THE PANGS OF FATEHPUR.

   Ensconced in my tiny village near Mashobra in the Shimla hills, these days I feel like Raja Hari Singh Katoch of Kangra when he was besieged in the Kangra fort by Jahangir in 1620.  Worse, actually, because the stalwart Raja had to put up with the inconvenience for only fourteen months whereas I have had to endure it every year for the last 14 years. And it's not the Mughal army I have to contend with but the Khan Market and Lutyen's gangs of Delhi.

   Come April every year and members of these gangs, in their tens of thousands, clamber up the mountain landscape and take over our roads, markets, forests and every bed in every homestead. Like locusts they devour everything and leave behind in their wake tonnes of plastic, bottles, empty packets of chips, cigarettes and condoms. Like Jahangir, they lay claim to our lawns, apple trees and parking places; the women have been spared so far, but that's only because we hide them with the cattle. We huddle in our houses, waiting for the pestilence- called tourists in modern parlance- to pass.

   I have given the origins of this annual invasion a lot of thought, and have come to the conclusion that it occurs primarily because we no longer visit our grandparents, and instead prefer to go on vacation to the hills! Think about it. The internet, competitive consumerism and the breakdown of familial relationships drive us to constantly seek " new experiences" and new vistas. Even if it means being stuck for eight hours on the Rohtang pass, being ripped off by taxi drivers in Dharamshala or abused by the pony wallahs in Kufri. It was different when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties.

  My grandfather, a patriarch no one messed with, stayed in a village of Fatehpur district in UP called Husainganj ( unless the good Yogi has now changed its name). He had built himself a huge haveli there and inscribed one golden rule in its stones: all his children and 17 grandkids had to visit him every summer: he even paid for the rail tickets. So I never even saw a mountain( or sea, or desert) till I was 25: every summer vacation my Dad would pack the family into a second class coach of the Kalka mail at Calcutta ( or Hazaribagh or Asansol or wherever he happened to be posted at the time) for the 24 hour journey to Fatehpur- annual migrations one looks back on with fond nostalgia mixed with a regret that my own sons ( part of the KM gang) have never seen this facet of the Old India. For today train travel is all about getting to the destination as quickly as possible, it's never about the pleasures of the journey itself. I recently travelled by Shatabdi to Kanpur and found that of the 62 passengers, 60 of them had buried their persona and noses into their smart phones. The 61st was a seven eight year old kid ( who should have been smothered at birth) who was sliding the door open and shut, letting in the flies and letting out the cold air. I was the 62nd, observing it all and weeping like Alexander the Great for I had now seen it all.

   For us the journey was itself a delight. There were no AC coaches or electric traction back then. We would stick our heads out of the open windows, breathing in the soot and smoke from the Bullet engines, jump out at every station to buy comics from the AH Wheeler stalls ( where have they all disappeared?), grab the local station food from the vendors- "jhalmoori" at Asansol, aloo tikkis at Dhanbad, samosas at Mughalsarai, puri-aloo at Benaras, the delicious pedas at Allahabad. All extremely unhygienic, swarming with e-colis no doubt, but Michelin star stuff which built up the immunity which in later years has enabled us to tackle the tasteless swill IRCTC serves on trains nowadays. But the "piece de resistance" for which we all used to wait, came at Fatehpur, which arrived at the opportune time for breakfast. Its generally deserted restaurant served the best buttered toast and omelette on the Grand Trunk line, on round tables covered with spotless linen and cutlery.  (The only railway restaurant that comes even close to its ambience and service is the Barog station on the Kalka- Shimla line). We left the restaurant only when they ran out of eggs, for the next two weeks in Husainganj was to be a vegetarian existence, without even onions and garlic.

   There was only a dirt track between Fatehpur and Husainganj, a distance of about ten kms; there were no buses, only the occasional horse carriage on a sharing basis. But my grandfather had the biggest haveli in the village and there was no way his grand brats would travel in a "tonga", for us he sent his personal bullock cart, drawn by two of his finest oxen: a magnificent, snow white pair standing almost five feet high at the shoulders, bedecked with colourful ribbons and tinkling bells, their regal horns sheathed in copper. The bullock cart itself was a caparisoned wonder, with sun shades, carpeted with Mirzapuri rugs and stocked with sugarcane stalks, peanuts and nimboo-pani.  We flew down the dirt track like Ben-Hur in the last lap of his famous race , giving the term " cattle class" an entirely new meaning. It set the tone for the next month, a controlled chaos of joint family living, over which my grandfather proudly presided: a patriarch who held his large family together with stern dictats, superb logistic skills and well placed inducements.

