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‘Punjab is broke; we need innovative ideas to get out of the mess’ |
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Musharraf’s mystique
Profile
On Record
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‘Punjab is broke; we need innovative ideas to get out of the mess’
Excerpts: How does it feel to be back in the centre of action in Punjab? It is an interesting feeling. I have been the President for four years from 1998, then Chief Minister for five years, and then I was out of power. We are now back in the race by God’s grace. It is a crucial time; we have got a year to go; and the party is mobilised and the morale of partymen is high. Punjab is very receptive. So, there should be no reason why we should not win the next election. If you became captain of the Punjab ship, so to speak, what would be your priorities for the state? My primary task would be to ameliorate the economy of the state. If one’s financial position is sound, everything is fine. Four million youngsters are waiting for jobs and something would have to be done to accommodate and help them. But you are inheriting a fragmented State Congress party some of which was your own doing when you were Chief Minister? I do not think that is correct. We are a big party and we are people with diverse opinions and during the course of our functioning everyone has his own opinion and we come together to discuss the issues. In politics, finally, we have the Congress President and whoever has any grievance or wish for something to happen in Punjab could go to the Congress President. So, we work quite closely. Much of the differences are media creation. If I go to a place then they ask why have you come alone? Why isn’t Mrs Bhattal there? You do not hold hands and move everywhere together. We are responsible people and we do our job. What’s your assessment of the Parkash Singh Badal government’s performance? Badal has never been an intellectual. He is a good man for campaigning. He will go off early in the morning to late night from village to village. And his thought process is forty years behind time, as far as I look at it. I do not think he could bring about policies that would propel the State into the next century and, let us say, take it high up. And then there are young men — Sukhbir and Manpreet — one was pulling the government to the right and the other to the left. So nothing was working. What do you mean that nothing was working? We have a major problem in Punjab. There is an economic crisis. We have income of about Rs 20,000 crore and there is a state debt of Rs 71,000 crore. This does not include the debt guaranteed by the State for public sector units which would double the debt figure. The State is borrowing Rs 8,000 crore approximately every year just to exist and that goes just to salary or to servicing. About the revenue stream, nobody is bothering about it. Punjab today is at half of the national growth. India today is targeting at about 9 per cent; we are at 4.7 per cent. So, if you do not do something which propels Punjab forward, the debt crisis will get worse. In short, Punjab is broke? Yes, we are literally broke. How does Punjab move forward without innovative ideas? You have got to bring about new ideas where you hold your people and your industries and say, “yes, we will do it”. Bring a new industrial policy; make a total paradigm shift from what the system was in the Badal set up and really target specific areas which you think can put Punjab forward. What did you do when you were in power? Didn’t you also let things slide? That is not correct. We did two things. For the primary sector, we said that income today is about Rs 30,000 per acre for the farmer, we have to target it at about Rs one lakh an acre. And among other things we encouraged citrus farming. We also brought that field-to-folk programme where the idea was to change the agricultural pattern into growing vegetables where you go to as many as five crops and set up marketing units to market them. In industry, we got commitments for 399 mega projects of Rs 1,07,000 crore. Had we put those in, apart from industry becoming buoyant in Punjab, we would have created a million jobs. Then the government changed and with that attitudes also changed. What happened? The government that followed us did nothing. Who has suffered? Not the Badal family, but the common man of Punjab. This witch-hunting has to stop. In industry there is a feeling that Badal will throw out everything put up during Amarinder Singh’s regime and vice versa. I would say that when the Congress comes back to power in Punjab, we will honour everything that the Badal government has done from this point of view. We want industry and the industry must know that there is continuity in policy whichever government is there. What about the debt waiver that Manpreet said they were negotiating with the Centre? The debate that took place in the Assembly because I had asked for it and this is where Manpreet Badal made a statement of Rs 35,000 crore. Mr Badal endorsed what his Finance Minister was saying not knowing what the facts were. The fact is that there was no figure of Rs 10,000 or 20,000 or 35,000 crore. There were only preliminary discussions. The Finance Minister was making a wrong statement to the House and his Chief Minister was endorsing that. That is why I said we will move a privilege motion against them. What about the issue of subsidies? Would your party advocate the cuts that were being sought by the Centre? We have a social commitment to the state. Of the 4.6 million families in Punjab, about 1.3 million families are Below the Poverty Line and half