The March of Virtue: Phase 4 in the Anna Hazare Crusade

http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/march-virtue-phase-4-anna-hazare-crusade.html

July 25 2012

News from the world of corruption has been mixed since the last phase of the septuagenarian social campaigner, Anna Hazare’s mobilisation on the issue. Any manner of forecast requires great confidence, but in days of extreme uncertainty and livelihood anxiety, a prediction would be an act of great valour. Anna Hazare’s fourth phase of agitation demanding a law that empowers a powerful ombudsman to investigate and prosecute corruption at every level, due to kick off with an indefinite hunger fast in Delhi on July 25, could bring the believers out on the streets in droves, much like his first two rounds of righteous self-denial. It could just as well end in disarray and discord within his core campaign group, like Anna Mark 3 did last December.

The uncertainty is further compounded by a pronounced tendency for eccentricity and squabbles in full media glare, shown by Anna’s core campaign group ever since the December bubble burst. Neither can unconditional media endorsement be taken for granted. That indeed was the happy and hospitable terrain on which Team Anna fought its first two rounds, but December for reasons that still remain to be analysed, brought a change of media agenda.

Processes of prosecution and sanction for official malfeasance may have picked up a notch, showing an earlier absent sense of purpose.  A definitive judgment on this would require deeper research, since the greater visibility of punishments being meted out to the corrupt, could well be an artifact of heightened media attention. Again, cases featured in the media have been a mixed bunch, which have not quite assuaged public anxieties about a political system seriously out of joint.

Bangaru Laxman, a former president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) earned a four-year prison term for the extreme folly of promising special favours – for a fairly paltry sum -- to a shyster with a hidden camera, who posed as an arms dealer and skilfully played on the political insecurities of a dalit placed at the top of a sectarian caste-based party. Within the same league of high politics, a former chief minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan, after thrashing about in a futile bid to deflect the blame onto his predecessors, was formally charged for complicity in the criminal expropriation of public land in one of the most expensive tracts of real estate in the country. On still another front, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati won an unlikely reprieve, when the Supreme Court decreed that investigations into her acquisition of assets, which have been by all accounts wildly disproportionate to known sources of income, had no basis in law. Questions have been raised by individuals with vast experience in corruption investigations, about the consistency and integrity of this order by the Supreme Court. The deeper point, not lost on the public, is that political expediency was determinant in both the launching of investigations in 2003 and their termination in 2012.

Within the lower links of the corruption chain, a clerk in the electricity department at Chandigarh was sentenced to two years in jail for taking a five-hundred rupee bribe to “correct” the electricity bill of a local resident. A policeman earned a like jail term after an auto-rickshaw driver reported him for extorting a thousand rupees to release a driving licence impounded without clear reason. And in a case that went right to the highest level of judicial appeal, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two hospital workers from Rajasthan, who had demanded a hundred rupee bribe from a patient.  With seventeen years having lapsed since the offence was committed, the Supreme Court found reason for leniency, commuting the term in prison from two years to one. A few days later, while pronouncing final judgment in a case involving a fifty rupee bribe and a jail sentence of six months, the Supreme Court observed: “The amount may be small but to curb and repress this kind of proclivity the legislature has prescribed the minimum sentence. It should be borne in mind that corruption at any level does not deserve either sympathy or leniency… (C)orruption corrodes the spine of a nation and in the ultimate eventuality makes the economy sterile”.

Assuming that the uptick in legal actions represents actual forward movement, it is difficult to assess if they are yet an assurance of growing institutional integrity. A political agenda is evident in some of the actions, and an impression persists that for every person hauled up for corruption and other misdemeanours, there are several who get away. A strong suggestion of institutional infirmity moreover, arises from fifty and hundred rupee bribes becoming matters that the highest court in the land has to render judgment on. In a functioning judicial system, matters of such triviality would not have progressed, if at all, beyond a first appeal. A widespread public impression that the judicial system is not anchored in consistent principles leaves those accused of wrongdoing with an incentive to try their luck with the appeals process, in the hope of ultimate exculpation, or at the very least, indefinitely delaying the process of accountability. Supreme Court judges have as a consequence, to deal with cluttered and confused dockets, when they should really attend to only more weighty matters of constitutional law and jurisprudence.

A viable division of labour within the Indian justice system remains a remote prospect, for reasons underlined by the arrest of  three judges of the Andhra Pradesh sessions judiciary in a “cash for bail scandal”. The issue was the grant of bail to the mining magnate from Karnataka’s Bellary district, G. Janardhan Reddy, widely known to have despoiled a vast expanse of land, ruined lives and livelihoods, and established an apparatus of coercion in his fief that trumps all the accumulated powers of the Indian state. A political notable with enormous clout within the BJP, Karnataka’s ruling party, Janardhan Reddy was swept up in the dragnet spread by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) after preliminary inquiries revealed gross illegalities by him and his two brothers in Bellary and the neighbouring district of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh.

