P A G E
Saturday, October 2, 1999
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E D I T O R I A L P A G E |
Saturday, October 2, 1999 |
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Economy
on recovery path
LESSONS
FROM PUNJAB |
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Campaign
of empty rhetoric
Sorry
for everything
Coexistence
to nonexistence
A
great victory indeed! |
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Economy on recovery path SIGNS of a steady impulse of growth have returned to the economy, ending two years of sluggishness. What is interesting is that this time the cheer is spread across the entire spectrum — from agriculture to manufacturing to service. The details compiled by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) for the first quarter of the financial year thus confirm earlier projections by research institutions. Several factors propelling the expansion are now woven into the structure and hence promise to sustain the growth. Manufacture of cement and mild steel has gone up thanks to the revival of the construction sector — up by 6.7 per cent from 4.2 per cent — which, in turn, received a boost in last Union Budget. This should pick up further momentum since leading housing finance institutions have reduced interest rates. The service sector is buoyant, up by 7 per cent compared to 3.68 per cent. Since 75 per cent of this sector is linked to manufacturing, this too will have a beneficial ripple effect. There are two other clear indications that the turnaround has been sparked by a growth in demand. The railways have carried 10.7 per cent more goods this year; last year the cargo haulage fell by more than 6 per cent. Ports too handled an increased volume of goods, another sure signal of the revival being enduring. There are some grey areas too and that is worrying. The CSO says agriculture grew by 2.8 per cent, obviously referring to the record output in last rabi season. This year the monsoon has been scanty in about a third of the country and yet paddy production is stated to grow by 4.2 per cent. There is some overoptimism here. Coarse grains (the staple diet of the poorest of the poor), pulses and oilseed have been badly hit, the last named will lose nearly a third of its yield. These will not affect the growth rate in the second quarter since the kharif crop enters the official statistics only in the third quarter. Another unhealthy aspect is the imbalance in bank deposits and advance. The banks mobilised 18 per cent more funds in the first three months than the same period last year but credit grew only by 15 per cent. This reflects a lethargic demand for both working capital and funds for industrial expansion. It needs closer watch and perhaps a cut in lending rates now that inflation is staying at around 2 per cent. It would seem from the way small savings balloon that a reduction in interest will not affect bank deposits either. In this atmosphere of
overall growth, government spending and the fiscal
deficit have also bloated. Revenue expenditure shot up by
21 per cent, pulling the fiscal deficit up by 26 per
cent. By the end of August — that is, in the first
five months of the financial year — the fiscal
deficit has already touched nearly 50 per cent of the
budget target, Rs 38,149 crore out of Rs 79,955 crore!
This is despite an increase in revenue collection by 9
per cent. This information is not part of the CSO’s
feel-good facts but from a routine monthly statement put
out by the Finance Ministry. |
GVG on poll reforms ON his last day in office as Election Commissioner Mr G. V. G. Krishnamurthy once again emphasised the need for sweeping changes in the electoral laws for strengthening the roots of parliamentary democracy. Mr Krishnamurthy and Mr M. S. Gill were inducted in the Election Commission with the specific objective of "taming" the then Chief Election Commissioner, Mr T. N. Seshan. That was the period when the Election Commission was usually in the news because of frequent confrontations between the temperamental Mr Seshan and his two junior colleagues. After Mr Seshan's retirement for a brief period the working relationship between Mr Gill and Mr Krishnamurthy was anything but cordial. GVG, as the retired Election Commissioner is known, sulked because he believed that he should have been made the CEC. However, with the induction of the extraordinarily quiet Mr J. M. Lyngdoh as Election Commissioner the Gill-led team worked with far greater harmony than the one which was imposed on Mr Seshan with the specific purpose of clipping his wings. Mr Krishnamurthy's retirement before the completion of the election process may create some difficulty in notifying the constitution of the 13th Lok Sabha. The issue was evidently raised by GVG's well-wishers for getting his term extended and not because his retirement would actually create insurmountable constitutional difficulty for a two-member Commission in notifying the completion of the election process. Heavens would not have
fallen had he been granted an extension in service as
Election Commissioner until the completion of the poll
process. In any case, he is due to retire as a civil
servant in mid-November. However, had the Centre acted in
his favour it would have been found guilty of violating
the poll-related guidelines of the Election Commission!
