Scrap BBC Tax at a time of austerity

James Whittingdale is expected to take a close and
hard look  at the BBC Charter and the Licence Fee

The Secretary of State for Media, Culture and Sport, James Whittingdale, should take a close and hard look at the Licence Fee when discussing the next BBC Charter, which will come into force at the end of 2016.

When the Conservative government is resorting to Victorian penny pinching and making the poorest and the weakest in Britain more vulnerable, the BBC is employing the resources generated through Licence Fee in Britain to launch a television programme in Bangladesh.

The launching of the BBC Bangla TV programme - BBC Probaho, on Bangladesh’s cable/satellite station, Channel-I is nothing short of an expediency as it will not reap any benefit for Britain and those who help the corporation survive by paying the Licence Fee.

It beggars belief that the new television programme being launched by the BBC Bangla Service will cut any ice with the audience, not least because of the sustained decline in the BBC’s influence in Bangladesh, but also due to the fact that the media market in the country is crowded by the presence of nearly a dozen television channels, if not more. Moreover, the continuous decline in the audience figures of the BBC Bangla's radio programmes are a testimony of the listless editorial leadership of the service.

The BBC World Service has a dubious distinction of floundering with public money when it attempted to launch its Hindi television channel in India in the 1990s. As the BBC faltered, its supplier the Asian News International or the ANI flourished. There is a widespread apprehension that like the ANI in Delhi, Channel-I is prospering at the cost of the Licence Fee payers in Britain as BBC Probaho is destined to fail.

The sponsorship of the longstanding relationship between BBC Bangla and Channel-I by the BBC Media Action also raises serious financial and editorial questions. Questions are being raised as to why the British taxpayers' money should be used to help a foreign media business flourish. Secondly, is the editorial stature of the BBC, despite its continuous decline, compatible with Channel-I's position in the media landscape of Bangladesh?  

When the government is making additional cuts, it should ensure that the ordinary people have enough resources at their disposal to make a decent living. Resources at the disposal of the ordinary people would  be better utilised to meet their basic needs rather than paying the bills of an expedient move by a maverick or a dubious BBC manager.

Also available: Why should I pay for the BBC

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a freelance journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.

High time India reciprocates to reap diplomatic dividends

What a gesture of friendship and camaraderie by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, first to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee​ and then on Saturday to Prime Minister Narendra Modi​. The people of Bangladesh have always been at the heart of the Indians and their struggle for independence remembered with reverence on the other side of the border and so are their strides on the social indicators of development.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has
walked the extra mile for friendship

Prime Minister Sk Hasina was quick to acknowledge the tide of geopolitics and its significance in South Asia, although it must be said that she had always been on the right side of a cordial relationship with India.

Notwithstanding the irritations in the bilateral relations, Sk Hasina has walked the extra mile not only to strengthen the friendly ties with her neighbour but also delivered on the promises made by the Bangladesh government to make the historic relationship smooth and render it with due cordiality.

It wasn't an easy task though!

Sheikh Hasina had to tread a dangerous path not only in the country, to overcome the widespread anti-Indian sentiments and wipe out an air of suspicion, but also within her party the Awami League to make Bangladesh's relationship with India effective and meaningful. She had to stave off strong and often conspiratorial opposition to friendly ties with India from a section of the domestic media, other groups in the civil society and also an arm of an influential international media organisation having strong roots and historic links with Bangladesh. Quite expectedly, this arm of the international media organisation downplayed the success of what is being termed "a historic trip" and highlighted Khaleda Zia's allegation, during a one-to-one meeting with Prime Minister Modi, that "democracy is at its peril in Bangladesh".

It is high time that India recognises the friendly gesture of Bangladesh in the backdrop of a bilateral relationship which has been on a roller coaster ride over the past more than four decades and with the evolution of geopolitics.

India should be mindful of fulfilling her commitments to the people of Bangladesh, made on several occasions. The public perception in Bangladesh is that India is quick to make promises but falters when it comes to delivering on time, often seen by Dhaka with suspicion and as a sign of lack of commitment. This perception is of course not without reason. The promises made by the then Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on reconstruction of villages post the devastating cyclone Aila took a lot more time to deliver than the usual period of gestation.

