Freedom First

Freedom First

Summary

The July 2013 issue of Freedom First, in its 61st year of publication, carries the cover line The Entertainment Googly. The issue takes the IPL spot-fixing scandal and the campaign against BCCI president N. Srinivasan as its central case, and asks why ten days of front pages went to a cricket administrator while larger scandals went unexamined.

Firoze Hirjikaka continues the previous month’s editorial on the decline of public standards; Ashok Karnik sets the Intelligence Bureau against the CBI over the Ishrat Jahan encounter; H. R. Bapu Satyanarayana argues that the media applies one standard to Srinivasan and another to the government. Sunil S. Bhandare reads the UPA II Report Card as a prospectus, M. R. Venkatesh explains the rupee’s fall by the gold import bill, B. Ramesh Babu recovers the untold story of India’s own foreign aid programme, and Nitin G. Raut and Brig. Suresh C. Sharma take up the Depsang incursion and Myanmar’s liberalisation. Madhu Kishwar opens her account of the demonisation of Narendra Modi, and the issue closes with Suresh Sharma on tribal education under the Right to Education Act, Sunita Narain on solar energy, and Atul Sathe on the kharland bunds destroying Konkan mangroves.

Key points

• The cover feature reprints ten consecutive days of headlines from a leading newspaper’s campaign against BCCI president N. Srinivasan, and asks why a cricket administrator drew that fire when larger scandals did not. The editor’s note calls the result an “Entertainment Googly” and nothing more.

• H. R. Bapu Satyanarayana’s “L’Affaire Srinivasan” argues that the same moral standard demanded of Srinivasan is never demanded of the Prime Minister, and that the IPL affair conveniently displaced 2G, the Commonwealth Games and Coalgate from the front pages. He wants the BCCI brought under the Right to Information Act.

• Ashok Karnik’s “The IB Versus the CBI” treats the Ishrat Jahan case as a collision between two arms of the security state, arguing that intelligence work cannot survive the retrospective criminalisation of its operations, while insisting that no officer stands above the law.

• Sunil S. Bhandare reads the UPA II “Report Card” as a corporate prospectus without a prospectus’s obligations: growth pangs, a fiscal deficit ratio averaging 5.5 per cent, a current account deficit at an estimated 5.1 per cent, and silence on corruption and external vulnerability.

• M. R. Venkatesh locates the rupee’s depreciation in the current account deficit and a 55 billion dollar annual gold import bill, noting that the rupee has fallen no further than the currencies of comparable economies.

• B. Ramesh Babu documents India as a giver rather than a receiver of aid: assistance to Nepal and Bhutan from 1950, a separate budget head from 1964, some 2.5 billion dollars accumulated, and a demand-driven model with no conditions attached, hampered by having no single agency to run it.

• Nitin G. Raut reads the Depsang incursion as a reminder issued on the fiftieth anniversary of 1962, and asks why India “withdrew” from its own territory. Brig. Suresh C. Sharma traces Myanmar’s opening from Ne Win’s coup to Thein Sein’s reforms and the competition between Chinese and Indian projects on the Bay of Bengal.

• Madhu Kishwar opens a long account of the demonisation of Narendra Modi with her own change of mind, having signed statements against him in 2002 before visiting Gujarat to see the situation for herself.

Essays

The Descent Continues …

By Firoze Hirjikaka

Hirjikaka answers the previous month’s editorial with a survey of institutional decay that reaches beyond politics into sport. Political parties closed ranks against the Chief Information Commissioner’s ruling that they fall under the Right to Information Act; the Law Minister’s interference in the CBI’s Coalgate report produced outrage and no change. He turns the charge on the public too, contrasting Indian achievement abroad with indifference to the state of Mumbai’s own streets.

• Reads the cricket betting scandal as a symptom rather than the disease.
• Notes the united front of political parties against coming under the RTI Act.
• Places a share of the blame on public apathy, and rests his hope on relentless exposure until a tipping point.

