The latest reports of the comptroller and auditor general of India (CAG) tabled in Parliament on September 9, which severely indict the Union government for its reckless decision to purchase 68 Boeing jumbo jets and 43 Airbuses for Air India, and sharply criticises the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas for gifting away its share of exploration rights in the Krishna-Godavari D-6 basin to Reliance Industries Ltd, is additional proof that ministers of the Congress-led UPA-II government — elected and appointed to safeguard the public interest — are serially failing in discharging this primary duty. Although the CAG reports stop short of saying so explicitly, by stating that the aircraft purchase decision “appears to be supply-driven” and that the petroleum ministry allowed “huge and undue benefits” to accrue to Reliance, there’s heavy innuendo of ministerial corruption.
These latest CAG reports following hard on the heels of the Commonwealth Games and 2G telecom spectrum allocation scandals — which according to earlier CAG reports inflicted losses upon the national exchequer of Rs.101 crore and Rs.176,000 crore respectively — to which if one appends the massive land allocation and illegal mining frauds unearthed by the Lok Ayukta in the BJP-ruled state of Karnataka, prove beyond reasonable doubt that elected governments across the country have metamorphosed into giant kleptocracies, unmindful of the public interest.
It’s against this backdrop of exposés and accumulating evidence that under post-independence India’s adopted socialist ideology the fence has become addicted to eating the crop, that the citizenry must appreciate social reform activist Anna Hazare’s crusade to rectify the system of governance within the nation’s democratic framework. Quite clearly, there is urgent need for an independent statutory authority to expeditiously investigate (as the police and all investigative agencies are controlled by tainted Central and state governments), prosecute (all public prosecutors currently report to government) and adjudicate (procedural laws are obsolete and the judiciary is deliberately under-staffed) the shenanigans cutting across all political parties, of the politico-bureaucratic kleptocracy. Whether all three functions should be vested in one powerful Lok Pal (ombudsman), or in two or three independent bodies, is a matter of detail which will undoubtedly be debated in the all-party standing committee of Parliament and finalised in the subsequent debate of the Lok Pal Bill in Parliament. But all right-thinking citizens must monitor the debate and ensure that it is enacted into effective legislation.
Following Hazare’s non-violent 13-day fast at Delhi’s Ramlila park in the latter half of August to press for expeditious enactment of an effective Lok Pal Bill and rousing nationwide support for the cause, a great opportunity to cleanse the malodorous augean stables of Indian democracy has been presented to the citizenry and the educated middle class in particular. The strong currents of this historic opportunity must not be allowed to run awry by the filibustering tactics of the neta-babu kleptocracy with a vested interest in the status quo. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of true liberty.
Time agnosticism of the Supreme Court
Although political and civic propriety demands that the role of the judiciary — particularly the higher judiciary — is appreciated for safeguarding the fundamental rights of the citizenry and restraining the excesses of Parliament and the executive, their lordships of the higher judiciary are not above criticism for complacently presiding over the world’s slowest and most dysfunctional legal system characterised by chronic delay, obsolete procedures, shocking lack of access and the almost total absence of legal aid and advice for the poor and indigent. Surprisingly, their lordships of the higher judiciary seem wholly unaware of the aphorism that justice delayed is justice denied.
The insensitivity of the oft-lionised justices of the apex court on the importance of dispensing speedy justice was nationally displayed on September 12. A special bench comprising justices D.K. Jain, P. Sathasivam and Aftab Alam passed an order referring an appeal filed by Zakia Jafri against Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for his alleged complicity in the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in Ahmedabad, during which her husband former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri together with 37 others were butchered by a riotous mob, back to the trial court for hearing and disposal. Zakia Jafri’s petition to compel the police to file an FIR (first information report) against Modi and 61 others related to a heinous crime committed in 2002, was filed in the Gujarat high court in 2007 which dismissed her plea in November of that year.
Two years later the Supreme Court saw sufficient merit in her appeal to appoint a special investigation team (SIT) and an amicus curia, and since then the affidavits of hundreds of witnesses including several senior police officers of the Gujarat government were part of the record of the SIT investigation. Despite this, instead of trying the case itself, the three-judge bench took the time-consuming option of referring the case back to the trial magistrate’s court for hearing and disposal. It will be several years before the trial court passes its order which will promptly be appealed in the high court. After that the petition (to file an FIR against Modi and co-conspirators) will finally be adjudicated circa 2015.
The sheer insensitivity about delivery of speedy justice and closure to Mrs. Jafri’s plea for prosecution of Modi and co-conspirators in a court of law when there is clearly a prima facie case of criminal negligence, even if not actual complicity — after all he was chief and home minister of Gujarat when the anti-Muslim pogrom of February 2002 was engineered — is shocking beyond belief. Surely the justices of the country’s apex court are well aware that under Article 32 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has wide jurisdiction to issue writs of certiorari or mandamus to transfer any case pending in any court of law countrywide to itself and adjudicate upon it. Now that it has thrown the ball back to the trial court shows the Supreme Court in very poor light as a respecter of persons, and a prisoner of procedure rather than an empowered institution demonstrably concerned about dispensing speedy justice.