Be that as it may, the issues he raised during a brief
inter-action with reporters have been under discussion
for a long time. It is indeed true that the delay in
taking up fresh delimitation of assembly and
parliamentary constituencies has created obvious
anomalies. As Mr Krishnamurthy rightly pointed that the
Outer Delhi Lok Sabha constituency has 28 lakh voters as
against five lakh in Karol Bagh or 40,000 in Lakshadweep.
In his inimitable style Mr Krishnamurthy also lambasted
the political class for ignoring the recommendations of
the Election Commission. It believes that for
"depolluting" the electoral process it is
necessary to allow only clean candidates to contest. As
far as the role of independent candidates and smaller
political parties in creating political instability is
concerned even the Law Commission has made useful
suggestions for making the electoral exercise more
meaningful. But without the political will to act there
is little that can be done for keeping out criminals and
political wheeler dealers from entering the country's
legislatures. |
Nuclear emergency WHILE there is consistent focus on the dangers of a nuclear war, the tremendous risks involved in even peaceful harnessing of this colossal power have been underlined yet again through an accident. A uranium reaction on Thursday at a processing plant in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, sent radiation levels soaring 4,000 times. Complete reports about the magnitude of the threat that the accident has posed have yet to come in but the initial reaction that the hazard may be of the order of the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters has forced 320,000 people to stay indoors. Such is the destructive capability of the nuclear power that an accuracy level of zero tolerance has to be maintained day in and day out. But in real life, the rule that whatever can go wrong will go wrong comes into operation sooner or later. The crisis in Tokaimura has been caused by human error, that perennial villain in such cases. Japanese workers are believed to have accidentally triggered the nuclear reaction by pumping too much uranium-nitric acid into a tank, company officials are reported to have said. The operation is suspected to have involved as much as 16 kg of uranium, as against the tank's maximum capacity of 2.4 kg. Apparently, adequate security mechanisms were not in place. While leakage in the Tokaimura plant itself affected 35 workers two years ago, there had been a similar incident in another of Japan's 51 commercial nuclear power reactors in July this year. Such incidents are
alarming wherever they take place, all the more so in
Japan which happens to be the only nuclear victim state.
Ironically, the tremendous losses that it suffered in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are suspected to have made the
International Atomic Energy Agency and other
international non-proliferation organisations a little
lax in monitoring its nuclear programmes. In fact, there
is an apprehension in China and both Koreas that it is
accumulating weapons grade plutonium for a nuclear-armed
Japan. A report titled "Thinking the Unthinkable:
Will Japan deploy the bomb?" released by the
National Security News Service also says that Japan's
status as a victim of nuclear bombings, its peoples'
distaste for nuclear weapons and its close ties with the
USA and Europe create a perception among international
monitors that Tokyo need not be held at the same
standards as other non-nuclear weapon states. This
speculation has been further fuelled by the release of
classified papers by Kyushu University in August on the
eve of Hiroshima day which have revealed that while Japan
had been a strong champion of nuclear disarmament, it was
secretly an active participant in the US nuclear weapon
presence as far back as the early 1960s. The only fig
leaf that Tokyo used was that it was willing to accept
the "temporary" presence of US nuclear weapons
on its territory, as long as it was stipulated that this
was not a "permanent" arrangement. Whatever the
pressures on the Japanese governments may have been, the
latest leakage is bound to strengthen the hands of
anti-nuclear power activists who may raise a hue and cry. |
LESSONS FROM PUNJAB THOUGH the opinion polls as well as the exit polls now appear to be getting a bit mixed as to whether or not the BJP alliance will come to power again (primarily because of the large number of seats the BJP is certain to lose in Uttar Pradesh), one thing appears certain. The Akali-BJP alliance in Punjab looks all set to face a severe rout and the Congress, which got wiped out last time around, is expected to do exceedingly well. According to the DRS exit poll telecast by Doordarshan, the Congress is likely to win 10 of the 13 Lok Sabha seats. So, what has happened? Is it that unlike the rest of the country, the macho Punjabis don’t think much of the victory in Kargil or is it that they feel it is perfectly all right for a person of foreign origin to assume the country’s highest seat of power? Though Congress spin-doctors will certainly try their best to make us believe that this is indeed the case, the fact is that the Badal ministry has performed so poorly in the past two and a half years, that it will take an