Parvez Rasool, a Kashmiri cricketer, was briefly detained in Bangalore on suspicion of carrying explosives, an incident which triggered anger in the Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley.

This is not an isolated case.

Earlier actor and model Tariq Dar, a Kashmiri Muslim, was mistakenly imprisoned in New Delhi for weeks for having terror links. But Dar was later found innocent.

Delhi University lecturer S.A.R. Geelani, a Kashmiri, was even awarded the death sentence in connection with the 2001 Parliament attack case, but was later released.

Are Kashmiri Muslims, weary of decades of violence, treated unfairly by Indian authorities in different parts of the country?

The Kashmiri cricketer’s detention did not go down well in the strife-torn region, where anti-India sentiment still runs deep.

Rasool’s detention comes at a time when New Delhi has decided to resume peace talks with the leadership of the Himalayan region aimed at ending over 60 years of dispute.

Kashmiri travellers and traders who talk of being harassed after militant violence in any part of India, say such incidents are pushing ordinary people further away from the Indian mainstream.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, chief of Kashmir’s main separatist alliance All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference, said he would be taking up the issue of Rasool’s detention during his talks with New Delhi.

Tens of thousands of people have died during 20 years of anti-India insurgency in Kashmir. The strife has left nothing untouched in the scenic region, once the heart of Sufi Islam in the subcontinent and home to an easy-going society.

Kashmir’s young chief minister, Omar Abdullah, said it is easy to see young Kashmiris as terrorists but urged New Delhi to handle the youth of his state carefully and help heal the wounds of violence.

Kashmiri sportsmen say these things humiliate people in Kashmir where violence between Indian troops and separatist militants has brought untold misery to the residents.

Does being a Muslim from Indian Kashmir invite suspicion in a predominantly Hindu country?

As part of its 100-day action plan, the Congress-led UPA government is pushing for the Women’s Reservation Bill, which seeks to reserve 33 per cent seats in parliament for women.

The UPA has also promised to give women 50 percent seats in local government institutions like the village council, up from the 33 percent of seats currently reserved for them.

That measure has  been in place for over a decade and a half. But has it done any good?

Initially, it was  feared that elected women would be no more than “dumb dolls”, manipulated into endorsing decisions taken by their husbands and other family members.

But a government-sponsored study in 2008 of elected women representatives in village councils has shown encouraging results.

“A sizeable proportion of women representatives perceive enhancement in their self-esteem (79%), confidence (81%) and decision-making ability (74%),” says the study.

So is extending reservation for women in parliament such a bad idea?

There are voices both in support and opposition.

Those supporting the move just have to point to India’s position on the gender-related development index (GDI) — 138 among 156 countries.

Nearly everyone says more women are needed in the legislatures. But the issue is how to get them there.

Reserving 181 of the existing 543 seats could pose a few problems.

In case the seats are selected at random before an election, here’s what an online petition opposing the reservation bill says:

“Two-thirds of the incumbent members will be forcibly unseated in every general election and the remaining will remain in a limbo till the last moment…politics will become even less accountable than at present.”

Some say women may be put up as proxy candidates and since a seat would be de-reserved after 15 years, lawmakers would not be able to build a following in a particular constituency.

Of course, the 33 percent quota can also be met by increasing the number of Lok Sabha (lower house) parliamentarians to 815.

This could be done by creating new constituencies or through double-member constituencies.

This would mean a new parliament building — the present one doesn’t have the seating capacity.

Besides, a six-year long delimitation exercise just got over before the elections.

Another option is to make it mandatory for parties to field a certain number of women candidates.

But there are misgivings women will be fielded from constituencies where they are expected to lose, just to get around the quota requirements.

Some say there needs to be a quota for the backward-class within the quota for women.

This begs the question if women should be treated as a uniform category and who will reservation empower.

A recent story in Outlook magazine said two-thirds of women MPs ride to the parliament merely on family connections.

Others have opposed the reservation bill on the grounds it may not necessarily empower women.

Columnist Shobhaa De remains opposed to reservation:

“I believe in a level playing field and not on reservations, as these prove to be counterproductive. I would rather that women be better educated and at par with men.”

The Women’s Reservation Bill has been introduced in parliament at least thrice without being put to vote.

At the same time, it is worth noting that the proportion of women in the new Lok Sabha is the highest ever.

It crossed the measly ten percent mark in this election!

Is there a way of getting more women into politics that will get everyone’s support?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not contesting elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower and popular house of parliament.

