THIS "CLEAN CHIT" NEEDS A MACHINE WASH.

   It had to happen sooner rather than later. After educating us on what to eat, read, wear, worship, sing, who to marry and other assorted aspects of culture, it is entirely appropriate that the BJP should now want to educate the Supreme Court on how to interpret and understand plain English. The reference is to the difference between the words "is" and "has been" in the sealed cover report on Rafael presented by the govt. to the court. It was largely on the basis of this report that the court  issued the "clean chit" to the govt. on the pricing and procedural aspects of the deal. And now the govt. wants the court to correct its wrong interpretation of these words, implying that some poor Deputy Secretary or Under Secretary has a better grasp of the Queen's English than three wise judges. Here is what the govt stated in the sealed cover report:

" The govt. has already shared the pricing details with the CAG. The report of the CAG is examined by the PAC. Only a redacted version of the report is placed before the Parliament and in public domain." [ Bold fonts by the author].

The Supreme Court, quite inexplicably , read the word "is" to mean "has been" while the govt. now says that it connotes "will be"! The whole thing is quite baffling. In the first place, the govt's drafting appears to be deliberately dodgy in order to convey precisely the meaning which the court derived viz. that the CAG has examined the pricing, as have the PAC and Parliament and that therefore there is no need for the court to intervene. The clear intention is to mislead the court. Why else would the govt. not clearly state the factual position: that it has given the pricing details to the CAG, its report is not yet ready and when submitted would be put up before Parliament and the PAC, in that order? Its ambiguous choice of words was clearly deliberate. The averment that only a redacted version is placed before Parliament is also incorrect, because the govt. cannot edit a CAG report- this too is misleading. Equally surprising, however, is the court's interpretation. How could it interpret "is" to mean "has been"? Even a proxy Vyapam candidate would know that the two formulations convey entirely different meanings. It is possible, but difficult, to ascribe the mistake to a weak grasp of the English language by judges who would by now have written millions of words in their careers. Is it possible that the court was now keen  to dispose of the matter quickly, having realised that it was way beyond its depth, and that therefore a certain casualness had crept into its approach? Or was it that it did not want to take on the govt. in this make or break matter,  decided to extricate itself from the rapidly escalating political mess, and  therefore adopted the meaning and interpretation which served this objective?

  Whatever the explanation, it makes for a very confusing, contradictory and questionable order, especially in the light of the less than transparent processes followed : sealed covers, reports in place of affidavits, examining defense officers without cross examination, etc. It also boggles the mind why the govt. was given a clean chit without going into substantive issues of pricing, choice of offset partner, reasons for cancelling the earlier deal with Dassault, failure to invite fresh tenders, etc. All these issues were summarily disposed of by either accepting the govt's word at face value or invoking Article 32 to deny the court jurisdiction in the matter. There are many factual errors in the order also, which have been pointed by many legal experts: confusing Mr. Mukesh Ambani's company with that of Anil Ambani's offset firm, terming gross violations of the DPP as "minor variations", stating that the withdrawal of the earlier RFP was initiated in March 2015 when there is no evidence to support this, but plenty to disprove it. In Arun Shourie's words " by giving the official assertions a verisimilitude of legitimacy" the judgment has curtailed the people's right to know what actually transpired in the shadows. Would it not have been more circumspect and legally correct to simply leave it for the CAG/Parliament and the PAC to examine the matter and take a view on it? Surely the court could not have been unaware of the huge political implications of the case, and the consequences of any perception that it was going soft on the government?

  And the expected fall-out has begun. Mr. Jaitley and the Raksha Mantri have lost no time in proclaiming that, now that the court has absolved the govt. of any culpability in the matter and that all is now hunky dory, there is no need for a JPC: a Parliamentary Committee can neither contradict the Supreme Court nor go beyond what the court has decided. In fact, they claim, even the CAG's report has now become redundant and superfluous! The court has unwittingly handed the govt. the perfect alibi to stall any further investigation. All democratic and transparent safeguards built into the system to act as a counter check to the executive in such matters have been demolished by this one judicial order. The court should have not taken up the matter at all, but once it decided to do so it should have gone to the root of the disputed issues and decided them cogently and transparently, or referred it to an SIT for further investigation, which is all that the petitioners wanted in the first place, without pronouncing on the merits of the case. It is a contradiction for it to claim that it has no jurisdiction under Article 32, but still accept only the govt's averments and declare that it finds nothing wrong.

  This does not bode well for the future: for if the court itself will not look into the matter for lack of jurisdiction, and the CAG or Parliament or the PAC cannot do so because the court finds no occasion to doubt the govt's assertions and accepts them at face value, then the govt. ( either the present one or a future one) has been given a blank cheque for all kinds of malfeasance. This surely could never have been the intention of the court. This order needs to be revisited. Immediately. 

" IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID ! "-- OR IS IT ?

