Politics Over Economics

Punjab, headings towards bankruptcy, deserves better governance, according to an editorial in The Tribune
That Punjab has been in a financial mess is known. But few, perhaps, expected the deterioration so fast and so soon. Media reports indicate the government has stopped making payments of TA/DA bills and discontinued provident fund withdrawals. Only salaries of employees are paid. Next year the government requires an additional sum of Rs 1,500 crore to implement the pay commission’s interim report. The crisis has deepened due to a 30-per cent decline in stamp duty collections and a 20-per cent fall in small savings. So common is tax evasion that one MNC pays more tax to the government than the entire industry in Ludhiana.
The successive governments in Punjab have survived on borrowed money. The last Badal government had left behind Rs 32,000 crore as debt. The Amarinder Singh government too borrowed heavily and pushed the state debt to Rs 53,000 crore. Having done that, it is not proper for Captain Amarinder Singh to point the accusing finger at the Badal government. Taxes are opposed, but few understand and object to loans. Besides, competitive populism has driven successive governments in Punjab to avoid imposing fresh taxes or user-charges on utilities. Instead, power and water are supplied free to a large section of society. Now the ‘dal-wheat’ scheme will cost the exchequer Rs 527 crore. Politics prevails over economics.
Some hard decisions are required which the Badal government, given its reputation for freebies, is unlikely to take. It should scrap the post of parliamentary secretary, cut down the strength of IAS/IPS officers to the sanctioned number, wind up or sell off all loss-making state enterprises, limit official trips abroad and slash VIP security. Effective governance is the main requisite. A smaller state like Haryana has a higher revenue collection than Punjab. If ongoing projects are held up on flimsy grounds and the Dera issue is allowed to vitiate the peaceful environment, why would anyone invest in Punjab?

Mismanaged State of Punjab

The Punjab story is one of mismanagement and an ostrich-like attitude towards problems, writes Ravinder Kaur, Associate Professor at IIT, New Delhi in The Times of India.

The recent Punjab election verdict clearly shows that to most ordinary citizens, there isn't much difference between various political parties. In Punjab, the politicians appear to be singularly insensitive to the problems plaguing the state. They remain busy in one-upmanship, in mudslinging and trading the same old charges and abuses. What is it that plagues the highest per capita income state of India, the green revolution's miracle state and its hard working, forever optimistic, if native people? The slowest growing economy, plateauing agricultural yields, ruined ecology, farmer suicides, unemployment, low sex ratios, dowry deaths, smack addiction. the list could go on. Whatever happened to the golden state? No doubt, two decades of disturbances and militancy took its toll. But can we lay the blame for the lack of sustainable growth on those decades? The Punjab story is one of mismanagement and an ostrich-like attitude towards problems. If we do not acknowledge our problems, they will go away, seems to be the attitude. The disaster in Punjab has been a long time in the making. For one, this is a state where economic development has not travelled hand in hand with social development. While per capita incomes rose and poverty declined and many Punjabis became obscenely rich, literacy, education and health care did not spread at the same rate. Literacy remains far below that of Kerala and even neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, which was once a part of it; there is a gap of about 15 percentage points between male and female literacy. Punjab is one of the few rich states to continue to have relatively high maternal mortality rates (178 per 1,000)- worse than Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Haryana and Gujarat. Infant mortality rates are also higher than those of many other less prosperous states. The sex ratio, abysmal for a century, declined further from 882 in 1991 to 874 in 2001. The child sex ratio fell even more. Given these dismal statistics, does anyone care whether the Akalis or the Congress rule? If politicians were genuinely interested, they should have had a very sound idea of what ails Punjab, Farmers find themselves indebted. The inputs into agriculture grow more expensive leading to shallow profits when yields don't go sky-high anymore. Diversification never took off so farmers remain trapped in a wheat-rice cycle and hence at the mercy of government minimum support prices (MSPs) and subsidies. The land on which the majority of Punjabis are still dependent for a living can no longer support even two sons - hence many prosperous families are choosing to have only one child, a son.The years of the green revolution had made people smell prosperity and, for some, real luxury. People got used to living standards and ostentatious lifestyles that eventually became unsustainable. The younger generations got themselves some education but this education was not the sort that led to lucrative jobs or entrepreneurial skills. What it did achieve was to make them unfit for agriculture. The young educated man wishes to pontificate and not get out there early in the morning to supervise the farm. His old father still does that while the bhaiyyas from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar do the actual work. The young man lounges in the courtyard, developing dangerous habits such as addiction to smack or other drugs.The drug addiction problem has reached alarming proportion in the state. The warning bells have been ringing for a while but not many have paid attention. Local newspapers are full of such reports but the national media turns a blind eye to it. Why? Perhaps because this is seen as a rich state's problem. Starvation deaths and farmer suicides evoke much more empathy and central government assistance when they take place in Andhra Pradesh or in Orissa. Shouldn't a rich state be able to handle such problems its own?There is little realisation that whole generations are going to waste, caught in the poor education, unemployment, land needing even fewer people to work on it syndrome. In villages, a majority of young boys and men are affected. Parents talk about the sons of others being addicted while refusing to accept that their own sons are in the same trap. It is always some one else's son. Boys who do not get money from parents to feed their habit threaten to commit suicide.Punjab needs to take bold and revolutionary steps. It needs to shed its 'agriculture' , 'wheat bowl' image and take a few steps for its own well-being. First, it needs to drastically revamp it education system, both public and private, and go all out for top quality education. This will make its sons and daughters see that there are other ways of making a living than begging for paltry army or public sector jobs or sending people off to foreign lands. Second, it needs to reduce gender bias so that it can make better use of its intelligent, talented and hardworking women. It needs to lower maternal and infant mortality rates and to allow its girl children to be born. It needs to create (not provide) employment through diversification, even id diversification takes place within agriculture.Let the young men and women decide whether they went to set up factories or sell tulips from their laptops. The politician needs to sell education and jobs to the Punjab peasant's sons and daughters.

