SBI strike holding the government and the country to a ransom

The SBI strike initiated by communist unions have paralysed the banking system in our country. Communist sabotage honed to an art. May the government employees who get their salaries credited to SBI go to dogs, so seems the contention. The demands raised by the employees(Communist unions) is preposterous. Please go through the following link:

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=122673


Edits & Columns




Unbankable!

Government must not give in to SBI employees

The government must be commended for standing firm despite the employees of State Bank of India (SBI) going on indefinite strike in protest for not conceding their demands on pension. The strike, which began on Monday, is particularly indefensible as SBI employees are a privileged lot. They are the only ones among public sector bank employees who enjoy three benefits—pension, gratuity and contributory provident fund.

The employees’ contention that their pension is not comparable with other public sector banks (PSBs), where it is 50% of the last pay drawn, unlike in the case of SBI where there is fixed ceiling based on 1992 salary scales, conveniently overlooks this fact. In all other PSBs, when pension was first introduced in the 90s, employees were asked to choose between pension and PF. They could have one or the other, not both. SBI employees alone were allowed to retain their triple benefit on the grounds that they are governed by a separate law, the State Bank of India Act.

On paper, then, the genesis of the present problem may be traced to this Act. In reality, it is essentially a consequence of government ownership. The reason why SBI employees have gone on strike so readily and why government has come into the picture is because SBI, like the other PSBs, is predominantly government-owned. Service conditions in ICICI Bank, for instance, are vastly superior to those in PSBs, including SBI. Yet, no one thinks of comparing ICICI salaries and perks with those in PSBs. Nor do ICICI Bank employees themselves contemplate going on strike to settle real or imaginary grouses. The government, on its part, does not concern itself with the details of the compensation package given to ICICI Bank employees. It is purely a function of what the bank can afford, based on its profits and the individual employee’s performance. This is not the case in SBI. In the circumstances, a higher pension outgo means lower profits and, hence, lower dividend to government. Moreover, there is always the real possibility that if pension is indexed to inflation, which is what it would mean if it were brought on par with PSB pensions, the government (read taxpayer) may finally end up picking the tab.

Shovan Deb Chattopadhyay's(Chief whip, Trinamool congress) West Bengal-Gujarat Comparison

http://in.rediff.com/election/2006/apr/05citizen.htm

Where is the Unnati in Bengal?

The Name of Gujarat been used by CPIM in the 2004 general election as alleged by BJP and Trinamul Congress. Their complain was in the midnight CPIM shows superimposed video films particularly in Muslim mohallas to obligated the Muslims and state BJP's allegation was CPIM politicized the riots of Gujarat for CPIM's gain.

Shovan Deb Chottopadhay, Chief whip of Trnamul Congress in an exclusive interview said the left front is asking vote for seventh time in the name of Unnata Tara Left front. But where is Unnati?

Chotopadhay quoted from food minister of Bengal Naren Dey's speech in the assembly that west Bengal is a deficit state in Rice, wheat, edible oil, eggs, meat, fish, salt, Dal. Chottopadhaya after 29 years of ruling if left front could not arrange the basic needs of the people what is the meaning of Unnati.

He cited example of claim of Left front government of 2000 crores foreign investment per year which means a total of 10000 crores in the last five year when Narendra Modi's govt could bring 129000 crores foreign investment in last three years.

In connection with the law and order, primary health, consumer market, investment scenario, literacy, health when west Bengal position is 13th Gujarat is 7th among the Indian states.

In Bengal around twenty five thousand teachers were appointed in the last five years where in Gujarat one lakh teachers were appointed in the last three years. Where in Gujarat sixty six thousand classrooms are available in Bengal fifty four thousand classrooms out of which eighteen percent is one room school and without latrine and drinking water facility.

In Gujarat for speedy trial of cases twenty five thousand Loke Adalat is functioning in Bengal not twenty-five is available, Chottopadhay added.

He also said in Gujarat 100 percent land of villages were documented in the computer but in Bengal in the last twenty nine years left front could not achieved even twenty percent documentation.

