Quotas are just cards being misused by Congress
While your newspaper expressed a great deal of concern over how the Congress was its own worst enemy, the party also needs to be saluted sarcastically on new standards it has set on innovation practices of the highest order.
In the last four weeks, the Congress has broadly played two cards and another one, to confuse, deny and delay in finalising candidates in the four seats of Canacona, Sanvordem, fatorda and Murmugoa.
The first was the youth congress card which it played early in the innings when a surprising mini bombshell was dropped that the heir apparent to the Congress throne Rahul Gandhi had selected two youth congress candidates Pratima Coutinho and Sankalp Amonkar for Fatorda and Murmugoa. This lead to a falling out and a virtual division in the congress ranks. The next card played was the Muslim card. While representation fir Muslims is a must, the congress has always played lip service to the cause without being serious. How many Muslims has the congress fielded in the last two elections. While uslims all over Goa are genuinely upset with the congress, the party still continues to make them believe that it is fighting for their representation. In reality, the congress has been merely using the excuse of Muslim representation to delay and deny tickets to candidates with a winning chance for a larger game.
It has done likewise by playing the youth congress card. In reality Youth Congress representation has been given by nominating Valanka Alemao in Benaulim. Alemao is an elected office bearer of the youth congress and had planned to contest for Youth Congress president.
The use of these cards has been exposed. It is now clear that the larger game is between Chief ministerial hopefuls who want maximum MLA’s to back them. The Rane’s and the Alemaos have fulfilled their quota through their families and friends and need to keep out MLA’s who may back any other Chief Ministerial hopeful. Chief Minister Digambar Kamat has been officially rooting for Sardesai but at the same time he has been backing BJP defector Vijaipai Khot who has now. It seems, been “transferred” to the NCP.
What is clearly evident is that the party has used every excuse in the book to counter the win ability formula. It needs to be emphasized that no such quota or representation was stalked about when Vishwajit rane encouraged defections from the BJP in Bicholim and Mandrem when there was no need to break the BJP and add to the congress quota. This was allowed on the pretext of win ability. While this mantra was sung in North Goa, the quota mantra was voiced in the undecided seats.
While proper representation to communities and groups is important, the congress cannot use this to settle political scores which is what it is doing now. In the long run this will not work. The muslims have seen through this and while they will back Sardesai in Fatorda, they are happy with a new party like Trinamul Congress which will end up giving about six seats to muslims. At the end of the day, the congress has pleased no one.
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PEOPLE’SEDIT
End war by
ending the state
David D’Amato
Much has been made of the announcement that, as reported by the New York Times, the US Department of Defense will take its “first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war.” The plan represents only a minor modification (if even that), but has been presented — by both its proponents and detractors in the US political establishment — as a veritable sea change.
President Barack Obama’s apologists on what I’ll call “the acceptable left,” those who still somehow believe that the president isn’t just a war-embracing clone of his predecessor, regard the “cuts” as a step in the right direction. From more overtly imperialist quarters come the groans and yowls one would expect, addressed to predicted closures of military bases and the waning of American global strength.As always, the devil’s in the details. Slate’s Fred Kaplan observes that Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary too once attempted this sleight of hand: “He would insist that he was making drastic cuts by comparing his budget with what he’d projected it to be (sincerely or not) the year before — while, in fact, he was requesting massive increases.”
Assessing the proposed shift, then, we would be wise to retain our incredulity at the tortuous Newspeak of the political class. Viewed in the light of war’s actual purpose as Big Business for a connected elite, the scores of doomsday scenarios used to sell it become less plausible. For market anarchists, war in many ways represents the epitome of the state’s interaction with human civilization; indeed, I have often suggested that to be consistently and undeviatingly anti-war means to be anti-state.
And to reject war and the state, in turn, is to favor a safer world, not the treacherous, entropic nightmare prophesied by today’s flag-bearers of military adventurism. That nightmare is largely descriptive of the world we live in today, one disfigured by America’s military empire and the economy built up around (or inside of) it.
Anarchism does not prescribe, it allows, swapping the rigid systems of compulsion with the adaptability of universal freedom; those who worry that it indeed allows too much might do better to direct their perturbation at the impunity allowed by arbitrary authority, the defining attribute of the social institution we call the state. Our argument for dispensing with the state is, in point of fact, that the state is a deeply and unavoidably malefic force, positioned directly against those worthy societal goals. Cutting through the disinformation that screens it, we find that the state wages war on those goals to make Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman rich.
The choice posed by market anarchism — based on voluntary association and trade — is not that of rules or no rules, but of individual sovereignty or top-down control. Should individuals and noncompulsory community organizations make decisions for themselves, or should a modern, state-corporate nobility, protected by law from the consequences of its actions, decide for all?
The war economy is a command and control economy, and neither Leon Panetta nor Barack Obama is going to do anything to change that; they work for it and not the other way around. To truly end the racket of neocolonialist domination, society must genuinely support peace and security by casting the state aside — regardless of what Washington says.
