Katju must reveal more to carry conviction

B.R.P. Bhaskar
IANS
 

Press Council of India chairperson and former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju has alleged that one of his brother-judges in the Madras High Court was corrupt and that the patronage of a party belonging to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition and "improper compromises" by three successive chief justices of India helped him to keep the job.

He did not name the judge, the party or the senior Congress minister of the UPA government who is said to have managed that party's threat to bring down the government. But he mentioned enough for inquisitive people to ascertain their identities or at least make informed guesses.

The media revealed that the judge in question was S. Ashok Kumar, who died in 2009. He was appointed additional judge of the high court in April 2003 after he had served as district judge for 15 years. At that time, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was in power in New Delhi and the DMK was a partner in the government. Before joining the state judicial service, Ashok Kumar was active in politics and contested assembly elections twice as a Janata Party candidate.

The DMK's interest in him was attributed to his granting bail to its chief M. Karunanidhi after he was arrested in 2001 in connection with a corruption case. The arrest at an unearthly hour smacked of vindictiveness. "Is your heart made of muscle or mud?" Ashok Kumar asked the police when the former chief minister was produced before him. "What was the pressure on you to arrest a 78-year-old man suffering from various ailments?"

The Hindu reported at that time that Ashok Kumar's sharp question had caught the public imagination as an all-encompassing rebuke to the police who showed scant regard for the law in their everyday functioning and had made him the man of the moment in Tamil Nadu.

While dealing with the case against Karunanidhi, he reportedly received threatening calls and his car was hit by a van belonging to the Jaya TV channel. NDA Convener George Fernandes appealed to the authorities to provide him adequate security.

While practising as a lawyer, Ashok Kumar had successfully campaigned for the setting up of a commission of inquiry into the rape of 17 Dalit women in a village in his native district Thirunelveli. Yahoo! listed him among Dalits and Adivasis who had risen to high positions.

From these facts it emerges that Ashok Kumar belonged to the non-Dravidian political stream and had raised the hackles of casteist elements before his appointment as district judge but was drawn into the feud between the Dravidian parties after he granted bail to Karunanidhi, whom Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa's police was perceived to have arrested in a high-handed manner.

This background is missing from the accounts of Katju, who is economical with facts and repeatedly refers to Ashok Kumar, with uncharacteristic judicial impropriety, as a "corrupt judge".

Katju's account of the Ashok Kumar affair appeared under the heading 'How a corrupt judge continued in the Madras High Court' in his blog, which is grandiloquently titled "Satyam Bruat". It appeared simultaneously in The Times of India. The newspaper used it not as an article but as a news story, which was presumably a privilege extended to Katju by virtue of his status as Press Council chief.

It was the second piece on his experiences as chief justice of the Madras High Court during 2004-05. In the first one he had revealed that when he assumed office he took an oath to himself that he would do his duty to the Madras High Court even if it meant losing the opportunity to become a Supreme Court judge.

According to Katju, there were several allegations of corruption against Ashok Kumar. When he was district judge, high court judges had recorded eight adverse entries against him but an acting chief justice, by a single stroke of the pen, deleted all of them. Since he was getting many reports against Ashok Kumar's corruption, he requested Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti to ask the Intelligence Bureau to make a secret inquiry. Lahoti told him later the complaint had been found to be true. He, therefore, assumed that Ashok Kumar's services would be discontinued on the expiry of his two-year term but he got a year's extension.

The rest of the Katju narrative is hearsay. He learnt that the Supreme Court collegium had recommended that Ashok Kumar's services be discontinued but DMK MPs met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the airport before he left for the UN General Assembly session and threatened to withdraw support to the UPA government if his services were not continued. Manmohan Singh panicked but a senior Congress minister offered to sort things out. After this minister met Lahoti, he wrote to the government to give Ashok Kumar an extension.

Still later Chief Justice Y.K. Sabharwal gave Ashok Kumar a further extension and Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan confirmed him as a permanent judge and simultaneously transferred him to another high court.

Katju said in conclusion: "I have related all this to show how the system actually works, whatever it is in theory."

