Commonwealth Games: Let's focus on our sportspersons

Trust officials associated with sports associations to spoil the party during an international event.

If it was their dishonest ways during the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games (CWG) that showed the country in bad light, four years later in Glasgow, Scotland, two of the fraternity has caused a flutter.

On Saturday, Rajeev Mehta, secretary general of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), and Virender Singh Malik, an international wrestling official, were arrested by the Scotland police for two separate incidents.

While the former was arrested for driving under the influence and injuring two people, the latter was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel receptionist. At the time of going to press, the charges against both have been dropped for want of evidence.

However, the incidents must not cast a shadow over India’s otherwise inspiring performance in Glasgow.

With 65 medals — 15 gold, 30 silver and 19 bronze — the country finished at the fifth position in the games. Even though the numbers will pale in comparison to the 101 medals that the country won in 2010, the 2014 tally is still encouraging because it was notched up even though some disciplines like archery and Greco-Roman wrestling — India won 10 medals in these two disciplines last time — were dropped this time.

In Glasgow, the grapplers put up a brilliant performance; so have the shooters and boxers. Then there was the sterling performance of Dipa Karmakar, who became the first Indian woman to win a medal in artistic gymnastics, and Arpinder Singh, who won a bronze in triple jump. On the last day, P Kashyap got the country’s first badminton gold in 32 years.

Even though charges have been dropped, sports minister Sarbananda Sonowal should set up a probe panel to investigate the whole issue.

This is not the first time an official has been accused of misconduct. In 2006, during the CWG in Australia, an official travelling with the Indian team was charged after he reportedly assaulted a teenaged cleaner in his room in the Games’ Village.

Irrespective of what comes out of the Glasgow incidents, the IOA must ensure that only officials with impeccable credentials are chosen for such assignments. For the time being we should make sure that the spotlight remains on the athletes who have made the country proud.

Protest benefits: AAP's idea to reward lawbreakers is bad

Shocking decision

Break the law and we will reward you — this seems to be the message from the AAP government in Delhi to the people. Its decision to foot 50% of the electricity bills of consumers who defaulted on their payment between October 2012 and December 2013 and to waive any penalty on these bills is unviable at best and unfair at worst. The government has identified 24,036 such defaulters who will be rewarded and this move will cost the state exchequer `6 crore. The Arvind Kejriwal government has already subsidised water and electricity tariffs at a cost of `200 crore. Cabinet minister Manish Sisodia’s statement that “the people who supported us during the andolan….should benefit now” puts the government’s move in perspective — `6 crore of the taxpayers’ money is being used to ‘benefit’ a few party supporters.
In Indian politics there is nothing new in a political party or government announcing sops in the hope that the intended group of beneficiaries would vote for the party. From cycles, televisions, mixies to laptops and even regularisation of illegal settlements, political parties, both at the central and state level, have tried to outdo the other. However, AAP’s move takes populism to a new level.
The AAP government in Delhi is in a tearing hurry, and in eagerness to sprint ahead it does not seem to ponder too much about the consequences of the statements and decisions it is taking. The subsidy can only be seen as a move to ‘reward’ those who stood by the party in its ‘bijli-paani andolan’ days. It sends out a covert message to AAP supporters that ‘if you stick by the party in all its decisions, you will be rewarded’. This move mocks the consumers who stuck to the law and did not heed Mr Kejriwal’s call to default on bill payments. This also sends out a wrong message to political parties like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which is on a protest against toll taxes in Maharashtra, that they can break the law and also to the people that if they go against the law they will be rewarded, not punished.

