A House For Mr Kejriwal

By John Cheeran
Delhi chief minister is a homeless man today. Arvind Kejriwal, the
primal aam aadmi, has been forced to vacate his two five-bedroom
duplexes on Bhagwan Dass Road in Lutyens’s Delhi, even before he could
step in there with his parents, wife and kids.
What you are witnessing is another slice of direct democracy,
practised by Aam Aadmi Party. On Saturday, Kejriwal told television
channel reporters that after listening to aam aadmis within his party
and a late night call from his conscience he has decided to let the
bungalows go. So another round of house hunting is on.
It is notable that compared to the house occupied by former Delhi
chief minister Sheila Dikshit on Motlial Nehru Marg, Kejriwal’s chosen
bungalows were poor cousins.
There has been an outcry, most notably by BJP leaders, at the spacious
bungalows allocated to the Delhi chief minister. How can an ‘aam
aadmi’ chief minister live in opulence, asked the media and critics.
Now that’s a question Kejriwal himself invited after peddling needless
symbolism. Kejriwal is a prisoner of his own cheap populism. After
free water and cheaper electricity, does Delhi CM have a right to live
in a 9,000 square feet quarters?
Why should anyone object to a chief minister living in a five bedroom
house? Or should Kejriwal continue to live in his Kaushambi flat and
take Metro every day to the chief minister’s office?
Good governance can steer clear of gimmicks. That’s one important
lesson Kejriwal has to learn fast. It does not matter whether Kejriwal
lives in a downmarket DDA flat in Mayur Vihar Phase III or in a
bungalow on Bhagwan Dass Road. What matters is that how he can make a
difference to people’s lives by bringing down toxic levels of
corruption, flouting of rules, and ensuring an even spread of
development for aam aadmi as well as non-aam aadmis. Justice and
governance should get rid of trite labels.
In a wired world, it does not matter where you are. As long as you
have access to enough information, you can make correct decisions.
Yes, where you sit matters in Kejriwal’s case up to a point – the
whole India is talking about him precisely because he today sits in
the chief minister’s chair. That’s the power of symbol and that’s the
meaningful inch of real estate in Lutyens’s Delhi that people should
be worried about.
And it also matters that Kejriwal should sit in comfort. He should not
be imagining himself to be a political Bhishma, neither should his
critics and aam aadmis expect him to be one, and prepare a bed of
arrows to express solidarity with the homeless and shelter-less
denizens of Delhi.
It is time to throw out puerile symbolism and get ready to work.
Everyone has a right to live in comfort, if not in opulence. To live
and work in comfort is not a sin, not a crime.
It would be foolish to expect that aam aadmi will forgive your
administrative dithering and political pussyfooting just because you
occupy a cramped quarters. And let’s not worry about who wields the
broom in Kejriwal’s home.

What they are talking about in Kerala

By John Cheeran

Congress in Kerala is in all sorts of trouble. Group war is raging in the party and the CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) is seeking the ouster of chief minister Oommen Chandy. The saving grace is that CPM itself is divided over bringing down the United Democratic Front (UDF) government thanks to the internecine rivalry between party secretary Pinarayi Vijayan and opposition leader V S Achuthanandan, who is now seen as the last communist in Asia, including China.

Consider the charges against Chandy. It has been alleged that Chandy is party to a series of frauds committed by a private company, Team Solar, which swindled people of money to the tune of Rs 10 crore (the official figure quoted by Chandy is Rs 1 crore).  Serious among them is an accusation levelled by Sreedharan Nair, a provincial Congress leader and industrialist, who says he had received an assurance from Chandy that Team Solar is a venture that needs to be encouraged, which made him part with Rs 40 lakh to Saritha S Nair, a femme fatale associated with the solar firm.

Chandy says Sreedharan Nair had parted with his money a week before he met him last July. All Malayalis are now debating whether the femme fatale, Saritha S Nair, was with the Nair Who Had The Money, when he met the chief minister. Chandy, who streams visuals from the chief minister’s office live (Is he the world’s first politician to do so? Will have to check Limca Book of records) says visuals of his meeting with Nair are not available. And the incorruptible Chandy has now appointed a panel of Malayalam speaking Sherlock Holmes to retrieve the lost visuals, sift through them and spot whether there was a sexy Nair, apart from the Money Nair. 

Rivalry among Congress A and I groups has ensured that details were leaked to the media about extensive telephone conversations that Saritha had with chief minister’s office, his assistants and an entire spectrum of Congress leadership in the state, including home minister, members of Parliament and Kerala Pradesh Congress chief Ramesh Chennithala. And remember Kerala’s chief minister did not have a cell phone in his name till now and has been making use of his flunkeys’s phones to stay connected!  

