Rahul Nuked Kalawati

The metaphors he used in Parliament during the debate for the confidence motion were far-fetched, on the verge of being laughable
_________
M Ratan
_________
When the handsome crown prince of the ruling party, the Indian National Congress, Rahul Gandhi stood up in the Lok Sabha on July 22 to expound on energy security while defending the India-US civil nuclear cooperation deal, in the debate on the trust motion, I said to myself that the young leader had the best chance to prove his mettle. He was on the live television with a captive audience and friendly news channels to glorify him.

He took us to the poor homes of Sasikala and Kalawati in Vidarbha, which he toured recently in his "discover India" journey. He talked of Sasikala and her husband's meagre daily wages and their three children's big dreams. He also narrated details of Kalawati's large family and her farmer husband's suicide. He tried to trace their misery to their lack of access to energy.

What baffled me was the irrelevance of the Sasikala and Kalawati stories to the subject on hand - nuclear energy in the context of the India-US deal. Can he wipe their tears in the foreseeable future with nuclear energy? There are millions and millions of Sasikalas and Kalawatis in the boondocks of India who have no access to safe drinking water, housing, electricity, employment, etc. They are trapped in poverty. We even see them on the footpaths of some major roads in the capital, begging along with babies in their arms. They are nearer home. Why did Rahul have to travel to Bundelkhand and Vidarbha to see them?

In 60 years of independence, we have not fully exploited our rich natural resources to expand electrification to reach the rural poor. We have power crisis even in most metropolitan cities.

Now, suddenly we are obsessed with nuclear power as if it would electrify our rural areas in no time if the Indo-American deal goes through, revolutionising the power scene in the country. What a terrible fraud on the Sasikalas and Kalawatis and their children!

The writer features regularly in mainstream newspapers in their respective "Letters to the Editor" columns

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fight Information With Information

Image
From the issue of cloning to publication of research in journals to intelligence tests carried out on various peoples to reproductive health, a brigade of 'conscience keepers' springs up to protest something it does not understand fully Cloning is now a hot topic of discussion in the fora of medical ethics. Prof Ian Wilmut of Edinburgh University, who gained celebrity status and attracted criticism equally for cloning the first mammal from an adult cell in 1996, has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryoes which he was awarded two years ago in favour of a method pioneered by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, Japan, who has managed to create stem cells from fragments of skin in mice without using embryos. A UN report called last week for efforts to ban reproductive cloning worldwide after a US research team reported the first-ever cloning of a rhesus monkey whose embryo was cloned from adult cells and then grown to generate stem cells. 'Moralists' ...
Read more

Can't Let Go

Image
Hurriyat-Lashkar-Jaish-Harkat's Kashmir would be Taliban's Afghanistan II World beware! Masood Azhar's rally in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, where he had vowed to recruit half a million terrorists. He managed to recruit many more _______________ Surajit Dasgupta _______________ T here is no need for any Indian to get worked up for what national self-flagellation champion Arundhati Roy said yesterday — that Kashmir needs ' AzAdI ' from India as much as India needs ' AzAdI ' from Kashmir. Instead, as senior journalist Harinder Baweja reminded Times Now in the debate in response to Roy's statement, let us think of Vir Sanghvi and any other known opinion maker who is less of a maverick than Roy. Sanghvi is one of the two writers who, in their respective columns in the same newspaper — Hindustan Times — had suggested last week that the Indian union set the Kashmir valley free for it to fend for itself. The presumption made in course of their arguments by Vir San...
Read more

Khaas Aadmi Party

Image
The AAP's bluff of representing the ordinary citizen must be called. In time. A rvind Kejriwal and other prominent faces of the Jan Lokpal (JLP) movement that caught the imagination of the nation in 2011 did the right thing in July-August 2012 by deciding to launch a political party of their own. First, under the present system, whatever laws a group of activists thinks the people of the country need can be made only by getting into the legislature. Second, the mistake of the Jayaprakash Narayan-led movement of the 1970s could not be repeated; those who led the movement should not have passed on the baton to older politicians. Political observers, however, began raising some valid questions right after the announcement of the intention. How could a band of people, howsoever well-meaning, who had a single-point agenda of getting rid of corruption by instituting an all-powerful lokpal (ombudsman), and who were apparently ignorant of other facets of governance, run a party that ...
Read more