Politician Kejriwal losing friends in NGO world
TNN | Oct 23, 2012, 02.18AM IST
NEW DELHI: As Arvind Kejriwal makes the shift from the NGO world to that of politics, he faces the tough task of keeping his civil society friends with him. NGO Vidharba Jan Andolan Samiti, which has been active in raising farmers' suicides and other problems in the parched belt, has accused Kejriwal of using it for his political purposes.
Kishore Tiwari, who heads the NGO, said, "We were asked to provide all details related to the irrigation scam and the recently developed power project crisis... these were given to the IAC. But all data given by us was intentionally not used... it resulted in single person focus where our main issues have taken a back seat."
This is not the first time that Kejriwal has lost support from friends in civil society but ever since he announced his political inclinations, those differing with him have preferred to go public. Earlier, civil society members on board the National Advisory Council had distanced themselves from his campaign, not wishing to be attached with his "approach and methods", as some put it.
The differences within Team Anna, when it existed, could have been passed off as fraternal arguments but the chasm between Kejriwal's overt political steps and the concerns of civil society to look at more systematic changes have a different dimension.
Tiwari said, "We demand IAC to focus on main demands of aam aadmi who are living in remote villages and are dying without food and medicine."
While Tiwari was initially supportive of Kejriwal's foray into politics, he sounded circumspect in a later letter, saying, "The basic need is to change the wrong model of development and fix a time agenda to deal with corrupt... We will convince these great leaders that's the main issue."
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Questions swirl around source of funding of Gadkari's firm
NEW DELHI/NAGPUR: Grave questions have surfaced over the source of funds for Purti Power and Sugar Ltd, controlled by BJP president Nitin Gadkari. Investigations reveal significant investments and large loans to Purti by a construction firm, Ideal Road Builders (IRB) Group, which had won contracts between 1995 and 1999, when Gadkari was the PWD minister in Maharashtra.
Besides IRB Group, the other significant shareholders in Purti are a clutch of 16 companies. TOI's investigations across four cities revealed that most addresses in which these companies are registered are unverifiable, and that the firms are controlled by Gadkari's close aides.
Records of 2010-11 show that directors of these investor companies included Gadkari's driver, his 'diwan' (accountant) and two employees of Purti. One of them is said to be a friend of his son, Nikhil. The IRB connection is significant. The company and its promoter D P Mhaiskar together subscribed to 68.4 lakh shares of Purti. More importantly, an IRB firm, Global Safety Vision, loaned Rs 164 crore to Gadkari's company. The BJP chief, who is one of the seven promoters of Purti, currently holds just 310 shares worth Rs 3,100.
When Gadkari met TOI in Nagpur on Monday, he denied any wrongdoing. "I am ready to face any inquiry," he said. He added, "I resigned as Purti chairman 14 months ago." TOI had withheld the story for 24 hours as the BJP chief was not available for comment initially.
Global's loan came in a year when Purti had a turnover of Rs 145 crore and accumulated losses of Rs 48.94 crore. IRB Group's contribution in strengthening finances of Purti is noticeable on filings of the company over the years. Also, Global appointed its director Ganesh Gadre on Purti's board as a nominee director. Purti's power and sugar plants and the 47.69-hectare plot — on which the factories are housed — are mortgaged to Global.
In a detailed reaction, Sudhir Dive, managing director of Purti Power and Sugar Limited, denied any irregularity in company's funding from IRB or other sources. "Purti has losses of Rs 64 crore, Mhaiskar loaned us Rs 164 crore through Global, and we have repaid him Rs 62 crore which includes interest," said Dive.
"There's no suspicion around the investment, growth and associations of Purti Power and Sugar Limited," said Dive in a written reply to queries sent by TOI. "All the companies are genuine and are 12-15 years old, they are also complying with all the rules and regulations," he asserted.
However, TOI's investigation shows that most companies that invested in Purti don't exist at the addresses shown in the records of the Registrar of Companies.
For instance, five of the investor companies — Nivita Trades, Swiftsol, Rigma Fintrade, Ashwami Sales and Marketing and Earnwell Traders — are shown as registered at Dube Chawl, a slum in Mumbai's Andheri East.
