Archive for July 2009
July 20 was a black day in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly because a senior member of the Opposition was censured for demanding a discussion on the State’s steadily deteriorating law and order situation. What made it all the more horrid was that the member was censured at the prompting of the Speaker who is expected to at least pretend to be impartial when the issues directly related to the people are concerned.
Speaker Ishwardas Rohani had, in fact, surpassed his own biased behaviour which had become his hallmark during his first term as the Speaker, by prompting minister of parliamentary affairs Kailash Vijayvargiya to move a censure motion against Deputy Leader of the Opposition Chaudhari Rakesh Singh and allowing the motion to be adopted by voice vote. Rakesh Singh’s “crime” was that he wanted to know from the Speaker day and the time for a discussion on the law and order situation. The Opposition had been demanding a debate on the issue from the beginning of the session.
Provoked by Singh’s observation during Zero Hour that the ruling party was avoiding a discussion on the law and order situation, Speaker Rohani said that the Business Advisory Committee had already approved a discussion on the law and order situation under Rule 139 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business of the House. But he would not say when this discussion would be allowed. This betrayed the Speaker’s mind because Rule 139 relates to “a matter of urgent public importance”. Rohani apparently had no compunction in delaying a discussion on the “matter of urgent public importance” indefinitely to help the ruling party.
As Rakesh Singh insisted on the day and time being fixed for a discussion, Rohani lost his temper and gestured to the minister of parliamentary affairs who was promptly on his feet with the censure motion against Rakesh Singh. Vijayvargiya was, through the intervention of other senior Congress leaders, agreeable in the afternoon session to express sorry to Rakesh Singh and withdraw the censure motion adopted against him but Rohani’s game of avoiding the unpleasant subject of law and order situation for the time being had succeeded.
Rohani was first elected Speaker, unanimously, in 2003. His manner of conducting the business of the House did not even show a semblance of impartiality. He was always impatient whenever an Opposition member raised an issue likely to embarrass the treasury benches. A constant grouse of the Opposition members had been that their notices of calling-attention or other motions touching upon the urgent problems of the people had either been delayed inordinately or not taken at all. This had led many times to unpleasant situations in the House and the Opposition members had not hesitated in levelling the charges of bias and partiality against the Speaker, something that might please the BJP leaders but did little honour to the institution of the Speaker.
An example will illustrate Rohani’s manner of conducting the business of the House. The Opposition wanted, two years ago, to raise in the Assembly what it had described as the attempts to saffronise education in Madhya Pradesh. Leader of the Opposition Jamuna Devi had brought to the House a copy of the textbook on social science for the Sixth Standard and alleged that the BJP’s election symbol “Kamal” was displayed in the book as the national flower. As the session started, CPI member Ram Lakhan Sharma stood up and said: “Speaker, Sir, we are very much aggrieved”. The Speaker, however, ignored him and other members from the Opposition benches as if they did not exist. This infuriated the Opposition members and they, Jamuna Devi included, trooped to the well of the House where they started shouting slogans. Rohani then asked them to go back to their seats and permitted the Leader of the Opposition to speak. As Jamuna Devi unfolded a sheet of paper, the Speaker ruled that the Leader of the Opposition could speak only extempore and that she would not be permitted to read from any paper.
(Rohani’s holier than thou attitude notwithstanding, the Madhya Pradesh government right away initiated steps to get the BJP symbol “Kamal” replaced by the national flower in the Social Science textbook for the Sixth Standard. It also “blacklisted” the publisher of the textbook and issued him a show cause notice seeking explanation for the “blunder”.)
Rohani’s warped sense of justice was reflected in the case of Harivallabh Shukla, who had contested and won on the Rashtriya Samata Dal ticket from Pohri constituency in the 2003 Assembly elections. A year later he contested the Lok Sabha election as the official BJP candidate against Jyotiraditya Scindia (Congress) from the Guna constituency – and lost.
Ramniwas Rawat, Congress MLA, moved a petition before the Speaker seeking disqualification of Shukla under the anti-defection law. Speaker Rohani allowed the matter to linger on for over two years, forcing the Congress, the main opposition party, to disrupt the House. Eventually, the Speaker gave his ruling and rejected Rawat’s petition. His ground: Shukla may have contested the Lok Sabha election on the BJP ticket but he neither joined the BJP nor resigned from his own Rashtriya Samata Dal.
Constantly aggrieved by Rohani’s partial attitude and short temper, the entire Opposition had submitted a motion of no-confidence in the Speaker during Rohani’s last term. Once a motion of no-confidence in the Speaker is submitted to the Assembly secretariat, the Speaker loses the authority, under the provisions of the Constitution and the relevant Rules of the Assembly, to preside over a session to take a decision on the motion. What did Rohani do? He abruptly adjourned the Assembly session sine die, nearly a week ahead of the schedule.
Manak Agrawal, whether he holds an office in the Madhya Pradesh Congress or not, seems to be the most powerful and feared person. He is at present at the centre of a controversy which is moving towards a showdown between the warring chieftains in the organisation.
There is no plausible explanation for re-admitting Inder Prajapat into the Congress except that Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Suresh Pachauri wanted to take on Manak Agrawal. Manak was a PCC general secretary till some time back when he was removed by Pachauri who had suspected Manak’s hand behind a scurrilous article about Pachauri in a Hindi journal recently.