This is for reasons of health and also because the constitution permits the prime minister to be a member of either of the two houses of parliament.

Like Singh, we have had prime ministers from the Rajya Sabha earlier but they sought to get elected to the lower house and succeeded easily.

As the de facto head of the government, the prime minister is expected to earn people’s approval directly.

Mayawati recently took a dig at Singh over the issue.

“This Manmohan Singh has not contested any public election…he was brought back door in Rajya Sabha and made prime minister,” the Bahujan Samaj Party chief said at an election rally.

“If Manmohan can become PM, why can’t an educated Dalit woman.”

This is possibly the first instance in Indian politics where the sitting prime minister has decided to stay away from the race.

But should India’s prime minister be a member of the Lok Sabha?

The opposition, after initially trying to make it a poll issue, now seems to have lost the plot.

The question keeps popping up on internet discussion boards.

FOR

– Those who support the idea of a prime minister from the lower house say that a popular vote marks acceptability by the people as compared to someone nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

– Such a person having earned the people’s mandate is seen as less susceptible to manipulation.

– A person’s performance as an MP is seen as a necessary test of his competence and claim to the top job.

– Some even suggest that a prime ministerial candidate should seek election with a pre-announced team, something like the shadow cabinet system in Britain.

AGAINST

– The most convincing argument against the idea is that the constitution puts no such caveat.

– The upper house is seen as a talent pool where competent candidates are sent after consideration. This compensates for impulsive behavior of voters which can sometimes make “good” candidates unelectable. For example, Manmohan Singh lost the 1999 Lok Sabha election from the posh South Delhi constituency.

– It is also felt that any prime minister would work according to the party’s ideology, membership of a house being irrelevant to his policies and performance.

– Moreover, the prime minister is in any case indirectly elected (by the party MPs), so the argument of his having greater acceptance may not cut much ice.

– Some feel that if the person is a representative of the majority party and competent then nothing else should count. Others say the proposal calls into question the very rationale of having an upper house, and therefore, needs to be fleshed out.

One comment on the online forum points to the question being a moral rather than a legal one.

There are two facts to bear in mind.

In the Westminster system of democracy, a prime minister from the upper house would be an anachronism.

Secondly, the constitution review commission recognised the lower house’s pre-eminence in its recommendation that the prime minister be directly elected by the house in the event of a hung poll verdict.

As for the practical aspect, the Congress is contesting around 400 seats in these elections, and finding a safe seat for a politician like Manmohan Singh, the sitting prime minister, should have been easy.

In March, opposition leader L.K. Advani raised the issue at an election rally.

“Singh will be more acceptable to the people of India if he decides to fight the elections and go to the Lok Sabha,” he said.

Did Advani have a valid point?

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?

History never repeats itself exactly, but it does leave signposts. So with India and Pakistan settling into a familiar pattern of accusation and counter-claim following the Mumbai attacks, it's worth remembering what happened after the December 2001 assault on India's parliament brought the two countries to the brink of war. Or more to the point -- thinking about the less remembered follow-up attack on an Indian army camp in Kaluchak in Jammu and Kashmir in May 2002 that nearly propelled India over the edge.

Following the attack on parliament that India blamed on the Laskhar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, both Pakistan-based militant groups, India mobilised its troops all along the border, prompting a similar mobilisation on the Pakistani side. Then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf went on national television in January to promise to crack down on Islamist groups; the activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed were curbed, and tensions abated somewhat.

These tensions exploded again in May when gunmen launched a "fedayeen" attack on a camp for army families in Kaluchak, killing 34 people.  (For an Indian version of the Kaluchak attack written at the time, this piece by B. Raman is worth reading.) The Kaluchak attack so outraged India, and particularly the Indian Army, that it came perilously close to war with Pakistan.  The crisis was averted after intensive American diplomacy. 

So where does that leave us now in the current uneasy no-war, no-peace environment? Or in other words, is there a risk of another attack, another Kaluchak? 

If, as some analysts believe, the objective of the Mumbai attacks was to trigger a new military stand-off between India and Pakistan to draw Pakistani troops away from the border with Afghanistan and reduce pressure on al Qaeda and the Taliban, then they failed.  Does that mean more gunmen will be assigned to launch a new attack and complete the task? Or will the governments of India and Pakistan, remembering what happened last time around, find a way to insulate themselves from such a risk?

