, incorporating the values, times and spaces of different universes will function with a multi-corporative open orientation committed to change and dynamism.

A marked feature of the multiversity will be its tentativity or indeterminacy. After the quantum physics of Max Planck and Hisenberg, the principle of determinism about the physical reality and thereby of human existence organised around some lasting idea, has been losing ground. The leaps of physical energy, of thoughts, of cultural and physical institutions are constantly unsettling. No single department devoted to one discipline can come up with ideas to further knowledge and improve human existence. For coping with the vital leaps, the multiversity will have to develop time-bound programmes in which scholars of different disciplines evolve new ideas as a cooperative and dialogical enterprise. For running such programmes, each teacher will have to be trained multidisciplinarily with an unquestionable grounding in one discipline. These futuristic as well as present-determined programmes will be guided and chaired by those who are competent.

The present feudal structures of the unidisciplinary departments organised on the principle of seniority will have to be mercilessly replaced by the programmes run on the consideration of merit. Obviously, the feudal and colonial structures of the present university will have to be dismantled.

The multiversity will be committed to total liberation. A famous educationist and scholar of North America, the late Northrop Frye, has repeatedly said in his writings that liberation of a society is possible through liberal education. His idea of liberal education that comes from the Victorian English critic Matthew Arnold, is related to the Western liberal democratic system in which a student is allowed “free play” of the mind with a strong telos for developing as a competitive individual. The multiversity, for its diverse and challenging research-needs and for the development of a futuristic multiversal society, will aim at producing a non or self competitive and growth-oriented de-individual, capable of participating in multidisciplinary cooperation.

The present system of examination meant to test memory, and gather the existing material, will need to be discarded. The entire teaching and research will focus on growth, which means the internal re-orientation and evolution made possible through distinct integration accomplished with mutual enrichment. Final evaluation can be partly external, but the main responsibility will be of the programme guide. At a mature stage students can also be invited to self-evaluate along with the guide. Growth can be facilitated by recognising a student’s interest and by leading him or her through research papers. For this kind of growth-oriented multiversity education admission has to be selective.

Production of a growth-oriented student is much more difficult than turning out a development-oriented competitive student. For growth, the entire reflex and response systems are to go through change. With what academic and unacademic disciplines will that become possible, is still a matter for thought. May be for that, the traditional Eastern disciplines like meditation and devotional music would be helpful. This maximally opened up student will be qualitatively different.

The multiversity, through its distinct structures and exposures, recommended and developed by each faculty and programme, will transform the student. It is not a utopian thought. Some of the best American and European universities are already doing this transformative job, although the specialisations to which they transform are limited to the systems conceived and constrained by the laws of the known universe. The multiversity student will cross over to the other universes and become “interversal,” if I may invent this word to convey my sense.

A special feature of this multiversity will be its emphasis on multimediation. It means to organise courses, academic structures, seminars, conferences and collaborative programmes involving other cultures to expose the students to diverse weltanschauungs in practice. Studying disciplines with the paradigms of one culture is not to become part of the world community. With the global opening up it has become imperative for the university to produce students and teachers who are both international and local simultaneously. Since the globe also possibly exists as parallel to the other universes, an interversal consciousness will constantly reshape the multiversity product.

But now the billion-dollar question is: Which country is going to set up the first multiversity? This initiative will need two prerequisites. First, the country has to be free from the nationalist obsession. In the Buddhist sense, the country is to be non-egoic and open to the larger environment on the earth and above. It implies that such a futuristic initiative cannot be taken in an environment that is dominated by a hegemonic polity taking education as a way to push its interested and uniforming paradigms. The second prerequisite for this initiative is flexible political, economic and cultural structures of the country. If they are coercive, de-emphasising multiple growth, then the bold initiative cannot be taken. The society has to produce, first, non-coerced free minds that are ready for multimediation (my research scholar Ms Deepinder Jeet Randhawa has developed a notion of “intermediation” for this kind of phenomenon).

The countries like Canada, Switzerland, and also the loosening up United States, are the likely sites for the multiversity. The confederative political structures of Switzerland, and the near confederative constitutions of the USA and Canada, encouraging different communities and culture, are already pressurising their universities for the next leap. Harvard, Yale, California (especially its Irvine and Santa Cruz campuses) and Geneva universities are slowly and steadily moving to become the postnational and postideological multiversities.