of them are poorest than the poor. If I think that I can do away with subsidies and let those people down, it is not possible. Look at the national level. Today, the Congress party is bringing out the Food Security Act. Why? Because of the poor people of the country. Similarly, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act the Prime Minister brought to give jobs to everybody so that they can feed their families. We will have to balance the business of subsidy. It should go to the poorest of the poor, but it should not go to the upper class. Why should Badal get agricultural subsidies when he has got thousands acres of land? What will be the impact of Manpreet’s departure from the Government and the Shiromani Akali Dal? Let’s put it this way. Manpreet Badal was sort of an intellectual; but his father was a politician and his brother’s politics was run by the father. So, if Manpreet wishes to fight the party he has his constituency, thanks to his father, which he will have to develop on his own. He will be able to do something perhaps there but only in a small area. The trouble with the new generation is that they want to jump too many steps in a day. This is my 41st year in politics and when I joined politics Sukhbir was studying in kindergarten. You cannot be at kindergarten and hope to take over. You have to learn the trade. Why didn’t you want Manpreet in the Congress? I do not think so because the line with the Badals in his area had been drawn between the Congress and the Akalis for the last 35 years. Ever since he emerged on the scene they had a system of ruthlessly putting down the Congress. You think for the sake of a little bit of support we can put up with Manpreet? I am not for that. We will be letting down our own workers. I have not discussed it at Delhi. But if I am asked, I will give my views on these lines. What do you think of Parkash Singh Badal and do you think Sukhbir will take over as chief minister even before the elections? I think Badal is getting on age and Sukhbir is jumping too fast. So to me both are the same. I really do not care whether Sukhbir becomes CM. I think Punjab is receptive and the Congress Party today is united and at the grassroots level they are just waiting for an opportunity. Badal has dropped all the cases against you. Does this mean the end of vendetta politics? He is very magnanimous! I never asked him to do the defamation case and never asked him to remove it. We do not have time for settling vendettas. Our focus is now to get Punjab moving. If anybody has a complaint about anything, the government will look into it. If we are concentrating on harming each other the loss will be of Punjab. We have to forget everything and just get on to the job of good governance and take it out of mess. There has been criticism that since you have been in power you have kept aloof and mix only in elite circles especially with foreigners including from Pakistan? This is absolutely a non-issue. I have friends in Britain, I have friends in Canada, America and Pakistan; everywhere I have friends. I have intelligent persons as my friends. This is one’s personal life; and without friends one’s life is boring. What was the big lesson you learned during this period out of power? My father, who ruled a vast area of the United Punjab, specifically advised me: “Never look back, always see forward.” So, I never see what has been left behind.
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Musharraf’s mystique
General
Pervez Musharraf, the former Army Chief and President of Pakistan, is like a ghostly radar echo that appears from nowhere, creates panic and vanishes in a cloud of chaff. Now it’s from London that he has popped up after years in exile and the subcontinent is buzzing with speculation. Interestingly, he has made a habit of doing this, each time he is away from his home base in Pakistan. This is the stuff that the media thrives on and Musharraf has made the most of it. Remember Kargil? That was when Musharraf made his explosive debut as the Army Chief of Pakistan in May 1999. The General was away in China, ostensibly on an official visit, when an intelligence agency managed to intercept his telephonic conversation with his Chief of General Staff, Lt-Gen Mohd Aziz Khan in Islamabad. Only then did we come to know that the multiple intrusions across the Line of Control were part of a sinister strategic manoeuvre which had been personally planned and orchestrated by Musharraf with regular Pakistani Army troops masquerading as Mujahideen freedom fighters. Until the treachery at Kargil was exposed, we had believed quite foolishly that Pakistan’s Army Chief was a sober and plain thinking commando incapable of intrigue or deception. Kargil unveiled that façade but more than that it also revealed Musharraf’s eccentricity. Maddened by the failure of his Kargil gamble, he went so far as to blackmail Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and threatened nuclear retaliation against India. Then quite mysteriously, Musharraf vanished from the scene, leaving a helpless Prime Minister to sort out the Kargil imbroglio and face the wrath of the international community. It was from Sri Lanka that Musharraf hatched his next move. This time around, the radar blip that painted menacingly on the Air Traffic Controller’s panel at Karachi was no illusion and left Nawaz Sharif dazed with no reaction time for a counter air operation. Musharraf landed on Pakistani soil and a saddened nation watched tamely as his loyalists including Lt-Gen Mohd Aziz Khan and Lt-Gen Ahmed staged a well rehearsed military coup. In his wildest dreams, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may