Congress setback in crucial India Uttar Pradesh polls

India's governing Congress party has suffered a major setback as votes are counted in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.

The regional Samajwadi Party appears headed for a landslide - it has won 194 seats and is leading in another 29. The state has 403 seats.

Congress also looks set to lose in Punjab, while it is engaged in a neck-and-neck contest in Uttarakhand state.

These polls are seen as a litmus test for national elections due by 2014.

They are also seen as a test for the Congress party-led central government, whose credibility has been eroded in recent months over a series of corruption allegations.

Manipur and Goa are the other states where counting is going on.

Blow to Congress

The most important of the state elections has been in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which has more than 200 million people.

Politics in the state has been dominated in recent years by Mayawati, a low-caste Dalit who heads the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and has had four terms as chief minister.

She has largely alternated in power with Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the Samajwadi Party. It mainly represents the interests of a caste grouping called the Other Backward Classes.

With returns coming in from all the seats in the state, Samajwadi is on track to form a majority government - it has won 194 seats and is leading in 29 more. The ruling BSP is a distant second with 63 wins and leads in 17 seats.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won 41 seats and is leading in six more, while the Congress party is leading in seven seats with 21 wins.

As the results came in, Samajwadi supporters danced in the street outside the party's headquarters in Lucknow, the state capital, says the BBC's Sanjoy Majumder.

Speaking to BBC Hindi's Ram Dutt Tripathi in Lucknow, Mr Yadav said: "The credit for our victory goes to the people, workers of the Samajwadi Party and Akhilesh [Mr Yadav's son and heir apparent]."

The 72-year-old Samajwadi Party leader, who is now expected to lead the government in the state, said he would "try to meet all the expectations of the voters".

He said the party's legislative board would meet on Wednesday to elect the new chief minister.

Speaking in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi took responsibility for his party's disappointing results.

The scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is widely tipped to be India's next prime minister. He was not running in the state polls, but had led campaigning for Congress in Uttar Pradesh.

"I led the campaign, so it's my responsibility, we fought well but the results are not that good," he said.

"Organisationally we are not where we should be in UP [Uttar Pradesh]... I think it will be a very good lesson for me, because I think it will make me think about things in a detailed way."

In Punjab, results have been declared for all 117 seats. The incumbent regional Shrimoni Akali Dal-BJP alliance has won with 68 seats beating Congress which has won 46 seats.

The race in Uttarakhand is neck-and-neck. The ruling BJP has won 28 seats and is leading in another three, while Congress has won 26 seats and is ahead in six. Uttarakhand has 70 seats.

In Goa, the BJP has won 20 seats and is leading in one while Congress has won nine seats. Goa has 40 seats.

Congress has won in the north-eastern state of Manipur where the party has got 42 of the total 60 seats.

The month-long elections were held in a total of 690 assembly seats and were staggered over a number of phases for security and logistical reasons.

A cosy ‘nuke-club’ of [n]one in the Middle-East! Result of Ironic ‘Official’ U.S. Amnesia on Israeli Secret...

by Selvam Canagaratna

"Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / He wasn’t there again today / Oh, how I wish he’d go away."

- Hughes Mearns, Antigonish (1899)

For over a half-century now US policy toward Iran has been drowning in irony.

Needless to say, the latest ironic twist comes from the Obama Administration’s decision to impose even more stringent sanctions to choke off Iran’s main economic artery, its oil export industry, ostensibly to ensure that one of the larger nations in the Middle East does not acquire an offensive nuclear capability.

The truth, as Gary Leupp, Professor of History at Tufts University notes, is very different. America is, and has been for over three decades, hell bent on regime change in Iran, and this is why: "The real reason Washington wants regime change is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal US-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979, depriving it of the services of the ‘Gendarme of the Gulf’ serving American oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the US wants to re-establish its lost hegemony."