Janardhan’s operations symbolise the cross-partisan and borderless world of racketeering in natural resources. He and his family are assured of immunity in Karnataka, and his trail of illicit payoffs has spread to neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, where it has seemingly contributed to the vast aggrandisement in the fortunes of Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, son of the former chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy. Janardhan’s moment of accountability came after Rajasekhar’s death in a helicopter crash, when Jagan Mohan staked a claim to the succession that seemed just too much like an unseemly power grab, even by the cynical standards of the Congress. Unsettled and greatly discomfited, the satraps of the Congress invoked the state government’s power to call in the CBI to pursue designated cases. Janardhan is today being prosecuted in a case lodged by Andhra Pradesh with a police agency controlled by the central government, for crimes committed in the main, in Karnataka.

Jagan Mohan, taken into custody a few months later, is facing tough questions about his pathway to fabulous wealth. Investigations have especially focused on his rapid accumulation of media assets, in both the print and broadcast sectors, in the space of a mere four years. But he has since his arrest, continued in a figurative sense, the triumphal political processions that deeply unnerved the state leadership of the Congress, inducing criminal proceedings almost as a panic reaction. Swatting down Jagan Mohan’s dynastic claims to chief ministership has proved politically expensive. The thwarted heir has since kept the Congress leadership continually off-balance with very visible and noisy political rallies across the state, finally breaking off from the party. In a number of byelections held in June, Jagan Mohan’s newly constituted YSR Congress won the one Lok Sabha seat at stake in Andhra Pradesh and 15 of 18 assembly constituencies. The Congress party’s fortunes in the state, in the ascendant since 2004, are rapidly waning and the accustomed model of bipolar politics in Andhra Pradesh, is being upended by the play of money power on an unprecedented scale.

When asked about the sources of his wealth, Jagan Mohan and his acolytes are prone to change the subject  and refer to the onerous responsibilities they have taken on, to mitigate the suffering of the poor. Corruption as an issue is glossed over or portrayed as an inescapable part of the process of attending to public welfare. For the more acute political observers, this is "patronage democracy" in all its absolute starkness. And since it is the accepted mode of politics, Jagan Mohan’s clinching argument is simply that there has to be some sinister reason why he alone is beginning to attract censure or sanction. To put things very simply, even at the slight risk of caricature: his corruption is in the interests of the poverty stricken masses, while all those others are just enriching themselves.

Public accountability versus the power to mobilise numbers in the electoral arena: this conflict that Indian democracy has confronted all through its career, is now emerging full-blown to undermine the integrity of its institutions. The electoral arena is in a certain narrative, the ultimate repository of democratic legitimacy. Designated custodians of constitutional propriety and financial probity, would have to yield to the compelling forces mobilised in the electoral arena. Aside from Jagan Mohan’s sweep of the Andhra Pradesh by-elections, Andipatti Raja – prime accused and in many ways the public face of the scandal of the telecom spectrum sale at bargain basement prices – illustrates this facet. Released on bail after 15 months in detention while a criminal chargesheet was filed for the collusive sale of the telecom spectrum to chosen favourites in the corporate sector, Raja was soon calling forth the power of the street in his defence, to trump strictures placed by even the highest judicial body. When his criminal trial resumes in Delhi, he has vowed to call the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India (CAG) to the witness stand, to explain the grounds on which his office arrived at an astronomical estimate of the loss caused to the public exchequer by the sale of telecom spectrum for second-generation (2G) services.

Meanwhile, the office of the CAG after what it called rigorous self-appraisal, concluded that its report on the spectrum under-pricing which triggered a political storm and took Raja to jail, had been soundly based and well-judged. This does not mitigate certain questions about methodology, which are now coming into the public spotlight. A certain difficulty with handling dynamic realities, with estimating the long term consequences of pricing decisions, has been characteristic of the CAG’s recent exertions. Its estimate of the loss from the spectrum sale, in some part, conflates a company’s stockmarket valuation with the true worth of a resource held. The simple fact that it chose to overlook, is that stockmarket values are highly speculative and the investment by foreign entities in Indian companies granted spectrum allocations for 2G services, was determined not so much by the underlying value of the resource, as by current capital investment needs and future expectations of profit. There is also the aspect of the pricing of services which the CAG consistently – and rather strangely -- ignores, since the value of the spectrum is part of a chain in which the price charged the telecom subscriber is the final outcome. India has among the lowest telecom tariffs in the world and yet these are not a variable in the CAG’s estimate of the under-pricing of the spectrum.

It is only now, after a Supreme Court intervention to cancel the bargain sale of 2G spectrum that the telecom industry and the regulatory authority are entering into a debate on the implications of the pricing of airwaves for subscriber tariffs. It is by all accounts, a tense confrontation with neither side willing to yield and the telecom regulator accusing the telecom companies of "scare-mongering"  and blaming all their current anxieties on bad decisions in the recent past.

Methodological disputes were nowhere on the horizon as the Anna Hazare movement kicked off in April last year, with the 2G revelations hovering in the background to create just the right climate of public outrage. And as it prepares for the next round, Team Anna has been delivered another potent propaganda weapon by the CAG’s estimate of losses to the public exchequer from discretionary allotment of coal blocks to a number of corporate entities in the public and private sectors. In March, media reports based on a leak from the CAG’s office put this figure at over Rs 10 lakh crore (or Rs 10 trillion), a whole order of magnitude more than the 2G losses. In a hasty public clarification, the CAG then explained that the figures were provisional. The figure quoted by the media, indeed, could be "misleading”, since the benefit reckoned to have accrued to the coal block allotees could not be considered as an equivalent loss to the public exchequer.