 That famous phrase- " It's the Economy. stupid !"- was employed successfully by Bill Clinton's election team to win the 1992 election against George WH Bush. It's being used used again by our resident pundits to explain the BJP's trouncing in the elections concluded on the 11th. of this month. This serve- all explanation is self-contradictory and only part of the truth. Because, by all accounts and conventional parameters, the Indian economy is not doing badly at all: inflation is well under control, GDP growth is at 7.2%, NPAs have declined for the second straight quarter, manufacturing has picked up, the stock markets are still on the up, fuel prices are declining, higher rates of MSPs have been announced, the kharif production is higher than the previous year. The Plan B explanation is that it is the farmer who has done the BJP in, beset as he is with drought, rising input costs, a slump in prices, the weight of unpayable loans. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth and it gives the BJP apologists an easy way out to explain its massive loss. Because it is not just the farmer who feels betrayed by the BJP, it is the entire cross section of society and occupations.

   Consider this: the BJP's vote share even in the urban areas of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan has plummeted drastically: from 75% to 25%, 90% to 55% and 95% to 63% respectively in these three states: the agriculture crisis cannot account for this. Economists tend to hijack the results of every election by appropriating the economy as the sole determinant of voting patterns, This is a myopic view, especially in a country like ours whose sheer size and diversity defies simple nostrums. For the fact is that there are many other factors that predicated the BJP's loss, and all of them are related to the style of governance and the personalities of its top two honchos, the CEO and the COO.

  They say pride goes before a fall, and that is exactly what has happened to Messers Modi and Shah. They never even bothered to conceal their abject contempt for the entire Opposition, and constantly demonised and vilified Rahul Gandhi and his family, their hatred for them assuming pathological proportions which in the normal course would require expert psychiatric intervention. Their facile call for a " Congress mukt Bharat" betrayed their despotic tendencies. This has now backfired on the BJP in three significant ways: one, the constant spotlight on Rahul Gandhi has made him a larger than life figure, embedding him securely in the public gaze even though the Congress kept losing one election after another, getting him free TRPs and eyeballs which he had not really earned, just as it did for Mrs. Gandhi post 1977, enabling her victorious return in 1980. The constant badgering made a fighter out of an otherwise unassuming, laid back Rahul Gandhi; pushed into a corner, he had no option but to fight back. Mr. Modi commuted a part-time politician into a full time contender. And finally, of course, the Prime Minister forgot the Indian voter's latent compassion for the underdog, a trait of our Hindu religion which has no place in the BJP's version of Hindutva. Mr. Modi has paid the price for his egotism this last week.

   Second, the law of diminishing returns has set in on the BJP's Hindutva and minority bashing curriculum; the average citizen is beginning to tire of it and is now refusing to read from this toxic script. The BJP should have realised this from their earlier by-election losses in UP, Bihar and Rajasthan, but the invincible duo failed to see the light, blinded as they were by the glare from their self acquired halos. And so the likes of Adithyanath, Giriraj Singh and assorted foul mouthed spokespersons and bought- out TV anchors continued to spew their hate and execration, evoking a revulsion from populations which have lived peacefully with a dozen different religions for hundreds of years. People have now begun to realise that the venomous Hindutva of the BJP and RSS is a political doctrine, not a religious one, and that this party cannot be allowed to be the gate-keepers to the world's greatest religion. And that is why these seeds of hatred and division sowed by the likes of the UP Chief Minister on the campaign trail did not sprout.

  Third, Mr. Modi made the cardinal mistake which all closet dictators do- assuming that the voter/ citizen is a fool who is quite content to be led by the nose. He assumed that your average bharatwasi  knows little, and cares even less, about affairs of state and government. And so he and his handpicked team went about driving a coach-and-four through every institution of good governance: Parliament, Planning Commission, Election Commission, the CBI, the RBI, the Universities, autonomous academic and research organisations, even the higher judiciary at times. The Defense forces were politicised for electoral purposes. The police in BJP ruled states became an adjunct of the gau rakshaks, as typified by the manner in which the investigations into the murder of a police Inspector in Bulandshahar are proceeding. Kashmir is sought to be bludgeoned into submission, with not even the pretense of a dialogue with our own fellow citizens. Legislations like the National Register of Citizens and amendments to the Citizenship Act are being rammed through to create an India in the image of the BJP. The Damocles sword of the Ram Mandir is sharpened every few months to keep the communal cauldron boiling at all times. Farmers are lathi-charged, shot, evicted from the path of the Bullet trains; the tribals are being dispossessed from their forests and lands to make way for big-ticket projects so that the Prime Minister can obtain another international citation for Ease of Doing Business. For the plain truth is that this is a government without any compassion, it has an EVM where the heart should be, it is antithetical to the humane values of a country which has produced a Gandhi, a Vivekananda, a Buddha. It is a mutant and the people are now beginning to recognise this and to reject it.

