AUTHORITARIANISM AND THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

   In the millennia to come, when our history is written ( not, however, by the likes of Mr. Rakesh Sinha, MP or Mr. Dina Nath Batra), it will no doubt record the immense damage done to our culture, ethos, public institutions, democratic fabric and constitutional values by the two terms of the present BJP government.  But it will also record the miracles that are playing out even as I write- the unintended consequences of the government's brutal and unilateral decrees and actions, the unexpected outcomes which their ugly algorithms had not factored in, but which will, in the long run, make this country a much better democracy than what the politicians had delivered so far. Just consider the results of the toxic CAA/NRC brew, the police brutalities, the undisguised vengeance extracted by Yogi Adithyanath, the blatant falsehoods of the Prime Minister and his henchmen, and of the protests that have followed.

   For the very first time in our 70 year history the concept of "secularism" has come out of the rarefied and elite portals of Parliament and the Supreme Court, where for years it had been kept as a captive idol, paraded in public only during elections: freed from its legalistic and political fetters it now mingles joyously with the ordinary citizens in the streets, parks and universities of India. If you wish to see the true face of this creature, go no further than Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, or Roshan Bagh in Allahabad or Park Circus in Calcutta or the Clock Tower in Lucknow or Phulwari Sharif in Patna, or or dozens of other such sites across the length and breadth of India. There you will see Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians sitting together in protest, braving the cold, the discomfort, the loss of earnings, the humiliation and worse by the police. There exists only one identity and one religion there, the one which this government has tried its best to shatter into a thousand pieces- Indian. The ham handed tactics of Ms Modi and Shah have brought about in just two months what the Constitution and courts could not in seventy years- a coming together of all our disparate religions, the real meaning of a secularism hitherto caught up in semantics, didactics and legalism, a realisation that what the constitution has given let no politician rend asunder. Ms Modi-Shah had calculated that with the CAA/NRC combo they would permanently divide the Hindus and the Muslims, picking off the latter family by family, ghetto by ghetto. What they have achieved instead is to bring them together, in a recognition of our religious abundance that goes far beyond a bookish secularism.  And this is just one of the results of the law of unintended consequences, there are others too.

   The citizens of India have also reclaimed the national anthem and the tricolour from the ceremonial tokenism they had been reduced to.  They sing the anthem lustily morning and night, drowning out the sound of jackboots always prowling in the peripheries. They now sing and wave them in the face of police brutalities as an answer to the calumny, untruths, fake news, violence and threats unleashed by an authoritarian government and its sold out media. It is their riposte to the repeated slurs of anti-nationalism, tukde-tukde, urban Naxals, sickular, libtards and similar invectives that make up the vocabulary of those in power. Our flag and anthem have finally found their rightful place- in the custody of the citizens, in the proud hands of a four year old at Shaheen Bagh rather than on the cold flagpole of a sarkari monument. They have acquired meaning and value.

  But it is the women who have sprung the biggest surprise on this government. They are the ones leading these sit-ins, the unseen, unheard fifty percent of India hitherto treated as camp followers of an outsized patriarchal ego. They come from all faiths, from behind the ghunghats, hijabs and burquas; the supreme irony being that the Muslim women whom the BJP had "liberated" by an over reaching Triple Talaq law are now voicing that freedom in a manner that the party finds extremely embarrassing! It is not the Triple Talaq Act which has empowered them, but the foisting of the citizenship issue. Home makers more comfortable in the privacy of their homes, they have now stepped out of not only their houses but out of the centuries of seclusion, to fight for their rights and their children's future. They are no longer deterred by the lodging of FIRs against them, or the ransacking of their homes by the police. Their's is the real secular pushback, against both the Hindu fundamentalists and their own obscurantist ulemas. These protests have given a voice and a power to the women of India that all past legislations could not, and this perhaps is the biggest unintended outcome of the BJP's miscalculations: they are now a force to contend with and the politicians and clergy can no longer ignore them or take them for granted. This can only strengthen our democracy.

  A new idiom and language of democracy has also emerged over this last one month, crafted in the streets and not in the arcane groves of academe or the comfort of plush studios. They can be seen in the creative posters at the protest sites ( " Show me your degree and I will show you my papers! "   "Hindu-Muslim raazi, to kya karega Nazi!:), memes on social media, paintings, lyrics and songs. An entirely new genre of music has emerged, not unlike the heady days of Vietnam, Woodstock, Bob Dylan, Marley and Joan Baez. And so we now have Varun Grover ( " Kagaz nahi dikhayenge"), Sumit Roy ("Go protest"), Poojan Sahil (" Pachtaoege"), and Amaan Yadav (" Ram bhi Yahan pe.") and countless others. It is a festival of egalitarian music.

   Our youngsters- students and youth-long derided as WhatsApp and Facebook organisms- are the vanguard of these protests even as their elders have preferred to play safe. The younger generation has displayed a better sense of history too and of our archival values: they are reacquainting themselves with the Constitution, with Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose, even with the older songs that confront tyranny and persecution- songs of Faiz, Nagarjun, Habib Jalib, Allama Iqbal and Dushyant Kumar. They have had to grow up quickly, to recognize the lesser evil, but they have now come of age in the more than 40 universities that have stood up and said "Enough is enough!" India will be the richer for this in the years to come, for from among them will emerge the new leaders of our polity and society, to replace the jaded, corrupt, opportunistic, morally bankrupt and ideologically regressive leaders of today who have betrayed them. 

