Frontline
Volume 28 - Issue 10 :: May. 07-20, 2011
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU
http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20110520281000400.htm
COVER STORY
Haunted by the past
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
in New Delhi
A senior police officer's affidavit in the Supreme Court revives memories of the Gujarat carnage.
AJIT SOLANKI/AP
CHIEF MINISTER NARENDRA Modi. The affidavit has the potential to hurt his aspirations to national leadership. Here, he addresses the media after appearing before the SIT in March 2010.
ON April 22, 2011, the ladies' wing of the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry organised a women entrepreneurs' exhibition in Surat, where Hindi film actor Sherlyn Chopra was one of the guests. Speaking on the sidelines of the programme, the actor gushed that Chief Minister “Narendra Modi is the most dynamic person” she had “ever met”, and “given a chance” she “would like to be his personal assistant”. Sherlyn Chopra went on to add that Modi spoke with style and confidence and that he spoke all the time about progress and a shining India.
Other Modi fans, including many in the blogosphere, picked up the actor's statement to come up with laudatory comments highlighting how a range of personalities from different strata of society, from anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare to actor Sherlyn Chopra, were endorsing Modi, his politics and his style of functioning. The thematic premise of all this commendation was “Modi's commitment to progress and development”.
However, news that emerged that evening from New Delhi once again drew attention to certain areas of Modi's political personality that go beyond “commitment to progress and development”. The news was about the affidavit filed by a senior Gujarat police officer, Sanjiv Rajendra Bhatt, in the Supreme Court, accusing Modi of instigating Hindus in 2002 to “teach a lesson” to Muslims. This instigation, the affidavit asserted, preceded the genocide of Muslims in the State. Naturally, this served to bring down the excitement Chopra's praise generated.
SIDDHARTH DARSHAN KUMAR/AP
MOBS ON THE rampage in a street in Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002.
This sequence of events, which unfolded over a period of around eight hours, signified a roller coaster of sorts for the Modi image. This is not the first time Modi has found himself in such a situation. Time and again, the Gujarat Chief Minister and his supporters have sought to underplay or even obliterate his association with the 2002 carnage and present him as the “leader who created a new, progress-oriented Gujarat, which is waiting to be replicated at the national level under his consummate leadership”. Such has been the force of the campaign that it packs sustained assertions that even large sections of the Muslim minority community are now Modi supporters on account of his development initiatives.
It is not as though this campaign has not had its successes. It has indeed spread far and wide, particularly among a section of the urban middle class. Despite all that, Modi's role in the 2002 carnage has come back to haunt him and his Hindutva-oriented political organisation repeatedly in one forum or the other. The unambiguous message from each of these episodes has been that Modi and his party will find it impossible to live down the Gujarat carnage however much they may try.
In fact, references to the carnage have come up most forcefully when Modi and his supporters have sought to advance the “development man” image aggressively. The BJP's National Executive meeting held in Patna in June 2010 is a case in point. A number of his close supporters had earmarked this conclave as the starting point of an aggressive campaign to project him as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). As part of this campaign, advertisements were placed in several newspapers in Bihar extolling Modi's governance skills and personal virtues. These hailed him as a model administrator whose record in Gujarat was worthy of emulation in Bihar and the rest of the country. The message was clear: here is your future Prime Minister.
One advertisement made a special reference to Gujarat's contribution towards relief work for the victims of the floods in the Kosi river and went on to suggest that Modi had taken care to wipe Bihar's tears too when the State suffered.
Another full page advertisement had the picture of Muslim girls in burqas working on computers and the slogan that the Muslim community in Gujarat was advancing much faster than in other parts of India. Barely a day after the publication of the advertisement, it was revealed that the picture was actually taken from a college in Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. In others words, it was a blatant trick.
INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP
IN A REFUGEE camp at Bapu Nagar in Ahmedabad in March 2002.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made his displeasure clear at what was going on. He perceived the advertisement relating to the Kosi floods as a direct affront and a challenge to his own administrative skills. As regards the advertisement with the picture of Muslim girls, he lampooned it as a third-rate gimmick. The Janata Dal (United) leader even went to the extent of cancelling the dinner he had planned in honour of his NDA ally's leadership. A couple of days later Nitish Kumar also returned to the Gujarat government the Rs.5 crore grant it had given for flood relief.
Nitish Kumar followed this up with instructions that Modi should not come to campaign in Bihar during the Assembly elections, which were held in October-November 2010. His contention was that Modi's presence would alienate the considerable Muslim support base that the JD(U) had in the State. He also highlighted the advertisement trick using a photograph of Muslim girls to buttress his argument. Ultimately, Modi and the BJP were forced to comply with this direction.
Modi's anti-minority image once again came into sharp focus during the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the Sohrabuddin Sheikh Murder case and particularly after the July 2010 arrest of Amit Shah, his trusted associate and the then Minister of State for Home. Shah was the first Minister to be arrested in the country in a case of fake encounter.
Revelations that a senior Minister of Modi's Cabinet had allegedly taken part in organising an encounter killing of a small-time criminal and his wife, who had no role in any crime, brought back memories of the 2002 carnage and Modi's alleged complicity in it.
All these developments, which signified the return of the 2002 carnage as a major point of discussion in the polity, did cause problems and place impediments in the assiduous image-building exercise that Modi and his associates undertook.
RANJEET KUMAR
BIHAR CHIEF MINISTER Nitish Kumar.
In 2010, during the run-up to the Assembly elections, he made clear his displeasure at the Modi camp's attempts to project the Gujarat Chief Minister's performance as worthy of emulation in Bihar. He ensured that Modi did not campaign in the State.
The latest in this series, Sanjiv Bhatt's affidavit, delineates Modi's alleged complicity in the 2002 carnage in concrete terms. Social activists who have tried to bring justice to the victims and survivors of the carnage over the past nine years believe that Bhatt's affidavit will impart greater strength to the legal points against Modi with regard to his alleged involvement in the carnage.
Call of conscience
Social activist Teesta Setalvad, who has been in the forefront of efforts to bring justice to the riot victims and survivors, points out that from time to time conscientious people have decided to end their silence on the carnage and come out with what they know. “Bhatt's action also needs to be seen in this light, she told Frontline (see interview).
At a broader level, the revelations that have harked back to the 2002 carnage have also underlined the general anti-Muslim thrust of the politics and policies of Narendra Modi and his government. Bhatt's affidavit has brought into sharp focus this thrust. An important point of discussion has been a recent study on “Relative Development of Gujarat and Socio-Religious Differentials” carried out by Dr Abusaleh Shariff, Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and member-secretary of the Sachar Committee, which prepared a comprehensive report on the state of Muslims in the country.
Shariff's study points out that Gujarat's Muslims fare badly on parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues. According to the study, levels of hunger are as high in Gujarat as they are in Orissa and Bihar. It also points out that the poverty of Gujarat's Muslims is eight times more than that of high-caste Hindus and 50 per cent more than that of Other Backward Class (OBC) communities. Twelve per cent of the Muslims have bank accounts, but only 2.6 per cent get bank loans.
Discrimination
The study also states that Muslims in Gujarat face high levels of discrimination, even in their enrolment for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). In the context of this study, questions have also been raised about Gujarat's claims about vibrant growth in other areas such as infrastructure development and industrialisation.
VIJAY VERMA/PTI
AMIT SHAH, MINISTER of State for Home in the Narendra Modi government who was arrested in 2010 in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.
In the midst of all this, Modi and his associates have sought to launch a strong counter-attack against Bhatt, highlighting the senior police officer's alleged misdemeanours in service. Central to this counter-attack are certain official proceedings against Sanjiv Bhatt, which allege a recruitment scam while he was chairman of a district police recruitment board.
It is pointed out that Bhatt was charge-sheeted on December 12, 2010, as part of a departmental inquiry into police recruitment that took place in May 1996. It is also pointed out that through a “Confidential” Memorandum, the Home Department had served a show-cause notice on Bhatt on December 29, 2010. A case that came up against him in Rajasthan is also highlighted as part of the counter-attack. It involves allegations by a section of lawyers of Rajasthan that Bhatt had falsely implicated one of their colleagues in a narcotics case in 1996. Bhatt was charge-sheeted in this case by the Rajasthan Police's Crime Branch before a trial court in Jodhpur on April 13, 2000. The IPS officer's appeal against the charges is pending before the Supreme Court.
The argument of the BJP leadership, as also Modi's supporters, is that Bhatt has sought to implicate Modi in the 2002 carnage only to cover up his own culpability in many cases and escape punishment. “In any case, an officer who has been thus implicated and charge-sheeted has no moral authority to raise charges against the Chief Minister. We are sure that his affidavit will not stand up to a good judicial scrutiny,” Prakash Javadekar, BJP spokesperson, told Frontline.
Notwithstanding such assertions, the fact remains that the return of the ghost of the 2002 Gujarat carnage signifies yet another round of political battles and legal wrangling for the BJP, and particularly for Narendra Modi, who continues to cherish an elevation to the top leadership in national politics before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
COVER STORY
‘Finally, the truth is getting out'
AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA
Interview with Teesta Setalvad of Citizens for Justice and Peace, which is fighting for justice for the victims of the 2002 riots.
H. VIBHU
Teesta Setalvad: “Bhatt's affidavit is direct evidence, which the Supreme Court cannot ignore.”
TEESTA SETALVAD is the co-editor of Communalism Combat and has been in the forefront of the fight against communal forces and in defence of human rights. Through her organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), she continues to fight a lonely legal battle against the Narendra Modi government in connection with the communal riots of 2002. In the context of police officer Sanjiv Bhatt's affidavit alleging that Modi, in a meeting, instructed the policemen not to stop the rioting Hindu mobs, Teesta Setalvad spoke, in this interview, about the pressure tactics of the Modi government and suggested that the Special Investigation Team's (SIT) role in investigating the cases had been below expectations. Excerpts:
What was your immediate reaction to Sanjiv Bhatt's revelations regarding Narendra Modi's role in the riots of 2002?
The first reaction was that finally the truth is getting out. But that was not the first time we heard of this meeting. Policemen, journalists, the political class who were in Gujarat in the first week after Godhra, all knew that such a meeting had happened. I reported about this meeting in Communalism Combat.
The Concerned Citizens Tribunal, headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer and including Justice P.B. Sawant, Justice Hosbet Suresh and K.G. Kannabiran as members, set out guidelines that it would talk about this meeting only if there was sufficient corroboration. I tried to get official corroboration as a convener of the tribunal. In 18 days, the tribunal heard over 16,000 testimonies from all classes. Finally, the official confirmation of this meeting came from Haren Pandya [former Gujarat Minister who was killed in 2003 in suspicious circumstances]. He appeared before the tribunal in mid-May 2002. The ‘words spoken' have not changed in any of the versions since 2002. So Sanjiv Bhatt's revelations are a final direct piece of evidence against Modi because he was present at the meeting. What Haren Pandya said was indirect evidence.
In 2005, when [R.B.] Sreekumar [Additional Director General of Police when the riots took place] filed his fourth affidavit before the Nanavati Commission, he referred to a conversation between him and DGP K. Chakravarthi, in which Chakravarthi said the Chief Minister had done this [the riots]. But all these pieces of evidence were indirect. Bhatt's affidavit is direct evidence, which the Supreme Court cannot ignore. They will, at least, have to examine it.
What are the commonalities in the versions of Sanjiv Bhatt and Haren Pandya?
I can't tell you much because both my statement and that of the SIT are with the judges. So I can't commit any impropriety. But in August 2009, when the SIT chief, R.K. Raghavan, assigned the case to a special inquiry officer, A.K. Malhotra [a non-Gujarat police officer], one of the SIT teams recorded the statements of Justice P.B. Sawant and Justice Hosbet Suresh in Mumbai. These statements are before the High Court and record what Haren Pandya told the Citizens Tribunal. They are pretty much what Sanjiv Bhatt has said in his affidavit. These commonalities will be used, hopefully, by an independent agency to get to the truth.
You need corroboration. We have been saying that the Intelligence Bureau keeps vehicle logs of all government officials. In Bhatt's case, his driver [that day] has confirmed that he had gone to the Chief Minister's house on February 27, 2002, unlike what many Gujarat officials have said. [Some officials denied Bhatt's presence at the meeting and some said they did not remember.] So, all these facts need to be connected to get to the truth.
This is important. There had been incidents of communal violence in this country before 2002, but in just three days in 19 districts of Gujarat 2,500 people were killed. This kind of mayhem had never happened before. So, it has shocked people to hear these kinds of utterances from the Chief Minister himself. Pandya was a member of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh], but even he felt the need to speak. People do find different ways of resistance. Sreekumar did it in a certain way, Rahul Sharma [a police officer who produced a compact disc having phone records that point to connivance of the administration and the rioters in the pogrom] and Haren Pandya did it in their own ways.
Sanjiv Bhatt has also accused the SIT of ignoring his statements for no proper reasons.
As co-petitioners, this is the most painful part of the process. We have full faith in the system and the Supreme Court of India. We expect an agency appointed by the Supreme Court to do a fair and independent job. Unfortunately, the agency, which is investigating many other cases, is found to have huge lacunae. We brought this out in a very sober fashion from October 2009 onwards. We brought out factual issues in front of the Supreme Court.
Narendra Modi won two elections after the Gujarat pogrom. The agency has to realise that Modi is facing severe criminal charges. He commands the State machinery, the administration and the police. He has full access to all the records. If the investigative agency does not insulate itself from the police and the administration, there are chances that evidence can be manipulated or destroyed.
More importantly, as Bhatt also said, people in the police would get to know who is deposing in court at what point of time. Bhatt had to depose before the SIT in 2009 on a specific date, which was later changed. In between the first date and the second one, there were police officers who went and told him what to say and what not to say. This is pretty much what happened with Sreekumar when he deposed before the Nanavati Commission.
The timing of Sanjiv Bhatt's affidavit has been questioned. Why was it that he came up with the affidavit after nine years?
I can only give my understanding of how civil servants work. How people work in certain situations. Bhatt responded in 2009 first, in front of the SIT. The first legal opportunity he got, he did speak.
I think there are different kinds of civil servants. The likes of Sreekumar and Rahul Sharma cannot stomach the illegalities. They took a radical step, which cost them a lot. It cost Sreekumar a promotion. Sharma has also been sidelined. The vast majority would choose a safe option and speak when they get a chance. His defence is also valid. He is an I.B. officer and I.B. officers are not allowed to speak in the public domain unless there is a legal inquiry.
There is another, wider, reason also. There is a certain disbelief as to whether perpetrators of communal violence will ever get punished. Even after the SIT was constituted, people felt that Modi was never going to be punished. All these things add up for a person like Bhatt to take such a stand.
What is your view on the SIT investigation and its handling of evidence? Some of the cases you have spoken about in public were dismissed by the SIT, especially the Kausar Bano episode. The SIT report accused you of “cooking up macabre tales of killing” and tutoring witnesses. A few activists from your organisation, the CJP, have accused you of doing the same.
It was a testimony about the Naroda Patiya massacre. There are 13 witnesses who have deposed on oath, who said that Kausar Bano's womb was split and the foetus was cut into pieces. The judgments are still to come. So how can the SIT say that an incident never happened and that I manufactured it?
The point is that this is a discourse created by the Gujarat government and some members of the SIT to make me and my organisation a target because, eventually, we are the only group that is supporting the victims even today. It is an attempt to discredit me. We told the Gujarat Police that we are available for any legal investigation. But the real aim is not to discredit Teesta but to demoralise the witnesses so that there are acquittals rather than convictions in these cases.
The Hindu, Deccan Herald and Indian Express had carried the Kausar Bano story even before I reached Gujarat. How can you say that Teesta Setalvad manufactured the story? Let it go through a proper legal process and it will automatically get testified. Why is the SIT prejudging the cases like this? If 16 witnesses tell an agency that this man is an accused, you have to record the name and then the court will decide. Does the SIT believe that the Supreme Court has given it the power to judge the accused before the charge sheet is filed? The job of the SIT is to record, and it should do so on the basis of the witnesses.
Teesta tutoring witnesses is not the point. But if 18 witnesses are saying something and the SIT accuses them of filing false affidavits, then the SIT is not convinced about the gravity of the crime and is also pushing the case towards acquittals as an investigative agency. The quality of the statements of witnesses have to be judged and [there is need to] see whether they have withstood the cross-examination in the court first before declaring them false.
Rais Khan and Himanshu Kumar [both of them were members of the CJP before they left it and made allegations against Teesta Setalvad of tutoring witnesses], while making these allegations when the cases are in court because they want to disrupt the trials, are actually committing contempt of court.
Could you tell us a bit about the state of affairs of the victims at present? Their present lives, survival mechanisms and their losses. How have you managed to keep up their tempo when they must be under tremendous pressure not to speak?
That's the question the media should ask first rather than whether I doctored witnesses. What does it take for a victim of mass violence to sustain the story? The Supreme Court ordered a transfer of investigation six years after we made the plea in May 2002. The court appointed Dr R.K. Raghavan in March 2008. The Supreme Court and lawyer Harish Salve delayed the matter till then despite the fact that our lawyers kept bringing it up.
You can sustain the witnesses for this long only by sticking to the truth. Whether it was Zahira Sheikh (chief witness in the Best Bakery case, who kept turning hostile) or anyone else, the core version of their statements has remained the same. That is our biggest strength. Sixteen people have named BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] Minister Maya Kodnani and VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad] leader Jaydeep Patel to the Gujarat Police. Sixteen people have named Atul Vaid of the VHP in the Gulberg Society case. They have talked about P.C. Pande and M.K. Tandon. The test of the victim is whether his or her core version remains the same or not. Our contribution to the cause of these victims has been to sustain these survivors legally, to ensure that they get legal assistance.
The fight for the direct victims, who happen to be minorities, becomes a very lonely one because the community members also sort of move ahead. However, I think one of the biggest things that have happened is the bonding of these people, which is beyond the successes and failures of the cases. Over 650 survivors have become human rights activists. They will not be misled anymore. Such consciousness is seen among the victims.
The narrative of the Gujarat carnage, thanks to the media, has remained in the subterranean realm and not been forgotten like other carnages, be it the 1993 Bombay [now Mumbai] riots or the 1984 killings of Sikhs. Post-2007, corporate influence in the media has made them sway towards the development model of Modi, but still at one level the media have kept the issue alive. Media was victim as well, you know. We have managed to convince the victims that the legal process takes long in this country. They have understood the politics of it. Our biggest victory is that despite the same government ruling the State even now, they have deposed fearlessly in Gujarat.
The economies of many people were demolished. Today, more than 23,000 people continue to live in transit camps. They are not even relief camps. Our organisation has also filed a PIL [public interest litigation] petition on the issue of compensation. Some compensation was given but even today victims of gender violence have not been given any reparation. People who lost their homes worth lakhs were given compensation of Rs.10,000 or Rs.15,000. We are trying to get them a compensation of Rs.2.5 lakh.
COVER STORY
Legal challenge
V. VENKATESAN
in New Delhi
Sanjiv Rajendra Bhatt's affidavit questions the SIT's objectivity in investigating the Chief Minister's role.
SAM PANTHAKY/AFP
Sanjiv Rajendra Bhatt, Principal of the State Reserve Police Training Centre, Junagadh. He said in his affidavit that he could not have disclosed the sensitive information earlier unless he had been called upon to do so under a binding legal obligation.