Opinion Polls: Congress should not sulk, BJP cannot gloat

The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) suggestion to put a lid on pre-poll surveys has found support from unexpected quarters with the Congress endorsing the commission’s views. Stating that they are not ‘scientific’ and are not conducted in a ‘transparent manner’ the grand old party has written to the ECI, which had asked various political parties to submit their views on banning such polls. The Congress’ dislike for opinion polls is understandable. After all, in most of the polls that have been released, the party is forecast to take a beating in the upcoming state elections. In Delhi, a state-union territory the Congress has been in power for three consecutive terms, an opinion poll shows the party trailing behind. The results are not encouraging in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh either. 
Psephology is a science that analysis political results. Depending on region, society and various other factors psephologists more often than not are able to reflect the sentiments of the electorate before voting day. Many democracies around the world also have opinion polls. Nathaniel Read ‘Nate’ Silver, the famous American sabermetricist (Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball statistics) and psephologist, has been successfully forecasting the career of major baseball players and forecasted correctly 49 of the 50 state winners in the 2008 presidential elections. Such popular was Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog the New York Times licensed its publication in 2010. In 2012, Silver forecasted the winner in all the 50 states. Opinion polls and pre-poll surveys help in gauging the public mood. While there might be room for doubting the neutrality and objectivity of an opinion poll, it should be remembered that these surveys are not oracular prophesies. Nor are they edicts carved on stone and remain unchanged. Depending on various factors they can change proving these surveys wrong. At present exit polls are banned and there is a ban on opinion polls 48 hours before the day of election.
The Congress will do well to remember Sophocles in Antigone: "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news". Rather than taking objection to opinion polls, the Congress should look at it as a harbinger and realise that there is still time for course correction before the general elections in 2014.

Floods: India lacks the science to deal with nature

                                                                                                                                                                          photo: from ibnlive

The torrential rains that have lashed across the north of India, especially in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, have caused great havoc with more than 120 people feared dead and over 60,000 people stranded without food and other basic facilities.  Videos of large buildings toppling into rivers have compounded to the fear. There are a lot of contributing factors to the present tragedy — the most obvious ones are that environment safety norms that the government should have maintained were flouted. The May 20 order of the National Green Tribunal for demolishing all illegal constructions on the flood plains and river beds of Yamuna and Hindon in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi is proof of this. Massive deforestation, thanks to unplanned and uncontrolled urbanisation in these ecologically fragile terrains, has also led to landslides in the region. That laws have been flouted and environmental concerns have been ignored points to the fact that the Doctrine of Public Trust when it comes to safeguarding natural resources, in this case rivers, has not been viable judicial tool.

The question that needs to be asked is what are the steps that the government will take from here; what are the lessons learnt and what will be done to minimise, if not prevent, such a catastrophe from happening again? The torrential rains over the last few days were two weeks ahead of its schedule, but it is no alibi for the government as it was not prepared to meet such a situation. While the armed forces pressed into rescue missions have been doing a commendable job, the government’s lack of technological expertise in forecasting such climatic variations has been exposed. The glitches faced by the R15-crore doppler radar system, meant to predict thunderstorms and other changes in weather patterns, acquired by the India Meteorological Department, has not proved the game-changer it was meant to be. While there have been efforts by the department to upgrade technology, the S-band doppler radar replaced the S-band cyclone detection radars, it does not seem to be on top of the game when it comes to weather forecasting. There are lessons that India can take from neighbouring Bangladesh in shoring up its early warning systems. Dhaka has, with the help of organisations like the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, set up advanced long-lead flood forecasting systems. Such systems can help authorities in India to be prepared to meet the challenges such seasonal vagrancies throw up.
Another area where the authorities concerned need to focus is on dissemination of information to the people in affected or flood-prone areas. Timely information reduces the causality during such situations. There are no two opinions that the foothills of the Himalayas are great tourist points and the state governments earn a sizeable part of their revenue through tourism. However, keeping in mind the infrastructural challenges and limitations, the government should think about regulating the flow of tourists to these places. For the government to invest in the state-of-art technology is also an economically prudent move as studies have shown that for every rupee invested in early warning systems the return in the form of less fatalities and minimal damage is beneficial.