  And so, while the colossal failure of the BJP's economic policy disasters have undoubtedly caused the citizens much pain, it would be foolish not to recognise the non-economic factors that are also in play. It is the latter in fact that is now making even the middle classes abandon the BJP. Universally, the middle class does not like instability or social stress, which appears to be the sole agenda of the BJP. Fault lines that had been slowly filling in in the last five decades- social, religious, regional- under the enlightened leadership of stalwarts who are now the object of Mr. Modi's derision are being re-excavated and widened. The country is increasingly uncomfortable with this balkanisation of a nation, the assertion of a false and exclusive identity, the anger and hatred that is being injected into its life blood. No political party is entitled to extract this price for petty electoral gains. THIS is the message of the recent elections: govern with a heart, not a 56 inch chest.

  

THE BIRTHDAY GIFT.

   It's that time of the year again, when I take a step closer to the final resting place- no, not the bar in Gymkhana club, which nonetheless comes a close second in the definition of " heavenly abode"- but, you know, Valhalla. In other words, my 68th birthday calls. I don't get many gifts of myrrh and incense these days, because, I suspect,  most folks are not sure I'll survive to give them the return gifts. My sister-in-law, Anjali, always gives me a either a Glenfiddich single malt or a Bill Bryson book, on alternate years, depending on her current assessment of what I need most that year: an upliftment of the spirits or of the sense of humour, respectively. My sons pool their resources to give me something that would keep me occupied for at least four hours everyday: last year it was a new Savings Account in State Bank of India, something I would strongly recommend for all retired persons with time on their hands: it takes roughly four hours of strenuous effort daily for about a month to change your address, and you will have had a second reincarnation before they change your mobile number. Don't even think of withdrawing whatever little money Mr. Modi, Mr. Jaitley et al have left there. ( Believe me, I've tried all three). This year my sons have already given me my first smart phone and boy! does it keep me occupied- I usually take a photo first thing every morning and spend the rest of the day trying to find it in the album or photo gallery or the cloud or wherever it disappears. My strike rate is like that of the Congress in the 2015 UP elections, but like Rahul Gandhi I'm not giving up. Neerja (the wife of 41 years) doesn't have to give me anything: she's already gifted me almost two thirds of her life and I've made a mess of most of it, so I can't really ask for anything more, can I ?

  That leaves only the government. The last gift it gave me was eight years ago when it allowed me to retire in peace, without either charge-sheeting me or withholding my pension. So now I've been thinking of asking the government for a gift this year, and, in keeping with the "zeitgeist" of the day, what I want it to do is to name Kanpur, the town from where I come( albeit reluctantly), after the Shuklas- rename it Shuklanagar or Shuklapur. After all, if the Marathas can have a Marathwada and Nirav Modi can have a Modinagar and the Agarwals can demand that Agra be named after them, and Mirzapur is likely to be rechristened  Mishrapur,  why can the Shuklas not have a city named after them ? Since the flavour of the day is the "gotra" I can proudly claim that the Shuklas have a strong case, descended as we are from one of the original seven rishis- Bharadwaj rishi. We were the ones who rowed Bhagwan Ram across the Saryu river in his exile, long before there was any Inland Waterway or flying boats to help with the crossing. And since nationalism is the other Chef's Special these days, let me inform the unwary reader that the Shuklas are also firmly embedded in the fight for the freedom of Bharat. We roundly supported Mangal Pande, the leader of the First war of Independence in 1857; although I myself was too young to have taken part in that glorious carnage, members of my gotra died in the hundreds to create a country in which in later times the Vijay Malyas, the Reddy brothers and Baba Ram Rahims could flourish. And, to top it all, I'm married to a Pande! So how about it, Adithyanathji? If your only hesitation is that you only rename places which have an existing Muslim name, then perhaps a little digging might reveal that Kanpur may have been Khanpur in the hoary past and thus qualifies for your evangelical renaming crusade? It's astounding what dedicated digging can turn up, you know.

