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.

*                                    *                                    *                                   *                                *

    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! 

THE LITTLE KNOWN SUB-CADRES AND ROHINGYAS OF THE IAS.

    The week before last I had written an article for the New Indian Express disagreeing with the govt's move to introduce lateral induction in the IAS (Privatising The IAS Would Be A Mistake, 14th Oct. 2017) . The feedback from the readers was interesting and has prompted me to analyse at least one part of it in some detail. Those in favour and against were equally divided, about 50:50, but what surprised me was the anger, vitriol and contempt for the IAS among those who favoured privatisation. They gave three primary reasons for this: the IAS was a service which had developed a cosy nexus with politicians, it was self-seeking, and it had made itself completely unaccountable to both the govt. and the public. How much truth is there in these not flattering charges?

   Plenty, I'm afraid. But for the purposes of this piece I'll concentrate only on the first one, the parabiotic relationship that the IAS shares with the politician, to mutual advantage.

  The IAS has occupied all the commanding heights of government over the years, but in order to remain there it has had to strike a Faustian bargain with the political executive. It is now the gate-keeper to the political authority, controls all Cabinet Committees and Ministries, policy making and all postings, promotions and appointments, even those of judges and military commanders. No one- but no one- is allowed to breach their hallowed portals. The armed forces, for example, have been trying for years to gain meaningful entry into the Defense Ministry and to have a COAS (Chief of Armed Services) but have been thwarted time and again. The IAS has consistently, and fiercely, protected its payscales and promotion avenues in all Pay Commissions and even awarded itself the "Apex Scale", an HR monstrosity, which has subsequently cost the govt. tens of thousands of crores in extending it to other services. It has cornered all post retirement sinecures, except where the judiciary has staked its claim first- but even that is smart give and take! It has had to pay a price for this, however. Unlike the "YES, MINISTER" model, where the astute civil servant controls the politician through deft tactical manouevers, team spirit and by thinking one step ahead of the politician (without compromising either his service or the public interest), the IAS has been lazy and has surrendered to the politician. This capitulation is of two types. The vast majority of officers have no political loyalties, try to be neutral but generally flow with the current, taking the easy way out. They are not "politicised" but merely compliant. A small minority, not more than 10%-15% of the cadre, however, become active camp followers of one political party/ politician or the other and promote only their interests, whether they are in or out of power. They represent a spoils system within the service and are the main reason why the IAS is seen to be politicised. And thereby hangs a tale.

    One of my readers, Mr. Duggaraju Srinivasa Rao from Andhra Pradesh, has sent me an interesting postulate. The IAS, like the other two All India Services, is structured into state cadres: an officer is allotted to a state which then becomes his cadre for life and he is expected to be loyal to that state. Mr. Duggaraju's thesis is that over time an unofficial sub-cadre has emerged in all states- these are political sub-cadres where the officer is allied with some political party or the other and subserves its interests  (rather than the public interest.) I find this postulate fascinating- and true!

 Such sub-cadres are an inevitable progression when officers, for purely personal gains, attach themselves to a political party, preferably the one in power, and swear allegiance to it. Over time they become "branded" and rise and fall with the fluctuating fortunes of that party and constitute a distinct sub-cadre within the state cadre. Thus the UP cadre of the IAS has its Samajwadi, BSP and BJP sub-cadres, Tamil Nadu its DMK and AIDMK sub-cadres, West Begal the TMC and CPI sub-cadres, Himachal has the BJP and Congress sub-cadres, and so on. No state is exempt from this Duggaraju rule, except perhaps Delhi where Mr. Kejriwal is too hot for any IAS officer to touch, especially with Big Brother watching from North Block!

  Readers from Himachal can see this thesis playing out right before their eyes! Both the BJP and the Congress have a bunch of IAS officers in their sub-cadres (and most readers from the state can probably name most of them too!) When their parent party is in power they occupy all the important posts and hound the officers of the other sub-cadre with transfers, departmental action and even police or vigilance cases. When their party is in opposition they lie low, go on long training assignments, study leave or central deputation. If none of these escape routes are available then they maintain a low profile, leak official secrets to their mentors or sabotage the current government's programmes. When they retire they get plum supernumary assignments, but for this the timing has to be perfect. It is important that they retire when THEIR party is in power, or they won't bag the sack of oats. If the timing does not match then they take premature retirement to avail of the sinecure in advance- a bird in hand is always worth two in the bush, especially if the bush may not be around for much longer!

