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Militancy's
Second Innings But it is the general gloom in Jammu and Kashmir that is more disturbing.
At one level, the Kashmir Valley, Doda and the heights of Kargil are different theatres of the same conflict. Therefore, internal strife has to be tackled with the same resolve as the invaders in Kargil were this summer. Having said that, it would be unwise to ignore that the problem in Kashmir is not merely law and order gone awry. Despite three years of popular -- at least nominally -- government, the level of confidence among the people is abysmally low. Actually, it has progressively fallen, despite the hype about tourism being on the mend and the militants losing mass sympathy. The voting figures bear that out -- even if a chief minister more concerned with how many film units have shot sequences in Kashmir prefers other indicators. The challenge of separatism can be met as much by the gun as by a responsive administration. This may appear an axiomatic truth; but does Farooq Abdullah know his axioms? Notional Literacy Mission Why India still hasn't educated itself out of its misery
India's literacy rate is growing at a piffling 2 per cent a year. Population goes up faster. Since the linkage between literacy and other indicators of social development -- community health, women's rights, birth control -- is more or less established, the slow progress of India's basic educators is in effect holding back a revolution. Nor is this tardy record a reflection of India's poverty. Functional literacy is not a PhD programme. Reports of it being a resource guzzler are grossly exaggerated. Some 50 years ago, a country as poor as Ethiopia undertook a very successful mass literacy programme. Nicaragua and Cuba are other examples. What was meant to differentiate the NLM from other such schemes was a high degree of mobilisation, modern management techniques, adherence to targets and a zeal that was, well, missionary. India needed it; it still does. |
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In
a week when India renewed its contract with democracy, warts and all, the news from Jammu
and Kashmir couldn't have been worse. The BJP candidate from Anantnag was assassinated.
The chief minister narrowly survived an attack. A bomb explosion shook Doda town hours
before a major political meeting. The most damaging evidence, however, came on September 5
-- the day of the first round of polling. Voter enthusiasm was non-existent. In Srinagar
11 per cent of the electorate walked down to the polling booth. In one assembly segment,
the turnout was 0.5 per cent. In 1998, in contrast, one of every three voters in the state
capital had done his duty. Statistics are often dismissed as irrelevant; for once they
cannot be. The lesson must be a sobering one for an establishment still heady with the
Kargil victory. It is a warning that the new regime in Delhi will have to deal with
rekindled fires in Kashmir as soon as it takes office. The militants, and their Pakistani
sponsors, have re-declared war. Let election euphoria and its aftermath not leave India's
rulers unprepared yet again. 
On September 8, International Literacy
Day, official India worked in overdrive. There were the right speeches and seminars, the
judicious release of figures, the self-congratulation. To crown it all, the National
Literacy Mission (NLM) received the Noma Literacy Prize for 1999 from UNESCO. Proud as the
NLM must feel, it is worth considering if the Mission should have been around to be so
honoured. After all the NLM was conceived in 1988 with a five-year, fixed-term framework.
In this period it was to provide the critical mass that would take India to complete
literacy by 2000. After a promising start, the NLM faltered. Today it has become just
another department in the HRD Ministry, making steady but hardly spectacular progress. As
a study conducted by a National Sample Survey team sees it, India's literacy rate will
reach a "sustainable threshold level of 75 per cent" by 2006. Bureaucrats
gleefully point out that this is a full five years prior to the expected deadline; it is
also a few decades too delayed.