Outlook National

Ma, Mati And A Shot At The Moon

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

A Murky Missive

Failed chit fund Saradha boss Sudipta Sen’s letter bomb to CBI became public on April 24
First victims were Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose, TMC MPs depicted as allies-turned-extortionists
But the real target was President Pranab Mukherjee whose strained relations with TMC is known. The letter painted the first citizen as a patron of corrupt businessmen.
It also targeted dissident TMC MP Somen Mitra by implicating businessmen close to him

***

The Multi-Layered Cast Of Characters That Feature In This Sordid Drama

Debabrata “Nitu” Sarkar: East Bengal club official close to Trinamool MP Somen Mitra; figures in Sudipta Sen’s letter to CBI along with Sajjan and Sandhir Agarwal.
Kunal Ghosh: TMC MP named in Sudipta Sen’s letter to CBI; was vice-chairman of Saradha Media Division; Sandhir Agarwal says Sen would drop Ghosh’s name and that Ghosh came to his office in March 2013
Mamata Banerjee: West Bengal chief minister; Sandhir Agarwal says that Sudipta Sen would drop her name
Mukul Roy: Trinamool MP; Mamata Banerjee’s second-in-command; Sandhir Agarwal says that Sen would often drop Mukul Roy’s name.
Nalini Chidambaram: Lawyer wife of finance minister P. Chidambaram; named in Sen’s letter to CBI
Omita Paul: President Pranab Mukherjee’s secretary, under Supreme Court scanner for U.K. Sinha’s appointment as SEBI chairman
Pranab Mukherjee: President of India; former Union finance minister
Rajeev Kumar: Police Commissioner of Bidhannagar; key SIT official; good credentials as investigator
Sajjan Agarwal: Calcutta businessman close to Pranab Mukherjee, Somen Mitra and the late G.K. Moopanar; named in Sudipta Sen’s letter to CBI.
Sandhir Agarwal: Son of Sajjan Aggarwal; MD of Orion Techno City which promoted the now abandoned financial hub; close to Pranab Mukherjee, Somen Mitra and the late G.K. Moopanar; named in Sudipta Sen’s letter to CBI.
Somen Mitra: Dissident Trinamool Congress MP
Shikha Mitra: Wife of Somen Mitra, Trinamool Congress MLA; director in Agarwal companies
Sudipta Sen: Saradha supremo, now in police custody
U.K. Sinha: SEBI chairman; named in Sudipta Sen’s letter

***

One of the country’s seniormost civil servants rushed to Rashtrapati Bhavan on the afternoon of April 22. He had a rather delicate duty to perform: tell President Pranab Mukherjee that his name figured in Saradha boss Sudipta Sen’s letter to CBI dated April 6. Pranab was informed that according to the letter, Calcutta businessmen Sajjan Agarwal, his son Sandhir Agarwal and East Bengal club official Debabrata Sarkar extorted crores from Sen, claiming that they were “very close” to the president. Sen had also written that the alleged extortionists flaunted their “intimate connection” with SEBI chairman U.K. Sinha (whose proximity to Omita Paul, Pranab’s powerful secretary, is now under the Supreme Court scanner).

The president was all ears during the briefing; he was relieved and grateful that a vigilant government agency had forewarned him, even though he had not been directly or indirectly accused of any wrong-doing. Forty-eight hours later, on April 24, when news channels went to town with the explosive letter that sought to implicate big names, the first citizen watched the proceedings on his huge flat screen. Fortunately for him, TV channels bypassed the portions pertaining to the president out of respect for the high office he holds. But those were early days; a clearer, sharper picture is emerging only now. Consider the following:

Ranabir Ray Choudhury, editor of Bengal Post, the now-defunct English daily owned by Saradha, insists in his column in Hindu Business Line that a “hush-hush meeting between Mamata Banerjee and Sudipta Sen was held at Delo near Kalimpong in 2011”. Ray Choudhury, who interacted regularly with Sen while on his payroll, says Sen has personally admitted meeting the CM. The veteran journalist’s assertion debunks Mamata’s claim that she never met the Saradha boss, and that she wasn’t aware of the existence of his newspapers and TV channels which folded up after the chit fund went bust, followed by Sen’s arrest and disgrace.
The Special Investigation Team constituted by the West Bengal government to unravel the Saradha scam has been tipped off about a secret meeting between Sen and Biman Bose, West Bengal CPI(M) secretary and Left Front chairman, in a house in Salt Lake’s FE Block at the end of 2010, when the Left was in power. Questioned by Bidhannagar police commissioner Rajeev Kumar, Sen has denied meeting Bose, but sleuths are confident of clinching evidence of the meeting. If so, it would hugely embarrass the CPI(M), because many perceive Saradha as Sen’s joint venture with Trinamool—and the Left naturally encourages this idea.
The Calcutta High Court is hearing a PIL demanding a CBI probe into l’affaire Saradha. But the Bengal government is unwilling to let go of the case. The SIT, headed by state DGP Naparajit Mukherjee, kept at bay policemen from Assam (where several cases are registered against Saradha) till they left for Guwahati empty-handed.

Even the Enforcement Directorate, which suspects money-laundering by Saradha, had to move court to obtain copies of FIRs. Even the ED has been denied access to Sudipta Sen. The Serious Fraud Investigation Office, under the Union corporate affairs ministry, is also similarly battling the SIT, whose proprietary attitude is raising unpleasant doubts about its motives. The SIT says it is entitled to guard its turf and federal agencies should go to the courts if they feel aggrieved.

Letter bomb Sen’s 18-page letter

The Saradha scam is multi-layered, as these snippets reveal. But its most intriguing aspect is Sen’s 18-page letter to the CBI—deliberately leaked to the media—an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, couched in a riddle. And the riddle, primarily, is the attempt to tarnish Pranab Mukherjee’s name: the president is the biggest fish the letter tries to fry without a shred of evidence.

Others named in the letter—lightweight Trinamool MPs Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose, Congress leaders Himanta Biswa Sarma and Matang Singh or his estranged wife Manoranjana Singh and P. Chidambaram’s wife Nalini—are really insignificant compared to the ultimate target the country’s president. The choice of targets lends credence to persistent reports that the letter was dictated by a Trinamool heavyweight at Mamata’s behest to defame the Centre and the Congress party in general and Pranab (an old Mamata bete noir) in particular. This inside story has many twists too, as an Outlook investigation reveals.

It’s hardly a state secret that Sajjan Agarwal, 60, and Sandhir Agarwal, 38, have excellent relations with the president—they have been close for three decades. East Bengal’s Debabrata ‘Nitu’ Sarkar, bracketed with the Agarwals in Sen’s narrative, is close to Trinamool heavyweight Somen Mitra, a former West Bengal Congress president. The East Bengal club is Mitra’s fiefdom, and Nitu runs it for him. Mitra’s wife Shikha is a Trinamool MLA. But the husband-wife duo is a thorn in Mamata’s flesh; they are viewed as the enemy within. Mamata views Somen as a Trojan horse: a Congress agent trying to split the Trinamool. Since the day the Saradha scandal broke, the Mitras have been demanding a CBI probe like the opposition CPI(M), Congress and BJP.

Interestingly, the Agarwals are as close to Somen as they are to the president. Sandhir addresses Somen, 68, as ‘uncle’. Sajjan, in a beige linen suit, sings paeans to Somen in his chamber. And Shikha Mitra is a director in Agarwal’s companies. Evidently, the Agarwals and Sarkar have deep ties with Somen and the president—the two heavyweights who are forever in the gunsights of Trinamool’s top brass.

Sandhir Agarwal (in tie) with Pranab Mukherjee in October ’10

The trio figures on page 15 and 16 of the letter. It says Sen was gripped by fear after a 2010 SEBI letter to him asked probing questions about his chit fund. Nitu told him not to worry, as he had ‘intimate connections’ with SEBI chairman U.K. Sinha. Nitu also assured him of the president’s ‘help’, as he was ‘very close’ to Nitu’s associates Sajjan and Sandhir. Nitu made it clear that ‘all the aforesaid persons’ had to be paid handsomely for their services. So, Sen paid Nitu Rs 5 crore, initially followed by Rs 80 lakh per month. According to Sen, over three years, he paid the trio Rs 40 crore. Sen quotes Sajjan telling him that he spent Rs 20 lakh monthly to “manage” SEBI’s Mumbai office. Rounding off the sordid saga of blackmail and bribery, Sen claims the trio warned him that if he disobeyed them, Nitu would unleash violent East Bengal supporters to teach him a lesson.

Speaking to Outlook, Nitu admitted knowing the Agarwals but denied any link with Sinha. “I was summoned twice by Bidhannagar police,” he said in his East Bengal club office over toasts, omelets and coffee. A thin gold chain peeped out of his shirt collar. The police recorded his statement under section 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. “Sudipta Sen paid the club by cheque because Saradha is one of our sponsors. I never threatened Sen as he claims. But I did raise my voice when cheques bounced. The police wanted to know how I met Sen. I was repeatedly asked about Pranab Mukherjee’s links with U.K. Sinha and the Agarwals. The police wanted me to implicate the president, but how could I tell lies?” asked Nitu.

Arnab Ghosh, deputy commissioner, detective department, Bidhannagar police, refused to divulge Nitu’s statement. Nitu remarked: “Can an ant finish off one kilo of mutton? The letter accuses me of extorting mind-boggling sums of money running into crores. I am ready to go to the gallows if anyone can prove that I snatched even four rupees. I have been deliberately framed; the government is gunning for me because I’m a Somen Mitra loyalist. Anyway, Somenda and the club are backing me to the hilt.”

Sajjan’s and Sandhir’s experience with the police is no different. Ghosh summoned father and son twice, but separately. Sandhir’s CrPC statement was recorded on April 30 and May 7. Breaking his silence, he told Outlook: “The police wanted to know about our relations with the Hon’ble president. I was asked if I knew U.K. Sinha well. They were loaded but absurd questions asked by a partisan police officer. Ghosh was wearing his loyalty to the Trinamool on his sleeve.”

Sandhir then elaborated on his statement: “I did tell (deputy commissioner Arnab) Ghosh that Sen had come to my office in February 2012 and wanted to invest in the financial hub my company Orion Tech City was then setting up as a joint venture with the state government. Sen dropped Mamata Banerjee’s, Mukul Roy’s and Kunal Ghosh’s names. Sen said he would iron out differences we had with the state government. Sen is not a serious businessman, but I kept him in good humour, meeting him 3-4 times because he is so close to Mamatadi and other TMC leaders. I also informed the police that Kunal Ghosh came to my office in March 2013; why he came calling could be ascertained from him.”

The Agarwals say with pride that as Union finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee told the West Bengal government in writing in 2010 to induct Orion Tech City as a joint venture partner in the financial hub that then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was setting up at Jyoti Basu Nagar on Calcutta’s outskirts. The Left Front readily accepted the recommendation. The financial hub, the second after Kulra, was launched with great fanfare on October 13, 2010. Delivering a speech on the occasion, Pranab had said: “The...hub is going to play a major catalytic role in the process of development of this region.... I am particularly impressed by Mr Sandhir Agarwal who had been in touch with me...and involved me, along with leaders of the banking world and financial institutions.”

Significantly, Mamata too gave the financial hub pride of place in her election manifesto. After coming to power in May 2011, she announced that it was one of the first targets she wanted to achieve. However, to bag credit for the hub, she insisted on a relaunch. Pranab said yes the moment he was sounded. Even the date for the relaunch was announced—August 27, 2011. But soon after her coronation, Mamata fell out with both Pranab and Somen. Her relations with Pranab turned frosty over the finance ministry’s refusal to sanction a special package for West Bengal. So much so that she refused to share the dais with him at the relaunch. Mamata’s boycott resulted in its abrupt cancellation.

The financial hub went into oblivion—until February 2012, when Sen turned up at Sandhir’s office “offering to invest his black money and play peacemaker”. By Sandhir’s account, after he refused to bite Sen’s bait, Mamata launched a financial hub on 19 acres on March 10, 2012 without the Centre’s approval. Moreover, citing a violation of rural land ceiling laws, her government took back 155 acres of land belonging to Orion, earmarked for the first financial hub. Sandhir says that the state government has not scrapped their project to prevent Orion from invoking the arbitration clause in the agreement.

Nitu and the Agarwals see themselves as victims of petty politics ensnared in the depening Saradha scandal. “We are caught in the crossfire; the grass always suffers when two elephants fight”, said Sandhir, fiddling with his stylish suspenders. “We wouldn’t have certainly merited a dishonourable mention in that concocted letter; I know the name of the TMC MP and his lawyer crony who drafted it, but won’t be divulging them yet; if we were not so close to the president and Somen uncle.” Sajjan added: “My first godfather was G.K. Moopanar. Because we belong to that school of thought, we don’t mind facing problems because of our political affiliation.”

As mentioned before, the president was forewarned about the letter on the afternoon of April 22, two days before it became public and created a furore. But what did the president do on April 23? Well, he had a chat with Sandhir (“Oh it was just a courtesy call,” Sandhir told Outlook) in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Pranab summoned Sandhir, who obediently flew to Delhi and called on the first citizen. “Take care,” Pranab told the young man.

Edited online to correct typos. A version of this article, with typos, appears in print

Saradha: The Cookie Can Crumble Thus

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Saradha scamster Sudipta Sen is averse to a CBI probe into the intricate web of deceit that he spun to dupe investors. But the CBI is keen on it, and is waiting impatiently for the Calcutta High Court’s nod to take over the case from West Bengal police. Experts believe the CBI is the right agency for the job, as the scam is spread over several states. Assam and Tripura have already called in the CBI.

Mamata Banerjee’s government, however, is trying its best to keep the CBI at bay. Two years ago, Mamata had humiliated Ranjit Sinha, who now heads the CBI. She had served an ultimatum to PM Manmohan Singh to sack Sinha from the post of Railway Protection Force (RPF) director-general, because he had objected to the deployment of RPF commandos for guarding Mamata after she became Bengal CM in May 2011. Mamata insisted on RPF protection because she feared a partisan police would harm her.

Manmohan obliged; Sinha was shown the door. But now the tide has turned. Sinha has already announced that the ambit of the recently busted jobs-for-sale racket, which cost Pawan Bansal his job, is being expanded to include railway appointments since 2009. A source told Outlook that the interrogation of Gautam Sanyal, osd to Mamata when she was Union railway minister, is now inevitable. Gautam, a central secretariat service officer, is now Mamata’s secretary. His interrogation by the CBI would be extremely damaging for Mamata. A CBI takeover of the Saradha case would surely be worse.

