Beyond issue of security

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

As India stepped into its 65th year as a sovereign, democratic republic on Sunday, with the traditional display of military hardware, some relics of the colonial era were still haunting it. Among them is a notorious law which shields men in uniform guilty of atrocities against civilians.

The law was introduced by the British during World War II to crush the Quit India movement of 1942, the last major campaign of the freedom struggle. It permitted security personnel to conduct raids and make arrests without warrant and granted them immunity from prosecution for acts committed in the course of operations.

Free India’s government re-enacted the law as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in 1948 to protect security personnel dealing with post-partition riots, and extended it annually till 1957.

A year later the law was revived to deal with tribal insurgency in Assam and Manipur. It is applicable only in an area declared as “disturbed”. Initially the power to declare an area as “disturbed” vested in the state government but later the central government was also empowered to do so.

AFSPA has now been in force in the northeastern states continuously for more than a half-century and in Jammu and Kashmir for close to a quarter-century. Punjab, where it was introduced in 1983 in the wake of the Khalistan movement, was freed from its grip in 1997.

The people of Manipur demanded withdrawal of AFSPA in 2000 after personnel of the Assam Rifles, a paramilitary force which traces its origin to 1835, fired on an unarmed crowd at Malom, near Imphal, killing 10 persons, including a 62-year-old woman and an 18-year-old National Bravery Award winner.

The Centre’s tough stance forced the state government to abandon its plan to withdraw AFSPA. Irom Sharmila, a young poet, began an indefinite fast demanding its withdrawal. More than 13 years later, the fast is still on. She is kept alive through forced nasal feeding in custody.

After five young men were killed in an alleged encounter at Pathribal, near Anantag, in 2000 the Jammu and Kashmir government asked the Centre to withdraw AFSPA or at least curtail its operation.

The Army claimed those killed were mercenaries responsible for a massacre. However, the Central Bureau of Investigation, which probed the incident, concluded it was a case of cold-blooded murder. It charge-sheeted five officers, including a brigadier, a lieutenant colonel and two majors, in a criminal court.

In 2004, the Centre, taking note of the Manipur agitation, appointed a five-member commission, headed by former Supreme Court judge BP Jeevan Reddy, to review the working of AFSPA. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said later the law would be amended to make it “humane” in keeping with the commission’s recommendations. However, there was no action.

The Executive’s helplessness in the face of the Army’s obdurate stand was revealed when Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who was earlier in charge of the Home Ministry, said, “If the Army takes a very strong stand against any dilution or any amendment to AFSPA, it is difficult for a civil government to move forward.”

The Judiciary stepped aside when the Pathribal encounter issue was raised before it. The Supreme Court asked the Army to decide whether the indicted officers should be tried by an army court or the regular criminal court. The Army, which opted for the court martial route, closed the case last week saying the recorded evidence did not establish any case against the officers.

The Army’s self-serving finding, arrived at in closed-door proceedings, has raised doubts about the ability of the system to deal with offenders in uniform.

Chief of Army Staff Gen Bikram Singh recently acknowledged that terrorist infiltration into Kashmir dropped from 1,852 in 2001 to 90 in 2013. However, he said, AFSPA cannot be withdrawn as it is a strategic imperative.

The AFSPA issue is not one of national security alone. It also has a bearing on rule of law. Both in Kashmir and in the Northeast, security personnel have attracted charges of rape. The Justice JS Verma Commission, which looked into the issue of women’s safety a year ago, suggested that armed forces personnel accused of sexual offences should not be given AFSPA protection. The Centre ignored the suggestion.

The National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court appointed Justice Santosh Hegde commission, which separately studied many alleged encounter deaths in Manipur, reported that all the cases they examined were fake encounters. Such widespread abuse of power will only make resolution of political problems difficult. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 28, 2014.

Another scandal to ride through

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Governmental and business circles, inured to periodic breaking of scandals, are seeking to brazen out the unearthing of several hundred offshore accounts of Indians in the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens by an international team of journalists.

Scions of old industrial houses as well as nouveau riche of the era of globalisation are among the 612 Indian nationals who form part of the 2.5 million individuals and entities in over 170 countries, whose names have been revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in the first batch of reports yielded by a continuing probe.

Launched in 1997 as a project of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, the ICIJ is a network of 160 journalists in more than 60 countries engaged in investigation of corruption and cross-border crime. The team is led by Irish-born Gerard Ryle whose award-winning investigative reports on use of orphaned babies for medical experiments and the Firepower fraud in Australia had attracted attention worldwide.    

The ICIJ offshore operations probe was made possible by more than 260 gigabytes of data which Ryle received by mail while investigating Firepower which was said to cut petrol consumption and vehicle emissions. It included about 2.5 million files and more than two million emails that helped chart offshore activity over several years.

Responding to queries, Finance Minister P Chidambaram said, “Inquiries have been put in motion in respect of the names that have been exposed.” Such pronouncements were made by government spokesmen after information about secret bank accounts of Indians in Switzerland and Liechtenstein came to light but they did not lead to any action.

Opening offshore accounts is not a crime but their structures are designed to conceal actual ownership and they are often used for illegal purposes like tax evasion. Interestingly, almost all the Indian accounts uncovered by ICIJ were opened during the economic boom of the last decade.

The Indian Express, which published information about the account holders, contacted them to find out what they have to say. Some responses suggest that they have something to hide. 

While the ICIJ report named several persons with high political connections in Azerbaijan, Colombia, France and the Philippines, no Indian politician of consequence figures in it. The two MPs in the list, Vijay Mallya and Vivekanand Gaddam, are political lightweights.

Some including Vivekanand Gaddam, Sonu Lalchand Mirchandani of the Onida group, Teja Raju, son of Satyam Computers founder Ramalinga Raju who was jailed in a fraud case, and Gurbachan Singh Dhingra of Berger Paints pleaded ignorance about the accounts in their names.

Some others like Samir Modi of the KK Modi group, Chetan Burman of the Dabur group and Thiagarajan Murugesan of the Paramount group said they had opened offshore accounts to attract investments or boost exports but the plan did not work out. Lankalingam Murugesu, known as ‘papad’ king, said his firm set up an offshore operation for better tax planning but did not use it. “We just thought it is better to pay full taxes,” he told the newspaper.    

Mallya’s firm, Ravikant Ruia of the Essar group whose name has come up in the telecom spectrum scam and Maitreya Vinod Doshi of the Premier Ltd said the Indian authorities had been informed about their offshore accounts. Radhikaraje Samarjitsinh Gaekwad of the erstwhile Baroda royal family and Rahul Mamman Mappilai of the MRF group did not respond.

Two years ago the authorities had received from a foreign government the names of 782 Indians with accounts in the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation’s branches outside the country. They refused to reveal the names on privacy grounds. The promised investigations did not lead to any action.

Cobrapost, a website, came out with a sting report alleging  the ICICI Bank, the Axis Bank and the HDFC Bank helped in money laundering. The Reserve Bank of India was said to be “seriously looking into the matter” but the Finance Minister gave the banks a virtual clean chit saying, “On the face of it, no real money was transacted and no real money laundering deals took place with any real person.”

When a financial scandal involving private players breaks out, the government goes through the motion of conducting an investigation but it does not result in action against the wrongdoers. The Supreme Court recently remarked that the government’s failure to control black money was indicative of its weakness and softness. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 9, 2013.