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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Mar 19, 2013 AT 15:20 IST
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Edited At: Mar 19, 2013 15:20 IST
The Telegraph, Calcutta, reports on the serious points raised by many of our senior netas as the cabinet cleared the criminal law (amendment) bill retaining 18 as the age of consent for sex, some of whom rued that the “stricter” provisions would rob the country of romance at the consensus-seeking all-party meeting, where leader after leader seemed to betray the utmost incomprehension of terms such as “stalking”, “voyeurism” and “trafficking”:
“Mohabbat to ab khatam hi ho jaayega. Ladka jab ladki ke taraf dekhega nahi aur uska peechha nahi karega to mohabbat hoga kaise (Romance will die out now. If a boy doesn’t look at a girl or follow her, how can romance happen)?” Yadav said, according to a senior politician who was present but didn’t wish to be quoted...
...Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav took the prize. He claimed people resorting to “transfer and posting” of women at workplaces could be jailed under the bill’s provisions. Met with a chorus of denials, he held his ground and insisted he could prove it.
When he showed the “relevant portion” to leader of the Opposition Sushma Swaraj, it left her speechless for some time.
The source told The Telegraph that Mulayam actually pointed towards the portion of the bill that deals with trafficking of women. The former chief minister had apparently confused “trafficking” with “transfer”.
“Ye mahilayon ke gair kanooni tareki se le jana aur gair kanooni kaam me lagana ke liye hai. Transfer-posting ke liye nahin (This is about illegally taking women away and forcing them into illegal professions. This is not about transferring or posting women employees),” Sushma explained. Mulayam nodded and the rest tried to suppress smiles.
Read the full report at the Telegraph: Tragedy of errors at rape law meet
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Mar 19, 2013 AT 15:20 IST, Edited At: Mar 19, 2013 15:20 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 28, 2012 AT 23:58 IST
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Edited At: Nov 28, 2012 23:58 IST
Lant Pritchett and Shrayana Bhattacharya succinctly sum up the recent debate about Cash Transfers in the Indian Express: Cash is no Cure:
If the problem is that people who are eligible find it hard to procure paperwork to prove their citizenship and poverty to make claims on state resources, while those who are ineligible nevertheless manage to get benefits, it is hard to see how moving to cash helps...
Cash transfers are terrific at what cash transfers are terrific at — a pure and direct transfer of purchasing power. If the goal of transferring resources to citizens is simply to attain a socially desirable distribution of money and ability to buy things, cash works very well. However, if the idea is to tackle market failures and attain a socially desirable form of behaviour, where administrators allocate benefits to the poorest and the poorest are able to use the subsidy amounts for good nutrition and health outcomes, the idea of cash as a cure-all is problematic. Much of the current discussion on cash transfers is focused on what the state ought to do, without enough consideration of what the Indian state is capable of doing. Proponents of a cash-based approach assume the state has better ability to supply cash than the supply of physical goods. However, cash transfers leave many of the hard problems in implementing social programmes in India just as hard, if not harder.
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 28, 2012 AT 23:58 IST, Edited At: Nov 28, 2012 23:58 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 18, 2012 AT 21:02 IST
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Edited At: Sep 18, 2012 21:02 IST
Sunil Abraham in the Deccan Chronicle:
Our policy-makers seem determined to extinguish the privacy of communications and also anonymous/pseudonymous speech through such devices as Know Your Customer (KYC) and data retention requirements for accessing the Internet through cyber-cafes, mobile phones, dial-up or broadband, ban on open wi-fi networks, plans to tie together Aadhaar and NATGRID and Central Monitoring System (CMS) to track a citizen using his/her UID across devices, networks and intermediaries, and requiring real-time interception equipment to be installed at all network and data centres....
An experiment featuring monkeys, bananas and ice-cold water, commonly attributed to the late American psychologist Harry Harlow, explains what’s being attempted by those who attack free speech. First, five monkeys are put in a cage with bananas hanging from the top that can be reached by climbing a ladder. Every time one of the monkeys try to climb the ladder, ice-cold water is thrown on all of them. Soon, the monkeys learn not to climb the ladder.
Then, one of them is replaced with a monkey that has never been drenched with ice-cold water. When the new monkey tries to climb the ladder, the other four monkeys attack it and prevent it from reaching the banana. This is continued till all the original monkeys are replaced with new ones.