‘Once You Join The Congress, You Are A Congressman’

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

He joined the Congress just six years ago, and now K. Siddaramaiah is Karnataka’s 22nd chief minister, a mantle he had twice before come close to wearing as a Janata Dal leader. The socialist lawyer-turned-politician, who pointedly called on the state’s leading writers and intellectuals before taking oath of office, spoke to Gauri Lankesh, soon after. Excerpts:

Although you are CM now, some Congressmen and sections of the media still call you an ‘outsider’?

That is a meaningless statement. Once anybody joins the Congress, he is a Congressman. Where is the question of someone being a newcomer or an outsider?

Will you hit back at H.D. Deve Gowda and his son H.D. Kumaraswamy who had twice deprived you of the CM’s post?

No, I don’t indulge in revenge politics, and won’t.

The previous BJP government’s amended bill to prevent cattle slaughter is awaiting presidential approval. Do you plan to implement that bill?

Certainly not. If it gets presidential approval, we will rescind it. Instead, we will continue with the Prevention of Cattle Slaughter Bill of 1964 which had faced no opposition.

The BJP had also started cow protection committees and organic farming commissions.

Those commissions and committees had become rehabilitation centres for the Sangh parivar. We need to promote organic farming, but not in the way the BJP did. I will disband all such outfits.

People in the coastal districts—the erstwhile Hindutva laboratory of the Sangh parivar—have after a long time ditched the BJP and supported the Congress in these elections. How do you plan to return the favour?

In those districts, the Sangh parivar had taken the law into its hands. The police and the district administration too had become totally inactive. DCs and SPs would follow the orders of the Sangh parivar chieftains. We will not allow such a situation to continue any more. We need to restore law and order in those areas. The atmosphere of fear that is prevalent there needs to be eradicated. We will take all measures to instil confidence in the people of those areas.

What do you plan to do with fascist outfits like the Sri Rama Sene, which had flown a Pakistani flag in Sindgi in Bijapur district, with the intention to cause communal disturbance, or the members of the Bajrang Dal who have attacked churches in many districts in the past? Will you ban them?

I am aware that people like these, whenever thrown out of power, indulge in such activities. We will do whatever we can to keep them under control.

As opposition leader, you objected to then CM S.M. Krishna’s move to cede state control and hand over the Udupi Krishna temple to the powerful Ashta mathas. The Yediyurappa government too had handed over the Gokarna temple to the Ramachandra matha. What do you plan to do with these two temples now?

I believe that both the temples should belong to the public and hence be a part of the muzrai department. I will take steps to get them back under government control.

All three CMs of the BJP had allocated large amounts of public money into various caste mathas. Do you plan to do the same?

None of the mathas had asked for money from the government. The BJP CMs gave money of their own volition. Some mathas had even refused to receive such dole. I don’t see any need to continue.

In the last five years, denotification of land had been the root cause of many scams. What is your stand on denotification?

I will not say that there will not be even a single case of denotification of land during my regime. However, when there is a genuine need for denotification, we have to ensure it is done in a transparent manner.

The Karnataka Congress is riddled with factions that could lead to dissidence in the future. Are you confident of lasting the full term?

Definitely. It is only in the Congress party that a chief minister has lasted his entire term in office.

Given the Congress’s performance in these elections, how many seats do you think the party will win in the state in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections?

I think we should get 25 seats. If we provide good governance, our voteshare will definitely go up and better our chances.

What is your vision for the state?

To make Karnataka the No. 1 state in the country, both in terms of infrastructure and in human development indices.

Wrap Up The Case

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

As temperatures soar in Delhi’s oppressive summer, Supreme Court lawyers in their sweeping, heat-trapping black robes must have read sweet hope in additional solicitor-general Indira Jaising’s tweet: “Summer is hear (sic), why do we need the gown? If the High Court can get rid of it, why not the Supreme Court?” Maybe even the ‘hear’ is a Freudian slip on her part, an expression of an earnest desire to be heard. The court is taking a short summer vacation, and Indira’s tweet may get some mulling over. If something comes of it at all, what those 140 characters achieve could be as sweeping as what happened when the Bar Council adopted a resolution to drop the “milords”, “your lordships” and so on, colonial forms of addressing judges that made way for the formal yet just that bit egalitarian “your honour” or “the honourable court”. In fact, some senior advocates drop even that on occasion, making do with a simple “sir”.

But the robe is a sticky issue. It is not only seen as lending gravitas to court proceedings but also as giving the profession a visual identity, much like white coats for doctors and hospital green or blue for surgeons. Some advocates, like Nikhil Mehra, don’t really want the suit and robe to go. “There’s a certain professional decorum in wearing the robe and the Supreme Court, after all, is the tallest court of the land,” he says and, should there be a change, he’d prefer the option of wearing the robe over shirt and trousers instead of over the formal suit, as is done now.

Many of the practices at Indian courts—seating judges higher, with liveried peons in attendance and the use of English in the higher courts, for example—are imperial vestiges. But the robe (or gown, as some call it) is also mandated by law. The Advocates Act of 1961 says “lawyers should be dressed in a sober and dignified manner in the court” and prescribes the following: for men, a black buttoned-up coat or sherwani with trousers, or a black open-breasted coat, stiff white collar and soft, white bands; for women, sarees or long skirts. Both men and women are expected to wear robes. Some have protested in the past. There’s the story of an advocate turning up in court in shirt and trousers and the judge ordering him to come back in a robe.

“The court should let go of such symbolism,” says Indira. “It’s a legacy of the British and serves no purpose. If we must indeed wear something formal, let it be short coats.” One suggestion on this came from a naval officer, who says lawyers could go for white—more suited to Delhi summers—instead of oppressive black. Lawyers are hoping the Supreme Court might take a cue from the Delhi High Court, which a few years ago brought some relief to lawyers by exempting them from wearing black robes during the summer. In winter, they revert to black robes, but it’s something many of them wish they didn’t have to. It’s a relic of the past, they say, nothing more than empty symbolism. Some even think it stifles the practice. “Judges don’t pay attention to lawyers who don’t dress appropriately and who don’t speak in English,” says Ashok Aggarwal, an advocate at the high court. His robes, he complains, give him rashes and he has nowhere to take this special problem as long as lawyers are required to be robed. There are lawyers who joke about there being a hierarchy of gowns on display in court—the higher a lawyer’s standing in court, the more expensive the fabric and the bespoke cut.

But the formalist camp (if it might be called that) has its own arguments—tradition, identity, solemnity—about which it’s as fervent as the opposing camp. As Mehra puts it, “When our judgements look to the English or American courts and cite them and when our legal system derives from our colonial past, why should there be so much fuss over something like a gown?”

An idea on Twitter can set off a thousand proliferating tweets. But the law will have to take its own course.

Puppets In Gumshoes

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Hon’ble Supreme Court was recently compelled to sketch an apt metaphor: the CBI, it said, is a caged parrot. Then, a Bangalore court called the Intelligence Bureau (IB) a pigeon. Surely no compliments intended, for the name-calling was directed at two federal policing agencies. How, then, would the garden variety police forces (state-level police forces and some of the smaller paramilitaries) fare on the Supreme Court’s scale of wretchedness? Would they be equated with amoebae, bacteria or viruses? Or with serous, pre-biotic fluid?

Biology tells us evolution is unidirectional. Morality, perhaps, is not governed by the laws of evolution. Indeed, the history of the CBI is one of regression and progressive diminution. Till the other day, the CBI cut such a heroic figure. The entry of an ID card-flashing CBI officer has electrified many a film scene. How and when did the transformation from hero to joker take place? In a crony-capitalistic order in which the state is captive, “society naturally divides itself into the very few and the many”, according to its constituents’ “unequal faculties of acquiring property”. Such layering is most likely to put together in politicians, civil servants, power brokers and pimps. Public spending has increased several-fold and this has dramatically enlarged the corrupting interface between the consenting public servant and the obliging client. Dozens of new laws have brought more and more areas of our private and public concern under bureaucratic gaze and control, creating enormous opportunities for rent-seeking. Corruption naturally comes to occupy the centrestage of public concern. Overwhelmed, governments all over resort to the strategy of what Leo Strauss calls a “necessary lie”, in which rulers, to distract people from problems closer at hand, feed them fables to keep them peaceful and pacified. Zero tolerance to corruption is the avowed goal of this government. It is also the supreme exemplar of the idea of “necessary lie”.

The neo-liberal discourse, however, tends to treat corruption as a purely economic issue—a market transaction in informal services in a bureaucracy-infested, over-regulated state. Bribery is purged of its moral connotations and made respectable as a facilitation fee for services in a transaction between socially anonymous partners. In a society on a roller-coaster ride to the abyss of consumerism, the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality is bridged by an evermore strident cry for hygiene in public life. Such a society dupes itself with foolish expectations and sets extravagant goals for its investigative agencies. Pining for an independent CBI is one such nostrum.

The CBI is no longer required to handle crimes in the ordinary sense of the term; more often than not it is the criminality of governments—their involvement in bribery and payoffs, their efforts to subvert parliamentarians, their involvement in fake encounters and engineering systemic pogroms, you name it—that keeps the CBI’s hands full. If it is not the government, it is its more formidable patrons, the super-rich, in whose gigantic shadow the government casts its miserable tent.

But, as in times when crimes and perpetrators were painted on scales less grand, it is still the sole prerogative of the government (I include the leader of the opposition as a representative of government in exile, and thus an interested party) to appoint the CBI director, and equip, outfit and determine the working of the organisation.

For the last several decades, ambitious leaders have sought to create loyal battalions of bureaucratic palace guards who, if they pass the loyalty test, are exempted from every other. The changed environment has led to a proliferation of officers with a natural tendency to voluntary servitude. Blind obedience confers a massive selective advantage over other officers and bureaucrats; the courage to stand up renders them incapable of finding a foothold in the fragile ecology of power and they invariably fall by the wayside. So the parrot cannot but speak in his masters’ voices, because he is wired like that, protein-coded for blind obedience.

Hegel proclaimed long ago that “self-interested egotism” is the very ideology of such crony-capitalist societies. The inhabitants of Hegel’s “spiritual kingdom of animals” find it less than useful to invest their time and effort in institutions of integrity and fair play. Given the time and a favourable environment, regression is but natural. As long as an environment conducive to the evolution of autonomous, rational, conscious morality is not created, caged parrots and pigeons will abound.

(The writer is a former home guards DGP of Bihar.)

No Justice For Insaf

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

On April 30, 2013, the Union ministry of home froze the bank account of a coalition known as INSAF (Indian Social Action Forum) and suspended its registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act or FCRA. INSAF is a network of 700 NGOs, people’s movements against acquisition of lands and forests and other resistances from Koodankulam to Kashmir. It has been a sort of facilitator, a clearing house for donations and support to various struggles. The home ministry believes its actions to “be prejudicial to public interest”.

On May 13, less than two weeks after the attempt to stifle INSAF, news agency Reuters filed this report: “Foreign institutional investors’ (FIIs) ownership of the BSE Sensex stocks touched its highest in eight years as of the January-March quarter, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a research report. During the Jan-March quarter, FIIs were net buyers of Indian equities, while domestic mutual fund companies and state-owned insurer lic were sellers, it said. According to regulatory data, FIIs have been net buyers for 15 consecutive sessions, bringing their total investment for the year to $12.70 billion.”

The contrast is quite remarkable. We celebrate those who come to set up business, invest in the stockmarket, mine our natural resources, build nuclear plants and run them. These investors in smart suits and sharp shoes are to be feted and waited upon. They are the good people with the big bucks who fit into the idea of India as an economic powerhouse, the winners in this game of globalisation.

Then there are the wretched of the earth who stand in the way of this wonderful progress. These little people inconvenience the big plans, be it the POSCO project in Orissa, SEZs across the country or the nuclear plant in Tamil Nadu. There seems to be no ambiguity on the issue for those who run the country, frame its laws and implement them: those who resist are a danger to public order.

Given the recent action on INSAF, one can only presume this is the Orwellian standard that will now be applied in a future India. Without getting into the complexity of FCRA, there is something seriously wrong with the spirit of the law. Basically, it can be countered not by legalese but by a very simple argument: if a government can get billions of dollars worth of foreign investment for a specific project that is cleared on paper, why can’t a meagre amount of foreign funds reach activists who wish to help those who actually live on the land where these projects are planned? And we are talking small change here, a few thousands to a few lakhs compared to the billions on the other side.

How did we end up creating a world where those who make the blueprints are celebrated while those who sweat it out with people are seen as dangerous?

The attempt to crack down on INSAF has been made possible because of the amendments to FCRA in 2010. Rule 3 of the law now says that the activity of any organisation that “employs common methods like bandh or hartal, rasta roko or jail bharo” will be deemed political in nature although it is not a political party. The government, of course, has the right to define such organisations.

The point here is not to argue against a scrutiny of funds that come for political activity. The rules, in fact, began to be tightened in 1984 when several Sikh organisations using violent methods were getting funds from abroad. The VHP likewise raises money outside India for activities that are certainly political. But how can legitimate struggles against specific policies, the leitmotif of a healthy democracy, be seen in the same light as advocacy of separatism, violence or communal hatred? The UN Human Rights Council resolution adopted on March 21 this year actually called upon states to ensure that “restrictions are not discriminatorily imposed on potential sources of funding aimed at supporting the work of human rights defenders”.

And if we are so suspicious of foreign funds coming for those who influence public opinion, why leave out the media? According to a FICCI report, FDI inflows to the information & broadcasting sector, including the print media, was $2.17 billion in India in Apr 2010-Mar 2011. The same report says that “India has one of the most liberal investment regimes and the media and entertainment industry has significantly benefited from this.” But we see no grand conspiracy about the “foreign hand” if the news channel we watch or the newspaper we read is partly owned by foreign groups when in fact there is evidence that the media now accepts certain agendas unquestioningly.

The INSAF story is at its core an action against the idea of legitimate protest on which this country was built. In an age of corruption at every level, it’s an obvious attempt to intimidate those who challenge certain notions of “progress” and care about things other than profit margins.