There is no denying that both Saritha and her partner, Biju Radhakrishnan, had a criminal past, before they hit upon the ruling Congress establishment with a seemingly credible and fashionable scheme of solar energy at homes and industrial units.

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Is Muslim League a dead horse?

By John Cheeran

There is little in common between Jawaharlal Nehru and Ramesh Chennithala. The former is India’s most celebrated statesman-prime minister, the latter a khadi-clad Peter Pan in Kerala.

Last week Chennithala, president, Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, tried to emulate Nehru when he said the rump of Muslim League in Kerala (what is variously described as Indian Union Muslim League Kerala committee, Muslim League, etc) has become a liability for Congress.

It was Nehru who dismissed Muslim League as a dead horse in the post-independence euphoria in 1957. (It is another matter that, two years later, he keeled over and the state unit of Congress struck an alliance with the League in Kerala). Now the dead horse is galloping faster than Congress in Kerala, threatening almost to wreck the United Democratic Front (UDF) coalition.

Will the high command in New Delhi agree about what Nehru said in 1957?

Why do Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi flog the dead horse? The Gandhis can hardly displease the rump of Muslim League in Kerala, for the Oommen Chandy-led UDF ministry leads a precarious existence even with the support of the League. So they will acquiesce, and League will continue to press their arguments.

It is important to realise who flogged Nehru’s dead horse into life.

With a 25% Muslim population in the state, both the UDF and CPM-led LDF are wary of alienating Muslim voters. But one cannot understand the need for a Muslim League, in Kerala’s cultural and social context, in electoral arena. Both Congress and CPM are quite accommodative of Muslim aspirations, so why strike a divisive note on the basis of religion? The answer should come from the Muslim community. League, however, has realized that only thing that matters in a first-past-post democracy is numbers in a given geographical area.

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Do Muslim girls want to marry at 16?

By John Cheeran

Getting married still remains a big deal in India. Kerala is no exception. These days a few Malayalis do not marry at all, but prefer to be in live-in relationships. But this is not about them.

It is about how girls are still pushed into marriage in Kerala much before they attain the age of 18, among Kerala’s Muslims, who constitute more than 25% of the state’s population. These are nothing but child marriages.

The Child Marriage Prohibition Act, 2006, unambiguously defines a “child as a person who, if a male, has not completed 21 years of age, and if a female, has not completed 18 years of age.”

A circular issued on June 14, 2013, by Local Self Government (LSG) department of the government of Kerala has sought to reassure unconvinced registrars across the state that Muslim marriages involving a male aged less than 21 and a female aged less than 18 is legal.

The circular violates provisions in Special Marriage Act 1954. As per this Act, if a marriage has to be solemnized, the man has to be 21 years old and the woman must be 18 years of age. Both the Child Marriage Prohibition Act and Special Marriage Act are applicable to the whole of India except the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

At the moment, a debate is on in Kerala about the intent and logic behind the Congress-led UDF government’s move to sanctify such child marriages among Muslims.

The LSG department is headed by an Indian Union Muslim League minister, M K Muneer, an MBBS doctor, who told The Times of India (the TOI led with the story on June 20 in Kerala which has triggered a state-wide debate, forcing rest of the newspapers and news channels to amplify the story) that he is personally against the move to encourage child marriages among Muslims.

But the government, harried by allegations against chief minister Oommen Chandy’s office of nexus with a set of financial fraudsters, is adamant and not ready to withdraw the circular. Muslim League has 20 MLAs in the assembly and the government runs on two-seat majority in the 140 member assembly.

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When India is a metaphor for BCCI

By John Cheeran

So who won? There may not be a definitive answer to that question but there is no doubt about who lost in the Chennai Test on Sunday –the Indian cricket fan. It was a victory for N Srinivasan and his brinkmanship, it was a victory for Arun Jaitley and his political nous, and it was a victory for Jagmohan Dalmiya and his sense of opportunism.

If you have been a cricket lover, you can henceforth love BCCI. What a beautiful four-letter word it is. You can use it now to let your steam out – ‘BCCI You.’ This is the only message coming from Chennai. Whatever the outraged public say, BCCI is a realm, where you are not given entry. You can buy a match ticket, enter M A Chidambaram Stadium, or M A Chinnaswamy Stadium or for that matter Eden Gardens. That’s it. (As much as you can cast your vote during elections but your tryst with democracy ends there.) You cannot walk into the portals of the BCCI. We will fix the game for you, that’s the message coming from Srinivasan, Jaitley and Dalmiya. We are in it together. We will run this as a private organization (which in any case, it is) and let no one come forward to clean-up our act, say the entrenched forces in Indian cricket.