THE affidavit filed by Sanjiv Rajendra Bhatt, Principal of the State Reserve Police Training Centre, Junagadh, Gujarat, on April 14 in the Supreme Court raises questions about its legal significance and relevance in nailing Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's alleged connivance in the carnage against Muslims in the aftermath of the Sabarmati Express train tragedy in Godhra on February 27, 2002. Bhatt has brought on record certain aspects of the investigation done by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the court to probe some of the allegations regarding the carnage. He claimed that he could not have disclosed the sensitive information earlier unless he had been called upon to do so under a binding legal obligation.
An affidavit is an important document and the consequences of a false affidavit are serious. An affidavit can be sworn by a party to the suit or application, or by his authorised agent, or, in their absence, by any other person having knowledge of the facts in question. In cases against the state or any other public body, an officer dealing with the matter or having access to the relevant records may do so.
The author of a false affidavit is punishable under Sections 199 and 200 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Under Section 199, whoever, in any declaration made or subscribed by him, which declaration any court of justice is authorised to receive as evidence of any fact, makes any statement which is false, and which he either knows or believes to be false, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence. Under Section 200, whoever corruptly uses or attempts to use as true any such declaration, knowing the same to be false in any material point, shall be punished in the same manner as if he gave false evidence. Section 193 of the IPC prescribes as punishment a prison term of a maximum of seven years and a fine for such a person.
A court may, at any time, for sufficient reason, order that any particular fact or facts may be proved by affidavit or that the affidavit of any witness may be read at the hearing on such conditions as the court thinks reasonable. Therefore, observers say it is unlikely that a serving police officer will take a huge risk by filing a false affidavit in the apex court.
Bhatt has filed his affidavit in Zakia Ahsan Jafri vs State of Gujarat. Zakia Jafri, wife of the slain Congress leader Ehsan Jafri (who was killed in the Gulberg Society massacre), had made 32 specific allegations against Narendra Modi and functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and civil servants and police officers. The most serious allegation was that Modi had convened a meeting at his bungalow in Gandhinagar on February 27, 2002, in which he instructed the Director General of Police (DGP), the Chief Secretary, and other senior officials to allow Hindus to vent their anger at Muslims for the Sabarmati train tragedy. The allegation, if proved, could form part of a criminal conspiracy charge against Modi in protecting rioters during the carnage.
The SIT, which is investigating this complaint, has, according to a report in the media, found that the Chief Minister had held such a meeting at his residence after he returned from Godhra that day.
Officials' response
Among the officials of that time, Director General of Police K. Chakravarthi, Secretary (Home) K. Nityanandam, Ahmedabad Commissioner of Police P.C. Pande and Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister P.K. Mishra denied that the Chief Minister gave such an instruction at the meeting. Acting Chief Secretary Swarna Kanta Verma and Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Ashok Narayan pleaded loss of memory owing to passage of time. Secretary to the Chief Minister Anil Mukim denied that he attended the meeting.
According to a story in Tehelka, which scooped the SIT report, SIT Chairman R.K. Raghavan has observed in the report that P.C. Pande, P.K. Mishra and Ashok Narayan, have been accommodated in post-retirement jobs by the Modi government.
Meanwhile, P.B. Sawant, retired Supreme Court Judge, and Hosbet Suresh, retired judge of the Bombay High Court, who were members of the Concerned Citizens Tribunal that inquired into the carnage, shared with the SIT the deposition before them of former Gujarat Minister of State for Revenue Haren Pandya on May 13, 2002. Pandya had told the Tribunal that he had attended the February 27, 2002, meeting, in which Modi made it clear that the police should not come in the way of a Hindu backlash.
Pandya was killed on March 26, 2003, making it impossible to confirm whether he had referred to the same meeting in which the senior officers had taken part. Curiously, however, the SIT did not consider the retired judges' statements because Pandya's deposition before them had not been recorded. The SIT concluded that it could not establish whether Modi had instructed the senior officials present at that meeting to allow Hindus to vent their anger.
Ironically, the SIT reached this conclusion even though Bhatt had brought to its knowledge that he was present at that meeting and was willing to testify after a criminal case was registered. Curiously, when the SIT examined Modi on March 25, 2010, he knew what Bhatt had told the SIT earlier. Asked by the SIT who all were present at the meeting on February 27, 2002, Modi named seven officers but added, without any prompting, that Bhatt was not present as this was a high-level meeting.
Bhatt was posted as a Deputy Commissioner of Police in the State Intelligence Bureau at that time. Since the State intelligence chief, G.C. Raigar, was on leave, the DGP wanted Bhatt to be present at the meeting to provide the necessary inputs.
Of the seven officers Modi claimed were present at the meeting, P.K. Mishra said he could not recollect if Bhatt was there. While Chakravarthi denied Bhatt's presence, the replies of the other three were vague. Verma and Narayan pleaded loss of memory.
The SIT inquiry officer, A.K. Malhotra, according to the story in Tehelka (February 12, 2011), had concluded: “Since Bhatt's presence at the meeting is not proved his statement has to be ignored.” The Tehelka story suggests that SIT Chairman R.K. Raghavan, too, inexplicably, endorsed Malhotra's conclusion and considered Bhatt an unreliable witness.
“Disquieting aspects”
Put in this context, Bhatt's affidavit raises interesting issues. While submitting the affidavit to the Supreme Court registry, with a copy to Raju Ramachandran, amicus curiae in this case, Bhatt said in his letter that he was not a party to the case but believed his affidavit disclosed facts that could be crucial to the determination of issues before the Supreme Court.
He said he had deposed before the SIT on several occasions and added that he filed the affidavit to bring on record certain disquieting aspects and inadequacies in the manner and approach of the SIT.
He claimed that he had provided the SIT with verifiable details regarding the ongoing cover-up operation, including the contemporaneous efforts made by high officials of the State administration to undermine the proceedings before the Supreme Court. He alleged that the SIT was disinclined to follow up these important leads.
According to him, the SIT does not appear to be living up to the enormous trust reposed in it by the Supreme Court to conduct an impartial and thorough probe into the allegations of a larger conspiracy and administrative complicity behind the Gujarat carnage.
More important, in his affidavit, Bhatt claimed that he gave the SIT, the names of witnesses who could corroborate the fact of his having attended the meeting with the Chief Minister on February 27, 2002. However, he alleged, the SIT chose to intimidate certain witnesses and coerce them into refraining from stating the facts. He requested the Supreme Court to ensure that the SIT followed up on all the leads provided by him in such a manner that even reluctant witnesses felt safe and confident to state the truth. He also appealed to the court to direct the authorities concerned to provide adequate and foolproof security to him and his family.
Bhatt's affidavit has landed the Supreme Court and the SIT in a serious dilemma. According to those familiar with the Supreme Court's procedure, the court must decide whether to take his affidavit on record. The question is whether the Supreme Court should take evidence directly from a witness who has been examined by the SIT.
Once the court, having answered this question, admits the affidavit, it must give the SIT a chance to reply to Bhatt's allegations. The SIT would then have to disprove Bhatt's claim that he was present at the Chief Minister's meeting with the officials on February 27, 2002. This would be a challenging situation, considering the fact that the SIT had dismissed Bhatt's testimony as unreliable. The court would then have to take a call on Bhatt's affidavit.
COVER STORY
‘His report is credible'
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
Interview with Prakash Karat, general secretary, CPI(M).
VIPIN CHANDRAN
Prakash Karat: “There seems to be reluctance on the part of the SIT to seriously investigate the role of Chief Minister Narendra Modi.”
How significant are the revelations made by the Gujarat IPS officer in his affidavit implicating Chief Minister Narendra Modi, considering that there is a move to discredit the police officer?
The affidavit filed by the IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt in the Supreme Court is highly revealing. It is well known that for the first 48 hours when the mobs ran amok attacking Muslims all over Gujarat, the police were silent spectators or, in some places, aided and abetted them. The affidavit provides the first concrete instance of why this happened. The Chief Minister, meeting with senior police officers, instructed them to allow Hindus to vent their anger. There is no reason to believe that a police officer would commit perjury and lie about being present at the meeting. His driver has also confirmed that he went to the venue of the meeting.
Apart from everything else, his report is credible because it matches with what really happened. Without instructions from the top, there could not have been inaction by the police all over the place.
We have seen in cases of widespread communal violence where, in some instances, the police act in a partisan manner but not to the extent when the entire state machinery becomes passive or complicit. There can be some individual instances of police inaction, but when it happens all over the State at the same time – that is why what he says appears to be credible.
Do you feel that there has been a cover-up by the SIT as stated by Bhatt in his affidavit?
There seems to be reluctance on the part of the SIT to seriously investigate the role of Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier, too, a senior police officer, R.B. Sreekumar, had provided sufficient information about how the entire operation was managed.
One would expect the SIT to gather all the evidence and make a case on Narendra Modi. The atmosphere in Gujarat is such that police officers and civil servants find it difficult to come out with the truth and take a stand. We have seen how other upright officers have been victimised.
There are some who claim that Bhatt's affidavit implicating the Chief Minister is motivated to discredit the development work done by the Modi government.
We are talking about 2002, which saw the worst pogroms against the minority community. You cannot justify or cover up this crime by touting development as an excuse.
The affidavit directly pinpoints the Chief Minister. Do you think this is reason enough for him to step down? Some political parties have demanded his resignation.
I think that the evidence and the material available merit the filing of a case against Narendra Modi. If that happens, it will be untenable for him to continue as Chief Minister.
COVER STORY
‘State's role will be questioned'
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
Interview with D. Raja, national secretary, CPI.
C. VENKATACHALAPATH
D. Raja: “The delay cannot be used as a reason to dismiss the issues raised in the affidavit.”
POLITICAL parties, including the Left parties, feel that the affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court by IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt needs to be given due importance in view of the seriousness of the post-Godhra carnage in 2002 and the context of the discourse around the development of Gujarat under Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Excerpts from an interview with D. Raja, Rajya Sabha member and national secretary, Communist Party of India:
What is the significance of Sanjiv Bhatt's affidavit? What does it say of the SIT in which a lot of confidence was reposed by people.
The IPS officer took a long time to come out and there must be a reason why he did so. The delay cannot be used as a reason to dismiss the issues raised in the affidavit. That an officer in service should come forward gives an amount of credence, and cannot be dismissed that easily. The SIT should take it seriously. The judiciary too should take note of it.
When the Gujarat pogrom took place, the Left parties and others said that such a horrendous crime could not have taken place without the connivance of the State government. It was not a spontaneous act of violence and even the Supreme Court made some comparisons with Emperor Nero. The present revelation shows that there was a conscious attempt to teach Muslims a lesson by the State administration. The question should be the other way around: why was it that honest officers were unable to speak the truth? What were the pressures and the compelling reasons?
Some of his colleagues, including the then Director General of Police, have tried to discredit his testimony.
The police are expected to act objectively and in a situation like the post-Godhra violence, they should have remained non-partisan, non-prejudicial, non-biased and pro-people. Our police forces are politicised and brutalised. We saw it in Mumbai, in the aftermath of the demolition. The findings of the [B.N.] Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry had indicted the police severely.
The constitution of the SIT and the monitoring by the Supreme Court show the need for an objective, independent pursuit of the cases in Gujarat. Not only Muslims in Gujarat but Christians too were targeted during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure at the Centre. Instead of being critical of the State government, he said that conversion needed to be debated. There was no forthright condemnation.
These issues are going to be raised in Gujarat. The only problem is that the Left isn't a strong force. In Gujarat, the Congress, which claims to be a secular force, is hardly seen as a serious force against communalism.
There are some who say that all-round development work has been done by the Modi government and that issues like Bhatt's affidavit have been raised to tarnish the government's image.
Secularism should be accompanied with social justice, equitable economic development. This is what inclusive growth is all about. Gujarat, which has a port area, had the advantage of infrastructure development like all those centres that were declared presidencies by the East India Company. This gave an impetus to growth in the post-Independence period. But there is uneven development, which is a characteristic of capitalistic growth. In the post-1990s, the corporate sector took advantage of the neoliberal policies. So it is not because of Modi but because of many other factors.
The other thing is that people were killed in 2002. No one can deny what happened. There are questions about the role of the State government. Had it been any other government, it would have been seen as a simple collapse of the law and order machinery.
But as Gujarat had been declared the laboratory of the Sangh Parivar, there was an ideological underpinning to the entire violence. The State government was in the hands of a party whose ideology is sectarian and fascist. That is why the role of the state will be continuously questioned as long as the BJP is in power there. Whatever one might say about Ayodhya, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that it was the BJP that had built the movement and created the atmosphere for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Nobody can exonerate the role of the BJP's top leaders in that movement.
COVER STORY
Marketing a myth
LYLA BAVADAM
in Vadodara
Narendra Modi seems to have set aside Hindutva to appease big business while the human development indices of Gujarat keep falling.
PTI
Chief Minister Narendra Modi poses for a group photograph with business delegates during the concluding ceremony of the 5th Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summit 2011 in Gandhinagar on January 13.
WHEN Anna Hazare praised Chief Minister Narendra Modi for his achievements in rural development in Gujarat, it resulted in a slew of messages to the veteran Gandhian from outraged non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and activists.
Rohit Prajapati and Trupti Shah, both social activists in Gujarat, said they had spent five days drafting their reply to Annaji but felt it was worth it because it had to be said. They said in their message to Hazare: “The statement of Annaji creates a wrong impression. It endorses Modi's authoritarian, fascist government, which is anti-farmer, anti-women, anti-working class, anti-Dalit, anti-tribal, anti-minorities, anti-environment, and against all the marginalised groups.”
A response also came from social activist and danseuse Mallika Sarabhai, who called Hazare's endorsement “appalling” and threatened to distance herself from the Lokpal movement unless Hazare “irrevocably retracted” his statement. Quick to point out the irony of the situation was the social activist Teesta Setalvad, who said there had been no Lokayukta in Gujarat for almost seven years.
Prajapati and Shah invited Hazare to Gujarat to see the so-called development work of a “Chief Minister who turned his back on scores of farmers who demand their right to farming as in the case of the Mahuva agitation; on tribal people who seek forest land”, and turned a “blind eye to pollution in towns and villages like Ankleshwar, Vapi, Nandesari, Vatva, Saurashtra and Kutch” and “fishing communities being deprived of their livelihood in Kutch”.
Gujarat is a State divided. At one end there is progress: 90 per cent of the village roads are paved; 98 per cent of the villages are electrified, with 80 per cent of them having electrified homes and 18 hours of electricity every day; and 86 per cent have piped water supply and good phone connections, banks, post offices and bus services. But amid all this, there are falling human development and social indices and rising corruption, which is all the more unacceptable because of the clean and progressive image that is being projected of the State.
Three big scams in two years have done little to promote Modi's Vibrant Gujarat. There was the Rs.1,700 crore Sujalam Sufalam scam in 2009: labourers who were to be given wheat in exchange for digging ponds in fields were given rice instead by local fair price traders although they had been paid wheat prices by the government. Many of the ponds were ‘dug' only on paper and large stocks of the rice were sent to Maharashtra and sold there at a profit. Also in 2009 came the Rs.260 crore scam pertaining to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme: non-existent traders sold boris (sacks) to set up sandbag check dams, non-existent labourers were registered, and NREGA funds were misappropriated. In 2010, it was found that the Fisheries Minister had been awarding contracts for fishing in 58 reservoirs across the State. Reservoir fishing is awarded on the basis of tenders. It was alleged that the irregularity cost the State exchequer Rs.600 crore.
In 2003, Modi initiated the Vibrant Gujarat Summit to attract investors to the State. The first time he attracted proposals worth Rs.69 crore. In 2005, he got Rs.1 lakh crore. Then Rs.4 lakh crore in 2007, Rs.12 lakh crore in 2009 and almost Rs.21 lakh crore in 2011.
So what is it that the investors get in return for this undoubted confidence they have placed in Modi? In a nutshell, they get easy access to land and water wherever they want it. They also get tax exemptions for five years in which they are also exempt from labour laws. In this easy scheme of things, agricultural land is easily turned into non-agricultural land and tribal land is handed over to industries. Companies that have been polluters and have been hauled up by courts and ordered to clean up their act respond by simply moving out to new areas.
Vibrant Gujarat operates on a straightforward principle – roll out the red carpet for big money and ensure that everything is placed at its disposal. Social indices such as health, especially of women and children; education; the status of minorities; the economic health of the middle class and the poor; jobs, livelihoods and environmental concerns are all taking a back seat in what people are beginning to call the race to help the already rich.
Exclusive club
The beneficiaries seem to be a small and exclusive club. Employment generation has not kept up with that in other States. Teesta Setalvad, in an article entitled “Vibrant Gujarat summit – 2011 – Ridiculous show-off of Power”, has compared the investment and employment opportunities of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. She concludes that from 2006 to 2010, Maharashtra had Rs.4,20,546 crore in investment and employment opportunities worth Rs.8,63,395; and Tamil Nadu had investments worth Rs.1,63,280 crore and employment opportunities worth Rs.13,09,613, whereas Gujarat had investments worth Rs.5,35,873 crore and employment opportunities worth Rs.6,47,631.
Teesta Setalvad's analysis says: “At the end of the year 2009-10 in Gujarat there were 8,32,000 educated unemployed people. Number of educated unemployed people was 9,64,000 in 2004, 9,00,000 in 2005, 8,30,000 in 2006, 7,78,000 in 2007, 8,25,000 in 2008 and in 2009 also it was 8,25,000. Now if in the year 2003, 2005, 2007 there has been capital investment as per [what the] Chief Minister says, then why there has not been any significant decrease in the number of these unemployed people?”
Prajapati and Shah say that the “growth” in Gujarat is of a “job killing” kind: “The success story of the two-digit growth has masked the several-digit realities of loss of livelihood, land acquisition, displacement and permanent loss of natural resources, which are treated as free goods in this process. The investment figure without the displacement and depletion of natural resources figure, and the employment figure without loss of livelihood does not make sense,” they said in their message to Hazare.
Dr Abusaleh Shariff, Chief Economist, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and member-secretary of the Sachar Committee, said: “Gujarat fares better on direct income measures, but this apparent prosperity masks higher poverty levels and a much lower ranking in human development.” According to a study carried out by Shariff, Gujarat's share is only 5 per cent in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, reflecting the State's inadequate commitment to income generation for the poor. He also said levels of hunger in Gujarat were high and comparable to those in Orissa and Bihar. Only Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh had higher hunger levels, he said.
The Reserve Bank of India's 10-year report from January 2000 to March 2010 on foreign direct investment put paid to the notion that Gujarat attracted high FDI. Maharashtra attracted FDI worth Rs.17 lakh crore during this period; New Delhi Rs.10 lakh crore; Tamil Nadu Rs.2.4 lakh crore; Andhra Pradesh Rs.2 lakh crore; and Gujarat Rs.2.8 lakh crore.
The easy availability of land and resources is perhaps the biggest challenge before new industry today, and this is what Modi offers. The Mahuva and Orpat Limited cases highlight how people (especially farmers) are ridden roughshod over by the government in the rush to give land to industries. In the Mahuva case, the local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator objected to a project that Modi had cleared. In 1999, the then Chief Minister, Keshubhai Patel of the BJP, had ordered the building of four CDTRS (check dam cum tidal regulatory structure) at a cost of over Rs.60 crore. Located in a stretch of 40 km, these were supposed to turn thousands of hectares of land arable. Local farmers were delighted, but their joy was short-lived because the land was handed over to a washing soap company that was diversifying into cement. The land perfectly suited the company's purpose because it had the limestone deposits essential for cement production. But the mining of limestone would spell doom for the natural barrier against salinisation of arable lands. Local resistance to the idea was quashed by goons.