A day after Prajapat’s re-admission into the Congress was announced in Bhopal, AICC general secretary and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh announced in Delhi that this was absolutely wrong and that he was writing to AICC general secretary in-charge of Madhya Pradesh affairs B.K.Hariprasad to rescind the decision. Hariprasad later told media persons in Bhopal that the party high command would take the final decision on Inder Prajapat. It has thus become a prestige issue for both, Digvijay Singh and Suresh Pachauri.
Prajapat, then a general secretary of the PCC, had, one fine July morning in 2001, walked into the Nishat Colony (Bhopal) bungalow of Manak Agrawal, also a PCC general secretary, shot him twice with his licensed pistol and then driven to the T.T.Nagar police station, about a kilometre away, where he was put under arrest under Section 307 IPC (attempt to murder).
Secret marriage
Prajapat was said to have married a 24-year-old dancer of Ujjain, Vidyut Kushwah, without divorcing his first wife and had kept it a secret. A news item about Prajapat’s marriage with Vidyut was carried by a Bhopal newspaper and then picked up by another newspaper of Indore from where Prajapat hails. He reportedly suspected that Manak had leaked the news about his secret marriage.
Manak was picking flowers in his lawn for morning puja when Prajapat walked in there and wished him good morning. Then he shot at Manak almost at point blank range. Before leaving Manak’s house, he was reported to have melodramatically announced: “Acchha Manakbhai, chalate hain” (OK Manakbhai, leaving now).
While one of the bullets had just grazed Manak’s chin, the other bullet had lodged into his neck. He was rushed to the State-owned Hamidia Hospital and an emergency operation was carried on him to remove the bullet. He gradually recovered and was back in the PCC.
Then PCC President Radha Kishan Malaviya had removed Prajapat from the post of the PCC General Secretary and had later expelled him from the party for six years. Additional Sessions Judge Abhay Kumar had sentenced him to rigorous imprisonment for seven years and fined him Rs 10,000 for the attack on Manak. Prajapat appealed in the High Court against the sentence.
After Prajapat’s arrest for the attack on Manak, Digvijay Singh was said to have quietly visited his parents in Indore and assured them all help.
Digvijay’s “find”
Manak had alleged that the conspiracy to kill him was hatched at the residence of PCC president Radha Kishan Malaviya (a trusted man of Digvijay Singh). He had even moved an application in the court of the Additional Sessions Judge to make Malaviya a co-accused in the case but it was rejected by the judge
Inder Prajapat, meanwhile, joined Uma Bharati’s Bharatiya Jana Shakti (BJS) and was its general secretary when Pachauri decided to take him back into the Congress. The argument given was that Prajapat was expelled from the Congress for six years and he had completed that period and had expressed his desire to rejoin the Congress.
Then chief minister Digvijay Singh had spotted Prajapat not for his organisational skills but for his guts and muscles. At his instance, then PCC president Radha Kishan Malaviya had taken Prajapat into the Congress and made him general secretary in charge of the organisation. Digvijay wanted to use Prajapat to “deal” with those in the organisation who were being troublesome. Manak Agrawal was one of them but not the only one. (Suffice to say that Manak had once annoyed Digvijay Singh so much that the then chief minister had taken his grouse against Manak to then Prime Minister and Congress President Narasimha Rao).
Manak knows a lot about the Congress and Congressmen in the State, is communicative, cooperative, and always available and, therefore, a darling of the media. Those at the helm of affairs in the organisation have found it difficult to keep Manak too near to them because Manak then overshadows them and their acolytes. And keeping Manak discontented is inviting disaster.
After he was sent as PCC president to Bhopal early last year, one of the first tasks of Pachauri was to remove Manak from the chief spokesman’s position. Pachauri realised his mistake soon afterwards and took him back. But the relations between the two remained tense throughout. Pachauri keeps himself surrounded by such people as are known neither for their organisational skills nor for their mass base. Similarly, he had packed the PCC with the mediocre. He has almost an antipathy for journalists. All the bad publicity that Pachauri had been getting was thus credited to Manak.
Since Manak was standing up to Pachauri, he became a natural ally of Digvijay Singh whose aversion for Pachauri is not a secret. The Congress organisation in Madhya Pradesh had for over a quarter century been dominated by the Thakurs, Arjun Singh and Digvijay Singh being the most prominent of them. Pachauri, a Brahman, was the beneficiary of BSP Supremo Mayawati’s successful social engineering in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The Congress high command realised the importance of the Brahman leaders in the organisation. However, the choice of Pachauri was not a sound one because he awfully lacks the qualities of a mass leader as 18 months of his stewardship of the Madhya Pradesh Congress has shown.
Re-induction of Inder Prajapat into the Congress at this stage does not seem to serve any purpose except to further annoy Manak Agrawal and help Pachauri’s detractors, the Thakurs, become active again to regain the lost paradise. Digvijay Singh, who sees no use of Inder Prajapat now and finds in Manak an ally, has taken the first step to undo what Pachauri has done (in re-admitting Prajapat).
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is “technically” right when he says that no virginity test was conducted on the tribal girls assembled at Sohagpur in Shahdol district to get themselves married under the Government-organised mass marriage scheme — “technically”, because the girls were subjected to humiliation not in the name of virginity test but to ensure that they were not pregnant. The method adopted, however, was the same.