In the subject of school dropout west Bengal's position is just above Bihar and Sikkim and the percentage is 78.74 %. SC & ST drop out is 84.93 % in Bengal Chottopadhay said but the drop out in Gujarat is only 18.69%.

In the unemployed sector left front's failure is remarkable seventy-two lakhs registered unemployed in west Bengal when the all India the number of unemployed is 4.16 crores. Which means in all India basis the percentage of unemployed is just above 3% where in Bengal it is more than 8 %.

He also alleged that left front partners had rocked the selling of Centaur hotel of Mumbai to Lalit Suri in Parliament but in Bengal great eastern hotel which was profitable till 1995 has been sold out to same Lalit Suri against only Rs 50 crores. The cost of Great Eastern Hotel is not less than 250 crores Chottopadhay claimed. He also blamed the state government for siphoning out the capital since 1996.

Why he has chosen Gujrat for comparison Sovan Deb Chottopadhay said in Bengal CPIM has discredited Gujrat for their personal gain but after a massive riot and within around three years the state of Gujarat positioned their state as developed state among the Indian states. People should know what is the real Development called.

Kinsuk Pallab Biswas
Freelance journalist
Kolkata

Brinda Karat and Ramdev Maharaj: A beautiful article by Sandhya Jain

The attack on Ramdev ji Maharaj was the most despicable when it comes to standards adopted by the commies in bhaarata. Brinda Karat complaining about animal samples in Ramdev ji's medicine is an apt analogy to a devil quoting from scriptures. The following is extremely humorous article by Sandhya Jain:
http://dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=jain%2Fjain79.txt&writer=jain
Yogi and the desi commissar

Sandhya Jain

Marx is dead, I'm not too well, and God, by god, is alive and kicking! Heaven help us, for the heavens have fallen upon our humble heads. Refugee commissars of an aborted Soviet Eden, hoping against hope to share the fruits of the October Revolution with the world's only twice-born nation, we have been ground to dust by rabble roused by a saffron-clad half-naked fakir.




Father Marx, your dialectic has crumbled before the spiritual materialism of a humble sadhu. This son of a poor Haryana farmer is guilty of one of India's million mutinies. Born Ram Kishen, paralysed at the age of two-plus, he was admitted to the gurukul of one Swami Baldev at the age of four, and decided then itself to be a swami. It's not fair; how could Hindus permit a poor little boy to breach the caste hierarchy?



At least we know why no one trusts Brahmins - they always break the rules. This Ram Kishen (he now calls himself Swami Ramdev and bewitches Hindus with his yogic powers by rolling his one good eye), was taught the holy scriptures, including Patanjali's sacred asthanga yoga. Daily he preaches the Hindu way of a healthy life before incredulous multitudes in colloquial Hindi and a smattering of English. Great Commissar, you can see that under the guise of Ayurveda, this yogi is peddling a potent cocktail of Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan, which we have had such a hard time squashing from the time of Bharatendu Harishchandra.



Dear Karl, we realised that if we did not respond with our own Molotovs, we would never again see a Red Star in the East. Our desi commissar Brinda Karat picked up the gauntlet by despatching medicines from the guru's pharmacy to the Union Health Minister.



Unfortunately, he proved a duplicitous bourgeois, possibly an admirer of the Baba. So while our family-owned television channel showed large pieces of animal and human material found in the samples, Doordarshan quoted contradictory findings from two separate laboratories, and the Minister said he did not know where our samples came from. What cheek, when we are supporting this Government to keep the brotherhood of saffron at bay.



We need Engles to intercede with the Angels. The Minister passed the buck to the Chief Minister of Uttaranchal, a wily Brahmin even by the standards of that cunning caste. He flushed our hopes down the cold waters of the Gangotri, which is partial of this Ramdev, because he once lived in its caves. I tell you, nepotism is built into the landscape of India!