  To extend Mr. Duggaraju's analogy, there are other types of sub-cadres also. To continue with Himachal, there is the Regional sub-cadre (do you belong to Old Himachal or New Himachal ?), tribal sub-cadre (officers from Kinnaur, Lahaul-Spiti, Bharmour and Pangi), Outsiders sub-cadre (allottees from other states marooned on this mountain), Reserved category sub-cadre (SC, ST, OBC). When I joined service in what now feels like ancient India there even used to be Delhi University and Allahabad University sub-cadres !

    To an extent, such groupings are not bad per se in that they promote an espirit d'corps, like in an Army regiment, for example, which only strengthens the organisation. But when they get overtaken by politics, and their only raison d'etre is self seeking aggrandisement (as the IAS sub-cadres have become) then they vitiate the service and weaken it. Incidentally, it would not be fair to only tar the IAS with this brush- it exists in all govt. services, including the Indian Police Service, the Indian Forest Service, the state services, and down to the clerk in the Secretariat or the patwari in the field. That the government still manages to hobble along is due to the other 10% who subscribe to no sub-cadre and still abide by the oath they took when they joined service. They are the Rohingyas of the civil services- stateless persons allied to no party, squeezed between opposing forces and unwanted by the powers that be, perpetually under threat of deportation to Delhi or Pangi or the north-east- but THEY are the real civil service, not the time servers and camp followers of the political sub-cadres.

   To conclude, Mr. Duggaraju's law is playing out right now in Himachal, which goes to the polls on the 9th of November. Since the BJP is widely expected to replace the Congress, one can now see the Congress sub-cadre chaps frantically digging their burrows and packing in the provisions to weather the long winter ahead. The BJP sub-cadre, on the other hand, is now coming to life like  grizzly bears after a long hibernation. And like the bears, they are hungry- for power, the loaves of office they have been denied for the last five years. They are already busy short listing their preferred postings and preparing a Schindler's list of the damned. Like homing pigeons, they will soon start returning from central deputation, study leave or wherever they were in hiding, and head straight for the house of the likely Chief Minister nominee. Incidentally, I have always believed that pollsters and psephologists predicting election results spend a lot of unnecessary money and time in doing opinion and exit polls. Instead, they should simply watch the bureaucrats- the weather vanes, as it were- who always know who will form the next government. Watch the sub-cadres and you will never go wrong.  

THE TALWARS ARE INNOCENT, BUT ARE WE ?

         

We may attribute the grotesque miscarriage of justice implicit in the conviction ( now set aside) of the Rajesh and Nupur Talwar to one judge and one investigating officer, but we would be deluding ourselves. This case represents a colossal failure of our entire system where every institution intended to safeguard a citizen’s rights- the executive, judiciary, Parliament and the media- has turned rogue like an auto-immune disease and turned upon itself. The checks and balances have not worked and the lives of two respectable members of society have been destroyed while their murdered daughter is just another statistic in our cavernous hall of shame.

The UP police and the CBI should of course hang their heads in shame. The former destroyed most of the evidence and could not proceed beyond besmirching the character of a dead girl. The CBI had no real evidence against the Talwars: the Allahabad High Court has painstakingly demolished their fabricated house of cards, Joker by Joker. The most important elements in proving guilt in a murder case are motive, murder weapon, and the chain of circumstances: the High Court could find none of them. Neither the SP Mr. Kaul nor the then Director of CBI Mr. Ashwani Kumar could be bothered with this nicety, however: they went ahead and prosecuted the Talwars without any evidence against them, or evidence that was concocted by pressurising a maid and intimidating forensic experts. They let suspicion and personal bias take the place of scientific evidence: this was the first failure. The second was the failure of the CBI’s legal wing/ Prosecution branch to point this out while vetting the case. Or did they do so and were overruled by the gentleman who went on to the luxury of a Raj Bhavan while his victims were rotting in Dasna jail?

The CBI trial judge who convicted the Talwars is the third failure. It frightens me to think that there are, in all probability, many more such judges in our judicial system who hold the lives and freedom of millions of citizens in their hands. I have rarely read a worse judgement in my life, even if we discount reports at that time that the first part of the order was written by his son and that the worthy judge had started writing the judgement even before final arguments were made in the case! Equally, I have rarely come across such scathing remarks by a High Court against a judge, describing him as a “film director” who was “prejudiced” and whose reasoning was “vitriolic”. It says that Mr. Shyam Lal’s approach was “ parochial and partial”, he tried to “give shape to his own imagination stripped of a just evaluation of the evidence and facts of this case,” and that he was “unmindful of the basic tenets of the law.” The fourth systemic failure ,therefore, is simply this: how could such a judge ever come to occupy a position where he could, literally, send a man to his death?

