Opinion View from the LEFT

“Unfortunately,these apprehensions are turning out to be true. For a week now,communal tensions continue to simmer,threatening to burst into flames in the districts of Sangli and Kolhapur in western Maharashtra. Violence broke out on the last day of the Ganesh festival in the Miraj town of Sangli district. It soon spread to adjoining districts in the country’s sugar bowl…As always,there is a deliberate design stoking such violence. The trouble started in the district after the police seized a decorative poster in one of the Ganesh mandals which depicted Shivaji Maharaja’s killing of Afzal Khan. Such a depiction was designed to provoke a confrontation…”

Gas feud

An article by Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) leader Dipankar Mukherjee criticises the prime minister for appealing to the warring Ambani brothers to settle the KG basin natural gas price dispute in the national interest. Since when has national interest become synonymous with corporate interest? he seeks to know. “On one hand the government — though belatedly but rightly — asserted a couple of months back that natural gas is a national resource and an asset which is owned by the people of the country,and on the other hand the corporate siblings are being cajoled openly by ministers to amicably settle the issue between themselves…”

At the first place,he says,the gas price fixed by the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) constituted by the prime minister himself had far reaching implications on the national energy sector in financial and economic terms.

“This was an executive decision and the executive is accountable to Parliament to clear the cloud of suspicion hovering around the hasty decision taken by the government,ignoring the advice of government agencies and wings like NTPC,ministry of fertilisers,committee of secretaries and without consultation with C&AG,PNGRB and state governments… Did the government surrender to,or collude with,corporate interest? The prime minister must clarify on behalf of the EGoM the brazen acts of omission and commission of the government. This is beyond the realm of settlement between the feuding corporate siblings,and lies within the domain of Parliament. The government cannot abdicate its responsibility to the corporates,” he says.

Education reform

In an article,Kerala Education Minister M.A. Baby lashes out at the HRD Ministry for not consulting the states and sidelining the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) while taking major policy initiatives. “The unilateral announcement by Kapil Sibal of the 100 day action plan involving far reaching policy changes like dispensing with the examinations in the 10th standard,is a clear indication of a federal deficit in policy making,” he says.

As regards Sibal’s reported statement that he would do for the education sector in 2009 what Manmohan Singh had done to the economy in 1991,Baby says: “The agenda notes circulated for the CABE meeting clearly reflected this misguided self-assurance on the advisability of neo-liberal reforms.”