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.