A State Of Stasis

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

“Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.”
—Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

As political India hobbles on towards the next big test, the sixteenth general election, the pity is that its condition cannot even claim the dignity of an authentic political crisis—which is to say an irremediable breakdown that presages an abrupt change, for better or for worse, in the ruling arrangements, and offers some chance, even if it turns out to be an illusion, of placing governance and policymaking on a new track. To diagnose and describe the present condition, we need to fall back on the old Greek political concept and term-of-art, stasis, and perhaps also invoke the modern medical connotation of the term, a stoppage of circulation of some body fluids, resulting in a severe degradation of vital functions.

Stasis applies to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, which is discredited, bloodied, delegitimised and demoralised, and also to the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is equally culpable but may be in a slightly better position only because it is not in power at the Centre. It applies to the functioning of every instrument of state, with the arguable exception of the higher judiciary and the two constitutionally sanctioned bodies—the Election Commission of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. It denotes an orgy of corruption, venality and official and corporate misconduct that has seriously damaged India’s image in the world. It mocks the very notion of democracy—‘the world’s largest democracy’—being a force for the good of the people. Some of the symptoms of this stasis are a non-functioning Parliament, grand-sounding Bills that may never become Acts, policy paralysis at a time the economy is deeply troubled and fresh burdens are being placed on the poor and the middle classes, new levels of political opportunism, and insecurity in the face of escalating violence by an assortment of thugs, rapists and other anti-social forces who have been set free, like some deadly virus, to prey on the innocent and the hapless in society. The conservative Whig Burke’s 1790 dictum fits India’s current political situation like a glove.

It would not be overly cynical to suggest that the two signature achievements of the UPA are corruption beyond compare, and a collapse of leadership. That, at any rate, is the perception across the land and, allowing for some exaggeration, it must be recognised as a perception rooted in lived or observed experience. But how does one resolve the paradox of a prime minister whose reputation for personal financial probity remains intact presiding over what is indisputably the most corrupt government in the history of independent India? In an insightful and nuanced analysis of the makings of the present ‘Age of Graft’, published in Frontline, the economist C.P. Chandrasekhar goes beyond the role of individuals and puts his finger on the systemic causes of corruption in contemporary India—the economic and the political. He proposes that “the essential point is that corruption tends to be greater in periods when there is a state-engineered redistribution of wealth in favour of a few and at the explicit or implicit expense of the many”, that liberalisation is one such period, and that in such periods “corruption is not just an aberration of a few wayward individuals” but is systemic and is aggravated by tendencies in the political economy. Obviously, economic strategy and policymaking have a significant role to play in shaping or influencing these systemic tendencies, which underlie and feed the many sources of corruption.

Rule of corrupt Manmohan cited coalition compulsions for 2G, but the Sonia ‘compulsion’ is believed to have claimed his rail minister

Herein lies the solution to the paradox of Manmohan Singh presiding over a regime that has seen the surfacing of a corruption scandal, a ‘scam’ in mediaspeak, practically every other week. It is the systemic transformation and the policy environment of which he is rightly regarded as the principal architect that enable this corruption beyond compare. The tragedy of this highly educated and urbane prime minister is that he will neither recognise this connection nor do anything to anticipate, prevent or counter the corruption, notwithstanding all the warning signals and the plethora of investigations and exposes by the CAG, the news media and others. His typical response once the government’s concealment and cover-up has failed is to rationalise the indefensible by pointing to coalition compulsions and to exhort the news media not to feed negativism, dampen morale or damage the image of rising India in the world.

There is reported to be a growing feeling in the Congress camp that the ‘split’ leadership between party president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is at the root of the present troubles and that the party can overcome the crisis only by collapsing the two roles and placing the responsibility, more or less permanently, in the hands of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The impression, sedulously promoted by the media and unconvincingly denied by Congress spokesmen, that the Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal scandals exposed and widened the rift between the two leaders, and that Sonia Gandhi had to force the hand of the prime minister who was out to protect the two ministers in his own interest has strengthened this feeling. But has the duality of leadership really contributed to the present plight? It is a relevant question and deserves a serious answer.

A careful examination of the facts in context will show that far too much is being made of this issue. Historically, in India as well as in several mature parliamentary democracies, the established, healthy practice has been to keep the offices of the prime minister and the party president or chairperson separate. The functions are quite different, assuming of course that the party and the government are run on democratic lines. Collapsing the two roles will not serve the cause of either democracy or efficiency and, in fact, the decline of democracy within the Congress party was signalled by the practice, which began in the 1980s, of combining the two roles. Secondly, there is no evidence to suggest that the duality of leadership has anything intrinsic to do with the troubles of the UPA regime, which can be explained in terms of its policies and their implementation, its insensitivity to the challenge of mass deprivation in rising India, and its akratic acts of commission and omission. In philosophy, akrasia is to do what one knows to be wrong, what is not in one’s enlightened interest. So why do it? There is a rich philosophical and legal literature on the subject. The Manmohan Singh regime’s handling of every stage of the development of the 2G spectrum and coal block allocation scandals offers textbook cases of akratic political conduct that has taken a huge toll on the government, the ruling party and the nation. Thirdly, there is no indication that either the Congress president or her yet-to-be-designated successor, Rahul Gandhi, is willing to assume the office of prime minister, should it be available now or in future.

Chaosward There is no sign Rahul’s willing to be PM; in the absence of secure environment, instances like Nirbhaya rape are growing

Was there any inevitability to what has happened to the UPA? The evidence does suggest it need not have come to this. After all, the UPA started with some natural advantages over the National Democratic Alliance regime it unexpectedly replaced in 2004. Its spearhead, the Congress, had a larger base and a better regional dispersion and organisational spread than the BJP. While there was nothing in it between the two coalitions when it came to constituent arithmetic, the UPA had more reserves, especially as it could count on potent, if unblushingly opportunist, external support from the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party when it came to the survival of the government. And until the Congress broke with the Left parties in 2008 on the nuclear deal, their external support and the interactions on policy issues resulted in the only really worthwhile, big-ticket achievements of the UPA—the enactment and operationalisation of the rural employment guarantee programme and the Right to Information Act.

“India will go on,” the writer R.K. Narayan famously told V.S. Naipaul in 1961, an observation the latter would grapple with, interpret and reinterpret obsessively in his attempts to figure out what the land of his roots was about and what it needed to do to heal its deep “wounds”. While Naipaul had problems with the deep meanings he read into Narayan’s observation, it surely applies to the state of democracy in India. A diagnosis and declaration of stasis in the polity does not mean the institutions of democracy are in mortal danger. What it does imply, however, is that political India stands at a chaotic crossroads without anyone being clear about what lies beyond the intersections. The hope against hope is that the patterns that have dominated national politics and policymaking over the past two decades and brought every government and coalition of this period low can be shaken up, and that something new, untried and bold can emerge from the next Lok Sabha election, even if the experiment should prove to be relatively short-lived.

The quest for political stability is understandable but then it must be remembered that it is longevity of the UPA kind—artificially contrived and manipulative, without vision, direction, focus or integrity—that has brought on this stasis. The lesson from UPA-II as it nears its end is that political stability is not worth having unless it can be premised on democratic, just, secular, efficient, transparent and clean governance, and policies that address the internal and external challenges of rising India in a progressive way. It is not worth having unless it is able to prioritise the basic needs and interests of the overwhelming majority of the population, the hundreds of millions of working people who suffer multiple deprivations in terms of income, livelihood, nutrition, education, health, shelter, environment and gender. Making a virtue of what seems like necessity, one almost wishes for instability following the 16th Lok Sabha election, an instability that brings creative disruption and carries within itself the potentialities of a new kind of progressive politics.

(N. Ram is the former editor-in-chief of The Hindu and its group publications.)

The Sheriff Is Secular?

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The Muslim Story

Nitish never visited minority victims of atrocities.
No compensation for victims of Forbesganj firing except for a boy
No intervention in arrests of Muslim youths of Bihar by ATS/police from other states
Inquiry in Bhagalpur riots but none into the riots in Bihar Sharif, a region from which Nitish hails
State has 16% Muslim; only 8% basic health centres in their areas
Only 0.3% budgetary allocation for Muslim for FY 2013-14

***

Laloo Prasad Yadav stoked his old fief with a huge rally at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan: he was showcasing his sons Tejaswi and Tej Pratap. Rival and chief minister Nitish Kumar promptly quipped that “T-2” had been launched. But behind all that humour, the CM’s problems are mounting. Particularly with the Muslim community, which Laloo will be wooing aggressively. Nitish is taking on Narendra Modi within the NDA essential to keep the Muslims with him, but that may not work, say commentators and members of the community. Across Bihar, in minority hamlets and towns, they have not forgotten the Forbesganj firing: police virtually occupied a village for six days and shot dead four residents to facilitate the setting up of a factory. The incident is two years old, but the wound was reopened again when arrest warrants were issued against 50 Forbesganj residents last month.

A video grab of the Forbesganj firing

First flashback to June 3, 2011. Farooq Ansari is still in shock from the incident—as if it’s fresh and not a memory. That day his 28-year-old wife Shazmeen, seven months pregnant, was shot dead by Bihar police in Forbesganj, Araria district. Three others and an infant were also killed. “She received two bullets in her temple, two in the chest and abdomen, one each in the right and left thighs. They ruined my life, my family,” says Farooq, who was working in the upcoming factory where the firing took place. Shazmeen was returning home after seeing a doctor. That afternoon, villagers were protesting against a private company that was building a wall that would block the only road leading to Bhajanpur, their hamlet.

This village of nearly 2,000 Pasmanda (backward) Muslims remains traumatised by the events. “After firing at him, they jumped on the face of my son and abused him,” says Pathkan Ansari. His son Mustafa, 18, had passed his last exam with a first division. “He was good in studies and the only hope for the family,” says his ailing father. The Forbesganj incident took place six months after Nitish began his second term; in all the rosy euphoria, the media largely ignored the event.

Around that time, in this northeastern district bordering Nepal, two Muslim women were raped by Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel. When the victims complained, SSB men responded by opening fire. Two villagers lost their life. Another incident ignored nationally, but with a resonance in Bihar.

Now the ghost of Forbesganj has been resurrected by 50 arrest warrants. “Some of them died on that day of firing, some are deceased otherwise. Many men from the village are underground or on the run. How can the dead be named in a warrant?” asks Mahendra Yadav, who is supporting the villagers’ legal battle. Mohammad Iliyas Ansari, one of those named in a warrant, tells Outlook, “Where should I go at this age of 61? The FIRs mention 5,000 unknown people. This is far more than the entire population of our village.”

The old man says the private company and police are working together and the latter threaten to book villagers under anti-terror laws if they do not withdraw the police complaints they have filed against the company. “We received Rs 1 lakh each from Laloo and Sonia Gandhi but Nitish babu neither visited us nor announced any compensation for the victims. This is the real face of Nitish’s secularism,” says Maulvi Rasool Ansari of Bhajanpur, who lost his 8-year-old son in the firing.

The Araria incidents are not the only dent in the secular image of Nitish. A year back, the arrest on terror charges of five Muslim youths from Barh Samaila village in Darbhanga (one of them, Qateel, died in police custody) has added to the alienation of Muslims. Nikhat Parveen, wife of Fasih Mahmood, now in Tihar jail, says, “Fasih didn’t even know about the charges under which he has been arrested. Forget the trial, not even the charges have been scrutinised in his case. This is justice delayed for him and for others as well.”

Moreover, there are reports in the local Urdu press about Muslims being similarly targeted and threatened in the Darbhanga, Gaya, Sitamarhi and Madhubani districts. Recently, two youths from Samastipur were picked up as terror suspects, but released after villagers staged strong protests. The charge turned out to be baseless. In Katihar district, this April, a Muslim woman was raped and cut to pieces. Relatives say when they went to report the incident, the cops were found drinking with the accused. Instead, police picked up 36 villagers from the victim’s community—including 16 women! A few days later, a 50-year-old Muslim woman was raped in the same village. A “lesson” was being delivered.

“Though the mainstream media is being managed in the state, if you analyse the Urdu press you will find that conflict and polarisation at the ground level is rapid now and there’s the danger of an imminent communal clash,” says Arshad Ajmal, a political analyst.

A recent study found that though Muslims form 16 per cent of the population, only eight per cent of the state’s primary health centres are in Muslim areas. A survey of maternal deaths in the Phulwari Sharif block of Patna shows that poverty and exclusion on the basis of caste and community has also contributed to maternal deaths. Budgetary allocation for Muslim areas is only 0.3 per cent of the total in 2013-14, against 2.1 per cent for SC/STs, who constitute 15 per cent of the population.

“Nitish is an opportunist who wants to grab more sympathy and votes from the Muslim community on the grounds of opposing Modi. How can he claim to be secular when he supported L.K. Advani? Doesn’t he know of Advani’s role in the Babri demolition?” says Dr Shakeel, a public health activist. Those building a case against Nitish also point out that of the state’s 29 cabinet ministers, 11 are from the BJP. Seven BJP ministers are from the RSS cadres, and some of them participated in the Ram mandir movement. Giriraj Singh, a cabinet minister, is a vocal Hindutva hardliner and even campaigned for Modi in the Gujarat elections. As for the Muslim representation in Nitish’s cabinet, it’s just two ministers. Yet, for Nitish ‘Secular’ Kumar, everyone except NaMo is secular enough to be pals with.

An Abstract Hunger

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The UPA-II government’s flagship programme, the Food Security Bill, which comes with a neat price tag of Rs 1.23 lakh crore, holds the promise of eradicating hunger. If passed, the bill, it is expected, will ensure foodgrain to 67 per cent of the poor. Surely, with elections round the corner, no political party can risk opposing it. But they have indeed opposed it.

The AIADMK, led by Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalitha, is opposed to any bill from the Centre; she has been tom-tomming her achievements in huge ads in many dailies. The Tamil Nadu assembly even adopted a resolution that it would oppose the bill. The state’s PDS covers all, and is linked to other schemes, such as those offering rice at Rs 2 per kg, free school lunches and maternity benefit schemes—all of which have good track records.

Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh, of the BJP, wrote to the prime minister this February, cautioning against the cash transfer proposed under the bill. The state passed its own food security bill five months ago and claims that its PDS network covers 90 per cent of the population. The BJP holds up the state as a shining example of good governance and its PDS of equitable distribution. Raman Singh believes a good PDS is the responsibility of state governments and any change should be done only with their consent. He has also sought exemption from implementing cash transfers, arguing that fluctuations in market prices and the inability of banks to handle the logistics might inconvenience intended beneficiaries. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, too, has dissented: he seems worried that the overriding powers of the Centre in deciding the numbers of poor in a state could end up imposing a bigger welfare burden on his government. This argument also comes from other states. One bureaucrat says, “The Centre wants us to identify the poor according to the standards set by it. This is unacceptable. The figures it has are a decade old. Already, we are incurring additional costs in universal coverage of the population.”

A survey published in the Economic & Political Weekly two years ago found that nine states had done away with the APL, BPL and Antyodaya categories and offered universal coverage. The PDS in some states provides pulses in addition to foodgrain. What the UPA’s food bill proposes is much less. A bureaucrat of Chhattisgarh says that already, in most states, 88 per cent of the target population gets adequate foodgrain. So what’s the big deal about a food security bill?

Photograph by Prabhjot Singh Gill

Here’s the Congress-led UPA’s dilemma. The government is in a crisis of credibility, and in a desperate bid to reaffirm its commitment to the poor, the party introduced the food security bill at the fag end of the budget session. But the Opposition refused to play ball. As early as in June 2009, former president Pratibha Patil had announced the food security bill. What took the Congress so long to show its aam aadmi hand? And why the tearing hurry now?

The Congress offers a meek defence, accusing the BJP of preventing the government from introducing an important bill. Even if the BJP goes along, there’s tremendous resistance—and not just from BJP-ruled states. At least 12 states have flag-marked their concerns. Some already have good distribution networks; some worry about additional burdens the Centre’s scheme might impose; most don’t care for a UPA bill patently aimed at vote-catching in 2014. As a last resort, the Congress could always say, “We brought the law. The states are not implementing it, and they oppose it, so vote us back to power.”

One of the main weaknesses of the bill is that it sets no time-frame for implementation. All it says is, “The states have to show preparedness before implementing the bill.” And here is what experts predict: Congress-ruled states will keep silent, non-Congress-ruled states won’t touch a bill that promises less than what they already give the poor. “Many states are already giving 35 kg foodgrain per family of five every month,” says a bureaucrat. “Why should they roll back the allocation to the 25 kg the bill envisages?” Especially when nutrition standards say a family of five (an “average” family, by official reckoning) needs some 54 kg of foodgrain?

Vilas Muttemwar, chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on food, consumer affairs and public distribution, which cleared the bill early this year with a dissenting note from the Left, says, “Why should states oppose the bill? It will only mean additional money.” As for the BJP’s stand, he says BJP member Capt Solanki, who was on the committee, was in favour of the bill and the committee had cleared it.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has lent his weight to the debate by urging parliamentarians to pass the bill. He points to the human price of hunger, saying that delay will be disastrous. It’s an opinion much valued. But the UPA will have to do more than come up with a vote-catcher. The granaries are overflowing with this year’s record harvest of 637 lakh tonnes. By winning over the states, it will have to ensure the grain doesn’t rot away the way it often does.

Planning For Dinner?

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Congress MP Naveen Jindal seems to believe that women in this country get pregnant to get themselves doles. Among his many suggestions to “strengthen” the food security bill, here’s what he said to the parliamentary standing committee on food, consumer affairs and public distribution: “The maternity benefit of Rs 1,000 per month for a period of six months should be started only after three months into pregnancy...before that the foetus is unstable...also it could lead to pressure on women to get pregnant for free food and abort later. The benefit should be given till the birth of the second child—this will help in ensuring population stabilisation.”

The businessman-MP from Haryana, whose name came up in the coal block allocation scam (they run a business empire in Chhattisgarh), is someone who aspires to “population stability” in a throwback to the Sanjay Gandhi era, when the two-child norm was the order and enforced with brute force.

Jindal obviously does not know of the correlation between greater food security for women and lower fertility rates. Many studies across the world and in some Indian states have shown how, when the quality of life generally improves, fertility declines. Incidentally, the cornerstone of the proposed bill is the emphasis it places on women and children’s health as a means to improve the overall quality of life of families and households. But the industrialist seems to have problems with that.

Former deputy director of the National Institute of Nutrition Veena Shatrughna says, “I am surprised that Mr Jindal wants such micro-level accountability on the money spent on pregnant women and is silent on subsidies offered to businessmen like him and the corporate class he represents.”

Jindal’s comments, however, have not been incorporated in the bill.

The Agent Of Change?

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ranjit Sinha finds himself at the helm of the Central Bureau of Investigation in its Golden Jubilee Year. While he is in the news and seems to be enjoying the attention, he also appears conscious of the public image. He could have a few more surprises up his sleeves, sensed Uttam Sengupta following a brief meeting with the man.

The plush office of the Director, CBI, on the 11th floor of the CBI’s headquarters in New Delhi’s CGO complex, is as large as a tennis court. And one had to walk almost the entire distance before approaching the Director’s desk. Ranjit Sinha, a Science graduate from Patna University, sat slumped on his chair, fidgeting with a file that contained the official order of the Supreme Court given the day before.

“Have you seen the order ?” he asked even before one could shake his hand and sit down, before adding, “ We are delighted with it. At last, something good will come of it..” A draft proposal to give more autonomy to the CBI, he informs, had been gathering dust in the Department of Personnel & Training in the PMO since 2010. “ It has now been taken out and a Group of Ministers will hopefully consider it.”

He waves his hand expansively in the air. “ The mind-set is changing. Earlier the government felt we needed only a desk, a chair and a pen-stand; and now you can see all this for yourself.” He had just constituted a team of officers to prepare a memorandum of suggestions that the agency had been asked to submit to the GOM. This is another “ Vineet Narain moment”, he feels, and hopes the Supreme Court would take the Vineet Narain judgment delivered in 1997 forward and ensure more autonomy for the investigating agency.

“ I don’t mind being abused by the court, provided it does some good to the CBI,” he adds. But the court’s order does not censure the investigation, he points out and waves the copy of the order.

I ask him about the controversy surrounding his appointment. BJP leaders Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj had vehemently opposed his appointment and the Delhi Police Commissioner, Neeraj Kumar, had filed a petition to the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) asking why he had been left out of the panel. “ What can I say ? Neeraj is also from Bihar…” He was pained at the vilification campaign at the time, he admits.

“ They even took out the Patna High Court’s orders in the fodder scam,” he says with a wry smile, “ but could not find a single stricture against me.” There were, of course, adverse observations but nothing by way of a stricture by the court, he points out. “ It was all due to a misunderstanding with the then CBI Joint Director, U.N. Biswas,” he suggests and goes on to say, “ But in all fairness, Dr Biswas never wrote any adverse comment in my ACRs ( Annual Confidence Reports) either,” he informs.

Does the CBI regularly consult the Law Minister and the Attorney General ? The agency, the CBI director informs, takes cases to them only when there is a difference or conflict of opinion between the Director, CBI and the Director (Prosecution). So, why did he take the status reports to be filed to the apex court to the law minister in the first place ? He had no choice in the matter , he explained, after both the minister and the Attorney General wanted to see the reports.

Did the agency leak details of the meeting ? Sinha denies the possibility and points out that he had gone to see the minister after 10 am with escort cars, hooters and security. It was certainly not a hush-hush affair and everyone had seen him arrive and leave, he says. But surely the changes made in the reports could have been leaked only by insiders ? Sinha shrugs, suggesting anyone could have done it.

He calls for masala chai for himself while this correspondent settles for green tea. What is the public perception about him, he asks out of the blue. Taken aback, this correspondent blurts out that there are mixed opinions about him. His detractors point out his alleged links with businessmen, even businessmen who are in the business of coal, while his friends and colleagues credit him for being rooted to the ground, being a ‘sound officer’ and upright.

He had clearly heard the criticism before. He smiles, shrugs and says, “ Some of them have been my friends for three decades and none of them is involved in the coal allocation scam, I can tell you,” he volunteers.

The man on the hot seat seems calm and composed and , more importantly, prepared for the unexpected. His eyes, however, give away the restlessness. They keep darting back to the large LCD TV screen on a pillar. He was clearly expecting news. The penny, however, dropped when late on Friday evening, the law minister Ashwani Kumar and the railway minister Pawan Bansal resigned. If the glint in the CBI director’s eyes is any indication, the investigating agency under him could well have a few more surprises up its sleeves.

Bread Lines

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

“Wo afsana jise anjaam tak laana na ho mumkin ,
usey ek khoobsurat mod de ke chhodna acchha.”
(When it is not possible to take a story to a logical conclusion,
it is best to take it to a beautiful turn and leave it there.)
—Sahir Ludhianvi

***

For Whom The Polls Toll

Early election offers an exit from Parliamentary stalemate
Poll gives new government chance to start on a clean slate
New mandate will bell cat on corruption, other touchy issues
New regime can push key legislation like land bill, food bill
In tough times, markets, economy need direction, not drift
Post-Karnataka, Congress prospects not rosy in other states

***

On the face of it, the troubled Congress regime in Delhi should let go in the afterglow of the decisive win in the Karnataka assembly elections. They could then say they left power on a high note and called an early election because it was the need of the hour. They could also claim that they are concerned about institutional integrity and public morality. If they did let go of power, they would spare themselves the daily pummelling by the media and the courts, as the already damaged national profile of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh plummets to newer depths.

For, after the Supreme Court made its second instalment of remarks last week that implied the PMO was involved in altering the coal blocks allotment probe report to shield the prime minister, a serious institutional crisis confronted India. If one embarassment involved the complex web of investigative agencies and law officers being arm-twisted by those acting in the PM’s name, another was a case of old-fashioned “mama-bhanja” (uncle-nephew) corruption. Union railway minister Pawan Bansal’s sister’s son stands accused of taking a Rs 90-lakh bribe (in instalments) to secure a top post for a railway board member. Bansal is more than just the MP from Chandigarh and a member of the so-called “PM’s Punjab Club” that includes Union law minister Ashwani Kumar. Pleasant and accessible to the media, Bansal was parliamentary affairs minister through most of UPA-II and navigated his way into the prized rail ministry in October last year, only to end up derailed himself.

But call it a train wreck or a sinking boat, sources in Regime Manmohan say they are quite determined to soldier on regardless of any signs of turbulence. A minister told Outlook: “We sacrificed Ashok Chauhan, we sent Suresh Kalmadi and A. Raja to jail, we forced Shashi Tharoor to quit. Did we get anything for this but brickbats?” That is why, sources in the government say, a decision has been taken to carry on, manouevre till the monsoon session and then try to paint the opposition in a poor light as disruptionists. Critical to these plans is the Food Security Bill—it will be pushed during the monsoon session, and failing passage, be notified as an ordinance. In short, the plan is this: all men in Manmohan’s leaking boat will paddle on furiously for as long as they can, although the rising waters could at any point just overwhelm them.

“It doesn’t seem the Food Security Bill will go anywhere. They should explore all options. The aam admi needs this.” Biraj Patnaik, Advisor to SC commissioners		“The courts’ actions should not be construed as judicial activism. There is a strong case for the right balance.” Manish Tewari, MoS, Information-B’casting

“The victory in Karnataka shows the public’s faith in the Congress’s agenda of development. It’s our first step of success.” Prithviraj Chavan, Maharashtra chief minister		“It’s their own business, but it won’t be wise to go for polls based on the Karnataka mandate. It’d be politically immature.” Mohammed Selim, CPI(M) leader

“Four states go to the polls in November. BJP should win most. If the Congress thinks they’d do well, they’re mistaken.” Rahul Sinha, W. Bengal BJP president		“We need early polls in the national interest. The Congress will suffer due to corruption, the reason it won in Karnataka. Naresh Gujral, SAD Rajya Sabha MP

It is a woman, however, who is at the centre of the decision making. Well-placed sourced say that Sonia Gandhi had suggested that Ashwani Kumar and Bansal be asked to quit, but the PM dug in his heels. At Congress meetings on this subject, some opined that the ministers should be sacrificed. But the problem currently is that the scandal over meddling into the CBI status report on the coal block allocation scam involving Ashwani Kumar leads to Manmohan, and there is no replacement for the PM. There is also “the problem of defending the legacy of a decade-long rule”. Yet, as a source close to Manmohan says, “To blame everything on him is unfair. He wanted Rangarajan to be finance minister, but Mrs Gandhi turned him down. And ultimately, if Mrs G asks the PM to go he will.”

There is also the simple belief, hard to substantiate, that ultimately this is an election year and that money from both the coal scandal and ‘railgate’ has actually been collected for the party. So, although sources say that “pressure is building, but it’s not yet clear when madam will act”, it would also be sensible to presume that there is a long-working understanding between Sonia and the PM. Yet, there are some ministers who have worked hard on certain policies and are furious about how the PM has backed the two tainted ministers. One of these ministers also believes that many provisions of food security cannot be implemented through an ordinance. Biraj Patnaik, the principal advisor to the Supreme Court commissioners on the right to food, says: “It was only a couple of months ago that it seemed there was an agreement between the parties in Delhi that there is a need for, and will be, a food security bill. Now it doesn’t look like it’ll go anywhere. They have an option of launching a scheme and also to have an all-party extraordinary session to bring the bill in. I’d think this is very important, and they should start considering their options seriously. The food bill has been waiting in the wings and it’s really the most important legislation for the aam admi.”

NDA leaders protest various UPA scams outside Parliament. (Photograph by Tribhuvan Tiwari)

Whatever it does, the larger point the Congress would be seeking is the perception that they have taken pro-poor initiatives. The result from Karnataka too would reinforce the line that the Congress works for the poor. Hence the Congress belief that it must carry on “for the virtues of our policies”. The Congress arrogance also stems from a belief in its indispensability—that in a fractured polity, it will be required to lead from the front or support from the rear any coalition. Besides, the Congress also argues that any advancement of the candidature of Narendra Modi (as PM) would also work in its favour (see box).

Moreover, a view increasingly expressed in the Congress is that in this age of judicial activism, the courts are overreaching their brief and encroaching on the authority of elected governments. Manish Tewari, the Union Minister of State, Information & Broadcasting, is guarded on the matter. “Democracy is a system. According to the Constitution, the courts have a responsibility to discharge if a petitioner approaches them. Their actions should not be construed as judicial activism. There is a very strong case for keeping the right balance,” he says.