The IB Versus the CBI

By Ashok Karnik

Karnik reconstructs the 2004 intelligence report that led to the killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others, and the CBI’s finding nine years later that a serving IB officer conspired in it. He argues that operational sanctity is the foundation of intelligence work and that reopening old inputs would freeze the IB’s national network, while conceding that no officer is above the law and that Ishrat, terrorist or not, had a right to trial.

• Argues that intelligence officers have no police powers and depend on state police to act.
• Wants a standing operating procedure for when one agency treads on another’s toes.
• Observes that India strengthens its agencies after every attack and emasculates them the moment after.

L’Affaire Srinivasan: Billions Cheated, Hypocrites All

By H. R. Bapu Satyanarayana

Satyanarayana’s charge is against the press rather than the BCCI. He tracks the spot-fixing investigation from three arrested players to the Dawood network, notes the silence of politicians who sit on the Board, and argues that the campaign against Srinivasan drew attention away from the government’s own scandals. His remedy is to bring the BCCI under the Right to Information Act and to legislate against fixing.

• Contrasts the media’s ferocity over Srinivasan with its brief interest in the Vadra affair.
• Cites S. Gurumurthy and M. N. Buch on media bias and the reach of the betting syndicate.
• Concludes that the guarantee of reform lies with cricket’s own millions of followers.

Painting a Mirage: UPA II’s ‘Report Card’

By Sunil S. Bhandare

Bhandare treats the government’s nine-year report as a sales document released before an election. Half of it is given to social welfare and the economic initiatives of 2012-13 appear at the very end, which he reads as the mark of more government and less governance. He sets the claims against the record: manufacturing growth down from 11.3 per cent to under 2 per cent, investment to GDP down from 38 to 35 per cent, and a current account deficit that the document does not mention.

• Reads the Report Card as a prospectus without a prospectus’s legal standing.
• Notes Aruna Roy’s resignation from the National Advisory Council days after its release.
• Argues that the Twelfth Plan’s remaining years would need growth of 8 to 9.7 per cent, which he calls impossible.

Rupee Depreciation: Foolish Government, Intelligent Indian

By M. R. Venkatesh

Venkatesh begins with the Finance Minister objecting to the word “plunge” and ends at the gold counter. The rupee has fallen about 7.5 per cent, no worse than the Brazilian real or the Korean won, but the current account deficit behind it is fed by gold imports that doubled to about 150 tonnes a month. Households buying gold as prices fall are, he argues, reading the market better than the economists lecturing them.

• Sets the rupee’s fall beside seven comparable currencies to show it is not exceptional.
• Identifies the 55 billion dollar gold import bill as the deficit’s engine.
• Notes that gold purchases are commonly made with unaccounted income, so the problem compounds itself.

India’s Foreign Aid Programme: An Untold Story

By B. Ramesh Babu

Ramesh Babu sets out the history nobody tells: aid to Nepal and Bhutan from 1950, a budget head of its own from 1964, and some 125 recipient countries since. He distinguishes the Indian model, demand-driven and without conditions, from Western aid with its visible and invisible strings, and records India’s refusal of foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

• Reports accumulated aid of about 2.5 billion dollars, most of it as grants.
• Finds about 60 per cent of it spent on training civil servants, engineers and managers.
• Names the central weakness: no single agency to plan, monitor and implement, after the 2007 attempt failed on a turf dispute between External Affairs and Finance.

The Deepsang Aggression

By Nitin G. Raut

Raut reads the April 2013 incursion at Depsang as creeping aggression of the kind that preceded 1962, and is scathing about a settlement in which India dismantled bunkers 500 km away in exchange for a Chinese withdrawal from Indian soil. Against the memory of 1962 he sets Nathu La in 1967 and Sumdorong Chu in 1986, where Indian commanders pushed back and China retreated.

• Criticises the External Affairs Minister for conceding that incursions follow from a “difference of alignment”.
• Argues the Ladakh pressure is aimed at forcing a territorial swap over Arunachal Pradesh.
• Concludes that China will respect India only in proportion to its leadership and its equipment.

Myanmar - The Latest to Liberalise

By Brig. Suresh C. Sharma (Retd.)

