VOX POPULI

by

Aam Admi

Issue:138

Date: 10.11.2012

Contents:

1. The Gadkari Affair

2. Intemperate & Irresponsible Statements By Our Politicians

3. The PM Should Speak On Inflation

4. On Corruption Matters

5. In Light Of ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy, Review Siting Of All Coast Based NPP’s

The Gadkari Affair

The Gadkari comment about the IQ of Swami Vivekananda and Dawood Ibrahim takes the cake. Anyone in public life should have that much sense not to take their names in the same breath or put them on the same page. The immaturity on the part of the BJP President in this matter is stunning. These kind of leaders think that they can get away with anything by adopting the excuse that they were misquoted or clarifying what they actually meant. In fact all this they should do before they open their mouth so that there is no chance of anyone even misinterpreting them. Even the RSS has criticized their blue eyed boy, Gadkari for the Swami Vivekananda comment. It is not that the RSS is any better since Mohan Bhagwat on Dussehra day openly declared that they do not look at the colour of the money that comes to them as long as it is used for a good social or public cause. Which raises a question that if Dawood Ibrahim agrees to contribute to the RSS cause, will Mohan Bhagwat accept his money? The BJP at its national executive meeting in Delhi y/day(6th) decided to brazen it out on the charge of Gadkari using irregular means for funding his Purti group, with which we claims he has no links now. This position is again going to cost the BJP very dearly in its ability to put the Congress on the mat for corruption in the upcoming winter session of Parliament. Not only that with the electorate before the upcoming general elections the BJP will be on a wet wicket to explain their stand on corruption. Moreover this indirectly corroborates Arvind Kejriwal’s charge that the Congress and BJP are but two sides of the same corruption coin. The manner in which the BJP has handled the Gadkari affair is a media disaster since with the TV channels, it has effectively pushed out the Congress corruption stories of Coal Gate, Robert Vadra propert deals and Salman Khurshid trust case to the background and brought to the fore the rift within the BJP and the fact that the BJP Hanuman’s tikki (pigtail) is still in the hands of the RSS. What should have been done is to dump Gadkari since after all he is just an individual and the party is bigger than him. This would also have demonstrated that the BJP as a party are willing to bite the bullet when it comes to hard decisions.

Intemperate & Irresponsible Statements By Our Politicians

Lately there have a been a spate of intemperate & irresponsible comments from many of our leaders belonging to almost every party ranging from saying that Swami Vivekananda and Dawood Ibrahim have the same IQ's, to saying that old wives are not as much fun as young wives to saying that 80% of the rapes are consensual to the belief that inflation is good for the farmers to accepting that Rs. 70 lakhs corruption is too small and Rs. 70 crores would be a better index to look at for initiating a probe. All this goes to show the mind-set of our leaders and their belief that the target segment that they need to address is more the immature, uneducated and those accept such statements as normal. Otherwise on matters of corruption like we have seen instead of looking at the basic fact that corruption is wrong, they tend to compare who is the bigger corrupt person and go back 10/20 years in picking at the other person to justify their present corrupt actions. We thus have mediocrity rampant amongst our leaders today and that too with no sense of morality and a basic adherence to values and principles. In fact they are leaders of the worst kind. These leaders as said earlier play up to the large mass of uneducated and under-educated India. If India has to change for the better we have to radically transform this. One option is to bring in proportional representation (PR) and the other is to give a weightage to votes such that those who have more education will have more value for their votes. PR brings in a truer representation of the voting pattern rather than the system that we have now of being first-past-the post. One of the criticisms of PR has been that it builds more coalitions than big majorities. And the reality in India is for the next decade or two is that you will have to live with coalitions. Therefore PR is an option since then you give our legislatures more of a representative feel of its constituency. The weighted vote needs also to be considered since our politicians tend to manipulate the large majority of uneducated and under-educated voters and convert them to vote banks. They get thus elected year after year by feeding these vote banks with populist schemes which again provide verdant opportunities for corruption. Thus the educated and considered vote based on careful thought and cultivated debate is lost in the scrabble of the large mass of illiterate votes. This weighted vote system will have an advantage since it will be aspirational encouraging the uneducated to better themselves through education. Not only that as we have seen the urban voting percentages falling in each election over the years because of the mostly educated voter being disenchanted that there is essentially no value for his or her vote, the weighted vote system may make it possible that more of the educated will come out to vote making our democracy more functional. These methods will in the longer term get our legislatures filled with a more educated and better quality of people than what we have today. In fact there has been a noticeable change in our successive Lok Sabhas that our MP’s are getting more and more educated and there are more graduate and professionally qualified people than in the past. This may be the only way to make our democracy meaningful which today is fast degenerating into a farce.

The PM Should Speak On Inflation

Around the first week of September 2012, after hiking the prices of diesel by Rs. 5 a litre, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said that the inflationary impact from the price hike would be just a bump lasting about 6-8 weeks. One would believe that this time span has passed and we need to raise the question - Has inflation been under control? The fact of the matter is that it has not and even RBI in its recent credit policy review has not ventured to reduce interest rates for fear of continued inflationary pressures. One will therefore conclude from this that the PM was probably lying or making a careless comment resting sure that there would be none to make him accountable for the comment. This is nothing new since the PM and his team have been doing exactly that, lying to us for the last 3 years and consistently at that. Inflation continues to be up and everything is going up from commodity to gold. The only thing that has been going down has been the value of the rupee and the BSE stock market index but for a blip of an increase whenever the FM has talked it up. Even consider the limit of 6 cylinders per connection in a year, which the government wanted to implement almost in the manner of a stricture saying that they have done their homework and this is the norm which individual families are using per available statistics and any usage of more than this number will have to be at the non-subsidised rate. Then when there was widespread opposition to this measure though the government stalled the roll-back, it is learnt that the number 6 may be revised to 9. This has been held back for the Himachal & Gujarat elections to finish otherwise the EC would object to this as a poll influencing measure. This pattern of unreliable data with the government has been the norm for all critical indices of economic performance over the last 3 years. Thus essentially one has to conclude that this government acting on such unreliable data is shooting in the dark and therefore has no clue in which direction the Indian economy is going. Everything that they do now is as if there is no tomorrow and they seem to not believing their luck on their new found energy at least on paper. The PM continues with his homilies and fable tales like every family has to manage with what they earn and if they stretch beyond their earnings, you know what will happen to them (speech of 4th Nov 2012 at the Congress rally in Delhi) and that now famous – money does not grow on trees (televised address to the nation after the announcement of FDI approvals in multi-brand retail). Whom is he talking to? A bunch of primary school students. Get serious, Mr PM.