The storm though, had already been unleashed. “Coal-gate” is how the scandal was promptly named by the media and late in May, that was where Team Anna focused as it began gearing up for a fourth phase of agitation. Few delicacies were involved this time around, as in the past when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was exculpated from personal involvement in corruption and only pilloried for sins of omission. Inaugurating the new season of uncivility, Team Anna first compared the Prime Minister to a transgendered character from the epics who served as a decoy, confusing the enemy as the real warriors prepared their strategies of attack on the battlefield. Then came the comparison with a blind king from the epic, who remained oblivious to all around him as his kingdom descended into bitter sectarian warfare.

Having delivered the best rhetorical insults it could summon up, Team Anna came down to its core demand: that the Prime Minister having held the relevant portfolio all through the time that the impugned decisions had been made, a criminal investigation into his conduct by a specially empowered team was an absolute necessity. “Coal-gate” was propaganda manna for Team Anna since it once again spotlighted the dilemma that debates on corruption have foundered on: how can an investigation into prime ministerial conduct be halfway credible when, as head of the executive branch of governance, he holds all the levers in his hands? This in turn translated, in Team Anna’s worldview, into an argument about the absolute indispensability of an ombudsman that would hold all the levers in any similar situation: to initiate and oversee investigations into corruption, bring cases to prosecution and ensure the integrity of the judicial process. Till the time that such a body is established by law, the centrality of the Prime Minister as head of the executive arm of the state, puts him beyond scrutiny. Parliament, which is otherwise the only mechanism of scrutiny he could be subject to, remains dysfunctional, unable to awaken from its torpor and initiate a debate that goes beyond partisanship, into realms of objectivity.

Predictably, Parliament failed the test once again, allowing the frisson occasioned by numbers beyond ordinary human comprehension -- and the passing opportunity to fling a few barbs at the Prime Minister -- to overwhelm any serious engagement with policy. Spokesmen for the ruling party soon launched their counter-attack, as the Prime Minister himself reacted with offended hauteur.  A minister in the Prime Minister’s office tossed out the old and clichéd accusation of "anti-national" activity, and another senior minister who obviously still carries a great deal of 1970s vintage rhetorical baggage, purported to find clinching evidence that Team Anna was the pliant tool of a "foreign hand"  with nefarious intent.

Invective aside, the Prime Minister’s team soon had ready an aggressive defence of the economic rationale of granting coal-blocks at a concessional price to hand-picked corporate entities. Expectedly, this defence focused on the dimension of the value chain that the CAG had proved relatively inattentive to: final user price. Coal block allocation at a low rate relative to potential yield and prevalent market prices, did not amount to any serious irregularity, since the coal that is extracted is meant for captive use in such vital sectors as power, steel and cement. Keeping the price of raw energy inputs low in turn, would yield the benign result of lower user prices for such vital industrial intermediates as electricity, cement and steel. Far from being a loss of public revenue, the allocation of coal blocks to major users of the resource – many of them in the public sector – was a measure designed with explicit intent to promote growth and improve the competitive status of the Indian economy.

The CAG had in its draft report, partially preempted this rejoinder, drawing on a Supreme Court ruling  that “the State legally owns the natural resources on behalf of its citizens” and when assigning these to private hands, was under obligation to ensure that “the benefit of the low cost of the natural resources would be passed on to the citizens”. This was not to be taken for granted; rather, it had to be proved that the prices at which these corporate entities rendered their service to the public reflected the economy of resource access they enjoyed. Neither the regulatory mechanisms in power, steel and cement, the CAG pointed out, nor the market mechanisms could ensure that corporate entities allocated coal blocks at bargain basement prices “would pass on the benefit of low cost of natural resources to the citizens”.

The CAG report has since the initial flurry of public excitement, fallen into a zone of obscurity, with no clear indication yet available of when it will emerge with the full imprimatur of the financial custodian’s authority. Team Anna meanwhile, has continued with its scattershot strategy, calling just at the moment that Pranab Mukherjee was granted the Congress nomination for the presidential election of July 19, for investigations into his recent and distant decisions as a minister in the Union Cabinet. Once ensconced in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mukherjee would have constitutional immunity, said Team Anna. The time to get to the bottom of all accusations against him was just when he was about to cross that constitutional threshold.