The situation is hopeless. For 15 years we earned public odium for supporting that Bihari cowherd; we remained loyal even after he lost support of both nar and Narayan. He repaid us by ridiculing the dictatorship of the proletariat and its bhadralok vanguard, and prostrating himself before that sweaty sanyasi.



Even before the saffron party could feel the pulse of the people (remember their wimpish response to the arrest of Kanchi Acharya?), the Yadav cowboy started shouting about "indigenous causes" and "foreign multinationals." Doesn't he know the Communist Party is one of the great multinational corporations? And we are doing so well in India - our real estate rivals the evangelical churches.



But the cowboy hit us bad, telling those idiotic television reporters that so long as herbal medicines added life to one's years (it should be years to one's life, but you can see how naughty he is), it hardly mattered if they contained the bones of "manav ya danav" (human beings or devils). Where does that leave us? Comrades preaching vegetarianism are a blot on the Gulag archipelago.



Worse, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh also jumped into the fray, saying the Baba is being victimised at the behest of multinational drug companies, to hurt the "swadeshi" concept of medicine, particularly the idea of yoga as a counter to the culture of imbibing pills for every ailment. Now swadeshi is simply Hindu (it can hardly mean Mecca or Rome), and yoga goes back to the Vedas, so you can see where Mulayam Singh Yadav is heading. It is said the yogi is his caste fellow; this could explain the behaviour of the Yadav twins.



It beats me that Hindu upper castes genuflect before this bairagi. They are the ones who guzzle the colas that Ramdev says are fit only to clean toilets. I must admit colas make economical cleaners, and Andhra farmers have proved they are cheap and effective pesticides. Actually, Ramdev has been smart to link us with cola multinationals -they have a bad product and a high public profile - and are easy to target. In fact, I think we made a mistake when we decided to pick a quarrel with Ramdev for the sake of a handful of retrenched workers in Haridwar, because the swami is a smart cookie and the dismissed workers are fools - they took us for a ride and we came off worst.



Look at the guts of a yogi who says he is willing to teach Comrade Karat pranayam, the Hindu science of breathing for a sound mind and body, and adds in the same breath that he is not a pushover like the Kanchi Shankaracharya. If only we had known this before; if only we could have foreseen that the storm that did not rise when the Shankaracharya was incarcerated would not abate when a smooth-talking fakir was at the receiving end.



You will wonder, Great Commissar, why the tsunami of public anger broke out for the latter, while God alone wept for the former. Since the dharma of both men is the same, I think the answer lies in their karmic responses to life's challenges - one is contemplative, the other combative.



But our real problem is that this swami is a mayavi, like his kinsman, Krishna. He spins his web around society gently, with yogic aerobics and loads of sweet talk, which he claims can cure all serious and even "incurable" diseases. His gullible admirers rush to buy his medicines on their own; he accuses us of links with foreign drug companies, and we are speechless.



Worse, in this era of intensified capitalism which is somehow called liberalisation, his programme boosts the TRPs of his host television channels and earns them fabulous revenues. The secular media is bourgeois, and ditches us for this reason. As for the Government media, it is a fact that all these good-for-nothing politicians line up at the ashram after dark for special life-enhancing medicaments. Haven't you noticed that the lifespan of a politician far exceeds the national average?



Sadly, the Ramdev episode has given a new lease of life to the hitherto dormant Hindu atma; Hindus will no longer be content to live as dhimmis in their own country. We chose the wrong target and attacked with the wrong weapon. With hindsight, it appears that a protective Hindu sentiment enveloped the yogi when that idiotic group, SIMI, told him to close shop because some Muslims were deriving medical benefits from the Hindu asanas. It did not help that a reputed Muslim classical singer derided the Astha channel, which Hindus revere, but was silent about Q TV. By the time our desi commissar jumped into the fray, the scales were already tilted against us.

