Taking a fresh look at historical characters happens routinely in mature democracies. There have been enough historians re-evaluating the role of Nehru, and there is no shortage of interpretations of Gandhi. And the BJP leader Jaswant Singh&rsquo;s book on Mohammad Ali Jinnah is not the first to say that Jinnah was not to be solely blamed for the partition of India in 1947. Ayesha Jalal&rsquo;s The Sole Spokesperson, for instance, argued likewise, saying that he was merely using the threat of an independent state as a bargaining tool to ensure a better position for Muslims in India. For every view that Ms Jalal offers, however, there are others pointing to Jinnah being aided and abetted by the British who had played a game of divide and rule for decades and who did not trust &ldquo;Hindu&rdquo; India after the Congress launched its Quit India campaign at the height of World War II.

BJP's Jinnah obsession

Business Standard

Once the US government and the Swiss bank UBS sign their historic deal, under which UBS hands over the account details of around 5,000 suspected US tax evaders, there will be a clamour for similar action from India. The US deal, some accounts say, will give the US government information relating to assets worth $10-15 billion, which are held abroad. And while UBS is just one bank, reports suggest that tax dodgers are responding positively to the government&rsquo;s amnesty scheme which ends on September 23. So why can&rsquo;t India lean on the Swiss to get access to similar information on Indian tax evaders? It is an important question, because the estimates of black money sent abroad each year by Indians ranges from $4.7bn to $22.7 bn.

The citadel isn&#39;t crashing

In addressing the issue of the massive backlog of cases pending disposal in India&rsquo;s courts, the Prime Minister has squarely put the put the ball in the court of the judiciary. Manmohan Singh told a conference of chief ministers and chief justices of High Courts that the apex court should be the catalyst, organiser, mentor and umpire in tackling this issue. This is because it is the judges themselves who are now primarily responsible for appointing judges, and a key reason for the backlog (4 million cases pending before the High Courts and 30 million before the lower courts) is the large number of vacancies in the courts. The underlying problem could be that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable candidates for the Bench, which is no longer held in the same regard as it used to be. There is also the need to &lsquo;catch them young&rsquo; as it becomes difficult for a senior lawyer to leave his practice as, with seniority, it becomes progressively more lucrative.

Clearing the backlog

The data put out by the ministry of commerce show a continuing decline in exports for July. This suggests that the worst is not over for the exporting community. Exports have now fallen for the tenth month in a row, compared to the same month last year. At $12.5 billion, July exports were 26 per cent lower than they were in the same period last year. With the fall in imports even greater at 36 per cent, though, the trade deficit for the first four months of the year has improved &mdash; to $6.2 billion, from $9.1 billion in the 2008 period. None of this is unexpected, given what is happening in the global economy. A few facts, however, need to be kept in mind. For one, the decline is getting arrested, almost in sync with the improvement in the world economic tempo. So, exports were $12.7 billion in December 2008 and fell to $10.7 billion by April 2009. They rose to $11 billion in May, to $12.8 billion in June and are slightly lower at $12.5 billion in July.

Arresting the decline

The government&rsquo;s proposal to roll out a plan by the year-end to raise solar power generation capacity to 20,000 mega watts (MW) by 2020 is laudable but could be a case of vaulting ambition, and therefore not very realistic. The Prime Minister&rsquo;s council on climate change has approved the setting up of a national solar mission for this purpose. If this goal is to be met, it would mean generating 10 per cent of the country&rsquo;s total power by tapping sunlight. Such a massive production capacity would be sufficient to meet the electricity needs of three of the country&rsquo;s biggest cities. There is no doubt that the country needs more power, and producing it from clean sources is the way to go when environmental pollution and global warming have become major issues. But the record of tapping solar energy does not inspire much confidence. No more than 500 MW of solar power production capacity has yet been installed.

Betting on the sun

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was born in 1980, as a new avatar of the old Jana Sangh&mdash;whose leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya had died unexpectedly in 1969. In the 40 years since then, the party&rsquo;s two stalwarts have been Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani. Mr Vajpayee is now out of politics, while Mr Advani has been given a fresh five-year term as leader of the BJP&rsquo;s parliamentary party in the Lok Sabha. The post-election situation cries out for new leadership but Mr Advani will lead the party&rsquo;s campaign in the 2014 parliamentary elections, by when he will be 86 years old. With the Congress almost certain to project Rahul Gandhi (by then 44) as its leader, there must be serious questions asked about what actually went on during the three days of the chintan baithak in Shimla.

A crisis of leadership

When the National Remote Sensing Agency, a part of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), launched Bhuvan 10 days ago, it put India on the global internet map, and gave the country something new to cheer about on Independence Day. Bhuvan, meaning Earth in Sanskrit, showcases India&rsquo;s geo-capabilities.

Virtual feather in Isro's cap

Even as the government accepts the revised report of the technical expert group on patent law issues, headed by RA Mashelkar, a key conclusion of the group has run into fresh controversy over the reasoning on which it is based. A globally-acknowledged Argentine patent expert, Carlos M Correa, who has been quoted in the report to support the group&rsquo;s contention that patenting cannot be limited to new chemical entities, has disclosed that his views have been misinterpreted.