As with the Prime Minister, Mukherjee’s reaction was again, all injured innocence. An official communique from his office, rich in adjectives and moral outrage, gave away the key fact that all issues raised by Team Anna were the subject matter of a public interest petition filed before the Delhi High Court. The unavoidable inference of this admission, perhaps unwitting, was simply that the public interest in discovering the truth about such sensitive matters as possible irregularities in the acquisition of submarines for the Indian Navy and the leak of sensitive information about naval operations planning, would have to fade away for the duration of Mukherjee’s tenancy in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Team Anna continues to dream of a world free of vice, when it would hold all the levers and mete out summary justice to those of lesser virtue. Meanwhile, an existing legal authority that has been tasked with overseeing the integrity of administrative processes, was sufficiently interested in “Coal-gate”, to sanction an investigation of its own. The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) was once devoid of real authority, because it had to depend on specific instances of wrongdoing being brought to its attention, and then had no powers of investigation of its own. Under an administrative arrangement put together in the mid-1990s when hearings of the “Jain Hawala diaries” in the Supreme Court revealed a glimpse into the cosy cohabitation of politicians and businessmen in the ideology-free world of sleaze, the CVC was given the power of oversight and superintendence over the CBI, including a decisive voice in the choice of its head. That was then regarded as an extraordinary policy intervention by the judiciary. In later years, J.S. Verma, who decreed this arrangement as a puisne judge in the Supreme Court and later ascended to the post of Chief Justice of India, has very candidly admitted that this extraordinary judicial intrusion into the policy domain, as it seemed then, had not quite brought about the positive changes he thought possible.

That sense of disappointed expectations is best represented in the state of the CBI: flabby, effete, and corrupt. This police agency controlled by the central government has jurisdiction all over India, subject to the explicit consent of state authorities. In recent times, the CBI has functioned as a steam valve, releasing pressure on state authorities when heinous crimes take place and questions are raised about the competence and commitment of local police forces. Administrative control of the agency still vests with the Department of Personnel in the Union Government, which is in turn directly under the Prime Minister’s charge. Despite the process of autonomy designed by Justice Verma being in operation for over fifteen years, the reputation of the CBI has been reduced to tatters.

The CBI is yet to reveal the direction in which its “Coal-gate” inquiries are proceeding. With its finely tuned political nose and individual officers’ appreciation of where best chances lie, obfuscation and indefinite delay are the most likely outcomes. Fundamentally, the CBI cannot be a credible investigator when it is controlled by a Prime Minister who has a stake in ensuring that his reputation and his cabinet colleagues’, is not damaged by any public revelation of wrongdoing. The public is uneasily aware that enormous deeds of financial deceit have been occurring behind walls of executive privilege and governmental secrecy. It is a state of anxiety that feeds into the deeper agenda behind Team Anna’s very conspicuous targeting of a prospective head of state and the head of the executive machinery: that no office should be spared the scrutiny of the wider public who have been repeatedly betrayed by their elected representatives. In turn, this translates into the message that older principles of the separation of power between legislature, executive and judiciary, are no longer valid. All three elements within this distribution of powers, should be subject to the scrutiny of a fourth, which for Team Anna would translate roughly as “the virtuous” and in the wider media discourse, as “civil society”.

This effort to coerce the institutions of the Indian state into compliance is different from Andipatti Raja’s or Jagan Mohan Reddy’s in being inspired by the quality of virtue, which Team Anna possesses and few others in active politics do. The Anna Hazare movement, indeed, is a powerful representation of elite disgruntlement at the state of governance. Its dominant motif is a forthright sense of disdain, loudly proclaimed, at the functioning of the institutions of representative democracy. And its programme is to secure democracy against a reign of iniquity by endowing the virtuous few with powers that trump all others.

This construction of virtue is now set on a collision course with another, which sees policy decisions and administrative arrangements exclusively through the prism of economic growth. Manmohan Singh won accolades for his five-year tenure as Finance Minister beginning in 1991, when India confronted an acute international payments crisis, and the economy seemed to be plunging headlong into a quagmire of inflation and stagnancy. Though his five-year tenure as Finance Minister brought no miracles, he has retrospectively been credited with the enormous spurt in India’s aggregate rate of economic growth, which began as a rebound from the disastrous drought year of 2002. Fortune’s child, he enjoyed through his first tenure as Prime Minister, the good favour of economic growth rates that persisted at unprecedentedly high levels. As the growth momentum began to flag, beginning end-2008, worshipping acolytes were inclined to put the blame on the unimaginative Congress party apparatchik, Pranab Mukherjee, who assumed charge at the Finance Ministry in January 2009. Manmohan Singh was still regarded as the miracle worker whose long absence from the pivotal ministry had put the Indian economy at risk.

Now directly in charge of the Finance Ministry, Manmohan Singh has signalled that his priority is to tackle the continuing slump in economic growth by boosting investment. Icons of Indian entrepreneurship in the age of globalisation, Azim Premji and N.R. Narayanamurthy, after public expressions of disappointment at his failure to deliver leadership when most needed, have since been holding their counsel, evidently waiting for some action. Mukesh Ambani was another captain of industry who chose to be very vocal about his concern at the policy drift, but his emotions could not have been unmixed with growing alarm over the CAG's indictment of his company, Reliance Industries Ltd., for a conspicuous failure to deliver after securing the right to exploit the Krishna-Godavari gas fields at what many thought, was a derisory rate.

