Why Manmohan Singh, Nero, is a Hero

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Did the UPA use cash to win the trust vote in 2008? It would be naive to believe that it did not. Should Manmohan Singh resign? No. He is still our best bet as Prime Minister. Singh staked his government for the nuclear deal. He could have played safe and clung on to office like a limpet, rather than put the UPA through the wringer. He saw the India-US civil nuclear deal as good for India. (It is). If he acquiesced in the cash transfer business (he says he was not aware), it was to secure India's national interest. Would we regard Manmohan Singh as a hero if he had failed to win the trust vote? No. He would have been shamed as a loser three times over: for turning the government prematurely out of office, for losing the nuclear deal and for betraying President Bush, a very....

Rail Budget: neither sugar-free nor Rasagulla. It is Mamata's Fudge!

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Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee said the Railways were passing through "difficult" and "testing" times. How come? The Indian economy is growing at 8.6 percent a year. Have the Railways fallen off the India map? Banerjee blames the Sixth Pay Commission. She makes a virtue of the Railways bearing the burden of higher salaries on their own, unlike other government departments. The Railways are a commercial organisation. They are not doing a sovereign function like maintaining law and order. There are obvious reasons why we do not expect the police to pay for their keep. That reasoning does not apply to the Railways. The tonnage that the Railways carry should be more than the GDP growth rate. Banerjee in her While Paper of 2009 said this should be 1.25 times GDP. She criticised Lalu Prasad for under performance, though under him the Railways had grown by over 8 percent....

Prices and A Govt That Doesn't Know Its Onions

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A colleague, who has done very well for himself and lives on Mumbai's Pali Hill, sent a new year's day message advising his friends not to buy onions and risk the attention of Income Tax guys on the look out for high value purchasers! He is the kind of guy who has a personal fitness trainer, eats organic stuff and would have thought that Rs 60 for a kilo of onions was the normal price if TV channels had not crowed themselves hoarse. Inflation-proof in other words. But even if you can afford to shut yourselves away from the reality of mundane Indian life, TV channels have a habit of making that reality intrude on you. So when TV channels ask what is driving up onion prices, they will have to take some of the blame. By fanning the fear of pricing rising further, they have made every housewife a....

Growth Vs Caring: A 'Stupid' and 'Nonsensical' Debate!

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Chasing growth is "stupid" says Professor Amartya Sen. That he is obsessed with growth is "nonsense" says Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. At the time when the government's stewardship of the economy is being called into question over high food prices, growing public debt, corruption scandals and imports financed with flighty foreign money, heavyweight economists are wrangling over its economic orientation. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has called the government's pursuit of faster economic growth and the desire to outpace China as "stupid," triggering an online debate among economists led by Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwati who says Sen's position is "untenable," while affirming that his is "the appropriate one." Professor Bhagwati had endorsed the government's twin-track "inclusive" growth strategy on December 2 at the Professor Hiren Mukerjee Memorial Lecture to Parliament when it was itself torn between the Opposition's demand for a committee of lawmakers to probe a telecom....

Aarushi's case: Closure report should not be the end

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The closure report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the Aarushi murder case should not be the end of the matter. Its admission of failure must trigger another set of actions. The least that the people of this country expect from its premier investigating agency is competence. Hopefully, the closure report will be made public when the Ghaziabad court opens after the year-end vacations, and people will get to know the pains that the CBI has taken, the leads it has followed, the events that plausibly happened on the night of May 16, 2008 when Aarushi and her manservant Hemraj were murdered, the most likely suspects and why the case has reached a dead end. This happened in the Jessica Lal case where the Delhi High Court ordered the Delhi Police to file a status report when main accused Manu Sharma was set free. Ever since....

Insomnia in the house of Tatas

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The Tatas are known as India's most ethical group. It is a reputation well earned. Infosys may have has a squeaky clean image but it operates in an industry that has little interface with the government. Unlike manufacturing, it does not require tracts of land, environment clearances, coal or ore linkages, or compliance with a host of regulations. The Tatas have maintained their image for probity for a hundred years. Despite that they have grown. It is no mean achievement. The Tatas have paid for their integrity. On November 10, while speaking at the eighth anniversary celebration of Uttarakhand state, group chairman Ratan Tata said his plan for an airline was grounded by his refusal to bribe. While on a flight an industrialist has told him he could get the job done by paying 15 crore rupees to the aviation minister, but Tata said he prized a good....

Bloodletting will improve Indian journalism

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By publishing the taped conversations that Tata group and Reliance Industries lobbyist Niira Radia had with select journalists, magazines Open and Outlook, and Mail Today newspaper have broken an unwritten understanding that journalists will not attack their own. Media houses still abide by that pact, though the Business Standard has questioned the practice of private treaties (a trend that the Times of India is believed to have set, where a newspaper (or a TV channel) picks up equity in an unlisted company hoping to gain when it goes public by giving it an editorial gloss in the time in between. It is unlikely that editors who enjoy the business of power broking will become born-again journalists overnight. They might turn more discreet. But the scrutiny has reminded a whole lot of journalists what is not acceptable behaviour, and what being true to their vocation means. This bout of bloodletting hopefully....

Will President Obama be fussy about handshakes?

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President Barack Obama is not visiting Bangalore or Hyderabad but can he avoid shaking hands with IT industry leaders? Right-wing radio hosts and channels like Fox News will not miss the opportunity to rip into him for warming up to those stealing jobs when America's jobless rate is around 10 per cent, says Thomas Friedman. The New York Times columnist and author of the best-selling The World is Flat finds America's political climate so toxic that the President's visit days after the November 2 elections is sure to draw bile for leaving his supporters to clean up the mess while he does the rounds of world capitals. The Democrats are expected to get a pasting in the polls. The visit itself has not hit the news in the US so far. Friedman was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in New Delhi. He is shaken by....

Media also to blame for pre-Games mess-up

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Guest editors on Karan Thapar's show, the Last Word, gave high marks for media coverage of the Commonwealth Games. Only Swapan Dasgupta gave it 50:50. He said the Indian media was uncritical until websites like the BBC's showed how unlivable the Games flats were days before they the athletes were to occupy them. Mark Tully, formerly of the BBC, said a lot must have been right with the preparations, for the Games to be successfully staged; it could not have been the result of a last-week surge in effort. I feel the media was right in being shrill. If it had not provoked a panic, it is unlikely that the government would have gone into crisis-mode. But the media is guilty of the same sin that it has been accusing Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, Sports Minister M S Gill and Urban Development Minister Jaipal Reddy of. The....

Vietnam Diary: Well-swept streets, paved footpaths & chain-snatchers

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Hanoi was celebrating its 1000th anniversary when Delhi was hosting the Commonwealth Games. Fearing that the Games would be a no-show and opting not to be vicariously embarrassed, I decided to head for the Vietnamese capital along with family and a friend. After watching the opening ceremony, I realised I had miscalculated but it was too late to make amends. I have an admiration for Vietnam - not for its state ideology, but the fierce independence of its people. The visit was supposed to be a leisurely lesson in history. The mess-up back home in the run-up to the Games made it an exercise in comparative civics as well. The first thing that strikes any visitor to any Vietnamese city is the ubiquity of motorcycles. They are everywhere. It is as if the Vietnamese are born with two wheels. From the hotel room I would look down to....