A parliamentary committee, with a varied political membership, recently recommended that there should be no sex education in schools.

Sex even if done at the proper time, with a proper person, in a proper place, is a topic that makes many Indians uncomfortable.

The committee itself refused a power point presentation on the question “after going through the hard copy because of its explicit contents.  The Committee felt that it was not comfortable with it and could be embarrassing especially to the lady Members and other lady staff present.”

The committee has recommended that chapters like ‘Physical and Mental Development in Adolescents’ and ‘HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases’ be removed from the general curriculum.

Instead, they want these topics to be included in biology syllabus for school leaving classes.

This leaves the students of the non-Biology streams at sea.

In school, two years before school leaving exams, I remember waiting expectantly as our Biology teacher reached the last page of a chapter on the Skin, which ended with a description of the anatomy of the female breast.

The teacher, a female, was an old hand and probably sensed the collective eagerness. She promptly skipped the page and went on to the questions at the end of the chapter.

A couple of years later as a Biology student in my school leaving year, the most dog eared pages in our Biology text book described the physiology of the female orgasm and the female reproductive system.

These pages too were skipped on the plea of self study.

At home, any discussion of ‘these’ was possible only in hushed tones with my brother. Involving your parents was out of question.

Nice kids are not supposed to take any interest in ‘these’ things. It’s a given.

Jyoti Bajpai, a development professional working in the field of reproductive and sexual health, recalls her own experience on sex education.

She and her female class mates at school were called away for a session on sex education on a pretext.

“What information we were imparted was limited to menstruation and menstrual hygiene and little else. It’s amazing that boys in my class were kept completely out of this. We were expressly warned against discussing any thing with them.”

When my mother was growing up her parents did their best to postpone the acknowledgement of the fact. She had to turn to her friends.

Things were much the same for my parents and my generation, but are they finally going to change for the coming generation?

A friend I talked to on this issue expressed his doubts on the appropriateness of sex education in schools. “It’s just going to be a source of fun for these kids and nothing else.”

But many Indians don’t see it as reason to deny adolescents the right knowledge, especially with 2.47 million cases of HIV infected persons in the country and with sexual transmission being the predominant mode of HIV transmission.

The NACO website says, “Most young people become sexually active during adolescence. In the absence of right guidance and information at this stage they are more likely to have multi-partner unprotected sex with high risk behaviour groups… “

With increasing exposure to television and internet sex education does not imply teaching kids about sex, which knowledge they will pick up anyways, but for many proponents of sex education it definitely means teaching them about what safe, healthy and acceptable sexual behaviour is.

A whole political culture has been built upon sexual mores- ranging from the Congress-led government calling homosexuality a disease to Hindu fundamentalist groups equating women visiting pubs as ‘loose’.

With two phases of elections to go it remains to be seen if this is going to earn political dividends.

Are our representatives in the parliament providing us leadership or abdicating it by following and mobilising their followers on their less informed instincts?

Amidst the stream of billboards, posters and party flags flooding Kolkata’s chaotic streets in the run-up to elections, a glazed hoarding featuring popular intellectuals of West Bengal is catching everyone’s eyes these days.

“Pariborton Chai” (We want change), reads the hoarding popping up at regular intervals, in opposition of the communists who have ruled the state uninterruptedly since 1977.

The hoardings are part of a campaign with a difference - It is not mounted by the opposition Trinamool Congress-Congress combine, but by a group of powerful intellectuals who have joined hands against the communists.

Battle lines were drawn by the intellectuals, who had patronized the Marxists for decades, after the government began seizing farmlands for industrialization and allegedly used repressive means to tame those opposing the policy.

The divide became official after the police firing of Nandigram on May 14, 2007 that killed 14 and triggered more violence, largely blamed on the communists.

In what is now infamously known as the Nandigram Recapture operation, communist cadres allegedly used brutal force in November that year to regain their lost bastion, a cluster of villages in south Bengal which flared up over land acquisition fears for a chemical hub.

At least 50 people, mostly farmers, have been killed in protests over land disputes with West Bengal’s government since 2007.

In October 2008, Tata Motors moved their car factory in Singur — which was slated to produce Nano, the world’s cheapest car — out of the state after villagers blocked highways to protest the seizure of their land.

The Bengal intellectuals, internationally acclaimed in the world of art, cinema, theatre and literature, became disillusioned by the policies of the Left and came out on the streets to protest like the political opposition.

From avant-garde filmmaker Aparna Sen to Magsaysay winning writer Mahasweta Devi, the campaign for political change in West Bengal found unprecedented expression in this outdoor campaign.

