Although the vast majority of the nation's citizenry which includes captains of industry eagerly awaiting President Pranab Mukherjee’s invitation to Narendra Modi to form the next government in New Delhi, has missed its implications, the sensational exposé of the Modi-led Gujarat government’s stalking of a Bangalore-based woman architect is a chilling preview of things to come in the likely event of a BJP-led government assuming office at the Centre.
On November 16, websites released audio tapes of conversations between Amit Shah who served in Modi’s cabinet as home minister for eight years and G.L. Singhal, a senior Gujarat state police officer. These tapes whose authenticity is not disputed, indicate that in 2009, Gujarat police shadowed the woman in Bangalore and Gujarat in shopping malls, restaurants, ice-cream parlours, gyms, cinema halls, hotels and airports and tapped all her telephone calls on ‘saheb’s’ instructions. Since then, it has been acknowledged by BJP and Modi’s spokespersons that the unidentified saheb was Narendra Modi.
Disparate pieces of evidence seem to indicate that Modi who reportedly deserted his wife several decades ago, was enamoured with the lady and was either jealous of a rival’s attentions or fearful that the latter would blow the whistle on his infatuation with her. But the salacious details of this triangle are not as important as the issues of public policy, in particular the flagrant misuse of state agencies i.e the Gujarat police and ATS (Anti Terrorism Squad) to mount a 24x7 surveillance of the woman for several months. This is additional evidence — supplementing the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat and suspicious ‘encounter killings’ by the police of alleged terrorists Ishrat Jehan and Sohrabuddin Sheikh — that Modi has no compunctions about using official machinery in pursuit of personal prejudices and agendas.
Although it’s politically incorrect to say so, the plain truth is that shaped by patriarchal, authoritarian RSS culture and given his minimal formal education, Modi is ill-equipped to appreciate the finer points of democratic practice and constitutional propriety. And if the BJP is voted to power at the Centre next summer — as seems likely — its prime minister will use the full weight of the Central government, police and investigative machinery to stalk critics and rivals and pick them off, one by one. For the great majority who care little for history, that’s classic fascist modus operandi.
Airs & graces
With monotonous regularity, jumped-up rustics who have had political or bureaucratic greatness thrust upon them by India’s democratic system, make outrageous monetary and material demands upon the national treasury. Worse, they get their way.
A recent example of brazen conversion of public property is provided by bejeweled Dalit queen Mayawati, leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), three times chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous and backward state — and an experienced practitioner of this emerging art form. According to an Indian Express news report (November 17), the Union urban development ministry has allotted three bungalows in Delhi’s Lutyens Bungalow Zone (LTF), each valued at Rs.100 crore-plus to the BSP leader for occupation by the party’s charitable trusts. In addition, a fourth bungalow has been allotted to behenji as her personal residence.
Nor is such abuse of public office restricted to the political class. V. Thulasidas, chief secretary of Tripura state, a nondescript bureaucrat plucked from obscurity by former Union civil aviation minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy and parachuted into the chairman’s office of the public sector Air India in 2003, scaled new heights as recounted by Jitender Bhargava, former PR director of the airline in his tell-all memoir The Descent of Air India (see book review p.142). According to Bhargava, the duty of an aide in a pilot car which preceded the Air India chairman to his office was to alert the liftman of Air India building in Nariman Point, Mumbai, just as Thulasidas was being chauffeured to his office portico, to ensure the elevator was waiting with doors open for the august chairman. Moreover, since this worthy was obliged to visit Delhi frequently, he appropriated the apartments of four senior Air India executives and transformed them into a lavishly furbished guest house for his own use. Despite all these airs and graces during Thulasidas’ chairmanship, Air India has chalked up a debt of Rs.78,000 crore and counting.
NB: you are shareholder of Air India.
Spreading rot
The rot in the legal profession and the country’s over-hyped judiciary is becoming too glaring to ignore any longer. Last month, three women lawyers publicly complained of sexual harassment by learned judges of the Supreme Court, no less, and another outed an unidentified senior counsel of the apex court. These egregious scandals were preceded by detailed reports of misuse of the office of Chief Justice of India by K.P. Balakrishnan and Y.K. Sabharwal, even as senior apex court counsel R. Anand and Abhishek Singhvi were exposed on national television for sexual harassment of women juniors.
Your editor who began his career as counsel on the original side of the Bombay high court several decades ago, discerned evidence of a creeping rot and excessive mercantilism in the legal profession soon enough, and exited it. As I saw it, the leading lights of the profession were mere legal technicians rather than well-rounded practitioners of constitutional values and imperatives. Willingness to discharge the unwritten pro bono obligations of the prof-ession was conspicuously absent and an unseemly trades-man’s mentality — rather than a gentleman’s indifference — towards primitive capital accumulation was pervasive. Little wonder the reluctance to respectfully encourage women members of the bar without vulgar quid pro quo demands.
However there is ground for hope. The new generation of top counsel in the profession tend to be graduates of premier institutions such as National Law Schools promoted by the Bar Council of India, which are academically rigorous and provide well-rounded education to students. As such, they are distinctly different from traditional government law college products. These nexgen lawyers offer some hope that when they rise to high positions on the bench and bar, they will initiate the overdue reform of the contemporary world’s most tardy and despised legal system.