The 214-hectare plant coming up at a cost of Rs.1,400 crore will require a mining lease for over 3,200 hectares. This will displace about 5,000 families, that is, over 30,000 people. Agriculture has been the backbone of Mahuva, which is relatively prosperous and dependent on 20 cotton gins and 50 onion dehydration units.
In February 2010, local MLA Dr Kanubhai Kalsariya organised a rally of the people of the dozen affected villages. Modi rejected the petition of the 5,000 Mahuva residents who walked to Gandhinagar to ask him to cancel the land lease for the plant.
In Saurashtra, a similar land acquisition plan was unfolding. As part of the Vibrant Gujarat scheme, Orpat industries was granted 40 ha of land in Wankaner district to construct a tourist resort. Wankaner is in a drought-prone area. Two shocking concessions were made for Orpat. It was given land at Rs.40 per square metre and sole access to the Garida pond, the lone waterbody in the area that was used for drinking water and irrigation. It was walled off by Orpat.
Angry farmers approached the High Court, which stayed all activity on the site and in March this year ordered that water be released into irrigation canals. Local residents have also challenged the all-too-speedy allotment of land and the price at which it was given. The High Court is expected to give its order on both soon.
Fr Lancy Lobo of the Centre for Culture and Development in Vadodara has been studying development and displacement in Gujarat since Independence. His report entitled “Development-Induced Displacement in Gujarat 1947-2004”, co-authored with Shashikant Kumar, shows 4,00,000 households displaced in 57 years of Independence; this means that 5 per cent of the State's population was affected by developmental projects. Lobo says that a study of 80,000 Gazette notifications of the Government of Gujarat and files from Land Acquisition Departments from 25 Collectorates shows that 33,00,000 hectares of land was acquired in this period.
Shadow of 2002 riots
The communal killings of 2002 still haunt Gujarat. Not only were the camps for the riot-affected closed down with unseemly haste but the ghettoisation of the minority community continues because of the general sense of insecurity. Though it is common to hear it being said that “Muslims have moved on”, the scars are still fresh for the community. If they have “moved on”, it is because they have had to, not because they were assisted or encouraged to. There are huge advertisements and posters of Modi's meeting with Muslim leaders, but within the community this is seen for what it is – buying of peace.
In a study titled “Relative Development of Gujarat and Socio-Religious Differentials”, Shariff says, “Empirical evidence suggests that relative to other States and relative to other communities, Muslims in Gujarat are facing high levels of discrimination and deprivation.”
Indeed, the discrimination extends beyond Muslims to all those who opposed Modi at the time of the riots. Serving Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who has brought on record certain crucial aspects relating to cases from 2002, is Modi's latest victim. The special police protection given to him has been withdrawn, presumably because he did not fall in line.
Lobo says that despite all his bravado, 2002 “still haunts” Modi. He believes Modi “has passed from Hindutva to Gujarati asmita (self-respect) to development. He is trying to offset 2002. I'm not saying he has forgotten the past. It is just dormant for the time being because his focus is development, and development for him means industry right now. And so agriculture is suffering. Tribal people are suffering. Sixty per cent of the land that has been acquired for water resources is in tribal areas. Not only is water being taken away from the tribal people, but the places where it is being sent are already prosperous areas. After globalisation this is the dominant paradigm of development. He is laying the foundation for himself in Delhi in 2020.”
Modi is able to steamroll his way in the State because the bureaucracy is scared and the opposition is ineffective. Lobo feels there is “a strange understanding” between Modi and the Congress, and this seems to be helping Modi consolidate his position further.
However, in March, State Congress president Arjun Modhwadia released some telling statistics. Citing figures from the report of the Suresh P. Tendulkar Committee appointed by the Planning Commission, Modhwadia said 31.8 per cent of the State's population lived below the poverty line. This meant that Gujarat had the highest percentage of poor people in the country. Claiming government statistics as his source, Modhwadia announced that 9,829 workers, 5,447 farmers and 919 farm labourers had committed suicide in the State during Narendra Modi's tenure as Chief Minister.
Undercurrents
So, will Modi's one-sided growth alienate large sections of society? Are his actions creating a gulf between him and his assured voters? There seem to be small rumblings, undercurrents that indicate that his hard-core voters are slightly disgruntled.
They are hesitant to consider the Congress because the party quite obviously lacks a presence. Also, the dominant feeling is still that Modi has restored Gujarati asmita. Speaking plainly, this gives validation to the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Asmita is a thinly veiled term implying that the minority community has been “taught a lesson” and “put in its place”.
Those who are the new victims of Modi's development goals are in a state of confusion. The man they saw as their hero is now creating policies that are affecting them adversely. There is a feeling of being let down and a reluctance to admit it.
In Luna village near Vadodara, farmers who voted for the BJP are still hesitant to speak against the party though they admit that the party's policies are destroying their livelihoods. They see the BJP as a Hindu party and as Hindus they want to support it. In return they expect favourable policies. That this is not happening is causing some turmoil and they are unwilling to express it openly.
The realisation that Modi has set aside his Hindutva plan, albeit temporarily, and is now set on a course that discriminates on economic grounds is an idea that is yet to sink in among Luna's farmers. Once it does, there is every possibility that the tables may be turned, and Modi may need to change his game plan.
COVER STORY
Stink of ‘development'
LYLA BAVADAM
The channel that carries effluents from the Nandesari industrial estate in Vadodara to the sea. The channel's interiors are a shambles, leading to seepage of effluents into bordering fields.
LUNA village is in Vadodara district. The road to Luna runs alongside fields of bajra, drumstick and vegetables. Separating the road and the fields is a channel 2.5 metres deep and 1.5 metres wide. This is the main channel that carries industrial effluents from Nandesari industrial estate in Vadodara to its final destination in the sea, after passing through 24 villages on its 55-kilometre journey. It is lined with brick and plaster, but its walls are in a state of neglect. In effect, it is an unlined channel. The opening is covered with slabs of concrete, which are again broken in places. Children and animals fall in with unfailing regularity and generally suffer skin ailments ranging from chemical burns to rashes, depending on how long it takes to rescue them. The government says the effluents have been fully treated before release.
A distinct chemical odour rises from the deep red liquid in the channel. According to Rohit Prajapati of the Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS), this mixture of “heavy metals like chromium, lead and nickel as well as persistent organic pollutants flow untreated into the ocean”. It seeps into the adjoining fields through gaps in the broken plasterwork. Sometimes farmers pump it into their fields because they do not want to pay for irrigation water. The harvest is usually good – plump brinjals with not a blemish on them, large cauliflowers with not a single worm. “My wife would be delighted to see such vegetables in the market,” says Kantibhai Mistry, a social activist who assists the PSS. “Except that I would tell her how they have grown. Even the insects know better than to attack these vegetables. They are so full of poison.”
While the “ laal ne peeru ponni” (local residents refer to the polluted water as “red and yellow water”) seems to act as a temporary insecticide, farmers are only too aware of what it does to their soil. Once the liquid evaporates, the heavy metals remain in the soil. Ghanshyam Ramanbhai Patel, a farmer, said: “It makes the soil hard and lifeless. We have to soften the soil with gypsum, add in extra natural fertilizer, but soon this will make no difference.”
The channel is not the only problem that Luna lives with. Worse is the presence of chemical and dye factories in the midst of an area that is so fertile that it is referred to as the “vegetable basket of Gujarat”. Drumsticks, especially, grow prolifically here and have a huge export market.
Luna's problems started in 2004 when chemical factories started getting permission to set up business there. Luna was an attractive destination because of its closeness to Vadodara. The fact that it was largely agricultural land did not dissuade the factory owners who seemed to know that getting it converted for non-agricultural use would not be difficult. It is a disconcerting but common sight to see chemical factories in the midst of fields. It was not possible to verify what the factories did with their effluents, but the presence of polluted groundwater gives credence to the accusations of the villagers that the factories indulge in reverse boring, that is, they dig a dry bore and get rid of the effluents by pumping it underground. Ghanshyam Patel was the first farmer in Luna to be affected by polluted water. In 2004, he switched on the pump of his borewell, which for 40 years had yielded clear water, and a yellow liquid gushed out. That is how it has been ever since. “In fact,” says Patel wryly, “we are even privileged to get different colours. Sometimes we have blue or red water.”
LYLA BAVADAM
A farmer in Luna village takes a sample of the water irrigating his fields.
As the pollution spread underground, other farmers were also affected. Ghanshyam Chhotu Patel's borewell threw out yellow water a month ago. The Collector and the local official of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board held a public hearing in Luna in February. “Hearings are held when a new factory has to open or if an old one wants to increase production. It is just a natak [farce] to get the NOC [no-objection certificate] issued. No one will hold a hearing if I tell them I have suddenly started getting laal ne peeru ponni.”
Water polluted by chemicals is a part of life in Luna now. Villagers try and make light of it by discussing the colour and shade of the day. But there is a more serious side. Ailments like severe skin rashes and constant itching, mouth and stomach ulcers, blood in stools, and miscarriages are common. Even among animals miscarriages have become frequent, especially among buffaloes. Farmer Anil Valand says, “Our cows and buffaloes drink red water. I wonder what will happen to the people who drink this milk over many years.” Luna sells about 2,000 litres of milk every day to private distributors in Vadodara.
Luna has been fighting what it is now resigned to accept as a losing battle. Ghanshyam Ramanbhai Patel said his correspondence and files from 2004 “were enough to fill a well”. He believes that the pollution is being allowed to happen with the connivance of the government. “If an educated IAS [Indian Administrative Service] man is not moved by 50 letters saying the same thing over and over again what does it mean? It means he has no intention of solving the problem.”
The belief that the government is aiding the polluters seems to have some substance. Common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) are meant to be run by industrial estates. In Gujarat, the government has taken these over under the guise of monitoring them effectively. This, clearly, is not happening. There is an impression that Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the industrialists have come to a cosy arrangement.
Yogesh Patel expressed it thus: “Modi must have told the industrialists that he will take over the CETPs so that they do not need to bother with pollution control. They are only too happy because now they can say they are sending the effluents to the CETPs and they do not know what the government is doing with it. And since governments are known to shirk their work, everyone is resigned to accepting that the CETPs will not function. This way Modi allows them to pollute as long as they keep up production. This is the way we have a Vibrant Gujarat.”
POLITICS
Hares and hounds
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
The rejection of the PAC report on the 2G scam by 11 members raises questions about the UPA's seriousness in dealing with corruption.
SUBHAV SHUKLA /PTI
PAC CHAIRMAN MURLI Manohar Joshi, after the committee's meeting on the 2G spectrum scam in New Delhi on April 28.
THE inquiry by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament into the Rs.1.76-lakh crore 2G spectrum scam is turning out to be as unprecedented as the scam itself. The inquiry is also moving into hitherto uncharted territories and generating a high-voltage controversy. The 2G spectrum deals were characterised by violation of norms and rules, deviation from accepted procedures and, above all, political-corporate intrigues. The PAC inquiry too has been characterised by allegations of violations, deviations and skulduggery. In both, the role played by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has raised several questions about probity in political and administrative action.
The controversy over the PAC inquiry reached a high point on April 28, when its members met in Parliament with the stated objective of discussing the draft report. However, no discussion took place on the contents of the report. Instead, the meeting ended in chaos on account of the clamour generated by some members over the method adopted to prepare the report. Ultimately, 11 of the 21 members rejected the report. Nine of them belonged to the UPA, and they were “supported” by one Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) member and one Samajwadi Party (S.P.) member. Ten members, belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Janata Dal (United), the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), gave their assent to the report.
While the UPA members alleged that PAC Chairman Murli Manohar Joshi, who belongs to the principal opposition BJP, had “outsourced” the report and “leaked” it to the media, the S.P. and BSP members stated that they could not agree to its passage as they did not get sufficient time to go through it. The 11 naysayers then went on to elect Saifuddin Soz of the Congress as the new PAC Chairman. Soz immediately took charge of his new role and conveyed the “rejection” of the report to the offices of the Lok Sabha Speaker and Murli Manohar Joshi.
Joshi pointed out that the appointment of the PAC Chairman was a prerogative of the Speaker and that committee members had no right to elect a new Chairman or remove the incumbent. He also added that the parliamentary convention was that PAC reports were adopted with a consensus in the panel.
“According to direction 69(2) of the Speaker's direction, no committee can reject the draft report prepared by a committee. The direction demands paragraph by paragraph consideration of the draft report. If members have disagreement on any portion of the report, they are free to come up with amendments or write dissent notes,” he told Frontline.
At the time of writing, Joshi was expected to submit the report to Speaker Meira Kumar, but the UPA, particularly the Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), is of the view that the Speaker will reject it on procedural grounds since it was not passed in the PAC. In a letter to the Speaker, the UPA members expressed loss of confidence in the BJP leader, stating that he had “scuttled democratic process” in the PAC.
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
PAC MEMBERS SAIFUDDIN Soz and Naveen Jindal (left) talking to the media outside Parliament House on April 28.
Kalraj Mishra, a BJP member of the committee, told Frontline that a PAC report had never been rejected in the history of the Indian Parliament and that the Congress and its UPA partners had flagrantly violated parliamentary procedure just because the report castigated the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) about the 2G spectrum allocation scam and indicted Home Minister P. Chidambaram and A. Raja, the former Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, who was removed from office and arrested for involvement in the spectrum allocation.
“One had sensed moves to scuttle this inquiry right from the period PMO officials were summoned to appear before the PAC. The Congress and DMK members raised a hue and cry and literally prevented it. An investigation into the manner in which the S.P. and the BSP members have turned around to support the rejection of the PAC report would also unravel some unseemly political and administrative skulduggery,” he said.
As the allegations fly back and forth, the PAC inquiry and the games behind it have invited greater public attention. The Speaker's role and her adjudication have become crucial to maintaining the sanctity of a time-tested parliamentary institution.
RAMESH SHARMA/BLOOMBERG NEW
PRIME MINISTER MANMOHAN Singh addressing civil servants on Civil Services Day in New Delhi on April 21.
Interestingly, the allegations about scuttling a probe by a parliamentary committee has come at a time when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been talking about his government's resolve to deal with the issue of corruption. The latest instance was his address to a conclave of civil servants on April 21, when he said “there is a growing feeling in the people that our laws, systems and procedures are not effective in dealing with corruption” and “we must recognise that there is little public tolerance now for the prevailing state of affairs”.
He also pledged greater transparency in administration and in the process of privatisation of state-run utilities and called upon civil servants to stand up boldly against any political pressure aimed at unfair practices. He told the civil servants specifically that they could contribute in many meaningful ways, with renewed energy, to the fight against corruption.
The developments in the following week, which culminated in the imbroglio at the PAC meet, however, showed that despite the high-sounding rhetoric and the message of determination that it sought to convey, the government and the Congress were only adopting half measures with regard to unravelling the truth and punishing the guilty. An analysis of certain proactive steps taken in the recent cases of corruption points to the primacy of political considerations in conducting inquiries.
Apart from the chaos at the PAC, the period was marked by two other developments – the arrest of Congress Member of Parliament and sports administrator Suresh Kalmadi by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) following its inquiry into the Commonwealth Games (CWG) scam and the inclusion of Kanimozhi, DMK Rajya Sabha member and daughter of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, as a co-conspirator in the CBI's supplementary charge sheet on the 2G spectrum scam.
Technically, the arrest of Kalmadi and the naming of Kanimozhi in the charge sheet were unrelated events that happened on the same day as part of two different cases and two distinct investigations. Kalmadi was arrested on April 25 on the charge of causing a loss of Rs.95 crore to the exchequer by awarding illegal contracts to a Swiss firm for the Timing-Scoring-Result (TSR) system for the CWG.
V.V. KRISHNAN
SURESH KALMADI, THE former chairman of the Organising Committee of the Commonwealth Games, being escorted to the Special CBI court in New Delhi on April 26.
Kanimozhi was named in the charge sheet for the diversion of Rs.214 crore from Swan Telecom, a partnership firm of businessman Shahid Balwa, to the Karunanidhi family-owned Kalaignar TV, of which Kanimozhi is an important shareholder.
The two developments generated considerable discussions in political circles in the national capital and outside. The discussions essentially revolved around the equations between the DMK and the Congress in the light of the 2G scam investigation. The DMK leadership's compelling need to keep Kanimozhi and Karunanidhi's wife Dayalu Ammal, who holds 60 per cent stake in Kalaignar TV, out of the ambit of the 2G investigation formed the core of this discussion. The focus on this aspect was so intense that at one point there were suggestions from within the DMK that the party would sever its relations with the Congress and the UPA if Kanimozhi and Dayalu Ammal were named in the charge sheet.
It is in this context that the arrest of Kalmadi and the naming of Kanimozhi in the charge sheet took place. Obviously, the arrest of Kalmadi, who was also the chief of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) until that day, was perceived as a measure to soften the blow on the Congress. In any case, Kalmadi's arrest in the CWG scam case was long overdue, and this was highlighted by the principal opposition parties.
Leaders of the BJP and the CPI(M) point out that the action against Kalmadi was also aimed at rationalising before the DMK how the government, particularly the Home Ministry, had not been to able exercise any extra influence or pressure on the investigating agencies. Despite these political connotations, the actions against Kalmadi and Kanimozhi have added some value to the ongoing investigations into corruption scandals.
But the UPA has been thoroughly exposed following the manner in which its PAC members reacted to the draft inquiry report on the 2G scam. Obviously, the developments on April 28 do not mark the culmination of the debate on the PAC inquiry or even a final point in the inquiry itself. This is expected to roll on politically and, in the process, embarrass the Prime Minister's seemingly impassioned exhortations to civil servants to fight corruption.
The state of affairs also indicates that the monsoon session of Parliament will be stormy, especially so in the context of the promise of Manmohan Singh and his Ministry to civil society activists led by Anna Hazare that the government would present the Lokpal Bill, which is committed to control corruption in high places. Questions will naturally be asked about the sincerity and commitment of the UPA government on this front when its MPs are perceived to be bent upon obstructing the work of a parliamentary committee that has been assigned the duty and responsibility of probing and exposing corruption.
POLITICS
In a bind
T.S. SUBRAMANIAN
in Chennai
A beleaguered DMK feels the heat as Kanimozhi, Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's daughter, is named in a charge sheet.
R SENTHIL KUMAR /PTI
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi arrives with his daughter Kanimozhi for the party's high-level meeting in Chennai on April 27.
THE Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has been facing crisis after crisis ever since the United Progressive Alliance government sought and obtained the resignation of A. Raja, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, on November 14, 2010, for his alleged role in the 2G spectrum scam. In the ongoing political battle of attrition over the 2G scam, the Congress, which heads the alliance, is wearing down the DMK, its partner in the UPA and the ruling party in Tamil Nadu.
The relationship between the two allies is strained once again. A beleaguered DMK is feeling the heat with the fallout of the spectrum scam having reached the doorstep of the DMK president and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. Cornered on the issue, the DMK has pledged to fight it legally even as the opposition All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) stepped up their offensive.
The latest crisis for the DMK developed on April 25 when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing the scam, named in a supplementary charge sheet Karunanidhi's daughter and Rajya Sabha member Kanimozhi, Kalaignar TV managing director Sharad Kumar, and three others for “criminal conspiracy and receiving illegal gratification”. Karunanidhi's wife Dayalu Ammal will be one of the witnesses in the case. Special Judge (CBI) O.P. Saini, who took cognisance of the charge sheet, issued summons to Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar, and the three others named in the charge sheet – Asif Balwa and Rajiv Aggarwal, directors of Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Limited, and Karim Morani, director of Cineyug Films – to appear before his court in New Delhi on May 6.