The Allahabad High Court has rectified somewhat what the CBI and Mr. Shyam Lal had perpetrated on the Talwars, but it took them four years to do so, and this too has to be a failure of the system. Why could they not have been released on bail pending their appeal? After all, sometime back the Patna High Court had granted bail to the notorious Mohammad Shahbuddin who has three life convictions and two dozen other criminal cases pending against him. Did the two dentists pose a greater threat to society, with their scalpels and drills, than the don with his assault rifles and guns and goons? The double standards of our courts is part of the reason our system is breaking down.

The media- particularly the electronic media- provides the next malfunction of the system. A TV studio these days is the Colosseum of Roman times where panellists, led by rabid anchors, bay for blood- it does not matter whose, just so long as it keeps flowing on prime time. Without any investigation or facts they brand people guilty, hound the police till they do likewise and create a malevolent public pressure which the Kauls and Shyam Lals of the world are only too happy to appease. These anchors have played no small role in railroading the Talwars.

Parliament too has failed us, and the Talwars. It has done nothing to legislate some of the corrections into the system: creation of separate Directorates of Prosecution to stop the predatory tactics of the police, introducing an All_india Judicial Service to improve the quality of our trial judges, allow more liberal bail laws considering that of every one hundred persons arrested, fifty-five will be ultimately declared innocent in our country, mandate fast tracking of appeals where the accused are already behind bars, bring in stricter gag laws for the media to prevent them influencing investigations and trials.

Most important of all, given the rapacious aptitude of our police, the whimsical nature of court judgements and the sheer enormity of miscarriage of justice in our country, it is high time Parliament and the Supreme Court considered introducing a system for compensating citizens wrongly imprisoned by the govt. Most progressive and rule based countries have them : 29 states in the USA have Wrongful Conviction statutes under which unfortunate detainees are given compensation ranging from US$ 50000 to 100,000 per year of wrongful detention. The UK too has the Criminal Justice Act. The logic for this is clear: the citizen has voluntarily given the state enormous powers over his life and liberty in the interest of a cohesive social order; when the state betrays this trust it must offer reparations to the people it has wronged. This trust is the bedrock of a democratic order.

We betrayed this trust and covenant with the Talwars. Do we have it in us to rectify these shortcomings before the canker pervades all ? 

PRIVATISING THE IAS IS A MISTAKE.

     The NITI ( National Institution for Transformation of India) Ayog has recommended to the Prime Minister that “lateral entry” from the private sector should be introduced in the civil services at all levels, from Secretary to Deputy Secretary. The PMO (Prime Minister's Office) is reportedly considering the matter seriously. A bunch of reemployed bureaucrats are seeking to undermine the vision of someone like Sardar Patel who had cautioned the Constituent Assembly that India would disintegrate if it did not have a strong and independent civil service.

    To be candid, the premier civil service of India, the IAS has not lived up to the Sardar’s expectations. It has, to an alarming degree, become politicised, slothful, complacent, venal and self serving. But that is not the whole story: the IAS has also delivered significant results in terms of quality of life indicators, human welfare index, the economy, preserving federalism, developing basic infrastructure, reducing poverty. Its officers are still chosen by the most rigorous, objective and fair selection process in the country. If it has faltered this is primarily due to the deteriorating quality of the political executive, particularly after Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency and its credo of a “committed bureaucracy.” It has not been allowed the independence and the freedom to “speak out its advice” which Sardar Patel had stipulated as an essential condition for its effectiveness. Political governments have used the tools of postings, transfers, reemployment, charge-sheets, and of late tickets to elections, to subvert, entice, and intimidate the members of the service to conform. That it still functions most of the time is a tribute to its resilience, selection and relevance.

   But instead of attending to the problems mentioned above (which have been flagged time and again by various Administrative Reforms Commissions and Expert Committees) the government is , as usual, opting for a quick-fix which will further erode the efficiency of the IAS and destroy for ever its special character. The ostensible reason being trotted out is that the IAS lacks domain knowledge in a fast evolving, technology driven world, and hence “ domain experts” from the private sector need to be inducted laterally to make it a modern institution. This is specious and mischievous too, as I will explain in a moment.

    The word “domain” here is synonymous with “technical”, meaning that the  IAS needs technically qualified people from the outside. Not true. It already has enough. In the 2017 batch itself out of 264 selected candidates , 118 ( 44.69%) are from an engineering background; if one adds on the Doctors , IT graduates etc. the percentage comes closer to 50. Among the 20 toppers in this batch, 19 are engineers and one is a doctor! There is enough technical expertise in the IAS and this is no reason to get more from the private sector.