exceptionally staunch BJP supporter to want to vote for the alliance a second time over. Traditionalists amongst us will pass this off as the ‘‘anti-incumbency’’ factor which is essentially jargon for saying that voters don’t elect back parties which are in power. Juxtapose this with another opinion/exit poll finding that Chandrababu’s Telugu Desam Party is likely to retain the largest number of Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh and you have something which potentially seems very exciting and makes a mockery of the so called ‘‘anti-incumbency’’ factor. Both polls, that Mr Badal will do badly and Chandrababu will do well, say essentially the same thing that, incumbent or not incumbent voters will vote for someone who’s making the economy grow, whose policies look like they’ll take the state forward into the 21st century and not backward into the 19th. That incidentally, is also the reason why Digvijay Singh did so well in Madhya Pradesh during the last elections despite being the incumbent Chief Minister. He was doing excellent ground-level work in terms of setting up schools and providing basic facilities such as drinking water. And yes, both examples also indicate very strongly (I’d love to say ‘‘prove’’, but I think that will apply only if the trend extends to other states) that voters are no longer swayed by traditional promises of more dole of more subsidies, or free water and power to farmers the way Mr Badal promised when he came to power. For if that were so, Mr Badal would certainly not be facing such a huge defeat and Chandrababu would not have been so sure of victory, as we all know. Chandrababu has virtually made a passion of cutting subsidies wherever possible and seems obsessed with making Andhra Pradesh India’s silicon valley. It’s not as if voters don’t like subsidies. They do, but they’ve finally realised at some very basic level, that subsidies actually cripple the economy. And if the economy gets crippled then not only does its ability to give those very subsidies get affected, the future generation of jobs also gets compromised. That is precisely what has happened in Punjab. For one, as an Economic Times report suggests, the state was losing a minimum of Rs 400 crore annually in providing these subsidies. Since Mr Badal and his cohorts were obviously not paying for this largesse who was footing the bill? Obviously it was the poor voter who was paying for it and he appears to have realised it. So when Mr Badal gave free power to the farmers he made up for this by charging more from the household sector! He obviously thought the Punjab farmer was so stupid that he would fail to notice this subterfuge. What’s more with the state bleeding, its ability to provide other basic amenities also suffered badly. Mr Badal appears to have, at least partially, understood the lesson. For, while releasing his party’s manifesto Mr Badal refused to comment on whether or not he would continue with the policy of subsidies. ‘‘These matters are always open to review’’, he was quoted as saying in The Economic Times of September 21. In Chandrababu’s Andhra Pradesh by contrast the state’s economy started doing disastrously soon after Chandrababu’s late father-in-law N.T. Rama Rao began his two rupee rice and other schemes. Within a few years from being one of the faster growing states, Andhra slipped into one of the slowest growing categories. Now, with Chandrababu cutting wasteful expenditure and crippling subsidies, the state seems on its way up again. Impressed by Mr Naidu’s vision the World Bank has lent him several hundred million dollars for various sanitation, water and electricity schemes and foreign investors have begun cautious forays into the state. At the risk of repeating myself, it is not as if the Telugu voter doesn’t like subsidies, but he has realised that the prospects of his doing well with a reviving economy are much greater than with a crippled economy. While readers can be pardoned for feeling I’m making too much of what appears to be isolated instances, the economist Surjit Bhalla has actually developed an econometric model which backs this premise. Bhalla, whose paper first appeared in his monthly newsletter Developing Trends last month, has studied the impact of economic factors such as GDP growth and inflation on voting patterns since 1977 his model has not examined the date prior to this as with the Congress sway over the country we really had a one-party rule in most states. Anyway, after running various regression analyses over the last 22 years, Bhalla has worked out an equation which gives weights or shows the impact of various economic factors on the voting patterns over the country. What he’s found is common sense but has the advantage of actually qualifying this impact. Whenever economic growth has improved and the Congress has been in power, the party’s vote share has gone up by 1.7 times the increase in growth. So, if the GDP growth rose 3 per cent in an election year the Congress vote share increased 5.1 per cent. Similarly if inflation fell one per cent point, and the Congress was in power, its vote share increased 1.3 times. This fall — so far with a 5 per cent fall in inflation, the Congress vote share improved 6.5 per cent. How realistic is Bhalla’s model? According to the