Chauhan has his fetish of “Kanyadan Yojana” (mass marriage of eligible poor girls) as his predecessor Babulal Gaur had an obsession with Gokul Graam (development of villages on the pattern of Gokul village near Mathura where Lord Krishna was supposed to have passed his boyhood with the cowherds). Uma Bharati’s fetish was the most esoteric. Immediately after becoming the chief minister, she had constituted a high-powered State-level Panch-Ja committee, the five Js standing for Jana (people), Jameen (land), Jala (water), Jungle (forests) and Janvar (animals). Neither Uma Bharati, nor any one else associated with her pet project, had been able to explain in concrete terms what they really planned to do. All one had from Uma Bharati and others was some vague claptrap.
Chauhan’s Kanyadan Yojana is, at least, not a vague concept and has some social purpose. However, his emphasis on this scheme, almost to the exclusion of everything else, has turned it into a rotten bureaucratic tamasha. The district officials, including Collectors, Superintendents of Police, Chief Executive Officers of District Panchayats, the Health Officers, Anganwadi workers, et cetera, are given quotas and asked to get actively involved in the hunt of the eligible girls and arrange their marriages. Almost the entire government machinery gets engaged in such mass marriages during the marriage season.
Since all his cabinet colleagues are not as devout as he, some of them treat the occasion like any other marriage ceremony, full of fun and frolic. A cabinet minister, who presided over a Kanyadan function, had found himself in the midst of an unsavoury controversy when the reports appeared in newspapers that the bedinis (girls from a tribe traditionally given to dancing) performed lewd dances at the marriage ceremony while the drunken audience made indecent gestures. The government sanctions Rs 5000 per girl for purchase of the household items to be given to the girl at the time of her marriage. As in any Government scheme, misappropriation of the Kanyadan money is also not uncommon.
It was this forced zeal of the Government functionaries that herded a group of couples, seemingly of marriageable age, in Byohari in Shahdol district in the last week of June. The panic spread among the organisers when one of the would-be brides developed labour pains.
This seems to have led to the overreaction in the officialdom at the next Kanyadan function scheduled three days later at Sohagpur in the same district. As many as 152 tribal pairs, most of them belonging to the near-extinct Baiga tribe, had assembled. Sohagpur’s Additional District Magistrate (ADM) was reported to have directed Dr Reena Gautam, gynaecologist in the Shahdol District Hospital, to organise physical examination of each of the would-be brides. The girls demurred but fell in line when told in no uncertain terms that they would be neither married nor given the “gifts” (worth Rs 5000) unless they submitted to the physical examination one by one. Of the 152 girls, 14 were found to be pregnant and were denied participation in the marriage ceremony, as well as the “gifts” that went with the marriage.
This method of ascertaining pregnancy was not only dehumanising, but unnecessary also. Pregnancy and marriage are two separate things in several tribal societies which are not burdened with Brahmanical hypocrisy. The Baiga tribe, in particular, is facing extinction and the Central government has, in fact, devised special schemes (implemented, of course, through the State government) to increase its number.
Even if Chauhan’s babus were so scared of pregnancy, they could have found it out through decent methods, by making inquiries about the eligible unmarried girls in their villages where everyone knows everyone else. Then there are the standard urine tests which are so common.
Ultimately, the unfortunate happening boils down to one thing: the young girls submitted to this degradation not for the love of Chauhan-sponsored marriage ceremony but simply because they are poor and the goods worth a few thousand rupees mean a lot to them. The State government has been claiming to spend thousands of crores of rupees in the name of uplift of the tribals who numbered around 1,22,33,000 in Madhya Pradesh, according to the 2001 census. The Chauhan government claims to have spent Rs 3056 crore on their uplift in the last financial year and increased the allocation to Rs 3869 crore for the current financial year. Will Shivraj Singh Chauhan explain where all this money is going –because the tribals continue to be as poor as they were decades ago and have to compromise their womenfolk’s honour for the paltry sum of a few thousand rupees?
Two days later the girl students came to Bhopal and held a protest demonstration in front of the residence of Sudha’s minister-husband Jayant Malaiya. As they wanted to submit a memorandum to the minister, the girls were beaten up by the baton-happy policemen.
Shivraj Singh Chauhan has perhaps become the first chief minister of Madhya Pradesh to use his police to beat up girl students. That he belongs to the BJP is no excuse.
Dr Sudha Malaiya, herself a BJP leader, historian, archaeologist, journalist, painter and Bharat-Natyam performer, is known for setting up institutions and running them by browbeating the officials.
Sudha and Jayant Malaiya belong to Damoh where she set up in 2006 her Ojaswani Institute for Nursing Science and Research. She falsely claimed that her Institute was affiliated to the Dr Harisingh Gour University of Sagar, and the District health officials believed her and placed all the facilities available at the District Hospital at her disposal.
For this a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was duly drawn up. It was signed by Dr Ashok Jain, Civil Surgeon and Chief Superintendent of Damoh District Hospital and also by two witnesses (as required) but not by “chairperson” of the Institute Dr Sudha Malaiya. Did she deem it below her dignity to stoop so low as to sign a paper along with a District level official? She is, after all, Sudha Malaiya.