Ramesh Dube, the owner of the chawl, maintained that no company had ever functioned from the area. "I know of no one who has or currently operates an office in this colony," Dube told TOI.
Three other major holders of the Group — Vidya Buildcon, Sanobar Infrastructure and Roller Multitrade — are registered at an address, Sri Nivas House in Mumbai's Fort Area, which actually belongs to the well-known Somani Group. When TOI visited the premises, members of the Somani family and their employees denied any knowledge of the firms which in official records operate from the same address.
Inquiries revealed that it was actually Pradeep Vyas, a manager of Gujarat Composite Limited, a unit of the Bangar Group that operates from the same building, who had mentioned Somani's premises as that of the Purti investors. Vyas admitted mentioning Somani's premises as the address of Purti investors, saying that he did so at the instance of his chartered accountant friend, Chandrashekhar Sarda. When reached in Kolkata, Sarda said that the companies actually belonged to Kolkata-based investors. "We liaison with them for ROC requirements," Sarda said.
Just like their addresses, the credentials of the directors of Purti's investor companies are also intriguing. TOI inquired about four of the set who were directors in 16 firms that invested in Purti.
Thus, Manohar Panse, who used to be Gadkari's driver, happened to be a director in five of Purti's investor companies. In fact, between 2009 and 2011, Panse was a director in six other companies as well. When contacted, Dive admitted that Panse was Gadkari's driver, but clarified that he is "now a director of only one company." Incidentally, Panse was a key witness in the case where a seven-year-old girl was found dead in a car parked in Gadkari's residential complex in 2009.
Likewise, the address of another director in some of these investor firms, Kawdu Pandurang Zade, is the same as Gadkari's in Nagpur. Zade, known as "Diwan" in the Gadkari household, was a director in 12 holding companies.
Importantly, Dive, who joined Purti as its MD in 2005, was the BJP chief's personal assistant when he was the PWD minister. He continued with Gadkari, serving as his personal secretary when the BJP president became the Leader of Opposition (1999-2004) in the Maharashtra Legislative Council.
Apart from the diwan and the driver, the other two directors are Nishant Vijaya Agnihotri and Sagar Shripad Kotwaliwale. Both are employees of Purti, with the latter reportedly a close friend of Gadkari's son. Interestingly, various combinations of two of these four were directors in 16 out of the 21 companies.
Apart from the common set of directors, there is something else that runs through Purti's investor companies as a conspicuous thread. At least 19 of these have registered the same email id with the Registrar of Companies — rajsharma54@yahoo.com. An e-mail sent to the id on Monday evening is yet to elicit a response. Gadkari and Dive said they did not know the identity of Sharma.
The investing companies have now got new directors, but they too are a closed group of people — 11 of them staying in the same locality in Kolkata.
FAMOUS FIVE: The people who have some connections with Nitin Gadkari
Sudhir Wamanrao Dive: MD in Purti Power and Sugar Limited since April 24, 2005. He was a tehsildar in Nagpur district. He came on deputation as the personal assistant of Gadkari during the latter's tenure as PWD minister between 1995 and 1999. Later, he was Gadkari's personal secretary. Dive's younger brother, Dilip Dive, was a BJP candidate in the recent civic elections.
Kawdu Pandurang Zade: Believed to be Gadkari's classmate and from the same village, Dhapewada. Along with Gadkari, Diwe used to run a shop in the ground floor of Gadkari's building. Zade has been living in Gadkari's house for several years. He is named 'Diwanji', which means a person looking after financial matters.
Manohar Madhavrao Panse: Driver of Nitin Gadkari. Now, he looks after all household work. His name featured when Gadkari was in a controversy for when a young girl, Yogita Thakre, was found dead in a Honda CRV belonging to the Gadkari family in 2009. 'Panse-kaka' is as good as a family member.
Nishant Vijay Agnihotri: Works in Purti Power and Sugar Limited and is posted at Purti's head office.
Sagar Shripad Kotwaliwale: Works at Purti Purti's head office since 2006. Rumoured to be a friend and classmate of Gadkaris' son Nikhil. Sagar is also an RSS activist.
