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 !
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.
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
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 ?
This is my comment in response to offstumped's post on Mayawati's victory
I think we are not giving enough credit where it is due. Arjun Singh should be credited with destroying BJP in UP. His Mandal 2 forced BJP to side either with their traditional upper caste votebank or to pick the emerging OBC votebank. BJP picked the OBC, paving way for Mayawati to run away with the upper caste votes. If this upper caste disenchantment with the BJP spreads to the rest of the North India, BJP may increasing start looking like the Congress, a party in the wilderness.
From the Editorial of The Hindu 09 May 2007
However, the order of a local court asking the police to register a case against the Minister on the charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder is another instance of misplaced judicial activism. The Minister has been named as the seventh accused in the case filed on the orders of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate S. Gopalakrishnan. Others named as accused include doctors, nursing superintendents, and a labour room cleaner. Ministers and administrators must certainly be held accountable but little is achieved by pinning over-the-top charges against them before the investigation is complete. On the same principle, will a Railway Minister be prosecuted for culpable homicide not amounting to murder when there is a train accident causing multiple deaths? Or a Prime Minister or Defence Minister for a military operation gone wrong? Or a Chief Minister or Home Minister for fake encounter killings by the police? What is needed is exemplary action that addresses the issues at stake, including issues of legal culpability — not a witch-hunt.Hmm.. I wonder if the Editorial team at The Hindu looked at this judgement delivered on the 19th of April 2007.
The Supreme Court has ruled that top rung officials like chairpersons, managing directors and directors of a firm can be held liable for criminal prosecution if a cheque issued by their company bounces at the bank.So if top officials of a company are responsible for what the company does, why should not the honourable minister be held accountable for his/her department. If one wants to enjoy ministerial perks, one better be prepared for being accountable for one's actions/inactions while holding that office.The burden of proving that they were actually not in charge of the company at the time when the cheque was issued would rest on the officials, a bench of Justices Tarun Chatterjee and P K Balasubramanyam said while upholding an appeal filed by public sector BSNL.
From NDTVIt is the duty of the Parliament to legislate and the duty of the executive to implement and the judiciary's duty is to see it is implemented,'' said Sitaram Yechury, Leader, CPI(M).
For a moment consider this situation. Tainted legislators rises from the the current 25% to say 51% and then they pass a law to provide immunity to legislators from charges of "human trafficking" . Would we expect the judiciary to ensure its implementation ? or would we expect the judiciary, as the safe keeper of the constitution, to throw this law into the dustbin it belongs ?
If the above quote of Honourable Member of Parliament Sitaram Yechury conveys the understanding that an average parliamentarian has about the roles of the branches of government, it is not surprising that we constantly hear that the legislature & the judiciary are on collision course.
Perhaps Mr Yechury should take a little time off from his busy schedule and relearn his 5th standard civics lessons.
The Cauvery tribunal took 16 years to reach a verdict and as expected it hasn't satisfied all the parties concerned. Karnataka feels let down, so does Kerala. So far Tamil Nadu seems happy with the verdict but I expect in the coming days they too will feel cheated ( or at least pretend to feel cheated). The verdict is in, but the issue has not gone away and it would be a miracle if it goes away. At the root of the dispute, is the question of how the water in river should be shared.
My take on the issue is that there are two different questions in this issue and resolution is possible if they are separated. The first question is who owns the water ? The second question is who should be allowed to use it ?
The answer to the second question is simpler. People who are willing to pay get to use the water. There are broadly two types of users. Those that use the water for navigation, fishing, recreation etc and those that use for irrigation,industry and domestic purposes. The first set of users do not lessen the quantity of water by their usage. The second set do lessen the quantity of water by using it. The first set should probably be pay an annual fixed price and the second set should pay in proportion to the usage.
The first question is more complex. Going forward, we can expect water to become a sufficiently scarce commodity. The aim of defining the ownership of water, should be to encourage increasing the amount of water that is available in the river. The main contributors to increasing the amount of water in the river would be communities in the catchment area & communities in the flow area. These communities should own the water in the river. They should be allowed to manage the flow ( through Dams etc ), use the water & sell the water. Land ownership in these areas could be used as proxies for arriving at water ownership with higher weight given to lands in catchment areas.
From The Hindu Govt clears ordinance to ensure sports feed on DDWith just weeks to go for the cricket World Cup, the government today approved promulgation of an ordinance, making it mandatory for private broadcasters to share live feed of important sporting events with public broadcaster Prasar Bharati.
Time for the cricket/sports fans to celebrate? Not really. The government may succeed ( if it can defend the legal challenges that are bound to follow) in creating an illusion, that it has got sporting action to everyone who has access to a TV set for free. But did any one tell them that there are no free lunches? The likely result of this move, would be lesser money in the hands of sports bodies. Is any one going to bid fancy prices for sporting events in India in the future? Lesser money in the hand of sports bodies means either lower spending on developing the sport or larger handouts from the government to keep the sport going.
.....
The decision will ensure that millions of cricket lovers in non-cable houses and radio listeners would receive live feed of Indian team's one-day matches, wherever it plays. However, for test matches, the government has said live feed would be required only for matches played in India while for those played abroad, the highlights would be sufficient.
Is any one going to try developing a PHL type tournament in any other sport ? No ! For the moment it is successful, DD will walk in and take away the advertising rupees that one was counting on. So Indian sports, like Indian education, can now wait for philanthropic hand outs.
It is budget time again and most of the focus seems to be on where the tax concessions are going to be or where the tax increases are going to be. News papers the day after the budget, headline with the tax concessions given or the increases. There is focus on new schemes, but there is very little focus on where the money goes & for whom. The Government when it doles out subsidies, often claims that it is for the poor. A short analysis below tries to to figure out some of the amounts involved.
Subsidy from the Central Budget 2006-2007
Food : 24,200 Crores ( From Indiabudget.nic.in)
Fertilizer : 17,252 Crores ( From Indiabudget.nic.in)
Petroleum : 27,863 Crores ( From the previous blog post )
Subsidy from the State Budgets 2006-2007
Education : 93767*(100-1.2)/100 = 92641 Crores ( From RBI & RBI ) . 1.2 = % of cost recovered from users
Electricity : 35,632 Crores ( From RBI
Health : 25775*(100-4.8)/100=24537 Crores ( From RBI & RBI )
Irrigation : 14911*(100-16.9)/100 = 12,391 Crores ( From RBI & RBI )
Just these expenses add up to 2,34,517 Crores. This translates to Rs 31,980 per family per year for the bottom 1/3 of the population [ Assuming population of 110 Crores & family size of 5 ]. This is just a fraction of the money allocated & spent in the name of the poor, none of which seems to have much impact on poverty. A very large loot, in a country which has so many poor people.
And we have not even touched on such heads like Social Security (13,171 Crores) [No, Social Security is not employee pension] , Nutrition (5148 Crores), Transportation & Communications ( 13,957 Crores), Agriculture (23,634 Crores).
Would it not be better if we just scrap these schemes and instead transfer the money to the poor families? With Rs 31,980 a year or an extra Rs 2,500 a month these families will definitely have a greater chance of pulling themselves out of poverty ( If they do not automatically come out of it by just this transfer)
The biggest issue with doing some thing like this would be to correctly identify the beneficiaries. Technology could help us here. I see having a single unique biometric based national identity as the starting point, something like the US social security number. More on this in a later post.
