By conferring the Nobel Peace Prize, 2009 on incumbent US president Barack Obama, the five-strong Stockholm (Sweden)-based jury, which conducts an annual search for the world’s greatest achievers in physics, chemistry, economics and international peace-making, has done a disservice to the memory of Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). In 1895, Nobel — the inventor of dynamite, perhaps the world’s first ever weapon of mass destruction — signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate to endow an eponymous foundation with the princely corpus of $250 million (Rs.1,110 crore today). Following prudent investment, this endowment has grown into a vast fortune, the annual interest and earnings of which are conferred upon extraordinary achievers in the fields of human endeavour enumerated above.
Since then over the past century, the annual Nobel awards which confer generous cash prizes of $1.4 million (Rs.6.5 crore) each have acquired great respectability. Among the winners of the Nobel Prize are Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Winston Churchill and Amartya Sen. Among Nobel Peace Prize laureates are Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. Significantly Mahatma Gandhi who developed the revolutionary concepts of non-violence and satyagraha (self-sacrifice) as a philosophy of conflict resolution, was short-listed — and passed over — on five occasions for the Nobel Peace prize, an act of omission which the Nobel Foundation has publicly acknowledged as a grave lapse.
Against this backdrop the award of the Nobel Peace prize to Barack Obama, a relative newcomer to international politics who until he was elected president of the United States last November was hardly known in the US, let alone the rest of the world, is as irrational as it is surprising. Although since his unexpected victory in the Democratic party primaries and presidential election of November last year, with his liberal humanism and oratory, he has captured the imagination of people around the world, the fact is that he has not engineered or brokered a peace which merits the Nobel conferment.
The plain truth is that since he assumed office in January this year, President Obama has not had sufficient time to end the American occupation of Iraq, establish genuine demo-cracy in Afghanistan, or show progress towards resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Palestine. Neither back home in the US, has he been able to legislate universal healthcare in the world’s richest and most powerful nation. Admittedly Obama has made well-intentioned moves to address all these and several other issues, but thus far he has little to show by way of actual achievement.
In the circumstances the conclusion is inescapable. The Nobel Peace Prize jury has acted with haste to prematurely award the peace prize to President Obama. Perhaps the expectation of the Nobel jury is that this gifted and accomplished leader who has restored the long-suppressed pride of non-white racial communities the world over, will rise to the occasion and usher in a new era of global peace and goodwill. But this generosity in anticipation has prematurely imposed an additional burden of great expectations upon a brave president floundering in a sea of troubles.
Just cause for special calamity taxation
There’s a curious moral vacuum and conspicuous lack of empathy in the Karnataka state government and civil society, for the plight of unfortunate citizens whose lives and livelihood have been devastated by the floods which swept 15 northern and coastal districts of the state in early October. According to data compiled by the state government, more than 500,000 homesteads and standing crops on 2.2 million acres valued at Rs.10,000 crore have been destroyed by torrential rain and the raging waters of the rivers Krishna, Malaprabha and Tungabhadra in spate. Consequently more than 5 million people — almost 10 percent of the state’s population — have been reduced to destitution.
While the response of chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa has been sensitively empathetic, the reaction of government bureaucrats doling out pathetically meagre relief supplies has been callous. For instance for loss of a home, the compensation being paid is a mere Rs.37,000; for loss of crops Rs.800 an acre; for a pair of bullocks Rs.10,000 and for poultry Rs.30 per head of fowl. Even a village simpleton knows the replacement price of these assets is ten times the compen-sation grudgingly decreed to people who have lost all — probably because government engineers and irrigation officials failed and neglected to desilt rivers, dams and canals.
Although the Bangalore-based affiliate of the American IT multinational CISCO has stepped forward with a handsome donation of $10 million (Rs.46 crore), the response of Karnataka’s over-hyped IT companies which have enjoyed income tax-free status for over a decade, has been typically mean and grudging. Therefore there is no option but to resort to stringent taxation of industry and the middle class, to raise the required Rs.18,000 crore to enable flood victims to put their lives back together. Karnataka’s IT companies which boast an annual aggregate revenue of Rs.51,600 crore, have accumulated huge reserves because of their tax-free status. They should be compelled to pay a special flood relief income tax of 35 percent of their annual profits in fiscal 2009-10.
Moreover all corporate employees should be obliged to pay an additional tax of 10 percent of their annual taxable salaries towards this humanitarian cause. This way a targeted sum of Rs.10,000 crore can be raised this fiscal. Moreover given that bars, restaurants, pubs, malls and goldsmiths are chock full of greedy customers, an across the board 10 percent special tax on these and other luxury items valid until the end of the current fiscal is just and reasonable and would raise the required additional Rs.8,000 crore. The Rs.18,000 crore thus raised could be transparently disbursed by a specially constituted rehabilitation committee.
Admittedly the imposition of additional taxes at a time when the Indian economy is emerging from recession will inflict pain on industry and the middle class. But since neither government, industry nor society is familiar with the concept of need-based charity or philanthropy, they must learn the hard way.