   He is gone now, of course, and so is the world we grew up in: the haveli is in ruins, the bullock cart is now a symbol of penury, not of status, the omelette is now a leathery strip served with sarkari reluctance, the station food vendors replaced by catering franchisees hawking packaged rubbish, most trains do not even stop at Fatehpur. Why should they? Nobody goes there for everyone is now headed for the mountains, the seaside resorts or the casinos of Goa. In this world of OYO rooms, Make My Trip.com, Airbnb and cashbacks, visiting grandfathers is such a waste of time. But I do wish the millennial generation would start visiting the old critters again: it would make them happy, it would lift my siege and might even save the mountains from further depredation. I speak, of course, as a grandfather-in-waiting.

MUZAFFARPUR DEATHS: HOW TO OUTSOURCE ONE'S CONSCIENCE.

   India is replete with deja vu moments, and the more things change the more they remain the same. In 2017 alone 175 children had died of encephalitis in Gorakhpur; today, as we applaud India's win over Pakistan at the World Cup, 156 have already died in Muzaffarpur of the same disease. The only thing that has changed in between is the grand introduction of the Ayushman Bharat or the PMJAY programme which had assured health care to 500 million of the country's poorest. The epidemic in Muzaffarpur was its first major test, and it has failed miserably.

  I rarely watch the trash that is churned out on our television channels every evening, but a programme on the Muzaffarpur tragedy by Faye D'Souza on MIRROR NOW on the 18th evening made the maggots crawl on my decaying conscience like nothing before. It painted a horrifying picture of a district hospital with doctor-less wards, no medicines, no electricity, an all pervasive blanket of filth, rotting food for patients and dying children packed two and three on beds. All certified to be kosher by the visiting Union Health Minister, a Chief Minister and a state Health Minister who attributed the deaths to consumption of " lychees" on an empty stomach and the administration's preoccupation with the elections! As one of the panelists on the show ( a doctor himself) said: not even a healthy man would survive in these wards after three days.

   What happened to Ayushman Bharat, that much vaunted panacea for universal health? Why could it not save these children? The answer is simple: because it is nothing but a quick fix, an M-seal that simply papers over the cracks without actually repairing it. It is not that PMJAY is defective per se, the problem is that it does not address the root cause of the problem, which Muzzafarpur ( like Gorakhpur earlier) has brought to the fore: an abysmal lack of both public and private health infrastructure in the rural areas. It is an excuse for the government abdicating its primary responsibility, pandering to its Guinness addiction: the largest political party in the world, the tallest statue in the world, the biggest income distribution scheme in the world, the biggest health care programme on the planet, and so on. These impressive statistics merely hide an ugly truth- the rural poor have no access to health care because it just doesn't exist on the ground, and PMJAY exists only on paper for them.

   India spends less than 2% of GDP on health, as against a global average of 6.5%; the Union budget provides Rs. 32000 crore for the sector, a mere Rs. 300 per head! WHO norms provide for a bed intensity of 3.5 per thousand population, whereas our figure is 1.3, and the shocking reality is that 70% of these beds are in the top 20 cities of the country. There exists a mind boggling shortage of doctors and nurses- a deficit of 1.5 million doctors and 2.4 million nurses- and we churn out only 50000 doctors every year from our medical colleges. It has been estimated that to cover these deficiencies an additional investment of Rs. 1.65 trillion is needed, 2% of our GDP.

   It is this yawning chasm in health infrastructure that the govt. needs to address; its failure to do so means that Ayushman Bharat can at best benefit only the urban populations, leaving 60% of India to contend with more Muzaffarpurs in the future. The essence of PMJAY is enabling private sector hospitals to take up the slack in availability of govt. infrastucture, but this business model fails when there exists no private health sector, as in our rural areas, because there is no money to be made there. Where then does the critical patient go? Back to the non-functional PHCs and corruption ridden govt. hospitals which are charnel houses in any case, as Faye D'Souza's programme so shockingly revealed.