The day after the post appeared, Katju placed himself at the disposal of the channels to answer questions. But when a NDTV anchor asked why he had chosen to make the revelation a decade after he left the high court, he walked out of the studio. However, he explained in his blog that he remembered the Ashok Kumar affair when he started writing about his Chennai days at the request of some Tamils on Facebook.

Following up on the Katju story, The Times of India published a facsimile of the letter Lahoti had written to the government agreeing to extend Ashok Kumar's services as additional judge "in view of the sensitivity in the perception of the government". It is dated July 18, 2005. Manmohan Singh left for the UN session only in the second week of September. The airport drama in Katju's account must therefore be a figment of someone's imagination.

Since the major dramatis personae have confirmed that there were differences between the judiciary and the executive on Ashok Kumar's appointment, there is no need to quibble over minor departures from the facts. Such differences are a necessary part of the consultation process. The pressure the DMK exerted to get a favourable decision is not something unusual or unheard of in the working of coalitions.

Katju cannot be faulted for being highly critical of the DMK. In the very first piece on his Chennai experiences he has mentioned that the state's AIADMK chief minister never interfered in the judicial process or pressured him to recommend any name for judgeship but the DMK, which was part of the coalition ruling India, had put tremendous pressure on him to recommend the names of some whom he found to be totally undeserving.

After the Katju bombshell and the discussion that followed, the question whether Ashok Kumar was a corrupt judge, as he has alleged, still begs for an answer. That the DMK, which had batted for some undeserving candidates for judgeship, favoured his appointment as permanent judge is not sufficient ground to conclude that he was corrupt. Katju has not provided any information on Ashok Kumar's alleged deeds of corruption or the nature of the adverse entries against him. He must be aware of the adverse entries which his predecessor deleted since they are on files to which he had access. Since he has provided no specifics, the public has before it no material on the basis of which it can decide whether Lahoti and his two successors made "improper compromises", as he has alleged.

According to a newspaper, the adverse references in the IB report "apparently dealt with 2002 and 2003 when Kumar was a district judge in Krishnagiri, in Tamil Nadu, but not very far from Karnataka, and he used to spend weekends in Bangalore". The IB's dubious role in cases like the ISRO spy case of Kerala, which the Supreme Court found to be baseless, and the Gujarat fake encounter cases, which are still under judicial scrutiny, raises the question how much reliance can be placed on its report relating to a person who has displeased men in uniform. Assuming that its report was unbiased, we still have to ask ourselves if spending weekends in Bangalore is sufficient ground to dub a judge corrupt.

As the BJP and the AIADMK on the one side the Congress and the DMK on the other vied with each other to exploit Katju's revelations politically, eminent lawyer Ram Jethmalani observed that he should have spoken at the right time. Some said he should have shown the courage to resign on this issue.

What would have happened if Katju had resigned on this issue? In all probability, the politicians would still have persisted with partisan battles and the CJIs would still have made improper compromises and he would have missed his promotion to the Supreme Court.

Katju must come up with more facts to carry conviction. If he doesn't, one will be constrained to conclude that he unwittingly became involved in the Dravidian parties' feud in which Ashok Kumar had got caught and that he too was willing to make an improper compromise.

Encounter with diversity

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party claims that its Hindutva ideology is based on cultural nationalism and not connected with the Hindu religion. However, its concept of culture is closely related to Hindu values, more particularly values promoted by sections of the community that dominated the society for long.

Consequently, in the Hindutva discourse, religious minorities constitute the “other”. The BJP and other Hindutva entities have criticised measures by previous governments to safeguard their interests as appeasement.

However, religious pluralism is only one aspect of the wide variety in Indian society which has given rise to the concept of unity in diversity.

The Narendra Modi government, which was swept into office by a pro-Hindutva upsurge, encountered another aspect of India’s diversity when it instructed officials of the central government who have official social network accounts to post messages in the Hindi language.

According to the census report, Hindi, which belongs to the Indo-European group of languages, is the mother tongue of about 45 per cent of the people. The figure has been arrived at on the basis of information provided by householders to the enumerators.

Both the BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, are known to have campaigned among people speaking various allied dialects like Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Magadhi and Maithili at census time to declare Hindi as their mother tongue to boost its claim for recognition as the national language.