   Secondly, the “domain” argument is misleading sophistry and betrays a complete lack of understanding of what the role of a permanent civil service in a democracy should be. The civil servant is not required to be a technical expert. He stands at the point where technology intersects with the development needs of the common man, which can vary from village to village. There can be no one size fits all solutions, no matter how good the technology, as both demonetisation and GST have recently demonstrated. The civil servant’s role is that of the synthesiser- to assimilate a technology or idea, adapt it to the local context, and then extend it to the hundreds of millions, making mid course corrections wherever required. The limited, one dimensional vision that technocrats have would make them unsuitable for this role.

    To fulfil this role an officer needs to have deep grass roots experience, and an IAS officer is uniquely qualified for this. On an average he spends the first ten years of his career in “the field”, getting to know the dynamics of the actual workings of government at the village, panchayat, tehsil and district level. This is an invaluable input for him when he moves on to the Secretariat or Delhi to a policy making level, and one that any lateral entry recruit would completely lack.

    In government nothing is purely technical. Take, for instance, the construction of a dam, which the proponents of lateral entry would regard as a job for a domain  (engineering) expert. It is much, much more for it involves areas an engineer would have no clue about: acquisition of land, resettlement and rehabilitation of oustees, diversion of forest areas, preparation of Environmental Impact  and Social Impact Assessments, formulation and implementation of Environmental Management Plans, financial closure for the project, negotiating PPPs with the buyers, etc. Building the dam is only a small part of the project. It is here that the IAS officer’s role as a coordinator becomes indispensable: he has typically worked in a dozen different departments, his knowledge of administration is both deep and eclectic, he does not exist in a silo like all domain experts do. He is supremely qualified to coordinate the functioning of a government that works through a hundred Ministries at the Centre and in the states.

     An IAS officer IS a domain expert, in the most difficult and complex of all domains- Public Administration, which is a witch’s brew of policies, demographics, politics, social imperatives, religion, law and order. He is an expert at balancing all these, sometimes contradictory elements, and still moving the nation forward. A private sector whizz kid, whose only focus has been on maximising of profit, can never understand the dynamics involved or get the balance right.

    Lateral entry will be a regressive move towards the spoils system, which is perhaps why the government is keen on it. It will give it the freedom to appoint loyalists, fellow travelers, favourites and ideological compatibles. But these birds of passage will have no stakes in the service. In one generation there shall be no permanent civil service left. The PPP (Public Private Partnership) model may work for commercial projects, but a permanent civil service cannot function on this model. Government should instead address urgently the issues highlighted above. By all means throw out the bath-water, maybe even a baby or two, but for God’s sake don’t discard the bath-tub itself!

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PIOUS, THE WEALTHY AND THE PLAIN STUPID.

    So the cat's out of the bag. The marquee appearance of UP Chief Minister Swami Adityanath in the Jan Suraksha Yatra Kerala last week, his strident call to deport the Rohingyas notwithstanding the Supreme Court's observations, and the announcement that he will also campaign for the HP and Gujarat elections is a clear indication of the BJP's election narrative. Hindutva will be the clarion call, not development, for hoovering up the votes. There can be no other explanation. Adityanath's only visible appeal, in his saffron attire and tilak on a shaven visage, is as the flag bearer of a new and aggressive brand of Hindutva. Being the head of the Gorakhpur math adds to these credentials, and he has just reaffirmed this by spending a week during Dussehra at the math instead of the CM's office. He has nothing else to speak for him: his six month reign has been a disaster, what with the anti-Romeo squads, targetting of madrassas, rising crime graph, near destruction of the beef, cattle and leather industry, the infant deaths at Gorakhpur, the violence against girl students at BHU. His only achievement has been that he has more or less dismantled the Yadav mafia of the previous regime, but only to replace it with his own Thakur-Brahmin- gaurakshak version. And yes, he has stated that the Taj Mahal does not represent Indian culture and therefore has been omitted from his Tourism department's brochure! His next big achievement will be the construction of a hundred meter high statue of Ram in Ayodhya: funds for the hospital in Gorakhpur where more than 1500 children die every year will have to wait till his religious fervour is doused by a couple of electoral losses, I guess.