   The govt. continues to live the illusion that big ticket announcements and projects will solve the problem: as evidence we had the Union Health Minister proudly proclaiming this week that a Super Speciality hospital has been sanctioned for Muzaffarpur. It will not help, because in the absence of primary health care the patients would have died before reaching the mythical super hospital. Studies have repeatedly shown that 80% of ailments can be managed at the PHC level if only governments were serious about investing in these institutions. Instead, as the MIRROR TODAY report has revealed, 90% of Muzaffarpur's PHCs are non-functional. Ditto for most other states. If they had been functioning the majority of these dead children would have survived.

   It is therefore no surprise that Ayushman Bharat could not save them, just as that other out-sourced gift to the private sector, the PM's Kisan Bima Yojana, has done little for the farmers, who therefore continue to kill themselves by the bushel. According to RTI  information obtained by THE WIRE, just for Kharif 2018 insurance companies collected a premium of Rs. 20,747 crores; they have so far paid out only Rs. 7697 crore as claims, even though additional claims of Rs.5171 crores are pending with them. At best, therefore ( for the insurers) they will pocket Rs. 13050 crores, at worst Rs. 7880 crores. It doesn't require a Niti Aayog to figure who are the real beneficiaries of this programme- last I heard, no insurance CEO had committed suicide. Outsourced insurance schemes like the Kisan Bima Yojana or Ayushman Bharat can at best be a supplement to the government's efforts, they cannot be a substitute for creation of essential infrastructure and policies such as irrigation, MSPs, dismantelling of unnecessary regulatory mechanisms, provision of village level health facilities and medical staff. 

   It's the same with all outsourcing by the government of its basic functions- education, public security, public health, transport, and in the days to come, the civil services too. We expect a government to deliver basic public goods, rather than farm it out to blood suckers because it cannot resolve its inefficiencies.This ever expanding outsourcing  policy is worse than a placebo- at least a placebo causes no harm but here people are becoming paupers, killing themselves or dying unsung three to a bed in some rat infested hospital because the govt. aspires to another Guinness record and a hero's reception at that temple of doom, Davos.

   One question remains, however: where does one outsource one's conscience?

RAHUL GANDHI AND CONGRESS MUST STAY THE COURSE.

                       RAHUL  GANDHI AND CONGRESS MUST STAY THE COURSE.

    Now that the Studio Bhakts gang ( the fawning mainstream electronic media) has achieved its first objective- the return of the BJP to power- it has embarked on its second mission: the ejection of Rahul Gandhi from the Congress. For make no mistake, the Congress is the only party that stands between the BJP and its Valhalla of a Hindu rashtra. Even in its darkest hour it has secured 120 million votes, as against the BJP's 220 million: no other party comes even close to this. And it has secured these votes across the country, even in states where it has not won any seats. Only the BJP has a larger national footprint. All other political parties, notwithstanding their strength in their own states, are regional players who lack an all-India vision and cannot see the larger picture from their Chief Ministerial chairs. Their focus is on their own survival and the nation be damned. Mr. Modi, the politician par excellence that he is , realises that with the Congress out of the way, his thousand year Reich will be secure. The regional parties can then be picked off one by one, at leisure, with the astute use of electoral bonds and the many caged parrots now in his menagerie, as he has shown, with varying degrees of success in the north-east, West Bengal, Odisha and even Karnataka.

   For the 134 year old Congress to be broken, however, the Gandhis- particularly Rahul Gandhi- have to be eliminated as its leaders; without this nucleus the party shall fragment into disparate winnows, to be gobbled up by either the larger regional outfits or the Modi-Shah leviathan. To be sure, the party has faced critical inflection moments in its history- in 1951, 1969 and 1977- and emerged perhaps stronger each time, but then it had titans of its own like Nehru and Indira Gandhi who helped it to weather the tempest. Today it is vulnerable as never before because it is at its weakest, numerically, organisationally and in terms of leadership. It has yet to recover from the two knockouts of 2014 and 2019 and is ripe for the plucking. Slice off the head and the rest of it will just wither away.