It was yet another case of natural resources being gift-wrapped for private aggrandisement and Ambani’s meeting early in July with Montek Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, has led to a predictable buzz about new pricing norms for gas extracted from the Krishna-Godavari fields and a possible bid by Reliance for a part of the telecom spectrum when fresh auctions decreed by the Supreme Court are held. It has also not passed comment that since Manmohan Singh took over charge at the Finance Ministry, Ahluwalia as his most trusted economic aide, has been receiving a number of high-profile corporate chieftains, including Vijay Mallya of the beleaguered UB group, whose Kingfisher Airlines could, despite some collusive credit arrangements with public sector banks, soon become the most spectacular bankruptcy  in India’s business history.

Ahluwalia himself  is clear about the course ahead if India is to pull itself out of the slough of economic despond: tinkering with interest rates was just no option since “growth is supply constrained”. Energy was one of the main drags and the private sector had the key responsibility here. As he puts it in a recent interview: “It was our policy that we must allow the private sector to grow. What we’ve now seen is that on the supply side it is not so easy for the fuel supply guys to catch up and what have we done? .. We have allowed captive coal to be bid. There is a bit of a controversy that it was not done via auction but we will take care of that as the new system is in place. The nationalised Coal Supplier, Coal India Ltd., has not come up to target, (and) that is a problem..”

A former media adviser has in this time written an elaborate apologia, crediting Manmohan Singh with having fostered a wide public understanding of the need for unfettered “animal spirits” to uplift the national mood and bring the best instincts of entrepreneurship to fruition. The Prime Minister is in the words of his former adviser, invoking the spirit of John Maynard Keynes, a pioneering economist of the first half of the last century, who has left a “lasting intellectual impact” on him. To quote this excursus into the mind of the Prime Minister, published early in July:  “An important behavioural idea that Keynes introduced to modern macroeconomics was that sentiment plays as important a role as rational calculus in shaping investor behaviour. His now famous quote on ‘animal spirits’ (that many in India have discovered after last week’s use of that phrase by Prime Minister Singh), is in fact a fine exposition of the idea”.

For those of somewhat longer memory, Manmohan Singh’s invocation of “animal spirits” in this time of economic uncertainty, should be cause not for celebration but for deep concern. It shows in effect, that his thinking has changed little since the 1990s tenure in the Finance Ministry. “Animal spirits” was a term that he often tossed around then as the basis of his belief that restraints on entrepreneurial behaviour needed to be removed, that indeed, the spirit of personal aggrandisement should be unfettered so that the economy as a whole could grow. His economic philosophy – then as now – is simply that the rich hold the keys and should be pampered with greater favours since in their benevolence and their innovative abilities, lies salvation for all others. His purported ability to quote the entire text from Keynes’ work where he celebrates this spirit of benevolence of the rich – while omitting much else from the same source which says the opposite – speaks of a troubling selectivity and an inability to look at the larger picture: “If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a regime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community ... [they] were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of ‘saving’ became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion.”

Two constructions of virtue are in contention as Anna Hazare prepares for the fourth phase of his agitation. For Team Anna, virtue is a closely held monopoly, embodied in its leader’s self-denial and moral resoluteness, consistently denied in the electoral fray and endangered by the ruthless competition between parties to extend their patronage networks. For Team Manmohan Singh, virtue is just as rare an attribute, typically found in close proximity with extreme wealth, and worthy of special commendation since it could easily slip into its opposite. The rich could well squander their wealth in self-indulgence, but are driven by inherent benevolence and a vision of the larger social good, to save and invest. What those of lesser vision call corruption – the use of public resources for the aggrandisement of private entities -- involves a larger social good, since the rich also create a rising tide that lifts those less fortunate to a state of greater economic well-being.

Which notion of virtue is likely to capture the public imagination? Much of that would depend upon media agendas. Anna Hazare had during his first two mobilisations, virtually unconditional media approval, with breathless news anchors competing to project him as the messianic saviour who had magically conjured up the Lok Pal as the ultimate weapon to slay all demons. By the time of the third mobilisation, with Manmohan Singh looking distinctly beleaguered, the consequence of another elite referendum orchestrated by Team Anna, with the media turning in a negative verdict, could potentially have been a catastrophic implosion of the regime. A key moment may have been November 2011, when the government, flailing desperately to extricate itself from a parliamentary logjam, notified a policy of allowing foreign direct investment in the retail sector. It was a quite brazen affront to parliament which was then in session, and the withdrawal when a chorus of condemnation arose, was abject.

The entry of big capital in the retail sector was seen as a benefit by powerful elements within the Indian elite. Farm lobbies in states of such consequence as Punjab and Maharashtra endorsed it with little reserve. And India’s largest English language newspaper spoke for large sections of the global Indian elite when it commented editorially that opening up the retail sector was the government’s “first big-ticket reform initiative in a long time”. It had the potential, “when implemented” to “transform India’s chaotic and predominantly unorganised retail sector, while hugely benefiting agriculture as well as the inflation-hit consumer”. With the assurance of all these riches lying ahead, it was regrettable that political parties, “even outside the staunchly anti-reform Left brigade have ganged up to disrupt Parliament”.

