EDITORIAL
DIBRUGARH, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
Nothing cures like excess
Today's quote
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“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?” Gautama Buddha
Putin tightens his grip he outcome of Russia’s parliamentary election was never in question. The United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin has dominated the political landscape ever since it was founded in 2001. Even so, the margin of the victory was unexpected. The September 18 elections were held against the backdrop of a protracted economic crisis, tensions between Russia and the West, and a war of attrition in the country’s neighbourhood. Lower oil prices and western sanctions have hit ordinary Russians hard. Russia’s economy contracted by 3.7 per cent last year and is expected to shrink further by 0.7 per cent this year. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic hardships trigger anti-incumbency sentiment. But in Mr. Putin’s Russia just the opposite has happened. When the results were declared, his party won more than three-quarters of the 450-member Duma. The Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party have retained some presence in the national Parliament, while the Yabloko and the Parnas, the two liberal parties critical of the Kremlin, failed to even enter the Duma. This could partly be because of the lack of a united opposition in Russia. The Communists and Liberal Democrats are hardly opposition parties, and agree with the Kremlin on most policy decisions. The anti-Kremlin parties have failed in, or been hindered from, building a broad base among the electorate. Alexey Navalny, the leader of the popular anti-government protests of 2011, has been barred from contesting elections. Boris Nemtsov, another popular opposition leader, was shot dead last year in Moscow. At present, there is no opposition leader in a position to challenge the personality cult of Mr. Putin.
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In any case, memories of the anarchic pre-Putin era may still be prompting Russians to stick by him. Mr. Putin is largely credited with fixing the economy and providing a stable political leadership to the country. Under his watch, Russia has come out of its self-imposed strategic retreat and started playing an active global role. Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and a combative foreign policy in Syria and elsewhere have proved popular among his domestic constituents. But the Russian economy continues to be heavily dependent on energy exports. If crude oil prices remain low for long, economic pain will persist. Though the muscular foreign policy is popular at home, Moscow has had to pay a heavy price for it. Whatever Mr. Putin had done in his first and second terms to rebuild ties with Europe, particularly with Germany, lies in a shambles in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. If Mr. Putin wants to rebuild Russia as a credible global power, a persistent economic crisis and stormy neighborhoods are not going to help.
The curious death of Ramkumar The alleged suicide of murder suspect P. Ramkumar in the high-security Puzhal Central Prison in Chennai has given rise to many questions and doubts. The claim that Ramkumar, the alleged lone assailant who stalked and killed young Swathi, took his own life by biting a live wire pulled out from a switchboard inside the prison is unusual. His lawyer alleges he was murdered. Even without questioning the suicide theory, it is clear that the prison administration has much to answer for. Ramkumar had suicidal tendencies, going by the police claim that he tried to slash his own throat when he was about to be arrested. Prison authorities say he was indeed under continuous watch by warders, and that he had been given psychological counselling. More ought to have been done to prevent the incident, as the case had become unusually sensitive, with the public debate assuming strong caste and communal overtones. It is surprising that the closely watched suspect had easy access, at a moment when he was conveniently alone, to a switchboard near the prison dispensary. It also so happened that the CCTV cameras installed in the modern prison did not cover that particular area where he chose to end his life. If he did commit suicide, there has been undoubted lapse in monitoring his movements. Prison suicides set off questions about the conditions of incarceration in our jails, often seen as overcrowded and understaffed. Suicide by electrocution is rare, as it is not difficult to deny prisoners any form of access to live electrical cables. There is truth in the theory that it is difficult to prevent a person determined to commit suicide, even if some correctional psychologists disagree. There ought to be an initial evaluation of incoming prisoners to identify those with a high risk of suicide. Thereafter, periodic assessments of their state of mind should be made. While continuous watch is inescapable, designing ‘suicide-resistant cells’ and auditing jails to identify and remove possible anchoring points for attempts to die by hanging are other necessary measures. When Ramkumar was arrested there was a sense of reassurance among the public, even though a few demanded a CBI investigation based on a few purported lacunae in the police version. The police were expected to put an end to all speculation about whether he was the ‘real culprit’ by bringing him to trial. It is a pity this did not happen. The Tamil Nadu government should order a judicial probe in order to credibly allay any impression, false though it may well be, that the case was sought to be closed extrajudicially.
