History was made in India Wednesday when diplomat-turned-politician Meira Kumar, 64, became the first woman speaker of the Lok Sabha - the lower house of parliament - with MPs cutting across party lines to elect the Dalit leader.
The newly elected members of the 15th Lok Sabha watched in rapt attention as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Leader of Opposition L.K. Advani, who were engaged in a bitter war of words until a month ago, together led Meira Kumar to the podium.
Political leaders from various parties paid rich tributes to Meira Kumar, who had quit the prestigious Indian Foreign Service (IFS) in 1985 to join the Congress, a party of which her father, the late Jagjivan Ram, was a revered leader.
"In many ways it is a historic event as it is for the first time that a Congress woman member of house has been unanimously elected as speaker," Manmohan Singh said, evoking thunderous applause in the splintered 545-member Lok Sabha.
Party president Sonia Gandhi proposed Meira Kumar's name for the post. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee seconded it.
Member after member welcomed the speaker. She returned the compliments, saying it was "a "historic decision" to elect a woman to the coveted post and thanked everyone for being chosen for the honour.
She assured the house that she would be judicious and give all members equal opportunity to speak.
Meira Kumar told a press conference later: "It was a historic decision to elect a woman speaker. I am deeply honoured that I have been elected the first woman speaker of the great and vibrant democracy that we have."
Later, when journalists asked her if men should be scared now that India has a woman president and a speaker, she laughed: "Well, I think so."
The prime minister said he hoped the "charm" and "grace" of the new speaker would "calm frayed tempers that sometimes happen in the house", evoking widespread laughter from MPs.
The Lok Sabha speaker's status in the Warrant of Precedence is next only to the president, vice president and prime minister. Meira Kumar is the 16th speaker of the Lok Sabha.
Advani said he did not have any idea that Meira Kumar would be elected the speaker when she was sworn in May 22 with 18 other cabinet ministers of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
"I read (in newspapers) that your voters are disappointed with your election as speaker but I feel you will be able to serve the people better in this position than as a minister," he said.
Finance Minister Mukherjee, leader of the lower house, said: "Your experience as a diplomat, political organiser, administrator in government and long standing in parliament and association with this house will help you render your responsibility as best as possible... in the real temple of democracy."
Communist Party of India's Gurudas Dasgupta said Meira Kumar's election marked a new chapter in India's parliament.
Meira Kumar belongs to the Dalit - formerly untouchable - community, one reason why political parties across the spectrum in the hung house rushed to support her.
The new speaker got down to her new job even as senior leaders of various parties were busy singing paeans to her and wishing her success. This was when two leaders from her home state of Bihar exchanged heated arguments in the house.
In her mild-mannered but firm way, Meira Kumar expunged the remarks made by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) president Sharad Yadav, who had a spat when the former was giving his congratulatory speech to the new speaker.
"Nothing of this will go on record," the speaker said.
A double graduate of Delhi University, Meira Kumar joined the IFS in 1973 and served in the Indian missions in Spain, Britain and Mauritius.
She took to politics in 1985 when Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister. She was elected to the Lok Sabha twice from Karol Bagh constituency in the national capital.
After one defeat, she shifted to Sasaram in Bihar -- a constituency that her father Jagjivan Ram, a long-time confidant of Indira Gandhi, represented for years in the Lok Sabha.
Meira Kumar, while taking the compliments of one and all, exhorted the Lok Sabha MPs to put the elections behind them and address the social and economic problems facing the country.
United News of India reports:
Sixty four-year-old Meira Kumar is the first woman Speaker of the Lok Sabha in the world's largest democracy.
She is also the second Dalit to hold this position, the first being the late G M C Balayogi.
By opting for a woman as a Speaker for the first time, the Congress hopes to take the message of social and woman empowerment into the rival camp.
The Congress decision to have a woman Speaker is a clear signal that the 124-year-old party is bent on getting passed the long pending bill seeking to give 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament and state Assemblies.
The women's quota bill was one of the major electoral promises in the Congress manifesto for the 2009 general elections. The bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by the first UPA government towards the fag end of its term early this year.
The election of Ms Kumar was unanimous with the Opposition also supporting her candidature.
She was elected to the Lok Sabha in the 2009 general elections from the Sasaram seat in Bihar, where the Congress could manage to get only two out of the 40 seats. She has earlier represented Uttar Pradesh and Delhi in the Lok Sabha.
Ms Kumar is soft-spoken but a firm pursuer of her social missions.