   It is difficult for citizens to confront a modern state, with its police, armies, coercive agencies and fake news factories. Equally, however, the results of a battle of ideas can never be foretold, and the rule of unintended consequences can never be discounted. Mr. Modi may still ram through his diseased ideas but it will be a pyrrhic victory, and a short lived one, because the opposition to him is changing the country for the better. The hitherto sterile concepts of citizenship, secularism, pluralism, nationhood, equality have come alive and their true value is only now being recognised. It is something the government's arrogance had not bargained for. One is reminded of the words of the poet Mohammad Iqbal: Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper, and then die in the hands of politicians. We may still be spared this fate.

THE YEARNING FOR LEARNING.

[ This piece has been published in THE CITIZEN under the title THE SLAUGHTER HOUSE OF INTELLIGENCE on 19.1.2020.]

   Article 51 (1) of our Constitution enjoins upon us to develop a critical temperament, to encourage the spirit of inquiry and reform, one reason why we have more than 800 universities and 48000 colleges. But it would appear that the present government at the centre, and its minions, are more of the opinion of the late Madhusudan Das who once famously described Madras university as "the slaughter house of intelligence." Having already shut down the real slaughter houses, it appears that it has now decided to shut down, or at least make life difficult for,  those universities which display too much of the spirit of inquiry or criticism- JNU, AMU, Jamia Milia, Hyderabad, Jadavpur- and to advise others( including the IITs and IIMs) to remember that curiosity killed the cat. To fill up the resultant vacuum the BJP has mustered its own pantheon of intellectual luminaries to share their scholarship with us, both citizens and termites, till the latter are flushed out of the woodwork by the NRC spray.

   The BJP/ RSS new age scholars have little time or patience for established history, science or literature and not since the Renaissance have we been exposed to such a wealth of transformational ideas. One ex-Minister, Satyapal Singh, demolished Darwin's theory of evolution because none of his ancestors ever saw an ape morphing into a homo sapiens, and since seeing is believing  ( he used to be a cop, hence the emphasis on eye witness testimony), he chose not to believe Darwin. He even wanted to revise the textbooks but was fortunately soon banished into the wilds, where no doubt he is now conferring with those poor derided apes who, like him, failed to evolve.

  The poor cow and its various derivatives have been imbued with powers that had escaped the attention of many centuries of scientific research- curing of cancer, exhaling of oxygen, passing gold in its urine being three of the most important scientific discoveries. Mr. Harsh Vardhan, the then Minister of Science and Technology no less, chided Delhi-wallahs for complaining about air pollution and advised them to combat it with " gajar ka halwa", thus revealing not only a sweet tooth but also an Achilles heel. The otherwise urbane and suave Piush Goel, in an epiphanic moment, took the scientific world by storm when he revealed at a Board of Trade meeting that it was Einstein, not Newton, who discovered gravity. He will hopefully correct himself when the penny... er.. drops. Never one to be outdone, our feisty Finance Minister Mrs. Sitharaman blamed Uber for our difficult drive to a five million dollar economy., confusing the driver-less economy with driver-less cars. Mr. Prakash Javadekar added his own bit by suggesting that listening to music in the mornings would neutralise the PM 2.5 molecules, but did not advise us on what to do with the far more harmful PM 2.0 molecules of Mr. Modi's second term. Unknown to us at that time ( but made clear this last week) the source of his arcane knowledge was revealed by Mrs. Kiran Bedi, the governess of Puducherry, in a recent tweet: a fake NASA video of the sun from which emanated ( according to Mrs. Bedi) the sounds of OM. It is quite possible that Mr. Javadekar had this celestial music in mind when he dropped his pearl. Neither of these eggheads paused to consider the obvious: that space is a vacuum and sound cannot travel in a vacuum. But then, of what use is the spirit of inquiry if it is not allowed to soar to the sublime heights of the ridiculous? My humble counsel to the duo is that they should stick to their forte: Mr. Javadekar to fudging figures of the tiger count and forested area, and Mrs. Bedi to giving the finger to the unfortunate Mr. Narainsway, Chief Minister of Puducherry.
  Mrs. Bedi was not the only Governor who refused to play second fiddle to Ministers: Mr. Dhankar of West Bengal fame, may just have made it more difficult for us with the Nuclear Suppliers' Group by divulging ( at a science congress, no less) that Arjun's arrows were tipped with nuclear warheads! The poor Mr. Jaishankar, our Foreign Minister, is reported to be now waiting with bated breath for Donald Trump's reaction. Not to be outdone, the tub thumping MP from Delhi, Mrs. Meenakshi Lekhi, thumped the Microsoft chief Satya Nadella by tweeting that he is a literate who needs to be educated, effectively putting him on par with the Bihar Class V student who cannot read a Class II text- officially literate but uneducated. We will have to wait and see what this does to Microsoft's shares, though Mrs. Lekhi's stock will certainly go up in Race Course road.

  Having demolished science, medicine( remember our PM's revelations about plastic surgery in vedic times?), astronomy and history, and having introduced " Bhoot Vidya" as a subject in some colleges, these mutant geniuses have now trained their guns on literature. IIT Kanpur has ordered an inquiry to determine whether a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz- HUM DEKHENGE- is anti national. Why? Because it was sung by some students at a protest against the CAA/NRC. While this quest for knowledge is commendable it does raise some questions about the condition of the Director's brain cells and telomeres. It is obvious that, in his quest for a few pats by the Deadly Duo, he forgot that Faiz was a democrat and a liberal, not an Islamist; a rebel against Pakistan authoritarianism who was jailed twice for speaking out and exiled. A little research would have revealed that the stirring words of the poem  which are the subject of the inquiry- " sab taaz uchhale jayenge,sab takht giraye jaenge"- were directed at the then dictator of Pakistan, General Zia-ul Haq, and that the other line- " Raj karega khalke khuda"- is not an Islamic chant at all, it simply means that God's people will rule.