The operators in South Block should recognise the fact that Bangladesh may be small in size but it occupies a position of strategic importance and it is only in India's interest to nurture the bonhomie and friendship that's in the air at a time of sweltering heat and high humidity in both the countries.

Prime Minister Modi's strategy of extending an olive branch of friendship to South Asian neighbours like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, notwithstanding her size and importance in regional and global politics is bound to reap diplomatic dividends in the time to come.

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
 All comments are personal.

An authentic Highlander with chubby looks & cheeky smile

My Tuesday morning passed with a sense of loss. Political passing has never been so remorse, at least recently. I encountered a similar sense of loss when Tony Benn passed away in March last year. Back home in India, political passings are full of statist grandeur, depicting the clout and power of politicians. A sense of loss is often overtaken by the public display of grief.

Courtesy: The Telegraph

I gulped emotion ever since the news of Charles Kennedy's untimely demise flowed from the television sets during the breakfast programme. A stream of  condolences followed. For Paddy Ashdown, whom Kennedy succeeded as the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, he was a repository of decency, wit, humour and charm, when large parts of modern day politics were bereft of the traits that rendered it humane.
Kennedy's high point in politics was when he vehemently opposed the Iraq War in 2003. With Tony Blair being the bagpiper in the campaign against Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and the Conservative Party under Ian Duncan Smith following suit in Britain, the Liberal Democrats under the stewardship of Kennedy stood rock solid as a moral compass, despite his denouncement for "treachery and treason", against the divisive war. Over a decade after the war, Kennedy's apprehension about its credibility had been proved right. The liberal in him insisted that inspectors be deployed to make sure that the weapons of mass destruction were destroyed rather than going all out for the scalp of Saddam Hussein.

Iraq is not the only issue where he instinctively made "an exceptionally shrewd" political judgement. The bleak performance of the Lib Dems in the recently concluded general election is a testimony to the gut feeling of Kennedy opposing any possible coalition with the Conservatives. The two parties were in coalition for five years and in the end the Conservative Party gained at the cost of the Liberal Democrats. Kennedy's opposition to the coalition was based on the intuitive apprehension that "David Cameron would use it to re-brand his party as Liberal Conservatives destroying the real Liberal Party in the process".

When Kennedy became the leader of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the political landscape in the United Kingdom was dominated by New Labour and more so by Tony Blair. The Tories were in utter disarray with leaders like William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard grappling as to how to cope with the Tony Blair phenomenon. Although the leader of the third largest party in the House of Commons, Kennedy with his captivating charm, authentic touch with the ordinary people, principled politics and brilliant oratory performed the role of a 'de facto' leader of the opposition in parliament.

It is to Kennedy's credit, and also that of Paddy Ashdown, that the Lib Dem apparently turned into a party of intellectual and ethical refuge for many - who despised the Tories and yet were not necessarily heart and soul with New Labour - despite its inability to become pivotal in the once effectively predominant bi-partisan electoral politics in Britain.

It was under his leadership that the strength of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Commons reached 62, the highest tally for a third party since the old Liberal Party days of the 1920s, in the 2005 general election, only to plummet to 57 under the stewardship of Nick Clegg in 2010.

As tributes flow from all sides of the political spectrum, Kennedy will be dearly missed in Britain for delving into the humane terrain of politics, his gaiety and serious principled politics. His stance on the Iraq War made the Liberal Democrats stand apart in the face of jingoism worldwide. Kennedy's lovable chubby looks and cheeky smile endeared him to many well beyond the murky world of politics. Binge drinking was his demon and Kennedy had to pay dearly for it. British politics will never be the same again without the sandy-haired Highlander.  

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com All comments are personal.

Stop learning and we're dead, Mr Gandhi

"In the long-run we are all dead", once said John Maynard Keynes. Reading about Rahul Gandhi's recent jibe at Narendra Modi, claiming that the incumbent prime minister had invited his predecessor to have an "hour-long Economics lesson from Dr Manmohan Singh" made me think that one can very well be dead not only in the short-run - as compared to the 'long-run' as mentioned by Keynes - but also when one is very much alive and aspiring at least apparently.