Daughter of late Deputy Prime Minister and prominent dalit leader Babu Jagjivan Ram and Indrani Devi, Meira Kumar gave up a career in the Indian Foreign Service which she had joined in 1973 on the request of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, to enter politics and claim her father's legacy.
She was born in Patna on March 31,1945. Her husband, Manjul Kumar is a Supreme Court lawyer and they have three children, Anshul, Swati and Devangna, all married.
Poet, painter, sportsperson and a social activist, Ms Kumar was educated at Indraprastha College and Miranda House, University of Delhi. She is a graduate in law and holds a Masters in English.
Ms Kumar successfully contested for the Lok Sabha seat from Bijnore in Uttar Pradesh in 1985. She was a member of the 11th and 12th Lok Sabha, re-elected with a record margin from her father's former constituency of Sasaram in Bihar.
She was inducted into the Manmohan Singh Cabinet as Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment in 2004.
Ms Kumar has actively participated in a number of movements for social reforms and protection of human rights.
Besides being a Minister, she has served on various important posts in Parliament including as Member, Consultative Committee, Ministry of External Affairs, General-Secretary, All India Congress Committee (AICC), Member, Congress Working Committee (CWC) and Public Accounts Committee.
Ms Kumar has also been closely asociated with a number of social and cultural organisations. She is President and Founder of the All India Samta Movement (also its founder). She has been on the Governing Body, Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) in 1987-92, and on the Central Advisory Board of Education, 1977-90 and 2004 onwards.
She has served on the National Commission on Population, and the National Integration Council.
She was Chairperson, National Drought Relief Committee of the Congress party during the century's worst drought in 1967. She had launched a Family Adoption Scheme under which drought-affected families were adopted by affluent families.
Ms Kumar has been committed to human rights and abolition of the caste system. She has visited a number of places where atrocities were committed against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
Ms Kumar's hobbies include painting and writing poems some of which have been published. She was the editor of Pavan Prasad--a monthly magazine (1980-92).
As Asia Times Online reports,
"I'll come back as a ghost to haunt my teachers," read the suicide note of a teenaged Indian student who recently shot himself in the head due to exam-linked stress. Another student - 16-year-old Anita Naresh - quaffed a bottle of pesticide in the run-up to her annual exams. More recently, Rajneesh Mittal, 17, created a national kerfuffle by trying to kill himself inside an examination hall.
March is the year's most dreaded month for Indian students: it's exam time and the pressure to excel can be lethal. This year, as many as 100 students have already committed suicide - in sometimes bizarre situations - across the sub-continent, leaving the country, and especially its parents, wondering whether the final deathly toll will exceed the 2006 mark when a staggering 5,857 Indian students attempted suicide due to exam blues, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Disquietingly, those who aren't pushed to the brink still have to grapple with acute anxiety and depression. Some are even led to experiment with macabre stress-busting recipes. This year's "hot" stress relievers, for instance, are broth made from lizard's body parts, bread slices smeared with pain-relief ointments and shoe polish, anti-epilepsy drugs, and the fumes of nail polish removers.
"Some students from the science stream are even making their own drugs from chemicals and salts available in their school labs," said New Delhi-based cardiologist Dr K K Agarwal, president of the Heart Care Foundation of India, at a recent press conference in Delhi. Helping the students in their quest for such life-threatening stress-busters, says the doctor, are websites which give them a step-by-step recipes for the concoctions.
According to clinical psychologist Dr Vedahi Bharati, there's an urgent need for cyber laws which can vet these web portals. The expert also proposes laws for parents, children, chemists and pharmaceutical companies to stop the casual buying and selling of OTC (over the counter) stress-relieving amphetamine drugs whose sales skyrocket during the exam period.
Exam stress isn't a particularly new phenomenon on the Indian academic landscape. Cases of depression and the stray suicide case have been common for many years. But lately, the situation has acquired a new gravitas with newspapers and TV channels reporting student suicides nearly every day.
What's pushing today's Indian students - a bright generation with a global reputation for their high intelligence quotient - to the brink? Experts believe the problem is symptomatic of a deeper issues; parental and peer pressure, rising ambitions and fierce competition are brewing a deadly cocktail for these young minds. Moreover, a nation racing towards affluence, an economy on a remarkable upward growth trajectory and skyrocketing salaries are putting unprecedented pressure on youth to succeed.
According to Delhi-based clinical psychologist Dr Veena Deb, "Parental expectations have also risen enormously over the years which is propelling these kids to breaking point." Deb feels that the changing dynamics of the Indian family - particularly, the death of the joint family system - means that there are fewer family elders around to counsel the young. With both parents working, and nobody at home to turn to in a crisis, it's easier for the youth to engage in high-risk behavior.