  The brains trust of Kanpur IIT should also know that poetry and poets have always embraced dissidence and have always stood against any kind of authoritarianism; that imagery is their stock in trade and shouldn't be interpreted literally; and that generations of youth have used the verses of poets as a rallying cry against what they perceive as injustice. The Director would be well advised not to inject politics into literature or else he would have more inquiries on his hands than he could handle. Who would he inquire into next: Shakespeare for promoting love jihad in Romeo and Juliet? Othello for honour killing? Charles Dickens for saying that " it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" as a prescient but unwelcome commentary on today's India? Rabindranath Tagore, whose imprecation to God to lead his countrymen to a world where the head is held high and the mind is without fear, may be interpreted by some lumpen to be seditionist? And will inquiries also be ordered into the poems of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Gulzar, Salil Chowdhury, Iqbal, Sahir Ludhianvi, Rahat Indori and Bhupen Hazarika ? Let literature be, sir, it's not your cup of tea. Or, as another poet said:

" A little learning is a dangerous thing,

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."

In college one of my Professors was fond of telling us that one should go on learning as long as one is still living. Given the spirit of officially sanctioned erudition  these days, however, all one can say is: " Death, where is thy sting?"

WHY INDIA AND ARVIND KEJRIWAL ARE ON TEST IN DELHI.

     [ This piece was published in THE CITIZEN on 12.1.2020 and in THE WIRE  on 16.1.2020 ]   

    Elections to Delhi have been announced for the 8^th of February 2020. Winning these elections may be important for Kejriwal, but it is even more important for India, or at least for that part of India which cherishes all that the Constitution had promised it. Although Delhi has just 70 seats, only 14 million voters( less than 2% of India’s electorate) and is not even a full fledged state, its politics is disproportionate to its numbers for it is the national capital, houses all the foreign consulates, is the hub of all media reporting, and is a genuine microcosm of India. Its residents represent the full spectrum of Indian politics, ideologies, opinions, religions, regions, castes and concerns. It is, in short, a good barometer of the mood of India.

  And this barometer appears to be falling rapidly, indicative of unsettled weather ahead. The country is caught up in a toxic miasma of controversies and protests over the economy, Kashmir, CAA, NRC, NPR, violence in Universities, police atrocities, strikes by Unions. Mr. Modi’s government, true to its nature, refuses to either acknowledge the unrest or engage with citizens; it is like a Tunnel Boring Machine which can only push forward blindly and has no reverse gear. It continues to defend itself by dissembling lies and half truths, branding all opposition to its policies as anti-national, and unleashing waves of uniformed repression. It uses its massive Parliamentary majority as a sledge hammer to bludgeon the states, mutilate the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution, and bulldoze its divisive policies through an apprehensive landscape. It has just lost Maharashtra and Jharkhand but the loss has only made it more vicious, vindictive and determined to reassert its authority.

  This then is the perilous backdrop of the elections in which Kejriwal has to strive to retain power. The Delhi elections will be a referendum on the lethal goulash of Mr. Modi’s policies, not just on Mr. Kejriwal’s achievements which are considerable and should have won him the elections on their own strength. But make no mistake, the results of these elections will determine the future course of our democracy, and not just who rules in Delhi.

  The unholy trinity of CAA/NRC/NRP is casting its malevolent shadow on this country, it is what is uppermost on the citizens’ minds right now, and is what has unleashed the police repression at Jamia, JNU, AMU, Meerut, Bijnor, Muzzafarpur, Bangalore. It is what has brought the youth of this country on the streets in numbers and anger not seen since JP’s mass movement. It is clear the country does not want this spectre, but our demographic institutions and safeguards will not confront the monster. Expect nothing from the legal challenges in the Supreme Court given its recent track record: at best the court will refuse to intervene on grounds of national security and sovereignty, a-la Rafale, at worst it will rule that the distinction between Muslim and other religions is reasonable. Expect even less from our mainstream political parties and leaders who ( barring Mamata Banerji and Priyanka Gandhi) have crawled into their holes to weather out the storm. Expect nothing but a mercenary servility from the media. Expect little from Big Capital and the expanding list of billionaires, barring a Rahul Bajaj and an Ananda Mahindra here and there. Forget about the "autonomous” institutions, they are riddled with more “ termites” than Assam and Bengal. The Modi- Shah duo, with their customary meticulousness, have sown up all the loose ends. The only part they cannot take for granted is the electorate, and the only language they understand is the message from the ballot box. Nothing will stop them- not the judiciary, not international opinion, not mass suffering, not deaths from violence, not the Constitution, not the collapse of institutions. But an electoral loss in Delhi will almost certainly stop their assault, if for no other reason than that it will give other states ( and even its allies) the nerve and reassurance to oppose the BJP’s disastrous policies. A Nitish Kumar may still turn and a Naveen Patnaik may still get off the fence.