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The heavy home season of Tests is an opportunity a TRP-driven BCCI can ill-afford to miss Abdus Salam Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore, circa 1987. A snake pit of a pitch. Iqbal Qasim and Tauseef Ahmed, of whom we didn’t hear much before or after, were lapping up wickets as only South Asian dust-bowl specialists can. At one end, however, a diminutive man held firm, fishing on the odd occasion, presenting a dead bat on most others, and unleashing delectable drives as only he could. Some seven months down the line, the same man would run amok in uncharacteristic fashion as he raced his way to a career-first hundred in One-Day Internationals (ODIs), the last tournament of his career. For millions of cricket connoisseurs, Sunny Gavaskar’s epic 96 against Pakistan on a crumbling wicket in his final Test match puts his unbeaten 103 in 88 balls against New Zealand in the Reliance World Cup in the shade any day. Doomsday prophets say the great game is now dying — Test cricket, that is.
The purist’s delight. The ultimate contest between bat and ball. And no matter how many open-heart surgeries they perform, from pink ball to day-night matches and coloured clothing to a World Test Championship, the audience has bolted. Cricket must bow to the zeitgeist of instant entertainment and embrace its new pint-sized normal, Twenty20. Hope from T20 But in the rise of the twenty overs’ format lies hope for the longest, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) willing. Look beyond the sound and fury of its current opposition to the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) two-tier Test system; the BCCI is projecting it as rallying to the defence of weaker cricketing nations, but the proposed system is also linked to a proposal for centralised marketing of global broadcast rights of bilateral series, as also the fact that a former Board president now heads the ICC and has turned on the current Board administra-
tion. Truth be said, the commercialisation of Indian cricket under the aegis of the BCCI has had not a small role to play in relegating Tests to an afterthought. As the pecuniary potential of the ODI, and subsequently the T20, dawned on the Board from the early 1990s through the 2000s, it refused to upgrade Team India’s calendar for Test cricket. Sample an icon whose career overlapped with this transition, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. When he made his debut in November 1989, cricket was largely played in white flannels; England, with its lucrative country cricket structure, was still the game’s financial leviathan. By the time he walked out at the Wankhede stadium in November 2013, the transformation was complete: India was dictating terms to the cricketing world, leveraging its financial muscle of multimillion-dollar broadcasting and sponsorship rights and as hosts of that consummate entertainmentsport jamboree, the Indian Premier League. Over the course of a 24-year career
in which he sat out only a handful of matches due to injury, Tendulkar played 200 Tests — 8.3 Tests a year on average. Contrast that with a near-contemporary, Australian Ricky Ponting. In a 17-year career starting 1995, Ponting ended up playing 168 Tests until he bowed out of the game in 2012 — or 9.9 Tests a year on average. Another nearcontemporary, Jacques Kallis of South Africa, notched up 166 Test caps over 18 years, at 9.2 matches a year. In a career of just 10 years, current England Test captain Alastair Cook has played 133 matches, or 13.3 Tests a year. The point is, unlike cricket’s new financial numero uno, the other Big Three — Australia, England and South Africa — have demonstrated a higher commitment to Test cricket. If those ballpark figures via careers aren’t enough, sample this. Since Tendulkar’s retirement, India has played 25 Tests as opposed to Australia’s 28 and England’s 32. Public memory is short but it is the
same BCCI, now wallowing in its packed itinerary this season of 13 Tests as proof of its commitment to the five-day game, that allowed Mahendra Singh Dhoni, then the ODI skipper, to sit out of a Test series in Sri Lanka in July-August 2008 because of ‘fatigue’ — this, after featuring in all 16 of the Chennai Super Kings’s matches en route to the final of the inaugural IPL between April and June that year. As history is made As India plays its 500th Test against New Zealand at Kanpur on Thursday, what the doomsday prophets are overlooking is the rapid redundancy of the ODI. It was an innovation for its time, and struck a refreshing contrast to the five-day game after officials hastily organised the first ODI between England and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on January 5, 1971, to compensate audiences for the third Ashes Test getting washed out. As the adrenaline of a mandatoryresult contest gets accentuated in a three-and-a-half-
hour format, the ODI increasingly battles its long middle, of uneventful hours before the plot thickens in the death overs. While its popularity still persists, partly because of the quadrennial World Cups, the likelihood of the ODI yielding diminishing financial returns going forward is high. Test cricket, on the other hand, has shaken off of its stupor of dour draws in recent years, with more and more matches ending in a nail-biting finish. If variety were the yardstick to predict sustainability of spectator interest, the bet is it will coalesce around the ends of the spectrum, with ODIs as the unviable halfway house. With the heaviest home season of Tests beckoning since 1979-80, India is poised to not only supplant Pakistan as the top Test team but consolidate its place, a fact that is likely to bring back the in-stadia spectators and television viewers. It’s an opportunity a TRP-driven BCCI can illafford to miss. It failed Tendulkar; it must not fail Virat Kohli.