But the hoarding also became a subject of contention within the intellectual camp, with filmmaker Suman Mukhopadhayay and actor-choreographer Mamata Shankar saying their pictures were printed without permission and they never intended to feature in an outdoor campaign that benefited a particular political party.

But these jarring notes are perhaps little solace for the communists who are fighting a double whammy - a unified opposition and a vocal intelligentsia that defected from their camp completely.

Much has been written about the imminent arrival in New Delhi of the Third Front, the joker in the Indian political pack that has talked itself up as a serious alternative to the two national parties in the 2009 parliamentary elections.

The difference they tout is of being more inclusive, bringing into the public fold social groups neglected or oppressed by the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Whether this claim, that some take rather very seriously, is sustainable is the moot question. The answer may be no, if the history of this rag-tag group that has emerged with near-decadal precision since 1967 is any guide.

The rise of these parties was part of a process of the broadening of Indian democracy, bringing into the public sphere middle and lower castes, religious minorities and tribals in their own right.

But this broadening has not completely gone hand in hand with it a deepening of democracy, empowering these traditionally subordinate groups.

Rather, critics argue it has become the cultural equivalent of the failed trickle-down theory in economics, bringing immediate benefits to the elite amongst them, entrenching some at the cost of others and widening social disparities.

The Congress party, ruling India uninterruptedly for the first three decades of independence, had as its power-base the landed elite, and its relationship with the subordinate groups was that of a patron and a client.

As some of these groups prospered economically from increased agricultural incomes, they began demanding a larger share in the public sphere. These groups were largely of the middle castes — what is today termed Other Backward Classes in official parlance — and comprised petty landowners and peasant proprietors.

Their aspirations were tapped by the various socialist parties which traced their roots to the left-leaning factions of the pre-independent Congress, factions that had actively led peasant movements in the 1920s and the 1930s.

It was also this upsurge that led these parties to implement job reservations for the Other Backward Classes — the official parlance for these castes — in the states they ruled, much before 1990 when New Delhi made it a national law.

But where they failed was to build upon this silent revolution to ensure a fundamental change in the role of the state as patron doling out (limited) resources. They did not ensure a process of economic redistribution that would benefit all.

Rather, many analysts argue they followed a policy that redirected resources to groups that had reaped the benefits of reservations, and had entrenched themselves as a new elite.

Separated thus from the ideological motivations that gave them birth and nurtured them, critics say most of these parties exist solely for the perpetuation of the cult of the leader and their policies are simply to ensure the dominance of groups that back them.

If one adjective had to be used for the motley crew of the Front, it may be “pragmatic.” The argument goes that it makes no difference to any one of them if India became a client state of the United States or of Tanzania or whether monetary policy is biased towards maintaining growth or containing inflation.

Each of them has slept with almost everyone else, supported policies across the spectrum, bonded with reformists, communists, communalists, secularists, pseudo-secularists, appeasers, all the various other terminological curiosities that pepper the Indian political glossary.

It is this pragmatism that may ease any fears of these parties. There might be degrees of accepting a globalised and liberalised world, but none of them have lost much sleep over ideology or practice, or would be averse to being gently nudged towards that direction.

(Reuters file photos of labourers standing at a road construction site in Bihar (Top) and a policeman keeping guard as voters queue up to cast their votes outside a polling station in Patna in the 2004 general elections)

The world's largest democracy chooses a new government in an election beginning on Thursday, and given the fires burning next door in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the men and women who will rule New Delhi over the next five years will doubtless exert influence over the course of events.

Indeed, with the pain and anger over  the Mumbai attacks of November still raw, the mood could hardly be tougher against Pakistan. Even shorn of the campaign rhetoric, the positions of both the ruling Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party on Pakistan begin from common ground. No dialogue with Islamabad until it "dismantles the infrastructure of terrorism", both parties say in their manifestos.

Full texts of the documents of the two main parties are here and here.

New Delhi's continued refusal to resume dialogue or indeed to expand other links such as trade has caught Pakistan between a rock and a hard place, according to this piece in 2point6billion.com, a website tracking developments mainly in China and India. While Islamabad has repeatedly called for resumption of dialogue since the attacks, Delhi has refused to comply until it is assured that Pakistan will prosecute all those involved in the planning and operations.

Delhi maintains that it holds information garnered from satellite, cellular and other communications devices captured at the scene that lead to specific individuals that Pakistan has as yet failed to apprehend. Islamabad denies the charge and says it is doing everything in its power to cooperate.

The result is that the noose has tightened around Pakistan, exacerbating its already dire financial situation. Trade between Pakistan and India, which had been growing and was forecast to hit US$10 billion by 2010, has dwindled to close to zero over the past few months, with Pakistan feeling the brunt of this economic demise, says the website. Islamabad has already had to apply for a US$7.6 billion loan from the IMF in February and garnered an additional US$2.8 billion in military aid from the Obama administration just two weeks ago. 