never have expected such betrayal from his favourite General who had been handpicked by him as the Army Chief of Pakistan. Having shown his true colours, Musharraf faded into the background and came forth in his new avatar as the military President of Pakistan. The scheming General took on the guise of an international peacemaker and joined the chorus against global terrorism. It was music to our ears and there were many who even believed that Musharraf was an angel of peace with Kargil and the military coup being only a fairy tale. This was dramatic irony that would have sent William Shakespeare into ecstasy. In his transformed civilian persona, embellished with a stylish Navy salute, Pervez Musharraf breezed into the Agra Summit in July 2001. He had the air of a seasoned statesman as he promised peace in the subcontinent with unabashed sincerity. The rugged Army commando had acquired Machiavellian skills with which he charmed the media and disarmed our political establishment. Fortunately, our armed forces were not taken in by this charade and always maintained that Kargil is the real face of Musharraf. In fact, what is little known is that Musharraf’s obsession with the Line of Control goes back to his days as a Brigadier when he tried his stunts at the Siachen glacier. In or out of military uniform, Kashmir has remained the deep-rooted military agenda of Musharraf and this has been the advice of our Service Chiefs for dealing with Musharraf. Sadly, this advice went unheeded at the Agra Summit where Musharraf craftily played his ‘Kashmir’ card and startled the Indian side as he merrily stomped out of the meeting with the media fawning over him. Now alas, it’s Musharraf ahoy from London. He has popped up suddenly from out of the cold, though it’s not surprising since the solitude of exile may have been unbearable for this power-hungry impresario. He is obviously eyeing his old hunting grounds in the subcontinent in keeping with the Biblical proverb — where your treasure is, there will also be your heart. Enamoured by Musharraf’s mystique, the media got him on their radar. His pronouncements on terror sound bizarre coming from someone who skillfully fuelled the terror network of the subcontinent even as he jumped onto the American bandwagon. So his penchant of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds has been stimulated by the current turmoil in Pakistan where anti-American sentiment is running high and the Taliban with their soulmates seem to be gathering momentum. With the Pakistan Army chomping at the bit, his old instincts may have been rekindled. Returning to Islamabad with a political party in tow may well be a ploy for a soft landing and to pave the way for another military coup. But does it matter how it happens? When there was a change of guard in Pakistan last time, Musharraf had flown in from Colombo; this time it would be from London. Should all this happen, there may be a silver lining to it. Hopefully, Pakistan may finally have someone with authority to whom we can
talk.
The writer was the Chief of Naval Staff during the Kargil conflict
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Profile
Malaria
continues to be the major public health hazard in many parts of the tropical world, with 500 million cases reported annually that result in 1-2 million deaths every year. Deaths from malaria occur in young children living in sub-Saharan Africa and are caused with P. Falciparum. Soon the Malaria of this type will be eradicated. Noted biophysicist Dr Chetan E. Chitnis has successfully identified the erythrocyte binding protein on malaria parasite and its host leading to development of a viable malaria vaccine. A recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Medical Sciences, Chitnis has now bagged the prestigious ‘Infosys Prize 2010’. For a man trained in physics from the IITs, working on the frontiers of biology might appear a strange shift. But not for Chitnis who could be closer to cracking the malaria conundrum than one may think. He is homing in on a vaccine for it by figuring out how the parasite plans out its invasion of red blood cells and blocking that path. The big switch, of course, came in the US in 1980s when he was at the molecular biology lab at Berkeley, and then at the National Institutes of Health, where his tailing of the parasite began. Chitnis returned to India in 1996 and joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Delhi. “It’s possible to do good science in this country”, he says, Chitnis received his Ph.D in Biophysics from the University of California-Berkeley in 1990. He completed postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is currently a Research Scientist in the Malaria Group at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in New Delhi. Chitnis is a young investigator in the Malaria group at ICGEB. He has established an independent research group and that performs basic research on malaria parasite biology and also has a strong programme on malaria vaccine development. A state-of-the-art process development laboratory with clean rooms and other infrastructure for production of recombinant protein-based malaria vaccines has been established at the ICGEB under this vaccine development programme. In addition, he has established collaborative links with clinicians at the Ispat General Hospital, Rourkela, Orissa and Malaria Research Centre Field Station, Rourkela, to conduct clinical research and field studies on malaria in a P. Falciparum malaria endemic region of India. Chitnis’ group at ICGEB, New Delhi, is ideally suited to not only conduct basic laboratory-based research on malaria but can also undertake field studies and