THE MISSING FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT

    The Indian Constitution gives us six Fundamental Rights: right to Equality, right to Freedom, right against Exploitation, right to Freedom of Religion, Cultural and Educational rights, and the right to Constitutional Remedies. The Supreme Court has recently given us another one: right to Privacy. It sounds pretty impressive on paper. Now, I'm no legal expert- for a long time I was under the impression that "corpus delicti" meant a beautiful body, and till recently I thought that RIP on a judge's grave meant Recused in Perpetuity, in deference to a common practice in inconvenient cases. But even I can see that these fundamental rights are not available to large sections of society, and of late they are being denied with renewed vigour.

    Equality still eludes millions of dalits, tribals and the poorest of the poor; our push for a digital India with Aadhar as its trumpet call is further disadvantaging these sections and denying them access to public welfare services such as pensions and food rations. Talk of equality is a farce when 200 million people go to bed hungry, when 15% of the population in under nourished( FAO figures), when 34% of the children are stunted, when the top 5% of Indians own 65.5% of the country's wealth while the bottom 50% have to make do with only 4.5%. Freedom is still a dream for millions of bonded labour and child workers, and for those who are indiscriminately arrested by the police, for the more than 400,000 undertrials in prisons, most of whom will be acquitted if their cases ever come up for trial in a system as clogged as a railways toilet. Freedom of religion did exist for some time, but is now being threatened by new conversion laws in some states that require the approval of a District Magistrate before one can exercise that option. The sporadic demands for a Uniform Civil Code and a muscular assertion of majoritarianism constantly haunt the minority psyche. Educational rights consist of mere statistics of enrollment figures; in actual practice, so dismal is our govt. educational system that a Class 6 student lacks the ability of a Class 2 student; 27.51 of every 100 children who join school drop out by the time they reach Class XI. Those who pass out of college are unemployable. The hardest hit here are the physically disabled: of 28 million not even 0.1% have access to schools and 0.01% to higher education. The courts are waging a valiant but losing battle to enforce our right to Constitutional Remedies, hamstrung by an adversarial central govt. and its own internal shortcomings. How, for instance, does one enforce one's constitutional right to freedom of expression when the govt. will not act against those who murder it ? Seventy journalists have been killed in the last 14 years, hardly anyone has been punished. How can this right be exercised when draconian laws- criminal defamation, sedition- are used to muzzle any contrary voice ? These remedies, unfortunately, are available only to the rich and powerful, usually to save their own skin.

    There is, however, one Fundamental Right that the Constitution has not given us, but one which is being enforced these days on a daily basis- the Right to be Offended. " Hurting the sentiments" of any one of the country's seven religions and 7331 castes/communities is an offence under the IPC and is the trigger for claiming this right. This legal oddity has always existed, right from the days when the film Kissa Kursi Ka and Rushdie's Satanic Verses were banned by the Congress, but over the last three years it has acquired an accelerated virulence and a violent character. Organisations- mainly perceived to be of the far right- have sprung up whose sole purpose in life is to feel offended. Anything which does not conform to their regressive ideology or can help them win the next election is a legitimate source of causing offence, and therefore for raising the demand for a ban, criminal prosecution, apology or mindless violence. Offence is taken at girls wearing jeans or a young couple going out in public ( Valentines Day ?), MS Dhoni appearing as a Hindu God on a magazine cover, Kamal Hassan's comment about Hindu terror, any form of sympathy for a Kashmiri or for the Kashmiri perspective, support for a  Pakistani cricket team, any questioning of the Indian Army ( sedition), possession of cattle or meat, intercaste marriages. Creative work- films, books, paintings- the very mediums which advance civilisation and its best values, are the primary founts of imagined offence and hence the primary targets for the proponents of this right.

    Taking offence has de facto become a fundamental right these days and is being practiced on a daily basis. The latest instance is that of the film PADMAVATI. Official Rajput organisations have joined hands with criminals and louts to ransack theatres, offer Taliban type of rewards for beheadings, hold up trains and threaten to maim the artists. As the furore over this film has demonstrated, two factors are conferring legitimacy on the sinister assertion of this right to be offended. One, neither the central govt. nor the concerned state govts are taking any action against these criminal elements for violence, criminal intimidation, destruction of public and private property, wrongful confinement, instigating public disorder, contempt of court, etc. Second, and even more telling, is the fact that this manufactured disturbance is being supported by these same govts, directly or indirectly. Union Minsters have done so by proclaiming that film-makers should  be "sensitive to cultural feelings" and to the "status of women", state Ministers have lamented that the feelings of the Rajput community have been "hurt", the UP, Punjab and Haryana CMs have asked for a ban on the film, the MP and Gujarat Chief Ministers, in their attempts to out Herod all other Herods, have actually banned it ( even though the Supreme Court has refused to do so!), the Rajasthan CM wants it to be censored, the Union Home Minister declares that even if the film is cleared by the Censor Board the govt. can always review it. The Congress and other opposition parties maintain a psephological silence, for this is the age of votes, not values. Only Mamta Banerji has had the guts to speak out in support of the film.