On Corruption Matters

In the Congress rally at Delhi y/day,4th Nov 2012, their top brass attacked the Opposition by saying that they were neck-deep in corruption. This is surely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. It is the Congress which has earned itself the dubious reputation for running the most corrupt government in India's history and it is calling others corrupt. It may be only Gadkari in the BJP who is involved in financial impropriety but the honour roll of corruption within the Congress starts from Sonia Gandhi, her son and son-in-law, and extends right across the present and/or past Cabinets even down to the recent re-shuffle where the tainted have been rewarded. After all there is nothing wrong with that since in the robber's code it is the extent of proficiency in the trade which allows you to climb the ladder of power. But the sad part in all this is that the Congresspersons are inveterate liars. They lie with a straight face like Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Dwivedi & A K Anthony, they lie with crooked faces like with Suresh Kalmadi, Pranab Mukherji (before he was bounced into Rashtrapati Bhawan), P C Chacko & Sushil Shinde, they lie in anger bordering on apoplexy like Salman Khurshid, A K Sibal and Narainswamy. But the important thing is that they all lie and that too all the time and on important and critical national issues. There is also the other thing that has emerged is that with a wink and a smile one can get to the other side of the law in your business transactions where the colour is grey and not necessarily black. This is the nature and manner of Robert Vadra's business indiscretions which essentially no one in India's political circles or in the corporate sector want to be investigated since if a precedent is set on this then there is the chance that 99% of India's corporate czars and businesses will be implicated. So like they say this is a dog eat dog world and everything goes. So go ahead and do anything you want but do not contact me if you get caught since I will pretend that I do not know you at all.

In Light Of ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy, Review Siting Of All Coast Based NPP’s

While the Kudankulam stir continues apace with the latest attempt to unsuccessfully to gherao the Legislative assembly in Chennai after the blockade of the ports near the plant site, the authorities are showing their stubborn side by continuing with the insertion of the fuel rods in the reactor to get it going in about a month’s time. This intransigence in the face of actual incidents like Fukushima earlier and now ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy which has wreaked havoc on the eastern seaboard of the United States, definitely prove that siting nuclear power plants (NPP) near the sea is a grave risk and shows up the obtuseness of our authorities to risks faced by the common people living around these plants. It is not just Kudankulam but also Jaitapur and many of the other NPP’s that will dot India’s coastline as a master plan to make us energy ‘secure’ at the possible risk to millions of people living adjacent to these plants and the livelihood of many more millions in adjoining areas consequent upon the impact on marine life with the rise in temperature of the seawater by about 7 degree Centigrade. The two most developed nations in the world first Japan in the case of Fukushima and now the US with ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy have not been able to cope with and protect its facilities from the fury of nature. Should we not take a lesson from these and take abundant caution while planning for our critical facilities. With global warming actually playing a more clear-cut role in the last few years as we have seen in the very unpredictable changes in weather which has led to extremes of floods and drought in many areas around the world and very severe storms, we have to factor in the unpredictability of nature and set up critical installations with more than abundant caution. The example for this is the unusual course of ‘Frankenstorm’ Sandy which hit the shores of New Jersey and the city of New York which hereto was too far north for the hurricances since the most norther they got was North & South Carolina and maybe Pennsylvania. Thus New Jersey and New York was hit causing massive damage with oil tankers thrown on to the beach, massive flooding of the streets including the subways of the Big Apple, fires in electrical power facilities causing severe power outages which took close to 6 days to restore. The Oyster Creek NPP in New Jersey had to take precautions against possible flooding. We had also the very remarkable sight of New Yorkers queuing up for petrol and food since without petrol, power and water, not many could fend for themselves. CNN also had a climate scientist from Princeton University come in and say that no strategic and critical facilities should be sited near the sea coast given the unpredictability of weather consequent of global warming. Thus when the most advanced nation in this world was not able to protect its facilities and people from the fury of nature, how are we so sure that we have taken all precautions to make our coast based nuclear power plants safe. Is it all bluff that the government authorities have been feeding us, since they have gone up to even the Supreme Court and given these assurances. The highest court of the land though not approving to stop the loading of the fuel rods in the Kudankulam NPP has been asking the right questions like lately as to where will the nuclear waste be disposed? But adamancy apart the government and its agencies have to seriously consider shutting down the Kudankulam NPP and review the siting of other coast based NPP’s. Or is it that life is cheap in India and the loss of life of a couple of lakhs at one time is not going to be much and that they will hardly be missed? Essentially the premise that without nuclear power we will have no energy security is wrong and it is time that we re-visited this principle and looked at coal and non-conventional sources of energy like solar power where technology has led to a large drop in costs making per unit energy cost equivalent on a total distributed basis to that from coal. Our energy security should come from the strength and capacity of our resources and not like with nuclear energy on the mercy of other nations to give us nuclear fuel.

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