As of now, the Supreme Court has shamed the government, but not actually asked any minister to go. Therefore, the Congress might take heart from the legal interpretation that it has a right to stay on. And the reality is that they can stay as long as a party like the SP does not pull the plug on them. Atal Bihari Vajpayee called an early election in 2004 and lost. Power, after all, is something that most regimes have the inclination to cling on to. Indira Gandhi imposed an Emergency on the country to hang on to power at a most uncomfortable time for her. Sonia had once acquired a halo by sacrificing high office and choosing Manmohan Singh for it. That aureole has long lost its light in the lurid glare of corruption scandals. It’s now just a matter of counting the days and preparing for the next turn in the troubled last leg of the regime.

By Saba Naqvi with Debarshi Dasgupta, Pragya Singh, Prachi Pinglay-Plumber, Dola Mitra

The Pain In The Gain

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Bharatkumar Raut

Narendra Modi may have more problems emerging from the fact that his name and influence had little effect in the Karnataka assembly polls. Besides enemies within the BJP and the consistent opposition of NDA constituent the JD(U), Modi has trouble waiting even from an ideological ally like the Shiv Sena. This is what Bharatkumar Raut, a Shiv Sena MP in the Rajya Sabha, told Outlook the day the Karnataka results came out: “There is no evidence at all that Narendra Modi is a vote-catcher. On the contrary, we believe he is a liability for the NDA and would lead to problems, which is why our leaders have recommended in the past that someone like Sushma Swaraj should be projected.” Raut had no qualms about being quoted and added that “we believe the elections will take place in December this year”.

His belief that Modi’s candidature will lead to “more loss than gain” is not different from the Congress argument that “Modi would actually work in our favour, because of the counter-mobilisation around us of minorities who now support regional and other formations.”

If elections are to be seen as a fight amongst individuals, the facts are as follows: in Karnataka, where Modi campaigned, the BJP lost 12 seats; the Congress gained eight seats in places where Rahul Gandhi went. It would possibly be poor analysis to reduce complexities to a showdown between individuals, but since Modi pitches himself as the BJP’s great hope, he has opened himself up to an examination of individual performance. As of now, there is no evidence that the BJP has fared better where Modi has gone outside Gujarat. Yet, it is expected that in the future he will get great support from aspirational urban India disappointed with the UPA. Relatively urbanised Karnataka was not impressed. In Maharashtra, too, the Shiv Sena now says he won’t make a difference.

A New-Found Agency?

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Why The Caged Parrot Is Singing

There is a lot of buzz on why the CBI has been ‘caught’ biting

New director Ranjit Sinha is an honourable and upright man who thinks, after the CAG, it is CBI’s turn
As per new rules, the CBI chief has a fixed tenure; he has nothing to lose by rocking the boat
With UPA government’s days numbered, there is no harm in aggressive posturing ahead of polls
Different groups in Congress are targeting or backing Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal
Going after Bansal following Ashwani Kumar episode could be CBI insurance against blowback
Any of the 12 companies being investigated by CBI may be trying to scupper the probe
CBI chief, with his perceived lack of political clout, caught in organisation’s internal dynamics

***

Director’s Cut

The last four CBI directors have been given lucrative post-retirement assignments carrying attractive perks and privileges

Amar Pratap Singh (2010-2012): Member, Union Public Service Commission
Ashwani Kumar (2008-2010): Governor, Nagaland
Vijay Shankar (2005-2008): Member, Commission on Centre-State Relations
P.C. Sharma (2001-2003): Member, NHRC. Granted a second five-year term by UPA.

***

On his first day in office after taking over as the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation in November last year, Ranjit Sinha told his team that he was not a ‘jehadi’. He did not believe in sniffing out stink because there was enough of it in the air anyway, but he would not turn his nose away if it was in his face. Five months down the line, he has raised enough stink himself for his line to Raisina Hill to stop ringing. A shell-shocked government, suddenly uncertain about how to deal with what used to be a well-behaved domesticated pet, has plenty of egg on its face, and at least two Union ministers running for cover.

“It is neither an unruly horse nor a caged bird; it is more like the washerman’s ass, which nevertheless lands a kick or two at times,” quipped a CBI insider this week. This was after the Supreme Court, hearing the alleged Rs 1.86 crore coal scam which implicates the bold and the beautiful of India’s political and corporate world, called the nation’s premier investigating body “a caged parrot speaking his master’s voice”, and gave the master, the government, a little less than two months to make changes in the law to allow the hapless animal to move around freely, or in other words, make it more autonomous and insulated from influence.

In duly placing on record India’s worst-kept secret that, for all its claims of autonomy, the ‘Congress Bureau of Investigation’ was little more than a poodle of those in power, Sinha, 59, has emerged as an accidental hero: a victim in the eyes of some, not quite in the eyes of many. After it exposed Union law minister Ashwani Kumar’s editorial skills and railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal’s headhunting abilities, all in the course of a week, there is plenty of buzz in Delhi on who, if anyone, could be behind this all—and whether some dark conspiracy lurks underneath?

Pawan K. Bansal, Rail minister; Ashwani Kumar, Law minister

The first signs of intrigue came when news broke in mid-April that Sinha had met Ashwani in the latter’s office to “share” the CBI’s status reports in the coal scam. In the good old days, when the watchdog snapped and retreated on command, a denial would have sufficed. But the apex court, hearing a public interest litigation seeking the cancellation of all coal blocks allotted to private companies, pointedly asked whether the agency’s findings had been shared with the political executive. Inexplicably—or perhaps not—attorney-general Goolam Vahanvati and additional solicitor general Harin Raval replied in the negative, prompting the court to ask the agency itself to file an affidavit to that effect.

Sinha, say insiders, faced intense pressure to say the same in the affidavit. Earlier, there was much hullabaloo on television when he was caught on camera visiting V. Narayanasamy, minister of state in the PMO, a day before he was to file an affidavit in court. His advisors, however, told him there was no way he could bluff his way out and it was better to come clean. That affidavit put the law minister in a spot because Sinha detailed the changes Ashwani had made—deleting two paragraphs from one of the 12 status reports that the agency was to file, prompting Supreme Court justice R.M. Lodha to say that the very “heart of the report had been altered”. Sinha had tried to rationalise it by asserting that the CBI was part of the government (it operates under the Department of Personnel and Training and a law ministry official sits in the CBI office 24x7), and that he had shared the report with the law minister, not an outsider. But the damage had already been inflicted. It was against the clamour for the minister’s sacking/resignation and the sine die adjournment of Parliament that the SC was going to adjudicate matters.

The drama quotient went up by a few notches at this juncture when the CBI, out of the blue, arrested the nephew of the railway minister in Chandigarh on May 4. The surveillance wing of the agency, tucked away in a hutment behind an inconspicuous CBI safehouse on Akbar Road in New Delhi, they say, was activated following a tip-off. And it took them six weeks and more than 100 hours of recorded conversation before they ‘stumbled’ upon the intelligence that a sum of Rs 2 crore was to be delivered somewhere in Delhi for a posting in the Railway Board. Were the government bosses in the loop? If so, which one?

“At that stage, the operation could be stopped only by the director,” claims a CBI official. “But he gave us the clearance to go ahead.” Why wouldn’t he, says a retired DGP? Had he halted the operation, it would certainly have leaked out and created fresh trouble for him. “Why would he take that risk?” He had no other option. Armed with a what it calls a “watertight case”, the agency is gearing up to grill the railway minister. The grapevine says another Railway Board member is also under the scanner and may well be arrested.

Even the sceptics are bewildered at the agency’s gumption to take on the railway minister and the speed with which they have moved on the case as compared to say, Bofors. In March, the CBI director had given clearance to a raid on DMK leader M.K. Stalin’s house in Chennai. It was acting on a complaint lodged in the Tamil Nadu capital, and was investigating the violation of customs rules in the sale of imported luxury cars, causing a loss of Rs 48 crore to the exchequer. It did manage to impound 28 such cars, even if none from Stalin’s house, which failure it blamed on media hype that presumably alerted the culprits and left it with all the explaining to do.

Picture of doubt Sinha leaving V. Narayanasamy’s residence. (Photograph by Indian Express Archive/Anil Sharma)

Tired of being at the receiving end of both the government and the Supreme Court, the CBI seemed to be flexing its muscle and sending out a stark signal to the political class. Most observers appear baffled by the agency’s sudden hyperactivity and unheard-of moves, so patently against the interests of the government, and so unimaginable till recently? How could a historically servile investigating agency find the steel to rock the government in a matter of months? Has the pet gone stray?

It is a measure of the confusing times we live in that no one’s quite sure whether the agency has suddenly discovered teeth or whether it is merely going through the motions to enable the government to claim that no other regime had allowed the agency so much independence. There is also no telling whether it’s the government which is riding the tiger or the CBI director. Or whether the Supreme Court’s injunction will now ‘liberate’ the agency from its political masters and they would finally agree to end the agency’s departmental slavery.

It’s much ado about nothing, the sceptics argue, and the agency remains as servile as ever. “In the Stalin case,” they argue, “nothing was recovered and the DMK leader was spared.” If anything, the prime minister and finance minister distanced themselves, voiced their dismay and publicly rebuked the agency for its “unfortunate timing”. This, when the natural assumption was that the UPA itself had ordered the raid, barely two days after the DMK had withdrawn support to its government at the Centre.

As for “the decision to appeal against the acquittal of former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar,” the critics go on to say, “it actually gives the government a breather and time to contain protests. And the CBI director’s affidavit before the Supreme Court has left the law minister largely unscathed.”

There is also speculation about Sinha’s own background. It dates back to 1996 when Sinha was posted as the CBI dig in Patna, and U.N. Biswas, then a CBI joint director, had requisitioned the army for arresting the then Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav in the fodder scam. Both the CBI and the courts had reprimanded Biswas, who had in turn accused Sinha of being the CM’s informer. In yet another instance when CBI director Joginder Singh had directed Biswas to submit a status report Sinha had prepared, Biswas, now a minister in the West Bengal government, had dramatically announced that the status report with the court had neither been seen nor vetted by him. Sinha had apparently bypassed the JD, his superior, and sent the report straight to headquarters. Given this history of Sinha’s, BJP leaders Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj had opposed his appointment as CBI director and even written to the PM in protest.

Likewise, the member of the Railway Board who has now been arrested in relation to the railway recruitment case says Sinha is settling an old score by implicating him. Mahesh Kumar claims to have been close to the then railway minister Mamata Banerjee and insinuated that Sinha, who was heading the Railway Protection Force (RTF) then, had to move on because of a tiff with him. A livid Sinha, when told of this insinuation, let loose a volley of invectives before asserting that he had never set his eyes on Kumar, let alone have a tiff with him.

He has enough friends and colleagues, however, to put a stamp on his character certificate. “He is unassuming to the point of being laidback and is unlikely to be adventurous or invite trouble,” says a friend. He is not cast in the mould of a Vinod Rai and has less drive than the CAG. He is known more as an easy-going, affable policeman. Sinha’s two children are employed with the Intelligence Bureau and the State Trading Corporation in relatively obscure jobs. “He does have powerful friends, some of them businessmen and coal transporters and others with direct links to powerful politicians; he could have helped his children find fancier jobs outside the government and PSUs. But he didn’t,” a long-time friend of his tells Outlook. People who have known him since his days as a probationer agree that he is no David taking on Goliath. “He is far too gentle and polite and far too eager to please everyone,” says another friend.

Caught out! ASG Harin Raval and attorney general G. Vahanvati

And so, the riddle remains. If the CBI is not free and if Sinha is not raring for a showdown with the government, what explains this sudden burst of activity against the government?

This brings us to the larger swirl of controversy that is doing the rounds. Many are wondering why the agency has gone after Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Kumar Bansal, both political lightweights, when there are hundreds of other, more corrupt politicians in New Delhi. Both the targeted ministers are from Punjab, the prime minister’s home state, and both his political appointees (refer ‘Kaur group’ vs ‘core group’ SMS). Their rise in the government and growing influence has not gone down too well within the party and they are clearly dispensable.

The simple theory is that CBI officials, upset at the abrasive law minister ticking the agency for its poor command of English, themselves leaked details of their meeting with him. Once Sinha dug in his heels on the issue despite the pressure, the agency decided it had nothing to lose by going on the offensive and arresting Bansal’s nephew as well. It could be used as ‘insurance’ or a bargaining chip, specially if the government tried to get rid of both the law minister and the CBI director. Sinha, at the very least, would then leave in a blaze of glory.

In any event, the current battle is unlikely to last long. The agency, say CBI officers, is not a constitutional body like the Election Commission or the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General. It is actually a department of the government and the CBI director does not even enjoy the powers of a secretary to the government. “The director cannot even purchase a mobile phone on his own,” says a CBI officer. So much for autonomy.

It is for this very reason that the agency has been clamouring for a degree of functional and financial freedom. One reason why its track record is so pathetic in investigating defence deals and major cases of corruption, say insiders, is the necessity to investigate abroad and get approvals for the same. “Very often, the government would approve a visit abroad for two or three days,” they complain, pointing out that it took a lot longer to investigate in foreign countries.

The UPA, ironically, has invested a lot in the CBI. Its budget has gone up substantially, though agency officials say it has always been around 30 per cent lower than what it asks for. The government has also sanctioned 71 special CBI courts, which has led to the speedy disposal of cases, which between 2010 and 2012 has gone up by 60 per cent. The number of vacancies too has come down in the past few years, from over 1,700 to a little over 800. And the government has not outrightly rejected the proposal to sanction 2,000 additional posts.

In a country with runaway corruption and where the annual Union budget in 2013 is five times higher than in 2004, the CBI registers only around a thousand-odd cases every year and investigates a thousand more. Anti-corruption cases constitute only one-third of this number while Disproportionate Assets (DA) cases are less than 10 per cent.

Giving the CBI more teeth and making it more independent will, therefore, require a lot more than a few changes in the law that the Supreme Court has recommended.

***

Not Quite According To Script

M.K. Stalin

March 21: Two days after the DMK pulled out of the UPA, CBI noisily raids DMK supremo M.Karunanidhi’s son, M.K. Stalin’s house in Chennai. The ostensible reason: the violation of customs in the import and sale of luxury cars. Finance minister P. Chidambaram, among others, slams the raid. CBI says the case was approved a month earlier, on February 12, and had been registered the day before the raid.

Impact: Manmohan Singh government had just lost 14 MPs in Parliament. The estrangement is complete.

