Showing posts with label America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label America. Show all posts

Friday, October 05, 2012

THE GRAND OBAMA BEGGING GAME!

Barack Obama came, he spoke and he conquered. At least that’s what some of the biggest media houses would have you believe. Nothing could be more misleading for the Indian public. Here are the reasons why the trip was only of feel-good value, that too for dumb people.

1. Obama had a clear-cut mandate. And that mandate was to show Americans that he was taking back jobs for them. He took away business worth $10 billion and 50,000 jobs. These $10 billion could have been used in India to create 200 times more jobs, because for every American job we create in America, we can roughly create about 200 jobs in rural India. It was a classic game of begging that the new America is now seen playing in India and China. With India, it’s about access to its markets and deals with the government. And with China, it’s about the revaluation of the Chinese currency to reduce their foreign debt and make Chinese products uncompetitive in American markets! I would even say that it was indeed sad to see such a weak American President for the first time in history. An American President is expected to speak like a great statesman – whether he speaks to businessmen or to the Parliament. He is expected to talk about America’s role in global peacekeeping and poverty eradication, the latter more so since India has 65% of people below the globally defined poverty line of people earning less than $2 a day. It was a shame that his talks never touched upon any of it.

2. He did speak of the need for Pakistan to bring 26/11 criminals to justice... But that is purely lip service. He never spoke of access to Headley. Just before coming to India, he doled out $2.2 billion military aid to Pakistan. Talking about Pakistan supporting terrorism, yet giving them money to spread terrorism in India; both cannot go hand in hand. It’s typical American double speak. He did not utter a word about stopping aid to Pakistan. He only used cleverly worded stuff about Pakistan to gain brownie points in India without giving away anything.

3. He did not utter a word about China and its role in supporting Pakistan or its illegal occupation of Indian land. But a few months back, he did speak about the need for China to be the guardian of South Asia, including Kashmir.

4. It was really nice of Obama to be so appreciative of Gandhi. But as Americans prepare for a war on Iran – less for security issues and more to revive their economy – I doubt if Gandhi is what he really believes in... Loving Gandhi and bombing countries for financial gains don’t go hand in hand. As a person, I am very sure that he appreciates Gandhi, but as a world leader, he does not display the same in his actions. Signing a memorandum allowing poor African countries to use children for war certainly doesn’t speak greatly for a Gandhian.

5. The big Obama announcement is supposed to have been about his support to India for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. It might be noted that what he said has been said in the exact words by Bush before him and Clinton before that. It’s a shame that as a nation, we get so excited by such lip service. We deserve to be in the Security Council, and without us the Security Council is a sham. Obama’s mentioning the same is not a favour. And there is absolutely no reason to be excited about it. A permanent seat is our due and it is the Security Council’s job to call us and give us this due with appropriate apologies for the delay. And we should then proceed to rip them apart for the delay.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
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Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Daring to Dream beyond Third World!

 I t is the season for pundits to pontificate on the decade that has gone by and appear suitably magisterial while predicting what lies in the decade looming over the horizon. I never wanted to be a pundit and will never be able to appear magisterial. So, I will restrict myself to suggesting some basic mindset changes in our country if we are to finally discard the Third World tag by the end of 2019.

The mindset change that we need is to stop thinking of India as a former colony and a victim of global myriad conspiracies. We as a nation are becoming so prickly that it is often laughable. If George Bush signs a nuclear deal with India that is truly historic, we whine and crib and proclaim that America wants to colonise India. If China arm twists the World Bank into not giving a loan for a project in Arunanchal Pradesh, we see dark conspiracies and start revisiting 1962. Ditto for the Doha round of WTO, for the Copenhagen Round of climate control talks and permanent membership of the UN Security Council. As a nation, we must become less prickly and more practical in pursuit of national interests. And what is our long term national interest? Growing at 8% a year and finally eradicating poverty. For that, we need to reform ourselves; not blame America or China.

The second mindset change that we need urgently as a society is to become more generous and charitable. Sure, we have examples of generous individuals and institutions in India. But what they do is not even a patch on what greedy capitalists do in America. I humbly request each one of the 200 million middle class Indians to make a pledge that they will voluntarily contribute Rs.5,000 a year towards primary education of poor children. Believe me, if middle class individuals and corporate entities make and implement this pledge, India will eradicate illiteracy by 2019 – even if successive governments are inefficient and corrupt.

The third mindset change that we as a society and nation need to urgently implement is to raise our sense of civic pride and responsibility. I know it is a tired cliché, the one about the Indian keeping her home spotlessly clean while nonchalantly dumping garbage on the streets. Indians desperately need to learn more civic manners and work ethics. It is wonderful to gloat about the beauty of our chalta hai mindset, but we will never cross the threshold of Third World scorn unless we change our ways as citizens. And please don’t blame politicians for this; it is you and I who are squarely to blame.

The last and most urgent mindset change is related to our education system. Our education system is geared to mass manufacture unemployable morons who only know how to follow orders, rules or a set pattern of work. Innovation, free thinking and initiative are ruthlessly discouraged – by schools, by parents and by peers. India will always be condemned to be a Third World nation unless we change this.


