Players on strike, Hockey India out to score self goal

Nothing could be more embarrassing for a country than its national hockey players boycotting their training, that too weeks before it is to play a major tournament like the World Cup. The main provocation for this rare protest was the failure of the authorities to redress the financial demands of the players, but there were many other maladies too. The overall picture is of the neglect of the game and players, while the organisers play petty games of one-upmanship. Talking of the financial demands first, it is really scandalous that nobody has cared to give them match fee for even international tournaments like the Olympics, World Cup, Asia Cup, Asian Games, FIH tournaments, Champions Trophy and test matches. They have even been denied the logo money. The Indian Hockey Federation had promised them cash incentives for winning a medal in recognised international tournaments. This promise too remained only on paper.

This neglect of hockey stars has gone to such ridiculous lengths that some of the players from Oil India and BPL who get Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 per month when they play for their departmental team, get virtually nothing when they join the national camp and play for the country. There could not be a better way to discourage and humiliate these sportsmen. No wonder, the players are now demanding, besides incentives, fixed salaries citing that the Pakistan Hockey Federation pays Rs 50,000 a month to its players.
Even otherwise, there is serious factionalism among the hockey administrators as well as coaches. Players are suffering because of it and at times become pawns. Now that the rumblings are out in the open, it is necessary to address the issues thoroughly. Instead of showing their anger over the strike by the players, the hockey bosses should gauge the extent of their frustration which forced them to take this extreme step. The issue had flared up in 1998 also when seven players, including Dhanraj Pillay, Mukesh Kumar, Ashish Ball and Sabu Varkey, who won gold at the Bangkok Asiad demanded match fees. The then IHF president KPS Gill simply threw them out.

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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Let PU flourish, Central status alone can help

The issue of conferring Central status on Panjab University has again cropped up as Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal has squarely blamed the Punjab government for stalling the move. As is well known, Mr Parkash Singh Badal had first agreed to PU getting Central status, which essentially means more funds for the premier institution, but later backed out on the advice of some critics, who feared the move would dilute Punjab’s claim to Chandigarh. Punjab has got two more Central universities, which will come up at Amritsar and Bathinda.

With its finances going from bad to worse and allocations for education falling over the years, Punjab has failed to meet its financial commitments for Panjab University. Instead of paying 40 per cent of the budget of Panjab University as agreed, the state pays only 10 per cent. Haryana, which was also to pay an equal amount under the initial arrangement, has disaffiliated its colleges from PU and stopped paying its 40 per cent share. As a result, the university has been left to fend for itself and forced to raise money through various means, partly by raising the charges for students and virtually selling NRI seats in top courses. The other universities in the state too suffer from the resource crunch. Higher education has become very expensive and gone beyond the reach of students from families with modest means.
If Panjab University is to grow into an institution of global standards — and a rising India badly needs such academic institutions comparable to the best in the world — then the university cannot be left at the mercy of some myopic academics and politicians. The faculty members of the university firmly stand behind the demand for Central status and they have not stooped to street protests to press the issue. But such dignified behaviour has not made much impact on politicians with goals other than promoting academic excellence. 

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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Delhi-Dhaka bonhomie, Time to begin a new era of friendship