translational research towards development of new interventional strategies against malaria. The Infosys Prize aims to recognise and acknowledge outstanding work done by researchers, creating role models and thereby encouraging the youth to pursue in scientific research, says Infosys Chairman and Chief Mentor N.R. Narayan Murthy. Scientific research, he says, is the key to sustaining growth and is critical for India to ensure that research remains an attractive profession for the nation’s finest minds, The winners of the Infosys Prize 2010 were chosen by a jury panel comprising eminent scientists and professors from across the world. In recognition of their outstanding contributions to the scientific research, the winners will receive a cash prize of Rs. 50 lakhs each, a citation certificate and a gold medallion. The awards will be presented to the winners by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Mumbai on January 6. The Infosys Science Foundation was established as an annual prize across five categories to reward and recognise outstanding investors or discovery or a cumulative body of work. The objective of this prize is to elevate the prestige of scientific research in India and to inspire young Indians to pursue a career in scientific research. The Infosys Science Foundation Trust was set up by Infosys Technologies in February, 2009, to promote research in science in
India.
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On Record
The
Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), set up in 1965 to promote academic research, is today aiming to attain a global foothold and emerge as the “Modern Nalanda” attracting scholars from the world over. Prof Peter Ronald deSouza, Director of IIAS and a renowned political theorist, has written extensively on panchayati raj and democracy. He speaks to The Tribune in Shimla. Excerpts: Q: How do you define the IIAS? Is it a think-tank, a research institute or a training centre? A: It is a place where some very important perennial questions of human existence with policy implications can be pursued. The institute has provided space for development of India’s human capital, where people from educational landscape can re-energise themselves. The biggest contribution of the institute is to create an inter-disciplinary mindset and in the process impact the research and teachings of scholars when they go back to their parent institute. There are no classes or training schedules but only seminars, workshops and study weeks that are thematic. The identified issues are debated in an intense period and can be wide-ranging right from Lohia’s writings to changing the social fabric of Haryana and Punjab. Q: What linkages does the institute have with other institutes in and outside India? A: Since the IIAS carries the burden of being at the apex of knowledge landscape in India, we feel the need to connect with other premiere institutes across the country. We keep holding collaborative programmes in which emerging issues are deliberated upon to lead a debate which can protect citizens of India. We have held a collaborative programme with National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, on ethical, legal and social implications of the human genome research. A seminar on Special Economic Zones (SEZ) was recently held and we will soon release a book on the subject. Q: What does the future hold for the institute and how do you visualise its growth? A: India is one of the most complex societies in the world which needs to be investigated at multiple levels. We wish to bring into India constitutional democracy. Therefore, we have to deal right from resource sharing. The institute should try to make its global presence by attracting foreign scholars individually or through collaborations with other bodies like the European Union, that we have already had in the past. The government has been immensely supportive as it understands the importance of helping institutions like ours. We would like to invite more scholars from world over. Q: Which areas need more study and research? A: One area which needs to be studied deeper is the relationship between science and society. Oxford has set up a separate Centre for Science and Religion, having realised the importance of the topic. Another area where we need to consolidate our initiatives is in connecting with India’s diaspora who are part of overseas knowledge institutes. Today some intellectual giants, who are big names in academics, are desirous of returning to their motherland to study the vibrant and merging India. We too are keen to consolidate on this aspect and help them re-connect. We are already hearing from scholars from Oxford, Copenhagen, Neo School of Social Research, New York, and many more such institutes. Another area which needs greater attention is to have more interaction with nations like Africa, Latin America and South East Asia as we have a lot in common in various areas. A lot of societal innovations are taking place in places like Bolivia, Brazil and Vietnam which we need to look at closely. Similarly, we need to connect with South East Asia where Indian culture has a major presence. Nobel laureate and pro-democracy leader in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, did research at the IIAS for eight months in 1986. Her husband spent three years doing research at the IIAS. Q: Any dream project? A: The conservation and restoration project of the Viceregal Lodge, constructed in 1888 and presently housing the IIAS, should be expedited. A lot of funds are required and I am sure, further deterioration of the building will be arrested.n
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