The two-page MoU puts all the facilities of the District Hospital, including its patients, at the mercy of nursing students of the Institute with the promise that the Hospital will not make any claims for the loss or injury to any property or person by the learners. The day the MoU is signed, it would be presumed that the Hospital had been indemnified in full for any future occurrence or mishap.
The Hospital was not to cancel or withdraw or postpone or rescind its permission to use any facilities by the Institute without prior concurrence and permission of the University/State government. What was more, the MoU assured the Institute to develop, change or alter its facilities as per the requirements of the Institute’s nursing students preparing for the bachelor’s degree.
In addition to charging heavy fees to the students, this unrecognised institute of Dr Sudha Malaiya gets hefty government grants.
This nursing institute is not the only unrecognised venture of Dr Sudha Malaiya. She also runs the Ojaswani Institute of Management and Technology at Damoh and claims through the brochures and handbills (to attract the gullible) that this Institute, too, is affiliated to the Sagar University.
However, the Sagar University had made it clear to Santosh Bharati, a journalist-activist of Damoh, that neither of the two institutes is affiliated to the Dr Harisingh Gour University of Sagar. Bharati had sought the information under the provisions of the Right to Information Act
A saga of insensitivity
Posted on: July 17, 2009
- In: Bhopal Gas | Government
- 1 Comment
No one resigned, no one offered to resign, and no heads rolled when a disaster, though of a different kind from the one in Mumbai but no less enormous in its gravity, struck Bhopal this day 24 years ago. The victims belonged to the lower-middle and lower strata of the society. They, more or less, accepted their “fate” stoically — or they did not have the means and resources to shake the establishment.
Pertinent in this regard is the observation of S.Varadarajan who, as the director-general of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), had done much to revive the faith of the survivors of the Bhopal MiC gas leak disaster of December 2-3, 1984 immediately after the tragedy had struck the unsuspecting residents. At a function in Bhopal on September 28, 1992, he paid handsome tributes to the Bhopal people for showing forbearance and patience in the wake of the disaster. Then he added, “The Bhopal people had behaved in a much civilised manner. Had even one person been killed, say, in Delhi, there would have been fires but the process of compensation would have been expedited with that”.
Those at the helm of affairs in the State as well as at the Centre fully exploited this “forbearance and patience” of the Bhopal people to: scuttle the inquiry into the causes of the disaster; wind up a project to compile data on the effects of the MiC gas inhalation on the survivors; ensure that the culprits are not punished; and agree on a compensation amount keeping in mind the interests of the US multinational rather than the interests of the poor Bhopal people.
Even after fighting prolonged battles in courts, mostly in the Supreme Court, the survivors have not so far received the compensation according to the norms prescribed by the Central government itself. As many as 15,274 persons have been officially admitted as having succumbed to the complications arising out of the inhalation of the MiC gas and nearly three lakh others are suffering from a host of ailments with varying intensities. No one has been punished for bringing such misery to lakhs of the people.
A proper treatment of the survivors was made difficult by the lack of information about exact contents of the cloud which had formed over Bhopal after the gas leak and which the residents had inhaled. The Union Carbide has the information but it has not released it so far. Dr Heeresh Chandra, one of the country’s foremost forensic experts, was of the opinion that the US multinational had experimented on the Indians some deadly chemical for use in a future biological warfare. Dr Chandra was involved in the investigations of post-mortem blood and tank residues. Phosgene and cyanide, the two most deadly chemicals, were also found in the blood of the victims, though these two chemicals had no business to be stored in the plant which was supposed to manufacture pesticides, according to the scientists who have studied the disaster.
If the Union Carbide refused to share information about the contents of the gas, the Indian authorities behaved like the paid agents of the Union Carbide, protecting the multinational’s interests at the cost of the people of the country. Here is a brief chronology of some important developments in the aftermath the tragedy.
The first major betrayal of the victims of the tragedy was the provision of safe passage in the government plane to Warren Anderson, chief executive of the Union Carbide, and main accused in the criminal case for causing the death of thousands of people. Later the warrants issued by the Bhopal court for extradition of Anderson were filed by the Ministry of External Affairs.
Faced with the countrywide horror, the Madhya Pradesh government ordered a judicial inquiry three days after the disaster. Justice N.K.Singh of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, who headed the one-member inquiry commission, directed the State government on March 26, 1985 to file its statement which the government did eight months later, on November 28. Another fortnight was taken by the government to file the list of documents relied upon. The Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), the subsidiary of the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), which was directly responsible for operating the pesticide plants in Bhopal, also filed its statement. However, the State government abruptly terminated the inquiry commission on December 17, 1985 – and thus scuttled the investigation of the magnitude and the ramifications of the Bhopal gas leak disaster.
Meanwhile, a project was undertaken to make a house-to-house survey of the affected people with a view to preparing their family profiles for their short-term and long-term rehabilitation. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Bombay, assisted by over 500 volunteers from various schools of social work in the country, assisted the government in carrying out this task. The detailed survey covering all the localities of 10 wards and a few localities in six other wards had been completed with 25,294 family interviews from January 1 to February 12, 1985 when the government abruptly wound up this project without assigning any reason. The TISS was not permitted to analyse the findings of the survey already completed as the State government had confiscated all the pro forma sheets.