  But I also have a plan B, just in case Yogiji is too occupied with election rallies to pay heed. See, I wish nothing for myself, in the tradition set by our " Mukhya sevak": if not my gotra, then how about my professional class, the IAS ? I feel a statue of a bureaucrat would make a good gift- the Anonymous Bureaucrat ( you never get to know which bureaucrat has bungled up on that last defence deal), on the lines of the Unknown Soldier. This would be the perfect way of remembering, in future years, a service that has served the nation well, and itself even better. And the statue would also be timely, because the IAS itself is highly endangered, like the wild asses of Kutch, and may not be around much longer. Given the huge numbers in which its members are joining political parties just before elections, it shall very soon be absorbed by the BJP, the Observer Research Foundation,or the Vivekananda Foundation, and cease to exist. So a statue, slightly bent at the waist, with the Conduct Rules in one hand and a red light in the other, would remind future generations of how higher  species can evolve into lower ones, quite       against the laws of Darwin  and  of  nature.    I am acutely aware, however, that there shall be very stiff competition in this department. I read on Whatsapp recently that a petition is doing the rounds demanding that a 100 meter statue of Sunny Leone should be erected( is that the right word?) near Bangalore. I'm told that the demand is based on the fact that she is responsible for India Rising ( at least the male half) and for her contribution to the Happiness Index, especially after demonetisation when the only libido left standing ( is that the right word?) was that of Mr. Jaitley. But there would be two major issues with building a statue for her, and they give me hope. One, it normally takes at least one battalion of armed police to protect her five feet seven inches frame from the attentions of her male admirers who suddenly discover that Braille is the only language in which they can converse with her. Can you then imagine what would happen if there were 100 meters of her, her magnified curves overhead stretching all the way up like a stairway to heaven?  The govt. would have to withdraw at least two full army divisions from the western front to protect her statue, and who would then protect our Pakistan border from the IEDs of Mr. Navjot Singh Siddhu ? Secondly, the DGCA ( Director General Civil Aviation) too would have a major problem on its hands. Every plane within a radius of 500 miles of her statue would be requesting their ATCs for a course diversion so that their testosterone driven pilots could have a glimpse of her before they crash into the Sentinel islands yelling " Hallelujah!" And don't forget those hang gliders- they can land on anything.

   So I still retain some hope that we may yet be immortalised with a statue on the Shimla ridge or Shuklanagar. Of course, the pigeons and their dive bombing tactics will pose a slight problem ( be you ever so high the pigeons will always be above you, to misquote our very own Supreme Quote- sorry, Supreme Court), but at the end of the day I'm a realist and accept the fact that some days you will be the statue and some days you will be the pigeon. I'm sure Sardar Patel already realises this, notwithstanding Ms Spandana's quip, and hopefully Mr. Modi also will- on 11th December ?
  Happy birthday to me, folks, if I say so myself!

WHY ARE CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ENVIRONMENT NOT ELECTION ISSUES?

   The election delirium is upon us again, and political parties are busy churning out 100 page manifestos, recycling the same trash they regurgitate every five years: reservations, subsidies, loan waivers, free power and so on. This time we also have the complimentary adds on- temples and statues, rising higher and higher in inverse proportion to the plummeting standards of public discourse. And as usual, nobody is even talking about the elephant in the room, already in "masth" mode: climate change and the environment. The manifestos are completely silent about them, and the nearest the candidates come to them are when they talk of building toilets ( to be subsequently used for storing fodder, naturally).

   Which is a pity and a man- made tragedy in itself, because we as a country are staring natural disaster in the face but continue to grin like idiots. We have the third worst ecological footprint on the planet, after the USA and China. The effects of climate change are already upon us- record temperatures, floods, droughts, extreme weather events, the old templates no longer relevant. It has been predicted that countries in South Asia will lose 30-40% of their agricultural output by 2050. The govt's own Economic Survey 2017 has estimated that the loss in agriculture production every year due to climate change is US$ 10 billion, or Rs. 70,000 crore at current exchange rates. According to the Lancet Countdown 2018 report on Health and Climate Change released last week, India  lost 75000 million man hours of labour in 2017, equivalent to one year's work for 7% of the working population (the figure was 40000 million in 2000). 80% of this was in the agriculture sector, and we still wonder why the farmers are protesting ? Pollution related deaths ( already at 500,000 per annum for India) will rise exponentially, heat waves have killed 9000 people in the last three years, migration of environmental/ climate refugees will overwhelm our cities. 24% of our lands are already degraded and headed for desertification, all major rivers are heavily polluted, ground water levels are depleting alarmingly with 60% of the blocks classified as water stressed, we have lost 10.60 million hectares of original forests in the last 14 years, we have been eradicating other living life forms at a galloping rate- in just the last two years the list of endangered species has gone up from 190 to 443 ( International Union for Conservation of Nature figures)  Apocalypse is round the corner, and all our politicians can ask is who was Mr. Modi's father or whether a mosque is a place of worship?

