Wednesday, June 27, 2007

We the people need some answers

The image below says it all. We would like to hear from our candidate what she has to say about these allegation. If they are a part of a smear campaign, let her say so. We do not want to hear from spin masters Jayanthi Natarajan, Abhishek Singhvi etc . Let the candidate speak !

Dawood Ibrahim's RTI plan

Here is how Dawood Ibrahim should plan his RTI ( Return to India, quite a few NRIs seem to have been bitten by this bug ).

Step 1: Float a party. Use the usual technique of bribes & intimidation (carrot & stick ?) to win a few Lok Sabha seats.
Step 2: Bargain with parties that want your support for Governor posts. Yes that is right, forget bargaining for ministries etc. Since political parties have not much use for Governor's role, they will happily give you as many as you want.
Step 3: Get your self appointed as a Governor.

Now you are done. You can now come to India, run your empire from the hallowed portals of the Raj Bhavan without any fear that any one can stop you or your activities. You cannot be prosecuted for activities in the past too!!. So as long as you are a governor you should be safe.

And here is why you can do it
From Article 361(2) of the Indian Constitution. [ Thanks realitycheck for pointing that out ]

No criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President, or the Governor of a State, in any court during his term of office.


Did our founding fathers envisage such a scenario ? They did not. They expected Presidents & Governors to be above board. They envisaged this more in the context of the Raj Pramukh.


Here is an excerpt from the discussions of the constituent assembly

Shri V.S. Sarwate (Madhya Bharat):

Coming to the Constitution itself I may say that every man residing in Indian State would have been happy if the Rajpramukh had not been linked with the Governor and the President. I am reminded of a jibe at Panini, the Sanskrit Grammarian and in one of the aphorisms he had said:


Shwa yuvam dyonah (original in Devanagari)



He applied the same rule to a dog, to a young man and to God Indra. Something like this has happened in this Constitution. I would refer to article 361. The section says: "No criminal proceedings whatsoever shall be instituted or continued against the President or the Governor or Rajpramukh of a State in any court during his term of office". It was quite all right as far as the President or the Governor was concerned; but the clause does not fit in with the Rajpramukh, whose office terminates only with his life. Take a worse case. Supposing a Rajpramukh commits a murder. There is absolutely no remedy against this in this Constitution.

Shri T.T. Krishnamachari (Madras: General): May I point to my honourable Friend that the Rajpramukh will hold his office only subject to the President allowing him to do so and if he commits a murder, he will be removed from the office


Ps : I think Shibu Soren should fire his legal team & his advisors.. Instead of bargaining for coal ministry he should have asked for post of governorship of some state.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

55 Million new jobs and not a whimper

It looks like the OECD report, which concluded that India on an average created over 11 million net new jobs a year between 2000 and 2005, got buried under a ton of debris that passes of as news in India. All major newspapers ( barring the Hindu, which seemed to have ignored this story altogether) ran a story about this in the inside pages. Google blog search throws up very few references to this.
This has triggered my curiosity. 1) Where did OECD get its data from ? 2) Why is the Indian political class ignoring this ?

The answer to the first question is simple.
From Page 30 of the report.

Data reported in the tables and figures are from successive five-yearly rounds of the National Sample Survey – a country-wide survey of households – covering the months of July to June, for the following years: 1987/88, 1993/94, 1999/2000 and 2004/05


So it is from data released some time back. The reports uses the current weekly status as the data to measure unemployment. One could quibble about the specifics, but over all data seems good enough to make estimates


2) The second question is more puzzling. One would have expected our politicians to have been the first to jump in and claim credit for the employment growth. The Congress is understandably hamstrung in claiming this credit. It was in power for very short time during this period and more over it mistakenly believes that it got voted in because the 'aam aadmi' did not see any progress in the early 2000 period. Statistics seems to fly against this belief, but the Congress is unlikely to publicly move away from its belief.

The BJP on the other hand should be jumping in and claiming credit, so why is it not doing so ? Has it also been brainwashed into believing the 'aam aadmi saw no progress' theory peddled by the Congress & the Left ? Can any blogger, who may have an insight into how the BJP thinks, explain this puzzling behaviour by the BJP ?