N. SRIDHARAN
DAYALU AMMAL, WIFE of Karunanidhi, holds a 60 per cent stake in Kalaignar TV.
These five persons, along with Raja and DB Realty co-owners Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka, have been arraigned for their involvement in transferring Rs.214 crore from the DB Realty Group to Kalaignar TV between December 2008 and August 2009 by “following a circuitous route” through Dynamix Realty, Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Limited and Cineyug Films. Raja was arrested on February 2 for his role in the grant of telecom licences and the allocation of 2G spectrum in 2008 in violation of the established guidelines and procedures. Raja and Shahid Balwa, who was also arrested, have been remanded to judicial custody in Tihar Jail in New Delhi.
While Dayalu Ammal has a 60 per cent stake in Kalaignar TV, Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar hold 20 per cent each.
The CBI questioned Dayalu Ammal and Kanimozhi on March 12 at the office of Kalaignar TV situated in Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai. On February 19, the CBI raided the Kalaignar TV office and interrogated Sharad Kumar after it found an alleged transfer of Rs.214 crore from Cineyug Films to Kalaignar TV. The CBI officers said Cineyug Films arranged the money from Shahid Balwa's DB group, the promoter of Etisalat DB and one of the main beneficiaries of the spectrum allocation. A Kalaignar TV official, however, maintained that the Rs.214 crore was a loan obtained from Cineyug Films and the same was returned with an interest of Rs.31 crore after the deal for picking up stakes in Kalaignar TV collapsed over differences in the valuation of shares.
R. RAGU
SHARAD KUMAR, MANAGING Director, Kalaignar TV, has a 20 per cent stake.
What has hit the DMK hard is the naming of Kanimozhi as a co-conspirator in the case. The party reacted immediately by convening its high-level implementation committee on April 27. However, the DMK's helplessness was evident when the committee merely passed a resolution expressing “surprise” at the inclusion of the names of Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar in the charge sheet and vowed to fight the issue legally. It blamed “hegemonistic forces” for playing “a game of political chess” since the Comptroller and Auditor General's report spoke of “presumptive loss” to the Centre. The resolution attacked the press and “some political leaders whose culture and way of life is to indulge in corruption” but who saw the allegations in the 2G scam as “a rare opportunity” to “politicise” the issue, dismember the UPA, “rattle” the DMK and remove Karunanidhi from political leadership.
There was little the DMK could do other than fulminate against the media and “some political leaders”. A chastened DMK did not indulge in brinkmanship this time. On March 5, it had threatened to withdraw six DMK Ministers from the UPA government and offer issue-based support because the Congress demanded that it be allotted 63 seats of its choice for the Assembly elections held on April 13. It is not clear whether the election results on May 13 will give the DMK-led alliance, of which the Congress is a partner, a mandate to rule once again. If the DMK pulls out its Ministers from the Union Cabinet and also loses power in the State, it will find itself in a bind. Informed sources said the DMK sent out feelers to the Congress that it was willing to form a coalition government (an idea it was opposed to earlier) in Tamil Nadu if the DMK-led alliance were to capture power again.
SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
FORMER COMMUNICATIONS MINISTER A. Raja being taken to court by officials from the CBI headquarters in New Delhi on February 17.
Informed DMK sources said Karunanidhi was anguished that the party's image had taken a beating. He explained to the high-level committee that if he personally brought Kanimozhi from her home to the meeting, it was not because he wanted to save her from the situation she was caught in. He saw her as a party worker and said her rise in the party could not be attributed to her being his daughter. He wanted to protect her on behalf of the party because he did not want the party's image to be bruised. It was out of “jealousy” that people were venting their spleen on Kanimozhi, but he would not betray the party for the sake of anybody, he said. Kanimozhi and her mother, Rajathi Ammal, were in a traumatic situation and he himself had not visited them for three days, the Chief Minister said.
Jayalalithaa's demand
AIADMK general secretary and former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and CPI(M) State secretary G. Ramakrishnan lost no time in attacking the DMK. Both demanded that Kalaignar TV be taken off the air. Jayalalithaa said it was not enough to merely mention Kanimozhi's name in the charge sheet. In a statement on April 25, she said: “The operational licence granted to Kalaignar TV, which was clearly started with graft money, should be withdrawn and the channel should be taken off the air immediately. Kanimozhi, like all others charge-sheeted so far, should be arrested.” She also wanted all the other members of the Karunanidhi family, “who were direct or indirect beneficiaries in the gargantuan scam” to be charge-sheeted and arrested. She insisted that “the money trail” should be “fully traced” and that “the funds that have been taken out of India should be recovered”.
M. KARUNAKARAN
THE OFFICE OF Kalaignar TV in Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters in Chennai.
Jayalalithaa alleged that the supplementary charge sheet indicated that “a clear kick-back link” had been established between some key beneficiaries of the spectrum largesse doled out by Raja and Karunanidhi's family. “This link has been established through the Rs.214 crore payment made to Kalaignar TV through a maze of companies linked to Shahid Balwa, the promoter of Swan Telecom, one of the biggest beneficiaries” in the scam, she said. “There is no justification for Shahid Balwa to pay Rs.214 crore to a newly launched Tamil television channel in which he has no other interest unless he had been asked to do so by Telecom Minister Raja as a quid pro quo for allotment of 2G spectrum licence,” she added. It was surprising, Jayalalithaa said, that while Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar were named in the charge sheet, Dayalu Ammal was left out.
Ramakrishnan wanted the functioning of Kalaignar TV, which, he alleged, was set up with the scam money as the capital, to be stopped until the court proceedings were completed. Action should be taken under the Indian Penal Code against the five named in the supplementary charge sheet, and it should be similar to the action taken against Raja, he said.
DMDK leader Vijayakant wanted to know why Dayalu Ammal was not included in the charge sheet when she held shares three times the value of shares held by Kanimozhi. “Since the case was being monitored by the Supreme Court, Karunanidhi, on moral grounds, should resign. Or his government should be dismissed for justice to prevail,” he said.
COLUMN
Denying their due
JAYATI GHOSH
The denial of public resources that are mandated under the Special Component Plan for S.Cs amounts to a huge assault on their basic socio-economic rights.
S. SUBRAMANIUM
DALIT WOMEN AT a rally organised by the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR), in New Delhi. A file photograph. The government of Delhi diverted as much as Rs.744 crore over three years to the CWG from funds that were especially earmarked for the Special Component Plans (SCPs) for the Scheduled Castes in Delhi.
THE arrest of Suresh Kalmadi on April 25 marked yet another scene in the prolonged drama surrounding the Commonwealth Games (CWG) held in Delhi in October 2010. Yet the general media focus on Kalmadi may have served to distract attention from the many other acts of omission and commission that mark the sordid history of that extravagantly planned and deeply flawed public show.
There are stories of funds diversion that have a bearing on issues that go beyond probity and corruption, however important those are. They also have direct and indirect effects on the conditions of existence of some of the most deprived and needy segments of the population. One particular story is that of the government of Delhi diverting as much as Rs.744 crore over three years to the CWG from funds that were especially earmarked for the Special Component Plans (SCPs) for the Scheduled Castes in Delhi.
In fact, this matter was raised in Parliament in August last year. At the time the Minister directly in charge of the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, P. Chidambaram (the same one who has recently been busy commenting on the quality of administration in different State governments), was called to book on this account. He accepted that this was wrong and went on to promise that the entire amount would be returned in the Budget for the following year. However, the Delhi government's Budget for 2011-12 shows no such increase – in fact the amount allocated has increased by only around Rs.134 crore to a paltry total of Rs.355 crore.
The idea of SCPs for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes was mooted by the Planning Commission in recognition of the fact that standard expenditure practices have not ensured benefits to specially marginalised communities and localities. The amount to be allocated under the SCP for S.Cs in Delhi is 16.93 per cent of the total Plan expenditure (based on the share of S.C. population according to the 2001 Census). The SCP guidelines indicate that only those schemes that ensure direct benefits to individual families, groups and hamlets of S.C. people should be included under the SCP and that priority should be given to providing basic essential services such as primary education, health, safe drinking water, nutrition, housing, electrification, sanitation, drainage, and prevention of submergence of buildings. Expenditure on livelihood promotion schemes and education is also encouraged.
As it happens, the Delhi government has already been systematically underspending on this crucial category. Instead of the required 16.93 per cent, it has spent on average less than 1.6 per cent in the period 2008-09 to 2010-11 – or around one-tenth of the required spending. This amounts to a cumulative denial of nearly Rs.5,000 crore in these three years. The current year is no better: not only is there no indication of any effort to put back the amount it had siphoned off earlier, as promised last year, but the allocation is still less than 3 per cent of the Plan spending, with a shortfall of nearly Rs.2,000 crore.
Why does all this matter? It matters because this is not just a story about state priorities and expenditure allocations. It amounts to the regular and continuing denial of the basic rights of many citizens who also happen to be Dalit residents of Delhi. Many official and unofficial surveys have found that the bulk of the S.C. population in Delhi is living in extremely precarious, unhealthy and poor conditions that are much worse than those of the general population. There is also evidence of significant discrimination against them in terms of access to infrastructure and basic services.
Delhi is regularly presented by national policymakers as the example of a shining and newly prosperous India. Indeed, in the now-common distinction between “the two Indias” – one rich and emerging if not already emerged, the other still poor and backward – Delhi is typically seen as the archetype of the former. And if one goes by the many newly built flyovers and shiny malls filled with happy consumers, it is easy to be impressed in this way.
But Delhi encapsulates India. It probably contains as much disparity as the country as a whole, with extreme poverty and destitution coexisting with the most extreme expressions of affluence. In the narrow bylanes of resettlement colonies or the chaotic congestion of jhuggi encroachments, very different income and consumption standards prevail. It is not just income but even access to the most essential goods and services that is lacking among such populations.
Because several of these are treated as “unauthorised” colonies, quite often human security is also under threat, not just because of petty criminals and gangs but because of the periodic enforcement drives of the state. A sudden and unannounced demolition drive in late March this year that dispossessed more than 800 families living in jhuggis in Gayatri Colony near Patel Nagar exemplifies this tendency. Even when the heavy hand of the state does not actually destroy the homes and livelihood of such people, the need to placate and bribe agents of the state at various levels creates huge insecurity.
For those familiar with the intertwining of social and economic discrimination in India, it should come as no surprise to learn that Dalits are predominant among such poor people. For example, the Mission Convergence Survey of the government of Delhi found that more than 90 per cent of S.Cs in Delhi were living in jhuggi clusters, resettlement colonies, unauthorised localities and construction sites – not exactly what could be called ideal housing. There were also a significant number of homeless Dalits living next to garbage-dumping sites.
A recent survey of conditions of S.C. families in Delhi conducted by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights finds even more appalling conditions in a wide range of areas, and poor access to basic needs. The poor condition of infrastructure and civic amenities endured by most of the sample of 2,400 families is particularly noteworthy. All the S.C. settlements were found to have narrow and dingy streets, poor drainage with overflowing sewage and associated stench and swampy conditions, creating many health hazards. Garbage heaps abounded with little or no public collection facilities.
Sanitary conditions are especially dreadful. Nearly a quarter of the survey respondents used open toilets, but it should be noted that this may be healthier for them than using public toilets (19 per cent), which were inevitably found to be stinking and without adequate water and flushing facilities. The issue of minimally adequate sanitation also has a major gender dimension: women and girls face great reproductive health risks as well as threats to their physical security, especially when they are forced to go long distances in search for privacy for such needs.
Many more examples and statistics relating to the appalling conditions of the majority of Dalit families in Delhi could be mentioned: forced to access only very poorly funded and often discriminatory public education and health care services, insecure livelihood and limited employment opportunities, and so on. But that is really not necessary because the main point is that a lot needs to be done and that there are many ways in which public money could usefully be spent to improve their conditions.
So the denial of public resources that are mandated under the SCP for S.Cs amounts to a huge assault on their basic socio-economic rights, as it forces them to continue to live in squalor and degradation. This major crime of omission has to be rectified immediately, but this will only happen if the government actually finds itself to be accountable in this matter. And for that, many more public voices need to be raised.
COLUMN
A case for autonomy
R.K. RAGHAVAN
The arrest of a Congressman and the naming of an influential member of a UPA partner in a charge sheet are proof of what an independent CBI can achieve.
EVENTS of the past few days should warm the hearts of those who have been clamouring for drastic action against dishonesty in high places. The arrest of a ruling party personality and the charge-sheeting of one high profile influential individual from the ranks of an alliance partner, in two separate cases, is proof enough that, given functional independence and overseen only by the Supreme Court, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) can produce impressive results. The whole nation seems gratified by this fearless move by the CBI, and this has greatly enhanced the much maligned organisation's credibility.
By all accounts, investigation in these two cases was methodical, painstaking and strictly lawful. The Supreme Court also seems satisfied with the quality of work. Is there not a case for strengthening the principal investigating agency's autonomy? No one disputes that such autonomy should be without diluting the CBI's accountability to the law. It is not the case of anybody pitching for the CBI that it should be totally free from any audit of its performance or conduct. What is being advocated by those who believe in non-partisan investigation, especially when an alleged crime involves looking into the role of politically influential individuals, is that the CBI should be allowed to proceed against culpable accused on the basis of facts culled out during its investigation and as per law.
This has possibly not been happening all these years because the ruling party or coalition enjoys arm-twisting authority over the CBI to deflect sensitive investigations just to save the former from embarrassment. Vested interests – similar to those who have been unabashedly scuttling the Anna Hazare movement recently – have indulged in deliberate distortions on the subject by circulating misinformation that once the CBI is given total freedom it will be out of control and devoid of accountability. Nothing can be further from truth.
Many politicians are not impressed with the proposal by some that the Supreme Court should monitor all CBI investigations, important or not. Such an arrangement is perceived as being not in tune with democracy. This is again similar to the attacks on Anna Hazare. He is assailed as anti-democratic all because he wants a decisive role for civil society in drafting the Lokpal Bill. The suggestion that prominence for civil society is contra to democracy is ridiculous to say the least. It is in this context that the proposed Lokpal Bill will have to be viewed.
What kind of relationship will the Lokpal forge with the CBI? One suggestion is that the Lokpal should have its own investigating apparatus. It is relevant that at least in one State, namely, Karnataka, the Lokayukta, the State equivalent of the Lokpal, has its own investigating team. The experience there has been reasonably satisfactory whenever it had a proactive chief such as Justice H. Santosh Hegde. This is the rationale behind the move that seeks a Lokpal, which would have an internal investigation body. The point is building such a team takes enormous time and energy. There is no doubt that talent available in the country is enormous. But the Lokpal staff will have to be chosen with great care, keeping in mind the need for utmost honesty on their part. Traditions will necessarily be built over time.
Possibly, a few CBI officers of proven ability and integrity could form the core of the Lokpal's structure initially. It must, however, be remembered that the CBI itself suffers from a staff crunch and it may be extremely reluctant to part with any of its trusted officers. Retired CBI personnel could help, but such numbers will be too small for induction into the Lokpal.
What will be the CBI's role in a situation where the Lokpal has its own investigating body? This will depend on what shape the Lokpal ultimately takes. It is possible that the Bill provides for the Lokpal drawing on CBI resources and skill whenever a particular case demands it. Such a provision will greatly enlarge the Lokpal's capacity to act fast in some important cases. There is the analogy here of some special investigation teams (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court or the High Courts indenting for officers serving in some States. The lending rules are flexible enough, and the Union Home Ministry has always shown itself willing to help.
Next comes the question of who all will come under the Lokpal's purview. This is a ticklish and contentious subject where unanimity is hardly likely to emerge. Two functionaries are particularly discussed here. These are the Prime Minister and members of the judiciary. While I can understand the justification for leaving out the latter, considering the need for conserving judicial independence, I do not, in the case of the Prime Minister. He is at best the primus inter pares in the Union Council of Ministers. He is a live political animal and takes or fails to take many crucial decisions that have financial implications. A Manmohan Singh comes only once in a while. The fact that he maintains a nearly 100 per cent honesty is no guarantee that his successors would emulate him.
If the Lokpal has to initiate strong action against a Prime Minister, there are always others who can step in to fill the breach. There will be no constitutional crisis in an eventuality where a Prime Minister has to step down following a Lokpal investigation. A Lokpal Bill without jurisdiction over the Prime Minister is like a Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. I do not, therefore, comprehend the unwillingness of some in authority now to include the Prime Minister among those who could be investigated by the Lokpal, particularly when the law of the land does not make a distinction between him and the others in the Executive.
The argument is, therefore, grounded on political expediency, which ignores the need for deterring top functionaries from lapsing into dishonesty. The 2G spectrum allocation case alone would indicate how the Prime Minister's authority was flouted by a dishonest Minister, and corruption in high places is an accepted reality. The slightest suggestion that the Lokpal is for handling lesser mortals alone would give the impression that we are intent on making a mockery of the whole battle against corruption.
There is one more area that has to be debated while examining the structure of the Lokpal. How will the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) fit into the scheme of things if and when the Lokpal becomes a reality? I am all for the CVC being subsumed by the Lokpal. I see no practical difficulty in the merger. Retaining the CVC is superfluous and could create confusion in the minds of those who want to lodge a complaint against a public servant. More than anything else, the CVC' performance until now has been nominal. This is not because its members lacked ideas or zeal. The set-up lacked the clout, which alone could make a difference while fighting sinister forces indulging in corruption or supporting it. The analogy of the Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) of Hong Kong is not wholly inappropriate here. To shoot it down as impractical because Hong Kong is a small island is being mulish and shows reluctance to try out bold experiments in a difficult situation.
Finally, many of us are appalled at the sinister attempt to discredit the Anna Hazard movement. Spin doctors based in the national capital have been hyperactive throwing confusion over vital issues surrounding the Lokpal. This is reprehensible, and those involved in this insidious game are doing the greatest disservice to posterity. Influential members of the civil society should join together to appeal to these elements to dissociate themselves
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ESSAY
IDENTITY & POLITICS
K.N. PANIKKAR
The demographic make-up of South Asia has helped reinforce identity politics in each country in the region.
RANJEET KUMAR
A MAHA DALIT rally organised by the Janata Dal (United) in Patna in February 2010, months before the Assembly elections in Bihar. Nitish Kumar's strategy of identifying the poorest of the Dalit sub-castes as "Maha Dalits" and offering them socio-economic packages served him well.
THE influence exercised by identity politics during the last two centuries in South Asia has been a subject of multidisciplinary inquiries. Historians are rather late entrants into this field; they were drawn into it only when History was invoked to legitimise its origin or to justify its contemporary articulation. When history thus became deeply implicated in the pursuit of identity politics, historians were called upon to explain its meaning and to trace its antecedents. Even then the interest of historians, by and large, revolved around the study of communal identity and its implications for national politics. The varieties of other identities, which practically crowded the social and political space, have bypassed their concern. This essay is an attempt not to fill that void by narrating the modes of articulation of identity politics in South Asia, which is a vast and complex subject, but to throw some light on why identity politics emerged as a dominant force in the region.
Religious dilemma of South Asia
Of the several common characteristics that the modern states in the South Asian region shared, their multicultural and multi-religious compositions have been the most conspicuous. They shaped the demographic pattern, influenced the course of social relations, defined the contours of cultural life and, above all, set certain parameters for the mutual relations of different countries in the region.
Given the commonly shared historical experience, particularly of colonial oppression and resistance, the region had the potential to develop a distinct personality in the post-colonial world through cultural solidarity, economic cooperation and political collaboration.