The origins of that 1979 revolution go back to the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s only democratic Prime Minister, Mohamed Mossadeq in ‘Operation Boot’, a coup orchestrated jointly by the CIA and British intelligence, which saw the Shah of Iran brought back from exile.

Robert Fisk, the famed Middle East correspondent of the Independent, London, in his magisterial work The Great War for Civilization: the Conquest of the Middle East, wrote that the return of the exile ". . . set in motion a quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, ‘Light of the Aryans’, would obediently rule Iran – repressively, savagely, corruptly and in imperious isolation – on our behalf. . .

"The fall of the Shah was an epic. His downfall had about it something of a medieval morality play, even ancient tragedy. It might have qualified as Greek if the Shah had been a truly great man who fell from grace through a single flaw. But he was not a great man and his sins were many. Hubris was perhaps his greatest crime, although the Iranians saw things somewhat differently. Yet they sensed this mythic element in their revolution even before the King of Kings piloted his personal Boeing airliner out of Mehrabad airport for the last time on 16 January 1979." [And, once more, flew into luxurious exile!]

In his book, Fisk recalls talking in 1997 to C. M. Woodhouse, then aged 79, Britain’s retired senior secret agent in ‘Operation Boot’ who in the last years of his life had been a guerrilla fighter in Greece, a Tory MP and a much honoured Greek linguist and academic. Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was by then dead: Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Teheran, his boss Allen Dulles, Robin Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian brothers who organized the coup, Mossadeq himself and the last Shah of Iran. Woodhouse, he noted, was the last survivor, and to him Fisk directed the crucial question: "why Britain and the United States, the ‘West’ – why we – had chosen to destroy Iran’s only secular democracy?"

Woodhouse looked at Fisk with his penetrating, unwavering eyes. "I’ve sometimes been told that I was responsible for opening the doors for the Ayotollah – for Khomeini and the others," he replied. "But it’s quite remarkable that a quarter of a century elapsed between ‘Operation Boot’ and the fall of the Shah. In the end it was Khomeini who came out on top – but not until years later. I suppose that better use could have been made of the time that elapsed."

"I was astonished," confesses Fisk. "The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which Mossadeq had just nationalized. The return of the young Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million pounds, a planeload of weapons and perhaps five thousand lives. And twenty-five years later, it all turned to dust."

Fisk observed that the Americans had chosen to call their part of the coup plot ‘Operation Ajax’, "which must at least have appealed to the scholar in Woodhouse, even if its classical origins did not invoke success; Ajax was second only to Achilles in bravery, but he killed himself in a fit of madness, a fate the Americans would have liked visited upon Mossadeq. But then Operation Boot/Ajax – though it was undeniably about oil – was never intended to change the map of the Middle East, let alone bring ‘democracy’ to Iran. ‘Democracy’, in the shape of the popular and somewhat effete Mossadeq, was the one thing Washington and London were not interested in cultivating. This was to be regime change on the cheap."

It was in 1997, Fisk reveals in a footnote, that the CIA unsurprisingly announced that "almost all the documents on the Mossadeq coup had been destroyed in the early 1960s." The announcement was characterised as a ‘terrible breach of faith with the American people’ by the former CIA Director James Woolsey who, in 1993, had publicly promised that the Iran records would be made public. A CIA historian had noted that there had been ‘a culture of destruction’ at the Agency in the early Sixties, said Fisk.

"Mossadeq’s rule and the coup that ended Iran’s independence in 1953 would provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979," wrote Fisk. "If the Shah was ever to be dethroned, there could be no flirtation with constitutional rights, no half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries left to restore Western power in Iran. There were also lessons for the Americans and British, and for the Shah, had they chosen to pay attention. The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States and Britain."

After Mossadeq had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower Administration to back the coup: "That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here last time!" he told the man from MI6.