The Government of India got the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act enacted by the Parliament on February 20,1985. However, it took more than seven months to frame and publish in the gazette the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Registration and Processing of Claims) Scheme, provided for in the Act. There was a further delay of over two years before the injured claimants were directed to go through the process of a separate medical examination for purposes of medical categorisation of claims based on the degree of injury suffered by each claimant. This exercise went on for nearly five years.
Finally, the Government of India arrived at a settlement with the Union Carbide under the aegis of the Supreme Court for an amount of 470 million US dollars towards payment of compensation to the victims and withdrawal of criminal cases which were instituted against 12 persons. It was calculated on the assumption that 3000 persons had died and around 1,02,000 others were injured. The settlement was accepted by the Government of India by ignoring the protests of some 30 all-India and Delhi-based organisations. Their allegation was that the figures of 3000 dead and 1,02,000 injured was arbitrary and not based on calculations. The Supreme Court later ruled that “if the settlement fund is found to be insufficient, the deficiency is to be made good by the Union of India”.
By now, the officially accepted figure of deaths is 15,274 while over three lakh persons are in the injured category. The settlement amount, accepted for 3000 dead and over one lakh injured, had to be distributed among nearly four times that figure and it came to an average of Rs 50,000 in several instalments. The process was completed only in 2006 – 22 years after the people were struck by the disaster. Now they are running from pillar to post for a semblance of a fair deal to them.
- In: Politics
- 2 Comments
The fire in firebrand Uma Bharati is dying down. All that is left out is a smouldering piece of log, with occasional flickers. Her politics seems to be at an end, at least for the time being.
Earlier this month, some activists of her Bharatiya Jana Shakti (BJS) held an angry demonstration in front of a Public Health Engineering (PHE) office in Bhopal in protest against non-supply of drinking water and blackened the face of an executive engineer. Uma Bharati wrote to the executive engineer apologising for the behaviour of her party workers. This was in sharp contrast to the Uma Bharati of last year when she had herself broken the locks of a fair price shop and asked the poor to carry away the food grains. This was in protest against the State government’s decision to permit the public distribution system (PDS) shops to be opened only for three days in a month.
Like Arjun Singh, she is a victim of her own megalomania. But unlike Arjun Singh, she has no control over her tongue or temperament. Having been pampered like a spoilt brat by the BJP and other organs of the Sangh Parivar, Uma had started believing that the BJP would collapse without her. Before and after her exit from the BJP in November 2005, she was at her vilest, using the most vulgar language against the BJP leaders whom she saw as conspiring against her. Babulal Gaur, who was the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, and M.Venkaiah Naidu, who was in charge of the Madhya Pradesh affairs, were special targets of her obscenities. She, though, did not spare even Lal Krishna Advani, the late Pramod Mahajan and even Arun Jaitley, not to speak of Shivraj Singh Chauhan who had succeeded Gaur as the chief minister even as she was herself expecting to be made the chief minister.
Mercurial nature
She formed her BJS with a vow to finish off the BJP and was able to draw to her outfit some hard working BJP activists who were not happy with the way the Chauhan government was being run by “touts and power-brokers”. Uma Bharati, however, lacked the patience and forbearance required to build up an organisation and, therefore, did not know how to handle the experienced political workers who had joined her. She became erratic in her decisions and more short tempered, occasionally suffering from fits of depression. Her tongue became more acerbic about the BJP leaders, particularly Advani. Once she went to the extent of describing Advani as a security threat.
Last year’s Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections marked a watershed in her political career. By that time, most of the BJP leaders who had left the party to join her bandwagon, had been lured back to the BJP by Chauhan by dangling before them carrots like Rajya Sabha seat or the party ticket for the Assembly. Already they had become fed up with the Sadhvi’s mercurial mind. Still, it goes to her credit that during the Assembly election campaign she exposed the Chauhan government’s corruption and misdeeds more effectively than the Congress which is the main opposition party in the State. A fiery speaker as she is (or was), she drew huge crowds while traversing the State. She, however, failed to get the majority of which she was more than confident. That sent her in a longish fit of depression.
By the time she emerged from her depression (which she euphemistically calls meditation), she had lost the will to lead or strengthen her political outfit. Then one day she suddenly and unilaterally declared her support to Lal Krishna Advani as the next Prime Minister and dashed to Delhi to meet him, leaving the BJS leaders in Madhya Pradesh dumbfounded and embarrassed. In Delhi she did not receive the welcome which she must have been expecting. She avoided Madhya Pradesh during the Lok Sabha election campaign, though she was occasionally heard of as travelling some western Uttar Pradesh areas. A BJS leader remarked that Uma Bharati was probably hoping that Advani, after becoming the Prime Minister, would be magnanimous enough to rehabilitate her. The Lok Sabha election outcome not only shattered Advani’s romantic dream but also sent Uma Bharati into an abyss.
Quietly, meekly and almost surreptitiously, she called a meeting of her BJS at Bhopal late last month. It was a lamentably non-event. Mercifully for her, the Liberhan Commission report was submitted to the Prime Minister in Delhi the same day and she used the opportunity to declare that she was prepared to be hanged for her role in the Babri masjid demolition. It did get her some publicity but not the type to which she had been addicted. Even the media has stopped caring for her.