Dump the Mashelkar report

Meet the new, improved leader of the Trinamool Congress
The clear victory of the Trinamool Congress in two West Bengal assembly by-elections, after its spectacular win in the parliamentary elections in May, has put the party in line to win the state in the assembly elections that are due in 2011. Perceiving the chief ministership of West Bengal as now being within her reach, the mercurial Mamata Banerjee has been taking pains to live down her image as a street politician who is prone to taking

Mamata's new tune

Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel deserves marks for his honest confession that he wanted the government to sell Air India in 2004, but was asked to keep it going. It is obvious that this was a decision taken when the Left parties were an integral part of the UPA coalition, with no thought to whether a state-owned airline with India&rsquo;s public sector culture could match the service levels of private carriers.

Running (down) a PSU

There were not many dissenting voices when, in early 2007, the finance ministry announced its decision to set up a separate debt management office to take over (from Reserve Bank of India) the responsibility of raising short-term and long-term debt for the Union government. The decision was in line with the recommendations made by the advisory group of the RBI on Transparency in Monetary and Financial Policy, in September 2000, to separate the public debt management and monetary policy functions of the country&rsquo;s central bank. The Group had suggested that the separation of these functions should take place in a phased manner, after achieving the objective of fiscal consolidation. Indeed, the revised estimate of fiscal deficit for 2006-07 was 3.7 per cent of GDP and the Budget estimate for the following year projected a further decline to 3.3 per cent.

Not the right time

The government&rsquo;s decision to only marginally hike the minimum support prices (MSPs) of paddy, pulses and selected oilseeds, and to freeze the prices of other crops at last year&rsquo;s level, is unlikely to go down well with farmers in a drought year. The timing of the announcement of new prices is also flawed, as kharif sowing is virtually over in most of the country.

Not high enough

India hosts next week an &ldquo;informal ministerial&rdquo; meeting of key members of the World Trade Organisation, to try and give fresh momentum to the stalled Doha Round of trade talks. There has been little progress over the past year, but a combination of forces may now make it possible for progress on some key issues. All the key groups of countries that represent different interests in the WTO will be present in New Delhi, and the meeting itself is structured such that participants have go to beyond prepared opening statements&mdash;which usually do not say anything more than being committed to the success of the Doha Round and what the national position is. In other words, participants will have to come prepared to indicate what and where they can give, and how much. The meeting will be a success if participants cover enough fresh ground for talks to be re-started formally at the WTO headquarters in Geneva.

Fresh moves on Doha Round

Sample surveys are just that. Their accuracy and validity depend on many factors &mdash; the representative nature of those sampled, the size of the sample, the quality of the questioning process, the possibility of systemic bias in the entire exercise, the weights assigned to different sub-groups sampled, and much else. It is the very impreciseness of the process, with all its unavoidable pitfalls, that make election forecasts in a heterogeneous society like India such a risky exercise; forecasting tends to be safer in more homogeneous cultures that have fewer divisions&mdash;be it of language, class, caste or anything else.

A single readership survey

What do investors do when, as in the Satyam case, the management perpetrates a fraud on them, when independent directors are unable to detect the fraud, or when auditors either connive or are lulled into certifying the accounts as true? File against the company in the Company Law Board, you might say. But the law there does not recognise shareholders as people who have any locus standi in the matter, never mind if they lost Rs 5,000 crore on account of the collapse of the company&rsquo;s share price. You could go to the police and file a case in the Economic Offences Wing, but that&rsquo;s a path whose success depends on whether your children and even perhaps grandchildren wish to pursue the case, after your time has passed. In any case, there is little doubt that action by a group is always going to be taken more seriously than anything done by individuals.

Empowering small investors

At some stage in what has become a sorry mess, the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) must sit together and ask themselves how things got to this stage&mdash;as Vito Corleone did with rival leaders in The Godfather, after there had been enough bloodletting on all sides. For, all the summary action taken against party leaders who have suddenly become &ldquo;dissidents&rdquo; stands exposed as illogical, without basis and biased. The questions are obvious.

How did it come to this?

The death of 66 tigers since January 1 this year (or about one every four days) is testimony to the continuing decline in the population of this endangered species of big cats, despite the government committing huge chunks of forest land for their safe dwelling and spending crores of rupees annually on Project Tiger.

Still more tiger deaths

After nearly a year of waiting, mobile phone subscribers can hope to get some serious browsing capabilities. Now that the Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) has finally cleared the reserve price for 3G licences (Rs 3,500 crore) and for Broadband Wireless Access (Rs 1,750 crore), prospective customers can expect to have these services up and ready in another nine months, at least in the metros.

Moving on 3G

A billboard at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay campus said in bold letters: &lsquo;Dignity at Stake&rsquo;. That was the slogan by protesting faculty at IITs across the country, the first such protest in the half-century since the first IIT was set up in Kharagpur. The protest is against a new pay scale, approved by the Cabinet on August 7, which falls short of what was recommended by the Govardhan Committee, and is also said to be inferior in some ways to what the faculty at general-purpose universities have been given by the University Grants Commission. At the top of the scales, directors at the IITs and similar prestigious institutions (the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the National Institute of Industrial Engineering will get Rs 80,000 per month.

Pay them more

The government&rsquo;s decision to launch a national project that will give every citizen a unique biometric identity card, and to put at its head one of the foremost names in the Indian software industry, has the potential to begin a process that can transform India. First, it sends a strong signal that the use of information technology for development has arrived.

Transformational IT

Most people would agree that the correct response to the Maoist challenge in West Bengal&rsquo;s Lalgarh was to crush the rebels and to re-establish the government&rsquo;s authority in the area, a task which has been done after an unconscionable delay of several months. Whatever the reasons for the disaffection of the local population, the government cannot afford to cede its authority.

Lalgarh lessons

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 567 - Editorial Comment