The Anna Hazare bubble-burst of December occurred on the back of visible signals of distress from the elected government. And Parliament, though still far from convincing in its response, did -- while Anna Hazare floundered in quest of an audience for his December spectacle -- put up a halfway credible spectacle of debating a tough new law to ensure the probity of all government agencies. And at a certain point, a vital component of the civil society coalition that provided Hazare with his momentum – the business lobbies (and derivatively, the corporate media which they control) – perhaps realised that the costs of success would be too steep.

Since Anna Hazare’s December fiasco, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries has become a major shareholder in Network 18, a news and current affairs broadcaster in English, Hindi and several other languages. Another industrial conglomerate, the Aditya Birla group, has acquired a stake in the India Today group of publications. The drift towards corporate control has clearly accelerated as the media deals with the economic downturn, which has led to a sharp contraction of advertising spending and cast a long shadow over the viability of several among the media platforms created in the boom years post-2003. For the rest, media ownership tends to be as opaque as ever and their agendas, unpredictable for the most part. Corporate India though, still has unmet expectations and Manmohan Singh is their best assurance of securing these. Anna Hazare could count on a degree of indulgence as he begins the fourth phase of his campaign, but media loyalties perhaps are likely to lie, with less equivocation than ever before, with the Prime Minister who sees wealth as the marker of virtue.

The Meadow: India’s own little dirty war

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, The Meadow, Penguin Books India, Delhi, 2012, pp xxvi + 510; Rs 499, ISBN 978-0-143-41875-7.

At several junctures of this profusely documented and rapidly moving narrative, the reader would worry about getting lost in a welter of detail. This story about the abduction of six western tourists in Kashmir in 1995 has for long been waiting to be told, since it is one where closure has not been achieved despite all these years. One among the six escaped to safety within days of being taken captive, recklessly plunging out into a directionless void. He was spotted by a helicopter patrol of the Indian security forces and could easily have been picked out by a marksman on board as a terrorist intruder. But something that day worked for him and he was rescued in a state of near mental and physical collapse. Another among the six, picked up by the kidnap team in the frustration occasioned by this escape, was after over a month in captivity, killed in a manner reminiscent of a medieval rite of vengeance. The other four dropped soon afterwards into a limbo of public inattention, as fatigue seemingly overwhelmed the search and more urgent security imperatives cropped up.

This book, named after the picturesque spot in the Kashmir valley where the first abductions took place, features a complex cast of characters, variously motivated. Many of them, though sworn to mutual enmity, are compelled to talk terms for the immediate objective of securing the freedom of four men caught in a conflict not of their making. There are others who remain in the shadowy fringes, and appear in the story through proxies serving a variety of covert agendas. Once that purpose was served, the four hostages became literally, the men who knew too much. Letting them live would have been a potential risk to the secret identities of the off-stage players. Like thousands of “disappeared” Kashmiris, Don Hutchings, Paul Wells, Keith Mangan and Dirk Hasert will probably enter the history books as “collateral damage” in the contest of wills between two neighbouring states with a history of implacable hostility, where inflicting pain upon the other was an end that justified itself.

Though it begins with the promise of unravelling the event that “changed the face of modern terrorism”, this book settles quickly into an unhurried account of three couples from different parts of the world -- Don and Jane, Keith and Julie, and Paul and Cath -- preparing for their separate journeys to Kashmir. At roughly the same time, John Childs, a design engineer for a weapons manufacturer in the U.S. was setting out on a business trip to eastern India. Being a sworn adherent of the philosophy that every expense an employer is willing to incur should be utilised for maximum benefit, he hatched the plan of staying on a few days more for trekking in the Kashmir Himalayas.

Javid Ahmad Bhat, from Dabran village in Anantnag district of Kashmir, was marked out as a young man with a future by early academic achievement and the qualities of leadership displayed on the cricket field. Radicalised by the farcical elections to the Jammu and Kashmir state assembly in 1987, Bhat decided when full fledged insurrection broke out in 1990, that the Kashmiri had to deepen his commitment to his faith and meet force with force. He crossed over to Pakistan soon afterwards and went on to Afghanistan for specialised arms training. By 1992, he was back in Kashmir with the nom de guerre Sikander, as the commander in Anantnag district of a militant cell answering directly to handlers across the border. 

The following year, he was told as the militancy seemed to be splintering, that he would have to integrate his operations with another unit that handlers across the border had named the Harkat ul-Ansar or “Movement of the Victorious”. Sajjad Shahid Khan or the Afghani, a senior guerrilla leader from Pakistan’s Pashtun belt, arrived in Kashmir early in 1994, trekking up into the forests east of Anantnag, seeding cells along the way while exploring the terrain as an operational base. He had been assigned to take over as military chief in the Anantnag sector, and despite early reservations, Sikander gladly subsumed his unit under the Afghani’s command. They had an old mutual associate, in Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial, a guerrilla from Pakistan’s Punjab province, who had trained alongside Sikander in Afghanistan before crossing over to Kashmir along with him in 1992.

Langrial had plunged headlong into a series of militant actions on arrival in Kashmir. But virtually coinciding with the Afghani’s arrival in the valley, he was captured in an Indian army operation. His release was the first major cause around which the Afghani and Sikander tested their newly forged military partnership. A pitched engagement with security forces in a neighbourhood of Srinagar was staged from which the two barely managed to extract themselves alive. Following this, an Indian army officer, Major Bhupinder Singh, was abducted and held hostage for Langrial’s release and executed when the “enemy” refused to negotiate.