When that’s done, although none of the monkeys left in the cage has ever been drenched with ice-cold water, they continue to enforce the regulation on themselves. This is what has happened in China. This is what is being attempted here – to social engineer the Indian netizen.
Read on at the Deccan Chronicle: The five monkeys & ice-cold water
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 18, 2012 AT 21:02 IST, Edited At: Sep 18, 2012 21:02 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 06, 2012 AT 23:39 IST
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Edited At: Sep 06, 2012 23:39 IST
Coincidentally, two independent pieces make substantially the same point: that things may not be as bad as they might seem. The poison coming out is a form of cleansing, not a sign of greater disease, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express:
...just in the last week, three central elements of India’s dirty political economy, which at first sight might seem unconnected, have arguably reached a new inflection point. Our political economy was founded on state complicity in communalism, a disregard of law and regulation by big companies, and the plunder of natural resources. But there is a distinct possibility that things may never be the same again..
The Naroda Patiya judgment was significant for several reasons. It has, for the first time, convicted senior politicians for complicity in a riot. This will send out a powerful message. As many people have pointed out, if such convictions had been achieved in the case of the1984 riots, our history would have been different...
Though seemingly unrelated, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling in the Sahara case, ordering an unprecedented Rs 17,400 crore to be returned to investors, is also part of the maturation of our system. This is the first time a really big fish has been hauled up for what, based on the court judgments, seem egregious violations. This judgment will empower regulatory institutions like Sebi, whose effectiveness has been undercut in the past by the uncertain course of the law...
Despite vicious attacks on the institution of the CAG and the controversy over numbers, there is now one incontrovertible fact. No state will, any longer, be able to dispose of mines in the recklessly casual way that they did in the past. You can actually begin something of a clean-up of this sector...
The BJP is overdoing its blockade of Parliament. But the government went out of its way to wreck the key institutional device for public reason — the committee system...
An editorial in the Business Standard makes the same point:
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 06, 2012 AT 23:39 IST, Edited At: Sep 06, 2012 23:39 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Aug 20, 2012 AT 23:51 IST
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Edited At: Aug 20, 2012 23:51 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express says the three reports are raising deep and fundamental questions about governance. Taken together they amount to an incontrovertible indictment of government.
A lot of the whispering against the CAG reports comes from an unstated fear: such scrutiny will slow down decision making. It will create economic uncertainty. These risks are present. But we have to face the fact that there is a lot more poison waiting to come out of the system. The system now needs to respond constructively and internalise new norms of governance, based on horizontal accountability, transparency and public reason, instead of arbitrary discretion. The CAG’s reports are part of the great cleansing now under way. In the medium to long run, these will make government stronger, not weaker, because it will be forced to ask the right questions.
You can contest the CAG’s numbers. But the reports, even if they do not say it, leave us in no doubt that the government is a rotting ancient regime. It is a deep morass of evasions, dereliction of duty, and outright fraud on the taxpayers. The responsibility for this runs to the highest levels, including the prime minister. He is, doubtless, an honourable and honest man. But will he admit that the government is at least guilty of a sin even worse than corruption: gross incompetence of the kind that has put the country’s future at risk?
Read the full column at the Indian Express: Great cleansing act
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Aug 20, 2012 AT 23:51 IST, Edited At: Aug 20, 2012 23:51 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON May 29, 2012 AT 23:11 IST
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Edited At: May 29, 2012 23:11 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express: Sin of littleness
It will take a novelist with unusual insight to diagnose how structures of power can warp the sense of self of those who inhabit it, diminishing them at every turn. What else explains how quickly smart politicians, intrepid journalists, wise judges, serious academics, imaginative entrepreneurs are one by one revealing their feet of clay? What we are witnessing at the moment, across a range of institutions, is an elite bent on self-destruction: ideas have been replaced by vendettas, the future with past resentments, constructive engagement with rank cynicism. The words of Gandhi, that master analyst of Indian politics, are hauntingly appropriate: “Our besetting sin is not our differences, it is our littleness. We wrangle over words. We fight often for the shadow and lose the substance.”
...
The pessimism of the moment is not simply that decisions are not being taken or that reform is not happening. It is more serious and elusive at the same time. It is that it is hard for optimism to survive the bonfire of credibility that daily news has become.