    Other constitutional rights be damned. The only fundamental right which matters in India today is the Right to be Offended, and this has become the new clarion call for the self appointed custodians of the country's culture and national pride. The govt. appears to agree and has legitimised it by its inaction, bans and statements. It may as well take the next step and legalise it: amend the Constitution and provide for it as the seventh fundamental right. We may as well end this "willing to wound but afraid to strike" charade and reveal ourselves in all our regressive glory. Then our country can officially become the kind of unfortunate place WB Yeats had written about , a place where

    " The ceremony of innocence is drowned,

       The best lack all conviction, while the worst

       Are full of passionate intensity."
Welcome to the New India of 2022. 

THE LANGUAGE OF GOVERNANCE

     In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And then God committed one of his periodical goof-ups, the first after the original mistake of creating Eve and involving us for perpetuity in sexual molestation cases: he created the Bureaucracy and the Bureaucrat took over the Word. Originally intended to convey meaning, the Word now became a means to conceal!- a mechanism which even the Right to Information Act has not been able to dent. But let’s not scoff at this, for concealment is an art- given the sheer scale of goof-ups and gerrymandering constantly going on in the labyrinths of power, concealing them behind just a few words requires far more skill than merely revealing to us that our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Shelley may well have been right when he said that, but could he have hidden behind words a hefty kickback in danger of disappearing? That's what one Minister was once required to do, without Mr. Vinod Rai finding out about it.

    Having successfully negotiated the required payola from a contractor, a Minister called for the file and wrote on it "Approved". The contractor, secure in the false illusion (like Lalu Yadav a-la Nitish Kumar) that the Minister was now committed and could not go back on either his word or file noting, refused to pay up. Unfazed, the Minister requisitioned the file again and simply added the word  "Not" before "Approved". The now chastened contractor, acknowledging defeat at the hands of a master, prostrated himself (like Nitish Kumar a-la Amit Shah) before the icon of democracy and begged for his contract back, wondering at the same time how the worthy would find a way around the neological cul-de-sac. The Minister, a wordsmith par excellence, extracted the file from his drawer and just added the letter "e" to the word "Not". The final noting read "Note Approved"- two simple words that concealed twists worthy of a Saki or an O'Henry !

    In the mid eighties in Shimla a powerful Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister, whose wife wished to devote all her time to disciplining other IAS wives and thus delegate her culinary responsibilities to a cook, moved the Finance Deptt. for the creation of a Class D post. The file duly reached the Joint Secretary (JS) in Finance. Now a JS, compared to a Principal Secretary to Chief Minister, occupies a slot in the bureaucratic food chain comparable to the position of the plankton in relation to the sperm whale, and in the normal course the file should have been cleared without a whimper, or whatever sounds the plankton emits when under stress. In this case, however, this humble organism (born and bred in the badass corridors of Hindu College) refused to accept his humble station in life and rejected it ! A livid Principal Secretary to CM, accustomed to worms squirming before him and not turning, returned the file with the noting: "Has this file been seen by the Finance Secretary? If not, it may be put up before him". (I may mention here that senior Secretaries belong to the same lunch club, operate on the principles of the Cosa Nostra, and are usually more adept than the macaque monkey in scratching each others' backs). The JS returned said file after recording on it the standard default option of all Finance Deptts.: "FD regrets to reiterate its rejection of the proposal". An epileptic Secretary to CM decided to teach this callow fledgling a lesson. Confident that he now had this amoeba cornered, he put the ball back in the JS's court with a thunderous ace: "At what level has this decision been taken?", thinking that this would expose the lack of jurisdiction of the JS. The latter, however, having dealt with seven foot Jats on a daily basis in Jubilee hall of Delhi Universit, was unfazed and responded with a classic cross-court of his own: "Secretary to CM is respectfully informed that the decision has been taken at the competent level." Game, set and match. No actionable information revealed. The sperm whale retired shortly thereafter, sans cook.

