VOX POPULI

by

Aam Admi

Issue:126

Date: 18.08.2012

Contents:

1. Excuses Galore & The Best Excuse Givers Are Also Rewarded

2. Police Laxity On Terror Issues

3. 15th August, Independence Day, Do We Need To Celebrate?

4. Independent Nuclear Viability Commission Required

5. Mobile Phones For BPL Families

Excuses Galore & The Best Excuse Givers Are Also Rewarded

The Indian economy is showing serious structural flaws indicative of a long term recession with the recent release of figures of the IIP which has shown a very low growth and among the sectors, capital goods showed a negative trend consistent with the figures that we have seen for the last two months or so. At the same time export figures for the last month were also down and the trade balance data has again showed major errors in computation by the DGFT and the Commerce Ministry. Thus it is not only that the economy is performing badly but the data on it cannot also be relied upon to take any proper corrective action. In all this Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Vice Chairman of the Planning Commission instead of putting his head into looking at the economic problems in a serious manner and coming out with constructive suggestions, has again taken the easy way out by blaming the failure of the monsoon on our economic ills. This is obviously being done to save the government and the policy planners from embarassment and is more a palliative statement which fails to give any confidence to the common man that anything serious is being done to save the economy and alleviate his misery. This in fact has been a pattern where all sorts of excuses are being given by officials and Ministers of this government and they get rewarded for possibly giving the best excuses. Like take the instance of Pranab Mukherjee who was a miserable failure in his last stint as Finance Minister giving only feel-good statements about the economy - that recovery was imminent which did not happen in the 3 years that he held office. And what does he get for the non-performance but get promoted as the President of India. In the same manner Sushil Kumar Shinde did not have a clue as to why we had the massive grid failures that affected almost the whole of northern and eastern India recently and what does he get for making a mess of things but be promoted as the Home Minister and the Leader of the House for the UPA in the Lok Sabha. And on his first foray on the floor of the House he gets into a mess with the entanglement with Jaya Bacchan on the Assam riots for which he had to finally apologise. So much for competence! In the same way the Assam CM by throwing up his hands on his government's ability to control the riots in Kokrajhar and adjoining areas and blaming the Centre for not giving intelligence has in fact encouraged the troublemakers to spread the nuisance to other areas of Assam like Kamrup district etc. If he cannot manage the situation, then should he not quit? What we need to do is that a clear accountability has to be brought in, on the performance of our ministers and government officials since only then we will be able to move forward in a stable manner.

Police Laxity On Terror Issues

After the fracas in Azad Maidan happened recently it has again come to the fore that the Mumbai police had ignored the warning of impending trouble at the rally which has resulted in a majority of their own people getting injured and losing 2 SLR's and a pistol in the melee. This kind of cussedness is nothing new with the Pune police also not considering the threat via anonymous letter based on the killing of the terrorist in Pune jail that revenge would be taken which finally happened with the low intensity blasts at Junglee Maharaj Road where luckily no one lost lives. The same was reported just before the 26/11 terror attack where the Mumbai police had overlooked the warning intelligence given by the Central agencies that a seaborne attack was likely. It is said that the signal from Delhi had been lying on the desk of the Police Commissioner for a week and he saw it only when he came back after the attack was going on full blast. If this is the attitude of the police who ignore leads and believe that they know all and are contemptuous of the terrorists then surely our society is not safe as we have seen time and again. Every single rumour, every single piece of random information should be pursued to its logical conclusion by the police and closed. Alertness and interception are the only ways of stopping future attacks from happening and the earlier our police force realise it, it is better for them and also for the society at large.

15th August, Independence Day, Do We Need To Celebrate?

On 15th August 2012 we celebrated the 66th anniversary of our Independence. At this point we need to pause and look at the word Independence which is also used interchangingly with the word freedom. On 15th August 1947, we did get our freedom from the colonial rule of the British but then in the context of a nation we need to examine as to when we should celebrate a nation, when it frees itself of colonial rule or when it gets formed. In this line of thought when a nation gets formed, its identity is cast and the guiding principles of its governance system is established.This is where one thinks that 26th January 1950 when India was announced to have become a Republic is the day that we should celebrate and not 15th August. There is another aspect to this kind of thinking since at an individual or citizen level, we have all been free since freedom is a state of the mind and irrespective of whatever methods that the rulers, of whatever kind colonial or otherwise, try to impose a common citizen remains free to a large extent based on the state of his or her mind. Even Rabindranath Tagore has said that as long as the mind is without fear there is no question of acquiescing to any kind of hegemony and the individual is essentially free. It is another matter that in India today the common citizen feels that earlier it was the British who ruled us and now the people who rule them, they do not know because of the gross alienation between the rulers and the ruled akin to colonial rule. Our leaders and politicians have created this kind of a divide by confining themselves to their air-conditioned ivory towers protected by Z+ security. Thus hereafter there is no need to celebrate 15th August on the scale it is done now but in a lesser manner just to recognise that also happens to be a date in our history when the British left our shores. In fact we should celebrate Mahatma Gandhi's birthday on 2nd October on a grander scale and similar to the present 15th August since he has been accorded the status of being Father of the Nation and is widely regarded as one of the most important persons responsible for the British leaving India. In the same manner the birthdays of our great and eminent people like Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Rabindranath Tagore, Swani Vivekananda, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Vallabhai Patel, Govind Vallabh Pant, S Radhakrishnan, Sri Aurobndo and others should be celebrated with great fervour so that the values and principles that they stood for become the guiding thoughts for our country particularly our youth. While concluding one needs to look at why politically 15th August is important apart from the being the day British left India and that is for the Congress party to reiterate time and again,year after year that it is they who got India its freedom. To an illiterate and gullible electorate which is the majority in India drumming this fact in ensures that it remains at the top of the mind when elections come along. The advantage that the Congress seeks is that they were there in 1947 and before that since none of the parties like the BJP or others were around at that time and it is the Congress' contention that the Communists did not fight for India's freedom. This thus gives the Congress party the halo it seeks which translates to votes at the hustings. This is, however,a minor reason not to celebrate 15th August as Independence Day since the primary reason is that we should not keep reminding a young and vibrant India about the chains of bondage that we suffered in the past. It is not that we suppress this fact but for the large number who have been born after 15th August 1947 and comprise the present population it is something to read in the history books.