The five far-sighted agreements signed between India and Bangladesh on Monday mark the beginning of a new and happy phase in their relationship. Visiting Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, known for her positive attitude towards India, has got from New Delhi enough to convince her countrymen that Dhaka can gain a lot by cementing friendly relations with India. Today it is $1 billion line of credit that India has pledged for its eastern neighbour; tomorrow it can be more. Both countries will gain immensely as a result of the accords reached between them to fight terrorism and take their economic, trade and cultural ties to a higher level. It is heartening that the opportunity that has come with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League recapturing power in Dhaka has begun to be utilised to create a mechanism of friendship that will be difficult to dismantle in the future.
The flow of the promised funds will help Bangladesh expand its train and bus services, providing a fillip to economic activity in the poverty-stricken country. Bangladesh has been allowed direct access to Nepal and Bhutan using India’s rail and road facilities. This was the long-standing demand of Dhaka. Another major demand of Bangladesh that more items should be allowed duty-free export to India has also been conceded. This may help balance trade tilted towards New Delhi. India, too, will benefit considerably with the coming up of a rail corridor through Bangladesh connecting Kolkata and Agartala, reducing the distance of 1700 km between the two cities to nearly 550 km. Under the changed political climate Bangladesh may also agree to the laying of the proposed gas pipeline from Myanmar to India.
It must be underlined that Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina’s leadership has been greatly helpful in fighting terrorism. She was constructive in not allowing Bangladesh territory to be used for terrorism when her government handed over arrested ULFA chairman Arabindo Rajkhowa to India a few days back. With India and Bangladesh taking on terrorist outfits together, the forces working against peace in India’s Northeast are bound to get weakened. This is how the two countries can ensure that the bonds of friendship become strong and durable. 

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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Delhi Durbar, BJP faces pulls and pressures

The other day when Ravi Shankar Prasad was briefing the media about the first meeting of the office-bearers chaired by new BJP president Nitin Gadkari, he failed to mention Gopinath Munde's name as one of the task force members for the March 10 anti-price rise rally in Delhi. BJP organising secretary Ram Lal, standing at a distance, had to hurriedly send in a slip to remind him about it and an embarrassed Prasad added Munde's name as well.
The bad wibes Munde and Gadkari share is common knowledge in the BJP. Munde, at one time, had resigned all party posts, protesting Gadkari's decisions about the Maharashtra BJP.
Therefore, it is not clear whether this was an oversight on the part of Prasad or a conscious effort to get into Gadkari's good books. As it is the hunt for new office-bearers is on and it is being said that at least two spokesmen, namely Prasad and Prakash Javadekar, might be elevated to general secretaries' status.

Pakistan Speaker in Delhi

Speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly Fehmida Mirza, in Delhi last week to attend the Conference of Commonwealth Speakers, reminded everyone of former Pak Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Similar in fashion and style to the firebrand assassinated Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leader, Mirza drew everyone's attention for more reasons than one. First, she stuck to Lok Sabha TV when giving a full-length interview, leaving out a lot of media persons who were waiting to speak to her.
Later, however, she made up for her unavailability by ensuring that the detailed remarks on "Role of Speaker as a Mediator" she made in a closed-door meeting of presiding officers at Vigyan Bhavan, reached all those who were keen to know what Fehmida had to say on issues.
Copies of her speech in the workshop were distributed at Vigyan Bhavan after the session concluded.

NRIs hail PM's announcement

The Prime Minister's announcement about his government's plans to grant voting rights to NRIs was welcomed overwhelmingly by those participating in the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) celebrations last week.
Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor did not want to be left behind in taking credit for it. He was heard saying that it was he who had proposed that NRIs should be allowed to participate in the electoral exercise as a “pravasi” when he had participated in the PBD celebrations in Mumbai in 2003.
His rival in Kerala politics, E Ahamed, who is the Minister of State for Railways, recalled that it was he who had introduced a Private Member's Bill in Parliament, seeking voting rights for NRIs when he was an ordinary member.
But many delegates wondered whether the announcement would be transformed into a reality.
Contributed by Faraz Ahmad, Aditi Tandon and Ashok Tuteja