(Additional reporting by Rajshri Mehta and Sandeep Ashar in Mumbai).
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Kerala teacher defies dress diktat, moves rights panel
Preetu Venugopalan Nair & T P Nijish,
KOCHI: A Muslim teacher of a government-aided school, suspended for not following the management diktat to cover herself with either a purdah or with a green-coloured overcoat, has approached State Human Rights Commission for justice.
"The school management insisted that I wear a green coat and issued a showcause notice asking me to give reasons for not wearing light green-coloured coat or purdah introduced for teachers. Though not happy I decided I would wear my doctor son's white overcoat instead of green to school," Jameela K, mathematics teacher at Sullamussalam Oriental High School in Malappuram in northern Kerala, who was suspended on October 20.
Jameela said the dress code was forcibly introduced at the beginning of the academic year and it hurt the sentiments of several female teachers who saw it as an affront considering that they always used to come to school decently dressed. "If the idea behind introducing the overcoat was to protect teachers from students' prying eyes, why should I be suspended because I didn't wear a green overcoat," asked Jameela.
Her suspension order says she has been placed under suspension for 15 days for "grave charges of indiscipline and disobedience". The school management claimed that Jameela was not suspended for violating the dress code. "We took disciplinary action against her as she raised baseless allegations against us," said school management committee member P Sakkariya.
The State Human Rights commission has asked deputy director of Education, Malappuram, to submit an inquiry report. "Prima facie, the school management's move is a clear violation of human rights as each and every individual has the right to decide what to wear. The decision to introduce greet uniform coat would only lead to further communal divide among people in the state', said SHRC member K E Gangadharan.
School headmistress Najma N V said, "The controversy was uncalled for as we had introduced asparagus colour overcoats and not green. It was unanimously decided by the staff and teachers and is not done to appease any political party."
But Najma in a letter to Jameela on August 13 had clearly stated, "As per the directions of the manager, I have been asked to serve a showcause notice to those who are not wearing the uniform coat (light green in colour) or black purdah introduced by the school."
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/09/indias-gandhi-family
India's Gandhi family
The Rahul problem
Sep 10th 2012,
WHAT is the point of Rahul Gandhi? The 42-year-old scion of the Gandhi dynasty, which has long dominated India’s ruling party, is still the most plausible prime ministerial candidate for Congress at the looming 2014 election. In advance of that, possibly within weeks, he may get some new party post (some talk of a “vice presidency”) or possibly a government job (as rural affairs minister, perhaps?). A cabinet reshuffle is awaited, with the washed-out monsoon session of parliament swirling down the drain.
Promoting Mr Gandhi now would in theory make sense for Congress. He has long been presumed the successor-in-waiting to Sonia Gandhi, his mother and the party’s president. He needs time to start showing some skills as a leader before campaigning starts in 2014. And for as long as Mr Gandhi does not rise, it is hard for other relative youngsters to be promoted without appearing to outshine him. That has left Congress looking ever older and more out of touch.
But he has long refused to take on a responsible position, preferring to work on reorganising Congress’s youth wing, and leading regional election efforts, both with generally poor results. The problem is that Mr Gandhi has so far shown no particular aptitude as a politician, nor even sufficient hunger for the job. He is shy, reluctant to speak to journalists, biographers, potential allies or foes, nor even to raise his voice in parliament. Nobody really knows what he is capable of, nor what he wishes to do should he ever attain power and responsibility. The suspicion is growing that Mr Gandhi himself does not know.
The latest effort to “decode” Mr Gandhi comes in the form of a limited yet rather well written biography by a political journalist, Aarthi Ramachandran. Her task is a thankless one. Mr Gandhi is an applicant for a big job: ultimately, to lead India. But whereas any other job applicant will at least offer minimal information about his qualifications, work experience, reasons for wanting a post, Mr Gandhi is so secretive and defensive that he won’t respond to the most basic queries about his studies abroad, his time working for a management consultancy in London, or what he hopes to do as a politician.