Unsurprisingly, around March, it's common for student helplines, resurrected by numerous voluntary organizations and non-governmental organizations, to be inundated with distress calls. "Most students feel relieved to be able to just pick up the phone and share their fears with someone," said a volunteer at a New Delhi-based helpline service. "It's a great catharsis for them and works like a salve for their frazzled minds."
The volunteer said many callers complain about pushy parents and recounted that last week a boy called in to ask where he could buy a pistol to shoot his mother for nagging him too much.
Sanjeevini, an official from another crisis intervention center, said, "An identity crisis, uncertainty regarding getting admission to the courses of their choice in college and a fear of low marks sullying their reputation are usually the main reasons for students attempting to end their lives."
Apart from insecurity and societal change sweeping across India, another big reason for student distress is the modern Indian education system. Outdated and flab-ridden, it puts an undue emphasis on rote learning and passing exams with a high percentage discounting creativity and personality development.
Of course there's no denying that in India, the student demographic - about 70% of India's 1.1 billion population is under 30 years, a sizeable chunk of which are students - leads to an enormous demand-supply gap. For instance, this year, over 1.3 million students are appearing for the Class X and XII Board exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) as against the 1.2 million who appeared last year.
These gargantuan numbers will create a mad scramble for the limited number of seats available at the top-notch engineering, medical and business schools that yield the most lucrative career options. For the undergraduate B-Tech and M-Tech programs offered through IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), for instance, around 350,000 students will compete for 5,000 seats.
Similarly, for the blue-chip Indian Institute of Management (IIM), from a large pool of about 250,000 applicants, only 1,200 manage to procure seats each year. This makes the exam even more selective than all the top US business schools put together. In fact the overall acceptance rate at IIM ranges between 0.1 to 0.4% compared with the acceptance rate of around five to 10% in the top US schools.
Keeping this severe crunch in mind, proponents of a better education system have often criticized the Indian government's frugal expenditure on education. According to the Kothari Commission set up in 1966, which put forward the blueprint for reform of the Indian education system, the central expenditure on education should be a minimum of 6% of gross domestic product (GDP). However, India's current figure hovers around 4%, far less than Saudi Arabia which invests 9.5% of its GDP in education and Norway, Malaysia, France and South Africa all of who spend in excess of 5%.
Apart from insufficient funding, many feel the entire Indian education system needs a revamp as it is based on an archaic template established by the British in the 19th century. Sporadic attempts by the Central Board of Secondary Education to relax admission criteria and make the exam system more student-friendly, have been brushed aside by critics as feeble sideshows, not really targeted at tackling the root of the problem.
All this is a pity considering India, the world's largest democracy, is increasingly viewed as a strong global player due to its exploding economic growth and enviable human resource wealth. If Delhi refuses to do anything about the future of India's young people - many of whom are literally killing themselves over academic pressure - it ought to be a matter of national shame.
Credits: Asia Times
Soon after hosting the fourth Military World Games at Hyderabad, Indian armed forces added another feather to their cap when two distance runners, both army men, R.S. Yadav and Deepchand, lean and hungry looking like most distance runners, took the top two places among domestic runners in the prestigious Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon, though overall they crossed the finishing line 16th and 17th in a field dominated by Africans.
You can't miss the point that the way our army runners are faring, it will only be saying the obvious that the country will have to look forward to its soldiers to narrow the gap in Indian and international standards.
The winner of Sunday's race, Diodone Disi, hopes it will not be long before an Indian runner figures on the podium.
For the benefit of those with short memories, it would do well to recall here the glorious contribution of our men in uniform to Indian sport.
In fact, long before the idea of the Military World Games was born, Dhyan Chand had made the army of our then British-ruled country famous worldwide with his wizardry with a hockey stick and ball.
So impressed was Germany's Fuhrer Adolf Hitler with Dhyan Chand's fabled magic in the 1936 Berlin Olympics that the story goes that he offered to straightaway elevate our humble soldier from Jhansi to the rank of a general should he decide to join the German Army!
That 1936 Olympics team had at least one other brilliant player from the army, the handsome Ali Iqtidar Shah Dara, who along with Gurmeet Singh, a 1932 Olympian, was lost to international hockey when their regiment was ordered to the World War II theatre in Malaya (now Malaysia), where the two later joined Netaji Subhas Bose's Indian National Army.