According to the findings of a recent survey, Indians use more than 780 languages and 66 different scripts. During the freedom struggle the Congress party, under Gandhi’s leadership, sought to promote Hindi as the national language. However, when the Congress government in the Madras presidency, provided for study of Hindi in schools, the anti-Brahmin Justice Party’s protests forced it to drop the move.

Vigorous opposition by non-Hindi speaking people, especially the Tamil-speaking people, foiled the efforts of Hindi enthusiasts to get the Congress-dominated body which framed India’s Constitution to grant Hindi the status of national language. It, however, provided for replacement of English with Hindi as the official language of the central government by 1965.

Tamil belongs to the Dravidian group of languages spoken mainly in the south. Tamil speakers are intensely proud of their language and many of them are against exclusive use of Hindi by the Centre.

Protests broke out in Tamil Nadu in the early 1960s when the Centre announced certain steps to promote the use of Hindi on the basis of the recommendations of the Official Languages Commission. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru assured the protesters that Hindi would not be made the sole official language without the concurrence of the non-Hindi states.

In 1963, parliament enacted a law to give effect to Nehru’s assurance. It provided for continued use of English by the Central government, in addition to Hindi, after 1965.

Even so, the Centre took certain steps to promote the use of Hindi in 1965. Protests in Tamil Nadu, spearheaded by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, took a toll of more than 60 lives. The agitation subsided only after prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri went on air and declared that the government would honour Nehru’s pledge to retain English as alternative official language.

The anti-Hindi agitation played a big part in the DMK’s phenomenal growth and its replacement of the Congress as Tamil Nadu’s ruling party in 1967. Since then the state has been continuously under the rule of the DMK or its offshoot, the All India Anna DMK.

The intense feelings of Tamil speakers on the language issue stem from their pride in its antiquity. While Hindi is only five or six centuries old, Tamil boasts of a history of more than two millennia

The BJP-led government’s directive to officials to use Hindi in social networks was ill-timed and imprudent inasmuch as a campaign on these platforms, conducted primarily in English, had made a significant contribution to the party’s electoral triumph.

Both DMK supremo M Karunanidhi and AIADMK leader and Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa opposed the government’s action. So did the BJP’s allies in the state.

The BJP’s first prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had addressed the UN General Assembly in Hindi. Media reports have indicated that Modi plans to talk to world leaders in Hindi, with the help of interpreters. Such steps can be justified in terms of patriotism.

Promotion of Hindi at home in a manner unacceptable to speakers of other languages cannot be viewed in the same light since it betrays unwillingness to respect India’s diversity.

Modi has not cared to speak on the language controversy. One hopes the lesson that the government has to be sensitive to the sentiments of all sections of the people has not been lost on him.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 24, 2014.

An eye to the 2014 poll

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

With the Congress party in deep trouble, foes are getting ready for the kill and friends are charting their own separate courses with an eye to the parliamentary elections, which is due in 2014 but can come sooner. The Samajwadi Party, which supports the government from outside, is exploring the possibility of reviving the third front.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, now in the latter half of its second five-year term, has been assailed by one scandal after another in the last two years. Just as it was sighing with relief over the split in Anna Hazare’s team, which had brought corruption to the top of the nation’s agenda, a scandal relating to coal mining contracts made headlines.

The coal scam, like the scandal relating to allocation of second generation (2G) spectrum, was brought to light by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the constitutional authority mandated to scrutinise government accounts. The CAG estimated that allotment of mining licences without auction had resulted in a loss of Rs1,830 billion to the exchequer. That made ‘Coalgate’ bigger than the 2G scam in which the loss was put at Rs1,766 billion.

The Congress was able to shift the focus in the 2G scam to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of Tamil Nadu, its second largest partner in the UPA, as its nominee, A Raja, was the Communications Minister during the relevant period. The opposition could only charge the Congress and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with failure to rein it in. Raja and Kanimozhi, MP and daughter of DMK chief M Karunanidhi, are now facing corruption charges in a court, along with some senior officials.

In the present scandal the spotlight is on the prime minister as the coal ministry was in the hands of the Congress party throughout and Manmohan Singh himself was in charge for some time. The Bharatiya Janata Party has stalled the proceedings of both houses of Parliament for more than a week demanding the prime minister’s resignation. It has turned down the government’s offer to discuss the CAG report in Parliament and vowed to carry the fight into the streets.

