God pays his debts. This sentiment — mixed with a dash of schadenfreude (a unique German word denoting derivation of pleasure from another’s misfortune) — was the dominant emotion which suffused your editor after reading news reports that David Davidar, former head of Penguin India and hitherto chief executive of Penguin Canada, has had charges of sexual harassment filed against him by one Lisa Rundle, a former woman colleague, in a Canadian court. Despite Delhi’s charmed circle of mutual backscratchers rallying around Davidar for past favours such as printing and publishing their stuff under the Penguin India label, the molestation charges levelled against this “international publishing rock star” are detailed and serious, and have cost Davidar his job. They could also cost him a jail term and Penguin Canada a bundle in damages.
Your editor’s admittedly unseemly schadenfreude flows from Davidar having unfairly rejected my novel Succession Derby submitted to Penguin India for publication in 1988. In those days this writer, having just completed assignments as editor of India’s first two business magazines, was a celebrated journalist and as such Succession Derby — to date the country’s most credible novel about corporate shenanigans — deserved to be published by Penguin, then the country’s sole national books publisher. Even so the crushing rejection of my work in which I had invested over nine months of continuous and solitary writing, by Davidar — a failed minor journalist who by some mysterious alchemy was plucked out of obscurity and appointed publisher of Penguin India — would have been acceptable had this jumped-up worthy not exhibited spiteful glee in turning down my carefully bound manuscript.
Nevertheless Succession Derby was eventually published by my friend the late Rohinton Malloo (cut down in the 26/11 massacre). But despite selling over 3,000 copies and receiving good reviews (“unputdownable” according to Vir Sanghvi) it lost money because some 2,000 copies were damaged in transit by India Book House, which is another story. Ironically Davidar’s own hugely-hyped novel House of Blue Mangoes was an embarrassing failure for Penguin.
Now nemesis has caught up and it won’t be easy for Davidar to wriggle out of this predicament, because evidence is emerging that Rundle is the second woman subordinate upon whom he has forced his unwanted attentions. That’s the trouble with this country’s parvenu lumpen bourgeoisie — they can’t take no for an answer, and move on.
Larger question
It’s a worst fear coming true. the sarva shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) initiative of the Union government, launched in 2001 following signing of the Millennium Declaration by representatives of 192 national governments, to ensure inter alia, that all children aged six-14 are in primary school by the year 2015, and the spearhead of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 which became law on April 1, is leaking funds.
The British media — particularly the sex-n-city weekly News of the World (NoW), a widely read tabloid (circulation: 2.9 million) — has gone to town in Blighty highlighting the defalcation of British aid for the SSA programme. The British government’s Department for International Development (DfID) contributes 24 percent of British aid to India to help the SSA programme. Citing a 2005-06 report of India’s comptroller and auditor general, NoW reported that Rs.10 lakh of DfiD aid has been squandered on the purchase of four luxury beds; Rs.90 lakh has been transferred into an unknown bank account; Rs.2 lakh has been paid for a personal computer and 7,500 television sets have been purchased for schools without electricity.
Yet back home, a larger question needs to be asked: 60 years after the Union Jack was hauled down from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort for the last time, why is New Delhi still soliciting and accepting aid from down-in-the-dumps Little Britannia? The answer is buried within the cynical observation that foreign aid is money transferred from the poor in rich countries for the rich in poor countries.
Steep descent
The dwindling minority of right-thinking people in the southern state of Karnataka, and the small sentient community within the garbage — sorry, garden — city of Bangalore in particular, are reeling with shock, dismay and despair following the sudden and dramatic resignation (with effect from August 31) of the state’s Lok Ayukta (people’s ombudsman), Justice (Retd.) N. Santosh Hegde on June 23. Appointed Lok Ayukta in 2006, this former Supreme Court judge has been so disillusioned by the persistent refusal of the state government to dismiss or prosecute proven corrupt public officials and ministers, that he has thrown in the towel 14 months before his five-year term was scheduled to end.
Hegde and his posse of investigators have conducted over 100 raids and investigations against state government bureaucrats and officials, including ministers with unexplained assets (real estate, motor cars, jewellery etc), unearthing vast wealth accumulated by even junior government servants. However under the provisions of the cosmetic Lok Ayukta Act, 1984, sanction of the state government is required for the Lok Ayukta to prosecute in courts of law. And despite 50-point banner headlines and detailed enumeration of disproportionate assets of over 100 officials raided and exposed by Hegde, not a single prosecution has been sanctioned.
Justice Hegde’s disgust with the open, continuous and uninterrupted corruption of the state government and its officials is unsurprising because (as your correspondent discovered at his cost following the recent purchase of a home) payment of an illegal fee is mandatory for every transaction between citizen and the state government. Amoral construction magnates, brokers and lawyers routinely factor in bribes in their bills claiming that a major proportion of every illegal impost travels all the way up to the chief minister’s office — folklore of corruption confirmed by the government’s consistent refusal to amend the Act to invest the Lok Ayukta with suo motu power to prosecute corrupt bureaucrats.
Meanwhile with Hegde seemingly determined to surrender the seals of his office, the steep descent of this once exemplarily governed southern state into the poet Dante’s inferno seems set to accelerate.