The legacy of Dhyan Chand was carried on by men like Nandy Singh, Balbir Singh, Haripal Kaushik and Hardyal Singh, to mention just a few.
For the record, the services won the Rangaswami Cup, emblematic of national hockey supremacy, at least eight times, starting 1953. No major hockey tournament of the country was complete without teams from cantonments like Ramgarh, Jalandhar, Meerut or Bangalore.
The services also contributed handsomely to other teams like football and basketball, throwing up stars like the legendary goalkeeper Peter Thangaraj and Khushi Ram, who was considered to be one of Asia's best basketball players in his day till he badly hurt his eye on court.
Footballers like Chandan Singh, centre-half of the first 1951 Asian Games gold medal-winning team, Brig. Devine Jones, Col. Puran Bahadur Thapa and others of his famous Gorkha Brigade team were some other shining stars in days when Indian football was a force to reckon with.
The services also boasted a decent cricket team under the expert leadership of Lt. Col. Hemu Adhikari, a team that featured players like Gadkari, Dani, Muddiah and Sen Gupta, all Test players.
Servicemen also dominated sports like boxing, wrestling and track and field.
The contribution of track legends like the 'Flying Sikh' Milkha Singh are part of folklore, not to mention others like Shriram Singh and the late marathoner Shivnath Singh.
Scan the list of athletics medal winners of those bygone times and most of them, you will find, belonged to the services.
So why the decline till Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore put the military back in the headlines of sports pages with a shooting silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens?
The answer, in a word, is the spreading insurgency and increasing border threats. The military has been called upon to do more important things than practice sport on the playgrounds of peacetime cantonments.
Still, army chiefs like Gen. S. Padmanabhan, followed by Gen J.J. Singh, thought it was time the army did its bit to stem the rot in Indian sport in general. It was time someone acted to place India on the international medals tables.
Congratulating Rathore on his Athens silver medal, Gen. J.J. Singh famously remarked that one Olympic medal was not enough. Hope his successor, Gen Deepak Kapoor, heard that.
It started out in 1932 with four creaky biplanes of World War I vintage. Today, at 75, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has evolved into the second largest air force in Asia, and the world's fourth.
It's a journey that has had its thrills and spills and has seen the IAF graduate from piston engine planes to fourth generation combat jets and from manual controls to fly-by-wire technology travelling the spectrum from the subsonic to the supersonic era.
Today, with the induction of cutting edge technology weapons and systems, the IAF is poised to acquire a strategic reach that its outgoing head, Air Chief Marshal S.P. Tyagi, who retired March 31, says is necessary if India's armed forces are to protect the country's economic, energy and other vital needs in a fast changing world.
In fact, it was President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the supreme commander of the armed forces, who outlined the parameters for such a role when he reviewed the IAF fleet March 7. It was only the fourth time in the IAF's history that such an event has been conducted.
"The Indian Air Force by the year 2025 will be a model air force for the rest of the world to emulate, endowed with the very best of technology in the world, alert and agile strategic planning capability and above all the most professional and dedicated air warriors," the president said.
To understand how this will happen, one has to begin from the start.
The IAF officially came into being on Oct 8, 1932 but the first fleet was raised April 1 the next year with four Westland Wapiti IIA biplanes, six Royal Air Force (RAF)-trained officers and 19 "Havai Sepoys" or air soldiers.
This "A" flight was blooded four-and-a-half years later during action in Miranshah in North Waziristan (now in Pakistan) to support army operations against insurgent tribesmen.
A "B" flight was formed in April 1936, also with Wapiti biplanes, but it was only in June 1938 that a "C" flight was raised to bring No. 1 Squadron to full strength. Its strength had by then risen to 16 officers and 662 men.
With World War II initially confined to the European theatre, the IAF first went into action on the Burma front only in February 1942, by which time two more squadrons had been raised.
On Feb 1 of that year, No.1 Squadron arrived in Burma with its newly acquired Lysanders, flying tactical reconnaissance missions. However, the Japanese advance was relentless and with the final evacuation of Burma, No.1 Squadron personnel were flown to India, where at Risalpur in June 1942, the unit began converting to the Hurricane IIB fighter.
The IAF again went into action with the resumption of operations against the Japanese in 1944 and, by the end of the year, its operational element had progressively risen to nine squadrons.
Five of the Hurricane-equipped squadrons played a major role in the Arakan offensive which began in December 1944, disrupting the enemy's lines of communication and constantly harrying the Japanese forces until victory was achieved with the reoccupation of Rangoon on May 3, 1945.
