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The Daily Janchetna
Year11, Issue:12, Tuesday, Nov.17,2020.
. Message of the Day .
. History of the Day-7 .
The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe. (Courtesy)
. Today’s History .
17th November
Important Events:
1920 — Gemini Ganesan, Tamil film star, was born
1961 — Chanda Kochhar, managing director and CEO of ICICI Bank, was born
1973 — Mirra Alfassa, also known as ‘The Mother’, spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, passed away
1982 — Yusuf Pathan, Indian cricketer, was born
2003 — Surjit Singh Bains, Punjabi singer, passed away
2012 — Bal Thackeray, founder and leader of Shiv Sena, passed away
Lala Lajpat Rai
His father, Radha Krishan, was an Urdu teacher. In 1884 Krishan was transferred to Rohtak, where Rai became the secretary of the Hindu cultural organisation Arya Samaj. He cleared his law exam in 1886 and started practising law in Rohtak and then in Hisar (today a part of Haryana).
He was elected to the Hisar municipality and his years in Hisar laid a firm foundation for a life in public service. During this time he was closely involved in activities of the Arya Samaj. In 1888 he went to Allahabad to attend a session of the Indian National Congress.
In 1892, he shifted to Lahore. He took the lead in famine relief during 1897 and 1899. He got together students from D.A.V. College and formed teams that would go to Rajasthan for relief work, concentration especially on orphan children. Rai was also at the forefront of relief work when an earthquake struck Kangra (now in Himachal Pradesh) in 1905.
Deeply influenced by Hinduism, Rai believed that the religion together with emerging nationalist ideals could be the basis for an Indian state. After joining the Congress, he participated in the political agitation in Punjab. Believing that Rai was a ‘revolutionary’ and the main leader behind the unrest in Punjab, the British government arrested him from Lahore and deported him to Mandalay (Burma) in May 1907. But before he was taken away Rai listed out what he considered were the ‘real’ causes of the disturbances in Punjab. These included government measures such as The Land Alienation Act Amendment Bill, hike in canal rates on the Bari Doaba Canal and the abnormal upward revision of land revenue in Rawalpindi, and the state’s ineffectiveness in tackling plague.
With evidence against Rai quite shoddy, Lord Minto was compelled to allow him to return to India in a few months.
Rai visited the United States in 1914. It was meant to be a short trip but he could not return to India until 1919, after World War 1 got over. He perceptibly observed the challenges in presenting an accurate picture of India to countries like America that saw the East predominantly through British eyes. “The civilised world’s ignorance about India, her culture, her history, her politics and her economy is simply colossal. People hold very peculiar views about us,” he wrote. “Our mysticism has sometimes amused and sometimes repelled them; our poetry and philosophy have at times been praised. Beyond this the affairs of India had little interest for the rest of the mankind.”
In a paper titled ‘Lajpat Rai in USA 1914 -1919: Life and Work of a Political Exile’, author and scholar Harish Puri writes: “Lajpat Rai…inspired a number of Indians and Americans to make a deep study of India and to advocate her cause in America and other parts of the world. Agnes Smedley a young journalist was drawn to Lajpat Rai after listening to his lecture at Columbia University on 10 March 1917.”
Smedley later wrote about her first encounter with Rai in her autobiography (quoted by Puri): “He [Rai] was a teacher and a wise man… He introduced me to the movement for the freedom of his people and showed me that it was not only an historic movement of itself, but it was part of an international struggle for emancipation.”
Rai, along with leaders such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh, came to be known as an ‘extremist’ or ‘militant’ nationalist of the Indian freedom movement. Attacking the Congress in his 1916 work Young India, Rai wrote: [T]he Congress was started more with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than with that of winning political liberty for India. The interests of the British Empire were primary and those of India only secondary.”
In 1920, after returning from the US, he, however, took an active part in the non-cooperation movement. His stance on issues of Hindu-Muslim equations was often divergent from mainstream Congress views, but he stressed on the importance of unity. In 1924, for instance, he wrote: “However divided Hindus and Muslims may be, however bitter their relations with each other, they are still united in their demand for Swarajya, in their opposition to the government, and in their hatred of the subjugation imposed upon them from without.”
Rai reflected upon a number of social and political issues. On the caste system, he wrote: I find no sanction for it [untouchabiltiy] in the Hindu shastras. I find no mention of it in history. As far as the Hindu untouchables are concerned, most sensible Hindus are agreed that in their case, at least, it is senseless, inhuman, and intolerable, because of the fact of their being followers of the same religion and members of the same community as the so-called higher castes.”
In 1928, when the Simon Commission visited Lahore, Rai led a non-violent protest against it on October 30. The police struck back with lethal force, carrying out a lathi-charge. Rai suffered serious injuries in the police assault and eventually died on November 17, 1928 of a heart attack.
Lala Rajpat Rai is remembered as a nationalist Indian and freedom-fighter who was unafraid of putting his views, even when they were critical of the Congress or Mahatma Gandhi, in the public domain. As an author and thinker his writings leave behind a fascinating and rich legacy.