Beautiful Soldiers, Brave Daughters

‘Do you have it in you’ is a tagline the Indian Army uses for its recruitment drive. They say you walk in as a boy into the armed forces and come out as an officer and gentleman. All these, one thought, was enough to the get the blood rushing through the veins and jump the queue to get recruited into the army. And how wrong a notion that was is evident in a rather novel way a local recruiter for the army chose to advertise. A billboard in Shillong with the photographs of Priyanka Chopra, Anuskha Sharma, Preity Zinta, Gul Panag and Celina Jaitley had the caption: If you want to have Beautiful and Successful Daughters JOIN INDIAN ARMY’. What is common among the Bollywood actors mentioned is that they all belong to army families.
There are many examples of successful women who can be associated with the army — the billboard advertisement being an example. It’s robs reason as to why it was not thought motivating enough to feature testimonies of women officers in the force? Another point that gets us pondering is how do the recruiters vouch for ‘beautiful’ daughters? To find answers we plan to approach the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune and maybe even call on at the DRDO Bhavan in New Delhi to check if they have come up with a secret formula that will bring the cosmetic industry to a grinding halt.
What about the ‘sons’ of those who join the Indian Army? It’s hard to recollect if any of them lost their way into Bollywood or stardom. Then again, in the great skewed Indian patriarchal society, isn’t it a sine qua non that ‘sons’ are successful. We guess it was this paucity of successful and handsome sons that got the local recruiters to focus on daughters. In all likelihood womens’ organisation will not see red over this — after all it is showing women as successful. We’re also not getting critical about the idea and have come up with a suggestion: rather than putting up such an advertisement in Shillong, Meghalaya, which is way up on the sex ratio table in India, the agencies should think about such moves in Chandigarh, Delhi and Haryana — that sit comfortably numb at the bottom of the table. This might help improve the sex ratio and increase the applicants to the Indian Army. Two birds with one stone they say.
(An edited version of this appeared in the Hindustan Times on April 22)

Media and telegenic violence

The quality of a democracy is measured in the freedom its citizens enjoy, under the Constitution, to voice their views without fear. Productive discussion, constructive criticism and the sagacity to ‘agree to disagree’ should be the yardstick used to measure the maturity of a democracy. It is not a positive sign when the state fails to protect this freedom from being questioned or intimidated by power or might. On Sunday (October 31) this freedom was intimidated when around 100 BJP Mahila Morcha women gathered outside the residence of Arundhati Roy and indulged in vandalism in the pretext of protesting against the writers pro-azaadi stand on Kashmir. Without getting into the merits of her statement, it should be said that the right to express oneself cannot be usurped. If there is anything ‘seditious’ in her words it is the duty of the government to look into it.

It is a cause for concern that similar acts of violence are on the rise; acts which once were the generally associated with the Shiv Sena in Mumbai who resorted to high-handedness in the name of the Marathi manoos, but now is common, be it the Sri Ram Sene unashamedly bashing up girls in Mangalore or religious fanatics chopping the palm of a professor in Kerala.

The police and the television media should also be blamed for their ‘tacit’ encouragement to such forms of protests. That the incident occurred at 11 am in the morning in a high-security diplomatic enclave of Luytens’ Delhi leaves a lot of explanation from the side of the police, especially because this was the second such attack on the writer’s residence, the last one in June this year.

What is disturbing is that before the group gathered and resorted to violence three different TV news channel crews were present in full gear to cover the incident. The question is: Were the news channels intimated about the protests? If so, why were the police caught unawares? Did the presence of cameras and OB vans egg the crowed to resort to violence? It is a known fact that media presence, especially live coverage, is the much-needed oxygen for such trouble mongers.

It seems that in the rat-race for survival of TV news channels, it is not just people who are being ‘sacrificed at the altar of TRP ratings’, to quote Arundhati Roy, but so are the fundamentals of journalism. It should not be forgotten that the above mentioned June attack was a result of a false report that appeared in the media about the author. The violence resorted to by right-wingers, the callousness of the police (administration) and the insensitivity and irresponsibility of the media (particularly broadcast) is a deadly cocktail that we should avoid at any cost.

(The edited version of this has appeared in The New Indian Express. Link:

http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/editorials/the-media-should-introspect/220738.html)