***

Ashwani Kumar

April: First, the Indian Express reports that CBI will tell the Supreme Court that law minister Ashwani Kumar looked at coal scam report. Then Sinha is caught on cameras captures the CBI director leaving MoS V. Narayanasamy’s residence. In response to a PIL demanding a special investigation, CBI chief confirms in separate affidavits the meetings and the changes made to CBI’s report.

Impact: Demand for the resignation not just of the law minister but also of the PM who held the coal portfolio for some time

***

Pawan Bansal

May 4: Even as UPA government reels under CBI disclosure, railway minister Pawan Bansal’s nephew is arrested for accepting Rs 90 lakh as first instalment towards a bribe to secure a posting for railway board member Mahesh Kumar. CBI says it had put the nephew’s phones under surveillance in end-March. Nine people are held. Bansal claims innocence, but CBI likely to interrogate him.

Impact: Another blow to Manmohan Singh government, dark whispers of PM’s appointees from Punjab being under attack

***

Sajjan Kumar

May 7: A Delhi sessions court acquits Sajjan Kumar in end-April of the charge of leading mobs in killing Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. The court says the evidence against Sajjan Kumar is unreliable and not credible. Six others are found guilty. CBI quickly bounces into the picture and says it is going to appeal against the acquittal verdict.

Impact: The Congress can no longer keep accusing the BJP of the 2002 Gujarat riots

By Uttam Sengupta with Chandrani Banerjee

How The Southern Portal Crashed

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Saffron’s Eight Sins

What went against the BJP

Subversion of 2008 mandate ‘Operation Kamala’, getting elected Congress MLAs to resign and contest on a BJP ticket to shore up numbers, insulted the voter
‘Resort’ politics Every few months, BJP loyalists and dissidents in blackmailing moves were pushing off to plush clubs and resorts with scant concern for public perception
Corruption The mining scams of the Reddy brothers in Bellary and the denotification of land in other cities, sent several ministers and even CM Yediyurappa to jail
Casteism Under Yediyurappa, the BJP put all its eggs in Lingayat basket, even replacing D.V. Sadananda Gowda with Jagadish Shettar to keep the community happy
Sex scandals An MLA’s wife commits suicide in Delhi, another MLA caught smooching a nurse, three MLAs caught watching porn in the legislature, a minister accused of sleeping with a friend’s wife
Church attacks Blind eye towards members of the Bajrang Dal who attacked churches and prayer halls in Mangalore and Bangalore in 2008 to prevent alleged ‘forced conversions’
Moral policing Sri Rama Sene attacks on pubs in ’09, Hindu Jagarana Vedike attack on homestays in 2012, in the name of protecting ‘Hindu culture’; ‘jehad’ on inter-caste love affairs
Infighting The Yediyurappa and Ananth Kumar factions were constantly at each other’s throats; the former’s exit is being attributed to the latter’s hold over L.K. Advani

***

Can I be the CM? Can I? Can I?

Siddaramaiah Two-time former deputy CM from the Old Mysore region. From the Janata stock. Took a padayatra to BJP bastion Bellary. [Update: Siddaramaiah Elected as New CM of Karnataka- Web Ed]
Mallikarjuna Kharge Union labour minister from Hyderabad-Karnataka region, whose quiet, rock-solid loyalty to No. 10 Janpath, is legendary
G. Parameshwar Australia-educated state Congress chief, a Dalit, whose chances dipped following a loss in his home-constituency
Veerappa Moily, S.M. Krishna Former CMs eyeing their chances if the high command favours a dark horse to stave off dissent

***

In the circular logic of politics, it’s apt that the election results in Karnataka generate a meaning that goes beyond immediate victors and losers, and has a relevance not limited to the state’s borders or political culture. The grizzled players of the state Congress, instead of losing themselves in celebrations, are eking out a moral from the story and holding it up for the big bosses in New Delhi to see. It’s a nervous message: corruption is bad politics.

What’s behind this curious note of caution tempering the elation and relief at returning to power in Karnataka after a gap of seven years? The survival instinct, pure and simple—and an honest appraisal of events as they evolved over the last few years. What lost the BJP its precious ‘gateway to the south’? There may be no answer as grand as the question. Yes, maybe a ‘correction’ to a rightward lurch in the polity, a bit of saffron fatigue. But equally, an accumulated frustration with the simple, everyday facts of massive institutional corruption. Dovetailed with visible misgovernance.

Jagadish Shettar after putting in his papers, May 8

The way Congressmen tie the narrative to the present situation at the Centre—with the UPA unwilling to let go of two ‘tainted’ ministers for even form’s sake—has a lot to do with how things unfolded in Karnataka. For, whatever gains the Congress secured in this election owes to what the BJP did during its five-year rule. More than the scams, it’s in being totally impervious to public opinion that the real damage came. A feeling had set in at some point that the party cared little about public perception.

Which hopefully will not be the mistake the Karnataka Congress will make. Or will it? Things have started off with the usual sounds of tug and pull, with over half a dozen candidates announcing they had a hat in the ring for the top job. Opposition leader in the outgoing assembly and padayatra man Siddaramaiah and Union labour minister M. Mallikarjuna Kharge headed the list of prospective CMs as we went to press; other major names in the air included Union oil minister Veerappa Moily and ex-KPCC chief R.V. Deshpande. That said, matters are unlikely to come to a head, all players agreeing amicably that “everybody will abide by the high command decision”.

The same cannot be said for the BJP’s innings that just came to an end: it had started by changing its very outlook to power. Its innovative ‘Operation Kamala’, to wean away Congress and Janata Dal legislators who later got elected as BJP men, was a classic example of how democracy can be subverted. It was as if, with opportunity knocking by way of its 100 seats—two short of the halfway mark of 112 in the assembly—it would brook no obstacle in the bid to grab and hold on to power. The lack of trust was obvious—it neither trusted the independents (whose support gave it a simple majority) nor its own partymen. Unlike the late Janata leader Ramakrishna Hegde, who was caught in a similar situation in 1983 but went on to provide a good government, the state BJP was just not prepared to make good on its first chance.

To be sure, there was a dichotomy from the beginning between the principles enunciated by the party’s tallest leader then, L.K. Advani, at the time of the 2008 campaign (“Give us a chance to provide a clean government”) and the mechanisms the BJP found handy to gain power. The Bellary iron ore mines had pretty much financed the whole campaign, and Operation Kamala to boot. There was going to be a payback time. B.S. Yediyurappa finally lost his hold on the sceptre by trying to manage the tensions inherent in the BJP’s deal with the Reddys.

Sushma Swaraj with the Reddy brothers. (Photograph by KPN)

And then there was also the humbler corruption of those who were tasting power for the first time. Take the land deals, well exposed by H.D. Kumaraswamy of the JD(S). At one point, the ex-CM was pulling out one scam a day for almost a fortnight. Each of the deals were violative of all norms, including high court verdicts, and related to acquisition of land for BSY’s family members, or whoever found favour with the CM.

By then, it was obvious that Yediyurappa considered himself a law unto his own. For, after all, hadn’t he led the BJP to power almost single-handedly, as he claimed to a senior party leader trying to reason with him on behalf of his colleagues. Indeed, the BJP’s rise to power was entirely due to his caste base: the large, dominant community of Lingayats who had stood by him. But then hubris struck. He became so brazen that even standard practices his predecessors followed—like not ignoring a bureaucrat’s written note quoting high court rulings—was given the go-by. The man even denotified land on a site lawfully allotted to his law minister!

The situation had clearly changed dramatically for the man who grew up in the RSS shakhas of Mandya. The time had come to unlearn the moral and cultural codes that had been drilled into him in the shakhas. The new mantra was RoI (return on investment). It’s what the Reddy brothers wanted. Yeddy went the whole hog: from land deals to mining; to backing the transfer of an honest forest official probing the theft of eight lakh tonnes of illegally mined ore the department had seized and retained at Belekere port; to the family’s Prerana Education Trust getting Rs 20 crore donations from the South West Mining Co and getting exposed by an active Lokayukta, Justice Santosh Hegde.

BSY with Modi. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 20 May 2013

And when the mining scam hit the ceiling, Yediyurappa punctured the party’s high command balloon further by walking in a procession to the Raj Bhavan to submit his resignation. It was also to send a message: that he alone mattered in the BJP and if it didn’t care, he would teach it a lesson. The high command, bent on protecting its ‘gateway to the south’, boosted his stature by caving in yet again. Why didn’t the party sack him then? Was it the fear of losing Lingayat support, as had happened to the Congress when community strongman Veerendra Patil was removed by Rajiv Gandhi in 1990? (It’s said that they never forgave the Congress—until now.) Whatever it was, BSY successfully converted every single crisis —even his three weeks’ stint in jail in the mining scam, the first ex-CM to do time—into an opportunity.

He succeeded in bullying the high command—despite the presence there of actively malevolent elements—into changing rebellious CMs who were originally his choices. Sadananda Gowda and Jagadish Shettar were asked to toe his line. When they didn’t, Yeddy packed off his group of 60-70 MLAs to a resort. All this happened when the state was facing its worst ever drought in a decade. The man who grew as a leader of the farming community did not flinch once during this period at their plight. Worse, even the party high command did not think of the consequences. They would go to any lengths to appease him, because the route to power was the Lingayat vote and that was all that mattered to the party.

It was not as if the rest of the ride was smooth. There were many ministers who fell by the wayside, rape charges, cheating charges, a medical education department recruitment scam, the stream of BSY’s close associates appearing one by one before the Lokayukta court on some charge or the other. His close associate, Shobha Karandlaje, also had to be dropped after dissident activity and because she was riding rough- shod over colleagues. Meanwhile, BJP MLAs were getting caught watching pornography in the assembly. Social harmony had become a bad word in the state lexicon. Church attacks, pub attacks, the state was in turmoil.

Mooo... Kumaraswamy and family offer prayers before casting their vote in Ramnagar

It was, again, a lack of trust that finally pushed him out of the party to launch the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP). Loyalty was difficult under the circumstances: some of his closest associates stuck to the BJP to win in the elections. Yediyurappa may have won just six seats but he has delivered a debilitating defeat, one of the worst ever in Karnataka’s history for a ruling party. And it’s not as if he completely took away the vote of the Lingayat community. Even his community, on which he had banked so much, trusted the Congress in several parts of north Karnataka. It is where the Congress got the majority of its seats. Yediyurappa, in fact, delivered the state to the Congress.

In fact, the Congress should be more than thankful to him for this victory. It’s got a decent 121 seats in its kitty, with 40 each going to the BJP and JD(S). It could have got more, maybe even 140-150, if only it had set its house in order by selecting the right candidates. More so in the Old Mysore region where the main challenger was the JD(S). To some extent, one of the reasons for it getting past the halfway mark in the 224-member assembly is the last-minute efforts to get disgruntled partymen working for the party. This exercise went on even in the last five days before polling. Indeed, even now there is no other election machinery that can match the Congress in the last few days of an election.

By Imran Qureshi in Bangalore

The Sene Patis Lose Their Marbles

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that one image sealed the BJP’s prospects in coastal Karnataka: three girls cowering in sheer fright in front of a bellowing mob. In July last year, when a handful of youngsters were celebrating a friend’s birthday at a homestay party in Mangalore, a mob of over 50 goons belonging to the Hindu Jagarana Vedike—an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—attacked them, supposedly to protect ‘Bharatiya samskriti’ from getting corrupted. The girls were nearly stripped, beaten black and blue and physically molested. The partying boys fared no better. As if that was not humiliation enough, all of them were hauled off to the police station while the goons who attacked them celebrated their success in front of the policemen.

The backlash was swift and severe. Though right-wing group leaders accused the youth of indulging in “sex work” and tried to protect their marauding brigade, youngsters in the coastal region saw through these ‘immoral policing’ tactics. Students from innumerable colleges and schools in the region held protest after protest. The writing was on the wall.

Much before the homestay incident, harassment had become a daily routine. Around two years ago, things came to such a sorry pass that a 15-year-old XIth standard girl student was harassed near Mulki and dragged to the nearest police station—for the crime of having a Muslim boy as a friend. While the Hindu goons raised a ruckus outside the police station, the station officer had the girl’s father come to the station and complained about her “behaviour”. She was so humiliated by the entire incident the next morning she hanged herself to death. The gangs now had blood on their hands.

Yet, the ruling BJP in the state tacitly supported the Hindutva goons. When the Sri Rama Sene—another right-wing Hindutva outfit—attacked young women in a Mangalore pub, the power centres were more interested in discussing the ‘morality of consuming alcohol’, a topic brought to the fore by hardline Hindutva leaders. C. Manjula, then head of the Karnataka State Commission for Women, was part of a conference, along with Sangh parivar ‘intellectuals’, to discuss the links between alcohol, rave parties, free love and other such ‘crimes’ linked to the homestays!

Now, even as all this moral policing was on, the dubious activities of some of the coastal MLAs had the public shaking their heads in disgust. Udupi MLA Raghupathy Bhat, whose wife died under mysterious circumstances in faraway Delhi, was the guiding force behind a state-sponsored rave party on St Mary’s island where alcohol, drugs and sex were apparently in plentiful supply. Recently, the same Mr Bhat’s sexcapades with an unknown woman in a hotel room and a resultant CD with graphic visuals were grist for the TV channels for a few days. Though he loudly protested his innocence, the BJP wisely denied him a ticket. Another party MLA, Krishna Palemar, was one of three caught checking porn clips when the assembly was in session.

But there were other serious socio-political developments which sealed the fate of the BJP in the region. Over the last couple of years, various churches in the region became the targets of a series of attacks. Fathers and nuns were beaten up, a number of false cases were filed against Christians for ‘coerced conversions’. The fate of the minority Muslims was no different. In 2005, members of the Hindu Yuva Sena—another parivar outfit—had stripped and beaten up two Muslim men, the father-son duo Hajabba and Hasanabba, alleging that they had tried to transfer cattle to the slaughterhouse.

Even as this case—which was captured on camera and widely reported in the state’s media—was dragging on in court, the audacity of the Hindutva mobs kept on increasing. In the name of protecting the ‘holy cow’, Muslims were attacked and robbed of money and other valuables in innumerable incidents. In one such attack, a Muslim youth jumped into a river from the vehicle he was travelling in to escape the mob. Unfortunately, he landed on the dry river bed and lost his life. As usual, the local police called it a suicide, hushed up the incident to protect the Hindu goons.