"But we don’t go in for ‘little eggs’ any more," noted Fisk. "More ambitious ideological projects, vast armies – and bigger egos – are involved in ‘regime change’ today. Maybe that’s why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily. The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by the Americans in the Cold War – and the last by the British. But the final word must go to the CIA’s man, Kermit Roosevelt [grandson of the buccaneering ex-President Theodore]: ‘If we are ever going to try something like this again,’ he wrote with great prescience, ‘we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want what we want’."

Obama and Cameron are one of a kind; like their respective predecessors in office, they play dumb about Israel’s sizable nuclear arsenal dating back three decades, but are nevertheless determined to go to war, if necessary, for the Big Lie: keep the Middle East a nuclear-free zone!

What, then, are they now after? Fisk has already told us: no more ‘little eggs’ [those are for the birds.]

Regime-change is the name of the game.

Negating the need for an external mechanism

by Jehan Perera

In the aftermath of the last phase of the war that ended in the military defeat of the LTTE, government leaders considered the "Sri Lankan Model" of overcoming terrorism to be one that the world could emulate.  An international conference was held in Colombo that was attended by military strategists from around the world.  The prestigious Wall Street Journal published in the United States went to the extent of arguing that there was a two-word response to those who claimed that terrorism could not be militarily vanquished.  Those two words were "Sri Lanka."  But in a gradual shift over the past three years since the end phase of the war, Sri Lanka is looking to become an international example of internationally determined limits of civilian casualties in fighting internal wars in particular.

At the present time the US-sponsored draft resolution regarding Sri Lanka before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva is in three parts.  First, the draft resolution acknowledges the constructive recommendations in terms of post-war reconciliation made by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa.  Second, it requests the Sri Lankan government to periodically report back to the international community regarding the progress made in implementing these recommendations.

Third, the draft resolution advocates the setting up of a mechanism by which the UN and the international community can offer assistance to the government in implementing these recommendations and monitoring the progress.

The Sri Lankan government’s position is that little over two months have elapsed since the LLRC made its recommendations and it is too soon to bring its implementation of these recommendations to the notice of the international community.  On the other hand, critics of the government point to the fact that the government has not yet even appointed a task force or executive body mandated to oversee the implementation of the recommendations.  Instead there have been some ad hoc responses that the government could claim to be responses to the LLRC. These include the setting up of military inquiries into issues of accountability and appointing a police commission to oversee the functioning of the police.

However, a closer inspection of what has been done so far by the government in terms of implementing the LLRC recommendations will reveal that the preliminary response of the government fails to give adequate attention to the spirit of the recommendations when put into practice.  What the LLRC specifically called for was independent inquiries and independent commissions which are not what the government has established.  The desire of the LLRC was clearly to see a fundamental change in the approach of the government and of the entire polity, to issues of governance and rule of law, which is well captured in its statement that what the country needs is the Rule of Law and not the rule of men.

GLOBAL DIVIDE

The first week of discussions at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva show a clear division of world powers on the proposed resolution on Sri Lanka.

The US-sponsored resolution is being backed by the EU and several European countries have made their positions known that they are not satisfied with Sri Lanka’s internal processes aimed at post-war accountability and reconciliation.  On the other hand, several non-Western countries have disagreed with the proposed US resolution.  These include Russia, China, the Non Aligned Movement and the Organisation of Islamic States.

Many country representatives at the Geneva discussions have opposed selective international intervention into the internal processes of sovereign countries and have expressed the desire to give Sri Lanka more time to heal the wounds of war.   There is more at stake in the debate in Geneva than Sri Lanka’s internal processes of accountability and reconciliation. Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gennady M. Gatilov alleged that an attempt was being made to monopolize accountability issues and exploit them as instruments of pressure by selectively imposing human rights monitoring at their discretion depending on their political conjuncture.

South African Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Marius Fransman, expressed similar concerns over double-standards adopted by certain countries. He noted that "The partiality in which some international bodies are perceived to respond to situation of human rights abuses in different parts of the world is also problematic. Some countries continue to enjoy the protection by certain Western powers even whilst gross human rights violations against their own neighbours is continuing.