Three weeks after the Mumbai attacks, the signs are not looking promising. Pakistan's new civilian government, which in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, was ready to send the head of its powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to India to cooperate in the investigation, has been retreating steadily from that position ever since. President Asif Ali Zardari told the BBC this week that there was still no evidence to support Indian claims that the attacks originated in training camps in Pakistan. 

Pakistan has cracked down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and outlawed the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a charity linked to the LeT. But India remains sceptical about how effective this will be. (Pakistan journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad has an interesting take on the history of the LeT in the Asia Times, in which he says the group might be banned but not bowed.) In the meantime, Pakistan has backed away from earlier reports that the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Maulana Masood Azhar, had been detained, with  Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi now saying that Pakistan does not know where he is.

Pakistan in turn has accused Indian jets of violating its airspace and summoned a senior Indian diplomat in Islamabad to protest. India has denied the accusations of airspace violations, which depending on which side of the border you sit on, could either be seen as a deliberate attempt by India to put pressure on Pakistan, or an attempt by Pakistan to paint itself as the victim of Indian aggression.

So what happens now? India has said it does not want to go to war over the Mumbai attacks, but nor does it want to pursue a peace process that would make the Congress-led government look weak ahead of a national election due by May next year. That potentially leaves the region sitting on a tinderbox for months. And very vulnerable to any fresh attempt to stir trouble between India and Pakistan.

(Reuters photo: Pakistan Rangers close the gate on a crossing point at the Line of Control in Kashmir after it was opened briefly for trade/Amit Gupta)

Now that the proverbial Left monkey is off the government’s back, the country’s education system will be among the sectors on the radar of the administration in its push for reforms.

With more than half of the billion-plus population aged 25 or below and foreign players eager to have a share of the lucrative industry by setting up branches in India, the education sector can potentially bring in a huge amount of foreign investment.

And for many students who would otherwise be squeezed out of the few elite colleges or would have to study abroad, opening up the system could make world-class education available to them without having to leave the country.

So the education minister’s recent remarks that the government may introduce in the August session of parliament a long-delayed bill to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India will be intently followed by institutions from countries such as the UK, Canada and the US.

High-profile institutions like Oxford, Harvard and Stanford have evinced interest in setting up shop here, apart from hundreds of others.

The Foreign Education Providers (Regulation for Entry and Operation) Bill was cleared by the Cabinet in 2007 but was never introduced in parliament.

The communists, who propped up the government for almost four years, were opposed to opening up the education sector, arguing that the entry of foreign players would benefit only a few who could afford the high fees.

But with an estimated 160,000 students spending $4 billion annually for higher studies abroad, bringing foreign institutes into the country could bring down education costs drastically and make quality degrees available to more. Imagine someone studying in Delhi obtaining an Oxford degree.

Another area of concern is the threat of a deluge of fly-by-night operators who would only eye profits without giving value to education if there is no proper regulation.

On the other hand, too much government control would deter quality institutions who would like to maintain a certain amount of autonomy to be able to function properly.

The answer could lie in the National Knowledge Commission’s recommendation to set up a regulatory body on the lines of the RBI for banks or TRAI for telecom.

With the Bill having a good chance of being taken out of cold storage this year, arguments in favour of and in opposition could be loud. The question remains - will it benefit the intended beneficiaries?

Another moot point - will HRD minister Arjun Singh and Co seek to stuff their quota doctrine down the throat of Harvard once it is in desi territory?

As a financial journalist, covering politics and parliamentary debate is sometimes part of my job. What I witnessed on Tuesday in parliament — wads of cash being flashed around inside the lowerhouse– is something I had never bargained for.

The civil-nuclear deal with the United States will go through, and some reforms may be pushed by the government with the help of
its new allies. But politics will never be the same again, tainted by allegations of bribery and a vulgur display of money power.

Shortly after his government won a convincing victory in parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the victory sent a message to the world that “India’s head and heart was sound and India is prepared to take its rightful place in the comity of nations.”

India has attracted global attention due to its strong economic growth and aspires to be a global power. But now more than ever, it needs to fix its politics and governance so that these two key elements do not derail its ambitions.

All political parties will need to seriously think about the events of the past few days and work out mechanisms to prevent it from happening again.

Global best practices need to be imbibed to help politics and governance catch up with the demands of a globalising economy. If it does not happen soon, then ordinary Indians’ cynicism and disillusionment with their politicians will become irrecoverable.

Too much is at stake.