The procedure laid down in the Constitution provides for scrutiny of CAG reports by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. Any discussion in Parliament or action by the government on the report can only come after that. This procedure has been derailed on a few occasions since the CAG report on the corruption in the deal with the Swedish arms dealer Bofors for purchase of howitzers when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister.

The combined opposition was able to force a probe by a joint parliamentary committee into the Bofors deal and the Central Bureau of Investigation conducted criminal investigation for years but no one could be brought to book. TN Chaturvedi, the CAG who produced the Bofors report, later became a BJP member of Parliament. Some observers believe Coalgate may go the Bofors way.

As in the case of the 2G scam, the Congress party’s first response to the CAG report was to deny there had been loss of revenue. Later a party spokesman accused the CAG, Vinod Rai, of harbouring political ambitions.

With opinion polls indicating that the Congress is going downhill and that its own fortunes are improving, the BJP is trying to force the government to quit and clear the way for early elections. With this end in view it is considering the possibility of mass resignation of opposition MPs. What is holding it back is the reluctance of some of its National Democratic Alliance partners to go the whole hog with it.

At one stage, the Congress itself was considering the possibility of early parliamentary elections as the drought spell in some parts of the country is likely to add to its difficulties later on. Its leadership, however, appears to be in a state of paralysis. It has not been able to take any meaningful steps to refurbish the image of the party and the government ahead of the elections.

The opinion polls show that as things now stand the BJP can hope to replace the Congress as the largest single party in the NDA as the largest single pre-poll alliance. But the indications are that they are getting only a part of the voters who are deserting the Congress. The bulk of them are moving towards the smaller national or regional parties. However, revival of the third front will not be easy. The Communist Party of India-Marxist, which played the midwife under similar circumstances in the past, is no longer in a position to do so. --Gulf Today, September 4, 2012.

Confronting corruption

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

On becoming Chief Vigilance Commissioner in 1998, N Vittal said he set himself the modest goal of lifting India a few points up in Transparency International’s global corruption perception index. He left office in 2002 without achieving the target.

In TI’s 2010 index, India is ranked 87th among 178 nations. It was in the 88th place in 2005. Obviously, Vittal’s successors are not faring any better than him.

Three major corruption scandals involving men in high places are before the public now.

One relates to award of contracts in connection with the Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi. As soon as the games concluded, the government relieved Suresh Kalmadi, a powerful politician who headed the organising committee, of his responsibilities and ordered investigation of the allegations.

Another scandal relates to the construction of a high-rise building in Mumbai to rehabilitate widows of army men killed in the Kargil war. High-ranking officials and relatives of influential politicians got the flats.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s name figured in media reports about the scandal. After he had discharged his responsibilities connected with President Obama’s visit, Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked him to step down and the Centre ordered an inquiry.

The third scandal relates to irregularities in 2G spectrum allocation, which, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General, resulted in a loss of Rs1700 billion to the exchequer. In the eye of the storm is Union Telecommunications Minister A Raja, who belongs to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party of Tamil Nadu. The opposition has sought his resignation. His party claims he is innocent.

Men in high places who are accused of misdemeanour often go scot-free. Ironically, in the early years of Independence, the system was able to deal with corruption cases more effectively than today.

The Constitution was not in place yet when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru learnt that a member of parliament had taken money to ask questions in the house. He moved a resolution in the house to expel the member. A high court judge was removed in the same manner after investigation showed he was guilty of misconduct.

The opulence seen at the marriage of a top bureaucrat’s daughter raised suspicions in a junior minister’s mind and he ordered an investigation. The officer, who belonged to the British-instituted Indian Civil Service, ended up in jail for corruption.

Such expeditious action is now a thing of the past. Investigating agencies of the central and state governments have lately invited the charge of acting in the interests of their political masters.

In a rare case of conviction of a VIP, after proceedings that dragged on for 13 years, a Delhi court sentenced Sukh Ram, a former Telecommunications minister, in February 2009 to three years in jail and a fine of Rs200,000 for possessing assets disproportionate to his sources of income. His appeal is pending in the high court. The last word in the case is clearly a long way off.

