Grave case of judicial injustice
The Supreme Court’s (temporarily stayed) directive to seal 25,000-40,000 allegedly illegally promoted shops and establishments in Delhi which has provoked trade bandhs in the national capital spread over several days, causing a business loss estimated at Rs.400 crore per day and jeopardising an estimated 100,000 jobs, apart from inflicting huge loss to the Delhi state government by way of sales tax revenue, projects the country’s much-hyped higher judiciary in very poor light. Indeed it is indicative of the unwarranted self-righteousness and head-in-the-sand characteristics of the higher judiciary in India. The facts and circumstances behind the Supreme Court’s confirmatory order of November 6 reaffirming an earlier order to seal thousands of shops and establishments in Delhi, are as clear as they are undisputed. The offending shops and business establishments are sited in residential areas in violation of the 1996 master plan of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) whose provisions — in typical Indian style planning — have been honoured more in the breach by the Central, state and municipal governments as much as by traders and the citizenry in general.
Against this backdrop and common knowledge that government officials in India are among the most corrupt worldwide (as confirmed by the annual rankings of the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International), the learned judges of the Supreme Court should have drawn the obvious inference that the national capital’s traders and small businessmen had been forced to make large ‘investments’ by way of bribes and inducements to state and municipal government officials to obtain business commencement and continuation licences. Indeed the court should have taken judicial notice of this painfully apparent socio-economic reality and cracked down on MCD and the state government rather than upon the capital’s traders and petty shopkeepers.
An important canon of the law of equity is the doctrine of estoppel which prevents those who acquiesce and condone a continuous civil wrong or offence from prosecuting it at their own pleasure and convenience. Likewise property law relating to easements prohibits those who acquiesce and/ or condone open and continuous trespass or transgression of property rights from arbitrarily curtailing reasonable access and user. In this particular case it is glaringly obvious that for several decades MCD had turned a blind eye to traders setting up shops and establishments in violation of the municipal master plan and that corporation officials have derived personal and public profit from this now suddenly criminalised community. Therefore it defies reason and commonsense why the learned judges of the apex court have disregarded these well-settled principles of law and equity.
A grave injustice born out of a conspicuous failure to take judicial notice of patently obvious socio-economic realities and narrow interpretation of law, is being visited upon thousands of traders in the national capital. In the interests of justice, equity and fair play the apex court should urgently reconsider and revise its judgement. Failure to right this manifest wrong will bring the country’s judicial system, already distrusted for the law’s delay and prohibitive expense, into further disrepute.
Indian Muslims need quality education
The Justice (retd) Rajinder Sachar Committee’s report on the pathetic socio-economic status of India’s 120 million strong Muslim minority community is an overdue wake-up call to the country’s political parties and the Indian establishment. The Sachar Committee’s report, which was formally presented to prime minister Manmohan Singh on November 18, highlights that in many parts of India the socio-economic condition of Muslims is worse than historically oppressed scheduled castes and tribes. Despite constituting 13.1 percent of contemporary India, Muslims are heavily under-represented in government, private sector industry and the armed forces. Educationally, 54.6 percent of Muslims in rural India and 60 percent in urban areas have never been to school (cf. national average of 40.8 and 19.9 percent respectively), says the Sachar Committee.
While some of the blame for the pathetic education status of India’s Muslims should be heaped upon mainstream political parties — particularly the mealy-mouthed Congress party which has ruled in New Delhi for an aggregate of 40 years in post-independence India — the community’s leaders are also to blame for the dismal socio-economic and educational status of Muslims in democratic India. Six decades after independence and universal adult franchise, it’s painfully apparent that India’s largest minority community did little to avail the social, economic and educational opportunities secular India offered.
In the circumstances, deprived of contemporary employment-oriented education, and ghettoised by riot after riot provoked by militant Hindu hardline political parties such as the BJP and the sangh parivar, it’s hardly surprising that embittered and unemployable Muslim youth are soft targets of the expanding network of international Islamic terrorist organisations. Against this backdrop, it is quite clear that provision of secular contemporary education to the large human resource pool within the 120 million strong Muslim community is an urgent national priority. There has to be a comprehensive overhaul of madrasa education to incorporate the teaching of maths, science, and English; English-medium schools need to be urgently established in Muslim dominated areas; education loans need to be facilitated for economically deprived Muslim students, and affluent Muslims (India’s wealthiest individual is Muslim) should boldly step forward to promote minority institutions offering secular education as the Aga Khan has done in several countries.
If this prescription is followed, the provision of modern secular education will inevitably be followed by economic empowerment. Reservations for Muslims in educational institutions and government jobs is ill-advised, as it will further alienate the community from the mainstream and provide incendiary electoral fuel to the BJP and the sangh parivar. Instead India’s 120 million Muslims need to be empowered by quality education, so this enterprising community will not only fend for itself but also enrich and empower the nation.