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EDITORIALS
Get In or Get Lost
 The Congress and CPI(M) should join
Gujral's Government--or face elections.Even for a country
used to non-performing governments, the past week has been particularly benumbing. As
speculation was rife about a possible split in the Congress Parliamentary Party and while
the debate on whether the Congress should or should not join the United Front (UF)
ministry intensified, the Union Government virtually shut shop. Unfortunately, this was
not unprecedented. The Centre similarly downed shutters for much of April, as the UF and
Congress negotiated a fresh, post-H.D. Deve Gowda alliance. The upshot of such political
manoeuvring can only be instability. Any government heavily dependent on outside support
is precariously placed. As it lurches from crisis to crisis, policy making ceases to be
priority, economic indices plummet and, more importantly, the faith of civil society in
the political system is shaken. Indians don't need to have this dystopic scenario spelt
out to them; they are living it.
At the root of the problem is the fact that the Congress and the CPI(M) -- the two
largest non-BJP parties in the Lok Sabha -- have stayed away from governance. They are
exercising power without responsibility, blocking initiatives on partisan grounds and
blackmailing the Government at almost every step. No wonder I.K. Gujral seems less a prime
minister and more a puppet on multiple strings. It is time the Congress and the CPI(M)
displayed some measure of responsibility. They must join the Government and give it the
solidity it requires; alternatively, they can withdraw support and hasten a mid-term poll.
On their part, the UF's constituents should realise the futility of barring the Congress
from the Union Cabinet. Making the Congress and the CPI(M) participatory partners will
only increase the coalition's longevity. If, on the other hand, the Congress and the UF
perceive their differences to be absolutely irreconcilable, they must end their farcical,
love-hate relationship. Let them then go for justice to democracy's ultimate arbiter: the
electorate.
Tale of
Two Boses
It is better to combine concern for mankind with a love for the market.
 At the mention of "Bose--the inventor", today's world may remember
not Acharya Jagdish Chandra Bose, the scientist friend of Rabindranath Tagore, but Amar
Bose of Bose speaker fame. However, J.C. Bose has shot back into public memory after a
century of near-oblivion. Scientists at the US-based Institute of Electronics and
Electrical Engineers (IEEE) have announced that Italian Guglielmo Marconi's 1901 maiden
transmission of cross-Atlantic signals was possible only with a transmission-reception
device designed by Bose. The IEEE holds that the credit for the invention of wireless
communications, for which Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909, should
indeed go to Bose. While that will no doubt set right a historical wrong, the incident
throws a new light on the Indian ambivalence over inventions and patents. The Bose of
wireless telephony had an ethical aversion to patents as he believed that inventions were
meant to benefit mankind and should therefore remain in the public domain. But the
contemporary Bose, famous for his speakers, is, like Marconi, an inventor with an eye on
the market.
In its attitude to patents, modern India is caught between the two Boses. It is neither
market-indifferent nor market-savvy. Three years have gone by since the country signed the
World Trade Organisation agreement, thus promising to accept the inventor's right over the
invented product. But successive governments have failed to amend the Patents Act to make
products (and not only processes) patentable. India refuses to patent products because it
lacks the confidence to contribute to inventions and fears that, by changing the law, it
will end up paying a lot more for others' inventions. So patent infringement carries legal
sanctity. While J.C. Bose spurned patents, and Amar Bose loves them, modern India is
afraid of protecting inventions. |
