Part 2
By Ahmad Cameron,
Judiciary
Judiciary is the 3rd and in many ways one of the most vital one, out of the five pillars on which any global power stands today. It is this institution which maintains a check and balance on the governance of a nation by overlooking the legislature, executive and all the major institutions of a nation. However the global standards set forth by Judiciary at the dawn of Independent India appear to have faded out in the innumerable seasons which have passed by. What a contrast that in a recent judgment about Allahabad High Court practices, the Supreme Court of India had remarked, “We are sorry to say but a lot of complaints are coming against certain judges of Allahabad High Court relating to their integrity. Some judges have their kith and kin practicing in the same court, and within a few years of starting practice, the sons and relations of judges become multi-millionaires, have huge bank balances, luxurious cars, and huge houses and enjoy a luxurious life.” This is just tip of the iceberg as we look around to find ex-CJI Justice Y. K. Sabherwal; Justices S. Sen, V. Ramaswami, etc have been able to get away in one manner or another, despite the judiciary fraternity and Government knew of the wrong doings of these functionaries. Now the relatives of the last retired CJI Balakrishnan have been found to have amassed wealth beyond their known sources of income. On the other hand, to wash his “apparent sins” after being caught in delivering ethically wrong judgments in favour of Union Carbide in the biggest global industrial disaster of Bhopal Gas Tragedy, ex-CJI Ahmadi resigned from Bhopal Memorial Hospital Trust chairmanship. Where his conscious was when he sat all these years on the trust is the question which keeps coming back to me whenever I think of this manmade tragedy? Interestingly as and when concerns have been raised by the public regarding the integrity of judges, at majority of the times those who raised concern were persecuted by the judiciary and in very rare cases the judges in question were reportedly subjected to even an internal enquiry. As per the Indian legal system when the content of a First Information Report (FIR) in a crime is a public document, it appears that the criminals among the judges have consistently been getting special treatments. Indian law however does not provide any scope for discrimination in status between criminals and judges if both have carried out an unlawful activity, or do it? On the issue of accountability of judges none other than ex Chief Justice of India J. S. Verma had said “[t]here is no point in saying that there is no corruption in the judiciary. No one is going to say it, much less accept it. One cannot go on sweeping it under the carpet and not expect it to show up. It is showing up now.” Further he recently commented on Balakrishnan’s culpability, “He (Balakrishnan) continues to be National Human Rights Commission chairman. His words hold no credibility. See, it’s like this. Corruption is the most egregious form of human rights violation”.
I watched the live broadcast of execution of Timothy McVeigh on US channels in June 2001. He was found guilty of killing 168 innocent men, women and children, including toddlers in Oklahoma City bombing. Here I could see how a truly powerful nation practices justice and does not fail to broadcast the same to send the right message across nationally and globally. On the contrary Tehelka’s sting operation on Gujarat carnage of 2002 exposed how the perpetrators of the genocide brazenly admitted carrying out most heinous crimes on hidden camera, specially when Babu Bajrangi loathed ripping a pregnant Muslim woman’s womb, pulling out the fetus and killing her! Such an exposure would have put any humane judicial system in a firefighting mode. On the contrary the Gujarat government attorneys brazenly admitted how false cases were fabricated, FIRs made defunct, transfers & postings of judges was carried out, pliable police and inquiry officers were made in charge. It would have been enough for any country like India aspiring to have a permanent seat in the UN Security Council to act in an exemplary manner. But it has been far from it. Or may be the phrase “justice delayed is justice denied for Gujarat genocide” is not a valid argument.
Had Judiciary still maintained the edicts of judicial process and procedures intact, things may have been considered to come back to normalcy in days to come? But the recent judgment of Allahbad High Court on the demolition of Babri Masjid where two judges out of three relied “more on beliefs than on the evidence, facts and findings of expert archeologists/historians” shows to what depth our judicial system has fallen. And there are no indications it may try to recapture its place of prestige in coming decades.