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON May 29, 2012 AT 23:11 IST, Edited At: May 29, 2012 23:11 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:46 IST
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Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:46 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express says our debates are about scoring points, not in making progress:
The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing about the destination than necessary. It is absolutely unconscionable that the need for a credible food security system still needs to be argued. Then we have a slightly more productive discussion about the route to get there. Some will argue that the Public Distribution System, though currently broken, can be fixed. Others will argue we need to replace food with cash. Sometimes these debates are in good faith. But sometimes in these debates, as in identity politics, belief chases evidence, not the other way round. But once we have, for good or for ill, chosen a route, we stop caring whether we will drive well enough to get to the destination. Or, worse still, we will actively subvert whatever route has been chosen. Often this is because each side can say, “I told you PDS won’t work.” Or, “I told you private provisioning won’t work.” We make sure that the conditions that might make the chosen architecture work do not obtain.
Read on at the Indian Express: Food Insecurity Bill
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:46 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:46 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:04 IST
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Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:04 IST
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express, last week:
Dear Mr Gandhi: The elections in Uttar Pradesh are, understandably, your major preoccupation. It is difficult to predict the result. But even if you do well, will India have reason to celebrate? Electoral success will show that you are better than the opposition. But that bar is now so low that it is almost an embarrassment to trumpet that one is merely better than the opposition. In 2009, the Congress got as propitious a mandate as any party could have expected. There was hope and expectation. The opposition, both on the left and right, was decimated. But what did India gain? It frittered away the good times. Instead of using growth to lay a secure foundation for the future, and create conditions where the scourge of poverty can be removed, we undermined the prospects for growth. We have high inflation, worrying public debt, slowing growth, uncertain currency prospects, falling investment, crushing interest rates...
Your party may not have some of the worst, exclusivist tendencies of your rivals. But you have not found ways of transcending the traps of identity politics that have kept India small...
Your party is trapped in two illusions. First, governance and politics are different issues. Second, only those policies that specifically address poor people affect the poor. You wreck the macro-economy in the name of the poor, and then cheat the poor because you refuse to govern...
Read the full piece at the Indian Express: Tomorrow's Battles
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 15, 2011 AT 02:04 IST, Edited At: Dec 15, 2011 02:04 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 07, 2011 AT 23:58 IST
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Edited At: Dec 07, 2011 23:58 IST
Mr Kapil Sibal was quoted by the Hindu today as saying that "he had been left with no choice" because the internet companies "refused to delete incendiary hate-speech."
In response, Google pointed to its Transparency Report which effectively demolishes Mr Sibal's claims, as it points out that out of 358 items requested to be removed in the period Jan-June 2011, only 8 requests pertained to hate speech, while there were as many as 255 complaints against "Government criticism".
Google also told Medianama:
“We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society. Google Search helps spread knowledge, enabling people to find out about almost anything by typing a few words into a computer. And services like YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view. Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.”
Mr Sibal's claims fail to stand up to scrutiny and are contradicted by another, yet unpublished, draft report by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) which shows that intermediaries are erring “on the side of caution” and "over-complying after complaints are filed" and that free speech on the Internet in India is already being curtailed in a “chilling” manner.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Dec 07, 2011 AT 23:58 IST, Edited At: Dec 07, 2011 23:58 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Aug 23, 2011 AT 23:45 IST
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Edited At: Aug 23, 2011 23:45 IST
Heard the one about the onion thief who is given three options to choose from as punishment: (1) Receive 100 lashes, (2) Eat 100 onions, or (3) Pay 100 gold coins?
As the story goes, the thief decides, without thinking much, that eating the onions is the easiest option. After eating around 10 of those, he realises that he cannot eat any more, so again, without thinking it through, he gives up and announces that he would rather receive the 100 lashes. But then, after enduring some 25 of those, he breaks down, announcing that he would actually, you see, rather pay the 100 gold coins and be done with it.
And so we come to the UPA II, the onion thief raised to the power of n+1.
It clearly has exhausted not three but many more options —on not just one but many, many occasions.
Even during its first avatar —in its first year itself, actually —it had made this proclivity well-known (remember Goa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Jagdish Tytler...?) So much so that we may well have renamed it the U-Turn Special.
And it has failed — or refused —to learn.
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Aug 23, 2011 AT 23:45 IST, Edited At: Aug 23, 2011 23:45 IST
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