India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday appeared to raise doubts over the veracity of
diplomatic correspondence cited by the Wikileaks and insisted that he had "not authorised anybody" to purchase votes nor was he involved in
any such "transactions".
"I think, people who are affected by them (Wikileaks expose), they have already commented on them, casting serious doubts about the
veracity of allegations made in these diplomatic despatches," Singh said here while commenting on the Wikileaks expose which alleged that
MPs were purchased during the 2008 trust vote.
"I have no knowledge of any such purchases and I am absolutely categorical, I have not authorised anyone to purchase any votes. I am
not aware of any acts of purchase of votes," he said while replying to questions at the India Today Summit.
"I am absolutely certain in asserting that I am not at all, I think, involved in any of these transactions," the Prime Minister insisted.
His response, however, did not categorically clarify whether or not the purchases took place at all during the Confidence Motion on July 22, 2008.
"As far as the events of the last few days (are concerned) and the so-called Wikileaks, I would not like to comment," Singh said
about the Opposition onslaught on the government following the Wikileaks expose.
"I would not like to comment on what we are going to do right now or in days to come. These are the matters which are being discussed in Parliament. If I have anything to say, we would say in Parliament first," he said.
Women's voices should be heard in the
ongoing global climate change debate as they have played a stellar role in raising environmental consciousness, Indian Congress President
Sonia Gandhi has demanded and asked the Commonwealth to take a fresh initiative on this.
Branding climate change as the most difficult challenge facing the humankind, Gandhi said the climate debate had so far been
gender-blind, ignoring the role played by women in raising environmental consciousness.
Delivering the Commonwealth lecture 2011 on 'Women as Agents of Change' at the Royal Commonwealth Society here last night, she
reminded that investment in women had the "highest-return", and said the society owed it to the women to give them "greater security" in
rapid urbanisation.
Gandhi, also the chairperson of ruling UPA on a five-day "private visit" here, was given a standing ovation as she walked to the podium to deliver the lecture as a packed hall which comprised High Commissioners, Ambassadors and British lawmakers.
Gandhi said that she sometimes wondered whether women's greater empathy with nature and concern for their children's future might not
help the world to find a new, more sustainable, less consumerist path of development.
"In 1989, the Commonwealth became the first major international organisation to publish a landmark scientific study on the devastating
effects of climate change."
Commonwealth Heads of Government also agreed on a Climate Change Action Plan in 2007, where, among other things, they called upon the
support of women to ensure effective action.
"How can such support be extended if women's voices and concerns hardly figure in the global climate negotiations, or in national and
local climate management plans?" she asked.
"Perhaps it is time for a fresh initiative to help the world bridge this gap. Such an initiative could suggest ways to bring
women's participation and perspectives more squarely into the global negotiations. We need climate justice not only between countries, but
also between genders," she said.
She said enhancing the role of women in protecting the environment is necessary.
"But what about protecting women themselves? Economic growth is leading to mass migration to cities. Disturbingly, this is being
accompanied by growing violence against women.
If urbanisation is the world's future, we must design urban environments and services in ways that will give women greater security, and educate and involve citizens in this cause. A
Commonwealth initiative bringing together our great cities to collaborate on this issue would be timely," she said.
Singh was answering questions over the correspondence mentioned in Wikileaks between the US Embassy here and Washington in which it
was alleged that Congress had kept Rs 50-60 crore for buying MPs to vote in favour of the UPA-I.
After the correspondence was made public on Thursday, the Opposition has raised demands for the resignation of the government, saying it was the "most corrupt" dispensation of Independent India and allegations against it had maligned the country.
Talking about the issue of corruption, the Indian Prime Minister said "some inadequacies have become apparent in our systems of functioning" and "we have to deal squarely with the malaise".
He said there was a need to "reform and improve governance" at all levels and there should be no doubt about his government's
commitment to root out corruption, to clean
our political system of the malaise that is of concern to public at large.