The Education Cauldron
The socialist policies of the Federal & Provincial governments in the area of spread of education since Independence made a very large section of even non-upper caste section of the society as first generation degree holders. Kudos to the planners of newly Independent India, today it has the biggest population in the world which can work as well as carry out conversation in English, a language which is not their mother tongue! But on reaching the gates of employers in Govt, Public and Private/Corporate sector, these initial generations of degree holders invariably faced road blocks. I recall being a member of a selection committee for a Class III employee position for a North East federal Govt office in 1996. There was just one post and that too was reserved for ST as per the roster system. Out of all those who appeared as candidates there was one candidate from ST who should have got this job. But the external expert on the committee along with the Chair, who both belonged to the upper castes, brought in a caveat saying, “If there is just one post then it cannot be under reserved category”! It hit me as a bolt out of the blue, so I wanted to see the exact rules and rulings in this regard. But there was none which could be placed before the members of the selection committee. When I insisted, the Chair and external expert conveyed why I am pressing for a ST candidate, if I wish and desire then the post may be given to the female candidate who was my co-religionist amongst the candidates who had appeared before the selection committee! I did not bite the bait and wrote my dissenting note as the selection committee member.
Year 1989-90 will always remain a watershed in India’s contemporary history. Mandal Commission implementation by Late V P Singh was a shot in the arm of the dormant weaker working class suppressed for ages. He turned out to be an incarnation of Buddha in 20th Century for the OBCs, SCs, STs and other weaker sections of Indian society. Though the upsurge of this weaker section had started few decades earlier in southern states of India, its repercussions dawned on the Northern India only with the Mandal Commission. Two things happened as a result of it. First, there was a freezing on recruitment of Class IV employees in Govt and Public sector undertakings. Those posts were increasingly outsourced to private contractors to provide contractual workers. I will come to it later. Second, the doors for opening private institutions for imparting post secondary education were left ajar for all those who had money, political clout and bureaucratic nexus to establish such institutions. The current ruling section wanted to maintain its hold on institutionalized professional education which was a sure path to success & prosperity besides political power in long run for every community. Consequently within a decade there has been a flooding of Medical, Engineering, Management, Technical Colleges and Universities in India. The same flock of hawks who were shouting from roof tops to have only merit based perusal of professional courses, read as Medical, Engineering, Management and IT programs; to keep pro Mandalites out of the reach of professional educational programs, had no qualms in opening these institutions for hefty capitation and regular fees. Marks had no criteria for admission and all those who had money to pay could get admission. Knowing fully well how competitive as well as hard it is to enter professions such as Medicine in the developed world, bureaucrats and government went overboard to establish separate quotas for children of NRIs for Medical programs. We must not forget, exceptions apart, overwhelming majority of the NRIs till the turn of this century have exclusively been from the upper castes and amongst the elites of minority community, which have enjoyed and exploited the privileges accorded to them for past several centuries by virtue of their birth marks!
Interestingly the teaching staff was not available due to sudden demand in the institutions which started opening up in almost all the major districts of the country. Hence in initial years of opening of these institutions there were hardly any regular full time qualified teachers. Yet the institutions were enrolling students and earning huge profits, with AICTE, MCI and UGC turning a blind eye to such wrong doings. It is much later after several complaints and intervention through PILs that Federal Govt came out with the order for higher education private institutions to display the names, qualifications and photos of the complete faculty at their web sites.
Recently one of the leading national daily pointed out about Karnataka“the speed at which engineering colleges were opened in the state has not kept pace with demand for BE courses”. In 2010 only six colleges – all in Bangalore – filled up all their seats. Nearly 20,000 seats have gone a begging this year, leaving empty classrooms across 187 colleges in Karnataka. It should have resulted in the decrease of the fees being charged by these institutions based on the economics principles of supply and demand. On the contrary, only reverse has happened! Early last year 44 deemed universities were derecognized by the Ministry of Education based on Tandon Committee’s findings. One of the reasons being they were running as fiefdoms owned and operated by power wielding politicians and industrialist families! Under the reasoning of protecting the affected students’ careers, Supreme Court came to the rescue more of the owners & operators of these institutions thus putting a stay order to derecognize them. But when such institutions were cropping up like wild grass, the same Court kept looking the other way!