It is the responsibility of the UNHRC to ensure that this type of selective application of the definition of human rights is being stopped."  South Africa is a country that is in a position to give moral leadership to other countries on account of its remarkable transition from governance based on Apartheid to democracy with practices of truth telling, repentance and amnesty taking a prominent place.

LLRC CONVERGENCE

However, it is also significant that while appreciating the positive recommendations made by the LLRC and other post-war developments, South Africa urged Sri Lanka to act decisively with regard to ongoing investigations on accountability.  This is also what the US-sponsored resolution seeks to ensure.  The US Ambassador to the Human Rights Council Eileen Chamberlain Donahue said that "doing a Human Rights Council Resolution on this subject is warranted and important because we believe there cannot be impunity for large-scale civilian casualties and that if there is to be real reconciliation it must be based on an accounting of the truth and serious implementation of changes.  So we are working to convince the Sri Lankan government that there has to be greater evidence of serious implementation of the recommendations in their own domestic report and greater accountability in order to satisfy the victims and the various communities that feel like they have not yet been heard."

The implications of this US position is that an international mechanism will only come in to play when domestic mechanisms have failed, and that the preferred option is to see the implementation of a credible domestic or internal mechanism. While it may be too late for the Sri Lankan government to completely defeat the US-sponsored resolution it may still be possible to seek amendments to it.  It is unfortunate that the government was advised to take on a confrontational posture with the world’s dominant power.  It appears that the government’s hope has been to ratchet up the rhetoric against US domination and Western imperialism and thereby rally the support of non-Western countries to its side.  Where the government’s plans may go awry is that even those countries, such as South Africa, see the implementation of the LLRC recommendations as being worthy of support.

  There seems to be convergence of minds both in Sri Lanka and in Geneva that the LLRC recommendations hold the key the country’s future.

There is still a possibility that the government can propose amendments to the draft US resolution that will be well received.  The government’s main concern will be the third part of the resolution, which calls for an advisory UN and international role in the implementation of the LLRC recommendations, and its monitoring.  In order to obtain an outcome that is least harmful to itself and to national sovereignty, the government needs to be able to convince the majority of countries in the UN’s Human Rights Council that it is prepared to set up independent internal implementation and monitoring mechanisms.  Needless to say, the participation of the political opposition, including the TNA, and civil society in the setting up of these mechanisms would be crucial to ensure its independence. 

The mistake in terms of hubris and desire for power that the government made in doing away with the 17th Amendment to the constitution and replacing it with the 18th Amendment would now be obvious. At this late stage, only genuinely independent internal mechanisms would negate the need for their international counterparts.

Location separating Sri Lanka and India too strategically important to allow oil exploration from other nations

by Sandeep Dikshit

Mannar oil exploration 

India is persuading Sri Lanka to allocate oil exploration blocks in the waters that separate them as it considers the location too strategically important to allow companies from other nations to base themselves in this area.

Diplomatic sources said the two countries were trying to set up a meeting between the Petroleum Ministers this month to discuss the issue afresh, now that Cairns India has struck oil in one of the blocks. If the talks make progress, the two Ministers could meet again in October, the sources said.
After the war with the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) ended in 2009, Cairns, which was allocated a block two years earlier, was encouraged by New Delhi to take up exploitation in earnest. This was the first time in 25 years that a company had prospected for oil in an area whose seas were considered no-go areas during the heyday of the LTTE.

India plans to step up its efforts in view of the international interest in the area after the war ended. Russian, Vietnamese and Malaysian companies have held meetings on the subject with senior Sri Lankan officials while China has also expressed its desire to get involved.

While Russia, Vietnam and Malaysia are considered friendly countries, New Delhi would not like to court adverse publicity at home if Chinese companies are successful. It has faced flak after the Chinese took up the expansion of Hambantota port in southern Sri Lanka because India had passed up the opportunity.