Maoist menace in Bihar : 1.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1398667,curpg-2.cms

Paraiya dogs become apna

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2006 12:08:38 AM]
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” In Bihar’s Gaya district, the counter-revolutionary reply to that could even be one of “Stray dogs of Paraiya unite! You have everything to gain without the chains!” In the Maoist-menaced police chowki of Paraiya where three constables were killed in July 2003, 36 stray dogs are currently doing night duty in and around the sprawling cop campus.

“It’s not always possible to keep a watch on every nook and cranny of the sprawling campus of the police station, especially at night time,” SHO Baidyanath Rai was quoted as saying by the BBC News. That job becomes far more difficult when the dilapidated police-station is plunged into darkness at night, thanks to very erratic power supply and no generator.

And so, in return for two daily meals of rice and pulses, accompanied off and on by chapattis, the stray dogs of Paraiya prowl the police-station premises at night, barking at all intruders so that the cops can flash their torches. And so what if the cops’ Lee Enfield rifles — also used by soldiers in World War 1 — are no match for the AK-47s of the Maoist militants!

The cops of Paraiya have little time to reflect on the irony that the state cannot afford to modernise the firepower of the policemen it employs to take on those who claim that power flows from the barrel of an AK-47 and not the ballot-box of independent India.

Some four months after Union home minister Shivraj Patil announced that rising Maoist violence would be tackled through police coordination and poverty reduction, the Lee-Enfield toting cops appear like have-nots when confronting the AK-47 wielding militants who claim to be fighting for the poor!

The only thing the cops of Paraiya have going for them is the articulate support of the stray canines who are not daunted by the prospect of being dubbed “the running dogs of feudalism”!

Indian Left on Iran Issue.

Perhaps the trans-national brotherhood of communists does not apply in the case of Irani communists with respect to their brethern in bhaarata. The communists in bhaarata have become the greatest champions against Iran Nuclear issue being referred to the UN Security council. Please pay attention to the last lines of the following article:
" The Left’s insistence that India should vote for Iran at the IAEA to defeat the US’s hegemonic designs is, therefore, politically myopic. Of course, India should, together with China and Russia, resist any attempt to twist the Iran vote into an opportunity to wage war. But the alternative to US imperialism is not Islamic fundamentalism.
The Left would do well to remember that the Iranian Islamists finished off the Tudeh Party communists, after the latter helped them overthrow the US-backed Shah in 1979."

These are the same people who would throw their fists in the air to
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1398663.cms
The Left in wonderland
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2006 12:06:33 AM]
The Left in wonderland
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2006 12:06:33 AM]
The Indian Left is badly in need of a reality check. Its recalcitrance, both on modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports and India’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency board on Iran, manifests an archaic politics. The Left parties’ concerted efforts to obstruct the airport modernisation programme privilege sectionalist interests of a small group of public sector organised workers over the greater common good of citizen-consumers.

The Left parties should learn to accept the fact that the modern economy is aeons away from the dehumanising capitalism it opposes. Its promise to boost economic activity and competition, if realised, would mean creation of more and well-paying jobs, and improved delivery of goods and services.

A progressive political agency, which would negotiate and work with global capitalism to maximise benefits for people across the board, would facilitate and hasten that process. The Left could don that mantle rather easily. But it should, before that, give up its programmatic commitment to the destruction of capitalism, as its comrades elsewhere in the world, particularly in China, have.


The fact that the Left puts dogma before historical reality is also borne out by its stubborn position on Iran. Even Russia and China have, this time around, agreed to a vote that would enable the IAEA to report Iran’s nuclear programme to the Security Council. It’s certainly not in India’s interest to have a nuclear power, which is fundamentalist to boot, in its neighbourhood.

The Left’s insistence that India should vote for Iran at the IAEA to defeat the US’s hegemonic designs is, therefore, politically myopic. Of course, India should, together with China and Russia, resist any attempt to twist the Iran vote into an opportunity to wage war. But the alternative to US imperialism is not Islamic fundamentalism.

The Left would do well to remember that the Iranian Islamists finished off the Tudeh Party communists, after the latter helped them overthrow the US-backed Shah in 1979.