    Another story which comes to mind is that of a  young Deputy Secretary (DS) in Shimla , now grown long in the tooth and safely parked in the USA, whose newly acquired wife happened to be in Delhi. He kept applying for leave to spend some time with her, especially during those long winter nights in Shimla when a quilt is not enough to keep one warm. His applications were invariably rejected by the Chief Secretary (CS) who had long ago replaced his wife with a bottle of triple XXX rum. The DS then changed tack: he requested for leave on  "compassionate grounds", stating that he had to check up on his aging parents in Delhi. Even this crap did not cut any ice with the CS (the mixed metaphor may be excused). The increasingly desperate DS then made his final gambit, taking a huge chance: he applied again, this time on "passionate grounds" viz. that he was only recently married and had not seen his wife for many months and would not be able to recognize her if he did not see her soon! It worked! Off he went to Delhi and he has not left her side since then- much to her annoyance, of course. The power of the word- the deletion of three letters- made all the difference between marital bliss and enforced "vanprastha". Why, he may even have joined the RSS if denied leave again, left his wife and become a Chief Minister !

    My own favourite is the one about the officer who wanted a bigger garage built in his official residence to park his two cars. He sent a note to the Secretary PWD requesting that the "garrage be constructed immediately.'' The latter's response revealed his stout English Literature background:  "Request approved. However the officer may be informed that while a garage can always contain two cars it can never contain two R's "!

    The good Lord need not worry- His Word is in good hands.

ANGER MANAGEMENT , LEMMINGS AND HONEY-BADGERS.

    Even the most rabid of Mr. Modi's detractors would not grudge him one thing: that he is an orator par excellence with an acute grasp of crowd psychology. He has all the arrows in his quiver: the suggestio falsi, the rhetorical question ( "kaha tha na?"), the breathless tapering off of a sentence, the pregnant pauses and suspenseful silences, the pumped up fist, the innuendo and worse. At his best he can be almost a Shakespearean figure- a King Lear, an Othello, even a Hindutva version of Richard III ( "A cow, a cow- my kingdom for a cow!" ). Why then does he have to descend to the level of a Kilkenny cat in his election rallies, as he recently did in Himachal? His generic hatred for the Gandhis was on full display but that is something we have come to accept, even though we still don't understand what lies behind it: there appears to be something almost personal behind it. But some of his comments went way beyond political antagonism. By calling them termites and rakshash ( devils), by branding the AICC as the All India Corruption Committee and terming the Congress ideology as "sadi hui soch" ( rotten, putrified thinking) he has lowered the dignity of the Prime Minister's office and exposed both his hubris and insecurities. Before Mr. Modi's arrival we had become accustomed to a different style of oratory from our Prime Ministers for the last twenty years or so. Mr. IK Gujral was the quintessential gentleman, seeking to make friends and to persuade by debate and discussion. Mr. Vajpayee was a fiery orator himself but his metier was passion, learning, poetry, reconciliation. Mr. Manmohan Singh was no orator but he was soft-spoken, learned, polite and never confrontationist. Their public speeches were both conciliatory and critical, but never scatological. Their followers also took their cue from their leaders' styles, and public discourse rarely crossed the laxman rekha. But all that has changed with the new government . Are the votes worth it if they are won by broadcasting hatred, anger, contempt, calumny and vitriol ? There is so much anger in Mr. Modi that I cannot but quote the Buddha: You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

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    Delhi just has to be the most messed up capital in the world- administratively, politically and environmentally. It is becoming more dysfunctional by the day. Things have become particularly bad over the last three years because Mr. Modi finds it hard to forget that Mr. Kejriwal delivered him the biggest haymaker of his political career by winning 67 out of 70 seats. Ever since then the Union govt. has a simple one point agenda for Delhi- let its administration and civic services deteriorate to a point where the AAP is totally discredited and Delhi-ites are ready to lynch Mr. Kejriwal. It does this through a multi-pronged strategy: don't allow the AAP to legislate any new initiatives ( by sitting on its Bills- at last count about 11 Bills were awaiting approval), intimidate the IAS and Dhanics officers into being loyal to the Centre rather than the state, use the three Municipal Corporations( all BJP controlled) to deliberately deny proper civic services to the citizens by constantly raising financial demands on the Delhi govt and instigating strikes, ensure non-cooperation by central agencies such as DDA, the Delhi Metro, CBI etc. And its lethal trump card is of course the Lieutenant Governor, a latter day Viceroy, a superannuated appointee who can ( and constantly does) veto the wishes of a govt. that has been elected by twenty million voters. He is omni-potent but accountable to no one. None other than the Supreme Court has held, in a recent obiter dicta, that he is the undisputed and constitutional head of Delhi. But have you ever seen him appear on TV to explain why he is presiding over such disarray and shambles, and what does he propose to do about it ? Why grill poor Mr. Kejriwal on prime time every evening when the Big Boss is the LG ? Is it that asking him to give an account of his administration would amount to some kind of lese majeste ?

