All circumstantial evidence seems to indicate that the fault of India’s 450 million children — the world’s largest cohort below age 18 — is not in themselves but in their stars that they suffer every misfortune ranging from chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and societal neglect. If not, how does one explain successive failures with egos in inverse proportion to their capability, being appointed to the critical office of Union minster of human resource development?
At the dawn of the new millennium when the United Nations Millennium Declaration vowed to eradicate global poverty and ensure enrolment of every child worldwide in school by 2015, the nation’s HRD minister was the egregious Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi whose most memorable contribution to Indian education was infiltration of hindutva mythology into historical narratives, and packing the boards of the IITs and IIMs with his acolytes. Joshi’s successor in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi was the committed Nehruvian socialist Arjun Singh whose most notable contribution was to unilaterally decree an additional reserved quota in Central universities — including the IIMs and IITs — for OBCs (other backward castes), a decision which sharply increased the annual intake of Centrally-funded institutions of higher education, ruining their teacher-pupil ratios and creating a massive shortage of qualified faculty.
Following the return of the Congress-led UPA government to power in New Delhi in 2009, the appointment of legal eagle Kapil Sibal as Union HRD minister was greeted with great enthusiasm by the public and media. Although he deserves credit for piloting the passage of the historic and long overdue Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 through Parliament, despite being a well-reputed lawyer, Sibal has presented several hastily drafted Bills including the Foreign Educational Institutions, National Council for Higher Education, National Education Tribunals Bills, which have been sharply criticised and blocked by the standing committee of the HRD ministry. The outcome of these developments is that Sibal — also the Union telecom minister and UPA troubleshooter — has little time for discussing education issues of grave importance, especially with EducationWorld.
Leadership as usual
It’s a wonder that rumblings about the “lavish lifestyle” and “bourgeois and petty bourgeois values” of the top leadership of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) which until 2009 was a major force in Parliament, and until last summer had enjoyed 34 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal (pop. 91 million), have taken so long to be aired publicly. Currently a “rectification document” is doing the rounds of the party’s membership and could well result in a coup against general secretary Prakash Karat and his politburo member wife Brinda Karat, MP (member of Parliament) — the CPM’s “top couple” who have continued to rule over the party despite its disastrous electoral reverses countrywide including West Bengal and Kerala, the party’s traditional stomping grounds. The immediate provocation for the rectification document is Lady Karat’s reportedly en famille holiday in South Africa where she is sporting currently.
The wonder is that it’s taken lesser members of the CPM so many decades to wake up to the reality that the party’s thoroughly upper crust leadership typified by the trendy top couple, has always followed lifestyles of capitalist pigs whom they routinely denounce from public platforms. The late Jyoti Basu — a barrister of the Middle Temple, the longest serving chief minister of West Bengal from 1977 right until the dawn of the new millennium — imbibed only the best Scotch and holidayed in Britain every summer.
Although the rank and file cannon-fodder of the communist parties are blissfully unaware, several historians have detailed the lavish lifestyles of communist leaders the world over. Leonid Brezhnev, the late general secretary of the now defunct Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) — once described as the deadliest mafia in global history — had an assorted collection of American limousines, and among the many special privileges of the 70 million card-carrying members of the CPSU was the right to shop in elite department stores which rivaled Macy’s in New York and Harrods, London. As for the excesses and sexual shenanigans of the much revered communist icon chairman Mao, I recommend perusal of The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Zhisui Li, his personal physician (Arrow Books 1996). Back home in India the CPM’s top couple is merely practicing leadership as usual.
Civic fall from grace
It’s confirmed, even if it’s not official. the garbage — sorry garden — city of Bangalore (pop.9.5 million) is the country’s most corrupt urban habitat. According to data painstakingly collected and collated by the civic governance NGO Janaagraha, the number of bribery complaints recorded in Bangalore since August 2010 on its multi-city website (ipaidabribe.com) aggregates 4,118 (October 26) outdistancing Hyderabad (1,097), Mumbai (1,033), Chennai (917) and Pune (639). Bribe extortions in Bangalore dwarf the numbers of other infamously corrupt cities such as Lucknow (171) and New Delhi (620).
Even allowing for the citizenry of Bangalore — the nation’s acknowledged IT industry hub — being more internet savvy than of Lucknow and Pune, its dubious No.1 ranking as the country’s most corrupt city is indicative of the heavy burden that its irredeemably corrupt neta-babu kleptocracy imposes upon it. Nevertheless it’s necessary to identify more specific causes of the transformation of this once truly garden city into the nation’s most venal.
An obvious cause is the failure of successive state governments to sufficiently develop Karnataka’s other cities which could have been a counter-magnet to Bangalore. Second, rural development in the state has been shamefully neglected, forcing massive distress migration into the cities and Bangalore in particular, whose population has steadily risen from one million to over 9 million during the past 40 years. These elementary planning failures of the unholy combination of politicians, bureaucrats, police and civic administrators who routinely extort bribes for every government or civic service delivered, have transformed this pensioner’s paradise into an urban nightmare.
What a fall!