IN TALKS

ONGC Videsh is in talks with Cairns to buy its stake in a Mannar block, and in recent meetings in Colombo asked for the allocation of the adjacent blocks. Sri Lanka has earlier played for time by telling India that it would wait for the results of exploration by Cairns before putting the other blocks on auction.

Now that Cairns has reported discovery of oil, India feels talks should begin in earnest. In recent talks Sri Lanka has offered one of the blocks but appeared non-committal on the others.

India is also keen to take up exploration in the Cauvery basin, which is not far from its own offshore oil-bearing area by the same name. Here too, India is reluctant to allow other foreign companies to get in. India says ONGC’s experience in the Cauvery basin would come in handy here, as similar geological characteristics would reduce the lead time for exploration and production.

But officials feel Sri Lanka could be playing for time after it informed the Indians about plans to carve out more blocks from the existing ones — Colombo might be sizing up the potential to strike a favourable revenue-sharing arrangement, they said.

New Delhi expects a favourable response after having stood by Sri Lanka during its annihilation of the LTTE’s military structure even though sections of the world community and Indian domestic public opinion assailed the security forces for human rights abuses. courtesy: The Hindu

Pictorial warnings on cigarette packs in Sri Lanka

The government is planning to bring in two important pieces of legislation which when implemented, could result in a significant reduction in tobacco smoking in the country. “The government will bring in laws which would require the industry to include pictorial health warnings on all tobacco packaging and also to ban smoking in all public and work places,” Health Deputy Minister Lalith Dissanayake said during a media workshop organized by the Jeevaka Foundation.

The organizations involved in the fight against tobacco have been urging the authorities to implement the two smoke-free laws, to make the public aware of it’s toll on health and protect non-smokers from second hand smoke.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), tobacco use kills one person in every six seconds.

The deputy minister said that amendments to the National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol Act has been sent to the legal draftsman and was been translated into all three languages.

Dissanayake said that the Health Ministry was expecting the finished document within the next two - three months and then forward it to the perusal of its health committee before presenting it in Parliament for approval.

The deputy minister also noted that Health Minister Maithripala Sirisena was making special efforts to realize this at the earliest.

He said that the government led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa always stood for progressive legislation of this kind, which has the good health of the people at heart, through initiatives such as Mathata Thitha, which aims at weaning the public away from the imbibing of death-inviting intoxicants and other harmful substances.

It is expected that the pictorial warnings would come first which when implemented would require the industry to include graphic warning labels such as deceased lungs, oral cancer, wasted gums, children afflicted due to second-hand smoke etc covering at least 50 percent of the pack, according to NATA chairman Prof Carlo Fonseka.

It would come into effect with the empowerment of Article 11 of the WHO sponsored Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which Sri Lanka has agreed to enact as a party to the FCTC.

Cancer Care Association chairman and National Cancer Institute, Maharagama medical officer Dr Samadi Rajapaksa said that pictorial warnings on packaging’s was one of the most influential modes in communicating risks of tobacco use to users. “Graphic pictorial warnings can be very helpful in decreasing tobacco use by increasing public awareness of its dangers,” he added.

Dr Rajapaksa also pointed out that studies carried out after the implementation of pictorial package warnings in many countries reveal remarkably consistent findings on the positive impact of the warnings in reducing tobacco use.

While welcoming moves to ban smoking in all public places, Dr Rajapaksa said that Public Health authorities worldwide have concluded that there is no safe level to secondhand smoke exposure.

Secondhand smoke has proved to cause lung cancer, heart disease, sudden infant death syndrome, low birth weight and serious respiratory conditions, he said.

He also said that a cigarette contains 4,000 harmful substances with 40 of them having a direct impact on cancer. In Sri Lanka, the doctor says that over 40 percent of cancers are directly related to tobacco use.

