On working women

The root cause of this issue is the shaping of attitude right from childhood. While women are pained at the sight of their sons performing household chores, they rejoice at training their daughters in house-keeping. While a man helping his wife at home is mocked at, a woman sharing the financial burden of her husband is not given any additional credit. On the contrary, she is under pressure and constant scrutiny to balance her professional and personal life. One wrong step in her personal life, she is accused of having sacrificed the family at the altar of her career. With such double standards prevalent in society, we have a long way to go before we practise gender equality in its true spirit.

The real issue is not about women working or staying at home. It is about the mentality of a majority of men who just don’t want to soil their hands with household chores. They enjoy life when their wives toil through day and night to ensure a comfortable living along with supplementing the household income. The need of the hour is not praise or due credit for women but a change in the mental make-up of comfort-seeking men. There should be a balanced distribution of labour in the families where women go out to work. If the gender divide can weaken at workplace, why not at home?

Ms Pentareddy portrays the grim reality encountered by women in the middle and the lower-middle class nuclear families. Our mother is our first source of inspiration, a fact that we often fail to recognise. Behind every successful individual, there is indeed a mother who has selflessly sacrificed her time or career to pave the way for her children’s future.

There is nothing big one needs to do to acknowledge the importance of a mother. An undisturbed chat over a cup of coffee, an evening walk once in a while, a hearty wish on her birthday, etc., are all deeds that will keep her going.

Role of media

There was a time when the media acted as a watchdog of democracy. Today, true journalism has become a rarity. The media have a significant role in formulating public opinion. But they ignore people’s issues such as poverty, corruption, and raging communalism. Customised and profit-oriented journalism have come to replace spirited journalism.

If the fourth estate has lost its exalted position, it is because of a paradigm shift in the priorities of reporting, driven by corporate interests. Both the print and the visual media are giving a go-by to journalistic ethics and all that matters is sensationalism.

Most of the reports are on political issues, followed by entertainment and sports sponsored by big corporates. Some of the reports are meant to satisfy the personal agenda of VIPs. A very small section is devoted to significant achievements in different sectors. Sensationalism is the order of the day and even the most ordinary incidents are blown out of proportion.

From the television news channels and other media, we come to know more about Hollywood stars and their luxurious spending than about the decline in agriculture, migration of labour and growing poverty among the rural masses After Bollywood, cricket is the most important item on the media agenda. In cricket too, they boost the image of only a few players. The media, including the government-owned sections, do not care about mundane things like poverty and unemployment.

The Election Commission at 60

After overseeing 15 general elections to the Lok Sabha, the Election Commission of India, in its diamond jubilee year, can with justifiable pride claim to have nursed and strengthened the electoral processes of a nascent democracy. The successes have not been consistent or uniform, but over the last six decades the ECI managed to make the world’s largest democratic process freer and fairer. One of the instruments of this success is surely the Model Code of Conduct. Designed to offer a level playing field to all political parties, it has been used to neutralise many of the inherent advantages of a ruling party in an election. Although the model code was originally based on political consensus and does not still enjoy statutory sanction, it served as a handy tool for placing curbs on the abuse of the official machinery for campaigning. While there have been complaints of excess in the sometimes mindless application of the model code, the benefits have generally outweighed the costs. Under overreaching Chief Election Commissioners such as T.N. Seshan (1990-96), the ECI did seek to extend its jurisdiction beyond constitutionally acceptable levels, but such attempts have been short-lived. After the Election Commission was made a three-member body, its functioning became more institutionalised and more transparent with little room for the caprices of an overbearing personality.

The diamond jubilee is also an occasion for the ECI to look at the challenges ahead, especially those relating to criminalisation of politics and use of money power in elections. Neither of these issues is new. What is clear is that the efforts of the Commission to tackle them have generally lacked conviction and have not yielded any significant results. Although the political system and players must take a major share of the blame, and the ECI’s powers are constitutionally circumscribed, these will have to be noted as failures. The dominant role of money in elections, which is taking newer and more outrageous forms, is deeply worrying. Instances of politicians paying for news coverage and bribing voters were widespread in the 2009-2010 elections. Another pressing issue relates to the powers of the Chief Election Commissioner vis-À-vis the two Election Commissioners. CEC Navin Chawla has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking that the Constitution be amended to equalise the removal process for the CEC and ECs. Against the background of the unseemly controversy over the previous CEC’s attempt to have his colleague removed on baseless and subjective grounds, an amendment that makes it explicit that the ECs too can be removed only through impeachment is an institutional imperative.

The way forward on Telangana

With the Union government announcing the terms of reference and the time frame for the Telangana Committee, the proper course for the Joint Action Committee of political parties that is spearheading the agitation for a separate state would have been to wait for its report, due by December 31, 2010. The five-member Telangana committee headed by the former Supreme Court judge B.N. Srikrishna needs the time and the space for examining this contentious issue in all its aspects. People and parties are divided on the statehood question, and the terms of reference necessarily had to be broad and wide-ranging, accommodating the demands for both a Telangana state and for a united Andhra Pradesh. In any case, including one demand in the terms of reference would have implied dealing with the other and neither could have been considered in isolation. The JAC’s stand against the committee examining the demand for keeping Andhra Pradesh united mirrored that of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, whose raison d’etre is a separate Telangana. Quite understandably, other parties, including those with high stakes in Telangana, were not willing to unqualifiedly fall in line with the JAC ’s ultimatums. The end-result could well leave the TRS friendless and lonely. Telangana accounts for 119 of the 294 members in the State Assembly, but only 12 of them have quit so far. Of these, 10 are from the TRS. Only one of the 39 Telugu Desam Party MLAs from the region resigned, while others decided to wait for the decision of the Congress MLAs from the region. As for the BJP, for long an unequivocal supporter of a Telangana State, one of its two MLAs from the region quit. An ineffective JAC, far from being able to convince all the legislators, was reduced to setting a deadline for other MLAs to quit.