newsletter, the model has been proved broadly correct in 20 of the 24 state and central elections that we have had since 1977. The latest, of course, was the last ‘‘onion’’ assembly elections, where the BJP got a severe drubbing in all states, primarily because of its failure to control the spiralling onion prices, and the widespread publicity this got all over the country. Based on the actual numbers for inflation and the GDP, Bhalla’s model had predicted a total 13.5 per cent swing in favour of the Congress and 9.1 per cent swing just because of the BJP’s poor performance on the inflation front. The actual swing in favour of the Congress was 14.9 per cent! This time around, based on the fact that the economy is now clearly out of the recession mood of the last two years, and inflation is at a historic low, Bhalla has predicted 42 per cent votes for the BJP and its partners and around 27 per cent for the Congress alone. Not surprisingly, according to me, the exit polls seem to suggest around the same broad numbers — 45 per cent for the National Democratic Alliance and 39 per cent for the Congress-plus alliance. Indian democracy may finally come of age. (The author is a
well-known journalist and commentator) |
Defence needs media scrutiny UNEASY questions are being asked about the media’s role in war. During and after the Kargil conflict did it play a balancing role and help to rally public opinion and national will, crucial for the successful waging of war? Or was the media too intrusive and jeopardised national security? Carried in most national dailies recently was a letter by a retired and respected Brigadier emphasising that there is an unwritten media code against reporting of Army operational functioning even during peace. Disclosing such details in times of war, as has happened in the case of Brig Surinder Singh’s supposed letter to the Army Chief about the “impending danger from Pakistan in his sector is unforgiveable”, according to the Brigadier. “It has never been done before, and amounts to a grave breach of security on the media’s part. Removing a field commander is the unquestionable prerogative of the Army hierarchy. The military is not obliged to give any explanation to the government or the press for doing so”. In World War II, the correspondents wore uniform, depending upon the service to which they were assigned. Press was hence a part of the establishment and fully cooperated with the military during war, accepting censorship gladly and willingly. The press was on the same side as the government and the people because the war was unquestioningly accepted and supported. Correspondents had status that was called the assimilated rank of captain or commander, light-heartedly alluded to as a “simulated” rank. There were no “sides” to be taken because the press contributed to the war effort just as everybody else. Veteran journalist Prem Bhatia was a war correspondent in the Middle-East in 1942 and attained the rank of Lt-Col by the time he quit to get back to The Statesman. World War II was probably the last time that this phenomenon of working together was true, opines Daniel Schorr, noted reporter-commentator and news analyst. In Vietnam, the military’s credibility plunged to a record low when the press discovered the untruths doled out to them in briefings. Chilling exposes highlighting the American military’s incompetence and excesses, including Seymour Hersh’s expose of the My Lai massacre, manifested in deep mutual suspicion between the military and the press, and the latter was accused of ruining morale at home and jeopardising the war effort. Admitted Donald P Mullaly, director of the WILL public broadcasting group at the University of Illinois: “Some say we ‘lost’ the Vietnam war. If we did, it was not because reporters revealed military secrets; it was surely because they revealed the awful truth; war is hell”. Brought into the Americans’ living rooms was the horror of war along with the inconsistencies between the military claims of winning and the evidence on the ground. Ultimately American public opinion rejected the notion that the loss of American life was worthwhile, and political pressure brought an end to US involvement. The British were quick to learn and succeeded in “managing” the news coverage of the Falkland War with remarkable efficiency by imposing restrictions on war reporting. Enamoured of the British success, the Americans imposed the requirement of pool coverage during the Gulf War, disclosing only convenient details. Horrid accounts of the war were avoided by concealing the casualties. Video game technology in full splendour was used to obfuscate the realities of war, and the media allowed to get a feel of success without giving it a chance to question issues of poor conduct, failures or even the war objectives. The media was led by the nose into reporting convenient details which boosted the image of multinational forces and dehumanised Saddam Hussein. In India the objective of “news management” is achieved by playing on “national security” sentiments to justify excessive secrecy. The MoD misled Parliament in July-August, 1997, through two written statements averring that no helicopter had ever been shot down by Pakistan in Siachen. That Pakistan did in fact shoot down a helicopter