   We as a nation have always had a dismal record of protecting our natural environment or of respecting the rights of other species to live, notwithstanding our ancient vedic philosophy. But the track record of the present BJP government at the center is particularly appalling. In its pyrrhic and single minded quest for a top slot in the Ease of Doing Business ranking it is decimating the environment on a scale not seen before, and destroying the livelihoods of those most dependent on it: tribals and poor farmers. The Forest Policy and various enactments are being re-written to enable diversion of more forest land for industrial projects, a prime example being the Inland Waterway project on the Ganga which is being exempted from preparing either an EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) or an EMP (Environmental Management Plan), and for which the rare Turtle  (Kachua) Wildlife Sanctuary on the river near Varanasi is being denotified, the first time since 1972 that a Sanctuary is being denotified. EIA and EMPs are  being exempted for linear projects( highways and railway lines) and real estate developments upto 50000 sq. feet. The Coastal Regulation Zone Rules are being liberalised to permit big capital projects such as ports ( the Sagarmala project), impacting in particular huge swathes of mangrove forests that are a buffer to storm surges. River linking schemes are being pushed through without any thought given to their environmental impacts on the river basins: there are 31 such projects on the anvil. The disastrous 900 km. Char Dham highway linking Kedarnath, Gangotri, Yamunotri and Badrinath has been given the go ahead, even though it will involve the felling of more than 40000 trees and result in an unimaginably huge footprint in these highly fragile zones; the Kedarnath tragedy of 2013 has been forgotten. Protected Areas (PAs) and Tiger Reserves are slowly being whittled away with the blessings of both the Forest Advisory Committee in the Ministry Of Environment and Forests and the Wildlife Board, now reduced to compliant flag bearers and packed with bureaucrats instead of scientists and specialists. In just one PA, the Panna Tiger Reserve, more than 5000 hectares of prime tiger habitat is being diverted for the Ken-Betwa river inter linking project for which 1800000 trees will face the axe. An astonishing 519 "relaxations" have been given for projects in Protected Areas since 2014. The National Green Tribunal is being systematically weakened so that it can be brought to heel. NGOs who work for the environment are being harassed and their fund flows squeezed. More and more people are being displaced to join the 60 million already displaced by projects since Independence.

   Mr. Modi's government appears to be mesmerized by big ticket projects and ventures, and will not let any concerns about the environment stand in its way. All warnings are dismissed as the rantings of "urban naxals" or interference by foreign entities who have no idea of India. But the danger and the threats are very real. Unfortunately, the victims of natural disasters and climate change will be the most vulnerable sections of society: farmers, tribals, fishermen, migrant labour and the tens of millions in urban slums. They do not have the wherewithal to protect themselves against the climatic and economic hardships that are inevitable as nature withdraws into its shell and strikes back.

   And here is what puzzles me no end: I can understand that the government, in its hubris and arrogance, will do what it wants to do; what I cannot comprehend is why the opposition is silent on these issues too, why civil society ( which gets its danders up at even a whiff of a MeToo story) and the media don't articulate them to create more awareness during election times. Surely, someone should be telling the unsuspecting voter what awaits him in less than a generation ? Everyone wants the tribal vote, but no one tells them what will happen to them once the forests have gone, or the farmer once the aquifers dry up and the glaciers disappear, or the orchardists about the consequences of the bees and butterflies becoming extinct, or the slum dweller on how to cope when wet-bulb temperatures reach 35 degree celsius. No, we don't tell them because we have our air-conditioners and ROs and air purifiers, we buy our food from malls and Big Basket and don't give a damn whether it comes from a farm or a lab, we drink bottled mineral water anyway. We have a surfeit of politicians but not a single leader who can LEAD, rather than be led by the populist nose. For a time we deluded ourselves that we had finally discovered one in Mr. Modi but he has turned out to be an ad. campaign with little substance. His renewable energy target ( for which he ironically got that UN award for the Solar Alliance) - 100 GW of solar energy by 2022- is floundering, and the best estimate is that it will not exceed 67 MW. The Ganga is dirtier today than it was five years ago, in spite of more than Rs. 4000 crores having been spent on it, which is not surprising, for a govt. which cannot clean 18 kms of the Yamuna in Delhi can hardly do any better for the 3000 km. of this once splendid lifeline. And so, while we may be the world's fifth largest economy we feature at the 177th spot out of 180 countries in the World Environment Performance Index. We were at 141 in 2016. How's that for a reality check while we line up to get our fingers inked at the nearest polling booth?

OUR RIGHT TO KNOW IS NOT NEGOTIABLE

      These last few weeks have had a bizarre quality to them, almost a Kafkaesque experience, with doses of Lewis Carol, Ian Fleming, Spy vs Spy, John Le Carre and George Orwell thrown in. The two high profile cases with the Supreme Court- Rafale and CBI- are testing the patience of both the Supreme Court and the citizens of a country waiting with bated breath for some Daniels to finally come to judgment. Rafale is clearly headed nowhere, notwithstanding the judicial sound and fury, and will soon be lost in the cumulonimbus clouds of defense secrecy, Official Secrets Act, technicalities over weaponry, government filibustering and the residual blame game over Bofors. We will hear no more of it till the sonic boom heralding the arrival of the first of the 36 planes next year.

    The CBI case, however, is much closer to our hearts because these are the guys who can walk into your house tomorrow and arrest you for having doodled on a file fifteen years ago. And so we want to, and are fully entitled to, know exactly what is happening in that famous cage carpeted with sleuths owing allegiance to all kinds of shady political and dubious entities. The CBI at the moment most resembles a Mafia organisation, with different groups reporting to their own capos, keeping surveillance over each other, planting and destroying evidence, plunging knives into each other's backs and doing the other things that promote organisational ethos and bonding. India has not seen this kind of internecine blood- letting since the time of the Mughals, and therefore we naturally want to know more of this synthesis of Mughale Azam II and Godfather III. And we certainly don't want the Supreme Court to play the spoil sport with our right to know.