Dr Rajapaksa said that he had informed the President on the importance of enacting the above laws and he had received a reply saying that it had been referred to the health minister.

Meanwhile, actor Roshan Ranawana speaking at the workshop attended by journalists representing nearly 40 electronic and print media organisations, said that Sri Lanka had lost many talented artistes prematurely due to tobacco use and alcohol abuse. He urged the young generation to stay away from both.

According to WHO, the leading preventable cause of death, tobacco kills more than five million people every year. One tobacco death occurs every six seconds. Tobacco killed 100 million in the 20th century and if preventable measures are not taken it could kill one billion in the 21st century.

INDIA WON’T TOLERATE VIOLATION OF RIGHTS OF TAMILS: NARAYANASAMY

Asserting that India will not tolerate violation of basic rights of Tamils and Indians anywhere in the world, Indian Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, V. Narayanasamy, on Monday hit out at attempts by certain parties in Tamil Nadu to “malign” Congress on Tamils issue.

“We will not tolerate violation of basic rights of Tamils and Indians anywhere in the world,” he said in response to a question on the US-sponsored motion against Sri Lanka over alleged human rights violations.

He said he had met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a couple of days ago at Delhi and requested him that India support the resolution against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC. The Prime Minister had assured him that he would ‘definitely’ consider the plea, Narayanasamy told reporters in Puducherry. 

However, he said, it was regrettable that some political parties were attempting to create a wrong impression that Congress was acting against Tamils in Sri Lanka. 

He pointed out that Congress had lost its leader, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the Lankan issue. Besides, the party spared no efforts to protect Tamils wherever they faced any ordeal. 

This being the fact some political parties, claiming to be champions of Tamils, were now attempting to “malign” the Congress on Tamils issue, he charged. He, however, did not name the parties. 

AIADMK supremo and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, DMK president M Karunanidhi and MDMK leader Vaiko had taken up the issue with the Indian Prime Minister recently, reports PTI.

Dirigisme at stake: Food, federalism, grain and cash

By Arindam Ghosh-Dastidar

THE United Progressive Alliance government is radiating its weakness on the Food Security Bill, close to three years after having floated what must still be a pie in the sky. The more the government fiddles, the more it is that people will suffer. While a parliamentary standing committee chews over the legislation, minister Sharad Pawar has laboured the obvious, but one that might yet defer, if not derail, the  passage of the Bill. Considering his consistent opposition to the legislation, it will not be easy for the agriculture minister to dispel the impression that he is intent on throwing a spanner in the works after it was introduced in Parliament. He could have spared aam aadmi, most importantly those below the poverty line, the knowledge that the public distribution system is a gigantic public sector disaster.

The PDS is the matrix on which must develop food security, but it remains monstrously inefficient. The logical corollary, in the minister’s reckoning, is that the food security law will come a cropper  because the distribution network is decrepit. Theoretically, he is right. Yet the reflection is on Mr Pawar, who has been the agriculture minister for the past eight years of the United Progressive Alliance government. His principal objection during the prolonged  discourse on food was to the subsidy issue, production levels and the percentage of the populace entitled to this welfare handout. Now that the nitty-gritty has loosely been settled and the Bill introduced, the minister, a member of the GoM, has raised a point of order that ought to have been settled long ago.  Wasn’t it his duty as the agriculture minister to revamp the PDS and transform it to an honest and dependable welfare network? Indeed, this revamp ought to have been effected in parallel with the rarefied discourse at various levels ~ the Planning Commission, the National Advisory Council, the Group of Ministers and the cabinet as a whole.

On the face of it, the minister has raised a seemingly valid reason; equally, he has presided over the PDS decline, thereby serving the interests of unscrupulous stakeholders. It is an open question whether the government will reflect on the eleventh-hour dissent on the part of a coalition partner. Sonia Gandhi, as head of the NAC, is unlikely to relent. At best, the government can follow a two-pronged praxis, go ahead with the Bill and effect a drastic restructuring of the PDS, regardless of whether it ruffles the feathers of certain parties. At worst, it could defer the passage of the legislation further still. Between the Bill’s introduction (last December) and its passage (present indefinite), Mr Pawar has made a last-ditch attempt to test the waters. And the issues raised can’t be an afterthought.