But is there a possibility that once India's elections are out of the way, there might be a slight softening of positions? A new government will be under less pressure to be seen to be acting tough. Looking at the manifestos again, you do detect slight differences in the tone.

Here's the BJP on Pakistan, true to its roots a touch more aggressive :

""There can be no ‘comprehensive dialogue’ for peace unless Pakistan a) dismantles the terrorist infrastructure on territory under its control; b) actively engages in prosecuting terror elements and organisations; c) puts a permanent, verifiable end to its practice of using cross-border terrorism as an instrument of state policy; d) stops using the territory of third countries to launch terror attacks on India; and, e) hands over to India individuals wanted for committing crimes on Indian soil."

The Congress on the other hand says dealing with ""terrorism aided and abetted from across our borders does not require a muscular foreign policy as advocated by the BJP.""

Here is their plan:

""But the Mumbai attacks have cast a long shadow on the on-going dialogue and engagement process. It is now entirely up to Pakistan to break the impasse by taking credible action against those responsible for the carnage in Mumbai. If it does so and dismantles the terrorist networks that operate from its soil, a Congress-led government will not be found wanting in its response. "

Has the Congress, still the frontrunner in the election, left the door to dialogue slightly open?

As the pro-India National Conference appeared set to emerge as the single largest party in Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections, the writing on the wall is a tad difficult to miss.

Fed up of living under the constant shadow of violence in a state divided under religious lines, Kashmiri voters surprised seasoned political pundits by turning up in large numbers to cast their ballots.

They defied calls of poll boycott from Muslim separatists and belied fears of violence in the wake of the bitter Amarnath Yatra land row that led to the fall of the Congress-PDP coalition government and imposition of central rule.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the high voter turnout a “vote for democracy” and Congress President Sonia Gandhi has said this should be a message for “our neighbours” (about what the people of Kashmir want).

Whether it is their desire for better governance and development first and the issue of autonomy later, the Jammu and Kashmir voters have set the ball rolling on the counting day in many ways.

Conducted in seven phases, the elections this time came on the heels of agitation over the Kashmir government’s decision to give forest land to the trust that runs Amarnath, a cave shrine visited by Hindu pilgrims.

This enraged many Muslims.

The government then backed down on its decision, which in turn angered many Hindus in Jammu, the winter capital of the region.

The deep divisions that surfaced and the polarized electorate seems to have helped the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a party that has traditionally struggled to make its presence felt in the state. The BJP won 11 seats from Jammu, a gain of 10 seats from 2002.

Both the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party have done well in the valley.

The National Conference has kept the doors open for a possible alliance with Congress to make the half-way mark in the 87-member assembly.

But such an alliance will not come without its customary wariness given the history of their political tie-ups in the late 70s and 80s, most of which were followed by periods of Governor’s rule in the troubled state.

It remains to be seen whether the NC and Congress take advantage of the lull in overall violence in the state and live up to voters’ expectations of giving more weightage to development issues.

Or will they get cowed down by separatists looking to regain their foothold in the region?

The White House staffers charged with transcribing the every public utterance of U.S. President George W. Bush and his friends do not have an easy job. If they falter even for a moment in the constant war against tape hiss, mumbling and ill-timed coughs, they risk putting the wrong words in some of the most powerful mouths on the planet.

And so, as I read today’s official transcript of remarks made by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the G8 Summit in Japan, I wondered if the transcriber forgot to take a cotton swab to their ear that morning:

PRIME MINISTER SINGH: Mr. President, it is a great opportunity for me to once again meet you and to review with you the state of Hindu-American relations. (Emphasis added.)

Surely some mistake? (UPDATE 5.25pm: The White House has now corrected the transcript on its website, but the original version can still be seen here and here.)

Singh is known to be a soft-spoken man, but he is very clear on at least one point: his Congress Party, which heads India’s coalition government, is intended to be a secular party, embracing equally the 230 million Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews, animists, agnostics and atheists that live alongside India’s 900 million Hindus. (Besides which, Singh himself is a Sikh.) A vote for Congress, so its leaders say, is a vote against what are darkly called “the forces of communalism” — a thinly veiled reference to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s main opposition, which believes Indians of every creed should revere and live by the wisdom of the Vedas and other ancient Hindu texts.

For once, the BJP might be delighted to read over Singh’s remarks, but he actually said “Indo-American” relations, according to Sanjaya Baru, Singh’s spokesman. (”An amusing mistake,” Baru said with a chuckle, adding that they were seeking to get the transcript corrected.)