Sharma traces Myanmar from independence in 1948 through Ne Win’s coups and the annulled election of 1990 to Thein Sein’s reforms, the return of privately owned newspapers and the NLD’s sweep of the 2012 by-elections. The second half is a survey of the competition now under way: a Chinese pipeline from Kyaukphyu to Yunnan, Japanese and Indian port projects, and the Kaladan route meant to shorten the reach to India’s north-east.

• Notes that Western sanctions drove Myanmar towards China, and that the tilt is now reversing.
• Warns that heavy new traffic in the Bay of Bengal threatens the livelihoods of coastal fishermen.
• Sets out the unresolved position of Rakhine State’s Muslims, stripped of citizenship by the 1982 law.

The Demonization of Narendra Modi

By Madhu Kishwar

Kishwar begins with her own conduct after the 2002 riots: she accepted the national media’s account, signed statements against Modi and raised funds for the victims, but declined to write under her own name because she had not seen Gujarat for herself. That reservation, drawn from covering Kashmir and Punjab, is the opening of her longer reassessment.

• States her original position and the reason she withheld her own byline.
• Argues that riot reporting is coloured by the ideological prism of the writer.
• Opens the series that the following issues continue.

The Right to Education Act (13): Education of Tribal Children

By Suresh C. Sharma

The thirteenth part of the magazine’s running examination of the Right to Education Act turns to tribal and backward-class children: 3.6 lakh girls in over 3,500 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas, hostels children walk out of within a week, and a UNICEF study in Koraput showing attendance well below the state’s average. The problem Sharma sets is how to let these children join the mainstream while keeping what is good in their own culture.

• Reports the reach of the residential school scheme and its enrolment by community.
• Uses the Koraput figures to show the gap between tribal and other districts.
• Frames delivery, not entitlement, as the Act’s real difficulty.

Solar Energy, Not War

By Sunita Narain

Narain takes the anti-dumping duties imposed by the United States and proposed by the European Union on Chinese solar panels as the sign of a sector that has arrived. Module costs fell some 60 per cent between 2008 and 2011, meeting the first objective of solar policy, but cheaper Chinese supply has emptied manufacturing elsewhere and pushed governments towards trade war rather than framework.

• Argues that solar growth still needs policy and financial support, not the market alone.
• Notes the cost collapse in photovoltaic modules and who paid for it.
• Warns that trade disputes threaten the cheap supply the transition depends on.

Kharland Bunds Destroying Konkan Mangroves

By Atul Sathe

Sathe reports Bombay Natural History Society studies in Ratnagiri on the coastal bunds built to reclaim saline land. At Bankot Creek a single bund cut a 48 hectare mangrove patch into 12.7 hectares on the creek side and 35.3 hectares cut off from the tide. With sea levels rising and coastal erosion increasing, he argues, the ecosystems that protect the land are being removed by the works meant to protect it.

• Draws on BNHS field studies of specific creeks in Ratnagiri district.
• Quantifies the mangrove area severed from tidal flow by each bund.
• Sets the loss against the coastal protection mangroves provide.

Elsewhere in the issue

• “A Soldier’s Tale”, in which Air Vice Marshal Cecil Parker recalls a punctured tyre near Sonepat in 1958 and the passing minister who stopped to help, later identified as Lal Bahadur Shastri.
• Dilip Thakore’s “Mandate for Politics as Usual in Karnataka”, reprinted from EducationWorld, on the Congress return to power and the caste politics that displaced administration in the state.
• Point Counter Point, Ashok Karnik’s regular column, on cricket in the dock, the Chhattisgarh massacre and the BJP’s brinkmanship over Advani and Modi.
• Cornucopia, Firoze Hirjikaka’s column, with an open letter to Rahul Gandhi and a piece calling Law Minister Ashwini Kumar the reluctant folk hero who may yet win the CBI its autonomy.
• A review by Anahita Uberoi of Parenting: The Art and Science of Nurturing by Shekhar Seshadri and Nirupama Rao.
• Nostalgia: Freedom First in July 1956, edited by V. B. Karnik, on non-alignment and the moral questions the policy could not avoid.

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