Shifty and weak, this government, one can politely say, is still finding its feet. There appears to be a glaring disconnect in the perceptions of the ministers of food and agriculture, almost a caricature of governance. With striking promptitude, food minister KP Thomas is anxious to dispel the impression of differences with Mr Pawar.  However tottering the PDS, Mr Thomas has conveyed the point that it will not be replaced by cash transfer. Much as the agriculture minister would plump for the latter as a relatively convenient option, the fact must remain that cash is no substitute for food except in the wake of a natural calamity or if "geographical conditions are adverse", as the Bill stipulates. Indeed, distribution of foodgrain with cash has decidedly been rejected by the social activists of the NAC. It is a cacophonous chord that emanates from the two crucial ministries of food and agriculture. The disconnect is symptomatic of the overwhelming confusion since the proposal was advanced by UPA-II. Leakages in PDS will have to be plugged, a task in which both ministers have a critical role to play.

As Mr Thomas cools his heels for a meeting with Mamata Banerjee, it becomes increasingly obvious that food is no less a topic of federal contestation. This mirrors the Centre-State discord over a raft of other issues with a bearing on public policy ~ from sharing river water with Bangladesh to the tackling of terror

The draft of the Food Security Act may be in place close to three years after the pledge by UPA-II, but the Planning Commission’s redefinition of poverty remains an ever so thorny issue. If the misadventure over the Lokpal Bill is a case-study in parliamentary fiasco, the concurrence of the states where the Congress’ allies are in power cannot readily be taken for granted. Not least because of the provision that bars states from providing subsidised foodgrain to those excluded from the Centre’s list of beneficiaries, indeed those who are deemed to be poor in Yojana Bhavan’s reckoning. Even before the Bill was introduced, the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and the JD(U) in Bihar were vehement in their opposition to this provision. Bengal’s Trinamul Congress is yet to spell out its stand, but the Chief Minister might well be loath to accept the Centre’s cap on the numbers that are entitled to eat. Her party’s relations with the Congress have become dire for a variety of reasons. The poor remain an indeterminate  segment in volatile Junglemahal as indeed in the rest of the state, most importantly the poverty-stricken belt of West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia. The passage of the legislation may not be easy if all the allies are ranged against the provision that has a terribly important bearing on those acutely entitled to food and its security. In the manner of the Lokpal Bill, the Food Bill will be a test for the federal engagement. Indeed, this will be yet another test in recent months after the Teesta water-sharing agreement with Bangladesh turned out to be a non-starter last September.

Tamil Nadu and Bihar seem poised to go off at a tangent, with the government in Chennai making it clear that it wants to continue with its universal coverage scheme, a critical engagement that no administration can afford to get diluted. The national legislation, at another remove, has skirted the issue of universal PDS. It is an open question whether the viewpoint of the states, where the Congress is not in power, will be taken care of. The dominant party at the Centre is yet to define the parameters that will determine the selection of beneficiaries. It is quite obvious that the party wants to control the numbers across the country.

The draft was formalised after a series of debates among the principal participants ~ the Centre, the GoM, the Planning Commission, the National Advisory Council and the States. But the norms to formulate the BPL census cut-off are yet to be finalised with the non-Congress states. In terms of a critical parameter, the Food Bill remains half-baked. The target group has waited long enough. The law on life’s essential must fructify. The unitary/ federal contruct and the spectrum of views are of lesser moment to the perdurably poor. Dirigisme is at stake. Food security can’t be enmeshed in ad hocism, dithering and egalitarian cant. (The Statesman/ANN)