  The only opposition to the government today is civil society, specially its youth and students. Mr. Kejriwal has to mobilise them and win them over, and add their support to the overwhelming good work he has done in Delhi in the fields of power, water, education, slum improvement, women’s safety. He can even nominate some- like Kanhaiya Kumar- for tickets. He should make Delhi police's violence and naked partisanship the basis for arguing for a different party at the state level, to act as a counter check to a rampaging Home Ministry. He should discard the caution he has shown so far in denouncing NRC and NPR: Delhi has tens of lakhs of migrants from Bihar, UP and Bengal whose livelihoods would be destroyed in the struggle to obtain valid documentation from villages they left years ago. The NRC is no longer a Hindu- Muslim issue, it will leave millions of Hindus disenfranchised too, as Assam has shown. He must tap into this fear and not pussy foot around it.

  The BJP, for all its posturing, is not confident of victory in Delhi and some early polls predicting a near sweep for the AAP will make it more desperate and ruthless. It will dig deep into its bag of dirty tricks and black trunks of electoral bonds to manipulate a win. The recent goondaism in JNU may just be a preview of what is yet to come- violence to intimidate and divide, dog whistles to the police, complaints to the Election Commission, more falsehoods by prime time anchors and the IT cell, more false cases against AAP leaders. If all else fails, do not discount a postponement of elections ( the Chief Election Commissioner has already declared that he is empowered to do so) and even perhaps President's rule notified at midnight by a worthy who never sleeps. All this must be anticipated, guarded against, planned for and countered.

  Delhi is the last frontier for India's democracy. Delhi's citizens can no longer feign ignorance or remain disconnected. If the BJP wins this election it will proclaim it as validation for its policies and for CAA and NRC and push them through even more relentlessly and ruthlessly. The Rubicon would have been crossed and there will be no second chance. Kejriwal must win Delhi, not just for himself but for India.

IT'S TIME FOR INDIA TO RECLAIM THE SPIRIT OF FEDERALISM.

             

[ This piece was published in THE WIRE on 3.01.2020 as " A Manifesto for reclaiming the spirit of Federalism."]

   One fault our Prime Minister cannot be accused of is of keeping his word or of delivering on his promises, whether it is the resolve to respect the Constitution, carry all sections of the people with him, provide jobs, double farmers' incomes or improve the lot of the Kashmiris. This " DO NOT DO" list is too long to be pasted on your fridge door so we'll skip the rest of it, except one item: Federalism. You will no doubt recollect that, on assuming office in 2014, one of his first pledges was to abide by the spirit and substance of " cooperative federalism" with the states. True to form, however, he has done everything to demolish it and replace it with an "adversarial federalism", a  centralised unilateralism that does not allow for any discourse, consultation, consensus building or difference of opinion.

   India is a union of states where the states( other than the units of British India) chose to join the Union at the time of Independence: that is why the Constitution gives them a large share of political and legislative autonomy, with separate Central, State and Concurrent lists of subjects. This does not, however, suit the hegemonic ideology of the BJP-RSS combine and its authoritarian streak. Which is why, from day one, the BJP has exerted its all to dislodge opposition state governments, sometimes by hook but mostly by crook. Its early clarion call for a " Congress mukt Bharat" was not just a thrasonical statement of intent, but also a strategy in this direction, where the Congress was simply a metaphor for all opposition parties. And it certainly succeeded in the first four years of its reign, winning state after state or arm-twisting the winners to join its flock: by 2018 its writ ran in 21 states and 72% of the country's geographical area.

   Even then, however, its gluttony for even more power did not persuade it to honour the promise of cooperative federalism and to work with the states. Crucial legislations were passed or amended without any consultation: Triple Talaq; amendments to the NIA Act, Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, RTI Act, Land Acquisition Act; changes to the Companies Act and Representation of People Act to introduce the Electoral Bonds; the Kashmir Reorganisation Act and changes to Article 370; the Citizenship Amendment Act. It used its intimidating numbers to ram a flawed GST through a GST Council. Demonetisation took the states as much by surprise as it perhaps did Mr. Arun Jaitley, the then Finance Minister. Brute majority and partisan Speakers were employed to gag any meaningful discussions in Parliament, the hallowed convention of referring important Bills to Select Committees almost totally discarded. State elections became near military operations, nothing was left to chance or the voter, regulatory agencies liberally deployed to remind candidates and MLAs on which side their bread was buttered, and the difference between buttered toast and bread and water. Central schemes were rammed through without conferring with the states- Ayushman Bharat, Crop Insurance, Swachh Bharat, Namami Ganga, Minimum Support Prices, Income Scheme for farmers. It mattered little that some states had their own schemes- sometimes better ones- for the intention was to promote only the BJP brand and drive all others out of the market, not unlike what Mr. Ambani was permitted to do for the telecom sector. It was made clear that the union govt. did not trust the state govts and so the convention of informing the state govt. of impending raids by CBI or ED was jettisoned and central forces, not local police, were deployed to escort the central teams, at times leading to a near confrontation between the two. The NIA was allowed to trample all over the policing/ law and order prerogative of the states.The Finance Commission is perhaps the most important instrument for determining the division of tax revenues between the union and the states, and thus its terms of reference are of vital concern for the states. And yet, the TORs of the current 15th FC have been changed without any consultation with the states: two in particular- relating to the base population criteria and the setting up of a separate Security Fund- have led to subdued protests, even by some of the BJP's allies. The Great Leader, however, cannot be bothered.