Take the example of the Medical Council of India (MCI) the apex regulatory body of Medical profession in the country. Its last Chief is now under arrest and there is a CBI case filed against him for issuing licenses to those who wanted to open Medical Colleges in India by bribing him. Scandal has been so glaring that Federal Govt had to intervene to dissolve the MCI. On the other hand, regarding AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) which is analogous to MCI and is responsible for issuing licenses to open Engineering, Management, Technological and Technical institutions, I got a first hand experience. I know that one extremely successful businessman who had huge tracts of land by virtue of having several brick kilns in western UP got license to operate several Engineering, Management & Technical colleges recognized by AICTE and spread in several districts of UP. During my visit to one of its campuses, there were hardly any essential set of workshops and laboratories to be able to teach and then award the Mechanical, Electrical, Communication, Civil etc degrees!
Faculty in institutions such as IITs, (where I have studied) or IIMs, IARI, IISc etc only carried out cosmetic research vis-à-vis domestic problems in specific, as the academia never addressed the core needs of the common Indian. There are three glaring examples to prove the point. IITs did get state funding for projects related to Gobar Gas or better design of Bullock Carts or Cycle Rickshaws. But till date has any of the designs developed by huge grants the faculty got became commercial entity though using those studies, research papers were published and faculty went abroad to attend International Conferences! Has any foreign or even an Indian company picked up such a design/patent to provide commercially viable products based on the research they carried out in these areas? The plight of the common man who drives cycle rickshaws is the same what it was at the dawn of independence.
Next is about IIMs. They have indeed produced remarkable managers and CEOs for our corporate sector as well as abroad. There is no doubt the graduates of these institutions are at par with the best B-Schools of the world as has been with IITs. But till Lalu Prasad, as Railway Minister, came up with the profit making Railway Budget, the best of the brains of these institutions for past several decades failed to come up with a solution which Lalu could, by making the “brilliant set of bureaucrats and technocrats” think out of the box! It did not surprise me when I read he had addressed the students, soon after presenting profitable Railway Budget, at the Mecca of Management Schools viz., Harvard University! Isn’t it amusing to note the same IIM faculty and graduates would work day & night to turn around a sick corporate sector unit in an excellent and out standing manner? So is it that they did not have the skills, brains, insight and capability, or there are some other reasons, such as they have not been committed to solve problems affecting the common Indian in general.
The last example is of the storage of Food grains in FCI warehouses. Millions of tons of food grains have been going waste every year since the country became self sufficient in food production by mid 1970s. But lakhs of poor are starving is also a ground reality. Recently Supreme Court had to intervene when the state of affairs were brought out through a PIL. Interestingly, neither IARI nor IITs, IISc etc till date have been able to give a structural engineering solution where food grains are collected, stored, monitored, controlled and distributed in a manner which is transparent, accountable, hygienic, moisture free, has long shelf life and efficient. Yes, they did come up with the design of concrete based structures all over the country to erect such storage facilities. Though these faculty members have frequently visited western countries, yet none could even replicate and/or reverse engineer the metallic aluminum silos found in the farms all over the developed world. I am certain the academia knew India is one of the top three Aluminum producers in the world. I looked at it in another manner. Factually in building warehouses of concrete required cement and steel, which the project staff could easily pilfer in order to build its own houses/mansions, while Aluminum based silos, if allowed to come up, would not have been of much use in getting the supervisory staffs’ houses of cement & concrete constructed! Did I say there was an unholy alliance between academia, the cement manufacturing syndicate of the country, the bureaucrats running FCI and politicians? No, I did not, but I do ask nationalist Indians, of particularly the jingoist breed, to please look beyond their noses.
It is not that this middle class and upper caste faculty, scientists, engineers, management gurus and researchers did not know what is correct and required or did not have any knowledge & skills to give the most cost effective & technology viable solutions. Exceptions apart who were branded as leftists or socialists amongst this academia, all over the country the best academic institutions’ faculty has given least regard to solve the problems affecting the masses of India. They never had the will to take such issues in the right earnest. There is no other rational but the fact that the majority of Indian masses come from the weaker section of the society, while the intellectuals coming from upper castes have been hardwired to believe they have been born only to rule, while masses are there to serve them!
