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| March 27, 2000 | ||
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| Dealmaker
Democracy The RS election is the best auction east of Sotheby's
It has been clear for a while now that the party system goes for a toss when it comes to Rajya Sabha preferences. Rather than create room for genuine in-house talent that cannot survive the hurly-burly of a popular election, party leaders tend to reward flunkies. The Congress' nomination of nondescript Inder Khosla in Uttar Pradesh and twice-defeated Arjun Singh in Madhya Pradesh is an extreme example. In turn, party MLAs use the leadership's moral, if that be the term, vulnerability to enter into private arrangements. A mindset that reveres socialism and other false gods may look askance at the idea of businessmen entering Parliament. The fact is men like Vijay Mallya and R.P. Goenka -- successful Indians and at any rate better, more agreeable models than, say, an Anand Mohan Singh -- have no place in the conventional political system and cannot hope to win a Lok Sabha contest. So they have to take recourse to more imaginative methods -- and redefine the political economy's theory of net worth. Fortress Bengal In
the state that gave India "babu English" there is an obvious
solution to solecisms: educate the babu. The West Bengal Government
prefers a more radical remedy: abolish English. Beginning April 14,
Bengali New Year's day, Bengali will become West Bengal was among the earliest states to be industrialised. Its factories have long ceased to flourish but its rulers still revel in a smokestack worldview. As the success of non-resident Bengalis bears out, the state is ideally placed to benefit from the services-sector revolution that is energising India. Inexplicably Jyoti Basu and his comrades have chosen to opt out, increasingly looking inward and making a perfectly easygoing society seem all the more intimidating and unfriendly to the outsider. The "Bengali only" drive is part of a larger proposal that, among other things, wants Calcutta to be renamed Kolkata and curbs placed on non-Bengalis buying property in the city. It owes its origins to the crazed rantings of a maudlin poet who, in any rational society, would have been dismissed as a fringe element. In Fortress Bengal, he has virtually become lawmaker. |
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 © Living Media India Ltd |
From
House of Elders to House of Pedlars is but a small journey. The upcoming
round of Rajya Sabha elections promises to be a bonanza for the suitcase
industry. Flamboyant liquor barons have united even the eternally-warring
Janata Dal (U) and Janata Dal (S) units in Karnataka. Fixers,
time-servers, professional sycophants, social climbing journalists and the
usual bunch of reliable suspects can be expected to be sworn in as MPs
shortly. From the voice of sobriety and cerebrity that it was meant to be,
the Rajya Sabha will move a tone closer to becoming the mouthpiece for
corporate and extra-political lobbies. There are two ways of looking at
this business -- and that word is used advisedly. First, to mourn falling
standards in public life, bleat about the death of rectitude and so on.
More instructive would be to analyse why politics is headed the way it is.
the
sole official language. The communist Government will expend its anyway
meagre energies and resources in translating and reprinting visiting
cards, ensuring firs are recorded only in Bengali and developing Bengali
software for its computers. The politics of language has a long history in
India. Mulayam Singh Yadav's imposition of Hindi in Uttar Pradesh and,
more recently, the DMK's decision to make Tamil the medium of instruction
are examples. Nevertheless, the futility of an anti-English policy cannot
be lost on West Bengal, which is suffering the consequences of two decades
of not teaching the language in state-run primary schools.