   On the 20th of November the Court took umbrage at media reports revealing the gist of the charges made by Manish Sinha, DIG in the CBI, against a Minister and a whole host of senior officers, alleging bribery, coercion, interference etc. in sensitive cases. It was also livid at the leaking of Mr.Alok Verma's reply to the CVC's show cause notice to him. So outraged was the Chief Justice, in fact, that he carpet bombed everyone in the court, refused to allow any lawyer to speak, abruptly adjourned the case without assigning any reason, and retreated to his chambers. With all due respect and deference, one cannot agree with this line of action.

   In the first place, it's been almost a month since Mr. Verma was removed unceremoniously in a midnight coup by the central govt.: he immediately filed a petition in the SC against this. Even a kid in a Bihar nursery school could see that his sacking ( it was no less) was illegal, it violated the amended provision of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act and a Supreme Court order: he could have been divested of his position only by the collegium of the PM, CJI and Leader of the Opposition. A month later and there is still no decision on his petition, and one month of his remaining tenure of three months has already been lopped off. Instead, the Court has busied itself with investigating tangential matters such as the charges against him and his replies to them. The petitioner has been put in the dock! These issues could surely have been examined AFTER  settling the legality of his removal. The government appears to be slowly achieving through the back door what it should not have been allowed to do through the front. 

   The developments of 20th November, culminating in the CJI's angry outburst- " You don't deserve a hearing"- are even more disturbing and disappointing because they are legitimising what SC advocate Gautam Bhatia in a brilliant article in the 29th October issue of the Hindustan Times calls " the jurisprudence of the 'sealed cover.' " Mr. Bhatia's piece was penned in the context of the Rafale case but is equally pertinent here, because the Court is insisting on the same confidentiality here. He points out that the "sealed cover" is being resorted to time and again by the court- Rafale, NRC case, Judge Loya case, and now the CBI case. He is critical of this process because it is "a court driven opaque and secret process" and because it " involves the court in a secret dialogue with( in most cases) the state."

   One has to agree with Mr. Mr. Bhatia. Why should there be a kind of gag order in the CBI case? Here is a premier organisation investigating the most important economic and criminal cases in the country, its senior most officers are at war with each other, its politicisation is nearly complete, it is subverting justice on a regular basis, its functionaries appear to be indulging in large scale corruption, investigations are being fixed. Why should the public not be told about this fecal state of affairs, all being carried out on the tax payers' moneys? Why should we not be told what the charges against various officers of the CBI are, and what their responses are? Why should we not be informed of the names of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians named by Mr. Sinha in his petition? This is not a matter that concerns the judiciary alone, the ordinary citizen is even more concerned because it impacts his life more than it does the judges who still have a degree of defense against crooked and rampaging policemen, which the Joe in the street does not have. It is the same Joe who probably votes for that politician, pays the salaries of these bureaucrats, has to deal with these policemen on a daily basis.

   No, sir, the jurisprudence of the sealed cover is a deviation from the settled principles of law. It imposes an opacity in what should be a transparent process; it confers a protection on the state and its minions which can only embolden them; it " infantalises" the public ( Mr. Bhatia's apt phrase) because it assumes that they are not mature or intelligent enough to make up their own minds. It smacks of a colonial mindset which is premised on the belief that only an instrumentality of the state can be trusted with "sensitive information." It also betrays a contradiction in the Court's own stand: once it admits a petition it acknowledges that some public interest is involved in it, how then can it deny relevant information on the case to the same public?

   The right of the citizen to know what the government and its agencies are doing has to be paramount in a democracy. The courts are an instrumentality to enforce this right, not to deny it. 

HOW TO CONSERVE TIGERS, MAHARASHTRA STYLE .

   Whatever one may think of Mrs. Maneka Gandhi's politics one cannot but admire and commend her commitment to the welfare of animals, both wild and domesticated. Her passion for their protection overrides her political compulsions, as is being evinced these days by her taking up cudgels against both the Maharashtra and Odisha governments ( the former her own BJP entity) over the killing of the tigress Avni by the Forest Department, and seven elephants by electrocution in these states, respectively. I have experienced her fierce loyalty for these mute creatures at first hand, in an encounter I am not likely to forget in a hurry.