Let me at the very outset pronounce my opposing views on Rahul Gandhi. In 2012, I had written my first blog post on Rahul Gandhi when he stopped short of making any mark as a "successful Indian politician" by failing to lead his party - the Indian National Congress - to victory in the assembly polls in India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, also one of the politically significant ones in the country.

My second blog post  on the Gandhi scion, written just after the worst ever drubbing faced by the Congress, was much more personal and sympathetic about the physical, psychological and emotional captivity that Rahul had to live with all his life, thanks to the greed for power of the leaders of the party he leads as its vice president.

Ever since he returned from his much talked about 57-day sabbatical, Rahul seems to have mastered the art of being the typical Indian politician - the usual street smartness without much substance and an iota of statesmanship.

What's the harm if Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought some advice on the economy from his predecessor Dr Manmohan Singh, who happens to be an internationally acclaimed economist? Moreover, Dr Singh steered India out of the economic mess in the early 1990s.

In many of the world's mature democracies there is either a well defined handover process during change in governments - as is prevalent in the United States when the president-elect works very closely with the outgoing head of state for weeks together to ensure a smooth transition in power - or the ruling and the opposition parties work in tandem despite the acrimony and competitive politics during the elections.

In the Westminster system, which is followed in India, it is often said that the British prime minister knows the leader of the opposition much more than his/her spouse. If that is the essence of the democratic relationship between the ruling and the opposition parties in India then why can't an incumbent prime minister invite his predecessor to seek advice.

In fact, Prime Minister Modi set a nice precedence when he called on Dr Singh immediately after assuming office, so did Dr Singh when he called on an ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee to wish the nonagenarian leader on his birthdays. Even Sonia Gandhi called on the former prime minister to condole the death of his long-time companion Rajkumari Kaul.

Competitive politics may be the call of the day but nothing can be more unfortunate if that killer instinct of achieving short-term gains comes in the way of civility and interpersonal relationships between the political actors in the country. Moreover, there is no harm in learning even if it is from a political adversary. As Albert Einstein reportedly said, "The day you stop learning is the day you stop living."

Political animosity between former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Jayprakash Narayan is well known. JP,  as the social reformer was known, was arrested during the Emergency and in return he made sure that Mrs Gandhi was ousted from power. However, before JP's death in 1979, when Mrs Gandhi called on him, the Lok Nayak wished her well and said that he hoped that the former prime minister's future would be brighter than her past. Political equation never came in the way of JP's affection for his "Indu" - the daughter of his friend Jawaharlal Nehru, despite their longstanding political differences.

Reading the news report on Rahul Gandhi's diatribe against Mr Modi, I find that the Gandhi scion has also criticised the strict disciplinarian  practices of the hardline Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Sayamsewak Sangh or the RSS, stating that "Discipline is an excuse for suppressing individuality." Mr Gandhi probably forgot that his grandmother Mrs Gandhi and uncle Sanjay Gandhi did exactly the same during the Emergency, and his father Rajiv Gandhi tried to do the same by introducing the infamous Defamation Bill in 1988, which was later withdrawn.

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.

A divided Kingdom

After days of discussions around a possible hung parliament and various coalition equations, who could have expected such a poll outcome in the United Kingdom? Certainly, not David Cameron. Or else, his party wouldn’t surely have campaigned so vigorously against a possible pact between the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP), vehemently ruled out by Ed Miliband.

Ironically, in a year that marks the octocentenary of Magna Carta — the Great Charter — signed by King John at Runnymede on June 19, UK’s major political parties planned their campaign strategies around fear. Magna Carta was the first formal document making it imperative for the monarch to follow the law of the land, and ensure individual rights against the wishes of the ruler. It was a charter of liberty and hope. But in its 800th anniversary year, we witnessed an election campaign tied to fear. Can anyone deny that exercising the franchise without fear or favour also constitutes an important individual freedom?

The Tories scared the English voters into believing that a minority Labour government would be captive to the SNP, which clearly wants to break away from the United Kingdom. The Labour, on its part, pressed the panic button based on their assumption that another five years of Tory austerity will cut the public services, including the much valued National Health Service, to size.