The system is most ineffective in dealing with charges against members of the judiciary. Advocates refused to appear before three judges of the Bombay high court, alleging they were corrupt. All three completed their term without facing any action.

In 1993 V Ramaswami, a Supreme Court judge, was impeached for financial irregularities committed while serving as chief justice of a High Court. The Lok Sabha, voting on party lines, exonerated him. Impeachment proceedings against a Calcutta judge, who has been found guilty of misappropriation, will start soon. The case of a high court chief justice, accused of land grab, is currently under investigation.

While conviction of Central or state ministers on graft charges is rare, many have had to pay a political price. In the 1950s, Justice MC Chagla, who inquired into the allegation that the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation had shown undue favours to a businessman, ruled that the minister had ‘constructive responsibility’ for the actions of officials under him. Following this, TT Krishnamachari, who was Finance Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet, resigned.

Since then the Congress party has got many of its leaders to step down from office and face inquiry. Other parties, instead of following this convention, have generally attempted to ride through corruption charges brazenly. That is what Raja and the DMK are trying to do. As the party, which heads the ruling coalition, the Congress cannot remain a passive onlooker. It has to confront the issue.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 15, 2010.

Sri Lanka: hope for the best and prepare for the worst

Tamil Nadu goes to the polls tomorrow (May 13) in the fifth and final phase of polling in the Lok Sabha elections. After that, in all likelihood, the Sri Lankan government will feel emboldened to launch the final assault on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are now trapped in a small stretch of land. One shudders to think of the plight of an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Tamil civilians caught between two ruthless forces.

There is reason to suspect that the Sri Lankan government has been going slow in the last few days since the fate of the civilians in the battlefield became a major election issue in Tamil Nadu. Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and his chief political rival, former All India Anna DMK Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, were engaged in an unseemly competition to pose as the saviour of the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Jayalalithaa, who had condemned the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the past as a terrorist organization, recently endorsed its goal of a separate Eelam state. Two regional outfits which have openly backed the LTTE, which was banned in India after its role in former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination came to light, had broken away from the DMK-led alliance on the eve of the elections and joined the AIADMK-led front.

Last week the two leaders went one step further. Addressing an election meeting, Jayalalithaa said, "If the AIADMK-led alliance wins all 40 seats (39 in Tamil Nadu, one in Puducherry), then the Indian Army will be sent to Sri Lanka to carve out a separate Eelam state, like what Indira Gandhi did to Pakistan by carving out Bangladesh. Karunanidhi responded by declaring, also at an election meeting, that he “assumes responsibility” for the creation of Eelam.

The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) raised the Eelam issue at the national level with a view to embarrassing the Congress, but as far as can be ascertained the issue did not cause a stir beyond the borders of Tamil Nadu.

When Jayalalithaa first announced her support for the formation of an Eelam state, in a sardonic comment, a Sri Lankan government spokesman said she should find some other place for it.

There was a flurry of diplomatic activity as the Central government realized that the mood in Tamil Nadu, where many people believe it is actively assisting the Sri Lankan authorities in the civil war, could damage the electoral prospects of the Congress and its partner, the DMK.

Following the visit of a high-level Indian official team, the Sri Lankan government said it would not use heavy arms. But it does not appear to have kept the promise.

The world's attention at the moment is fixed on about 192,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), besides the civilians trapped in the no-fire zone. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, in a press release issued after a telephone conversation with the Sri Lankan president, said this issue was among the highest of priorities internationally.

The Asian Human Rights Commission, in a statement, said the people caught in the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE are ordinary folk who have lived in the north and the east from time immemorial and who have sustained themselves and helped others in the past. They deserve the full attention of the government as well as the international community in order to be able to escape this troubled situation and as soon as possible to be integrated back into their natural habitat.

It added, “Obviously, the LTTE will not cooperate in any way either for the release of those trapped in this small area of land or to contribute to their well-being. However, this cannot be used as an excuse by the government, which has the obligation to protect its citizens. The fact of the limited resources available to the country to ensure the well-being of these persons is no excuse as the international community, expressing itself through the highest officer of the United Nations, has assured complete cooperation to the government to deal with this issue. The richer countries of the world have also assured the government and the United Nations of their support to see this through.”

Let us hope for the best and prepare for the worst.