As their protégés embarked on this sequence of futile and strategically reckless actions, the mood among the Kashmir jihad’s handlers across the border began distinctly to darken. Principal among the strategists was “Brigadier Badam” of Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), identified throughout the book only by the nickname he picked up with his fondness for gulping almond-flavoured milk as a substitute for the alcohol he had given up during the Afghan jihad. Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the senior Islamic cleric and mentor of the Movement based in Karachi, was summoned and asked urgently to send an envoy into Kashmir to whip the militants back in line.

Masood Azhar was the person chosen for this mission. Operationally inept , Masood had picked up a lasting physical disability from a friendly fire incident at the Afghan training camp he attended, after stepping out to relieve himself on a dark night and failing to speak out the password for re-entry. Azhar though, had a way with words. Born into a family of relative wealth, he was known, like the father who mentored him into his lifelong commitment, as a “no doubter”, who allowed not the faintest glimmer of scepticism into the aura of his fundamentalist faith. Azhar entered India on a false passport in January 1995 and after about a fortnight spent in idle wandering around the streets of Delhi and a visit to the Deoband Islamic seminary, arrived in Kashmir early in February. He addressed a council of the holy warriors in Anantnag, but then the Afghani -- seemingly carried away by his eloquence – persuaded him to address the Friday prayer in Anantnag’s principal mosque.

Azhar was reluctant at assuming a major public profile but gave in to the Afghani’s suggestion. They were spotted on the way and chased down by an Indian military patrol. A third member of the group fled to safety in the thick woods around, but Afghani remained with Azhar, knowing that his high value visitor from Pakistan could not manage the same fleetness of foot. They were both taken in by Indian troops amidst joyous scenes of celebration.

Furious at the turn of events, Brigadier Badam quickly sent word to Sikander,  who was by now consumed with guilt that a motorcycle mishap had prevented him being part of Azhar’s journey to Anantnag. Badam outlined a very straightforward operation titled “Ghar” or “home”. It involved a certain number of high value individuals being seized as hostages to ensure the safe release of Azhar, the Afghani and Langrial. Sikander was assigned two operatives to work alongside him, one of whom, Abdul Hamid al-Turki, or the Turk, he had special reason to worry about. Though a warrior with undoubted jehadi pedigree, having fought in theatres as far afield as Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan, the Turk was known to be impetuous and rather reckless, prone to acts of brutality that could alienate the silent support guerrilla operations depended on. But Sikander was not given much time to voice his own tactical preferences or pick the personnel involved. By February 1995, the kidnap team had already been briefed by ISI handlers and sent across the border. The initial directive was to pick up personnel from western companies engaged in engineering projects in Kashmir, notably in the hydroelectricity sector. Later, the mandate was altered to just snatching whoever came to hand.

From here on, there is a complex sequence of events that leads to the kidnap party, which had taken on the identity of Al Faran, arriving at the meadow where three western couples and the solitude-loving John Childs were camped early in July 1995. The moment the four men were seized, was one of incomprehension and some puzzlement, not terror. Their captors conveyed little sense of threat, merely explaining that they needed to take away the men for questioning regarding possible involvement in Israeli espionage. But then, the supposed interrogation just did not seem to end, and the three women who hung about waiting for their companions to return had to make the agonising decision of leaving the scene of the abductions and trudging down to Pahalgam town, where they made a complaint at the nearest police station.

The local police though had their  hands full with managing another possible flashpoint for violence. The Amarnath yatra, had been till the eruption of militancy in Kashmir, a low-key annual voyage of piety undertaken by a few thousands. But since then, it had been transformed into an annual contest of wills between the Indian security agencies and the more extreme militant units. The time of the abduction was especially bad, since militant groups had just set off bombs at Pahalgam, where the pilgrims began to gather prior to their trek up to a cave temple, and a Hindu vigilante group that had arrived in force to impose its will on the locals, had set off a retaliatory rampage against all Kashmiris they could lay hands on. With a potential security meltdown on his hands, the local police superintendent urgently messaged superiors in Srinagar, recommending that the trekking routes beyond Pahalgam be cleared of all western tourists and fresh arrivals be dissuaded.

His plea was ignored and this is the first of the mysteries of the official Indian response that calls for fresh scrutiny. On July 5, the German student Dirk Hasert and his friend Anne Hennig arrived in Srinagar and were told by all the officials they consulted that aside from the downtown area of the city, every other part of Kashmir was safe for the “holiday of a lifetime”.  The Norwegian Hans Christian Ostro, who emerges in these pages as an engaging and zestful personality, needed no such positive reassurance. Indeed, when following five months in Kerala steeped in learning kathakali, was warned that Kashmir was dangerous territory, he had admonished his dance teachers for being “narrow-minded”.