She is said to have once again gone into meditation (or depression) leaving her BJS workers once again in the lurch.
We, the Indians, …………..
Posted on: July 7, 2009
We, the Indians, are adept at manipulations of all kinds. We are also adept at inventing a manipulation where none exists, if it helps our design. It is part of our nature to trade a myth as the fact.
It should, therefore, come as no surprise if some bright-brained pundit of electronics has found a key to manipulating the electronic voting machine (EVM) so as to programme it in such a way as to transfer all the votes, or a certain percentage of these, to a particular political party or a particular candidate in elections.
The one who has discovered the code to doctor the EVMs must necessarily be a “conscientious mercenary”. Prima facie, it is a myth because one can be either conscientious or mercenary and not both. I have invented this myth and want to trade it as a fact in the national interest. An Indian does not do anything but in the national interest. Didn’t Manmohan Singh pay crores of rupees to some Opposition MPs to purchase their votes during the “trust vote” in the national interest? Whoever has acquired the code to manipulate the EVMs is one who is above caste, creed, religious or political consideration. His (or is it her?) expertise is available on the first come, first serve basis.
For the 2008 Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, the EVM manipulator’s expertise was made available to Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan. Apparently, State Congress president Suresh Pachauri did not approach him (or her) first because of his own arrogance. He discovered his folly only after the results were out and the BJP, under the leadership of Shivraj Singh Chauhan, had returned to power for the second term. A distraught Pachauri threatened to expose EVM manipulations with the help of his “friends in the UK and the US”.
Before Pachauri could carry out his threat, the EVM manipulator was hired by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh for the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP’s would-have-been Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani missed the bus this time, in spite of stacks of black money at his disposal (part of it was visible in his personal campaign over the websites in most of the countries).
Now Advani is ruing his failure to first approach the EVM manipulator, as Pachauri was after the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections. Advani may also be cursing Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan for not telling him on time that EVMs can be manipulated.
Advani’s plight is really pathetic; he seems to have lost faith in the future and present of India and is suggesting going back to the last century when the printed ballot papers were used and it took almost day and night to count the votes in a single Lok Sabha constituency. What a fall for a man who was running a high-tech campaign for Lok Sabha and was talking of nothing but smart phones and laptops not long ago! In this retrograde thinking, Advani has the support of the leaders of various parties like the AIADMK, CPI (M), Janata Dal (S) and the Lok Janshakti Party. They are all losers to the EVM manipulator.
After Advani’s dream of becoming Prime Minister was shattered, former Delhi chief secretary Omesh Saigal has surfaced to claim that he knows a secret code in the EVM, through which the machine can be programmed to transfer every fifth vote to a particular candidate. It appears that Saigal has got some (not the whole) clue to the EVM manipulator’s modus operandi. Why didn’t he surface earlier and help Advani is a mystery.
The Election Commission has, meanwhile, vehemently denied the possibility of the EVMs being doctored. Doesn’t every organisation issue denials if its bosses don’t like something, particularly if the organisation is headed by bureaucrats, serving or retired? What one understands is that all the victims of the EVM manipulation are planning, under the leadership of Advaniji, to take a group of experts from all over the world (Advaniji has agreed to defray their expenses from his black money fund) to the Election Commission to show to the Chief Election Commissioner, the two Election Commissioners, the Deputy Election Commissioner and the Commission’s legal advisers how the EVMs can be doctored. It is agreed that Omesh Saigal will be with them and given the first opportunity to show how every fifth vote can be transferred to a particular candidate. Advaniji is said to be consulting his astrologers for a “shubh muhurat” for this Great Exposure.
Justice Prakash Prabhakar Naolekar, the new Lokayukta of Madhya Pradesh, has held out the assurance that he will make the Lokayukta Organisation a true guardian of public interest and dispose of the complaints strictly on merit, without pride and prejudice and without succumbing to pressure. In fact, he has said it in too many words during his interaction with the media after being sworn-in in Bhopal’s Raj Bhavan.
Samples: he has never in his life worked under anybody’s pressure; he will perform his duties with honesty in future also; he is not bothered with anyone’s likes or dislikes; he will go strictly by the evidence; there will be no delay (in disposal of cases) on his part; the cases will be disposed of as soon as the evidence is produced; he will not allow the platform of the Lokayukta Organisation to be misused by any one; every one is equal before him, whether he is a minister or any ordinary person; and lastly, his priority is expeditious disposal of the pending cases.
Having said all this, Naolekar went to the Lokayukta office and promptly took up a case for expeditious disposal. It was not a case that had been “pending” for long or had been agitating the public mind because of the dubious role played by Naolekar’s predecessor. The case that Naolekar took up so hurriedly is only a couple of months old and relates to Ravi Nandan Singh, who resigned as Advocate-General of Madhya Pradesh exactly a week before Naolekar was sworn in as the Lokayukta. Singh had stated that he had resigned “on moral grounds” because of the complaint against him before the Lokayukta.