And mind you, BCCI is the most professionally run sports organization in India. It only shows how poorly managed our other sports organizations are. You cannot criticize BCCI on certain counts. For example, former and current cricketers are taken care of financially by the board. There is no breakdown of administration. Indian board flexes its muscle and money at the International Cricket Council. It vetoes ICC proposals and takes on the perpetrators of imagined insults to the nation and its cricketers. BCCI may be a mafia, it is a mafia that gets things done. Like what? When Srinivasan was around, India regained the World Cup, in 2011, 28 years after its first title triumph. The board’s coffers are full. It religiously conducts all domestic tournaments, and on the face of it, there is a degree of process (however skewed it may be) involved in its decision making. To a large extent, this explains the silence of the satraps of the state associations in the working committee meeting in Chennai on Sunday.

But when it comes to big decisions, there is opacity, deceit, subterfuge, arm-twisting and mutual back-scratching. Very rarely we see the ‘back-stabbing’ attempted by the western lobby, led by one of the most ambitious politicians around in India now.

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Manmohan and UPA favourites to win trust vote

By John Cheeran
Who will win the trust vote on July 22?
My take is that the UPA and Manmohan Singh will survive.
The parliamentary flotsam in New Delhi stands to gain zilch if the government is defeated on trust vote. If defeated, Manmohan Singh will continue as a caretaker Prime Minister, though nuclear deal will collapse.
But if the flotsam characters such as Rashtriya Lok Dal, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, and Janata Dal MPs vote in favour of the UPA, they can nibble at some sort of power for the next nine months, or till when Sonia Gandhi decides to go for the polls.
Given the political climate, Congress will find it tough to return to power at Centre. Even the NDA will have strenuous times to muster the majority. That’s why splinter formations are in vogue.
That’s why the Price for an MP has gone up to Rs 30 crore.
Democracy is a costly enterprise.
We have to pay for it.

Rahul Gandhi meets Madam Poverty

By John Cheeran
It indeed was a historic moment the other day at Amethi.
Much like Siddhartha, and quite strikingly that is, another Rahul was looking for meanings.
The Prince of India, and son of Amethi, left his New Delhi abode and went into the wilderness in search of what I’m being told, the meaning of poverty.
It is a pity that after 37 or so years of living as an Indian, Rahul Gandhi, had to visit a hut in Amethi to know all about poverty.
And this is after his grandma abolished the said phenomenon with the magic words of “Garibi Hatao” in 1970s.
Reports in the Indian media say that Rahul Gandhi asked a Dalit girl named Sunita the meaning of being poor during a fly-by-night revival of the political behemoth, the Congress Party.
Let me a quote from a newspaper report.
” Sunita’s reply that poverty to her meant spending the day working to ensure that there was diner at night moved the youth leader. He visited her kitchen and insisted that he would share their dinner. He sat on the floor of the kitchen and shared the meal the family had prepared for themselves.”
It is important to note that if all goes well, at a certain point in time, Rahul Gandhi is bound to shoulder the burden of ruling the nation. He is already representing Amethi constituency in the Parliament.
So whatever the Prince of India does, it matters.
But it should be better Rahul gets his enlightenment from the managers of his party rather than indulging in such gimmicks. Does Rahul admit that he became an MP without knowing anything about the living conditions of his voters in Amethi?
If Rahul was willing to see, he could have met Madam Poverty and her brood in New Delhi itself.
There is more to India than 10, Janpath, Mr Gandhi.

National Herald: End of An Era

By John Cheeran
National Herald, the newspaper conceived by Jawaharlal Nehru, is preparing to put together its last edition.
And, I’m sure, none in New Delhi will miss the parting of this herald. Not even its employees.
No journalist in Delhi will feel the absence of this one-time legendary newspaper, for it had ceased to have any presence even in the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, from where it used to bring out the inky editions.
For seven years I trudged down the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg never once I bothered to step in that office, even when I wandering without a job.
Now that I’m reading AFP wire copy saying that Herald is ceasing publication, it amazes me that I have never seen a copy of this paper, which played critical role in the Indian Independence struggle.
Well, I have walked past history, without allowing, not even a particle of dust from that history to settle on my shoulders.
In the twenty first century, Soniaji’s Congress does not need National Herald, though it has continued till its last breath as the official newspaper of the party.
Today, Congress and Sonia have better mouthpieces than National Herald. So amidst dwindling revenue and falling circulation, the Congress chief’s decision to perform last rites to the newspaper seems a sensible decision.It is interesting to note the current editor-in-chief T.V. Venkitachalam.
“We do not follow the latest fashion and Bollywood trends. In all these years, the paper has adhered to the values Nehru espoused – objectivity and the tradition of independence. There has never been any interference from the Congress. But we never bothered too much about the business aspect of paper,” he said.