In Asia, India despite its poverty and problems, is another likely site for the multiversity. The push will come from the multicultural and multinational realities of different States. As they become more self-conscious and assertive, they will refuse to be taught the singular and one-dimensional nationalist paradigm. The political scenario emerging after the last two general elections has already exploded the uni-nationalist way of governing and seeing.

(The writer is a former Professor of English and Dean of Languages, Punjabi University, Patiala.)

More Kargils in Terai?
by Amar Chandel

IT is tempting to dismiss Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's assertion that "Today we have calmed down the volcano of Kargil but tomorrow the volcano can erupt somewhere else as the lava is boiling". After all, India has conclusively plugged the lava, made in Pakistan and channelled across the Line of Control to Kargil, Dras and Batalik. But there is an iota of real threat in what he says.

Pakistan has been quietly preparing the ground elsewhere. If properly activated, the Pakistani agents can make the boast of their Prime Minister come true. Following tremendous international pressure, the regular Pakistani soldiers may not be made part of the next campaigns quite that blatantly, but the hardcore hired mercenaries can be depended on to mount another aggression soon enough.

This has nothing to do with their burning zeal to "liberate" Kashmir. It is just that they are not keen to go back to Afghanistan and the NWFP at this stage. Word has gone round that an all-out American attack on the camps of Osama bin Laden is imminent. So, they are either going to stay put on the Pakistani side of the LoC — if at all they vacate the Indian territory fully as promised — or, better still, shift to another equally "ripe" location: the 1,000-km Indo-Nepalese border.

The tactical advantages that the Terai area offers from the Pakistani point of view are tremendous. The border is porous like a sieve and there are any numbers of safe havens —Madhubani, Sitamarhi, Raxaul, and Muzaffarpur — nearby.

In fact, the area had been identified by the ISI a long time ago and preparations were afoot there to cultivate it. And now, it has been activated like never before, for obvious reasons.

The madarsas coming up in the area have been drumming the philosophy of the Wahabi school, which has been dominant in Saudi Arabia, in the ears of vulnerable youth. Laden himself is an adherent of this orthodox and puritanical form of Islam. ISI operatives are instrumental in running these schools. The Taliban on its part has been supporting the madarsas in every way that it can. Among the distant supporters are Lashkar-i-Toiba and Harkat-ul-Ansar. The poison ivy nurtured by these schools during the past decade is ripe for exploitation now.

The ISI has planned multifarious disruptive activities to bleed India in this vulnerable area. These range from introducing fake Indian currency notes to organising communal riots and from causing bomb blasts to sabotaging railway tracks.

Unfortunately, the police and the border security personnel have faced the challenge in a rather laid-back manner. Even the integrity of some lower-ranking officials is open to question. For a handful of rupees, these people have been looking the other way or even worse, colluding with the antinational forces.

But the biggest threat is posed by the "sleeping" ISI agents who have been leading a straight, inactive life for so long that they have managed to escape suspicion. It is they who can cause the maximum damage through their confidence tricks. Thanks to the skewed politics prevalent in the region, they have risen to fairly high positions and can wreck the system from within.

The Indian response has been reactive and piecemeal all along. The Indian forces scrambled well after the intruders had dug in even in Kargil. So far, it has not been clarified as to who was responsible for the Himalayan intelligence failure. Was it the Ministry of Defence officials who ignored the warnings or was it the defence officers in the field themselves who kept their superiors in the dark? Now that the Kargil operation is almost over, the "post-mortem report" needs to be put before the nation. Equally important, a similar mistake needs to be avoided at all costs in the Terai belt.

What needs to be kept in mind is that international pressure or no international pressure, Pakistan is going to give up its plans to Balkanise India only after leopards manage to change their spots. After all, it is hell-bent on taking revenge for the separation of Bangladesh. Every Pakistani soldier who came into Kargil had to take an oath on the Quran that he would fulfil this holy duty and that exactly is the brief of the operatives in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar too. Now that his diabolical Kargil plan has come unstuck, Mr Nawaz Sharif has changed colours faster than a chameleon does and has already started talking of "holding face-to-face peace talks" with Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee. His spurious vows of good faith notwithstanding, the Pakistani establishment continues and will continue to further the late President Zia-ul-Haque's Operation Topac tailored to dismember India.