It may not be freaky to assume that Ravi Nandan Singh’s recommendation as Advocate-General of the State has played an important role in the selection of Naolekar for the Lokayukta’s office. Naolekar was practising law in Jabalpur, as had been his father and grandfather. Ravi Nandan Singh’s karmabhoomi is also Jabalpur. Singh might have occasions to appear before Naolekar when he was judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court (which has its main bench at Jabalpur) from June 1992 to April 1994 (when he was transferred to the Rajasthan High Court). After his retirement from the Supreme Court on June 29 last year, Naolekar had been living again in Jabalpur where Singh was the Advocate-General and his wife Sushila Singh is the Mayor of the Jabalpur Municipal Corporation. Naolekar was reported to have been attending the functions of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Jabalpur where the Mayor was also sometimes present.
Naolekar’s eagerness to “exonerate”, at the very first opportunity, Ravi Nandan Singh of the charges of accumulating disproportionate assets has naturally created disquietude in the mind of the people who have seen in the past the Lokayukta only trying to curry favour with those in power. The last incumbent, Ripusudan Dayal, only did it much more brazenly. Justice Faizanuddin, the predecessor of Ripusudan Dayal, had seen the ‘politician-bureaucrat-criminal nexus’ as largely responsible for the increase in number of cases of corruption and had virtually accused then chief minister Digvijay Singh of shielding the corrupt.
Shahida Sultan case
And how did Faizanuddin himself act in a case pertaining to Digvijay Singh? The Income-Tax Department raids on the premises of a liquor baron’s establishments had yielded a diary in which were reportedly recorded the sums of hush money paid to various functionaries in the Digvijay Singh government – the chief minister included. The I-T Department forwarded the relevant records to the Lokayukta for an investigation. Even without registering a case or starting a preliminary investigation, Faizanuddin had, in a statement, ruled out payment of hush money to Digvijay Singh. Faizanuddin is also a former Supreme Court judge.
The Shahida Sultan case illustrates vividly the working of the Lokayukta Organisation. She was picked up, on a tip-off, by the Lokayukta police at the Bhopal railway station as she alighted from the Karnataka Express in the night of May 8, 1997 with a suitcase containing over Rs six lakh. Shahida was a Police Inspector and was on deputation to the Transport Department. She was posted at a check-post on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border in Khandwa district.
The Lokayukta police investigated the case and filed a challan in the special court under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The special court sentenced her on July 31, 2007 to two years’ rigorous imprisonment for being in possession of assets disproportionate to her known sources of income. Was that Shahida’s only crime? To say that Shahida was making money at the check-post for herself and was occasionally bringing suitcases full of currency notes to keep at home is simply ridiculous. For whom did she bring the suitcase?
There were curious turns in the investigation of the Shahida case. A relative of hers, Javed Mirza, came forward to claim that the money in the suitcase belonged to him and that Shahida was bringing it to deliver to him. He, however, could not produce any evidence to substantiate his claim. He was also sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, along with Shahida, by the special court.
The most deplorable turn in the case came when the State Government moved an application in the special court, through none but the prosecuting counsel (who was representing the Lokayukta Organisation), for withdrawal of the case “in public interest”.
Why had Shahida Sultan, a small fry in the system, become so important to the high-ups in the government that they shamelessly trampled all decency and propriety to save her? And what was the “public interest” involved in her acquittal? No one, who has an iota of intelligence, can believe that the concern of the then chief minister and his coterie was merely for a police inspector who had a small hobby of stacking in a suitcase currency notes obtained through illegitimate means and coming to Bhopal once in a while to dump the suitcase in her house. Since the investigation of the case was so thoroughly bungled by the Lokayukta police, the people would never know for whom the suitcase was meant or how many suitcases she had delivered earlier there.
It may not be appropriate to draw conclusions about Naolekar’s intentions on the basis of his selection of the first case even though some may see in this an eagerness to help a friend. Some really challenging cases are before him — and these include the corruption complaints against about a dozen ministers of the State. Perhaps the most important is the complaint against chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and his wife Sadhna Singh, known as the dumper scam, the investigation of which has already been substantially bungled by Naolekar’s predecessor Ripusudan Dayal.
Constitution is not for burning
Posted on: July 5, 2009
Ram Bahadur Rai, formerly of the Jansatta, feels that the country’s problems can be solved if the Constitution is thrown into the Ocean or consigned to the flames. Why this observation deserves consideration, instead of being dismissed as the manifestation of an old journalist’s pent up frustrations, is because it was made not at a coffee table but before an enlightened audience. Rai was the main speaker at the 17th Rajbahadur Pathak Memorial Lecture Series in Bhopal.
(The late Rajbahadur Pathak was hailed by his contemporaries as a journalist committed to the social concerns and his memory is being kept alive by his son and daughter-in-law Manoj Pathak and Renu Pathak by inviting on his death anniversary eminent personalities to speak on the current issues. The past speakers include Dharmpal, Nirmal Verma, Habib Tanvir, Kishan Patnaik, Prabhash Joshi, Sitaram Yechuri, Brinda Karat, Govindacharya, Mastram Kapur, Pushpesh Pant and Nandkishore Acharya).
Failures of Media
This year’s topic was the “failures of the media”. Rai dwelt at length to emphasise that foreign direct investment (FDI) was the real culprit and that it was because of the FDI that the editorial responsibilities had been usurped by the owners and the profit, not the public interest, became the sole concern of a media organisation. He praised Jawaharlal Nehru for putting a ban on FDI in the media (Reader’s Digest was made the only exception). A decision to review Nehru’s policy on FDI was taken by the government of V.P.Singh and ultimately FDI in the media was allowed by Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government in 2001.