  And so the electoral bonds financed blitzkrieg to demonise Rahul Gandhi and to dismember his character and abilities, to make him an object of ridicule and calumny. There are two strands to this onslaught: the "dynast" argument and the " not fit to be a politician" narrative. Both are specious and as hollow as the moral innards of the anchors who froth about them on prime time every day, or of those life members of the Lutyens and Khan Market gang who have suddenly seen the light and discovered God in the form of Mr. Modi and have no hesitation in confessing all to that bald Father Confessor of CNN TV.

   It would be unrealistic to maintain that there is no dissatisfaction with dynastic politics, but it is certainly not the reason why Congress lost, or why Rahul Gandhi should quit. This is a false narrative built up by a supine media more loyal than the king. If it was true then how is it that 162 "dynasts" won in the recent elections, a full 30% of those now in Parliament? Nor is this flaw the monopoly of the Congress alone: according to a survey by HW News 22% of the total tickets given by the BJP were to "dynasts". It does business with dynastic parties: the SAD, Shiv Sena, Paswan's LJP and is wooing other family concerns like the TRS and the YSR Congress. Just about every regional party is dynastic in nature: BSP, SP, BJD, DMK, NCP, RJD: why create this narrative about the Congress alone? The BJP will also gravitate towards this, given time, for it takes about two generations of being in power for this feudal trait to entrench itself. 

  The second narrative now being purveyed by these channels- that Rahul Gandhi is a failed politician and unfit to lead a national party- is equally devious and false. He is the only Congressman with a pan-India image and his stature has risen in the last two years. The pre- Balakot opinion polls were unanimous that he was closing the popularity gap with Modi and was only 12% points adrift of him. Yes, he is not decisive at critical moments, his calculations have gone awry at times, he is ill advised , he has not been able to shake off the legacy of deadwood that was the curse of his inheritance as President, he lacks the ruthlessness and killer instinct of the BJP duoply. But even the latter can make mistakes, as when they lost three states in December 2018. Yes, he lost in Amethi, but then even Indira Gandhi and Vajpayee had lost elections.

  The naked truth is that Rahul Gandhi did not lose the 2019 polls, Congress ideology did. Messers Modi and Shah have created a New India in which there appears to be no place for what the Congress has always stood for:  liberal values, secularism, inclusiveness, consensus, human rights, genuine federalism, compassion for the poor.  In the New India these are all dirty words and ideas. True, the Old India of the Congress has also been identified with a lot of negative traits- cronyism, corruption, hangers on, vacillation, and this image has to be rectified.  Rahul Gandhi's challenge, therefore, is twofold: purge his party of these negative qualities and power brokers is the first one. The second challenge, perhaps even more important, is to resist the urge to jettison the ideology of Old India under the BJP onslaught or to try to emulate the masculine, hyper nationalist, Hindutva, market driven ideology of the BJP. That would be a tragedy of monumental proportions. For if India is to survive as one nation it is the values and principles of this same derided Old India, of the Constitution, debated and resolved by our founding fathers, espoused by the Congress since its formation, which alone can ensure this. Rahul Gandhi and his, hopefully, new Congress should not give up on them even though they may be out of fashion for the moment. He must cleave to them with even greater passion and conviction now, take them back to the citizens, convince them that there is no other path which the country can follow. He would do well to remember the prophetic and cautionary words of Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly: " Democracy in India is only a top dressing of the Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic." Much of this shallow top dressing has been eroded in these last five years; Rahul Gandhi owes it to our founding fathers to ensure that what remains is not blown away by the devil's wind now gusting across this country.

  Given the present hypnotised mood of the nation, this is a tough task: there will be more election losses for the Congress, the rats will jump ship in droves, factionalism and rebellion will become endemic in states, the old guards within his own party will resist change, the power of the state will be used ruthlessly, the media will get more strident and biased, smaller opposition/ regional parties will cave in, the head winds will be relentless. Precisely the reason why Rahul Gandhi should not abandon his ship at this time and should stay firm on his course. The people will gradually realise that they have been following a Pied Piper and not the promised Messiah. The tide will turn, sooner rather than later, and when it does there must be someone who can guide the ship to a safe harbour.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR THE HIMACHAL FOREST DEPT. TO WAKE UP?