  Till about a month ago it appeared that federalism was all but dead, but Jharkhand and CAA/NRC/NPR have miraculously given it a new lease of life. The BJP is now on the backfoot, having lost Rajasthan, MP, Chattisgarh, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and barely scraping through in Haryana. It has lost its oldest allies in the TDP and Shiv Sena. It now rules ( along with its allies) in only 16 states and over 39% of India's territory, a big come down since 2018. Led by the feisty Mamata Banerjee, state after state is rejecting NRC, including a few which are part of the NDA or allies of the BJP who had voted for the CAA in Parliament: at last count 11 states had declared that they would not allow NRC to be implemented in their state. A couple of fence sitters ( AAP in Delhi, TRS in Telengana) are also likely to jump onto this bandwagon very soon. Mr. Modi's govt. is characteristically  unmoved and unrelenting as ever, maintaining that since citizenship is on the union list the states are constitutionally bound to implement the NRC.

  That is certainly true, in a narrow technical and legalistic sense. But legality and legitimacy are two different things, and in a democracy  legitimacy is just as important. Any central programme has to be implemented by the states, and if a large number of them are opposed to them they can stall them till the cows come home to Mr. Adityanath's gaushalas. Mr. Modi will soon discover that either he renounces NRC altogether or he enters into a dialogue with the states. In both cases the spirit of Federalism would have won. If he does neither and continues to dissemble or engage in repression, he will lose more allies and soon discover that he is unable to govern: a party may have 400 seats in Parliament but if it does not take the states along it will be a lame duck, such is the beauty of the federal structure our Constitution has given us.

  This is an encouraging sign that the spirit of federalism, which had been smothered these last few years, is reviving and that the states are coming back into their own. The hegemonic BJP will perhaps now realise that their ruthless attempts to paint this vast and disparate country with one colour, one culture, one religion and one identity cannot succeed; that the states are in fact sub-nations of a national whole and must be respected, that India is a country of a thousand identities and cannot be subsumed into one superimposed majoritarian model.

  The Pied Piper's music is becoming increasingly raucous and out of tune with a country which wants to march to a different tune. Notwithstanding his overwhelming majority in Parliament Mr. Modi will soon realise that he cannot function without the federalism he had promised but had mocked and defenestrated. But there is a warning here for the states too- a predator is most dangerous when it is cornered. As more and more states go out of the BJP's toxic embrace ( I have no doubt that both Delhi and Bengal are lost to the BJP, and that the political weather vane  Mr. Nitish Kumar will soon point in a different direction) they cannot afford to be complacent. They need to take control of the national narrative and make the Modi-Shah duo react, rather than the other way around. For instance, they should be categorical and specific about rejecting CAA and NRC- mere statements by CMs is not good enough, they should adopt resolutions to this effect in their Assemblies ( as Kerala has done) to give them a legislative imprimatur . The same needs to be done for the NPR too for it is nothing but NRC by another name and another door. They need to be more aggressive about the GST, the Finance Commission recommendations, central projects which displace people and damage the environment ( like the Bullet train, Aarey, the mining and power projects given to Adani and Reliance in tribal areas). They must be prepared to fight it out in the courts, and in the ballot boxes if the center dismisses them. And most important of all, they must dismount from Twitter and get back to grassroots politics- in the "new" India where the internet is either shut down most of the time or is ruled by the trolls of BJP's IT Cell, there can be no substitute for street-by-street, house-by-house engagement. Mamata Banerjee has blazed a trail in Bengal which other states must follow. Are Rahul Gandhi and his Chief Ministers, Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati, Tejeshwi Yadav, Biju Patnaik, Arvind Kejriwal listening?

  

THE LONG AND SHORT OF THE HAIRCUT.

   For somebody who has passed the life expectancy age in India I have a middling cluster of hair fallicles on my head. Nothing, of course, like my old colleague and friend Sandip Madan in the USA, whose mop would make any char woman scream with delight. But then Sandip has a natural advantage; at six feet three inches he has at least eight inches on me ( and he's still growing, like the Himalayas where he served for some time). The height difference ensures that his pate gets more of the nourishing sunlight and less of the PM 2.5 ( no, that is not a reference to Mr. Modi's second term), hence a more luxuriant growth. But in pure economic terms he loses out to me: whereas he has to visit a hair dresser( there are no more barbers left in the USA, ask George Carlin) once a month, I get by with a quarterly visit. The savings are substantial, till Mrs. Sitharaman imposes a GST on them.

   It was not always so. Back in the early 80's, before genetics and the brown man's burden had taken their toll, my crowning glory required a monthly shearing. Now, it's not easy for a Deputy Commissioner in a small district town to have a haircut; he can't just walk into a barber shop like the Delhi police into Jamia Milia, without causing a brouhaha. The normal practice, therefore, was to gently persuade ( a-la Mr. Amit Shah) a reluctant barber to the residence to do the fleecing, assuring him that he would not be arrested for damaging public propertyif he was found wanting and clipped off a little extra off the top. My barber in Una district of Himachal was my mali's brother but no pushover: he extracted all the collateral benefits of being the DC's Jack the Clipper. He would come every month armed with applications and requests from various citizens for gas connections, mutations, ration cards, driving licences et al. ( remember, this was before the mythical Acche Din). Unlike us IAS types, he was not as stupid as he looked for he never presented the petitions when he was shearing me, they were always proffered at the critical moment of the shave.                                Now, in those salad days before I learnt better, an administered shave was a sine qua non, based on the perceived wisdom that men who go to Heaven can get there only by a close shave. Mine barber would apply the foam liberally on the Shukla kisser, sealing my lips, and then advance his requests one by one. There was no way I could argue, not only because I was rendered vocally hors de combat, but also because no one in his right senses argues with a man from Una who is brandishing a cut throat razor two centimeters from one's carotid artery. The Punjab Reorganisation Act, I am told, was devised primarily so that Punjab could get rid of Una since even the sturdy Sikhs found its unruly citizens a handful. Thanks to the barber, therefore, my monthly haircuts thus did more to improve the lot of the people in this benighted district than Mrs. Gandhi's 20 Point Programme. The barber became a very popular figure in the town and, I am told, even briefly considered running for MLA, such was his perceived proximity to the DC, till my precipitate transfer put paid to his plans.