The history of South Asia during the past 60 years, however, did not realise such a possibility. Instead, the relationship between different states was influenced more by recriminations of the past rather than the possibilities of the future, leading to mutual suspicion, distrust and occasional hostility and even armed conflict. Among the many reasons that led to such a situation, an important factor was the compulsions of ‘mutual vigil' undertaken by these states about the condition of the minorities who were the followers of their religion. The official response apart, popular opinion also played a role in exacerbating mutual tensions occasioned by religious oppression or discrimination. The religious condition of each country not only impinged upon its own internal situation but also affected the mutual relations between the countries constituting the region.
What prompted such an interest and consequent vigil was the nature of distribution of the religious population in these countries. The demographic make-up of South Asia has helped reinforce identity politics in each country. For, ‘India' is present in the communal discourse of Pakistan and Bangladesh, so are ‘Pakistan and Bangladesh' in India. The Tamil leaders of India are emotionally involved with the Sinhala-Tamil conflict. Thus the ethnic and religious configurations were major factors in the formation and articulation of identity politics in individual countries. In all of them, however, identity politics has been in conflict with national and secular politics. In India it goes back to the period of the anti-colonial national movement in which an undercurrent of caste and religious identities was present.
The concerns and anxieties of the Muslim minority in India, the Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka were transmitted to their co-religionists in other countries in the region. The Hindus in India believed that they had a responsibility to safeguard the interest of the Hindus of Pakistan or Bangladesh or of Tamils in Sri Lanka. So did Pakistan and Bangladesh in relation to the Muslims who lived in India. Each of these countries looked upon itself as the protector of its co-religionists in the region. This religious positioning had two implications. First, it attributed a religious identity to each country, even in case of a declared secular state like India; and secondly, it overlooked the fact that it amounted to interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Being the most powerful country in the region, India tended to undertake the task of ‘course correction' in neighbouring countries. The interference in East Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal are examples. India had sent its army to East Pakistan, presumably in defence of democracy, and to Sri Lanka, to help resolve the ethnic conflict. In recent times India evinced undue, and perhaps uncalled for, interest in the internal turmoil in Nepal. Such a self-assumed responsibility, which progressively gained ground after Independence, was an elixir for the politics of identity in individual states; more grievously it generated hostility towards others, leading to disastrous consequences. Several lives, including that of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, were lost in the process. No country in the region was able to maintain friendly relations with its neighbours, which intensified the tension between different religious communities.
Different categories
The politics of identity has many hues, demarcated by different states of consciousness prevalent in a society. They can be broadly grouped into two categories: the politics of domination and the politics of resistance. The main motivation of the former is the quest for power for which identity is invoked as a means of mobilisation. The latter is the politics of rights in which identity serves as a cohesive force for achieving internal solidarity. The identity politics of the majority religion belongs to the former, whereas the identity politics of minorities, such as Dalits and Adivasis, to the latter. In the last two centuries, South Asian countries witnessed several instances in which religious identity was at the centre of political movements. However, almost all of them were riven by internal contradictions: religion served as a powerful means of mobilisation; at the same time it also imparted to it political unreality.
Several examples of the role of religious identity in political mobilisation in South Asian society can be cited. The movement for the formation of Pakistan and the construction of a Ram mandir at Ayodhya are prime instances. Although religious identity has served as an emotive symbol to elicit instant political support, it has proved insufficient to ensure the continued sustenance of a sovereign state. That is the lesson the developments in Pakistan culminating in the liberation of Bangladesh affords. The majority of citizens in the western and eastern regions of Pakistan shared the same religious faith. Yet, they could not coexist as a nation, possibly because of internal colonialism practised by the ruling elite of West Pakistan. Given the cultural disparity between the east and the west, the cultural neglect was felt as cultural oppression by the intelligentsia. But whether it was the central issue in the separation of Bangladesh is doubtful, even if culture provided inspiration and legitimacy. The formation of Bangladesh was in fact the negation of the identity politics that had given birth to Pakistan.
The formation of Pakistan and the liberation of Bangladesh, in which large-scale death and destruction of property took place, did not deter the progress of the politics of religious identity in India. Instead, it gave greater momentum to it. Until the end of the anti-colonial struggle the Hindu fundamentalist forces represented by the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh were not able to gain much support. The trauma of Partition was effectively used by them to mobilise the support of the displaced Hindu population. In all the areas where the Hindus who migrated from Pakistan had settled, communal politics rooted in religious identity and hostility gained ground. Partition served as a launching pad for a large-scale mobilisation based on Hindu religious identity.
Among the several factors enabling the construction of Hindu identity politics during the post-Partition era, the projection of the ‘outsider' as the ‘enemy' and the Hindu cultural pre-eminence in the past were the most prominent. History became so integral to Hindu identity politics precisely for these reasons. The Hindu history written up as fables by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Navaratna Rajaram cast Muslims as barbarian invaders who indulged in the destruction of Hindu culture and civilisation as a religious mission. They argued that the Muslim invasion was not motivated by plunder alone; it was undertaken to achieve the religious objectives of conversion and destruction of temples. In contrast, the cultural and intellectual attainments and political and administrative excellence of Hindus were projected. To prove the point, the philosophical attainments of the Upanishads were quoted; the healing qualities of Ayurveda were referred to; and the political acumen and administrative skills of the Guptas and the Cholas were invoked. Hindu identity politics was anchored on these two interrelated arguments regarding Muslim aggression, on the one hand, and consequent Hindu decline, on the other. In the light of this experience, Hindu identity politics also assumed the task of imbibing self-confidence and pride in the glorious past and rectifying the ‘historical wrongs' committed by Muslims.
The success of Hindu identity politics was primarily because of its ability to communicate and popularise these two ideas through a series of symbolic acts. Almost all political parties either incorporated the logic of Hindu identity in varying degrees or took care to refrain from injuring popular religious feelings. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) foregrounded Hindu identity as its political platform and experimented within it to arrive at a programme to unite Hindus. The nature of Hindu identity it projected, however, was Brahmanical in conception and content, and inbuilt into it was an attempt at hegemonisation of various castes and sects. The prime example of Hindu identity politics was the movement leading to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The tortuous path of temple politics demonstrated that mainstream parties took care to ensure that religious identity was not ruffled.
Religion: Two tendencies
Beginning with the accounts of medieval foreign visitors, a popularly held stereotype about South Asia has been the religious character of the people of the region. In fact, there was nothing particular in the religious life of the people to warrant such a characterisation. What led to this impression perhaps was the public performance of rituals and the annual journey undertaken by devotees to a network of pilgrimage centres. In the past there were only very limited number of such centres and the journey was so arduous that few people undertook it. In recent times, however, a visible change has occurred. The development of transport and communication, improvement in infrastructural facilities, the growth of an affluent middle class and state support to pilgrimage tourism have considerably enhanced popular participation in pilgrimages. Not only has the number of devotees who congregate in these centres swelled, but a large number of new centres of pilgrimage have emerged. As a result, religiosity has become so integral to the life of the people that the characterisation by the medieval travellers is more appropriate to modern times.
The two interrelated tendencies, which had a bearing on identity politics, and which developed simultaneously are the religionisation of politics and the commodification of religion. Both these tendencies had their roots in the increase in religiosity among the followers of all religions; religiosity being understood as distinct from belief in religion, and the fast-changing material conditions of life in the region. Although a global phenomenon, the influence of religiosity is particularly marked in South Asia. Working behind this are a variety of forces: unprecedented proliferation of religious institutions; effective marketing of religious ideas by godmen and godwomen; organisation of religious festivals as grand spectacles; investment of capital to improve the infrastructure at pilgrimage centres; and so on. The cumulative effect of these developments is the slow displacement of the secular from the public sphere by religiosity and obscurantist practices.
More importantly, participation in public events reinforced religious commitment and identity, which in turn generated social demarcation based on religious division and consolidation. The consequence of this division is that religious communities in South Asian countries are witnessing internal ‘religious wars', which are both physical and ideological, though not of the same genre as the religious wars in the past. They do not begin and end with physical confrontation; they are essentially ‘ideological and cultural wars', which continuously exist even when there is no physical confrontation. They are waged by all religions and religious groups, either in aggression or in defence. As a consequence, society in South Asian countries has become deeply divided on the basis of religion. In the process, religion has become the most decisive defining factor.
A growing tendency during the last century among the followers of all religions in South Asia has been the emergence of greater internal solidarity induced by the compulsions of self-defence. The cultural and political penetration by the imperialist interests of the West has led to the closing of ranks among Muslims, the virtues of Islamisation being upheld in the process. A large number of splinter groups emerged among Muslims during this period, representing different shades of response. Christian missionary work, devoid of much of its earlier philanthropic content and focussing more on evangelisation, has resurfaced in poorer countries.
AFP
YOUNGSTERS BURN A Pakistani flag at the Intellectuals Memorial in Dhaka on December 14, 2002, to mark Intellectuals Day. Bangladesh honours intellectuals who were killed on this day in 1971, two days before the end of the liberation war.
Hindu fundamentalism has been striving hard for internal consolidation by incorporating Dalits and Adivasis into its fold. It does not limit its activities within the country but promotes long-distance religious nationalism to bring expatriates within the religious fold. Religious organisations, several of them supported by their respective governments, are engaged in spreading religious consciousness and promoting solidarity. These developments are orchestrated by a network of religious organisations and individuals who use religion for promoting their material interests. Religion has therefore spilled over to civic institutions and has become an important factor in public transactions. Consequently, the social and political consciousness developed in South Asian countries during the colonial and post-colonial periods has fairly strong religious overtones. It drew upon ethnic, religious or caste differences, in most cases harking back to their primordial origins. As such they were either religion- or caste-specific.
After their initial involvement with reform, most of them were engaged in community consolidation. The beginning of identity politics can be traced to the activities of such organisations, which campaigned for the rights of the members of their communities. This was primarily because, given the conditions prevailing then, the path to power and representation in administration was envisioned through community pressure. The caste and religious organisations all over the country, therefore, graduated from efforts at reform to demands of social and political rights. Several historians have argued that the colonial system of enumeration had contributed to the self-perception of caste or religious belonging. That may well be, along with several other factors. But the innumerable histories of caste written during the second half of the 19th century were not only a part of an effort to legitimise a hierarchy in the caste structure but also to proclaim their ethnic identity. In the 20th century, caste consciousness, which either already existed or was generated, was invoked for political mobilisation.
Identity politics in South Asia has drawn upon these tendencies occurring within the religious realm. It has a long history going back to the early phase of colonialism. The search for the cultural sources for national awakening in the context of colonial hegemonisation or oppression invariably reached out to religious traditions, among both Hindus and Muslims. As a result, within the anti-colonial movement, political formations inspired by religion and incorporating the followers of specific religions came into being. The formation of the Muslim League in 1906 and of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1914 paved the way for the institutionalisation of identity politics and the incorporation within it of the followers of respective religions. During the post-colonial period, the influence of religiosity in civil society is reinforced by the nexus between the state and religion. In all countries in the region, the state is implicated in religion, either directly or indirectly. Pakistan, after a brief affair with secularism, chose to be an Islamic state. Bangladesh did the same. In Sri Lanka, Buddhism is the state religion. India has remained a secular state, but the deviations by the apparatuses of the state from the ideals of secularism are very many.
Marginalised groups
In contrast to this, the identity politics of marginalised and oppressed groups is rooted in opposition and resistance. Their marginality defines their identity, and the aim of the politics emerging out of it is more often aimed at inclusion and equality. This genre of identity politics is fundamentally different from the politics of Hindu religious identity. While the latter aims at the hegemony over marginalised groups, the main character of the former is resistance.
Until very recently, the identity of such groups was ignored or effaced by either the influence of dominant ideology or social power. For instance, women were confined to the domestic space, subordinated to the power and authority of the patriarchal ideology, which women themselves had internalised. The early autobiographies of women who participated in public life bear testimony to this paradox. The politics of women's emancipation, therefore, was as much a struggle against patriarchy as against the entrenched patriarchal biases of women themselves. Women not only acquiesced to male authority within the family but also fulfilled the role of its defenders and practitioners. That women also surrendered the agency of their emancipation to the care of the male was an indication of the hegemony the male exercised within the family.
Outside the domestic sphere, women had to depend upon the male to gain sufficient space for the articulation of their ideas and demands. As a result, during the initial phase men played the role of catalysts in women's attempts to break out of the traditional order. Notwithstanding the importance of this support, it proved to be an impediment in realising the quest for equality. What the male championed for and conceded to women during the period of the renaissance and freedom movement was rather limited freedom. It was only when women were able to extricate themselves from the control of the male and emerge as independent players that they were able to gain a modicum of equality. This transition, however, has given rise to politics of women as women, often without sensitivity to their social location.
The most powerful articulation of identity politics has occurred among the members of the lower castes, who were traditionally excluded from mainstream life in society. The emergence of Dalit consciousness can be traced to the period of the renaissance, even if the renaissance mainly addressed the problems faced by the upper castes, except in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Dalits suffered a double denial, both material and spiritual. They were excluded from common facilities such as the use of wells in villages or public roads or admission of children in schools. They were forced to live in segregated areas in villages. They did not have access to temples and could not conduct rituals at deaths or births, without the participation of Brahmin priests.
Implicit in these forms of exclusion was the possibility of the formation of an identity, in contrast to the Brahmanical order, which exercised ideological hegemony over the subordinate castes. The Dalit identity, however, was highly fractured because of the existence of several castes within the ranks of Dalits. Jyotiba Phule tried to give them an ideological cohesion through the work of the Satya Shodak Samaj, and B.R. Ambedkar sought to imbibe the necessary political content through agitation for social and political rights. The philosophical basis for unity was advocated by Narayana Guru in Kerala and practical programmes for promoting identity by ‘Periyar' E.V. Ramasamy. However, none of them was an advocate of the continued existence or necessity of caste; what they tried to do was to address the then existing caste consciousness to go beyond castes. In fact, inherent in their conception was a denial of caste, as the only caste they envisioned for mankind was that of humanism.
In complete contrast to this past, not only has caste identity powerfully resurfaced in contemporary India but has also managed to be at the centre stage as a major mobilising force in politics. Most political parties now claim the support of one caste or the other. The caste and religious consciousnesses are both complementary and contradictory. They are complementary as caste identity is invariably located within religious identity. At the same time, caste identity also tends to fracture the monolith of religious identity. The success of the politics of either caste or religious identity would depend upon their complementarity. As a consequence, identity politics in India tries to bring together caste and religious identities in order to ensure wider social support. The effort has not succeeded so far because Hindu identity politics tries to incorporate the caste and tribal identities in its fold, which in actual operation amounts to cultural denial and oppression of Dalits and tribal people. One of the reasons for the failure of the politics of Hindu religious identity has been the incompatibility of its aims with the aspirations of Dalits and Adivasis, without whose support Hindu identity politics cannot muster enough support.
The identities other than caste and religion are increasingly gaining political articulation in the region. Some of them exist only in the margins, struggling for social attention and acceptance; some others surface intermittently with a well-formulated agenda. While the identity of sexual minorities is an example of the former, linguistic and tribal identities are of the latter. All these identities are real and socially constructed, but they cannot culminate in politics unless ignited by a sense of deprivation and marginalisation. That is the reason why all social identities do not necessarily generate their own politics. The existence of identity and its articulation in politics do not have a direct relationship.
The transition of identity into politics is an extremely complex phenomenon, mediated by a variety of factors and the conjunction of several historical forces. In South Asia, its origin can be traced to the mediation of colonialism, which legitimised certain social identities through administrative measures and communitarian conception of society. Religion and caste were indeed social realities in South Asia much before colonialism intervened. But the difference is that caste and religion existed, perhaps more cruelly, during the pre-colonial era, but not casteism and communalism of the order witnessed during the colonial or post-colonial period. The origin and spread of identity politics in South Asian countries can therefore be traced respectively to the legacy of colonialism on the one hand and the cultural backwardness and social obscurantism of a large section of the political class, on the other.
Slow process
The emergence of identity politics has not been a sudden and spontaneous phenomenon but a slow process of evolution. Its growth can be traced to the limitations of renaissance and nationalism, which, given the multi-religious and multicultural character of society, was forced to make a series of compromises with primordial identities. As a result, the society which emerged out of anti-colonial struggles continued to bear the burden of casteism and religiosity. It is a paradox that South Asian countries could not achieve ‘organic' development, and as a result remained culturally backward, despite political advancement. It was in this culturally backward social space that identity politics flourished.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
L.K. ADVANI on his Somnath Ayodhya rath yatra in 1991, which deepened communal chasms in the country.
The 20th century was witness to the slow erosion of liberal politics and its unmistakable replacement by identity politics in South Asian countries. This change has been most conspicuous in India where religious and caste identities have crept into the political practice of almost every party. Many reasons can be attributed to this fundamental discomfiture of democratic politics. Among them two are most pertinent and decisive: the failure of the education system to provide secular socialisation and the inability of liberal and class politics to subsume primordial and ethnic identities.
Initial socialisation
The beginning of socialisation occurs within the precincts of the family as it imbibes its cultural and social perspectives, which in most cases are drawn from the religion, caste and class it belongs to. The initial socialisation, therefore, is not a matter of choice but is inherited by the circumstances of birth. Much before interaction with the outside world is possible, the family imparts an abiding cultural and social identity which, more often than not, is loaded with religious and caste sensibility. This is because the domestic space, in most cases, is governed by rituals prescribed by religious and caste traditions. The impression thus gained through early socialisation generally persists, as the family as an institution reinforces the virtues of conformity and discourages critical engagement.
An opportunity to overcome the influence of primordial identity thus created by the family, and to come to terms with different social conditions, through both experience and conceptualisation, is inherent in secondary socialisation. The most effective agency of secondary socialisation is education, which creates the space for a person to come into contact with a variety of social realities. This helps the engagement with the complexity of the world and to realise the limitations of the experience gained in the domestic space. The exposure to new conditions could be a startling revelation to many, disturbing their complacence and self-assurance and in turn enabling self-critical introspection.
It was such a transition that the advocates of liberal education, from Ram Mohun Roy to Abul Kalam Azad, had in mind when they advocated modern education. But over the years the impact of liberal education has considerably diminished in social consciousness, particularly of the middle class. This is possibly because of two interconnected phenomena: first, a decline in the secular character of education and, secondly, the increasing hold of religious and caste organisations over educational institutions.
Post-independent India pursued a secular path in education under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad, and so on, in order to create a modern society. When the governance fell into the hands of communal forces, they tried to undermine the secular character of education in order to create an ideological base for a Hindu state. Apart from this, communal organisations owing allegiance to different religions have been engaged for a long time in running educational institutions that promoted obscurantism and orthodoxy and sought to impart a mental training that militated against critical thinking. In India, education always had a communal tinge, arising out of the legacy of the colonial system; but the recent intervention of the state and the involvement of religious organisations have brought into being a middle class with a communal world view. They form the base of identity politics in contemporary South Asia.
Availability of political space
Another factor that facilitated the growth of identity politics is the availability of political space left open by the inadequate mobilisation of overarching identities that could subsume sectarian identities of caste and religion. The relationship between class identity and primordial identity is pertinent in this context. Inherent in the formation of class consciousness is the possibility of overcoming all other forms of consciousnesses. The relationship between primordial identities and class formation is not characterised by mutual inclusion – caste and religion in class and vice versa – but the former being progressively effaced or undermined by class politics and thus ‘the sack of potatoes' realising their commonality. Unlike caste and religious identities, class identity is acquired through struggles, which help overcome primordial identities. The formation of the class, therefore, involves struggles with primordial identities, which exist in varying degrees in situations in which class formation is weak, ineffective and incomplete. A ‘pure' class consciousness and identity would hardly exist in any society, as the ideological and cultural influence of other identities would inevitably be present. In other words, elements of primordial loyalties will continue to exist and cannot be wished away. It, however, does not mean their primacy.