    Unlike the Congress, the BJP does its homework thoroughly. It has realised that its development plank of 2014 will not work because it has collapsed under the weight of too many hasty "reforms", a Prime Minister who loves to police rather than govern with empathy, and a Finance Minister who refuses to get out of the barrister mode of scoring debating points rather than keeping an open mind. And so it is now evident that Hindu nationalism and minority bashing will be the primary agenda for the coming state elections- the opiate of the masses is still a potent force. More poison will be injected into the already ailing body fabric of a tired and confused nation. And herein lies the real danger. Regardless of who wins these elections, the poison will be here to stay. In the three and a half years it has been in power the BJP has altered our cultural fabric of inclusiveness for ever: the mutual suspicion, distrust and animosity between communities and religions it has engendered will persist for a long time, if not for ever. In a way, it has already won the cultural battle- it remains to be seen if it wins the political one too.

*                              *                            *                              *                                 *                        *

    Are you still wondering how tens of millions remain unemployed and undernourished, and thousands commit suicide out of economic distress, even as our economy continues to be the fastest growing in the world? Well, wonder no more. Its because all the gains are being cornered by that 1% of Indians who own 55% of its wealth, or the 10% who have collared 74% of it ( Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report)- the rich are getting richer while the poor are rotting where they were. I refer you to the latest Forbes  Annual India Rich List 2017, which contains some revealing figures. The combined wealth of the 100 richest Indians increased by a whopping 26% to US$ 479 billion. or Rs. 31 lakh crore. To put this in perspective, their wealth is more than the country's forex reserves, it is almost three times the total NPAs of our banks, it is about 20% of our GDP, it is equivalent to the annual incomes of 310 million Indians ! Heading the list, of course, is Mr. Mukesh Ambani whose wealth went up by 67% to US$ 38 billion or Rs.2.5 lakh crore.

    Now, one does not grudge these financial wizards their wealth, but one is certainly entitled to question the economic model which permits this scandalous inequity in a country where 40% of people go to bed hungry. It shows us that a high GDP cannot be the end all of economic planning, because its gains are siphoned off by a privileged few who possess the wherewithal to exploit the policies and systems which in any case are tailor-made for them. The distributive aspects of growth are even more important than its absolute numbers. A 5% GDP growth, whose gains go down to the lowest levels, is much more preferable than a 7% growth which is cornered by the few. Our economists have not yet realised this , but the politicians are beginning to if the results of elections in the UK, USA and now even Germany are anything to go by: the mantra of globalisation and growth for growth's sake is getting increasingly discredited ( I have no doubt that Mr. Modi too, notwithstanding his PT Barnum type of soap-box skills, will also discover this in the coming polls). He is enamoured of the western, neo-classical model which is driven by unrestrained consumerism, a dog-eats-dog market place where the richest are lauded and the devil takes the hindmost. It will not work. Perhaps the time has come to go back to that old man whose spectacles are used only for promoting govt. programmes . Maybe we should also look through them once in a while and try to understand his vision of a country where the  "daridranarayan"- the poorest of the poor- would be at the centre of all policy making, and not just the Ambanis and the Azim Premjis. Do you detect a delicious but tragic irony in this- that our rulers take the votes from the poor but deliver the wealth to the rich ? Isn't that vote laundering ?

*                                         *                                    *                                      *                                 *

    My earnest advice to Mr. Chetan Bhagat is that he should stick to what he is good at: churning out assembly line pulp fiction and bilge. He should not don the universal expert's hat, and in particular should desist from projecting himself as the champion of Indian "traditions", which appears to be his new avatar while lashing out at the Supreme Court judgement banning the sale of firecrackers in Delhi NCR till Nov.11 this year. This order has not come a day too soon. Only a nitwit or a bhakt would fail to admit that Delhi becomes an Auschwitz during and long after Diwalis and the hospitals are packed with respiratory cases for weeks afterwards. Last year the quality of air index reached 999 and then packed up because the scale stopped at a reading of 1000!  (the WHO norm is 60) . And this happens at the precise time when the city is already engulfed in the acrid pollution caused by burning of 35 million tonnes of stubble in neighbouring states. Nobody- not Chetan Bhagat, not Shekhar Gupta, not Sehwag, not the RSS- has the right to inflict this on hapless citizens in the name of tradition, livelihoods or religious freedom. or whatever. The Supreme Court had given us enough time to stop the practice voluntarily, but as usual the average Delhi-ite doesn't give a shit. Mr. Bhagat can lock himself in his air conditioned house, switch on his air purifier and write his best selling rubbish, but the ordinary citizen does not have the luxury of this protection. Every right thinking resident of the NCR should welcome and support the decision of the Supreme Court. As for Mr. Bhagat, since he is so fond of a numeral in the title of his books, may I suggest a title for his next one- THE HALF- WIT. ? It could be an autobiography.