    As if this were not bad enough, there is also a plethora of statutory authorities issuing all manner of directions, sometimes contradicting each other, to which nobody pays any attention, each questioning the other. The city is a modern tower of Babel, confusion confounded- should trucks be allowed in or not ? Should Badarpur TPS be shut down or not? What the hell do we do with the 15000 tonnes of garbage we produce every day? Should all construction activity be stopped ? Why is garbage still being burned at the landfills? Should odd-even be introduced again ? Does it actually lower pollution levels? Is Amarinder Singh allowing stubble burning in Punjab to get even with the BJP and AAP ? There is no shortage of "Authorities" or Ideas in Delhi- just a famine of people who will implement them.

    And while India's finest grapple with these daunting issues, the Air Quality Index is approaching the 500 mark, and the PM 2.5 ( no, its not the title of Chetan Bhagat's next book, though almost as deadly for the brain) continues to climb. We are constantly looking for exotic solutions to the death shroud of pollution tightening around us- mechanised sweeping of roads, seeding of clouds for rain, spraying water from helicopters, installing huge air purifiers at major intersections. The courts are on a banning spree; ban away a problem and it will disappear. But it doesn't, because problems have to be resolved, not wished away by judicial dictats. Take the ban on stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana. It cannot be implemented by challaning or locking up 15 million farmers. It must be recognised that this is an economic issue, not just an environmental nuisance, as the NGT appears to think. It costs Rs. 2000 an acre to remove the stubble, money the already embattled farmer can ill afford to spare. There are mechanical devices already available to remove the stubble- straw chopper-cum-spreader, rotavator, happy seeder, cutter shredder, baler- which can either shred the stalks and spread them as compost or stack them in bales for use as  fuel,fodder, feed or as raw material for paper units. They cost  between Rs. 45000/ or Rs. 3 lakhs each, way beyond the means of the average farmer, especially when compared to a matchbox costing one rupee ! The govt. should make these implements available on a cooperative/community basis free of cost. In the long term it should wean these farmers away from the cultivation of paddy in these water deficit areas. Punjab and Haryana were never meant to grow a water guzzling crop like paddy, which is sucking dry the ground water table. Punjab is a water stressed state and practically all its blocks are in the "black" category. Stubble is a by-product of paddy and reduction in the area under paddy will solve both problems, of water and pollution.               The same lack of clarity and political/ administrative will applies to Delhi:  we will not do the obvious and simple things: protect Delhi's green cover and stop deforestation ( 400 trees are being chopped down at Pragati Maidan to make space for an international convention center !), protect the Aravallis and the Ridge( 40% of which has already been lost) , our last defence against the deserts from the depredations of the Haryana and Delhi govts , revive the lost 600 water bodies of the city, preserve the Yamuna flood plains from ever increasing construction, declare selected roads as one-way to reduce congestion, add another 5000 buses to the DTC fleet ( their numbers have actually gone DOWN by 2500 over the last three years), shift ALL industrial units out of the city ( Beijing has done it, with remarkable results), introduce Odd-Even scheme mandatorily for two months every winter, stop ALL construction in the winters ( dust is the biggest pollutant as per all surveys).

    Delhi's citizens are equally culpable for the mess they are in and deserve every particle of PM 2.5 which they breathe in every time they open their mouths to complain against the govt. They will just not change their honey badger attitude and habits, and resist every reform or change. They continued to burst fire crackers this Diwali inspite of all appeals and orders. They will not walk or take the metro or a taxi ( it is illustrative to see the hundreds of cars outside, say, Lodi Gardens every morning: they belong to people who will DRIVE half a kilometer to walk two kilometers in the park- why can they not walk the entire 2.5 kms?). They will waste hundreds of litres of water daily to wash their cars. They insist on polluting the Yamuna with hundreds of idols every year, they will burn huge mounds of firewood during Holi and Baisakhi. They will oppose Odd-Even or BRT or cycle lanes. They will defy every measure suggested by the govt. Its an endless and despairing list, actually a DIY step-by-step guide to suicide. We are lemmings , led by honey badgers.

    As I finish this piece in my flat in east Delhi I'm seriously wondering if I'll ever get to see the sun  again. The pigeon on my window sill appears to have read my thoughts, for it looks at me like Edgar Allen Poe's raven and croaks: Nevermore!