with two pilots flying incessantly to maintain a beleaguered post in the glacier was revealed in 1998, almost two years after the incident in the form of posthumous citations of the two pilots read out at the defence investiture ceremony in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The government’s pathological use of secrecy as a device to cover up inconvenient and disturbing details under the garb of “national security” gets borrowed by the services themselves. Much the same appears to be happening now in the case of Kargil where slimy worms of ineptitude are creeping out of the can, with charges and counter-charges being flung within the services, pointing to a massive cover-up attempt. Surely this can’t be any less “damaging” than the Press actually ferreting out the truth so that long-term correctives can be effected. The Editor of London Times in confrontation with the British Prime Minister, Lord Derby, had commented: “the government of the day thrives by secrecy, it acts in secrecy, expediency is its guide. The press lives by disclosure”. No individual or
organisation is infallible and hence beyond the scope of
public scrutiny. National security is for the tax-paying
public, and therefore people have a right to know if any
holes exist in the system. The media’s patriotic
duty is to help locate and expose these chinks through
objective and fearless journalism. |
Coexistence
to nonexistence THIS piece is not about political coexistence where disparate or inconvenient neighbour countries choose the path of cooperation for fear of economic or physical extinction. Nor is it about conjugal coexistence, forcing incompatible and mutually insufferable partners to hang on to each other because they dread the thought of family’s devastation. It is rather about the value system determining the course and the very fortune of a society. We all know that, in any era, the good and the evil, the faithful and the treacherous, the sublime and the ridiculous, the naive and the crafty have always existed side by side. This is quite understandable as it reflects the heterogeneous reality of society, with different standards of well-being, education, culture, values etc., among the people. But, what we witness today, are quaint bedfellowships and disturbing patterns of coexistence which have sinister portents and could entail grave consequences in the long run. A few notable examples are given from the Indian panorama to bring out the decline of times, the chasm that exists between promise and performance of our leadership, and the fate that we unwittingly invite for ourselves. It is a matter of everyday experience to find that: Bad roads, indifferent construction, substandard repairs co-exist with proliferating supervisory staff. Corruption, food adulteration, spurious drugs and tax evasion flourish with corpulent enforcement machinery and teeming inspectorates. Poor maintenance and shoddy service are never failing companions of any edifice — whether a public building, a human institution or a service centre. Malnutrition and starvation deaths subsist with bumper crops and overflowing granaries. Mighty skyscrapers and palatial buildings stand cheek by jowl with filthy slums which house the migrant labour. Vandalism, slovenliness and guile form portion of the package tours to a pilgrimage centre, historical site or scenic resort. Sati, dowry, female foeticide are practised simultaneously with our homage to and worship of woman as “devi” i.e. goddess incarnate. Sectarian and parochial loyalties thrive along with our claims of the society being well on way to modernity. Benefactor and the beneficiary, patron and the client live together in symbiotic relationship — one feeding the other and the two together sucking the system. Professions of austere living and righteous conduct in public are flanked by outrageous consumption and wanton accumulation of wealth in private. Such incongruities and paradoxes in our midst abound. They not merely signify abdication of authority and repudiation of legality, but the very breakdown of ideology. The net result is that faith and optimism of the common man are snuffed out. He turns cynical. He feels cheated and scandalised. He boils and seethes. If he could, he would explode the system. Without being a prophet
of doom or a soothsayer one can say with certainty —
as night follows day — that unless we give up apathy
and manage these ugly contradictions, we are heading for
a collapse of civilised order and atrophy of the process
of lawful governance. There is danger to our stability,
our integrity, our existence. Chaos, wilderness,
destruction await us. “And if destruction be our
lot”, to use the words of Abraham Lincoln, “we
ourselves shall be its author and finisher”. |
Campaign of empty rhetoric