Corporate & Financial Institutions
Business houses of Birlas, Tatas, Walchands, Scindhias, Kirloskers, Bajaj, TV Sundram, Goenkas, DCM, Escorts, Mahindras etc were the first generation who inherited the industrial infrastructure left behind by the British as a result of active support extended by the India’s new set of rulers who wanted to retain its own bourgeoisie in the post independence days. The licenses permit Raj under the garb of socialistic state kept the lid on the nexus between the politicians and the corporate sector which was effectively implemented by the bureaucracy. In a quid pro quo for the donations and funding of politicians/political parties, the legislature ensured the corporate sector got a captive market for its globally incompetent goods. The only exception being the Marwari businessman, Rama Krishna Dalmia, whose support for Jinnah during Independence movement days, faced rough waters immediately after Independence for the financial bungling he carried out. His financial scandal can be termed as the first corporate scam of post Independent era. In 1947, Dalmia engineered the acquisition of Bennett and Coleman by transferring moneys from a bank and an insurance company, of which he was the chairman. Dalmia had to cough up Rs 2.5 Crores for his illegal acts in addition to going to jail.
The next 3 decades was a basking time in sun for the pampered breed of Indian industrialist. For instance, the automobile manufacturers from India only made cosmetic changes to declare new models of cars or scooters for their customers. None, literally no one, carried out any substantive R & D for improving the fuel or aerodynamic structural efficiency of the cars, scooters or motorcycles they were manufacturing. Even in heavy vehicles category the monopoly of Leyland, Bedford and Tata-Mercedes-Benz owned by Indian industrialists ensured to milk out a market worth billions of rupees for three consecutive decades. The story was replicated in other sectors too such as Textiles, Sugar, Edible Oil or Cement.
It is only with the arrival of Sanjay Gandhi’s dream project of Maruti Car that things started changing. With the return of late Indira Gandhi to power in 1980, Maruti production became the turning point for the things to come in future decades in the public sector and corporate world. The monopoly of not only cars on Indian roads was broken but even of the two wheelers too, when Bajaj who were manufacturers of Vespa and API of Lambretta scooters found competition by Scooters India at initial stages and gradually the market was flooded with Japanese automobile players tying up to produce motorcycles of Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawasaki. Imagine Honda tied up with a second rung of Indian industrialists such as Hero cycle manufacturers of Punjab! A new term got coined viz., SKD and CKD kits standing for “semi knocked down” and “complete knocked down” respectively in the manufacturing parlance of India. Starting from the assembly of colored TVs few months before commencement of 1982 Asian Games, the culture of SKD and CKD started the process of dismantling of the indigenous small and medium scale manufacturing capability India had built in previous decades.
Start of 1980s also marked the beginning of IT explosion. Later with Rajiv Gandhi, a computer savvy PM, taking over the reins of the country, IT became the most coveted industry. HCL of Shiv Nadar and Raju’s Satyam Computers became the biggest supplier of Computers to National Informatics Center, the nodal agency responsible for computerization of majority of Federal, Provincial and Public Sector organizations; which could not have its own IT infrastructure.
Today we have experienced scams where the nexus between the corporate sector and politicians strikes the common man in its face on a frequent basis such as JMM Bribery, Hawala Scam, Fodder, CRB, Securities scam of Harshad Mehta and then of Ketan Parekh, UTI, Fake Stamp Paper, DSQ Software, CWG, 2G scam and now the latest ISRO’s S Band scandal.
Through the manipulation of accounting data in connivance with the Charted Accountants, Raju of Satyam Computers swindled close to Rs 8,000 crores. Interestingly, when Satyam collapsed the top brains from within India and NRIs were on its Board of Directors! Once again none other than our judicial system along with highly qualified professional physicians came to the rescue of Raju by giving him a reprieve to stay out of jail in a hospital ward! This practice has been perfected by all politicians, bureaucrats and corporate swindlers in a uniform manner with judiciary and medical experts brazenly coming to help such scammers to the hilt.
To Be Concluded…
“Impressions of an NRI about Indian State – Part 1”
(The author has served as a senior faculty member at the National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie. He has also worked as a Senior Scientist in the Ministry of Defense. He can be contacted at Email: [email protected]