Independent Nuclear Viability Commission Required

On the Kudankulam NPP there was news that by end of August 2012 it would go on-stream and start supplying power to the Southern grid. At the same time the PM expressed his dismay that Russia the principal suppliers to the Kudankulam NPP had refused to bear the liability if at all any accident took place at the plant and its impact on the nuclear reactors equipment that are likely to come from France and the USA for nuclear reactors in different parts of India. Why is the liability issue coming up now at the fag end when the Kudankulam NPP is at the last stage of commissioning? Was this not covered earlier while signing the agreements for the plant? Was this also not what the Kudankulam villagers were saying all along? Along with it came the news that Haryana farmers had a sit-in protest on a nuclear plant coming on their agricultural land in which our eminent and recently retired Gen V K Singh, Chief of Army Staff also joined in considering it was his native village. This while even the inscrutable High Command of the Congress party running the UPA-2 coalition, Sonia Gandhi, had publicly announced that for public projects and industry no agricultural land should be acquired. These are the immaturities or contradictions that we see in India and particular to nuclear energy where a lead screen is drawn on the plans, programs, strategy and operations on grounds of national security. This allows a coterie of scientists and technocrats to dictate terms according to their whims and pet interests which is essentially the virus that is affecting our nuclear programs. Why a country blessed with coal reserves for the next 100 years should pursue the risky option of nuclear energy is something that will never be understood? This more so in the context of the Fukushima tragedy in Japan,where in the independent government commssion report that has been recently released, it has been brought out that the nuclear power industry and the government there actively colluded to propagate the myth that nuclear power was essentially safe and lulled into that belief the stakeholders refused to even recognise these risks. And once when these came to the fore like in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown both the energy operator and the government plotted to keep the information on the risks away from the people and even to their workers and those who lived in the neighbourhood of the plant. You can imagine what would happen in similar circumstances in India where without very much of activity in the area of nuclear energy we pull a veil on operations and it is only after an accident happens that information will come out that there were no liability guarantees. Indian people in the minds of our establishment are dispensable like fodder and deserving of no consideration except to throw some pennies at them if and when an accident happens. Thus it is time that the entire nuclear policy for India be reviewed by an independent commission with feedback from the public and cosmetic gestures like having an autonomous Atomic Regulatory Board are just not enough.

Mobile Phones For BPL Families

The latest initiative by this embattled UPA-2 government of giving mobile phones to BPL families is indeed laughable. The emphasis of roti, kapda, makaan and bijli seems to have been expanded in modern times to the mobile phone. For people occupying our gaddis little does it matter that they have not been able to provide for the first four on the above list but to start on a fifth to delude the public. You may not get food - roti - to eat since the powers that be would rather have it rot in godowns or in open - free to air - spaces as we have seen and what we will see in the next few months with international food prices riding high the better part of our grain stocks will be exported to earn money for the country keeping the worst of the stocks for our people or have them starve. The benefit of all this will go to the vested interests of traders and large exporters with no benefit to the farmer or the aam admi. As for kapda we continue to export cotton, which once upon a time was the aam admi fabric, made famous by Mahatma Gandhi with khadi , but does not clad our people any more. Makaan there are none for the aam admi as we have seen in Mumbai, the teeming metropolis that is representative of the housing problems in our country, where land is hijacked to serve individual interests of politicians and even slum re-development projects are cleared not keeping the interests of the slum-dwellers in mind but on how much FSI and towers that will be allowed for selling the flats that will come upon that property. Bijli we have again lately seen how 600 million people were deprived of power for close to 14 hours with the cascading failure of the Northern, Eastern and North Eastern grids which one may say was a one-off incident for those living in the urban areas but is a daily feature for our rural brethren who on an average do not get more than 6 - 8 hours of power a day. Thus the option for sloganeering on the first four was not possible since all avenues to exploit these had been exhausted and per force the government had to come up with a new tool to delude the common public. This is where the mobile phone comes in to capture the imagination of an aam admi who is starving or living on one meal a day, living in the open or on the pavement or in the shelter of a house balcony or under a flyover and therefore needs no electrical power but give him a mobile phone and he will forget his suffering and talk his heart out until the pre-paid amount runs out and then not affording to pay the phone bills he will smash the phone to the ground. Q.E.D. & R.I.P. So much for freebies that have no meaning and do not empower the people except for that instant when they cast their vote.

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