Agreeing with a questioner that allegations like 'cash-for-vote' affects the country's image, Singh said, "this lays an emphasis that
we need strong, purposeful electoral reforms in which funding of elections and political parties can be more transparent (and) accountable than it is presently."
To a question on growing demands by various communities for reservation in jobs and educational institutions, the Prime Minister
said Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and some minority communities have "suffered from persistent discrimination" over centuries and the
government has an obligation to correct it.
This can be done by affirmative action, he said, adding the government was, at the same time, committed to excellence and rewarding of excellence.
In her lecture, Gandhi set out five areas in which women have emerged as "agents of change" in India.
They included Self-Help Groups pooling savings and securing loans for local projects; elected roles for women in rural self-government; social activism through the establishment of the
language of human rights for women; the establishment of local enterprise collectives, some of which have been replicated elsewhere
in Asia; and the setting up of village information centres and IT kiosks.
She said that women's enterprise also played a role in regions ravaged by violence and conflict, and within India, these groups had
taken the lead in mediating, peace-building and reconciliation in areas of strife.
"Today, women in India are becoming agents of change through their own initiative, their energy and enterprise.
Through individual and collective action, they are transforming their own situations and indeed transforming the broader social context itself.
"India is at the cusp of a 'demographic dividend', due to its young and increasingly educated and skilled population by a 'gender
dividend'.
It will, I believe, yield enormous economic gain and lead to profound social transformation," Gandhi said.
She highlighted the "powerful" role of technology in reducing gender inequalities through the creation of IT sector jobs allowing women to live independently, and the proliferation of knowledge-based enterprises run by women in rural areas, allowing them to access
government services.
The United Progressive Alliance chairperson said it could be argued that the progressive victories of the women's movement, their
achievement of the right to vote and other rights, were the 20th century's seminal contribution to human advancement.
"It has been a long journey. I fervently hope that the 21st century will take this to its logical conclusion. May this be, not the
century of any particular country, but the century when women finally come into their own, the century when representative democracy is
re-imagined to give women their due share, the century when the vocabulary of politics and culture is re-engineered fully to include
that other half of mankind."
The Commonwealth Lecture, now in its 14th year, aims to stimulate understanding and debate on the Commonwealth and its role in world affairs.
Previous Lecturers have included the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Professor Muhammed Yunus and Terry Waite.
Gandhi noted that the modern Commonwealth owed much to India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who envisaged that the
Commonwealth could be a bridge between the dying world of Empire and the new post-colonial world being born.
"Nehru, the statesman, saw merit in an institution that sought to build bridges at many levels between countries and peoples. She
said Mrs Indira Gandhi valued the Commonwealth in a less idealised way than her father. She shared a personal bond with the leading Commonwealth figures of her time and brought to it a special focus on the development needs of its members," she said.
The Congress President said she accompanied her husband Rajiv Gandhi to successive Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings and
"remember some of the colourful episodes that took place behind the scenes."
She said "although the women's movement has already transformed the way in which we look at society in each of our countries, the search for equality is far from finished.
"History, culture and economics still remain weighted against women. In my own country, most worrying of all is the declining sex
ratio of females to males. The age-old preference for sons, coupled with the development of sex-selection technologies, has given an
alarming demographic twist to gender bias. That this is happening in regions of substantial economic prosperity within the country is even
more disturbing."
At the same time, she pointed out that in the recent Commonwealth Games in India's capital New Delhi, young women from these very regions won the most number of medals.
"In a poignant interview, one of them recalled that her parents had wished her to be a boy - but reconciled themselves after she
developed her sporting prowess."
She said the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of a number of outstanding social reforms.
"But it was Mahatma Gandhi who brought about the first real and nation-wide wave of emancipation through his mass mobilisation of women into the freedom movement.
"Unusually for his time, he believed that India's economic and moral salvation lay in women's hands. He condemned the traditions of
child marriage, female seclusion, dowry, enforced widowhood, and the lack of education that had shackled Indian women for so long," she said.
"Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation, can perhaps also be called the Mother of Indian feminism," she said.