  But times have changed and many fallicles have since been brushed under the carpet. I now live in Delhi where the barber of yore is as extinct as the swallow. The humble hair cutting shop has now been replaced by the fashionable salons, hair dressers, stylists, parlours, coiffeuse, and friseurs ( "We would love to dye for you"). They are so fancy they don't "cut" your hair any more, they use small machines to nibble at them. At the end of the operation your hair needs no combing- it stands up automatically when they give you the bill, usually in the vicinity of a thousand rupees ( without the GST). Very soon, I expect, the job will be done by A.I. via the dulcet tones of Alexa; you will then need a part of Mr. Anil Ambani's remaining fortune to have a hair cut. 

  Fortunately, my pension only permits me to live beyond the Yamuna, Delhi's unofficial poverty line, and the intrepid barber still survives in its unauthorised markets and colonies. I patronise the Diamond Hair Cutting Saloon in Madhu Vihar, modelled apparently on Dodge city of Wyatt Earp fame, which is why I no longer have a shave with my haircut: without the protection of my erstwhile magisterial teflon a cut throat razor is best kept away from the jugular in these shady environs: (remember that riveting scene from " The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"?)  My barber- Salim Mian- charges me Rs. 70 for every pruning episode but I find even this a bit excessive for the few desolate strands that remain on my head. One day I put this to Salim Mian ( in a friendly way, of course, because even the scissor can inflict some serious damage) and suggested a graded fee, declining by five rupees every year in proportion to the loss of hairs on my scalp. His response was worthy of a member of the PM's Economic Advisory Council: " No, janab, I may instead have to increase my rates. You see, in your case, I am not charging for cutting your hair- I'm charging for the time I spend in looking for hairs to cut!" Touche! or Toupee! as the case may be. I do hope someone in the PMO will look at this gentleman when the current Chief Economic Advisor resigns, as his allotted time is almost up going by the tenures of his unsung predecessors.
  When I am at my cottage at Mashobra I avail of the services of Mr. Swami. Built like a Patton tank with handlebar moustaches, Swami operates from a hole-in-the-wall establishment in old Mashobra bazaar, but he also has other irons in the fire: he is also the local "kabadi wallah" and recycles half the waste of the area, not including retired IAS, IPS and Army officers who in any case have minimal recycling value. He charges only Rs. 40 for a haircut and it shows- I usually emerge from his premises looking like a cross between an American Pit Bull terrier terrier and a porcupine. But Neerja doesn't mind: she feels I blend into the rural landscape perfectly.
   My MPB ( male pattern baldness) is becoming more evident as the years roll by and the patch on the crown is expanding like the hole in the ozone layer. I briefly considered taking the Gautam Gambhir cure, i.e. going in for hair transplants: my research shows that it didn't do much for his cricket but it enabled him to win the last Parliamentary elections since the voter could see that he had a better coiffure  than his lady rival: he won by the proverbial hair's breadth. But further research revealed that it costs one rupee to transplant one hair fallicle and needed an investment of about Rs. 40000/, no mean outlay for a pensioner whose pension may stop at any time because his state is going bankrupt holding Investors' Meets where the only one making the investments is the government itself- in organising the said Meet. And what if the damn strands don't grow back? My long experience in the Forest department of Himachal shows that the survival rate of transplants is barely 30%, and therefore what I would probably end up with is not dense woodland but open scrub. So I've decided to keep my money for more worthy purposes, such as for collecting my legacy documents for the impending NRC, and continue hoping that Baba Ramdev's Kesh Kanti hair oil will finally deliver on its promise. So okay, I tell myself, I'll never have long, wavy tresses but then Samson did, didn't he, and where did his golden locks get him? Under a pile of Philistine rubble. All because of a haircut.

A WEEK OF SHAME BUT MOMENTS TO BE PROUD OF.

   Our judiciary had an opportunity to redeem its somewhat dubious recent record this last week, but as the saying goes it never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. We were hoping that after its bewildering judgment on the Ram Mandir, its volte face on Sabarimala and the unforgivable delay on Kashmir the higher judiciary would now at least- with half the country in uproar over the citizenship issue- call our rulers to account. But it has once again demonstrated its worrying and lacklustre commitment  to defend democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

   Pronouncing on a batch of petitions on the 18th of this month, the SC refused to provide any relief to the besieged students of Jamia: it did nothing more than issue notices to the govt. and fixed the next date for the 22nd of January next year, no doubt hoping that time is the best healer and it would not have to take any decision. For by the 18th it was clear to everyone that the police violence on the Jamia students was unjustified, excessive and perhaps even pre-planned. Not only was the court oblivious to the reality, it failed to appreciate the fact that Jamia is a minority institution and therefore deserved a more sensitive approach. The least it could have done was to [a] order a judicial inquiry into the incident, and [b] prohibit the police from entering any university campus without the VC's permission ( which in any case is the convention and unwritten rule). The very next day the Delhi High court too chose to prioritise process over justice: it refused to provide any interim protection to student protesters, order any inquiry or do anything more than, ( you got it right), issue notices. One cannot but contrast this with the undue alacrity with which it had responded when the police-lawyer clash took place last month at Tees Hazari: it had then ordered that no lawyer should be arrested, even though all evidence on social media then clearly showed lawyers beating up police officials.