The Hajabba and Hasanabba inquiry dragged on for a few years. The police conveniently ‘lost’ evidence, eye-witnesses turned hostile, the victims came out and said they feared for the lives.... End result? The court dismissed the case for lack of clinching proof. That day, even as Hajabba and Hasanabba wept tears, the Sangh parivar burst crackers on the streets of Udupi and celebrated the ‘innocence’ of its Hindu rowdies.

It’s no surprise then that a vast majority—and not just the Christians and the Muslims but also the youth and even ordinary men and women—have turned against the BJP. Surprisingly, this includes many in the region who had long supported the Hindutva agenda and voted religiously for BJP candidates. Clearly, the people had decided enough was enough. This may come as a surprise to many but many years prior to the BJP finding its present form, much before its reign in Delhi, the infamous rath yatra, the Babri Masjid demolition, or anything else, it was in Udupi that the party’s earlier avatar—the Bharatiya Jan Sangh—had tasted its first ever electoral victory. Way back in 1967, it had captured power in the Udupi Town Municipal Corporation elections and till recently had successfully held on to it.

In the 1983 assembly elections, when the Congress was first routed in the state, the BJP had won 18 seats from the coastal region. Though it lost some of these seats in the 1985 elections, it subsequently kept increasing both its voteshare and the number of seats. Which was what culminated in the BJP capturing the Vidhana Soudha in 2008.

People like Kaladka Prabhakar Bhat—who ran his ‘coastal republic’ here much like the Reddys did in Bellary—and others of the RSS had assiduously developed the region into a Hindutva laboratory over the last five decades. But it took just a couple of years of being in power for the cracks to develop within. Sex and sleaze, corruption and communalism, goons and gangs, attacks and harassment, they all combined to seal the BJP’s fate.

For the first time in five decades, in the elections held to the urban local bodies last March, the BJP lost the Udupi tmc to the Congress. It was a sure sign that Kaladka Bhat’s empire was finally crumbling.

Indeed, the intensity with which the people in the 17 constituencies of coastal Karnataka have turned against the BJP has even shocked its political rival, the Congress party! Out of eight assembly seats in Dakshina Kannada district, BJP won only in Sullia, that too with a margin of a mere 1,373 votes. In the remaining seven, the Congress won with comfortable margins. For instance, in Mangalore constituency, sitting Congress MLA U.T. Khader was expected to face a stiff battle. But to the surprise of all, this time around he won comfortably with a margin of 29,000 votes. From Mangalore (South) constituency Yogish Bhat of the BJP had won three consecutive elections. This time he lost by a margin of 12,200 votes. From Mangalore (North) Krishna Palemar of the BJP lost by a margin on 5,397 votes.

Of the five constituencies in Udupi district, the BJP has won only one seat. From Udupi town, Pramod Madhwaraj of the Congress beat his BJP rival by a margin of over 40,000 votes. That’s the highest margin in the constituency in the last 40 years!

In Uttara Kannada district too, it was the same story. Vishweshwara Hege Kageri is the sole BJP winner from here. He barely scraped through from Sirsi with a margin of 3,059 votes. There was no better proof that the ugly face of Hindutva had not only consolidated the minority votes against the BJP, even among its earlier Hindu supporters, it had evoked utter disgust. After years, the once harmonious coastal region of Karnataka heaved a sigh of collective relief.

By Gauri Lankesh in Bangalore

(Gauri Lankesh is the editor of the eponymous Kannada weekly, Lankesh Patrike)

Soot In The Soul

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

After 25 years, the Sangh parivar’s so-called ‘gateway to the south’ stands firmly shut. Considering the scale of debacle, this isn’t a temporary setback. The BJP has lost two-thirds of the assembly segments from what it won in 2008 and its voteshare has fallen by almost 40 per cent. A facile explanation for the defeat might blame persistent dissidence in the BJP in the past five years, and the two splits last year that led to the formation of B.S. Yediyurappa’s Karnataka Janata Party (KJP) and B. Sriramulu’s Badava Shramika Raitha (BSR) Congress. That explanation has some truth: figures show that between the two of them, the KJP and BSR Congress received more than 12 per cent votes, which is close to BJP’s 14 per cent loss.

However, these numbers alone do not explain the BJP’s troubles. Even before the elections, the party couldn’t find credible candidates in nearly one-fourth of the constituencies. Many candidates lost their deposits. And not one-third of the winners are core Sangh parivar activists. Does this defeat then signify the failure of the grand Sangh parivar experiment in Karnataka?

Please note: Despite the BJP’s intentions, the great Karnataka experiment was anything but a Hindutva one. True, the BJP depended on its core urban Hindu support, but its success from 2004 onward was the result of a social coalition of Lingayats, several neglected OBC groups and some Dalit groups. However, the social coalition acquired potency only in association with the money power from mining. Gali Janardhana Reddy and his Bellary associates injected huge amounts of money in the Bellary area during the 2004 assembly elections. By 2008, the practice was widespread, with real estate and mining money influencing election outcomes. Sriramulu was an example of the new BJP leader’s profile: caste appeal plus money power. In fact, it was new leaders like him who dominated the BJP governments in Karnataka, much to the chagrin of core Sangh types. Even when practised, the Sangh parivar’s aggressive stance against the minorities and women backfired spectacularly, as the evidence from coastal Karnataka amply demonstrates.

In 2012, the BJP’s social coalition fell apart and the mining lobby found itself severely constrained through Supreme Court interventions. As splits occurred, the BJP continued to offer delusional arguments claiming that the corrupt elements have left, and the newly cleansed party would now follow Modi’s Gujarat model. However, with a five years’ governance record to examine, the people of Karnataka haven’t bought that claim. Despite some achievements like the Bangalore Metro and Sakala (right to guaranteed services), the BJP in Karnataka didn’t have a development narrative like Modi did. Its governance seemed limited to welfare programmes (mostly distributing cash and subsidies to caste groups and mathas) and politically symbolic measures like having a separate agricultural budget. Far more damaging was the behaviour of its leaders. The corruption cases that came to light were trouble enough. But facing accusations of favouring their own family members, BJP leaders, including Yediyurappa, asked if the children of politicians shouldn’t run business. Some BJP members were embroiled in sex scandals; some others were caught watching porn clips in the assembly. The voters were not amused.

Now, the challenge for the BJP is to build a new social coalition. That will still revolve around Lingayats, and a combination of backward castes in addition to its core urban Hindu base. However, the BJP will have to ensure that such an expansion is grounded in some political morality. It will also have to ensure that the cohesiveness of the party doesn’t come from only money and the desire for power. This will become evident if they pay attention to one aspect of the Congress victory: the drama over ticket distribution may have dominated the media narrative, but in the end, the winners have turned out to be veteran administrators with relatively clean images. The BJP list sorely lacked such figures.

Another point: the party’s rebuilding plans will have to take on a local flavour. Even for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the BJP cannot simply hope to adopt a national strategy, especially one that depends on Hindutva or on Modi’s Gujarat model. Even Modi will admit the importance of the social coalition he has built for his success. In any case, a political argument based on good governance is effective only after people have experienced such governance. Polarising figures like Modi can only hope to raise the enthusiasm of the party core. If the BJP wants to expand its social base, it will have to make a political argument—one that is a combination of local and national factors.

(The writer teaches history at the Karnataka State Open University.)

Power To The People

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

'Safety first and power later' is a fact that has been reinforced by the Supreme Court when giving a green signal to the continuation of the controversial Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu where two Russian-made 1000 MW nuclear reactors are under construction that are already delayed by over 5 years. The verdict means more power for the people of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Puducherry where power cuts are common.

This also comes as big morale booster for the Indian nuclear establishment which was off-late undoubtedly very jittery, worried that the apex court may put a moratorium on the Kudankulam start-up.

But some of that got dented when last month the Indian nuclear watchdog, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, for the first-time admitted that it had found four valves that were 'deficient' at Kudankulam; these have since been replaced. The anti-nuclear protestors have already rejected the SC judgement suggesting it is 'unjust' and say they will continue the fight in the people's court.

The verdict by the apex court comes as a 'great relief' to Ratan Kumar Sinha Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who said: 'I humbly welcome the judgement of the court, it should lay to rest all perceived doubts about the Kudankulam atomic reactor. The reactor is at an advanced stage of commissioning and criticality or the start of the nuclear chain reaction in the plant should happen soon.' Today, 99.66 per cent of all physical work at the first unit of the 1000 MW Russian technology is complete and could be operationalised in weeks and the second unit could come online before the end of the year, where 93% work is complete. According to the Department of Atomic Energy, 15 of the 17 additional safety steps that the court was deliberating upon have already been complied with.

India has big plans for nuclear energy. There are both opportunities for countries to sell nuclear technology and material to India and for smaller countries to buy reactor technology from India. India, being a founding member of the global nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, has had a 'spotless proliferation' record, so doing business with India is opportune in the 21st century.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has always strongly batted for use of nuclear energy, speaking at the diamond jubilee celebrations of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata, West Bengal, Singh had said: 'I am convinced that nuclear energy will play an important role in our quest for a clean and environmentally friendly energy mix as a major locomotive to fuel our development processes.'

So after this verdict, and in a global landmark, probably the world's safest nuclear reactor at Kudankulam, that Indian experts say can never face a Fukushima type of disaster, since it can be cooled simply by air flow and gravity in times of emergency, will finally be commissioned. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited asserts that Kudankulam will be the world's first 'generation 3 plus' nuclear reactor, suggesting it is today the safest in the world.

India today has 20 operating nuclear power plants, all owned by the government, which generate about 4780 MW of power and in addition runs about half a dozen research reactors. The country has accumulated, according to the government, about 360 reactor years of experience and has an 'impeccable [safety] record.' Singh, a known votary of nuclear power, had staked the future of his own government in 2008 in favour of the landmark Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement that brought India back into the fold of global nuclear commerce. India now wants to ramp up its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW by 2032, by importing reactors from France, Russia and USA.

India's nuclear energy program has been unique as it relies mostly on home grown technology and today the Department of Atomic Energy makes its own 700 MW Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors, while a smaller 220 MW reactor is being offered for export to countries who may seek the technology.

Nature unfortunately has been unkind to India as it is not well endowed with uranium and if all the resources are used a 10,000 MW nuclear program can be sustained only for 40 years. But on the other hand, since the Indian soils are rich in thorium, a globally unique nuclear energy development pathway called the three-stage nuclear grand plan has been put in place by the country.

The idea is to install small reactors that use natural uranium to generate power, the waste that emerges from this can then be used as fuel in so called 'fast breeder reactors.' And, finally, a completely new kind of reactor, the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor, a plant that feeds on the abundant thorium reserves, could generate enough electricity to power the nation for 250 years, fulfilling India's quest for energy independence.

India had been under international sanctions ever since it exploded a nuclear device in 1974, which became stifling in 1998 after India tested nuclear weapons at Pokharan, in the deserts of Rajasthan. The sanctions were formally lifted in 2008, when the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the International Atomic Energy Agency, suitably amended their rules to accommodate India into the nuclear commerce club in spite of the fact that India has still not signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Impeccable behaviour was applauded and an exception made for India so that India's desire to provide clean carbon free energy to its vast 1.2 billion population could be satiated.

Today, India is ready to import 40,000 MW of installed capacity of nuclear reactors of which 20,000 MW may come from two American suppliers, General Electric and Westinghouse; another 10,000 MW may come from Russians and the rest 10,000 MW may be supplied by the French. Negotiations are at an advanced stage, efforts are on to find suitable solutions on how to accommodate the requirements of a people-centric nuclear liability regime that the Indian Parliament enacted recently.

In the last 2-3 years, India has been facing a new wave of protests, almost unheard off against the nuclear reactors. Take Jaitapur in western India, where imported French reactors are to be placed or the most consistent protests as seen at Kudankulam on the southern tip of India, where Russian made light water reactors are almost ready to be commissioned. 'Not in my back yard' was an issue that was almost unheard of in India, but in the 21st century, as people become more and more aware, questions will be asked, as they indeed are being asked, on the relevance and need for nuclear energy and they will have to be answered as there is a new groundswell of people's opinion certainly not charitable to the nuclear industry.

Nuclear power is no longer a 'holy cow' that the Indian prime minister's office protected under its fold. Such was the ignorance and arrogance of the plant engineers at the 1000 MW Kudankulam nuclear plant, that within weeks of the Fukushima disaster they tested the main pressure relief valve at the plant, in the middle of the night, without having had the basic courtesy of informing the locals of the test. The steam released from the plant made such a noise that it could be heard tens of kilometres away, not surprisingly the locals panicked and then rallied around to form a robust but small anti-nuclear movement. Later the then Indian nuclear chief Dr Srikumar Banerjee confessed and apologized to the people, but the seed of suspicion was sown. The only Indian nuclear utility the government owned Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited also acknowledged that they had failed in the out-reach program. Wining hearts and minds is critical if nuclear power has to play a big role in India's quest for energy independence.

If all goes as per plans, the world's single largest nuclear power park may come up at Jaitapur, a coastal site south of Mumbai where AREVA the French nuclear giant is getting ready to install 9900 MW of atomic reactors.

India is one of the few of a handful of countries that has end to end capabilities from mining of uranium, enrichment, using it in atomic power plants and then also has the capability to re-process the waste so that every drop of energy is squeezed out from the scarce uranium resource. Since the country believes that plutonium the so called 'long lived dirty by-product' of a nuclear program is also a rich source of energy, suitable highly modern reactors are being indigenously designed to harness all the energy. The world's only 500 MW Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor is at an advanced stage of construction at Kalpakkam south of Chennai, a plant that will generate more fuel than it consumes.

Ratan Kumar Sinha, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Mumbai, India's highest decision making body on matters nuclear, says: 'India is deeply committed to increasing the role of nuclear energy while ensuring full safety of its citizens'.

Nuclear energy is like having a tiger by its tail, it is easy to get into and once countries install reactors, these facilities need to be nurtured for the working lives of at least 40-60 years, but beyond that once the plants have been decommissioned they need to be maintained and hence the challenge of constructive, effective, truthful communication would span many generations.