Mrs Ramachandran’s book—along with just about every other one about the Gandhi dynasts—is thus hampered by a lack of first-hand material on its subject. Mr Gandhi can only be judged by his actions, his rare and halting public utterances, and the opinions of others who work near him. Given that limitation, she does a decent job: sympathetically but critically analysing his various efforts. She concludes that his push to modernise the youth organisation of Congress as if it were an ailing corporation, applying management techniques learned from Toyota, were earnest and well-meaning but ultimately doomed to fail. “Brand” Rahul, she suggests convincingly, is confused. A man of immense privilege, rising only because of his family name, struggles to look convincing when he talks of meritocracy.
The overall impression of Mr Gandhi from Mrs Ramachandran’s book is that of a figure who has an ill-defined urge to improve the lives of poor Indians, but no real idea of how to do so. He feels obliged to work in politics, but his political strategies are half-baked, and he fails to develop strong ties with any particular constituency. He has tried to disavow the traditional role of a Gandhi (which would pose him as a Western-educated member of the elite with a near-feudal style of concern for the masses) preferring to pitch himself as a man ready to drink the dirty water of village peasants, and to eat food among the most marginalised of society. But his failure to follow up on such gestures (and many others), with policy or prolonged interventions to help a particular group, suggests a man who strikes an attitude but lacks skills in delivering real change—either as election results, or social improvement.
Part of the problem is presumably the coterie of advisers who surround Mr Gandhi. Western-educated, bright and eager to cosset their leader within a very small bubble, they appear unready for the messy realities of Indian politics: the shady alliances that are required to win elections; the need to strike deals with powerful regional figures who increasingly shape national politics; the importance of crafting a media strategy in an era of cable TV news. More basically, they seem not to have developed any consistent views on policy. What does Mr Gandhi stand for: more liberal economic reforms; defensive nationalism; an expansion of welfare? Instead they prefer to focus on tactics. Perhaps because of their poor advice, their man too often looks opportunistic and inconsistent.
Opportunities have presented themselves to Mr Gandhi in the past couple of years. One was the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement, of last year and this, when young, urban, middle-class voters, in the main, expressed rage at huge scandals overseen by the elderly folk who run Congress and their coalition allies. Mr Hazare’s campaign successfully drew on their anger, yet it was a halting, confused movement. Mr Gandhi might have intervened at some point, and tried himself to tap into public anger over corruption and inequality, and drawn some of the sting of the Hazare camp’s efforts.
Or, when Mrs Gandhi was absent, being treated abroad for a serious illness (rumoured to have been cervical cancer), he might have taken charge and confronted the anti-graft campaigners. He could at least have set out evidence for how the government was tackling graft, claimed credit for the government’s introduction of a right-to-information act, and lauded the fact that suspect politicians had been arrested and (temporarily) put in jail. Instead he flunked the test in hiding, not daring to speak out, other than in one ill-advised intervention in parliament.
Another opportunity of sorts was to energise Congress in state elections. The failure of the campaign led by Mr Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh (UP) early in 2012 is briefly but convincingly assessed in the biography. Congress did worse in the state during the assembly elections than it had in the 2009 general election. Mr Gandhi led the party to a humiliating fourth place, even doing dismally in constituencies where the Gandhis have long been local MPs.
Perhaps he was doomed to fail from the start (voters did not think Congress could win in the assembly elections, so did not see a reason to “waste” their votes). But his methods—poor public speaking, a failure to understand how particular castes and religious groups would act, weak connections to local organisers—did not help. The main mistake, in retrospect, may have been that he invested so much of himself in that particular poll. But similar efforts, in Bihar and Kerala, in recent years, brought similar results.
Since the poll in UP Mr Gandhi has made little impact on Indian politics. That would change quickly if he is indeed promoted to a higher position and takes on a bigger role. But the growing impression of the man—certainly the one promoted by Mrs Ramachandran’s “Decoding Rahul Gandhi”—is of a figure so far ill-prepared to be a leading politician in India.
Just possibly, therefore, this is the moment for Congress to dare to think of something radical: of reorganising itself on the basis of policies, ideas and a vision for how India should develop, and not on a particular dynasty that seems, after various iterations, to be getting less and less useful. Mrs Ramachandran’s book does not touch on this thought, but it is high time for the powerful within Congress to think about it.
(Picture credit: AFP)
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