  Frankly, I think our judiciary has dwelt in its ivory towers for far too long under the pretext of "independence", to the point where it now sincerely believes that it is an entity apart from this sorry society and that the people's problems are not its problems. It is in a state of disconnect, as the slogans by lawyers in the Delhi High Court on the 19th ( " Shame on the judiciary!") showed. It is time for our judges to smell the coffee, if not the stench from the burning pyres of rape victims and lynched cattle traders, or a Constitution consigned to flames every session of Parliament. If our democracy and constitutional values collapse, as they surely must if this government is not halted in its tracks, it will not be long before their ivory towers too bite the dust. It is too much to hope for a Solomon in these dystopic times, but will at least a Daniel come to judgment?

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  Is it possible for our political parties to descend any further into the depths of hypocrisy, duplicity, opportunism and the desperation to stay in power? Yes it is. They have been naked to the public for a long time but now we can even see their suppurating sores. Even in their thrall of the BJP they could not have failed to recognise that the CAB ( Citizenship Amendment Bill) for the abomination it is, and yet they were concerned only about their perks of power and not the country- the NDA allies as well as some " like minded" parties. They voted for the Bill, but now that they can see the country-wide backlash against it these despicable leaders are desperately trying to distance themselves and issuing post facto caveats to their support for it. The BJD, which has sat on the fence for so long that the iron has entered the soul of its patriarch, said that it is for the CAB ( now CAA, thanks to another midnight exertion by the President) but against the NRC. So does the JDU and its dissembling leader Mr. Nitish Kumar. These gentlemen are either dyed in the wool liars or ethically challenged- probably both- because anyone could see that the CAA and the NRC are conjoined twins, "joined at the hip" as brilliantly described by Mr. Pavan Verma in a recent interview to Karan Thapar. The spineless AIADMK has suddenly discovered that Sri Lanka Tamils have been left out of the Act. The Shiv Sena, after its disgraceful support of Mr. Shah even after it swore to abide by secular values in Maharashtra, also now finds the Act violative of the Constitution. The Jan Shakti party of the Paswans has today announced that it does not support the NRC. The SAD of Punjab fame, another ally with an Achilles heel which Mr. Shah can crush at any time, realised in quick time that the Sikhs were not supporting the Act; this proud community is intensely aware of its minority status and realises it could be on the hit list next time around, and is therefore also protesting against this Act. So now the SAD belatedly wants Muslims also to be included.

   None of these vacillating groups, however, are to be trusted; they are hypocritical and prevaricating to the core. If the national protests subside and the judiciary continues to snore out mere rhetoric in its deep slumber this whole sorry lot will jump back onto the BJP bandwagon. One can only hope that the voters in their respective states are making a note of all this, and will remember at the next hustings who stood by the country in this grave hour of peril, and who sold it for forty pieces of demonetized silver.

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   There hasn't been much that we Indians can be proud of these last few years, but even as our famed pillars of democracy showed how hollow and cracked they have become there were moments last week we can take pride in. It has been our youth, especially the students, who held aloft the banner of freedom in the face of vicious police atrocities across the country, holding a mirror to the judiciary, politicians and media. Protests by others have only followed the furrows carved out by these youngsters. We can justifiably be proud of people like Kanhaiya Kumar, the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Milia Ms Najma Akhtar, Ram Chandra Guha, Swara Bhaskar, Farhan Akhtar, that weeping student of Jamia ( a Hindu girl, it may be noted) who asked what the point of education was if they were not allowed to question the govt's discriminatory policies. We must be proud also of the fact that these protests themselves vindicate the diversity of our nation, for though there were demonstrations against the CAB and NRC throughout the country, each targeted a distinct aspect of its horror: in Assam it was the danger to its culture, in the North-east their tribal identities, in Punjab the implications for other minorities like Sikhs, in Tamil Nadu the plight of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, in Hyderabad and UP its impact on Muslims. And cutting across this spectrum was the over arching concern for human rights, constitutional values and the promise of a truly secular India. The last week has been a reminder to the BJP that this country values its diversity and will not be apologetic about it, that it takes patience and consensus to keep this disparate tapestry together, that there cannot be a quick-fix, one size fits all solution to historical legacies, that jingoism and authoritarianism are no substitute for statesmanship. It is not Section 144 or the suspension of internet or police repression that will keep this country together but the values of Nehru and Gandhi: it is time to return to them.

CUSTODIAL KILLINGS ARE AN ALIBI FOR FAILURE OF GOVERNANCE.

             

   The early morning execution of four rape suspects in Hyderabad on the 6th of December this year was actually a custodial killing, and it was bad enough; what was worse, however, was the jubilatory response to it.

When the President of a constitutional democracy publicly asserts that child sex offenders should not be allowed a mercy petition against a death sentence, when MPs in Parliament demand that those accused of rape should be publicly lynched without any trial, when a frustrated public showers rose petals on policemen who have just shot dead four rape accused in what appears very much to be a custodial killing, when "celebrities" across this sorry nation erupt in joy when they hear of this murder- then we have reason to be very worried. For these portend not only the total collapse of the rule of law, that our criminal justice system has now become a criminalised justice system, but also that this country is fast becoming a vast Colosseum with the people baying for blood; it doesn't matter whose blood, for what the cohorts are seeking is catharsis not vindication, revenge not justice. As we were reminded on the 7th of December by a wise Chief Justice of India: there is no such thing as instant justice. The Prime Minister, of course, maintained his sphinx- like silence, as he is wont to do whenever any moral or fundamental guidance is required.