From FDI, Rai moved on to black money and said that Rs 70 lakh crore of black money had been stashed by Indians in foreign banks. He quoted Govindacharya and S.Gurumurthy to point out how many primary schools and how many bridges could be built with that money if it was brought to India. (We have heard enough of this from the BJP’s former Prime Minister-in-waiting Lal Krishna Advani during the Lok Sabha election campaign).
Rai was being less than honest when he blamed the FDI for all the ills in the media and kept quiet about the role of unscrupulous owners who had started encroaching upon the editorial domain to further their business, industrial or political interests long before the question of allowing FDI in the media was considered by the V.P.Singh government. C.R.Irani had dissolved the Statesman Trust, which arbitrated in case of a difference of opinion between the editor and the management, in the late 1960s because he did not agree with the then editor on certain issues. The 1970s and 1980s saw further erosion of the independence of the institution called The Editor, and with that suffered the newspaper’s role to inform and educate its readers.
Leaving aside the polemics on the failures of the media, one feels really concerned about Rai’s outburst that the Constitution should be thrown into the Ocean or torched. (Exactly this is what Parkash Singh Badal had done in the 1980s and the BJP, led by Lal Krishna Advani, had agitated demanding Badal’s trial for sedition. Today, Badal is the chief minister of Punjab under the provisions of the same Constitution and the BJP is the junior partner in his government. The BJP leaders did not utter a murmur when Badal appointed his son Sukhbir Singh as the deputy chief minister of the State even though he was not an MLA).
Rai did not suggest an alternative to the Constitution nor did he point out how the Constitution came in the way if the editor of a newspaper wanted to highlight the miseries of the suffering people or if a chief minister was really interested in ensuring drinking water supply to the people or wanted to punish the officials and contractors who had swallowed the money allocated for providing mid-day meals in the schools. If there are some genuine shortcomings in the Constitution, these can be removed through amending it. The problem is not so much with the Constitution but with those who are responsible for implementing its provisions. While a very few amendments have been made keeping in mind the larger public interest, most of the amendments have been made to get the politicians in power out of the difficulties. Rai can burn this Constitution and have another one in its place (unless he believes in the theory of the withering away of the State) but what will he do with the Manmohan Singhs and the Advanis and the Badals and the Mayawatis.
The amendment pertaining to the election to Rajya Sabha vividly explains the collective manipulation by politicians to help themselves at the cost of the people’s interest. , The Council of States, or the Upper House of Parliament, was envisaged by the authors of the Constitution as a body comprising representatives of the States. In August 1954, it came to be known as Rajya Sabha. This House is not subject to dissolution. One-third of its members retire every two years and the vacancies are filled by holding fresh elections. The members of the State legislatures constitute the Electoral College. The Schedule IV of the Constitution had allotted the number of seats (in Rajya Sabha) to each State/Union Territory.
Section 3 of the Representation of People Act had ordained that a candidate seeking a seat in Rajya Sabha should primarily be resident of the State from which he/she was trying to get elected. The idea was to make use, in the highest law-making body of the country, of the learning, intelligence and experience of such persons as, for some reason, could not or would not contest the election to the House of the People or Lok Sabha but whom the members of the State legislature in their collective wisdom considered as eminently suitable to represent the State in Parliament.
Unscrupulous politicians
All went well for about two decades. Then this institution, too, fell prey to the manipulations of the power brokers. The political parties, having requisite number of members in a State legislature, started sending to Rajya Sabha people for reasons other than their intelligence or commitment to public service and even persons from other States. The domicile clause was flouted by manipulating the law — prospective candidate would register himself or herself as a voter in the State or buy or rent a House there. Thus, Manmohan Singh became a “resident” of Guahati and Advani and Hansraj Bhardwaj of Madhya Pradesh.
When these violations ceased to be occasional aberrations and became endemic, some public-spirited persons like Kuldip Nayar sought judicial intervention to put an end to this malpractice. As the things started getting hot for the beneficiaries of the malpractice, and they included top leaders of political parties, they, in their “collective wisdom”, decided to legitimise the malpractice by amending the Representation of People Act. It was done by the NDA government with the backing of the Congress in August 2003. The amended Act made the contest for Rajya Sabha open for a person from any state.
The constitutional experts were horrified. Doubts were raised on the legitimacy of the amendment, because by one stroke, Parliament had sought to change the federal character of Rajya Sabha. Fali S. Nariman felt that the amendment would open the floodgates to big money bag owners and power brokers to descend upon the small people of the states and get elected to the Upper House. He warned the government against making Rajya Sabha “a stock exchange for moneybag holders from outside.” The consequences of the changes in the law would be grave, he said, because there are nine states which send only one member each to Rajya Sabha. What would happen about the representation of these states in the House if all nine members are from outside, he asked.
The Directive Principles of the Constitution enumerate succinctly what the States are expected to do for the people. V.P.Singh remembered the Constitutional provision for special efforts for the betterment of the other backward classes to play his politics with Devi Lal but he did not pause to think that the same Constitution was expecting from him as the head of the government at the Centre to “provide for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years”. In fact, had the politicians in power acted only on this part of the Directive Principles immediately after Independence, the complexion of the country would have been different by now
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