Islamabad will up the ante all over India but the Terai belt is going to be the favourite scene of action. One positive sign is the help extended by Nepal. Realisation is dawning there — as it is happening in the rest of the world — that terrorism poses a threat not only to India but to entire South Asia and Pakistan is one of the main exporters of the plague. But the real brunt has to be borne by India. The next few months will be crucial in the war against this "jehad" because the floods have made the job of the mercenaries easier.

Book Bond
by Rajnish Wattas

RECENTLY when I acquired an autographed copy of An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, it was an unequalled joy. I love to collect books, and if able to afford, the first hard-bound editions to come out. To have them autographed by their celebrity writers is the crowning glory!

My most cherished nugget among this collection is a copy of Ruskin Bond’s Scenes from a Writer’s Life; as he not only autographed it, but also wrote a warm, personal note in his inimitable style. There is also a copy of Shobha De’s Selective Memory; acquired more for glamorous, socialite reasons — than really for its literary merit. And I nearly got the inaccessible and irascible celebrity author VS Naipaul to sign a copy of his Enigma of Arrival during his rare visit to Chandigarh nearly a decade ago; but for a pestering academic, who spoilt it all for us.

Why do I indulge in this unabashed, mushy celebrity chasing? It’s not so much to show off my phoney “close connections” with the big and the famous of the written word — but more to strike an indelible bond with their talent; which I so much admire. It greatly heightens the pleasure of reading their works; as every time I open the pages of the book; he hurried squiggle of the writer, a part of his literary persona, comes to presence. I also relive the pleasant memories of the personal encounter with him; whether it was at a book-reading session or a coveted private meeting. Ruskin Bond’s inscribed copy comes alive with his warm humility as a person and makes his writings so much more credible. Similarly Shobe De’s book will always carry with it whiffs of her heady perfume and her sensuous, sultry beauty.

Getting all those signed copies is no cake-walk. A keen ambition of mine that still remains unfulfilled, is to obtain an autographed copy of R.K. Narayan — the reclusive ninety plus grand old man of Indo-Anglian writing. However, my dogged perseverance has yielded at least some results.When Narayan turned 90 sometime back, there was quite a media splash. Cashing in on this surge of attention, I sent a copy of a “middle” written by me on his fictional town of Malgudi, to his equally famous brother R.K. Laxman; seeking his good offices to get it autographed by Narayan. Though very sceptical about such a favour maturing, I did keep a vigil on the mailbox. And then one fine day I did receive back my piece with a warm, personal note inscribed by the great RKN himself!

Perhaps, behind all this book-hooked, autograph hunting by me, lurks a secret desire to attain the same literary heights. My closest brush with such “booker” dreams coming true, was when a coauthored book of mine on trees got finally published. At last, I too, was an author of a book — and all ready, to oblige the imagined rush of autograph-hunters!

However, the harsh realities of authorship fantasies soon dawned on me. Even though I waited for hours patiently at the book store on the day, it was displayed prominently in the show window — no anticipated fan club materialised. Notwithstanding the sympathetic book-seller’s reassurances that such genre of reference books had slow but sure circulation — the dream was a closed chapter for me.

The only copies I have been able to sign so far with a great “celebrity” flourish, have been those gifted free to friends and family. Never mind the hole in the pocket; at least I have penned down my indelible bond with books.

India’s dismal showing in UNDP report

by Tavleen Singh

THE annual release of the human development report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is usually a bleak moment for India. This year’s report, released last week provides a tiny glimmer of hope. For the first time in the 10 years the report has been coming out we have been counted as being in the moderate category of human development rather than low, and although we are still among the 50 poorest countries in the world (132 out of 174) we are up six ranks since last year. The rest of the news continues, alas, to be bad unless we compare ourselves, as most newspapers did in this Kargil aftermath, with Pakistan.