  This moral and systemic degradation did not happen overnight but has been sixty years in the making, assiduously engineered by those in power. It began with criminals infiltrating into our Parliament and Assemblies: in just the last 15 years, between 2004 and 2019 the percentage of MPs with criminal charges against them has gone up from 24% to 39.9%. They and their likes have in turn protected their own, whether it be a Sengar in Unnao, a Chinmayanand in Lucknow or their henchmen in Kathua. They have taken control of an already corrupt and predatory  police,  ensuring an immunity from any legal action for their sexual depravations. When law breakers turn law makers, what are the odds of a country having a fair and efficient justice system?

   Our criminal justice system - the police and the judiciary-has been deliberately and systematically broken down over the years and allowed to atrophy because it suits those in power, and indeed keeps them in power. Numerous recommendations of Law Commissions and Police Commissions to improve the infrastructure have been buried, even the occasional, half-hearted Supreme Court order blithely ignored. If even the apex court cannot ensure that its recommendations to appoint SC and HC judges are implemented, then what chance is there for real justice to be delivered to the people? Consider some figures.

  Successive govts have had no time, or funds, for improving the deplorable conditions of the judiciary and have run it to the ground. Only 0.08 % of the central budget is provided for this sector. We have 19 judges per million of the population whereas we should be having 50 as per international benchmarks. If we factor in the vacancies the actual availability would be even less. The current strength ( January 2016) of judges in all courts is 16743; according to the Law Commission it should be 60000. The total vacancies of the lower courts as on September 2018 was a mind boggling 5748; of the sanctioned strength of 1080 judges in the high Courts as many as 414 or 38% are vacant.

  It should therefore, come as no surprise that more than 30 million cases are pending in the system and any kind of justice is a distant illusion for most. 28750 rape cases, involving more that one lakh accused, are under trial and 235000 are under investigation. The accused in the Nirbhaya case were convicted four years ago but are yet to be hanged. The conviction rate for rape, as per NCRB data, has seen a consistent and sorry decline over the years: from 46% in 1973 to 25% in 2017. ( These, mind you, are conviction by the trial courts; many convictions are overturned in appeal). Given this dismal output of the judicial process, is it any wonder that there are more than 350000 reported crimes against women every year , of which 40000 are rapes alone? In the background of the fact that 90% of such cases are not even reported, we may well ask: do we even have a viable criminal justice system in this country?

   The state of the police force is even more abysmal, if that is possible. The total sanctioned strength at 1.90 million ensures that we have only 138 policemen per 100,000 population, actually about 100 only if the vacancies of 24% are factored in. The accepted international norm is 225, so it is no surprise that India ranks as the fifth lowest out of 71 countries in this respect. There is a shortfall of at least half a million policemen. But our rulers are well protected and cared for: according the BPRD ( Bureau of Police Research and Development) report of 2017 as many as 56994 cops are posted on personal security of 20828 VIPs, an average of almost 3 policemen for every so-called VIP. Contrast this with what is provided for the ordinary citizen- one cop for every 663 people. The streets and public places have been handed over to criminals: the police claim they don't have the manpower for proper patrolling, but they have no problem in pouring out hundreds when it comes to beating up protesting students or farmers.

   It is not just the central governments but the states which too have been criminally apathetic to the ever expanding rot in the system. Some years ago it was decided to set up 1023 Fast Track Courts( FTCs) to expedite the then pending 166,882 rape and 160,000 POCSO cases. But so far only 420 have been established; 15 states have have not notified a single FTC. A Nirbhaya fund was set up in 2013 to improve the infrastructure for the safety and rehabilitation of women and rape victims; it has amassed a corpus of Rs. 3600 crores, of which Rs.1656.71 crores have so far been released to the states for various approved projects in the last five years. Shockingly, 90% of this has not been spent by the states which have so far submitted UCs of only Rs. 146.98 crores as per the latest information provided to Parliament by the WCD Ministry.

   This broken, ramshackle legislative, judicial and police architecture can never deliver any real justice. On the contrary, it has become vulnerable to, if not complicit in, the manipulations by an unscrupulous government. The people have realised this and are resorting to vigilantism across states. The police, of course, need no encouragement to become vigilantes themselves because it fits in with their predatory instincts and saves them a lot of hard work that proper investigation requires.

   Our criminal justice system has all but collapsed, and women being the most vulnerable section of our society are being forced to bear the brunt of the fall out. Every section of our power structure has contributed to this degradation: a Chief Justice of India  who absolved himself of a charge of sexual molestation in the most opaque manner and was allowed to get away with it, political parties which have no qualms about publicly supporting rapists, a judiciary which doesn't question the police, a public and media which demands instant retribution, not justice We have degenerated into a juridical ecology where people accused of white collar crimes ( with no charge sheet filed) can be kept in jail for 106 days, but rapists and lynch artists get bail almost immediately and are garlanded by Ministers of the government, where the police refuse to register FIRs in rape cases or to protect victims or witnesses. Unnao, Kathua, Hyderabad- these are badges of shame for any country. And now  we are, inevitably, regressing to the BC era, to the code of Hammurabi ( as retired CJI Lodha reminded us last week) and the dictum of an eye for an eye; it doesn't matter whose eye is extracted or what process is followed. The Hyderabad "encounter" and its resounding endorsement by a citizenry which has reached the end of its tether is an augury no civilised democracy can either accept or ignore. The social doctrine of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber tells us that violence is the monopoly of the state; this may well be so, but it does not include police vigilantism.