  Triund is a magnificent, rock-strewn meadow at 3000 meters at the base of the towering Dhauladhar range behind Dharamsala. Till about ten years ago it had only one three room forest rest house and was visited by about a dozen trekkers everyday. You could spend the night there only if you had a permit for the rest house, which has neither electricity nor running water. Today it is visited by a thousand people a day, there are dozens of semi-permanent structures and tents despoiling the place. Dozens stay for the night in them, defecating wherever they fancy, the meadow is strewn with garbage, faeces and plastic. Last year a local environmental NGO had cleaned up the place and had carted more than 30 large bags of garbage and trash down the mountain. If this makes you angry, here is something that will make you furious: the entire area is a Reserved forest and no non forest activity is permitted there by law. People have now even started getting plots entered in their names, in connivance with the Revenue officials. Every structure and tent is an encroachment. The Forest department is aware of what is going on but chooses to remain in deep slumber. What the hell is the HP Forest department doing? you may well ask.

  The HP High Court has posed this precise question to the department this week and has asked the Deputy Commissioner to remove all the polluting eye-sores within three months. But why does it have to take the judiciary to remind the Forest department that it is its bounden responsibility to implement the Forest Conservation Act, the Indian Forest Act and the Godavarman judgement  (1997) of the Supreme Court? Triund is just one example of how the apathy, irresponsibility and downright connivance of the department is devastating the natural environment of the state, whether it is the Rohtang slopes, Hatu peak in Shimla, Manimahesh in Chamba, Chandertal in Lahaul, Kheer Ganga in the Parvati valley or Choordhar peak. I was horrified to learn the other day that 100 vehicles are allowed upto Jabri ( on the trek to Hampta pass) EVERY DAY! Dozens of people camp at the pass itself. I had been to the pass some years ago and can vouch for the fact that it cannot sustain more than ten people at a time. And this is part of the Inder Killa national park- how are people allowed in without permission, and with no rules to govern their stay there?

  The explosion of trekking in forest areas and fragile mountains is getting completely out of hand and in the days to come shall pose the biggest danger to the natural environment, including its flora and fauna. But the department tasked with protecting these areas is in deep slumber, worried only about how many more posts of PCCFs and CCFs it can wrest from an equally somnolent government. I have been arguing for years that the carrying capacity of these natural spots/ routes should be determined, a system of permits introduced and rigorously implemented, camping sites developed with pit toilets and running water, vehicular traffic completely banned from these areas to preserve their pristine character, violators severely fined. HP's forest department, however, is sleeping the sleep of Kumbhakaran, and by the time it wakes up there will be nothing left to preserve.

  Thankfully, the higher judiciary shares these concerns. There is a path breaking, but little noticed, judgement of the Uttarakhand High Court of 21.8.2018 which is of relevance to Himachal also, though I doubt if the mandarins of our Forest department are aware of it. In Writ Petition( PIL) 123 of 2014, Justices Rajiv Sharma and Lok Pal Singh addressed head on the environmental destruction caused by uncontrolled camping on the alpine meadows ( Bugyals in local parlance) of  Roop Kund in Chamoli district. After discussing at length various authoritative environmental studies and judgements of various courts, they passed the following orders, inter-alia:

* A complete ban on overnight stay/ camping in the meadows.

* Removal of all permanent/ semi permanent structures ( of the UK Tourism Board) from the meadows.

* Restrict the number of tourists to the Bugyals to 200 per day.

* Dismantle all encroachments( by tourist/ trekking organisers) within three months.

* Clear all the accumulated garbage in the meadows within 6 weeks.

  I am not aware whether the Uttarakhand govt. has appealed against this order or not. The judgement may be a bit harsh( especially the ban on overnight stay) but it's the only way to go, at least for the time being, till the government introduces proper safeguards and systems to regulate and restrict the ever increasing numbers to the carrying capacity of a place. The HP forest department can do far worse than adopt these prescriptions, and use them to develop its own template for a sustainable policy on eco-tourism.

  I tremble every time I read that the Himachal govt. is opening up some new, virgin, natural destination for eco-tourism or trekking or adventure sports. This is tantamount to signing the death warrant of that place in terms of preserving its environmental heritage and values.