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Saturday, July 28, 2012

For Salman Khurshid, it is a Big Challenge ahead; and I Personally look forward to a Revolutionary a couple of years ahead!

As a media house, from the very beginning, we have been extremely vocal about the Indian judiciary – and that’s why we have also started our bimonthly supplement of Governance Watch with a special focus on the judiciary. We strongly believe that a poor justice delivery mechanism has been the root cause of most of our problems. It goes without saying that India has a weak, or rather a limping justice delivery system, which makes sure that justice is denied in most cases; and even if delivered, it does not hold any value, thanks to the time (read lifetime) it takes to be delivered. By the Centre’s own admission, there is a staggering number of nearly 300 million court cases pending at several stages in different courts of India. This situation is a deliberate creation of our successive governments. If criminals were to be punished, how would they rule? Thus, to make the rule of criminals easy, the governments in India over the years have deliberately kept the judicial system in our country dysfunctional. It serves the purpose of the legal fraternity as well. Thanks to the years or decades that it takes to execute a case and to take it to its culmination, the legal fraternity invariably ends up making windfall profits. And thanks to the absence of a time-bound justice delivery mechanism, making moolah is not at all a challenge for our legal fraternity, as they are quite adept at purposefully making cases hang on for years. The only thing that we nowadays talk about is corruption. And the one and only solution for solving this issue of corruption is a functional judicial system. Corruption and greed are globally prevalent; yet these touch far less lives in USA than in India simply because the American judicial system is functional while ours is dysfunctional. In America, they have ten times more judges per million people than in India; so there is a fear of immediate punishment – while in India, there is no such fear of punishment.

Thus, there are two key things that the government must do to make our judicial system functional. The first is to take the number of our judges to about ten times the current figures. If we are to try and achieve such standards, we need to have about 100,000 or so more judges. It sounds huge, but is surely achievable; and in a span of five years too. Therefore, to have 20,000 additional judges per year, we have to budget for approximately Rs.60 billion per year additionally, assuming that the expenses around a judge and his office assistants put together would be (and is actually definitely) not more than Rs.3,000,000 per year. Given our massive annual budget and given that at least we at the IIPM Think Tank have been lobbying for the same through our alternate budgets for more than 11 years now, it’s a shame to see budgets being passed year after year with no focus on the judicial machinery and with no substantive budgets being allocated for improving the said system – that too after the government bravely declared that by 2012, all the backlog of our 3 crore pending cases will be cleared. It’s just a year more to go and nothing concrete has happened in that direction. The second thing the government must do is pass a statutory law in the Parliament that would guarantee and typically force the delivery of justice in a timely manner. In developed countries like US, for petty cases, people filing cases in the morning get justice literally by the evening. Even if India doesn’t end up being so fast, still the concept of having a law that enforces that a case be adjudged within a stipulated time would be good enough.

Of late, to me personally, our law ministry was doing relatively good and so was our judiciary. The honourable Supreme Court of India has been displaying a proactive behaviour with respect to burning social and political issues (of course, it indicates the failure of the other two pillars of the nation viz. legislature and the executive at large). The decisions taken by the Supreme Court since the last couple of months are in the areas that largely come under the ambit of the executive and not the court per se – almost akin to “ethical hacking”. The judiciary for that matter was designed to oversee the law breaching incidents and not spearhead the law implementation operandi. Traditionally and fundamentally, functioning of the courts were restricted to provide justice to aggrieved parties on the basis of evidences collected by the executive and by following the laws drafted by the legislature. However, and although it could be construed as trespassing beyond their decision areas, the court’s efforts have been laudable. Take for example the appointment by the Supreme Court of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe money laundering cases and to go deeper into the black money issue; or even the action taken by the Supreme Court against New Delhi police officials after Baba Ramdev’s protest against black money and corruption – both of which should have been initiated by the executive or the legislature or the state machinery. In both these cases, the Supreme Court went a step ahead to protect the very essence of democracy, and this is highly commendable. Similarly, the order to distribute food grains – which is otherwise rotting in granaries – to poor people was given by the court again. Under all circumstances, such orders are meant to be announced by the executive, as food storage and distribution are responsibilities of the state administration. But by going beyond its defined role, the Supreme Court has come to the rescue of millions. Moreover, this apex institution with its near-clean record has kept its head high and continued the legacy of protecting the nation – unlike within the other two pillars of democracy, there have been literally very few cases of corruption in this institution.

Under our former Minister of Law and Justice, Mr. Veerappa Moily, the entire judicial machinery was being overhauled. By facilitating the release of 750,000 petty offenders languishing in prison for years – their only crime being that they were poor – Moily at least did what no other law minister before him had done. His heart looked to be at the right place. His vision to take care of pending court cases was yet to be realised – and then he was shifted out of the ministry. Rather than going into the reasons behind the decision, I would rather say that our newly appointed law minister, Mr. Salman Khurshid, is hugely capable and comes with a great reputation and background.


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