Donald Trump, a contrarian view India has an old love affair with the Democrats in the United States, but the Republican Presidents and legislators have done more for India-U.S. relations than Democrats in recent years. John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton and their wives conquered hearts in India, but they did not transform the relationship as the younger George Bush did. Mr. Clinton initiated the process of normalisation with India, but came down on India like a ton of bricks when it tested nuclear weapons in 1998. In the days following the tests and sanctions, many close Democrat friends of India, even the Chairman and members of the India Caucus in the Congress, deserted us, except for Congressman Frank Pallone. The State Department was not on talking terms with us. It was a statement by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that he could understand India’s concerns as it was in a “tough neighbourhood” that changed the bleak atmosphere for India in Wash-
ington. Again, it was Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican, who whittled away the sanctions against India over a period of time.
heights. Despite all his camaraderie with the Indian Prime Minister, he spared no occasion to lecture India on the merits of religious tolT.P. Sreenivasan ea r ann c de Though nuclear fiDemocratic presidential delity. Many tricky issues candidate Hillary Clinton remain even as we call was once referred to as ourselves a major defence “the Senator from Punjab” partner of the U.S. by her detractors, there is no evidence of her having Republican presidential gone out of her way to candidate Donald Trump favour India. She has remains an enigma maintained a friendly face wrapped in mystery, with towards India, but her con- his confusing pronouncecerns about China and Pa- ments on domestic and kistan were all too evident foreign policy. He has during her term as Secre- been accused of having tary of State. As President, neo-fascist tendencies. she is likely to continue But his positions are the ambivalence. evolving. He seems to have abandoned the idea Barack Obama started of banning Muslim immioff as a hot favourite in gration, building a wall India, but appeared disil- between the U.S. and lusioned after his visit in Mexico and stopping all 2010, when he failed to migration and win the nuclear and the outsourcing. fighter aircraft contracts. His initial opposition to He has realised the the nuclear deal did not value of the North Atlanstand in the way of its tic Treaty Organisation, implementation, but he even though he still beextracted a price for every lieves that the partners step he took with should pay for the services Narendra Modi to take the they receive. But he is carelationship to greater pable of thinking out of
the box and this may well be the reason why he is still neck and neck in the race with Ms. Clinton today. Positions that align with India’s Terrorism is the recurring theme in every speech that Mr. Modi makes and that is a measure of India’s most important preoccupation today. Mr. Trump’s agenda is identical and India can rely on him to fight terrorism in all its forms, whether it is the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Taliban or the Pakistansponsored outfits. “Pakistan is probably the most dangerous country in the world today. The only country that can check Pakistan is India,” he said in September 2015. No Democratic President, not even Ms. Clinton, will take such an unequivocal position on Pakistan and terrorism. As a businessman, Mr. Trump has been an admirer of India to the extent of encouraging investment in India. Two Trump Towers are in the making in Mumbai and Pune in
What About These Situations For example, how many times have you been driving to work when another motorist has cut you off, made a dangerous lane change without signalling, or nearly rear-ended you because they were tail gating you? I'm sure this has happened to you. How did you react? Did you react emotionally by blowing your horn incessantly, speed up to catch them and give them a rude gesture, or did you just sit there boiling over? In other words, did you take this action by the other driver personally? Well, at one time or another, we have all probably felt this way and allowed this inconsiderate motorist to ruin the rest of your day. So, what have you done? You took their actions
personally. What about the technological marvel of the modern day computer that
quits responding, or develops a glitch so that you cannot get to that critical assignment? Do you think that this inanimate object was designed to foul up your day just when you really needed to get that task done for the boss? No. It's just a piece of machinery - it has no mind, it has no soul, it has no personality. So, if you take its'
failing as personal, you have made it human. Do not take it personally. Realize that you are assigning power to this computer it does not have - you again have given it power that it does not possess. You have given it power to control your emotions. And, what about that colleague who is never wrong, and where you are never right? Is this kind of person telling you more about yourself, or are they really making an unconscious statement about who they are, and their own need for ego enhancement? Do not take his or her actions personally or you are allowing someone else to tell you who you are and what you are worth.