'Dalit' Gurdwara

Dalits have separate Gurdwaras in most of the Punjab villages. Here is one, in the name of Guru Ravidas, at village Narangwal in Ludhiana district.(pic: jaypee)

The threat from within

The caste-ridden Sikhs face greatest threat from within, writes Dipankar Gupta in Hindustan Times, tracing their journey from a community confident of its faith to one feeling threatened by the likes of Sacha Sauda head

Sikhs may be just 2 per cent of the population but in their self-image and deportment, it is as if they constitute 200 per cent of India's one billion. As the saying goes: "Ek Sikh barabar sava lakh." Even during the worst days of the Partition, Sikhs never felt insecure about their religion as their Hindu counterparts did, and continue to do.Why then does a small, insignificant sect like the Dera Sacha Sauda, that does not even claim to be Sikh, get mainstream Akalis and a large number of everyday Sikhs so hot and bothered? This Baba is no medieval tyrant and martyrdom of any kind would be thoroughly wasted on him. He is a minor figure whose demonising by the Akalis raised his stature and downgraded their gurus who gave up their lives in far more glorious battlefields.The question then is: How did the Sikhs suddenly turn so insecure? When did it happen and where were we all looking? Or did the lights suddenly go off in the changing room?The original Panthic Party, which later morphed into the Akali Dal after 1947, never evinced such worries either, and those were very difficult times. They regularly participated with the Congress before Independence. The party even supplied the congress with a stable of leaders from Pratap Singh Kairon to Swaran Singh. On election campaigns in undivided Punjab, the Panthic Party frequently displayed the Congress symbol along with its own. On no occasion did any of this to-and-fro movement from Panthic Party and back threaten Sikhism. Nor did the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee declare Kairon or Swaran Singh, or any of the others who took their political blood lines to the Congress, apostates or `tankhaiyas'. Sikhism had that much confidence.In 1899, when Sardar Kahn Singh Nabha wrote "Hum Hindu Nahin (We are not Hindus)," he did not castigate any other religion but just said the plain truth. The Sikhs were not Hindus and let the record state the facts. It was not as if he was prompted to write this tract because of the perceived fear that Hinduism was eating up Sikhism. In this sense he was not the mirror opposite of Swami Dayanand who took every other religion, including Sikhism, as a threat to the Hindu faith.Nabha's interjection was to remind his readers of the symbolic energies at the heart of his faith without deriding non-Sikhs, nor, even for a moment, hoping to proselytise other religions to his own. Even the Singh Sabhas and Chief Khalsa Diwan of that period were intent on crafting a separate Sikh identity and not in impressing their own thought prints on their immediate religious neighbours. Interestingly, in the 60 years after Independence, the Akali Dal has never used the Partition to evoke partisanship the way Hindu parties, and sadly, the Congress even, have done from time to time. This is indeed quite remarkable. Sikhs too had suffered along with Hindus in their migration to east Punjab and beyond. And yet, unlike Hindus, the Partition is history for Sikhs, and not a source of political energies.When I was working with re-settled rural Sikh refugees in Punjab and Haryana, what struck me the most was that they found my questions, which recalled the Partition, quite stupid. So many of