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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Licentiousness breeds extremism by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Last week I once again condemned the burkha and will do so till the end of my days. By that time, with the unstoppable rise and rise of Wahhabi Islam, they will probably have incarcerated me in black polyester and turned off my voice.
I unconditionally hate fanatical proselytisers – male and female – what they do to my faith and the faithful. The way they ban pleasures and progress, fill young minds with strictures to paralyse the will and suppress god-given desires in lands of freedom and autonomy.
Their inner lives are stormy, psychological dramas which turn dangerously unstable. Some of the resulting turmoil and sexual unrest may be swelling the seething brain of the next terrorist manqué.
On blogs now thought to be written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, you are given the impression from news reports that he was a lonely boy, unhappy with his peers who drank and partied.
At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint. Millions of Britons of all backgrounds are alarmed by the dissipation and debauchery that now defines Britain.
For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused.
You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.
The Pakistani journalist Maruf Khwaja describes this inner chaos in an Open Democracy blog. In some homes they cannot watch television, listen to music, dance or indulge in anything pleasurable: "[Muslims] want to do what their secular friends do, have nights out, go clubbing, have boyfriends and girlfriends. Many are depressed by social isolation and attempt to escape by leaving parents and Islamic legacies behind."
Others, like Asif, revert. He says he had a contact list full of willing white women whom he chatted up to "get into their knickers" and now that he is a good Muslim, he talks to covered-up ladies and can "really communicate with them". The saintly Muslim female has desexualised herself, protects herself in the polluted land she lives in full of mad, bad and dangerous sinners.
Women who are not coerced but choose to cover themselves are expressing that revulsion and fear of contamination. Their solutions are as bad as the problems they are trying to escape, sometimes worse. Sexual abuse, rape and forced homosexuality remain the dirty secrets of British Muslim communities, kept under wraps as it were, while they flap around proclamations of purity.
I cannot stand these false virtues and self-reverential pieties nor am I pleading on behalf of screwed-up men who would murder us naming Allah. I am saying that the collapse of all restraint in our societies is breeding sicknesses and madness, and may be pushing some Muslims to the edge of reason.
Non-Muslims are as concerned about social nihilism, and increasingly so. A list was sent home to the parents of girls at a middle-class school in London last week sternly reminding non-uniformed sixth-formers that there were still rules of decorum to follow. A list followed of garments henceforth disallowed: no tops that show the midriff or cleavage, no tight mini-skirts, no underwear showing, no clothes with holes in them, etc, etc.
Do parents and their teenagers think such wanton wear is OK for school? In an alarmingly short time, the nation has gone from Fifties uprightness to public striptease, even in schools.
We mothers of teenagers who can't bear this milieu are trying to do the impossible – to somehow let our born-free children find themselves and define their futures while holding them back protectively from the debauchery of modern British life.
In Natasha Walter's new book, Living Doll: the Return of Sexism, she describes the widespread self-degradation of young women and girls who wear "fuck-me" clothes, binge-drink and sleep around, all in the name of emancipation. Their heroines are Jordan and glamour models in lads' mags and what they really, really want is to be just like these big-breasted big-timers.
Teenagers told her they had had dozens of sexual partners already and some said they would happily go in for lap-dancing or porn shots "for enjoyment". The word that comes up all the time is "choice", but one has to ask what choice is there, really, when a pushy popular culture tells females as young as eight that they are creatures of the flesh which they must tame and give over to the public gaze and touch.
To me, that choice is engineered just as it is for veiled women. Both are victims of societal pressures that mould and compel certain decisions. They are perhaps twins born of the same womb.
Dr Marcus Braybrooke, a respected Anglican clergyman and theologian, has expressed his anxieties: "[All of us] face the same challenges in an increasingly alien society. Original sin and sexual inhibition has been replaced by what most Christians and Muslims would regard as undue permissiveness." Atheists too and humanists I bet, and all other sorts.
The last decade was a period of economic greed and libertine excess encouraged and reflected by magazines, television, music, high-paid entertainers and childlike resistance to self-control. Modesty was for losers. Some of those losers turned modesty into the ultimate cause, turned themselves into morality warriors and claimed God was on their side.
With things falling apart and ethical compasses broken, you can see why so many are turning to self-discipline and certainties in an age of chaos. Islamic Stalinism is set to grow stronger. A society in a state of perpetual abandon cannot survive that onslaught. We need to sober up and see what we have become. The future is grim; it needs us to be serious.
— By arrangement with The Independent

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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