Pallava Bagla is Science Editor for New Delhi Television and Correspondent for SCIENCE magazine. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at Pallava.bagla AT gmail DOT com

Pawan Kumar Bansal

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I still maintain that the rail ministry was mishandled all these years. Look at the men and women who were ministers here—Nitish, Laloo, Mamata, Dinesh, Mukul and so on. Did they have the business acumen to handle such a major portfolio? And none of them belonged to the state of Punjab which has set an example for the rest of India. It seems that not raising the railway fares was their only achievement. This is not the way to run the railways. It’s a business, look how the airlines hike their fares day-to-day, some even hour-to-hour. And then the people demand punctuality, safety, comfort, good meals and so on. Thank god I have stepped in, and the situation has improved dramatically.

Mind you, I didn’t have anything to do with my nephew, Vijay Singla, who’s now a temporary guest of the CBI. That boy had business and profit running through his veins. He’d been making some wonderful suggestions to make Indian Railways the best in the world, but I had not paid much attention. You know, there are silly things like conflict of interest which affected our progress. He was always arguing that the only way to make railways profitable was to make it a deluxe service. You know, Laloo, Mamata and co boasted they never raised passenger fares and look at the state of affairs. I made a small beginning and will continue to do so because I have the blessings of Madam and the prime minister.

Vijay often had long chats with me. Everything about the railways must be expensive because that’s what mattered in India, he said. Look at the number of luxury cars now on the roads. People pay thousands of rupees to watch silly IPL matches, making the BCCI richer and richer. The Railway Board’s prestige must also go up. So why not set a price on promotions for entry to the Board? What is Rs 10 crore in India, it’s peanuts. I am proud of the fact that senior railway officials were keen to enter the Railway Board and prepared to pay for it. They now have the right kind of ambition which was lacking earlier.

Mind you, these were all Vijay Singla’s plans...he never told me he was going to implement them. Indeed, we have to look at them from the ‘vision’ point-of-view. If the officer concerned paid Rs 90 lakh to Vijay, it must have been from the national progress point-of-view. As the new Railway Board member (electrical), Mahesh Kumar would have rejuvenated the working of the railways, providing it with some much-needed shocks.

Some of my colleagues are making fun of me—they say it’s time for a new version of the old Bollywood film Mama Bhanja. Let them make fun, but I will have the last laugh. After all, I and Vijay have only kept the flag of Punjab flying.

The Mumbai-based satirist is the creator of ‘Trishanku’; E-mail your secret diarist: vgangadhar70 AT gmail.com

Scorched Grassroots

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Business Blues In Bengal

2010 Tata Motors pulls out its Nano project from Singur before assembly elections 2011 after Mamata mobilises farmers against the plant
2011 TMC government announces its “no-government intervention-in-land acquisition” policy
2012 Government rules out granting SEZ status to companies
2012 Infosys, Wipro projects fizzle out
2013 ABG Haldia Bulk Terminals withdraws operations; cargo handling company from Haldia port accuses TMC goons of threatening employees
2013 Sajjan Jindal pulls out steel plant from Bengal, to set up shop in Orissa

***

Payback By TMC

Industry: Industries shutting shop has been attributed to TMC politics
Communalism: TMC’s ad hoc sops for Muslims stokes resentment, polarisation
Lack of social mobility: In spite of Mamata’s Ma-Mati-Manush rhetoric, Dalits largely ignored
Law and order: TMC ushers in an era of political violence in the state
Crimes against women: Rising crime turns worse with callous comments from top leaders, including the CM
Political intolerance: Varsity professor arrested for circulating cartoon; outspoken farmer branded ‘Maoist’, space for dissent shrinking

***

Two years ago, on the bright, sunny morning of May 13, a beaming Mamata Banerjee sat in a room of her one-storey house in the shanties of Kalighat surrounded by ecstatic party colleagues and animated journalists from across the country. The air was alive with excitement and anticipation. After all, it was a moment of historical significance. The results of the Bengal assembly polls had just been announced. Mamata had blown the Left Front’s defences apart with an overwhelming majority; the world’s longest-running democratically elected Communist government had come to an end. In keeping with her consciously subaltern image as the leader of the masses—symbolised by the inspired motto of Ma, Mati, Manush—the celebrations were modest, yet charged with joy. Endless cups of tea and coffee appeared in small clay cups. Basketfuls of puffed rice (muri) and fried snacks (teley bhaja) went around. Songs were sung. Hundreds had gathered for a glimpse of their leader. Didi stepped out often to acknowledge their thunderous cheers.

Two years later, on another sunny May morning, it looks as if the crowds had never left Mamata’s residence. But instead of lusty cheering, there are cries of despair and anguish. Cheated out of their life’s savings, the angry, stricken groups demand justice.

The Bengal chit fund scam couldn’t have broken at a worse juncture for Mamata and her Trinamool Congress government—just in time for a performance appraisal due after completion of two years in office. The most common words used to describe Mamata’s performance in a random Outlook survey of a cross-section of Bengal’s population have ranged from ‘disappointing’ to ‘dismal’. After the Saradha scandal, reinforced with the complicity of Trinamool henchmen, “dishonest” is a word that has been added to Bengal’s repertoire of disillusionment.

Photograph by Reuters, From Outlook 20 May 2013

“She advertised herself as a ‘paragon of virtue’,” sniggers a sardonic Left Front chairman Biman Bose to the amusement of supporters. “All that honesty has gone bust in just two years?”

Other than parading her honesty, Mamata rode to power brandishing her ‘grassroots’ background. She does come from a lower-middle-class household, and continues to live and work out of her small house in Kalighat overlooking a sewer and just across from south Calcutta’s red light district. However, observers never tire of pointing out Mamata’s Brahmin surname, or the uncomfortable fact that almost all her ministers come from the upper castes—as they have always done in West Bengal, including the 34 years the Left Front ruled the state. “She still seems to put her trust mostly in the upper castes—Brahmins and Kayasthas hold key positions in her ministry (Partha Chatterjee, Mukul Roy, Amit Mitra) except a few,” says Bengal political commentator Tarun Ganguly.

Insofar as the burning political issue is concerned, Bengal politics has played up the ‘class’—as opposed to the ‘caste’—divide for decades. Thus, like the Left in the past, though the TMC bagged almost the entire ‘nomoshudro’ (lower castes or Dalit) vote comprising 65 per cent of Bengal’s electorate, there has been no major shake-up in terms of socio-political mobility. In states like Bihar and UP, the emergence of obcs and Dalits has shaped politics in recent decades. But in Mamata’s Bengal, they remain largely invisible.

Protests against Trinamool after the Saradha scam

If the lack of social mobility for the lower castes doesn’t count as a problem in Bengal, analysts argue that the one main focus for the Bengali politician has been to appease the nearly 30 per cent Muslim votebank. Here too, Mamata’s tell-tale sops indicate a policy cut from the old cloth. Unless she adapts to the changing times, it may backfire on her. As Ganguly observes, “Like the rest of the Left agenda, Mamata has also usurped the Left practice of appeasing Muslims because of votebank politics. But try as she may, the fact remains that she had no qualms about aligning herself with the NDA and in the future she could do it again if needed.” Mamata’s brazen ‘butterpolishing’ of Muslim religious leaders—she announced Rs 2,500 a month honorariums to each imam—angered even a section of the Muslim community who find it ‘insulting’ and offensive. “What does she think? She can buy my vote just because she is paying my religious leader some money every month?” says Najma Begum, a beautician, who comes from a deeply religious family which opposes the move.

In the realm of industry, Mamata has effectively abandoned the late, brief reawakening of Left support for investment under Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. “We are doomed,” laments Sheikh Mohammed, a resident of Singur, who not only voted TMC in the 2011 polls, but was also among the “unwilling” farmers who joined Mamata’s campaign that hounded the Tata Nano plant out of Bengal. He believed Didi’s campaign promise of getting back land given for the Nano project, and her boasts that she’d “turn Calcutta into London”. “But in two years we see that Didi has turned Singur into a wasteland and our dreams into a nightmare,” he says. After a negative high court order on the issue of the state’s handing back land at Singur from the Tatas, it has become a symbol of the TMC’s failings. Mamata’s ardent supporters in the region have turned into her worst critics, actuated by a strong sense of betrayal. “If we had the Tata Nano, we could have been the best state in the country in terms of industry. Now we are the worst,” Sheikh says dejectedly.

Mamata’s comments on the Park Street rape ignites emotions

Industrial policy experts agree. In an interview to Outlook, former commerce and industry minister Nirupam Sen says, “Bengal wouldn’t have been just best in the country, but it would have been one of the best car manufacturers in the world if Tata Motors was allowed to operate in the state.” He explains further: “Since the Nano was to be the cheapest car in the world, at the time when our government was in negotiations with Tata Motors, I had automobile manufacturers even from Germany and Austria—unquestionably pre-eminent in the world auto industry—express their curiosity about the project. The loss of the Tata Nano was a devastating loss of opportunity of economic development of the state.” In retrospect, the Nano’s pullout before the 2011 assembly polls appears to have set the current flat tone for the future industry policy in Bengal.

In fact, industrialists were dismayed by the Mamata regime’s hands-off policy regarding land acquisition—going against the grain of accepted practice across the world, it said it would not help investors find land in Bengal. Since then, several other industries have fled or stalled operations in a state already denuded of big manufacturing industry. These include the ABG Group and Jindal. As against the present 2.8 per cent growth rate of industrial production in the country, West Bengal has a rate as low as 1.8 per cent.

The last two years have also seen Bengal erupt in political violence of such ferocity that it prompted governor M.K. Narayanan to remark that a “kind of goondaism” was plaguing Bengal politics. The immediate trigger for his comments was the audacious physical assault on senior Left leader Abdul Rezzak Mollah by alleged Trinamool goons in January, followed by days of arson and CPI(M)-TMC fighting. Even more disconcerting were the veiled barbs aimed at the governor himself by TMC leaders in response to his remarks. Panchayat minister Subrata Mukherjee darkly said that the governor had better watch his words or else there’d be dire consequences.

Protesters decry the attack on Presidency University by suspected Trinamool goons

Activist and thespian Kaushik Sen explains, “Political violence is not new to Bengal. There were many instances even during the Left regime. But the difference is that top Left leaders rarely came out in defence of goons who allegedly worked for them. The current trend of top leaders commenting on or seemingly condoning acts of violence if the perpetrator is in some way connected to the ruling party was unheard of.” Indeed, public alarm over political violence is not only based on the actual incidence, or whether it’s on an upward curve, but reflects deep concerns about how leading political figures have tended to respond to it all. For example, when SFI leader Sudipto Gupta died in police custody last month, Mamata called it a “small, petty matter”.

In an example of brazen misgovernance, as recently as February, TMC councillor Mohammed Iqbal (Munna) was allegedly shielded by a top state minister (one of Mamata’s favourites) after someone in a rampaging mob he led at a college election shot and killed a police constable. As Munna, pursued by the police, went on the run, a furious Mamata cracked the whip on police commissioner Ranjit Pachnanda for doing his job and going hard after a suspect who happened to be a Trinamool man, ultimately replacing him. Pachnanda met the same fate as former joint commissioner Damayanti Sen, who solved the Park Street rape case in April 2012, and dared to refute the CM’s statement that the rape was ‘staged’ and was aimed as a slur againt her government. That a woman CM, that too who led the charge against Left ‘oppression’ in Nandigram, could say something so insensitive was noted with disbelief. The following castigation in the press and statewide protests against the government’s inability to curb crimes against women must have hurt. When the Delhi gangrape rocked India in December 2012, Mamata commented, “It happens everywhere—not just in Bengal.”

Last month, after suspected TMC goons raided the prestigious Presidency University campus, beating students and vandalising laboratories, party leaders didn’t react by condemning the act or promising an investigation, but said the violence was self-inflicted by the CPI(M) (the SFI controls the college union; the TMC barely has a presence) just to malign Trinamool. For many students who were witness to the unprecedented political assault on an educational institution, the response felt callous. “We were so scared we would be molested that we had a friend lock us in a room from outside so that the goons wouldn’t find us; we turned out the lights and hid under benches,” said a Presidency student.

A beleagured Saradha agent with clients’ details

“The problem is that the TMC has still not been able to shake off the Opposition mentality. It needs to get out of partisan politics, and like most progressive states, embrace a pluralistic approach. Even Narendra Modi himself is trying to shake off his sectarian image in his readiness to brace himself for a larger role. Mamata needs to learn to do that,” says analyst Ganguly.

Ravenous for public recognition as Bengal’s saviour, all Mamata has accomplished till now is a dissipation of her benevolent, sisterly image and considerable goodwill by being on a constant defensive, in denial of her government’s shortcomings and having paranoiac perceptions of loss of face and defeat. Add to that an inability to face reality.

Last month, for example, when Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi visited Calcutta, Mamata had an opportunity to demonstrate that she could rise above perceived competition, and not be bothered by the loud, persistent whispers that Modi was the better CM and had capitalised on her failed industrial policy (the Nano factory was weaned away to Gujarat). Instead, she chose absence, taking a morning flight to Delhi the day Modi was scheduled to arrive in Calcutta. In spite of Modi’s image as a communal rabble-rouser forever tarnished by the Gujarat riots, he commands some grudging respect, even in liberal-secular Calcutta, for the way he has successfully solicited industrial development for Gujarat. In contrast, Mamata is seen as no better than the Left by a city bereft of the glossy markers of well-being that industry delivers. Her move to avoid a probable juxtaposition with Modi only served to bolster that image gap.

Mamata’s almost pathological hypersensitivity to criticism seems to dog every step of hers—preventing her from showing moderation at various points, as well as goading her towards a style of governance marked by haughtiness and impetuosity.

Any assessment of the Trinamool finally has to touch the lowest point in a generally poor performance—the TMC supremo’s record of suppressing political dissent. The litany of retaliatory wounds by the Trinamool run deep. Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra was arrested and roughed up for circulating an e-mail that caricatured the chief minister. College student Tanya Bhardwaj was labelled a “Maoist” for simply asking the CM a critical question. Shiladitya Chowdhury, a Jangalmahal farmer, was also tarred with the same brush and arrested at a rally for asking the CM why fertiliser prices were going up. All of these events attracted the ire of civil society. Mamata’s style has often been termed ‘fascist’ even by erstwhile supporters like author Mahasweta Devi.

The compound effect of her many faults has gradually eroded Mamata’s support base, especially throughout urban Bengal. Yet she blunders on, now with a heightened sensitivity about the impending panchayat polls. A majority of the victims of the Saradha scam are from the Bengal countryside—a TMC bastion since Nandigram. A loss of face before 2014 is hardly desirable. The near future could tell if its inner defences are breached.