The manifestation of class identity and politics in itself does not lead to the elimination of the already existing primordial identities. The implication of class identity and politics is that primordial identities are brought under the scanner and their unreality is underlined. Class and community are real in the social life of the people, but there is no community in which class is not present, except perhaps in the very primitive stage of human evolution. In contrast, class transcends communitarian loyalties.
The character of identity politics can hardly be read without taking into account class-community relationship. Given that a community is necessarily an ensemble of classes in which the interests of the dominant class prevail, identity politics does not represent the interest of the community as a whole, as is often claimed, but only of a class within it. Identity politics is therefore anti-democratic, as it does not address the interests of the collective which goes by the name of a community of caste or religion.
Text of the keynote address to a seminar on “Identity Politics in South Asia” conducted by Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, on March 21-23, 2011. The author can be reached at knpanikkar@gmail.com
LEGISLATION
Trial by fire
V. VENKATESAN
in New Delhi
As the joint drafting committee begins work on the Lokpal Bill, its civil society members face challenges from various quarters.
PTI
Social activists and civil society members of the Lokpal Bill drafting committee, (from left) Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh, Anna Hazare, Prashant Bhushan, Shanti Bhushan, Justice Santosh Hegde and Arvind Kejriwal, after a meeting in New Delhi on April 23.
AS the leader of the five-member civil society group within the 10-member joint drafting committee to prepare the new Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare finds himself in an unenviable position. After his successful agitation for equal participation for civil society in the legislative exercise to create the first Lokpal at the Centre, people expect him to set high standards of probity for his team, even though it will have a short tenure (ending on June 30) and a limited agenda. Allegations casting aspersions on civil society members on the committee, even if they relate to the past, make them defensive and distract them from the committee's task.
Anna Hazare himself was prudent enough to ignore the allegation of financial impropriety against him. The Maharashtra government instituted a commission of inquiry under Justice P.B. Sawant in September 2003 to inquire into allegations of corruption and maladministration against a few State Ministers and Anna Hazare, who had led a campaign against them. The commission's report, submitted on February 22, 2005, concluded: “The expenditure of Rs.2.20 lacs from the funds of the Hind Swaraj Trust [a trust which Hazare runs] for the birthday celebrations of Shri Hajare was clearly illegal and amounted to a corrupt practice” (page 365).
Sections of the media highlighted this in the days after Hazare's recent campaign. But his close confidant, Swami Agnivesh, described this in a television programme as a mistake rather than an instance of corrupt practice; some observers considered it too technical to cast aspersions on Hazare's personal integrity. In 2005, Hazare had challenged the State government to take action on the report, but the government chose to ignore it. Hazare did not offer any fresh explanation on the subject after the recent campaign.
The other civil society members on the drafting committee had a harder time. The presence of former Union Law Minister Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant Bhushan, also an eminent public interest lawyer, on the committee invited sharp criticism. Many observers questioned whether the civil society component of the committee was inclusive at all and whether the inclusion of both the father and the son in the committee pointed to a dearth of legal talent in the country.
The civil society members of the committee have asked the government to include among its nominees a member from the opposition parties and someone representing Dalits to make it more inclusive. But they were unwilling to accept similar advice and let their own side reflect the diversity of views within civil society on an effective Lokpal Bill.
At a press conference in New Delhi, film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, historian K.N. Panikkar and activist Shabnam Hashmi questioned the selection of non-government members on the committee, claiming it was not a true representation of civil society. They said the government had chosen the easy option by succumbing to Hazare's demands. To this, Arvind Kejriwal, a key member of the Hazare team, claimed that both the Bhushans had played a key role in drafting the Jan Lokpal Bill and were tough negotiators. This was the reason, he added, the government tacitly opposed their inclusion in the committee and wanted the smear campaign against them to succeed.
The campaign against the Bhushans has, by far, been the dirtiest. On April 13, some media organisations received from an anonymous source a CD containing a purported telephonic conversation between the erstwhile Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh and S.P. chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, and between Mulayam Singh Yadav and Shanti Bhushan. The purport of the conversation was to suggest that Shanti Bhushan had told Mulayam Singh Yadav that Prashant Bhushan could “fix” a particular Supreme Court judge for Rs.4 crore.
Bhushans' defence
In his defence, Prashant Bhushan released the reports from two renowned forensic laboratories, the Hyderabad-based Truth Labs and the United States-based Sound Evidence headed by George Papcun. These reports found that most parts of Mulayam Singh Yadav's speech on the CD were copied from a conversation that had taken place between Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2006. On the basis of spectrograms, the reports established that there were multiple signs of editing and gaps in Shanti Bhushan's purported speech in the conversation. “Words/phrases have clearly been edited/lifted from many different conversations and stitched/spliced together,” the reports found, according to Prashant Bhushan.
Meanwhile, reports suggested that the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL) in New Delhi found the CD genuine and without breaks in recording. Prashant Bhushan questioned why the CFSL ignored the reports of Truth Labs and Sound Evidence showing the exact positions of editing signatures and some of the gaps in Shanti Bhushan's speech. In any case, he said, both the CFSL report and a so-called report by a government laboratory describing the CD as genuine were not in the public domain and, therefore, beyond scrutiny.
Shanti Bhushan did not deny that the CD carried his voice. But he added that forensic reports showed that bits and pieces from different conversations appeared to have been spliced together to create his speech. Shanti Bhushan also denied that he had met Amar Singh, as Amar Singh claimed on the CD.
In a case before the Supreme Court, Prashant Bhushan is seeking the public disclosure of Amar Singh's 2006 tapes. He has alleged that Amar Singh, by fabricating the CD involving the Bhushans, has aimed to make the Supreme Court judge concerned recuse himself from hearing the 2G scam case, and the Amar Singh tape case. To substantiate this allegation, Shanti Bhushan has filed a criminal contempt petition in the Supreme Court and sought an independent investigation into the conspiracy behind the fabrication of the CD.
Sections of the media also sought to raise the issue of the allotment of farmland in Noida to Shanti Bhushan and his son, Jayant Bhushan, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, by the Uttar Pradesh government. The Bhushans have claimed that the land was allotted under a regular scheme floated by Noida. It was for farmland plots of 10,000 sq. metres on which a farmhouse of up to 15,000 square feet was allowed to be constructed. It was not specified as to where in Noida the plots would be allotted. The Bhushans applied for the plots in March 2009. In May 2009, the authorities in Noida called them for an interview to verify the means of finance. In January 2010, the Bhushans received a letter from Noida saying a plot in Sector 165 had been reserved for them and that the allotment letter would be issued to them separately. In January this year, they received the allotment letters, giving the rate as Rs.3,500 per sq m.
Media reports on the transaction insinuated that the Bhushans received the allotment because Jayant Bhushan was arguing the Noida park case against the State government in the Supreme Court, and the allotment was aimed to silence him. On December 3, 2010, the Supreme Court held in this case that the Noida park project was not on a forest area but it imposed certain conditions because of its proximity to the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. One of the conditions was that permanent construction in the park area should not exceed 25 per cent of the total land area. Jayant Bhushan had argued the case in favour of the petitioner, who had challenged the construction of the Rs.650-crore park, citing violation of environmental norms. The court had stayed the construction until the delivery of judgment.
The Bhushans admitted that there were no criteria for the allotment of farmland that could be found either in the advertisement or in the subsequent brochure of the scheme. They said that if the allotments were found to be questionable, they would readily surrender their plots. The Bhushans argued that the Noida park case might be the reason for the delay and the poor location of allotment to them.
Meanwhile, another allegation against the Bhushans pertained to evasion of stamp duty payable by them in the valuation of a property in Allahabad. In 1966, Shanti Bhushan entered into an agreement to purchase a house in Allahabad, where he had grown up, for a consideration of Rs.1 lakh. However, the sale deed could not be executed because the 99-year lease granted by the government in favour of the owner had expired and was pending renewal. When the lease deed was renewed and the property was converted into freehold, the Bhushans demanded execution of the sale deed, which was refused by the owner. Thereafter, a compromise was arrived at between the Bhushans and the owner: the owner agreed to sell a major portion of the property to the Bhushans for Rs.1 lakh, provided that the remaining portion of 4,317.78 square yards (one square yard is nine square feet) was left with the owner to sell independently to others. The sale deed was executed in 2010 on the basis of a mutual agreement between the parties.
On September 29, 2010, two months before the execution of the sale deed, the Bhushans filed a copy of the deed and asked the Allahabad Collector to determine what stamp duty would be payable at the time of execution of the sale deed. Since the Collector did not make any such determination, and the sale deed had to be executed by November 29, 2010, the Bhushans paid the higher of the two methods of duty calculation. Meanwhile, the Bhushans received a notice from the authorities fixing April 28 or May 5 for the finalisation of the stamp duty and mentioning Rs.1.33 crore as the approximate stamp duty payable. The Bhushans insist that it was not a notice for evasion of stamp duty, but an invitation by the Collector to help him to determine the appropriate stamp duty payable. The Bhushans have promised to pay the legally applicable stamp duty.
The notice from the Collector to the Bhushans coincided with the expose of this transaction by Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh, who questioned their continuance in the drafting committee. The Bhushans' rivals in the legal profession also sought their exit from the committee as, in their view, these allegations pointed to serious improprieties. However, the Bhushans' friends in civil society vouched for their integrityand urged them to continue on the committee.
The Karnataka Lokayukta and another civil society member of the drafting committee, Santosh Hegde, also came under attack. Digvijay Singh asked why the State Lokayukta had not been effective in curbing corruption at the highest level in Karnataka. Hegde took it as an accusation of defending the corrupt and contemplated quitting the drafting committee, blaming the political class as a whole for its reluctance to enact a strong Lokpal Bill. However, other civil society members on the committee prevailed on him not to quit. Digvijay Singh later denied that he had accused Hegde of defending the ruling party in Karnataka.
Karnataka Lokayukta
While Hegde was well within his rights to protest against Digvijay Singh's remarks, observers were surprised that he contemplated quitting because of them. After all, Hegde took pains to factually challenge Digvijay's claim of ineffectiveness of the Lokayukta. He said that he had not allowed the State government to refer the complaint against the Chief Minister to an inquiry commission, which would have taken it out of the Lokayukta's jurisdiction, and that the inquiry into the complaint was not yet complete.
The ethical standards that should govern the conduct of civil society members continue to be debated. Hegde indicated that if the allegations against the Bhushans had come out before the composition of the committee, they would not have been nominated. While he did not support the demand for the Bhushans' exit, he himself set a higher moral standard for himself by suggesting that he would have quit if he faced similar allegations after nomination to the committee. Others on the committee, however, felt the Bhushans must continue and that the allegations against them could be probed separately by an independent body. They did not think that the Bhushans would compromise their independence of judgment because of these allegations.
The five civil society members appeared to tide over the challenges to their personal integrity after Anna Hazare and Congress president Sonia Gandhi exchanged letters expressing their support for a strong Lokpal Bill and their opposition to any kind of smear campaign against the committee members. The five members, however, were greeted with substantive criticism of the revised Lokpal Bill, which they circulated to facilitate a nationwide consultation before the second meeting of the committee scheduled on May 2.
The consultation organised by the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) cautioned against relying too much on the proposed Lokpal Bill. Instead, it recommended a basket of measures to address problems of governance including grievance redress and corruption. The Lokpal Bill could only be one of those measures aimed at building and strengthening existing institutions and processes, it said.
Another consultation, held under the banner of Citizens for Public Accountability in the capital, brought out the divergence of views on the Lokpal Bill. The participants, who included two former Chief Justices of India, M.N. Venkatachaliah and J.S. Verma, were critical of the draft Jan Lokpal Bill's provision enabling the Lokpal to investigate complaints against judges of the higher judiciary, especially when the latter would be empowered to probe charges against the Lokpal itself. According to them, the proposed Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill must take care of complaints against the higher judiciary. However, the civil society representatives on the committee (except Anna Hazare) feel that the JSA Bill could take care of the professional misconduct of the judges, while the Lokpal could investigate complaints of criminal misconduct against them. The differences on this are far from resolved.
Besides, the revised Jan Lokpal Bill has elicited intense criticism from some experts on some of its major provisions. The openness with which the committee considers these misgivings will determine how the Bill evolves.
LEGISLATION
History of deception
A.G. NOORANI
The 1985 Lokpal Bill destroyed the raison d'etre of the institution of an ombudsman, but all successive governments copied it.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
Jayaprakash Narayan. The Lokpal Bill was one of the three planks in the movement launched by him to eradicate corruption.
PUBLIC anger was understandably aroused over the gross delay by Parliament in the last 40 years to enact a Lokpal Bill and with the toothless one that the government sponsored. It is not widely known that the delay was aggravated by deception and fraud in 1985. It was, however, emulated by almost all governments that came later. One does not grudge any of those who rushed to Jantar Mantar to grab a few minutes' fame before TV cameras. Tinsel town, predictably, did not go unrepresented. If the cause had stirred them earlier, their disquiet remained their best preserved secret. One cannot expect Anna Hazare to study – or, for that matter, care for – the nitty-gritty of the law. Some of those who could have known ought to have spoken earlier loud and clear.
The Lokpal Bill was one of the three planks in the movement launched by Jayaprakash Narayan 40 years ago to eradicate corruption. The other two were electoral reforms, designed particularly to end the play of money power, and an effective anti-defection law. JP did not jump into the fray all of a sudden, still less did he resort to theatricals. He studied the problems, deliberated on solutions, and consulted a wide range of persons – lawyers, academics, activists, and so on. He consulted, in particular, the Lokayukta of Maharashtra, Justice S.P. Kotval, who was a former Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court.
JP expounded his views in a seminal article entitled “How to check the canker of corruption” in Everyman's, a weekly he founded, in the issue of September 1, 1973. It was edited by the late Ajit Bhattacharjea. He recalled the recommendation of the Santhanam Committee on Corruption that “[if] a formal allegation is made by any 10 members of Parliament or a legislature in writing addressed to the Prime Minister or Chief Minister, through the Speakers and Chairmen, the Prime Minister or Chief Minister should consider himself obliged, by convention, to refer the allegations for immediate investigations by a committee…”.
He recalled also the Tamil Nadu Public Men Inquiry Act, 1973. Its definitions of “public man” included the Chief Minister, but its definition of “criminal misconduct” was confined to bribery or illicit acquisitions by abuse of power. M.G. Ramachandran was a member of the Joint Select Committee that considered the Bill. But, of course, as we all know the law completely succeeded in banishing the evil of corruption from Tamil Nadu for all time to come. Corruption simply does not exist in Tamil Nadu today.
JP dwelt, next, on a document that had set the ball rolling. “The Administrative Reforms Committee had recommended in October 1966 the institution of the office of a Lokpal at the Centre and of Lokayukta in the States with wide statutory powers. For reasons that are not clear, the Government of India took over 18 months to make up its mind; and it was only on the 9th May 1968 that the Lokpal Bill was first introduced in Parliament. It was passed by the Lok Sabha in August 1969, but it made no further progress owing perhaps to the power struggle that was brewing within the Congress then and that burst out into the open in September 1969.…
“It was only after Indiraji's great electoral victory in 1971 that the Lokpal Bill was re-introduced in the new Parliament on 11th August 1971. Many spectacular Acts have been passed since the victory, such as the Constitutional Amendments Acts, but the Lokpal Bill, in its own way more important than the others, has been languishing until today. This and the other delays and omissions… suggest a deplorable lack of any sense of urgency on the part of the Government of India in dealing with a cancerous disease not only of the body politic but of the nation as a whole.”
Unlike some today, JP knew that no Lokpal could wield the magic wand. He wrote: “Let me not create the impression that the appointment of a Lokpal and Lokayuktas will in itself cure the disease of corruption so rampant among Ministers and civil servants. This is not the place to go into the question, but if the Lokpal Bill and the Maharashtra Ayukta Act, which is claimed to be patterned after the former, were carefully scrutinised, it would be discovered that the action of these vital officers is severely limited and hemmed in by restrictive provisions. It is in many ways a case of giving by one hand and taking away by the other… a fertile and well-known source of corruption at the State level, which embraces MLAs, local party functionaries and even Ministers, is the matter of transfers, postings and promotions of subordinate and higher government servants of all departments. Not only is this a source of corruption, but it also occupies most of the time of the Ministers.”
THE FACSIMILE OF an order issued by the Government of Kerala on the "setting up of an Interim Machinery to enquire into allegations against Public Men".
Anna Hazare, in contrast, asserts that the Lokpal Bill “will put the brakes on corruption in the country and help reduce the gap between the poor and the rich” ( The Hindu, April 17). It is a man of such colossal self-assurance and naivety who leads the movement. Kotval's first Annual Report, for the period from October 25, 1972, to October 24, 1973, lists the crippling restrictions on the Lokayukta's powers.
The interim report of the Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) on “Problems of Redress of Citizens' Grievances” initiated the discussion in the country. The ARC was headed by Morarji Desai. Its emphasis was on the redress of citizens' grievances for maladministration even if there was no breach of the law. This was based on Scandinavia's Ombudsman, who is essentially a parliamentary institution rather like India's Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). Speaking to the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in Jaipur on November 3, 1963, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said that while the ombudsman system fascinated him, he felt that in a big country like India, the introduction of such a system was beset with difficulties. But then, Nehru was never enamoured of inquiries into charges of corruption, anyway.
Paragraph 25 of the ARC's report said: “The following would be the main features of the institutions of Lokpal and Lokayukta: (a) They should be demonstrably independent and impartial. (b) Their investigations and proceedings should be conducted in private and should be informal in character. (c) Their appointment should, as far as possible, be non-political. (d) Their status should compare with the highest judicial functionaries in the country. (e) They should deal with matters in the discretionary field involving acts of injustice, corruption or favouritism. (f) Their proceedings should not be subject to judicial interference and they should have the maximum latitude and powers in obtaining information relevant to their duties. (g) They should not look forward to any benefit or pecuniary advantage from the executive government.”
Appended to the report was a Draft Bill which covered (clause 7) both, “injustice in consequence of maladministration” and favouritism and corruption.
The British Parliamentary Commission Act, 1967, covered maladministration alone [5.5(1)]. The first concrete step for the appointment of an ombudsman institution in India came with the introduction of the Lokpal Bill in the Lok Sabha on May 9, 1968, to implement the recommendations of the ARC. The Bill was referred to a joint committee and was later passed by the Lok Sabha (August 20, 1969). But while it was pending in the Rajya Sabha, the Lok Sabha was dissolved, and the Bill consequently lapsed. The Bill was again introduced in the Lok Sabha on August 11, 1971. It lapsed on the dissolution of that Lok Sabha, the fifth, in 1977.
A Bill on Lokpal was introduced in the sixth Lok Sabha on July 28, 1977. The report of the joint committee, incorporating certain amendments in the Bill, was placed before the Lok Sabha on January 20, 1978. However, before the Bill could be adopted by Parliament, the Lok Sabha was dissolved, in July 1979, and the Bill lapsed. None was considered by the seventh Lok Sabha elected in 1980.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
THE LOKPAL BILL, first introduced in Parliament in 1968, was reintroduced after Indira Gandhi came to power in 1971. The Bill came up during the tenures of a succession of Prime Ministers, but most governments that came after Rajiv Gandhi's retained the clause that made the intended legislation a caricature of the institution of ombudsman. Here (from left), Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Rajiv Gandhi.
