Backward march

• According to Andalib Akhtar in ‘Laloo’s defeat will be a defeat for peace’ (...

• According to Andalib Akhtar in ‘Laloo’s defeat will be a defeat for peace’ (IE, February 17), if Muslims are at peace in Bihar, then prosperity is sure to follow. What about the scores of businessmen leaving Bihar everyday for fear of getting abducted? Is this peace and prosperity? Today if you ask any person starting his career, Bihar will be the last place he would like to work in. How can the state prosper then? Laloo has been ruling Bihar for the past 15 years and during these years the state has only gone backward.

— Anirudh Tambe Vadodara

So Mumbai can live

• Apropos of ‘Bulldozing basic rights’ (IE, February 23), there are lakhs of middle-class people who sincerely hope to live in a decent, clean city and breath clean air. They are tired of being sardined in trains and buses, spending hours in the traffic. These people are not rich and they support their chief minister.
Many of the the migrant workers come from Bihar, UP. If the incompetent governments of these states are forced to provide basic rights to citizens, there won’t be such desperate relocations, nor demolitions. Mumbai must be freed of the slums, not to create playgrounds for the rich, but to release its resources, so that the city can breath again.

— Amit Joshi Mumbai

By another name

• I Fully endorse the Home ministry’s decision to bar players from sporting Indian tricolor on their gear. Not only that, they should also question the BCCI’s right to use the name ‘India’ when referring to what is essentially a club side selected by a private club. Let them call their team ‘BCCI’ or whatever. Why confuse the public that this team has something to do with the country?

— Mohandas Bangalore

Degrees of violence

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• Let Shaibal Gupta not compare Bihar and West Bengal for political violence in ‘Average Bihari ko gussa kyon aata hai’ (IE, February 24). There is not much political violence in West Bengal, not because democracy is working well and elections are held in an ideal manner. The CPM has so controlled the villages, through its little Stalins, that no one even dares attend a meeting of any other party. RJD, through its goondas, has not yet been able to establish that complete a sway.

— A.K. Aggarwal Ahmedabad

Banking on freedom

• In your editorial ‘Figuring out freedom’ (IE, February 24), you are comparing the process obtaining in the corporate sector with the practice obtaining in the public sector banks on top level appointments. Shorn of all the procedural niceties surrounding the top appointments in the corporate sector, it is the will of the promoter/dominant owner represented through his directors on the board that counts. Then why grumble about the right of the dominant owner of the public sector banks, vis. the government? Having said this, it should also be stated that the process of selection should be wider and transparent and it should not be the selection of the buddies of the finance ministry officials or of the minister. They should allow fresh breeze to blow in the suffocating PSB board rooms and corporate HQs. The increasing tribe of individual shareholders of these PSBs also has a right to express its views.

— S. Subramanyan Mumbai