partnership with Indian entrepreneurs. He has gone on record as saying that after the installation of the Modi government, India has become a “top place’ for investment. In January 2016, Mr. Trump complimented India for “doing great” and expressed surprise that nobody was talking about it. Since he puts his money where his mouth is, as President, Mr. Trump is likely to embrace India. As a businessman President who has pledged to bring prosperity to the U.S, he may find a valuable partner in Mr. Modi. Mr. Trump’s admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his championship of Brexit may well be signs of his wanting to be different from others. But neither of these, even if taken to their logical conclusion, will hurt India’s interests. On China, Mr. Trump has been ambivalent. His main criticism about China is on trade and currency matters. In fact, his anticipated “trade war” with China could wipe out $420 billion off China’s
exports, according to Kevin Lai, a Hong Kong economist. Mr. Trump has also had some good words to say about China, but his distrust of Beijing is obvious and he is not likely to act against our interests. The Democratic optimism about China being a responsible nation that can be entrusted with looking after stability in South Asia is not likely to be shared by Mr. Trump. In the middle of September, barely two months before the polls, Ms. Clinton may have a slight edge over Mr. Trump but the matter is not settled as yet. Mr. Trump has begun to lead in critical “battleground states” like Ohio and Florida, where Ms. Clinton was leading till recently. If the Americans take a leap into the dark on account of their frustrations about the economy, terrorism and China, as the British did in the case of Brexit, we may end up with Mr. Trump as President. India has fewer reasons to be uncomfortable about such an eventuality than generally feared.
Tall Talks And Misrule Sir, A report published in media makes us laugh in our sleeves which suggests that congress will make a house to house survey on the promises made by BJP. Long 15year misrule by congress itself is enough to transpire how corrupt the party has become over the years after independence. More important, congress members started thinking that India belongs to them. Almost all the important places, institutions are named after the members of the Gandhi family. Now, time has come to rename these places and institutions. We fail to understand, why the party still thinks itself as indispensable to Indians. When the likes of Tarun Gogoi, Ripun Borah, Akon Borah talk of Principles, of the price-rise, it sounds like devils chanting scriptures. Will these leaders be kind enough to explain why congress has been reduced to a Lilliputian stature in Lok Sabha? Why the party has been gradually decimated from one state after an-
other? We firmly believe that the recent suicides that rocked the entire state are direct fall-out of the corruption of the previous government led by Tarun Gogoi. First, it was the case of the businessman who left out a suicide note accusing Jatin Mali, the ex M.L.A of Palashbari. Subsequently, it transpired that some heavy weights of congress too are embroiled. Then the heart rending suicide of Ganeshguri Hotel came involving four persons including a oneyear old infant. The suicide note was pointed to one Putul Gogoi who is reported absconding but has been nabbed from Moran. Further investigations by the Police will surely unveil the truth. Bribing for jobs and other favours reached the zenith during congress regime which hopefully is ebbing now under the present ruling dispensation.
Yours etc. Ashok Bordoloi Dibrugarh