The format of the two Bills of 1971 and 1977 was abandoned and deformities were injected into the Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha on August 26, 1985. It was withdrawn on November 15, 1988, on specious grounds after the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) which debated it had been sent on a merry-go-round in 23 States at government expense “from Shimla to Trivandrum and from Panjim to Port Blair”. But it was this deformed Bill that was adopted as a model by all successive governments with little noise from any of the ones who made noises at Jantar Mantar.
To the Bills of 1971 (based on the first Bill of 1968) and of 1977 we must now turn. The 1971 Bill empowered the Lokpal to inquire into both a “grievance” and an “allegation”. These terms are of crucial importance, for they constitute the raison d'etre of the Lokpal.
A grievance was defined as a claim by a person that he had “sustained injustice or undue hardship in consequences of maladministration”. The term “allegation” was defined to cover not only “corruption or lack of integrity” but also abuse of public office to secure gain or to cause harm or hardship to another. It included, no less, action motivated by “improper” motives. In sum, the Lokpal was empowered to investigate a large variety of improper acts even if they did not constitute corruption under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947.
The 1977 Bill altogether omitted from its scope grievances about maladministration since a separate machinery was contemplated to entertain such complaints. However, it widened the area of the Lokpal's jurisdiction in respect of charges of improper behaviour by defining “misconduct” in the widest terms. To the provisions of the 1971 Bill, in respect of abuse of office and conduct actuated by improper motives, it added two more ingredients which bear recalling.
They are: “if he (the public man) directly or indirectly allows his position as such public man to be taken advantage of by any of his relatives or associates and by reason thereof such relative or associate secures any undue gain or favour to himself or to another person or causes harm or undue hardship to another person (Explanation: for the purposes of this clause, associate in relation to a public man includes any person in whom such public man is interested); or if he fails to act in any case otherwise than in accordance with the norms of integrity and conduct which ought to be followed by the class of public men to which he belongs.” The 1971 Bill excluded the Prime Minister; the 1977 Bill included him.
The 1977 Bill was moved by the Janata Party government, in which Shanti Bhushan was the Law Minister. It was sponsored by Home Minister Charan Singh, who had, as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, got promulgated on October 21, 1967, the Uttar Pradesh Public Men Inquiries Ordinance. It covered “any imputation of misconduct” against a serving or past Minister, legislator and members of local bodies and so on. Under it, the government would have no power to prevent an investigation or inquiry from being held if required by any person; it would have no hand in the selection of judges; and the investigating agency would be completely insulated from the influence of the government.
The scheme provided that any person could make a complaint of misconduct to the Governor against a present or past holder of any of the offices specified. He would be required to file an affidavit in support of the complaint and deposit a security of Rs.1,000. The Governor would then request the Chief Justice of the High Court to nominate a judge to conduct a preliminary scrutiny and eventually order a fuller one by a commission of inquiry. The judge could even order the Chief Investigator to prosecute the offender.
No Bill in recent history has been so badly mauled by the JPC as the Lokpal Bill of 1977 was. It was headed by Shyam Nandan Mishra, who was to win undying fame later as Foreign Minister. The Bill had defined “misconduct” to include, besides corruption, failure to act in any case otherwise than in accordance with the norms of integrity and conduct which ought to be followed by the class of public men to which he belongs”. The JPC considered this to be “too wide and is, therefore, likely to be amenable to different interpretations”.
This was disingenuous. Section 45 of the Army Act of 1950 makes it an offence for any officer, Junior Commissioned Officer or Warrant Officer, to behave “in a manner unbecoming his position and the character expected of him”. Section 35 of the Advocates Act, 1961, renders an advocate liable to disciplinary proceedings if he has been guilty of “professional or other misconduct”. Also, the JPC felt that since MPs “do not exercise any executive powers they should not be treated at par with other public men exercising such powers”. Therefore, the concept of “misconduct” for them should be different. The report had notes of strong dissent. The Bill lapsed on the dissolution of the Lok Sabha in July 1979. Indira Gandhi had no use for any such law when she returned to power in January 1980. Rajiv Gandhi had a go at it. The Bill that his Law Minister, A.K. Sen, a man for all seasons, moved in the Lok Sabha on August 26, 1985, departed radically from the models of 1971 and 1977 and set up, in effect, a parallel quasi-judicial body with its remit confined solely to the criminal offence of bribery under the Indian Penal Code or the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
Here (from left) V.P. Singh, H.D. Deve Gowda and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha by V.P. Singh's government on December 29, 1989, was an exact replica of the Rajiv Gandhi government's Bill except for two changes. The Prime Minister was explicitly covered, and reference to the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1947 was replaced by reference to the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
This destroys the raison d'etre of the institution. It is designed to help people who have been badly treated even if no law is breached. It is meant also to cover abuse of power and misdemeanours or misconduct even if they do not constitute offences under the law. Since courts exist to try offences under the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988, why set up a parallel body?
The sinister purpose behind this appeared in clause 24 of the 1985 Bill, which read thus: “Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law for the time being in force, where on an inquiry in respect of a complaint against a public functionary the Lokpal or the competent authority has held that any allegations made in the complaint have not been proved or substantiated, no prosecution shall lie on any complaint, report, information or otherwise and no court shall take cognisance of any offence on the basis of the same or substantially the same allegations as in the complaint.” In other words, a Lokpal probe, skilfully initiated, would bar prosecution in the courts altogether.
No such provision existed either in the 1971 Bill or in the 1977 Bill. However, it was faithfully copied in the V.P. Singh government Bill as clause 23.
The 1971 Bill covered both grievances in respect of maladministration and allegations of misconduct. The 1977 Bill was confined to “misconduct” alone, albeit defined in modest terms to cover abuse of power and improprieties as well as corruption.
The 1985 Bill omitted grievances of maladministration as well as charges of misconduct and restricted the jurisdiction severely to matters which are for the courts to decide – criminal offences as defined in the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act.
Having thus restricted the Lokpal's jurisdiction, the 1985 Bill sought to exclude the criminal courts' jurisdiction as well. And not only if the Lokpal exonerated the Minister but also if, disagreeing with his findings, the Prime Minister chose to exonerate his colleague. For, clause 24 referred to the results of an inquiry by “the Lokpal or the competent authority”. And who was this “competent authority”? Clause 2(a) said it “means the Prime Minister”. The whole thing was a fraud.
Nonetheless, each of the succeeding governments, headed by V.P. Singh, H.D. Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sponsored and supported in Parliament a Lokpal Bill which it very well knew to be a caricature of the institution of the ombudsman as it is known in the world over and as was known in this country before 1985. A monstrous fraud was perpetrated on the country in 1985 and perpetuated thereafter.
An ombudsman does not preside over a parallel judiciary to try offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. The courts of law take care of that. To confer such a jurisdiction on the Lokpal and oust that of the courts is to confer immunity from the law to men in high office. For, unlike the courts, the Lokpal has no power to award punishment at all. It can do no more than report to a designated superior of the delinquent – the Prime Minister vis-a-vis Union Ministers. Worse still is to confine its jurisdiction to trial of offences and exclude from it just those kinds of cases for which the institution of an ombudsman has been devised and set up for decades the world over; namely, acts which do not constitute offences in law and for which the courts can provide no redress. Maladministration and abuse of power are classic instances of such acts.
The Bills of September 10, 1996 (H.D. Deve Gowda regime), of July 23, 1998 (A.B. Vajpayee regime), and of July 9, 2001 (A.B. Vajpayee regime) all studiously copied Rajiv Gandhi's (or A.K. Sen's) Bill of 1985 and confined the Lokpal's remit to corruption as defined in the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988. In each case an anaemic Lokpal could do no more than report to the Prime Minister, while ousting the court's jurisdiction effectively by a parallel judiciary of sorts. L.K. Advani, needless to mention, was Deputy Prime Minister in the Vajpayee government.
In glaring contrast, a mere executive order of December 20, 1969, made by the Government of Kerala to set up “an Interim Machinery to enquire into allegations against public men” proved effective. It defined “misconduct” to include any act which is actuated “by improper or corrupt motives”. Judges who sat on commissions of inquiry defined the term “azhimathi” to cover a whole range of improprieties. (The Karnataka Lokayukta Act, 1984, also included in the Lokayukta's remit the failure “to act in accordance with the norms of integrity and conduct which ought to be followed by public servants of the class to which he belongs” [S 2 (2) (d)].
Kerala's Order of 1969 was superseded by the Kerala Public Men (Prevention of Corruption) Act, 1983, the Kerala Public Men's Corruption (Investigations and Inquiries) Act 1987, and finally by the Kerala Lok Ayukta Act, 1999. It covers both lack of integrity and “injustice”. This Lokayukta has the power to order public servants, including the Chief Minister, to vacate office (Section 11) and to initiate a prosecution (Section 12).
If a Lokpal is to be worthwhile, the selected person must (1) have jurisdiction in respect of both maladministration and misconduct; (2) be appointed by a procedure that excludes executive influence and control. The Chief Justice of India and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha must be on the selection panel along with the Prime Minister; (3) be a former judge of the Supreme Court or a former Chief Justice of a High Court; (4) have jurisdiction over a wide range of “public men” – the Prime Minister, MPs, senior civil servants, heads of public corporations and national universities, and so on; (5) have an independent investigating agency of his own and not be dependent on the Central Bureau of Investigation; (6) have the power to launch prosecutions himself and order vacating of office; (7) be easily accessible; (8) have a juridical personality. It would be best to amend the Constitution to give him constitutional status comparable to that of the CAG.
LEGISLATION
Democratic war
V.R. KRISHNA IYER
The Lokpal must be an independent body accessible to every citizen on any matter of corruption affecting the purity of public life.
IT is well known that corruption is widely prevalent in India. Time and again, acts of corruption have been brought into the public domain. They violate human rights, undermine the rule of law, distort the development process and disempower the Indian state. While there are laws against corruption in India, there exists a wide gap between the law in the books and the law in practice. Therefore, a comprehensive law providing for forfeiture of illegally acquired property, in India and abroad, of public servants is the need of the hour.
The Jan Lokpal should have independence in its functioning. It must have the power to inquire into, decide and forfeit illegally acquired property of public servants, their relatives, associates, name lenders, and so on. For discharging the onerous duties of the Lokpal under the said enactment, that office must be given wide powers, including the power to call even from Swiss banks details of funds deposited by public servants. Power should be conferred on it to attach and confiscate movable and immovable property even before a final decision is taken. There must also be a provision stating that all transfers of illegally acquired property shall be void if such transfer is effected after the issue of notice of forfeiture. The accused public servant should be burdened with the duty to prove that all the assets he possessed are legally acquired wealth.
The Lokpal should be headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court with impeccable integrity. There has to be a provision for appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Lokpal will be an independent body accessible to every citizen on any matter of corruption affecting the purity of public life and will act only according to its chaste conscience. The members of the Lokpal body can act without fear or favour or affection or ill will of anyone in India, be he ever so high. Its jurisdiction will extend to investigate the proceedings of the Prime Minister, the President or other public authority or public body functioning in a manner affecting public interest, public life or work. The Lokpal cannot be changed by the government and can be replaced only by resignation or a unanimous decision of Parliament, Prime Minister and President.
Such a body will be supreme in its operations and its guidance will extend over the executive, legislative and judicative wings of government. The Lokpal and other members of the body will be selected by an independent authority in India and they can be prosecuted or subject to any court's jurisdiction only on a specific motion for that purpose in Parliament or the State Assemblies and approved by a two-thirds majority of each House.
On the other hand, the Lokpal, acting on the basis of a majority, can quash any decision or order of any authority that is found delinquent after a full and fair inquiry.
India has seen many avatars of corruption – the Bofors scandal, the fodder scam, the 2G spectrum allocation scam, the swindle in the Commonwealth Games preparations, and so on. The people of the country strongly believe that toothless pieces of legislation made by legislatures are the reason why corrupt people go scot free. The people also seem to have lost belief in the judicial system, which has been able to bring to justice only a few of the corruption-accused and that too after a minimum of 10 years.
The people have realised that their elected representatives do not do any legislative work and have started pointing to acts of corruption through the strong media. The people's struggle for independence from the British has now turned into a democratic war against corruption.
How can one expect a Prime Minister who does not exercise his franchise to wipe the tears of the aam aadmi who is suffering on account of rampant corruption? Development is now seen to be synonymous with corruption. To make the legislature do its duty, the people, who believe in a system of good governance, have turned to weapons of non-violence, such as satyagraha. For development to happen, India first needs independence from corruption.
Power is tempered with accountability; sans investigation, power is tower. This principle has been accepted in the Bill now introduced. But the supreme functions vested in this new instrument must be free from state control. Or else it becomes another tool of torture in the hands of the executive – a remedy aggravating the malady.
Prashant Bhushan has made a sound critique of the Bill. The larger the power, the more responsible is the accountability, lest the instrument destroy democracy. Today, if the judiciary delivers an authoritarian judgment, there is none to correct it nor is it accountable to any agency or authority. This makes judges a body of dictators.
The appointment of judges and the critique and correction of their fiats are vital. What is provided on this behalf is insignificant. Besides, access to correct the blunders of this arbitrary body, to make its selection democratic and transparent and its performance subject to a democratic organ has not been given due consideration.
Under the guise of control over judicial and other instruments, we cannot create a royalty above all. That is, the choice is between fascism and a self-created authoritarian Grand Jury. The verdict of the jury for misbehaviour of the judiciary and executive authority will make the whole system self-contained and democratic without totalitarian bias.
Judges are not jungle creatures but maintain standards of conduct. During the days when J.S. Verma was the Chief Justice of India, an informal code of conduct was evolved, which commanded the concurrence of the judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court. This code of conduct, to have a binding force, must be incorporated in the Constitution itself and made enforceable. Thus, the standards of conduct of judges abhor corruption, misuse of power or other oblique behaviour. They can be enforced by the Grand Jury. The delinquent conduct not only of the judiciary but of all public authorities must be dealt with by the Grand Jury.
This steering body with final authority must be selected by a commission for appointment and performance. No longer confined to the judiciary but including every instrument that enjoys public power, the Grand Jury will sit for a period of 10 years and can be removed for misconduct only by the paramount power of the two Houses of Parliament. These are matters that have to be refined by the draftsman and presented to Parliament. These are rough ideas and have to be debated by Parliament and approved with a two-thirds majority. The whole process is cumbersome, but when complicated problems face a nation, the process has to be complicated. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum (Let justice be done though the heavens fall).
Two fundamentals
Two fundamentals that make the Grand Jury itself accountable may be indicated briefly. Public power becomes a terror unless it is accountable to the nation and makes itself accessible to the littlest Indian who has a grievance of corruption or improper behaviour justifying an inquiry into the conduct of the judges implicated. In principle, access to every citizen and accountability to ‘We, the People of India' is accepted in the Lokpal Bill. I have suggested the creation of a basic authority with supreme powers. If both Houses of Parliament, each with two-thirds majority, have the power to appoint and to dismiss, surely it will be a grand wonder of paramount power.
Modifications and refinements may be necessary in what I have said. A national debate may bring out flaws, and faults and failings may be disclosed and corrected at the final stage. Egregious errors cannot be avoided in advance. Only when the nation debates the issue latent errors will become patent.
It is my conviction, as I have repeated several times, that an appointments commission should be set up with transparency and opportunity for the public to speak up. When this article gains national circulation, new thought will surface and correction may still be possible. A performance commission also may be necessary. Perhaps, it is good to remember Edmund Burke's observations: “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”
The Grand Jury I envision will be a powerful body, itself accountable to the people through Parliament, and its processes will be transparent and progressive. Glasnost and Perestroika are principles that apply to all instruments where state power is vested. After all, the greater the power, the more dangerous is the abuse. It is a fact that the former Chief Justice of India has been accused of corruption, and yet the Prime Minister has kept silent. While I have demanded power in Parliament even against the Grand Jury, that is because “in all forms of government people is the legislator”.
The former Chief Justice of India with grave aspersions against him is silent and the Prime Minister and Parliament are keeping guilty silence. But an event of corruption has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent. Dear Prime Minister, still I hold you as a statesman and straightforward repository of power. Parliamentarians, remember your duty to the nation. Speak up against corruption. Silence is grave guilt where it is your duty to speak on the side of the nation.
Dear Prime Minister, I still have great hopes from you. Act now and make the judiciary a credible instrument beyond suspicion, beyond delinquency. Manmohan Singh, you are the guardian of democracy for the nonce. Therefore, I cite Swami Vivekananda to impress upon you the basics of democracy and godism:
“Feel, my children, feel; feel for the poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden; feel till the heart stops and the brain reels and you think you will go mad…. I do not believe in a God, who cannot give me bread here, giving me eternal bliss in heaven!”
COLUMN
Public or private?
BHASKAR GHOSE
In the private vs public debate, the joint family system may have lessons to offer in terms of subordinating personal interests to those of the larger unit.
SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
A DELHI TRANSPORT Corporation bus during rush hour. A file picture.
IN Delhi, as in some of the other cities in the country, the bus service is run, at least in part, by the public authorities. Until about a couple of years ago, the image of the Delhi bus was one of a decrepit, scarred, noisy vehicle, which more often than not was found stationary on the side of a road; usually it was festooned with leaves from a nearby tree, the generally accepted sign – for inexplicable reasons – that it was out of action. Inside the buses that moved, getting to sit was an option one rarely got. It was usual to hang on to the overhead rail, if one could get to it, or to the back of a seat; occasionally, one did get to sit.
Today that image has begun to change. There are still some of the old, rickety, scratched buses – actually built locally on truck chassis – on the roads, but one sees more and more of the low, sleek green or red buses that came in ones and twos before the Commonwealth Games, now seen in large numbers. These buses are easy to get into and out of, and while they can be crowded, one has the option of waiting for the next bus.
And there is, now, the Metro, sleek, air-conditioned, smooth and usually punctual – of late, there have been several instances of trains running late for whatever reason.
Private buses still exist, though. These horrors are the remaining Blue Line buses, which have in their time killed, maimed or otherwise injured thousands of people in their frenzied efforts to pack in as many passengers as possible and put in as many trips as they can even if that meant driving at murderously high speeds. They were, and are, dented, scratched, hard to climb into and dangerous to get off, given their steep and often skewed steps. True mongrels of the streets – flea-bitten, mange-ridden and aggressive.
Behind the difference between the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) buses and the Blue Line buses are two entirely different policies that, quite literally, drive them. One seeks to provide, like the Metro, a service to citizens, enabling them to move around the city; perhaps, the Metro has an added motivation, that of earning enough to be able to repay the enormous amounts spent on setting up the system. The Blue Line owners seek to earn as much as they can from bus services they see as an investment of money, with as little spent on overheads as possible. Which is why they are being driven off the streets, which is why they are going to court to stay on the streets. It is simply a matter of being able to earn money.
The new airport in Delhi has been set up with exactly the same intentions: to earn as much money as possible, not just to repay the amounts spent on constructing it but to get the owners handsome profits. But consider what they give the travellers who use it – thousands and thousands of them – both domestic and international: a world-class airport that ranks among the top four in Asia and among the best in the world, toilets that are sparkling clean, clean wide seats in the waiting lounge, spacious passages and corridors up to the departure gates with “travelators” to speed one onwards to those gates and to bring one to the baggage claim areas on the way in.
