One law for Mayawati, another for Advani
Men, Matters & Memories

By M L Kotru

There is an old adage things must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. This is becoming painfully true in India. The credibility of the democratic system is under assault. The government and our rulers may ignore the dangerous degree of public disenchantment with the prevailing system only as their own peril.

Doubtless our lordships in various courts of law have good reason to pass judgments as they do, but for laymen legal arguments to justify inconsistent decisions count for nothing. Possibly the prosecution under police or political tutelage deliberately puts up partial evidence that no judge can reasonably act upon. But whatever the reason, the impression on the public mind is dangerously negative.

Two recent cases that have attracted wide attention present a picture in contrast. On the one hand the CBI is efficiently pursuing the alleged involvement of Mayawati in the Taj Corridor case as well as certain cases involving property transactions. On the other hand, during a decade of prosecutions in various courts the CBI obtained decisions by courts to frame charges against Home Minister Advani and seven others. But now, inexplicably, it has failed to get Advani charged although the others have been charged for much lesser crimes than they were sought to be by the earlier courts.

Can one blame the supporters of Mayawati to believe, rightly or wrongly, that there is one law for Mayawati and another for Advani? Indeed, it is becoming painfully clear that almost no upper class leaders ever get jailed for corruption or for any other crime. Whether it was the Urea scandal in which public money running into crores was spent for goods that never arrived in the country, or for Bofors, or for the Jain Hawala case, no leader was punished. Why, then should simple-minded common people not start believing Mayawati when she says she is being persecuted only because she belongs to a disadvantaged community?

Indeed, Mayawati's demand that the assets of all national leaders, including the Prime Minister and his family, should be investigated by public men of eminence is also an issue to be addressed to.

Sadly, it is not just corruption and the failure to punish the powerful that leads to growing public disenchantment with the system. This feeling of disenchantment and despair is spreading to diverse fields and is influencing an entire new generation to either reject the system or to further distort it in order to thrive. For example, the manner in which big money can buy young students admission to medical and other universities disregarding merit is a sure prescription for rebellion. If ordinary citizens start believing that law, governance and the entire system is fashioned only to favour the rich, the country is inviting serious trouble. Examples of how money can power its way to trample all rules and achieve results abound.

Rather than cataloguing the many acts of malfeasance of which the pillars of our democracy are guilty, I would prefer to recall the words uttered by a former Supreme Court Judge at a seminar sponsored by the Bar Council of India Trust in January 1981. Said Justice Krishna Iyer : Constitutional cosmetics can only ill serve the people. Verbal valour and writ based face-cream are no substitute for our commitment to human rights. Why should the most honest element in our public life be hypocrisy? Why must all parties defect from the people ? No philosopher's stone of Constitution can produce a golden revolution. What can is our changed approach to the Constitution. What the founding fathers had tried to establish was not merely a welfare state but a social justice state. The Directive Principles and the fundamental rights were designed to make new history and destiny for the nation, a new economic order, a material base for the people's happiness with a federal parliamentary form of government. The paramount goal was to free India through a new Constitution, to feed the starving people, to clothe the naked masses, to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity.

Speaking 80 years after the Constitution was promulgated Krishna Iyer noted that the previous three decades had made human life and human rights distant neighbours. There is indeed a basic structure of Indian society but this structure consists of omnipotent poverty, the rise in the cost of having and pell in the best of life, police shootings, riots, torture, crimes and squator Human rights, constitutionally guaranteed have these value today than when the Constitution was fashioned just as the Indian rupee has less purchasing power than when the country be came free.....There is a growing gap between life and law. There is grave mistrust of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive. And violence seems to be order of the day. For such a state of affairs all the parties are to blame. You may shoot at sight a Navalite but the dead have voices and multiply among the living. The economics of politics is not silenced by police tactics. Who will police the police, or judge the judges when we argue for Article 14 (equality before law), not legalism, and for a systematic change a la Article 38 (securing a social order for the promotion of the welfare of the people) which slumbered all these years. Politics pander to caste. To make matters worse the legislature the executive and the judiciary are poised against the people. Why ? Because there has developed an alliance between money power and political power.....

I sum up with these telling words from the Justice : ''The tragic irony of Indian penury is that in our sick society. Subsequent to Justice Iyer's assessment, by a borrowed constitutional doctrine, reduced this militant mandate into a pulp declaration by arguing themselves into the conclusion that equality before the law merely meant the platitudinous proposition that, among equals, there shall by equality . By this simple device all unequals- the vast numbers who hunger of eqality- were put out of the role of the disturbing doctrine of equality covered by Articles 14 to 16. So law can make all pariahs equal to some pariahs but no pariahs equal to any prince. Legal equality is then distant social justice...''