these Sikhs told me to move on and not keep looking over my shoulder for monsters and chimeras of the past.That was such a relief. Hindu refugees, in general, were still agonising over the Partition and related stirring tales of their experiences during those times. Most of this recall was highly adorned as my Hindu respondents in the early 1990s were either babies or playing in the mud in knickers when 1947 happened. Some post-Partition Hindu families even held prayer meetings to solemnly remember the day they were ousted from their homes. I found none of this among Sikh refugees. It is no surprise then that even a sectarian party like the Akali Dal has no use for the Partition as a leavening political agent.Later, during the bad days of Khalistan, a large number of Sikhs felt that they were humiliated by the Indian state, but on no account did they believe that their religion was under threat. Khalistanis were, of course, baying to the contrary from the margins, but an overwhelming majority of Sikhs did not politically side with these secessionists though they were widely admired for giving the hated agents of the government a tough time. This is not an `a-ha' moment for, in spite of the trauma post-Bluestar, Sikhs were willing to look ahead the moment Prime Minister V.P. Singh visited Punjab with a healing balm.The Khalistani years, if one may call them that, however demonstrated that in times of crisis, it was not as if there were Sikhs and Sikhs. Regardless of caste and origin, all Sikhs came together. This is where the difference lies when we come to the Sikh over-reaction to Dera Sacha Sauda. There are now Sikhs and Sikhs and the lines are drawn along the grooves of caste.Most of the animus against Baba Ram Rahim came from the Malwa region of Punjab where Jat Sikhs are politically dominant. It does not matter really if Jats vote Congress today and Akali tomorrow, it would always be a fight between `lions'. Dera Sacha Sauda trampled on this territory by bringing in non-Jats to kick up dust and spoil the Jat versus Jat slugfest. This is why Baba Ram Rahim was so profoundly despised in Jat-dominated Akali circles. It was not because he was undermining Sikhism so much as using his "low caste" followers to defeat Jats in their own lair that made Baba Ram Rahim such a hated poster-boy for the Akalis. If the Congress had won without his support, that would still have been acceptable. It is not true, as the Akalis allege, that in the advertisement put out by Baba Ram Rahim he dressed like Guru Gobind. His turban did not have a `kalgi (or plume)', he was stirring Rooh Afza (or something pink) with a ladle and not with a sword (which is Khalsa tradition), and further, he was wearing pink and not blue, not even white. No icon of Guru Gobind can ever be depicted in that colour. Chhatrapati Shivaji's popular imagery looks closer to Guru Gobind than this pink spectacle. And yet many Sikhs blindly believed the Akalis when they said that Baba Ram Rahim was imitating Guru Gobind and thus mocking Sikhism. The majority of such Sikhs did not bother to verify the facts as they were primed to believe anything against him. It was their Jatness, not their Sikhness, that Baba Ram Rahim deeply hurt. In the 1980s, Hindus too eagerly believed the tale that the Anandpur Sahib Resolution was secessionist. The drive to hate always numbs the better senses.At the end of the day what is most depressing is that Sikhs are becoming caste-ridden, and more and more like Hindus. If this trend continues then Sikhism will probably find its greatest threat from within and not from figures clad in baby pink.