IAF personnel were decorated with 22 Distinguished Flying Crosses and a host of other honours. The service was also honoured with the bestowal of the prefix "Royal" to its nomenclature in March 1945.
The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 saw the RIAF losing many of its permanent bases and other establishments, as also some squadrons, and literally had no time to recover from this as it went into action Oct 27 of that year as it performed the then unimaginable feat of airlifting a full battalion of Indian Army troops from New Delhi to Srinagar to stave off Pakistan-backed intruders who had swarmed into Jammu and Kashmir.
Three days later, the first Spitfires reached Srinagar and were soon engaged in strafing the raiders. The fighting continued for 15 months, with heavy RIAF involvement throughout, till a ceasefire came into force Jan 1, 1949.
On Jan 26, 1950, India became a republic and the force dropped its "Royal" prefix. At this time, it possessed six fighter squadrons of Spitfires, Vampires and Tempests, one B-24 bomber squadron, one C-47 Dakota transport squadron, one Air Observation Post flight, a communications squadron and a growing training organisation.
Ten years later, the IAF was called on to perform an unusual commitment when it was asked to support UN operations in the Congo (formerly Zaire) in 1961-62.
This involvement continues till date, with about a dozen Mi-35 gun ships and Mi-17 medium transports deployed on UN peacekeeping duties in the African nation.
The IAF was again tested in October 1962 when war erupted on the China-India border.
In all this, the IAF was expanding rapidly, with its compliment of 28,000 officers and men at the time of the China war increasing by some two-thirds by the end of 1964.
Another epoch making event took place in August 1962 with the decision to purchase 12 MiG-21 fighters from the Soviet Union - the IAF's first combat aircraft of non-western origin - and for Soviet technical assistance in setting up production facilities for the fighter in India.
Since then, a number of MiG variants have been inducted into the IAF which now also flies the -27 and -29 models, as also the Sukhoi SU-30 air dominance fighter that has only a handful of rivals in the US F-16 and F-18 Super Hornet and the Swedish Gripen.
The IAF once again went to war in 1965 with the Canberras flying 200 interdiction missions against Pakistani bases, and the nippy Gnats and Hunters stopping the advance of the enemy armour in the deserts of Rajasthan.
This conflict, in fact, was the first full-scale war in which the post-independence IAF was involved.
Then, in 1971, the professional standards, capability and flexibility of the IAF were put to the acid test as the political situation on the subcontinent rapidly deteriorated due to the liberation movement that began in what was then East Pakistan.
Aerial conflicts between the Indian and Pakistani air forces began on the eastern front on Nov 22, preceding a full-scale war by 12 days. On Dec 3, the Pakistan Air Force launched pre-emptive strikes against IAF bases at Srinagar, Amritsar and Pathankot, and at others in northern India. The IAF responded in kind.
In the end, the IAF had good reason to be satisfied with its showing during the conflict.
Since then, it has been a period of consolidation and growth with the IAF fleet strength now at a little under 1,400 aircraft, including 294 air superiority jets, 300 ground attack aircraft, 99 second line combat aircraft, 282 helicopters, 254 transport aircraft, and 154 trainers.
It's little wonder that the IAF should be eyeing a strategic reach and the creation of an Aerospace Command to integrate the capabilities of the three wings of the Indian armed forces.
Explained Tyagi of the concept he mooted three years ago: "I see that India as it grows economically will have to worry about trade security, economic security, food security, energy security. That is the new role of the armed forces. In addition to the traditional defence role, (they) will also have to perform the security role."
This meant the armed forces would have to operate in an expanded area.
"If you agree with that line of argument, then we are saying that we'll have to be prepared to launch operations - not fighting necessarily - to protect our interests at larger distances," Tyagi maintained.
So, how far has the IAF advanced in playing such a role?
President Kalam provided the answer: "The air force has the best of fighter aircraft in the world with multi-role capability, with the ability to carry unique payloads. Above all, you have the capacity to (launch) long-range deep-penetration missions."
If one considers that only six air forces in the world operate midair refuelling tankers and even fewer the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) - the first of which will join the fleet later this year, one begins to appreciate the strategic depth the IAF is acquiring. These are powerful force multipliers and play a critical role both in the training process and in times of conflict.
And, once the IAF begins inducting the 126 multi-role combat aircraft it hopes to acquire soon, it will be truly on the way to translating President Kalam's vision of the future into reality - and continuing its motto of "Touching the sky with glory".
Indo-Asian News Service