So have the “forces of communalism” reached even as far as the White House? Or is this just another example of the confusion some non-Indians have grasping the differences between “Hindu”, “Hindi” and “Indian”?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the civilian nuclear deal with the United States is all about whether India holds early elections or not.

Every newspaper is speculating if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has staked his personal reputation on the deal, will resign to disassociate himself from an administration that failed to save a pact keenly watched by the world.

But are these the arguments India should be debating in the short-term or should we be discussing the real benefits and drawbacks of the deal?

The communists oppose the deal, in large part because they see it as a front for Washington’s strategic bulwark against a rising China and increasingly unstable Pakistan.

Besides, they say there are many holes in the deal that Washington will use to manipulate India’s foreign and strategic programmes, and that nuclear energy is not a solution to the shortage of electricity in the country or rising oil prices.

Why? Because nuclear energy can not meet India’s huge oil consumption in the transport sector, is expensive to produce and will expose India to manipulations by a small international cartel of uranium suppliers.

But most Indians feel, if straw polls by newspaper and television channels are to be believed the nuclear deal is good for India: The agreement is meant to provide India with the means to produce clean energy — a key constraint to economic growth. And the rise in crude prices underlines need for diversified sources of energy (even if nuclear will take ages to fill the gap).

Internationally, the accord represents a long overdue acceptance of India as a responsible nuclear power.

From the pro-deal camp here are a few points to ponder:

* Even if relations sour with the United States, India can turn to France, Russia, Australia or other uranium producers for supplies, courtesy the waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group which is independent of the deal with Washington?

* Why should India not use the deal to get a waiver from NSG and the opportunity to clear its name as a nuclear pariah state?

If the deal falls through, it is unlikely Washington — or any other nuclear nation — will broach the idea of selling nuclear fuel to India anytime soon.

But will that outcome make India more dependent on outside sources for energy, and weaken its own economic prospects against the growing clout of China?

This is the kind of debate that India would benefit from. Focusing on elections may only reap short term political benefits.

India’s 80-year-old opposition leader says he needs help on “money matters”.

Not only does his wife pay all the bills at home, but he asked business leaders on Tuesday for help in drawing up a new economic model which does not ape the West.

He also had some strong words for the Congress-led government, accusing it of failing to control inflation and failing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor.

When Advani’s own coalition government was in power, it followed pretty similar policies, except with more emphasis on privatisation of state-run companies. But it lost power partly for claiming that India was shining, when poverty was still rampant.

So it’s fair enough to look for economically sustainable ideas to help India’s poor, in fact it is probably essential to address widespread poverty more aggressively.

But is Advani being realistic to suggest there is an alternative to a “Western” development model in the modern world?

And is it right that a man who could be India’s next prime minister so blithely admits to not really understanding economics or money matters?

Is the sun setting on the Congress-led UPA government? India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is certainly riding high after victory in the southern state of Karnataka at the weekend , giving it a first chance to run a government in the south.And it’s the latest in a long losing streak for Congress in state elections. The question is whether the ruling party can turn things around.

The economy certainly isn’t helping. Rising inflation seems to have already wiped out whatever electoral benefits the farmers’ debt waiver might have brought. A slowdown in growth, already apparent in industrial production statistics, won’t help either.

So the first problem for the government is to bring down inflation in time for next year’s national polls.

For now, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is sounding optimistic, and a favourable monsoon would certainly help. But there is little relief on the horizon from global oil prices, and the government may soon have to bite the bullet and raise domestic fuel prices again.

Reining in inflation will be tough, but not impossible over the next year.

On the political front, all the momentum is with the BJP.

At times, Congress looks disorganised and rudderless. In several elections, Congress seems to have paid the price of failing to nominate a candidate for the chief minister’s job, and relying too much on the pull of the Gandhi family.

At the very top, many analysts are asking if the prime minister has provided the kind of strong leadership his country needs.

But a week is famously a long time in politics, let alone a year. State election defeats don’t bring down governments. It is how the parties react to these mid-term verdicts that can make a real difference.

And it is here that Congress has its chance. The BJP-ruled states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh go to the polls this year, and if voters turf out the incumbents in all three, the BJP could indeed lose some of its shine.

Let’s not forget that only a year ago the BJP was beset by infighting and divided over what its electoral USP was — development or Hindutva. The ageing L.K. Advani does not always strike the right chord with voters across the country, and it is far from clear Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi will emerge as a politician who can garner national support.

I have yet to see a national opinion poll which predicts a clear win for the BJP and its allies. The UPA is losing ground, but the BJP still has a lot of work to do to regain the top spot.