Almost half a century ago, in his monumental three-volume magnum opus Asian Drama, Nobel laureate-economist Gunnar Myrdal ascribed many of the woes of post-Nehruvian India, already notorious for government corruption and on the brink of mass starvation, to the Great Man’s amateurish experiments with socialism, and described India as a “soft state”.
In step with the establishment, even the country’s judiciary is too soft and reluctant to render swift and condign punishment, especially to the high and mighty who ride rough shod over the populace and the law. This is the explanation behind the strained and convoluted judgement of Justice C.R. Kumaraswamy of the Karnataka high court acquitting Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa in a disproportionate assets accumulation case which was first filed in 1996, and subsequently moved to Bangalore in 2003 to be heard by a specially constituted sessions court.
After hearing the case for 11 years, the sessions court delivered a deeply considered judgement (September 27, 2014) and convicted her to four years in prison in addition to a fine of Rs.100 crore for possessing assets valued at Rs.53.60 crore including gold, real estate, sarees and footwear, vastly disproportionate to her legitimate income. On the contrary, in a prolix and meandering 919-page judgement Justice Kumaraswamy described Jayalalithaa’s huge assets accumulated in five years (1991-96) during her first term as chief minister as “relatively small”, and ruling that “the disproportionate asset (sic) is less than 10 percent and it is within permissible limit”, acquitted her. Curiously he found nothing wrong in the CM receiving huge cash gifts into her bank account.
In India’s soft state, it’s not only political big fish who get away with the loot, plunder and gross abuse of position. Recently, actor Salman Khan was able to secure immediate bail from the Bombay high court after his conviction in a drunken driving case which involved his luxury limo driving over several homeless citizens sleeping on a pavement. And every week, one reads about sting operations on government engineers, clerks and sub-registrars which yield mind-boggling disproportionate assets, but are then heard of no more.
Over four decades ago after qualifying as a barrister, your editor quit a promising career in the Bombay high court following disillusionment with the slothful and cruel justice system. I seldom regret that decision.
Shame then & now
Recently while on a state visit to China, India’s newly-elected prime minister Narendra Modi felt it incumbent upon him to comment that in the era before the BJP-led NDA coalition was swept to electoral victory in 2014, people of Indian origin abroad regretted their ethnicity and were ashamed of being Indian. Now under the new dispensation, they entertain no such regrets and are proud to be Indian.
Recalling my five years as a politically active and outspoken law student in London four decades ago, your editor must admit to being often embarrassed and secretly ashamed of being Indian in those days when stories of the country’s “teeming and starving millions”, and clumsy birth control drives made media headlines around the world. Add to all this, the superciliousness of Indian high commission staff, and the routine thrashing that visiting Indian cricket teams received. Modi is right, most Indians abroad — or at least in the UK — tended to be embarrassed even if not ashamed, about being Indian.
But is there cause for pride now in the new after-Modi era? Lamentably, I continue to be ashamed about the new surge in intolerance against minorities; continuous corruption; the law’s delay and insolence of office; blatant oppression of women (and lewd and indisciplined behaviour of Indian males towards them) and neglect of children. To venture abroad for a vacation is to return depressed to the slums, garbage and pot-holed roads of 21st century India. And most of all, one is ashamed of the pitiful inability of the self-serving Indian establishment and intelligentsia to solve the simplest problems confronting society. The Children’s First Party of India (estb. 2013), which has solutions to all these problems (www.childrenfirst.in) has attracted a membership of only 114.
Prime minister, I was embarrassed then, ashamed now.
Holy steel men
Contrary to popular belief, academics who are also men of the cloth don’t necessarily brim with the milk of human kindness. Some of them are hard-nosed alpha males — and tiger nuns. A case in point is Dr. (Rev) Valson Thampu, principal of Delhi’s show-piece St. Stephen’s College. Recently the right reverend came down heavily on Devansh Mehta, a third year philosophy student of the college for publishing an interview he had with Thampu in the online St. Stephen’s Weekly without clearing the content with him prior to publication. For this sin and reporting the incident to the media, Mehta was suspended, prompting him to file a writ in the Delhi high court. Justice Vibhu Bakhru was clearly appalled by Thampu’s overreaction. Revoking the suspension order, the learned judge pulled up the reverend for his “behaviour”and lack of “sense of humour”.
Earlier, immediately after his appointment as principal of St. Stephen’s in 2007, Thampu pushed a policy proposal to reserve 40 percent of the college’s annual intake for students from the country’s 24 million-strong Christian community, thus breaking with Stephen’s secular, liberal traditions. Some academics in Delhi insist that the reverend is a fundamentalist.
Nor is Rev. Thampu a rare example of tough and assertive men of the cloth. In an Anglican boarding school, your editor remembers numerous six-of-the-best enthusiastically administered by reverend fathers. Moreover in the early years of this publication your editor received a tongue-lashing from the principal of the next-door St. Joseph’s College of Commerce for making an innocuous appeal for support to this then fledgling magazine.
Don’t be fooled; often behind the cassock there are men of steel.