The campaign of fear, it seems, is going to haunt David Cameron in the weeks and months to come, as he heads to form a single-party government backed by a slim majority. Armed with the over 50 seats in Westminster, the SNP will make every possible effort to irritate David Cameron and undermine the authority of his government over Scotland.

Nicola Sturgeon, the charismatic leader of the Scottish party, had vouched to enhance the influence of Scotland in Westminster. She led her party to win 56 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. But, given the outright majority of the Tories, the election outcome didn’t necessarily enhance SNP’s power in Westminster. Sturgeon will, therefore, try her best to enforce that power by questioning Cameron’s authority, and, thereby, fuelling Scottish ambition of independence from Britain in the form of a referendum.

The rise of the SNP meant bloodbath for the Labour and the Liberal Democratic Party in Scotland. Jim Murphy, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, have lost their seats to the SNP. Alexander lost his seat to a 20-year-old student, Mhairi Black.

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and a key figure in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition and Charles Kennedy a former Lib Dem leader too, suffered the same fate. So did Vince Cable the Business Secretary and Lib Dem leader from Twickenham, a constituency he held for nearly two decades. What is surprising is that the coalition partners may have projected their record in government during the campaign, but it is the Lib Dem candidates who were punished as the Tories returned as winners.

As the election results stated coming in on Friday morning, I met a girl from a religious minority community. She told me, she voted for the Conservative candidate overlooking Cable, who represented the middle ground and sanity in British politics. And she is not alone in holding that view. While the voters were polarised as a fall out of a vitriolic election campaign, it is equally true that the electorate can’t be stereotyped by their religious and ethnic backgrounds any longer. Across the country, young voters from the religious and ethnic minority groups stood by the Tories, generally considered tough on immigrants and religious and ethnic minorities. For years and generations, these groups have constituted the core support base of the Labour Party.

The performance of the Labour Party isn’t that dismal in London. They have increased their tally from 2010, probably a message for the city’s Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson, the darling of the party’s right-wingers. Rumours that Johnson would be propped up as a leader of the Conservative Party if Cameron failed to deliver an outright majority, were circulating. The electoral outcome in London also underlines a consolidation of working class votes in favour of Labour after the Tory onslaught on a possible Miliband government in a tacit agreement with the SNP.

The electoral outcome across the United Kingdom is a complex equation, definitely much more than what caught the eyes of the poll stars, a majority of whom were proved wrong.

The equation is even more complex in England. The United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), which wants the UK to quit the European Union (EU) and blames the migrants — especially those from the East European countries — for all the ills that have befallen Britain, have made significant inroads in England, not necessarily in terms of seats won, but in the share of votes garnered by the party.

The rise of the UKIP comes not necessarily at the cost of the Conservatives, which incidentally is its parent party. But, also at the cost of Labour. The Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls lost his seat because of the number of votes secured by the UKIP in his constituency of Normanton in West Yorkshire, up in North England. The polarising party led by Nigel Farage is making its presence felt beyond the South of England which sees the maximum immigration from the continent.

Despite the resounding success of the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru, another nationalist party in Wales, has managed only a handful of the 40 seats. But there is apprehension that the trend set by the Scots will inspire the Welsh to speak out more vigorously for independence.

With a large number of leaders not returning to parliament, the Labour Party faces a generational crisis. The burden of the skeletons of the New Labour, left by the Blair-Brown years, seemed to have been too heavy for Miliband to bear. The infighting between the Blairites and the Brownites, which later resurfaced in the form of a family war between the Miliband brothers — Ed and David — the latter leaving the Labour Party to take up a plum job in the US, split the organisation too wide for Ed Miliband to stage a comeback.

An outright majority is not all comfort for Cameron. Now that there is no coalition, he will face enhanced pressure from his backbenchers to deliver more for the Tory core voters.  Europe and immigration are causes for concern for the prime minister so is the difficult task of balancing the books and yet deliver a reasonable public service.

Divisive politics awaits a divided nation.

A version of this write up was first published in the DNA on May 9, 2015

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.