DOES anyone remember why Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Government fell? I speak not of the technicality of it, which was his losing the confidence motion in the Lok Sabha, but why Dr Jayalalitha Jayaram was so incensed with her former ally, Mr Vajpayee, that she flew all the way to Delhi from Chennai to take tea with Sonia Gandhi and announce a “political earthquake”. The reason, dear readers, was a man called Adm Vishnu Bhagwat. Jayalalitha wanted him reinstated as Navy chief and she wanted the Defence Minister’s portfolio taken away from him for having sacked Admiral Bhagwat in the first place. Yet, did any of you once during the campaign hear anybody mention Bhagwat’s name? He himself, in what seemed like a desperate attempt to attract attention, campaigned vigorously for the Congress Party wherever he could and still not one of our political leaders considered it worth mentioning his name. A similar thing happened, if you remember, when Inder Kumar Gujral’s Government was brought down last year. The Congress Party flew into high dudgeon because he refused to sack the DMK Government in Tamil Nadu on the basis of the Jain Commission report. He rightly considered it improper to dismiss a legally elected government on the basis of the report of an inquiry commission so the Congress withdrew its vital “outside” support. The country was forced into a general election but when it began not even Sonia Gandhi found it necessary to mention the Jain Commission in her campaign speeches. For those of you who may have forgotten, this was the commission that investigated the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Now let us calculate what it cost the country to have two general elections in two years. The 1998 general election cost us over Rs 626 crore and this one, when the sums are finally done, is likely to end up costing us around Rs 900 crore. As important, if not more so, are the hidden costs of the kind of irresponsible politics that brings governments down for silly reasons. The real costs are the roads that never got built, the power plants that never got off the ground, the schools and hospitals that remained in suspended animation because there was no government to fund them, the policies that never got framed and the many months we have spent without proper governance. Kargil proved, if proof was needed, that it is dangerous for India to remain without a proper government. Defence analysts I have talked to in Delhi concede without hesitation that Pakistan would not have dared launch its Kargil misadventure if there had been political stability in India. You do not need to be an expert on military matters to know this but is there any sign that our political leaders have got the message? None. Both Congress and the BJP have shamelessly tried to exploit Kargil for political advantage in the campaign with one side going with the eminently foolish slogan that Vajpayee was the best Prime Minister in war and the best Prime Minister in peace. When Congress attempted to demolish this claim by harping on the charge that the government was sleeping when the intruders came, the campaign turned into a slanging match. Can there be any possible political advantage to the country of this kind of empty rhetoric? But, then empty rhetoric is what the entire campaign has been about. Despite the fact that whenever the ordinary voter’s voice has been heard he has repeated ad nauseum that all he wants are schools, roads, electricity, drinking water, our leaders have spent the entire campaigning attacking each other. So much so that in political circles in Delhi this election is already being called the “tu, tu, main, main” election. The infection has been so contagious that even our venerable Marxists, so proud of their ideology and principled politics, have caught it. So, we have seen the extraordinary spectacle of Mr Jyoti Basu calling Lal Krishna Advani a criminal, Siddharta Shankar Ray a murderer and Mamata Banerji a liar. At a more exalted national level we have seen Sonia Gandhi call Vajpayee a traitor and a crook (made money out of sugar, wheat and telephones) and Ghulam Nabi Azad charge him with immorality. The BJP has not lagged behind in the “tu, tu, main, main” department either with the inimitable Pramod Mahajan somehow dragging Monica Lewinsky into an attack on Sonia Gandhi and the equally vituperative George Fernandes accusing her of doing little more for the country than producing two children! Speaking of children, we have seen a great deal of empty rhetoric from one of the two Gandhi children, the media’s new darling, Priyanka. Her speeches, made mercifully in fluent Hindi, have concentrated on what a wonderful man her late father was and how her wonderful mother will now carry on his good work. In the same breath, she tells voters in Amethi that when 70 per cent of Indians live as badly as they do, it seems meaningless to attack “this one woman, Mummy.” She appears not to notice the contradiction. If her father was so wonderful and did such wonderful things for Amethi then why are 70 per cent of the people living such miserable lives? Why pick on her, though, when there is not a single campaign speech that will be remembered for anything but empty rhetoric. Here, it is the Prime Minister and his senior colleagues who must shoulder most of the blame. The question of India having a “foreign” Prime Minister is an important issue, even for your columnist, but surely someone in the BJP’s campaign committee could have come up with a few others? By making Sonia Gandhi the focus of the entire campaign the BJP’s campaign managers have inadvertently ended up making her also its biggest star. On the whole, though,
what a wasteful, worthless exercise the whole process has