The dera way for Punjabis

It’s an eclectic mix of Babas offering anything from solace to miracle cures, reports Vijaya Pushkarna in The Week after visiting few deras in Punjab

With her eyes on a door 30 feet away, she rests her head against the wall of the darbar sahib of Dera Sant Baba Ram Singh Ganduanwale. Along with half a dozen sisters-in-faith, who are asleep, she awaits Puran Brahm Maharaj to open that door and give darshan to the sangat (congregation) on a hot Sunday afternoon. A couple of granthis are reading softly from the Granth Sahib in the centre of the hall. "You can sit or lie down. Nobody knows when the door will open. Are you visiting this place for the first time?" the woman from Mohali asks enthusiastically. High walls enclose the dera on the Chandigarh-Sirhind road, and after a number of questions from sevadars, one is able to enter the courtyard.Some people are lying on the grass, with their children playing nearby. There are all kinds of vehicles parked inside. A number of people are working in the langar (community kitchen), and we are asked to partake of it as we wait. The woman from Mohali says that the Baba's family has been with the Sikh gurus from the days of Guru Nanak. "Maharajji's brother, Sant Baba Ajit Singhji Hansaliwale, also has a dera, a few kilometres away. You can go there and visit the highly enlightened soul," she says. She shows posters and calendars of the two brothers who provide spiritual sustenance to thousands like her. "Even before I tell him my problem or pain, he knows it. And if he suggests a way out, you can be rest assured it will work," she says. "Though I visit a gurdwara in Mohali, everyone needs a maharaj for solving small and big problems," she adds, as she offers me a glass of lassi in the langar, where half a dozen men are waiting. When I tell them that I want to write about their devotion to the Maharaj, they clam up. One of them raises his voice and says: "Maharajji is a learned man. He has the world at his feet, and does not believe in publicity. And he has told us not to publicise our faith either. Journalists write whatever they want to. So please excuse us." The woman's tone, too, changes, but she has a suggestion. "You start coming here, and in a few weeks you will experience the miracles of Maharajji. Then you write."Tens of thousands of devotees like her flock to deras looking for a maharaj or sant baba for spiritual guidance and a magical panacea for their woes. Apart from devotees, the babas get sewa-voluntary service. Sewa can be anything from sweeping and cooking, to offerings like an air-conditioner or a few sacks of wheat. Each dera, which means a place, sports a darbar sahib, with the continuous reading of the Granth Sahib, and a langar. Most gurus interpret the Granth Sahib and preach respect for all religions. There is nothing like conversion. Alongside the Granth Sahib, people place the portrait of their Maharajji.Sant Ram Singh's dera at Neelon Bridge in Ludhiana is simply called Guru ka Langar. He quotes Guru Nanak to the faithful, who touch his feet, make an offering, and pour their hearts out. Credited with travelling across the country to propagate the teachings of Guru Nanak, the 90-year-old seer has only one message: "Only your God is real. Everything else like money, friends and family will be left behind. Do all the good you can."Joginder Singh, in his 40s, could never think of doing anything other than serving at the dera. "If people want to reach God, they need a teacher. For me that teacher is Sant Ram Singhji," he says. Ram Singh visits the dera only occasionally. Those who want to meet him go to his house a couple of kilometres away.Surjit Kaur, a little over 60, lays her infant grandson at Ram Singhji's white socks-covered feet, and tells him that he has not stopped crying for the past two days. He strokes the baby's head and tells Surjit that all will be well. "This grandson is Babaji's gift to us, to my daughter who has two daughters. We don't go to any doctor for the children as he is our doctor," she says.Why do people flock to deras, I ask Ram Singh. "People have to be guided to the Guru. It is kaliyug, and more and more people will go with the frauds, who will exploit them. I am a man of Guru Nanak and I tell people to consume neither liquor nor meat and to work hard. I tell them that apart from God, everything else will be left behind," he