So, although we still have an adult literacy rate that is a shaming 53.5 per cent it sounds less shaming when you consider that only 40.9 per cent Pakistanis are literate. Similarly, although we spend twice as much of our GDP (gross domestic product) on defence than on health. Pakistan spends more than five times more on soldiers than on doctors.

It’s when we stop measuring ourselves against Pakistan that we realise how little has been done in the past 50 years to improve the lot of ordinary Indians. Can there be anything more shaming, for instance, than the fact that two tiny countries in our own neighbourhood — Sri Lanka and the Maldives — are less poor, better educated and healthier than us? They also watch more television and use the telephone more which in this information age, are considered important indicators of development. In India we can count 64 televisions per 1,000 people and 15 telephones whereas, tiny Maldives counts 39 TVs and 63 telephones.

It’s clear, then, that we have a long, long way to go before we can even reach the living standards of a moderately developed country like Thailand. Some experts calculate that if we continue to grow economically at 7 pc a year we will reach Thailand’s level of development in about 25 years.

Yet, most of our political leaders have boasted, since the economic crisis in East Asia, that this country has been saved by the fact that we did not grow as fast as them. Well, as someone who recently returned from Thailand told me that even after that nation’s collapse (that began two years ago) it looks better than India. And, it looks better mainly because its people look better. Even the poorest of the poor — those who make their living out of pavement shops and menial jobs — look clean, healthy and decently dressed. This is what human development is about.

The last few decades of the 20th century will be remembered mainly for the fact that most countries in the world recognised that they could prosper and earn international respect not for their military might but for what they could do for their people. This is why the human development report, started ironically by a Pakistani economist called Mahbub-ul-Haq, should be considered the most important measure of development, especially in South Asia.

But, in India the report barely creates a ripple in the press when compared to the acres of newsprint we devote to such things as fashion and high society. There is almost not a newspaper left in the country which does not carry a special supplement on the latest fashions and the latest parties which is frightening when you consider that most urban Indians eke out an existence on the pavements of our cities. Even more frightening is the fact that the average Indian is illiterate, has no access to healthcare, clean drinking water or sanitary living conditions.

A couple of states in India, notably Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, have started their own human development reports but unfortunately they have not served to jolt either our state governments or the central government into action on a war-footing.

When they do our political leaders will realise quite quickly that the problem lies not so much in a paucity of funds but in the way that the funds get spent. If we examine the hundreds of crores of rupees that are ostensibly spent every year on ‘poverty alleviation’, we will find that most of this money is spent on creating jobs for officials whose first task is usually to ensure that they have decent offices and all the other perks that come with government service! It’s only when these “armies” of officials are properly housed and provided with air-conditioned offices does a certain trickle down effect begin to take place and even here there are problems especially in rural India where these poverty alleviation programmes are meant to work.

The beneficiaries of employment schemes, for instance, complain that they do not get the money they are supposed to get until they have parted with some of it to the official in charge of its disbursement. The same is true of those who supposedly benefit from self-employment and housing schemes. Yet, governments have come and gone and nobody has examined what has gone wrong with the ministries that deal with human development. What is worse is the fact that even if the coming general election throws up leaders who would like to examine what went wrong their first reaction is likely to be the setting up of an inquiry commission. The commission will then take several months to be set up and several years before it produces a report which will, in all likelihood, end up locked in some dusty government office, unread and unnoticed.

Why? Because, powerful vested interests have been formed over the years in India not being allowed to develop. These vested interests consist mainly of officials and there are many ministers, and ex-ministers in Delhi, who do not hesitate to admit that even when they have tried to bring about changes they have been thwarted at every step by ‘entrenched vested interest’, read babus.

So, are there any solutions? Yes, and they are relatively easy ones. For a start we need ministers in charge of human development portfolios to be the best that a government has to offer and not the least important as happens to be the case today. Secondly, you need procedures that are not so convoluted that it takes years for an idea to materialise into action. Thirdly, we need a Prime Minister who takes enough personal interest in the subject to start cutting down on the red tape involved in even the simplest tasks. Finally, we need every state government to produce its own annual human development report which includes suggested solutions.

Unless urgent action is taken we can forget about India becoming truly strong and powerful no matter how many nuclear bombs we make and no matter how significant our scientific and technological successes might be.