   It was sometime in 2001 or 2002: she was a Minister in Mr. Vajpayee's cabinet and I was heading the Forest Department in Himachal. A crisis of sorts erupted when a Himalayan brown bear in Gopalpur Zoo in Kangra district caught some infection and in spite of all the attentions of our wild life veterinarians, its condition worsened, and it seemed to be slipping away. One day I received a direct call from Mrs. Maneka Gandhi; she herself was on the line, no protective shield of PS or PA. And boy! was she hopping mad! For the first few minutes she let me know exactly what she thought of me, the HP Forest department, and its vets.- and her opinions do not bear recounting. She wanted an immediate update on the bear's condition, and on being told of the discouraging prognosis, informed me that she was sending down two vets from the Zoo Authority of India to treat the bear; she also offered the advice that the Himachal vets could be assigned to treat bureaucrats! She slammed down the phone, and by next day her vets were at Gopalpur. The brown bear recovered, and we all slunk back to our respective offices, our tails demurely between our shaking legs.

   And so it is no surprise for me that, in this respect at least, she has not mellowed down in the least. And she is absolutely right, for the killing of Avni, a three year old tigress (also known as T-I ) by the Maharashtra govt. is nothing but a cold blooded murder by the same department which was supposed to protect her. Avni's territory lay in the Yavatamal region, a scrub forest woefully lacking in a proper natural prey base. She was held responsible for the death of 13 villagers over the last two years, even though no autopsies were conducted on the dead to positively establish this charge. The Maharashtra Forest Department's [MFD] conclusion was based on " circumstantial" evidence, which in India is usually enough even to send a man to the gallows, so what chance does a poor tiger have against our bureaucracy?

   It is now clear that the MFD has been been grossly incompetent in managing this tigress and in taking the easy way out by simply killing her. And not just her- the MFD is probably guilty of the murder of three, not one, tiger: Avni's two nine month old cubs have not been since the 3rd of November; there is little hope for them for they are too young to survive without their mother. Here are some indisputable facts that have now emerged about the culpability of MFD and their favourite shikaris:

* Even though MFD was aware that the scrub forests of Yavatmal had an inadequate prey base for the big cat, and that conflict with humans was inevitable because there were many villages there, it took no steps to relocate the tigress.

* The department, according to the Forest Minister's own admission, had been "trying" to tranquilise and capture Avni for the last eighteen months, without any success! No further evidence is needed of its incompetence. To add to this, an expert team from the Madhya Pradesh forest department (which has plenty of experience with capture and relocation of the big cats) had offered to help but was turned down.

* According to NTCA (National Tiger Conservation Authority) protocol, even where a man eater is involved, its elimination is the last resort, when attempts to capture it have failed. As we have seen, no genuine attempt was made to capture Avni. It is not even certain that she was a man eater. A man eating predator is one which prefers a human over its natural prey ,usually because it is too old or injured to hunt other animals), actively stalks humans, and consumes the kill. None of these preconditions were met in the case of Avni.

*  The Maharashtra FD was criminally complicit in engaging private shooters to kill the tigress without any genuine attempt to capture her. The person who finally shot her (Asghar Ali Khan) was not even authorised to do so; it was his father, Shafath Ali Khan, who was engaged by MFD to kill the tigress. ( Incidentally, this father-son duo have terminated hundreds of wild animals- wild boar, blue bull, leopards- in similar operations).  Asghar Ali is now claiming self defence,  that the tigress had charged his team at night while they were out looking for her and he had no option but to shoot her dead. Which raises the question: what was he doing there anyway? Why was he hunting her when it was his father, not he, who had been licensed by the MFD to eliminate Avni?

* Even the claim of self defence has been disproved by the autopsy report of the tigress. According to the report reproduced in the Hindustan Times of November 10, 2018: " The bullet had pierced the lateral end of the carcass. ( If), as mentioned by the hunter that T-I was charging at them, the bullet would have pierced the upper shoulder, head, face or back if that was the case. The animal was not attacking the forest team but standing 10 meters away."

* Equally damning is another finding of the autopsy. Photographs of the dead body of the tigress show a dart sticking out of her left flank, which was used by the FD and the hunter to claim that they had first tried to tranquilise her, but the dart was ineffective. This too has been trashed by the autopsy report: " The dart only pierced the surface of the tigress's carcass, which meant that it was merely placed by the forest team to show that the tigress had been tranquillised or else the quantity would have been more." 

   It is pretty clear now that Avni was killed in cold blood, no bona- fide attempt was made to capture her, she was shot by someone who was not authorised to do so, and that the Maharashtra forest department is engaged in a massive cover up. The state Forest Minister, who has been justifying the killing from day one and shielding the guilty, has amply demonstrated that he too is complicit in the matter in some way. Both the Minister and the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wild Life) should be immediately sacked. The two inquiries ordered will get nowhere and shall only legitimise the cover up. What is needed is an independent inquiry, not by forest officers who will protect each other, but by a team of wild life experts. Mrs. Gandhi, who is waging a lonely battle, should demand such an investigation and/ or conservationists should approach the courts. With just 2226 tigers left in the wild ( 2015 census) India certainly cannot allow bungling foresters and crassly ignorant Ministers to preside over the deliberate killing of more of these magnificent creatures. The alarm bells are already ringing: we lost 132 tigers in 2016; Maharashtra alone accounted for 23 deaths in 2017  (National Tiger Conservation Authority figures). With this level of attrition surely we should not be eliminating more of them under the garb of man-animal conflict ?