been with voters not being particularly keen to vote and
political leaders having almost nothing to say. It will
seem even more wasteful and worthless if the exit polls
are right and Vajpayee becomes Prime Minister again. So,
did anything good come out of it at all? Yes. If another
BJP coalition takes power at the end of next week we know
for sure that Jayalalitha will not be in it. |
Sorry for everything
A well-known Bengali comedian was once asked during a DD interview in Calcutta, which DD programme he watched most. He replied without batting an eyelid: Sorry For The Interruption. This familiar slogan has been succeeded by a new one “You Are Watching The News Channel”, about the only caption which appears regularly on the channel because once a programme has started, you never get captions for the many talkers and anchors who now flit in and out of its many chat shows and interview programmes. So you either have to guess or ring up the Duty Room, which is a Herculean task. Watching, incidentally, is the operative word. Because if now one gets a clear image, far better than for the National Channel, which DD has reduced to dreary routine although it once used to be the flagship channel, its sound is terrible. Which at times is merciful. For instance when one is watching Mr Guha, who is now DD’s whiz kid for its business programme. I have tried hard to (a) make out what he is saying because he has a very fluffy way with words and (b) from where he gets his accent, which is more or less Mohan Bagan trying to be Boston. In case there was something wrong with me, I asked some other viewers. They all had the same problem and suggested we should ask DD for an interpreter to explain what Guha is saying. DD, are you listening? When the news channel is not distorting the sound, it makes the seconds tick away visibly on the screen. Such seconds cost lakhs per minute and DD is the only channel, which has such time watches. I am told there is a gadget which takes care of such embarrassing moments. But then, when did DD ever get embarrassed? However, after its wild plan to induct news editors and producers to anchor its news hours, DD has suddenly woken up to the fact that it has some experienced and competent correspondents out in what DD considers its boondocks, who could probably teach the news editors and producers a thing or two about screen technique. There was a neat litte despatch on the Cauvery Waters dispute by Maya Jaideep from Bangalore. Others are also being pulled out from the woodwork such as Sanjeve Thomas in Hyderabad, who offers good competition to the competent T.N. Sudhir of Star News in Hyderabad. And Rudra Sanyal in Delhi, who was pulled out from Kargil at its most newsworthy to do an in-house timing course by DD’s administrative and management experts, suddenly popped up with a byline last week, and a very good thing too. Even from distant Calcutta, correspondents such as Sushmita Gupta and man whom DD’s newsroom could not identify, did quite a good job of reporting on Wednesday night. They certainly spoke clearly. Which is more than can be said of some of the anchors on the entertainment programmes of DD News. Cinema Scene, which is obviously DD’s answer to Victor Banerji’s Film India on the BBC has another of those bubbly young women, who not only goes at a reckless speed but drops all her consonants along the way. The male anchor is barely decipherable. A pity, because the content of the programme, including personalities like Amitabh Bachchan, Bobby Deol and Subhas Ghai had possibilities. Were there then no good programmes on the News Channel? Yes, there was a top class interview by Onkar Goswami talking to Shunu Sen. Sophisticated, elegant, informative because both knew each other and their subject well, and moving when discussing Sen’s personal disability without becoming mushy. Without captions, but I doggedly ferreted the names out. TAIL-PIECE: After the
Srinager bonanza and the food programme A Taste of India
on Star Plus on Sunday Nights, where the anchoring leaves
much to be desired, Mr Pramod Mahajan’s son Rahul
had landed another programme on DD I. What is coming to
be known as the heritage series. Well, there are many
more DD and private channels still left to conquer by
young Alexander. |
October
1, 1924 THE Legislative Assembly, with its nationalist majority, has added one more feather to its cap and one more title to the gratitude of the country, by passing Dr. Gour’s Bill for repealing the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The debate, in its concluding stages, was chiefly remarkable for the prominent part which the Punjab played in it. Mr Duni Chand of Ambala made an able and vigorous speech in support of the Bill, which Mr Calvert represented the views of the bureaucracy. Sri Alexander Muddiman, as usual, tried to draw the Leader of the Opposition into his net but the latter lost no time in showing that he was too old a bird to be caught in a trap of that kind. The majority in favour of the Bill was even more decisive than in the case of Pandit Nehru’s amendment on the Lee recommendations, being 71 against 40. It remains to be seen
whether the Government will have the courage, the
imagination and the sense of fairness to accept this
verdict. |
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