Carving out smaller States is too important and complex an issue to be taken in the heat of inflamed passions and under the pressure of political agitations. In the absence of a political consensus, and when concerns are raised about the wider implications for the other parts of the State, decisions will have to be made after wide-ranging consultations, and on the basis of a well laid out road map. Those clamouring for a separate Telangana will surely help their own cause by extending full cooperation to the Srikrishna panel, instead of vitiating the atmosphere again by instigating violence or asking elected political representatives to resign. All stakeholders must ensure that the panel succeeds in its rather difficult task of balancing the interests and concerns of different sections and recommending a plan of action towards a solution, as set out in the terms of reference.

Politics under economics

At first sight, the Greek financial crisis poses serious problems for Greece, for the euro, and possibly for the status and standing of the European Union. The data are bleak. The GDP fell by 0.8 per cent in the last quarter of 2009, following slides of one, 0.3, and 0.5 per cent respectively in the previous three quarters; the government’s own prediction of a 2010 slide of 0.3 per cent is widely considered an underestimate. The crisis has already had an impact, with the euro falling to $1.35 at one point, and all 16 eurozone countries face further falls through sales of the euro. The ratings agency Standard and Poor has downgraded the Greek sovereign debt. That makes the country’s recent €2.5 billion three-month debt sale risky, as it implies Athens’s lack of confidence in its own longer-term economic future. As for the EU, its rules allow bailouts only over specific projects, and it wants IMF help to be the last resort. France and Germany have expressed support, but privately accept that the eurozone might need to do more.

Closer analysis, however, shows a much more politically loaded picture. Prime Minister George Papandreou has pointed out that the crisis is largely the making of the previous conservative government. Secondly, the Chief Economist of the European Central Bank, Jürgen Stark, has confirmed that Athens manipulated economic statistics for years, which the EU’s own monitoring procedures missed. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s initial rejection of support for Athens may well have been motivated by the need not to alienate her coalition partner, the neoliberal Guido Westerwelle. The ideological issues involved are highly significant. The ratings agencies themselves gave major commercial banks top ratings just before those bodies collapsed in 2007-8. Finally, it must be remembered that other eurozone states and the international financial institutions may be acting as much out of ideological antipathy towards Greece’s centre-left government as anything else. The IMF is notorious for ordering states to slash health and education spending as a precondition for loans. That would hit ordinary Greeks, among the worst paid workforces in the EU, very hard. Mr. Papandreou needs urgently to devise a workable and sustainable strategy to cope with these forces and factors.

Test cricket is best

In an era of rampant commercialism and the rumbustious rise of Twenty20 cricket, pessimism regarding the well-being and future of the grand old game of Test cricket is common. But any suggestion of its impending demise is way off the mark. That the structure of the five-day game has a built-in resilience that helps it triumph over existential challenges was once again demonstrated in the second Test between India and South Africa in Kolkata. If the home team deserved credit for turning things around brilliantly after a pasting in the first Test at Nagpur, the operatic irresistibility of the Eden Gardens climax proved that Test cricket is in robust good health. Seat-edge endings in the abbreviated forms of the game often appear contrived and formulaic. But a result such as the one that saw India level the series against the Proteas with nine balls left has an authenticity that Test cricket alone can aspire to. It is a pity that it was not a full series of three or five Test matches and was squeezed in only after the Board of Control for Cricket in India was criticised for favouring the ODI and T20 formats at the expense of Test cricket. While it would be naïve to suggest that limited overs cricket might be a passing fad, it is the duty of the game’s administrators to ensure that the best in the business play one another more often in Tests.

Which other form of the game provides the space for the sort of heroism that Hashim Amla displayed over the last two days at Eden Gardens? The South African, who batted 1,033 deliveries for 490 runs in three innings, exemplified the virtues of the longest format all through the series. He began at Nagpur with an unbeaten double hundred, after which his illustrious colleague, Dale Steyn, ripped the heart out of India’s batting with a classical demonstration of pace bowling. Amla’s battle with Harbhajan Singh on the final day in Kolkata was intriguing, although the tenacious Indian off-spinner triumphed in the end. But it was also a series that will be remembered for the batting exploits of Sachin the Great, world cricket’s most thrilling batsman Virender Sehwag, exquisite strokemaker V.V.S. Laxman as well as the prodigiously accomplished Jacques Kallis and the ever-dependable M. S. Dhoni. In the end, India deserved to hold on to its No.1 Test ranking because it showed strength of character. After losing the toss and letting South Africa rattle up over 200 runs for the loss of just one wicket on the opening day, Dhoni’s men played with great belief, commitment, and offensive skills to rewrite the script on a sporting wicket that made five days of old-fashioned cricket such a pleasure to behold.