What happens to kids after hostilities?

by Amita Malik

AT the time of writing, hostilities are drawing to an end, with Pakistan still playing fast and loose. But about one thing one can be sure. The Indian print and electronic media have played a major role in bringing both the glory and the tragedy of war face to face with the nation. Television, because of its visual immediate has helped rouse an entire nation to back our jawans and share the anxiety of their families. The close-ups of the identity cards of Pakistani regulars killed during the hostilities and the actual sight and sound of guns booming, of helicopters hovering over impossible mountain terrain, the solemnity of the military funerals, bereaved families expressing proud sentiments while trying bravely to conceal their tears, have all done their bit to boost the morale of the soldiers and airmen and women and make them realise we are one with them.

But after all this, there is one image which constantly appears on our TV screens which continues to haunt us about the Save the Children Fund and which provides much food for thought about the future. It asks what happens to the children after hostilities are over and everyone has left? And it ends with a shot of a little boy writing the alphabet on a board as he teaches his little friends in the open air.

One of the biggest jobs the media has done is to focus attention on the shameful follow-up and utter neglect of those who fought so valiantly from 1948 onwards and the widows and children as well as those maimed. The awards and pensions which were not delivered, the land which was promised and not given. The widows in remote village in Kumaon who were left to starve. The bureaucrats denying his pension to a man who lost his only son because his address had changed after he had enlisted. There are countless such stories coming from the lips of those affected and they make one hang one’s head in shame. No doubt, the politicians who always make grand gestures and the bureaucrats who quibble and ruin families from the comfort of their desks are largely responsible. So I do not blame the father who lost his young son at Kargil asking bitterly. How many children of bureaucrats and politicians were fighting on the front? A very good question.

And now we know what will happen. That the print and electronic media will plunge immediately into the elections and the aftermath of war will be forgotten. But this is something that we must not allow to happen again. There must be special sections or columns or programmes set up on TV, radio and the print media to do a continuous follow-up after Kargil. People who gave generously after the last three wars, even little children their pocket money and brides their jewellery, are still trying to find out what happened to all those watches, gold and crores of money which they gave for the jawans and their families. Ugly stories are floating around of how they lined the pockets of those entrusted with them and how there was no accountability in the end. It is precisely this kind of on-going story that must be pursued relentlessly by alert investigative journalists from both the print and electronic media, so that it does not happen again.

There is another very big story to be pursued by the media. And that is the shocking intelligence failure which led to Kargil. Here is another vital topic for investigative journalism and, indeed, several books. Remember the Henderson Brooks Report on the India-China war has not yet seen the light of day although Krishna Menon lost his job and several top army brass disgraced. There are ugly stories of bureaucrats starving the Air Force of vital equipment of Pakistan having superior communications equipment and of jawans on those icy heights starved of snow boots. There was a revealing shot of a jawan in an army truck laughingly holding up his foot to show his shoe split across. War is always ugly, but bureaucratic bungling, corruption and callousness on the part of those who never go to the front is worse. It is time that the media exposed all this.

Of course, one of our worst failures, in spite of rosy PIB hand-outs, is that of Doordarshan whose border transmissions and programmes are totally inadequate technically (why, one doesn’t even get Delhi DD clearly in Delhi) and where professionalism hardly exists. Mahajan’s banning of PTV which is quite easily available and scrambling of Dawn’s. Website on the Internet which can be bypassed expose our inadequacies and antediluvian minds all the more,

75 YEARS AGO

Weekly birth and death reports

DURING the week ending on the 17th there were in all 433 deaths of male and 188 of female. Of this, 211 were due to plague, 3 due to smallpox, 7 due to measles, 17 due to phthisis, 170 due to fevers, 13 due to bowel complaints, 7 due to asthma, 13 due to pneumonia and 6 in childbirth. As many as 281 deaths were among Mahomedans and 125 among Hindus. The number of births during the same period was 146.

During the week ending the 10th, there were in all 494 deaths. Of these, 243 deaths were due to plague, 131 due to fevers, 1 due to bowel complaints, 24 due to pneumonia and 7 in childbirth. Deaths among Mahomedans were 325 and among Hindus 143.