   

THE WALKING DEAD or LESSONS FROM THE METRO.

   As I find it a little more difficult to get out of bed each succeeding autumn morning, my mind  (what's left of it, that is) inevitably wanders to thoughts of ageing. The process is very gradual and kind of sneaks up on you: the cells stop multiplying but continue dividing, not unlike the BJP, the telomeres stop communicating with each other a-la Mr. Jaitley and the RBI Governor, the joints protest loudly like Mr. Kejriwal at any sudden move, the memory starts playing tricks like it does frequently with Mr. Rahul Gandhi on the stump, and one begins to speak like Sashi Tharoor i.e. in words that no one understands, certainly not my sons, nephews and nieces weaned on the two syllable patois of Twitter and Instagram. So slow is this process, however- like being murdered by a  four toed sloth- that one is not even aware of it.

   And then one day- WHAM!- it suddenly hits you full on the geezer. It can happen in different ways- a wilting feeling in bed just when you're about to embark on your MJ Akbar routine, that ECG report when you take out that new health insurance policy, the moment when your son is blessed- is that the right word these days?- with his second child or third divorce. It can even happen as it did to Groucho Marx: you are standing grieving at the graveside of your batchmate, all alone because everyone else has left, when a chap sidles upto you and whispers: " Not much point in going back home, is there?" My own epiphanic moment, however, came in an entirely different and discomfiting way.

   I usually travel by Metro since I need to reduce my family's carbon footprint which rivals that of Bigfoot or Godzilla, thanks to my wife Neerja. I seem to have spent my entire life following in her trail like an excited puppy: earlier it used to be so that I could spoon up the random smile, the casual word of endearment, the fleeting expression of affection- all too precious to be left discarded by the roadside. Now, however, I do it so that I can switch off the fan, lights, AC, geyser or heater in her wake: she NEVER puts them off because God himself once said " Let there be light!" and she's a deeply religious person. She HAS to say hullo to her mom, sister and bevy of friends six days in a week, and- you guessed it- it can't be done over the phone because Airtel maytell everyone about it, and in any case they all have to see who is wearing which type of Banarsi saree that day. So she burns the hydrocarbons like Mr. Mohammad bin Salman is giving it away for free in order to atone for blowing away Mr. Khashoggi, not a recommended use of wind power.

   So here I was on the Delhi Metro one day; it was crowded and I was standing in the aisle hanging on to a strap like yesterday's washing. Suddenly a pretty young girl got up from her seat and offered it to me with the words( I shall remember them till my dying breath): " Uncle, please take the seat." UNCLE ! When a beautiful member of the fair sex calls you Uncle you just know that there's no point in going on living; it's the kiss of death and you now belong with the dinosaurs. It was at that exact epiphanic moment that I realised that I was now a prime candidate for the geriatric ward. I had boarded the train as a sprightly 66 year old, but deboarded at Mandi House a broken relic. My metamorphosis was complete: I now belonged to the ages.

   One year later, however, after twelve months of this fossilized existence I must concede that things are not all that bad: being a dodo has its upside. I no longer mind the aching joints when I wake up every morning because they indicate that at least I'm still alive. The best thing about getting old is that all those things you couldn't have when you were young you no longer want, and therefore don't miss them any more. I no longer fret and worry where my wife goes of an evening, just so that I don't have to go along with her. Mr. Jailtley gives me an additional Rs. 50000 exemption on my income ( before he mops it all back with incessant cesses, of course), and the Railways give me a 40% concession on the fare even though the train is 12 hours late and/or cancelled. The govt. respectfully refers to me as a "senior citizen" before asking me to line up for four hours in various queues. And most important of all, I'm gradually moving out of that lethal " MeToo" zone which has felled many a perpendicular stalwart, if you get my drift. Though, if accused of molestation, I might well be tempted to follow the example of that zippy 81 year old who was recently accused of rape. Standing in the dock he could barely conceal his pride at having been conferred this honour at his age, and when asked by the judge, pleaded guilty! The judge, of course, was having none of this and fined him a thousand rupees for lying under oath ! Or that other old dodger who was approached by this hooker outside a bar who propositioned him thus: " Hi, dad, I'm a great believer in barter: what do you say to some sex for some beer?" The ancient geezer thought for a long moment and replied: " What kinda beer you got?" Ah, the arrogance of old age! As Oscar Wilde almost said: the young know everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the old don't give a damn about anything!

   And that, dear reader, is the problem with the kiss of death: you're dead but don't know it. The walking dead.