Compare that with the mess that is the airport in Chennai. It is being built, or rebuilt, forever from the looks of it. For years now, that airport has been under construction. The pace of rebuilding is not just slow but trance-like. Occasionally, one can see a worker dreamily moving something from one point to another. Meanwhile, passengers, especially those arriving with families, have to trudge down an excessively long passage, usually dirty, with splotches of mud on the shiny new surfaces that no one cares to remove, to emerge at a narrow walkway casually covered from the burning sun or from rain, to a chaotic mess of cars and buses which ensures that your arrival in the usually restful city of Chennai begins with a traumatic experience – part physical effort, part exasperation and anger, and part sheer terror.
The Delhi airport has been built in just about three years by a private consortium; the Chennai airport is being rebuilt by the Airports Authority of India (AAI), a public sector organisation. One would logically assume that the motivation behind rebuilding Chennai airport is to provide travellers with better amenities and a less stressful way of starting or ending a journey, especially now that more and more people are travelling by air. That motivation, as in other public sector organisations, is lost in the private ambitions of its officials to get higher posts, higher pay, more amenities, and better perquisites. In fact, they are the ones who would stop work and subject ordinary travellers to frightful ordeals just to get some personal comforts.
How, one wonders, can these two opposed mindsets coexist? There are publicly owned and operated services, such as the bus service and Metro in Delhi, that are modern, practical and provide a service in the true sense of the term, and there are the others such as the AAI, whose messy, disgracefully slow rebuilding of Chennai airport is done without a thought to the ordeal of passengers, passengers who pay for service and do not get anything out of the goodness of the AAI's heart.
Then there are the rapacious, privately owned Blue Line services in Delhi whose private owners are concerned only with what they can make, completely indifferent to the travails of the passengers and to the lives of those they kill while keeping to the schedules that bring in their money.
Two kinds of thinking
Clearly two kinds of thinking work here; or perhaps one should call them ideologies, except that the word has been corrupted by being used in ways it never should have been. In one, private persons form organisations to provide people some kind of service – one has talked about transport, but it could just as easily apply to medical services – and ensure that, in exchange for money, people get service that is fully worth that money. This sits beside the ideology of taking money for a service and then providing a dreadful parody of the service.
On the other side, there are public authorities who believe taxpayers' money must be used to provide people with services that are truly worthwhile, and there are other public authorities who could not care less just so long as they get their salaries and are able to lobby for better postings and also, in some cases, make some money on the side.
Finally, it is a question of people, and while that is obvious enough, what is surprising is that even in the fractious and composite society such as the one we live in, the notion of a society nears a breaking point, where it shatters into individuals looking out for themselves. It is not the systematic destruction of a collective self-esteem that we often blame the former colonial rulers for; this present generation has grown up many years after the colonial rulers left. One can only assume that it is a consequence to the break-up of something that was once a cornerstone of Indian society in all parts of the country, the joint family.
It had its drawbacks, true enough, and many have been the Western-educated scholars and experts and analysts and policymakers who have denigrated it as being antiquated, repressive and everything else that is not postmodern and futuristic. But it was a unit that held persons together, that conditioned persons to subordinate personal interests to those of the larger unit. The notion of a “society” then became something tangible and enduring. And in such a situation personal greed and acquisitiveness found place only rarely and usually under extraordinary circumstances.
But we have let that crumble away; we have placed great emphasis on the “nuclear” family, which is on ourselves, or personal interests. Once that becomes prime, the concept of suddenly subordinating all that to the good of a separate entity called the “public” is alien, inevitably. If we are able to pay the price, then we deserve what we have now and must confront and live with the AAIs and their ways, with the Blue Line services and, also in some cases, with the benefits – Delhi's privately run airport and publicly run bus and Metro services. And we will see “society” develop in that pear-shaped fashion. We deserve no less, nor any better.
Congress, BJP leaders held in U.P.
Atiq Khan
Ban orders re-imposed at Bhatta-Parsaul
LUCKNOW: Several Congress and BJP leaders were arrested in western Uttar Pradesh as the protest against the recent violence in Bhatta-Parsaul villages in Greater Noida intensified on Thursday. Rajnath Singh and Arun Jaitley of the BJP were among them.
Many Congress workers were injured when the police lathicharged them at several places, including in Lucknow, to foil their attempts to block traffic to condemn the arrest on Wednesday night of party general secretary Rahul Gandhi at Bhatta-Parsaul.
The Amethi MP was released at around 1.30 a.m. on Thursday.Lok Janshakti Party leader Ram Vilas Paswan, social activist Medha Patkar and Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda's son Dipankar Hooda were among the other leaders arrested as they tried to proceed to Bhatta-Parsaul, where ban orders under Section 144 were re-imposed. Bhartiya Kisan Union leader Mahendra Singh Tikait was detained in Meerut.
The former BJP president and Ghaziabad MP, Rajnath Singh, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley and senior leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi were arrested in Ghaziabad after they staged a dharna at Ambedkar Park. They were released later.
The BJP will stage a dharna in all district headquarters on Friday to protest the alleged exploitation of farmers by the Mayawati regime, and to condemn corruption, party vice-president Vinay Katiyar said at a press conference here.
Special Director-General of Police (Law and Order) Brij Lal said Ms. Patkar had earlier visited Bhatta-Parsaul and was stopped when she tried to visit the villages again on Thursday. Mr. Hooda, bound for Bhatta-Parsaul from Palwal in a cavalcade of 40 vehicles, was stopped on the Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida)-Aligarh border and asked to return. About 300 Bhartiya Kisan Union workers held a meeting at Achcheyja near the Dankaur railway station in Greater Noida. About half-a-dozen of them went to Bhatta-Parsaul and then returned.
A Home Department spokesman said life was not disrupted as a result of the Congress' ‘chakka jam.' Home Secretary Deepak Kumar said 135 Congress workers, MPs and MLAs were arrested on Thursday. Congress MP from Haryana Virendra Singh and MLA from Delhi Anil Chaudhary were arrested in Ghaziabad, Congress Legislature Party leader Pramod Tiwari in Allahabad, Sanjay Singh, MP, in Sultanpur and legislators Naseeb Pathan and Vinod Chaturvedi in Mainpuri.
In Lucknow, where the Congressmen staged a dharna near the Chief Minister's office, Pradesh Congress Committee president Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Lucknow West MLA Shyam Kishore Shukla and other workers were arrested. The police used force to disperse the agitating workers.
The arrest of Mr. Gandhi came after hectic parleys between Chief Minister Mayawati and her officials and some anxious moments in government circles.
This was evident from the fact that a press conference was addressed by Cabinet Secretary Shashank Shekhar Singh, on behalf of the Chief Minister, midnight on Wednesday after Mr. Gandhi was arrested.
Mr. Singh said the Congress had sought permission for a public meeting at Bhatta-Parsaul for Thursday, but the district administration re-imposed the ban orders in “public interest.”
Supreme Court: why was charge sheet filed against Hasan Ali without scrutiny?
J. Venkatesan
Also why weren't we informed in advance of its filing, judge asks ED
“When you have constituted HLC, you don't place charge sheet before it. We are surprised”
Charge sheet filed before special judge will be subject to further directions of Supreme Court
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has pulled up the Enforcement Directorate for filing a charge sheet against the Pune-based stud farm owner, Hasan Ali Khan, in a money laundering case without placing it for scrutiny by the High-Level Committee (HLC) constituted by the Centre.
A Bench of Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S. S. Nijjar faulted the ED also for not informing the court in advance of the filing of the charge sheet in its May 4 status report. Taking a serious view of this lapse, the Bench said any order passed by the special judge, Mumbai, on the charge sheet would be subject to its further directions.
On May 4, the Bench reserved verdict on the petitions filed by the former Union Law Minister, Ram Jethmalani, and others on setting up of a special investigation team (SIT) to track black money cases, even as it was argued that the HLC, set up on April 22, could not be effective.
On Thursday, when Solicitor-General (SG) Gopal Subramaniam gave his written submissions in the case, Justice Reddy asked whether the charge sheet filed against Hasan Ali on May 6 was placed before the HLC. When the SG replied, “certain transactions remained incomplete and that was why it was not mentioned” Justice Reddy said: “We must express our reservations over this. Tell us whether this charge sheet was scrutinised by the HLC appointed by your own government.”
Surprising
When the SG answered in the negative, Justice Reddy said: “We thought that somebody should look into the charge sheet. You don't want us to have a mechanism. When you have constituted a HLC, you don't place the charge sheet before it. We are surprised. You have suggested a mechanism but yet the charge sheet has not been placed before the HLC.”
Justice Reddy told the SG: “We heard the matter on May 4, but there was no mention in the status report that the charge sheet was ready and it was to be filed on May 6. [However] it is obvious that you had the charge sheet on May 4 and chose not to inform us. Why it was not mentioned that the charge sheet is to be filed? Why is it that we were not informed that investigation is complete against Hasan Ali?”
Senior counsel Anil Divan, appearing for the petitioners, said the HLC was not even aware of the charge sheet being filed, and urged the court to suspend the officer concerned for not placing it before the committee.
The SG assured the court that the charge sheet would be scrutinised by the HLC before further orders were passed by the special judge.
Mr. Divan expressed an apprehension that the special judge might not take cognisance of this charge sheet if it was inadequate and sought a direction to restrain him from taking further steps on the charge sheet.
In a brief order, the Bench clarified that the charge sheet filed before the special judge would be subject to further directions issued by this court. The Bench directed that a copy of the 900-page charge sheet be supplied to the petitioner's counsel in 10 days.
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 13, 2011
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All set for counting of votes today
Special Correspondent
Elaborate arrangements made for the process which will decide the fate of 6,679 candidates
NEW DELHI: The Election Commission has made elaborate arrangements for the counting of votes polled in the Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, West Bengal and the Union Territory of Puducherry, and in the by-elections held for the Kadapa Lok Sabha and Pulivendula Assembly constituencies in Andhra Pradesh. The polls were held between April 4 and May 10.
Within the first few hours of counting, the trend is likely to be out. The process, scheduled to begin at 8 a.m. before the watchful eyes of the Commission's 701 observers and agents of the political parties, will decide the fate of 6,679 candidates who contested in the mini-general elections. About 14.16 crore voters (nearly 20 per cent of the total electors in India) participated in the elections in the four States and Puducherry.
Officials have to count votes recorded on 2,00,157 electronic voting machines. First, they will take up counting of postal ballots cast by services voters.
Commission sources said altogether 43,982 counting personnel will be involved in the job. To ensure that everything goes well and peacefully, a huge posse of security personnel, including 177 companies of the Central police forces, has been deployed.
Altogether, there will be 839 counting halls at 294 places in the four States and Puducherry.
Websites
To enable people to know the trends and results, the Commission will upload the particulars after 8 a.m. on the websites : eciresults.nic.in and eciresults.ap.nic.in
West Bengal has a 294-member Assembly, Tamil Nadu 234, Kerala 140, Assam 126, while in Puducherry the Assembly's strength is 30.
The entire counting process will be videographed and also recorded through web cameras and transmitted to the headquarters online to ensure transparency.
Two additional micro-observers will be deployed along with the Observer. While one micro-observer will watch data entry in the computer, the other will tally the hardcopy (printout) from the computer with the original 17C part B received from the counting table.
The Observer and the Returning Officer have been asked to sign the compiled figures after verification. The results will be declared only after clearance from the Commission.
Allahabad High Court sets aside acquisition of land
ALLAHABAD: In a major embarrassment to the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday set aside notifications issued for acquisition of more than 100 hectares of land in Gautam Buddh Nagar district for “planned industrial development” in Greater Noida.
A Division Bench comprising Justice Sunil Ambawani and Justice Kashi Nath Pandey, while allowing several writ petitions filed by residents of Shahberi village in the district, said the entire action of acquiring the land was a “colourable exercise of powers” and ordered return of the land to their owners.
The Bench set aside two notifications issued by the State government on 10.06.2009 and 09.11.2009 for acquiring the land.
In the notification dated 10.06.2009, the State government had proposed “to acquire a total area of 156.93 hectares of land in the village,” while the one dated 09.11.2009, published in the official gazette, had “declared the acquisition of land.”
“The Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority [GNOIDA] was fully aware and was planning to use the land in village Shahberi and neighbouring villages for multi-storey housing complexes to be developed by builders on relaxed conditions.”
The court noted with concern “that on one hand, a request was made for acquiring the land for public purpose for planned industrial development, and on the other hand, a few days before the proposals were put up before the State government for issuing notification [dated 09.11.2009]... the GNOIDA, without informing the State government, held the Board's meeting for converting the land use for residential purposes to lease off the land to builders for housing complexes for earning profits.”
“The land is proposed to be acquired at the rate of about Rs.850 a square metre and to be given, within a month, to the builders at Rs.10,000 per square metre, and that too on payment of 5 per cent of the price, on allotment,” the court said.
Quashing the notifications issued by the government and “all consequential actions taken by GNOIDA,” the court ordered “the respondents will hand over the possession of the land back to the land owners.” — PTI
SIT member seeks protection against departmental action
Manas Dasgupta
He is investigating Ishrat encounter case
AHMEDABAD: Gujarat cadre IPS officer Satish Verma, who is a member of the Special Investigation Team probing the alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan, on Wednesday sought court protection against any likely action against him by the State government.
The officer, who allegedly delayed the arrest of a man accused in an old case — the Porbandar RDX case — and apprehensive of a possible departmental inquiry following a recent order of the Gujarat High Court, moved the plea for a review and recall of its earlier order.
Mr. Verma, an officer of the rank of Inspector-General of Police, expressed the apprehension that the government might use the High Court order as a pretext for acting against him. For, he was investigating the high-profile Ishrat case as part of the High Court-appointed SIT. He earlier sought court permission to register a fresh first information report on the ground that the police encounter could possibly be a fake one.
Even as Mr. Verma was investigating the Ishrat case, the Porbandar RDX case was being pursued against him. He and two others — another IPS officer Atul Karval and inspector Sukhdevsinh Zala — were facing allegations that they had let off Sattar Maulana, a key accused in the Gosabara arms landing case, when they were posted in Porbandar in 1993. Part of the RDX consignment, which landed at Gosabara near Porbandar, was later used in the Mumbai serial blasts in 1993.
On April 28, this year, a Bench of Chief Justice S. J. Mukhopadhyaya and Justice J. B. Pardiwala ordered the government to act on the report prepared by Pramod Kumar, Additional Director-General of Police (administration), on the roles of the three police officials in the Gosabara case.
The government entrusted the task to Mr. Kumar following a Public Interest Litigation petition filed by practising advocate Yatin Oza, who is also a former BJP MLA, seeking action against the three officers as they allegedly acted against national integrity and security.
In the plea filed on Wednesday, Mr. Verma urged the court to restrain the government from taking any decision prejudicial to him. He blamed the government also for changing its stand on the issue. The petitioner pointed out that when Mr. Oza filed the plea before the High Court in 2005 and subsequently an appeal in the Supreme Court, the government took a clear stand that the petition was filed not in the public interest but of “personal vengeance.” However, now the state government was silent on the issue.
The petition is likely to come up for hearing on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Balwant Singh tendered an “unconditional and unreserved apology” to the court for delay in transferring three police officers who it felt could have influenced the Ishrat case investigation.
A Division Bench of Justices Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari earlier asked him to explain why contempt proceedings should not be initiated against him for not complying with the court order promptly in transferring the three officers, who could have tried to intimidate witnesses.
In his affidavit, Mr. Singh said the delay was mainly because the Home Minister was busy with the budget session of the Assembly as well as his and the Minister's tight schedules in making security arrangements for the World Cup cricket matches held in the State.
Allahabad High Court sets aside acquisition of land
ALLAHABAD: In a major embarrassment to the Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday set aside notifications issued for acquisition of more than 100 hectares of land in Gautam Buddh Nagar district for “planned industrial development” in Greater Noida.
A Division Bench comprising Justice Sunil Ambawani and Justice Kashi Nath Pandey, while allowing several writ petitions filed by residents of Shahberi village in the district, said the entire action of acquiring the land was a “colourable exercise of powers” and ordered return of the land to their owners.
The Bench set aside two notifications issued by the State government on 10.06.2009 and 09.11.2009 for acquiring the land.
In the notification dated 10.06.2009, the State government had proposed “to acquire a total area of 156.93 hectares of land in the village,” while the one dated 09.11.2009, published in the official gazette, had “declared the acquisition of land.”
“The Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority [GNOIDA] was fully aware and was planning to use the land in village Shahberi and neighbouring villages for multi-storey housing complexes to be developed by builders on relaxed conditions.”
The court noted with concern “that on one hand, a request was made for acquiring the land for public purpose for planned industrial development, and on the other hand, a few days before the proposals were put up before the State government for issuing notification [dated 09.11.2009]... the GNOIDA, without informing the State government, held the Board's meeting for converting the land use for residential purposes to lease off the land to builders for housing complexes for earning profits.”
“The land is proposed to be acquired at the rate of about Rs.850 a square metre and to be given, within a month, to the builders at Rs.10,000 per square metre, and that too on payment of 5 per cent of the price, on allotment,” the court said.
Quashing the notifications issued by the government and “all consequential actions taken by GNOIDA,” the court ordered “the respondents will hand over the possession of the land back to the land owners.” — PTI
It was my voice, but the CDs were doctored, says Amar Singh
Gargi Parsai
NEW DELHI: While claiming that the CDs containing his purported phone conversations with politicians, bureaucrats, Bollywood stars and corporate bigwigs were “doctored,” the former Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh, however, said he would not initiate any action against Reliance Infocomm — service provider — which tapped his phone for a year on the basis of a forged authorisation letter.
“Why should I act against the phone company? They do not have the wherewithal to investigate. It is the CBI and the government which can investigate. The apex court should have directed the CBI and law enforcing agencies to find out at whose behest the authorisation letter was written,” Mr. Singh said in his reaction to Wednesday's court order lifting the interim gag order on making the tapes public.
The Supreme Court had said Mr. Singh, if so advised, might initiate proceedings against the service provider. Observing that he had “prevaricated” and had not come with “clean hands,” it gave him no relief on his prayer for a judicial enquiry into the matter and guidelines on broadcasting or publishing such conversations.
Addressing a press conference here on Thursday, Mr. Singh said although his voice in the CDs was genuine, “like the plea taken by [lawyers] Shanti [Bhushan] and Prashant Bhushan in the matter of a CD featuring the former, I also say that the CDs of my phone conversations are a spliced, cut and paste job.” Mr. Prashant Bhushan was the amicus curiae in the case.
Mr. Singh claimed he had not approached the court for a gag order. “The then Chief Justice of India Y.K. Sabharwal had on his own, in the interest of privacy of an individual, given an interim order banning the tapes from being published or telecast by the media. Now another Bench has lifted the gag order. Whether that Bench was correct or this, I cannot comment.”
Even as he said he was “happy and satisfied” with the court's order, Mr. Singh criticised the court for its observations that he was not entitled to be heard on the merits of his case as he had “prevaricated”' and taken “inconsistent positions.”
Suspecting that the Congress was behind the phone tapping, Mr. Singh had named party president Sonia Gandhi a respondent (no. 7) in the matter. However, when he learnt that the tapping was done on a “farzi” (fraudulent) authorisation, he withdrew his allegations against her. This is one of the inconsistencies the court frowned on.
On the contents of the CDs featuring him, Mr. Singh said he was a “two-in-one” person — an industrialist and politician. “I can have personal talks with other industrialists on business. As [the then] Chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Development Council I took no decisions. I only advised. I had the power of the tongue but no power to take decisions. Even the Prime Minister has advisory councils which have given suggestions. It is up to the person in a constitutional position to take decisions.”
To pointed questions on specific contents of the CDs, he said he did not remember.
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