Twenty two years later Justice Iyer's sentiments make as much sense today as they did then. It is time that those in positions of power and influence to wake up and realize the danger of continuing the present drift. Despite progress in some sectors of the economy, we are getting dangerously close to igniting social tensions that could explode to demolish or disintegrate society.

Has the Indian invasion begun?.........
Yours Randomly,

By Dr. R. L. Bhat

Nehru may not have meant an invasion of the world by what he called India’s ‘tryst with destiny’, yet for long India has been poised to invade the world. As one of the first civilizations it should have gone abroad centuries earlier. It in fact did. The widespread habitations in the East Asia from sundry islands to mainland fringing the Indo-china are attestation to the fact of India having ventured out along its vast coastline. The landline from central Asia to the Chinese plateau was equally agog with Indian men of letters and philosophy marching back and forth. There is a story of the Christ having been taught at one of the Buddhist monasteries-which some say was right there in the Jewish land possibly Syria where the Christian Lord is said to have been coached for a dozen years. Others say that it was actually in the land of Ind that Jesus spent these primal years and had his intimate brushes with reality and being.

Continuing the trail, or building one anew, others hypothesize that after being laid on the cross he was actually taken to India-to Kashmir some add-where he lived a long sagely life anywhere from Srinagar to Leh or at both places simultaneously! With that hoary history, India could have been the invader the world would have welcomed. Instead, for a millennium India remained the terrra aurum where all types of adventurers from self seekers to proselytizers to business dealers to cultural intruders landed for gold goods and glory. And, she kept supplying gold sometimes for mosques of Ghazni-which one imminent historian tells us ‘was the true cause for one notorious invader plundering Soomnath!-at others to build London. She kept sending her men and women to man the plantations in east or to slave it out in the west. She, indeed, kept complying meekly to every one of these demands for men and materials.

When one of these men came back to survey his ancestral land he found a continent steeped in darkness and repaired quickly back. But apparently there was more than ‘darkness’ here which made him coming again and again till finally he was convinced that all was shiny and sublime here. Somehow Naipaul was never seen as a symbol of resurgent India. For all his graphically Indian name he remained an Indies man. So did others like the president of Ghana who recently came to visit his roots in what is now increasing being called the Ulta Pradesh. On the other hand there is Salman Rushdie. He probably is less sympathetic of India and its essence than Sir Naipaul. And thereby hangs a tale of why India never carried out those invasions and conquests around the world. India seems more-much more-comfortable surveying rather than monarching the world. In recent times India and her tribes have been even more comfortable depreciating the land and the ethos they live in or come from. Here a critic, rather a cribber, is acknowledged better than an admirer. Salman fits the bill like a fiddle that can tell in a thousand twisted tones how the Indian midnight never dawned into a day.

So Salman represented India. Rather, he represented the resurgence of India that was acoming but never came to fruition before. After Salman there was a deluge. That deluge came primarily from the Indian technocrats who had drained out long before him. Of that stock cometh Bobby Jindal who may soon be the governor of the US state Louisiana. Others have been in the governing rings in Canada for more than a decade now. Curiously there have been fewer men in places that could matter in the old empire England when it was the first place Indians flocked to. Indeed, it was not till Idi Amin hounded Ugandan Indians out that they took something of a hold on the British landscape. To be sure the motherland did everything to thwart it, what with every Indian politico crying for the blood of Hindujas, Pauls and whoever else you have there! The great Indian indifference in play again…, eh? But that has not tampered with the wild west of Americas. The Indians who Columbus searched for there have finally registered their presence there. From Silicon Valley to Bobby Jindal lie the years when India began to truly make a mark on the world. Could one say that the swarthy Sushmita Sen began this newest of Indian trails?

For all that Narasimaha Rao-ian advice to the beauty queen to study Indian culture she in fact heralded the arrival of the cult called Indian. Today this cult is visible everywhere. In Europe, Africa, Arabia and, of course, America Indians are proving the most irrepressible people around. Whether it is the financial markets or NASA, the ubiquitous computerics or rarified arenas of politics you have them manning and womaning them all. Indeed, it now seems almost fair to assume that all good Indians would sooner or later end up in the occident, particularly America. This is as good an invasion as any. And like all conquered peoples the ‘natives’ are all up in the arms. The Brits have already been calling for a stop. The Germans did it sometime back.

The Americas are beginning to. Ironically it is more the Indians in India, than the Indians in there who they are protesting against. While Bobby Jindal may do in Louisiana what Schwarzenegger did to California, the Americans are busy decrying Indian skills for all the ‘outsourcing of jobs’ this country has been attracting. And, that confirms that Indians have actually been invading the world.