. Current .
The message from Gujarat 2017
Despite the long history of communal tensions, clashes and riots over the past several decades, the much-contested elections went on with clock-work precision, and without any possibility of violence, booth-capturing or worse.
It is this ‘Gujarat model’ that the nation can be proud of, and try to replicate it.
It also raises the question: With no predictions of tension and violence in the air at any time, why did the Election Commission feel it necessary to conduct two-phase polling?
Considering that the state’s was a stand-alone election in the neightbourhood, the EC could still have commissioned police and paramilitary personnel almost at will for the polls, even providing for unpredictable eventualities.
As conventional wisdom has it, multiple-phase polling is generally reserved only for large states with a possibility of violence, and the situation is reviewed election after election -- and Gujarat did not fit into the bill since the previous 2012 assembly polls at the very least.
It is also conventional political wisdom that multiple-phase polling helps better-organised, cadre-based political parties even more than their own inherent grassroots-level strengths permit.
No marks for guessing which is the better-organised political party in Gujarat or the rest of the nation, for now, or even in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
All the other parties put together do not hold even the shadow of a candle, leave aside a candle, to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This too has more than one message for the 2019 elections, depending on which side of the wall you stand, and which side of the wall you want to read from.
. Informative .
The Imperial Bank of India
The history of modern banking in India can be traced back to 1806 when the Bank of Calcutta was established. In 1809 it was re-named Bank of Bengal. Then in the 1840s the Bank of Bombay and Bank of Madras came up.
While these three banks’ evolution was influenced by ideas generated by the great economic churning taking place in Europe in the 19th century, local needs and conditions in India played an important role too. The establishment of the Bank of Bengal saw the start of limited liability, joint-stock banking. The Bank of Bengal was allowed to issue notes that could be used for paying public revenues in certain areas. According to the banks’ royal charters, 80% of share capital was privately subscribed and the remaining state-owned.
The three Presidency Banks were at the helm of Indian banking till their amalgamation in 1921 into the Imperial Bank of India, which combined the role of a commercial bank and a central bank. However, with the establishment of the Reserve Bank o India in 1935, the Imperial Bank ceased to have a central banking function. It now became a purely commercial bank and certain business restrictions on it were removed.
After independence the economic model of five-year plans necessitated a re-organisation of banking. On July 1, 1955, as per the State Bank of India Act 1955, the State Bank of India (SBI) was constituted and it took over the business and undertaking of the Imperial Bank. In the same year the State Bank of India (Subsidiary Bank) Act was passed, with the State Bank of Hyderabad becoming the first subsidiary of the SBI.
In the next five years, the State Bank of Bikaner, State Bank of Jaipur, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Indore, State Bank of Saurashtra and State Bank of Patiala became subsidiaries of the SBI.
In a paper titled ‘Indian Financial System & Indian Banking Sector: A Descriptive Research Study’, Dr. Mamta Ratti, professor and principal, Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Management Studies, Panchkula, writes: “[A] significant development, since the mid-fifties, was related to the widening of range of banking operations, which includes, term lending and underwriting of securities, as forms of finance. The directing of bank funds to the requirements of the five-year plans was reflected in the flow of bank credit to the priority sector. But the quantitative magnitude to these new areas remained insignificant to materially alter the basic structure of India banking.”
Some of the developments in the 1960s included the amalgamation of the Bhor State Bank Ltd with the SBI and the taking over of the Unit Bank Ltd. Chennai by the SBI. In the 1970s the SBI introduced the perennial pension plan and an integrated rural development programme. A cash certificate scheme, wherein deposit certificates were issued for a fixed period on payment of issue price, was introduced in 1980.
In the next few years the SBI established the non-resident investment cell and launched a self-employment scheme for educated unemployed youth. In 1988 a pilot project called ‘Stree Shakti’ to encourage women entrepreneurs was started by the bank. The India Magnum Fund was launched the following year.
During the early 1990s, with the Indian economy opening up, the SBI had to re-engineer itself to adjust to the needs of an expanding economy. By the end of 2013, the SBI had over 14,800 branches in India and 2.3 lakh employees. In the financial year 2012-13, its revenue was Rs 200,560 crore, with domestic operations contributing to 95% of the revenue. In 2013 Arundhati Bhattacharya became the first woman chairman of the SBI.
The country’s largest banking and financial services firm by assets, the SBI’s importance goes far beyond the banking sector. Examining the challenges the SBI faces, Srikanth Srinivas wrote in Business World in July 2013: “Though SBI is not really huge by global standards…it is gargantuan compared with any Indian bank. It is the equivalent of the next three largest domestic banks — ICICI Bank, Punjab National Bank and Bank of Baroda — rolled into one and accounts for one-fifth of India’s banking business. And it has been doubling in size every five years. In almost every business it is in, SBI is by far the biggest player.”