replies.I ask him to comment on the controversial Dera Sacha Sauda's Gurmeet Ram Raheem Singh. Ram Singh replies: "I want to know what his religion is. Who is he, an udasi, a jogi, a sanyasi, a nath, a sant or a Sikh? And whose preaching is he teaching? A real mahatma never fights."As I leave, some say Ram Singhji did a 25-year-long penance before setting up the dera. I drive along the meandering roads to reach Dera Dhakki Sahib at Maksudra village of Payal tehsil in Ludhiana. Baba Darshan Singh, 43, a resident of Gharuan village in Ropar district, founded the dera in 1987, and has remained controversial all along. Three years ago the CBI indicted him and 18 followers for opening fire and attacking the villagers, who resisted the dera's encroachment on public land.Darshan Singh's supporters used to carry arms and flaunt their political connections. He himself flew in a helicopter to preach all over Punjab. And in the political battle between Akali stalwarts Parkash Singh Badal and the late Gurcharan Singh Tohra a few years ago, he is said to have sided with Tohra. An angry Badal jailed him when he became chief minister last time. Once mobs torched his dera.The starting point of Dhakki Wale Baba [Darshan Singh] may have had a lot to do with the forest land on which the dera has come up. The dera is lush with trees and scores of devotees visit the eco-friendly huts, which house the darbar sahib, the langar, and a guest house. Darshan Singh's aide Gurdeep Singh explains that Dhakki comes from the dhak tree that grows abundantly in this forest. The dera's private areas are sealed off with a grille fence. Built in the centre of an enormous earthen mound, the two-storeyed house has a cave-like entrance, which gives it the look of a sadhu's abode. Notices on trees exhort people to respect all religions. Darshan Singh does social work by helping poor girls get married, conducting de-addiction programmes and teaching Gurbani. Says Gurdeep: "Baba tells his devotees to be honest and to serve the poor. His is the role of a teacher. People are not allowed to touch his feet, or bow before him. They can do so at the darbar sahib." The controversies surrounding Darshan Singh have apparently not affected his followers. Many have travelled from distant places, unmindful of the scorching heat. Apparently many deras are unsure whether the Akal Takht wants their closure or just the winding up of Dera Sacha Sauda of Gurmeet Ram Raheem Singh. At Dhakki Sahib, there is an undercurrent of fear as they are not on good terms with Chief Minister Badal.My next destination is the Dera Baba Mastanaji Maharaj near Mandi Ahmedgarh. Its Sant Baba Karnail Singh, 31, assumed the gaddi of the 18-year-old dera one and a half years ago. For 14 years, Karnail Singh was the general secretary of the Youth Shiromani Akali Dal and a trusted lieutenant of the Badals, particularly Shiromani Akali Dal working president Sukhbir Singh Badal. "My family in Canada was very devoted to Baba Mastanaji Maharaj and I used to visit this place from childhood. Eighteen months ago, he took me to the bank and made me the nominee of his assets. That night he told the sangat that I would be the spiritual inheritor of his teachings, his dera, and he passed away," says Karnail Singh as he supervises the kar seva (voluntary work) of his devotees. Karnail Singh, clad in a white pyjama-kurta, tells the sangat to stop kar seva for a while because of the heat. The doors are opened, and the people rush in. They are told not to touch his feet. After listening to their burden of woes, he comforts them and hands out prasad-a small plastic pouch of puffed rice and a tablet. "These tablets help these people a lot," says Karnail Singh showing a plastic basket full of strips of Avil and Duragesic. One is an anti-allergy pill and the other is a combo of diclofenac sodium and paracetamol. The prasad and his comforting words seem to work wonders on the devotees.Says Vimala Rani, who is in her 50s: "I had a severe eye ailment and had to undergo two surgeries in Ludhiana. But the pain continued. Three months ago, my daughter's mother-in-law told me to come here. I have been coming ever since and now I have much relief."Jasmeet Kaur, another devotee, says: "The old Maharajji knew our problems on his own. Even when doctors gave up, his cures worked. That jyot is with this young Baba, he's a true inheritor," she says