On July 8, when John Childs fled his captivity, feigning the desperate need for a nocturnal trip to the toilet, the leader of the kidnap ring had sent his men in frantic search. At some point, the directive was changed: any number of substitutes could be picked up. Hasert was the first to be snatched from the tent that he was camped in. A few hours later, Ostro was taken from a tea stall near Pahalgam. Unlike the others, Ostro was taken by force rather than subterfuge. He put up a fight but was overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

Immediately after his rescue, John Childs was debriefed by local security and intelligence agencies and put on a plane back home with almost unseemly haste. Here is another of the mysteries of the official security response. In recounting events from the time, Childs confesses himself still perplexed by that decision since he expected quite reasonably, to be asked to help in the aerial survey of the abductors’ territory to pinpoint their location.

First word from the kidnappers came as a telephone call to Yusuf Jameel, a senior journalist based  Srinagar’s press enclave. The price demanded was simple: the release of twenty-one prisoners held in India, with Azhar, the Afghani and Langrial at the top of the list. D.D. Saklani, a retired lieutenant-general of the Indian army who was then the top security advisor to the state administration, had personally been on the helicopter patrol that rescued Childs. When a direct line of communication opened up with the kidnappers, he chose to entrust the negotiations to Rajinder Tikoo, Inspector-General of Police for the Kashmir range. Tikoo was hesitant, but could not turn down an order from the man at the top of the security hierarchy. Saklani gave nothing away and allowed Tikoo little leeway: “You’re a good conversationalist. You go your own way, and try to drag it out as long as possible”.

To begin with, there seemed little scope to drag things out. Tikoo’s first conversation with the terror ring’s representative was surly and ill-tempered. The clock was ticking and the first executions of the hostages, he was told, would take place within hours. Tikoo adopted a tone of bluff good humour: this was not a marketplace bargain over the price of vegetables, it involved complex government decisions, he pleaded. He seemed with his tone, to have won at least some measure of trust from his interlocutor. The kidnappers were evidently nervous and unsure about when they should raise the stakes.

Parcels meanwhile kept getting passed through intermediaries, mostly located in Srinagar’s press enclave: a hazy black and white photograph first and then five days later, an audio recording of the five hostages appealing for their release.

Over the following days, Tikoo took his conversations with the kidnappers into the realm of theology and spirituality, repeatedly underlining the virtue of compassion. The intermediary he was addressing seemed indulgent. But just over a fortnight into the abduction, he was startled to receive an unscheduled call, with the familiar voice of his interlocutor sputtering in rage: “You have violated your word and you will be blamed for the consequences. You want their deaths on your hands? How stupid do you think we are?” Tikoo was alarmed but was told nothing about the cause of the anger, except that there had been an Indian army raid.

Rushing over to Saklani’s office, Tikoo was told to calm down while he determined what exactly had happened. The explanation offered after about an hour was that the army had conducted a raid as part of normal operations and discovered a suspected terrorist safe-house. It had been evacuated by the time the raid party arrived, though it was later discovered to have been the site from where the first telephone call to Tikoo was placed. There was no ill intent there, just a failure of coordination.

Tikoo was unconvinced. A few days later, Al Faran released a photograph which purported to show two of the hostages, Don and Keith, injured in the army raid. Anxiety levels spiked but Tikoo found the photographs unconvincing and read them as a means of warning off any further rescue bids and building pressure for an early resolution. Tikoo was a patient man who worked in considerable uncertainty. He could give nothing away and could never be sure when the kidnappers would just determine that further conversations would be futile. But he moved on. At one point, he managed to extract a commitment from the kidnappers that they were willing to bring down their prisoner release list to four. This was conveyed in strictest confidence to Saklani, but carried almost in a triumphal tone as top news story in the following day’s newspapers. The kidnap party was furious and Tikoo once again thrown into turmoil over unseen hands controlling the pace of events. But through the first half of September, Tikoo continued his delicate conversations over telephone, dealing with frequent rages and accusations of bad faith. There was hope in the intermediary’s seeming willingness to stick with an agreed schedule for each of their conversations, by now conducted over radio rather than telephone.

Tikoo was by now beginning to see signs of fatigue in the adversary and had turned the conversation around to a possible ransom. By September 17, he had a figure: the kidnappers were willing to settle for a crore (ten million) of rupees.

He had little time to bask in the glow of this triumph. Early the following day, as newspapers in the national capital were being dropped off, he had a call from a colleague in Delhi, informing him that the city’s largest newspaper had a frontpage report on the ransom deal. Tikoo rushed to Saklani’s office to demand the source of the leak, which he knew would be a deal breaker. Saklani promised to find out but discovered little. In a state of nervous exhaustion by now, Tikoo asked to be taken off the case.

A detective squad in the Crime Branch of the police force – all native Kashmiris – had meanwhile launched its own operation, hitting hard at possible informants on occasion, going undercover and teasing out clues on others. With sustained inquiries, the squad managed to unravel the kidnap party’s first moves. Contrary to initial belief, the group had not gone up into the higher mountain reaches, but down into Pahalgam town, where it had sheltered in a well-known tourist resort for a while. Bit by bit, the squad then reconstructed the entire course of the party’s movements. By mid-July, the squad had begun to focus its search on the Warwan valley, about fifty kilometres south-east of Anantnag, a harsh wind-swept basin that is inaccessible for eight months of the year. With only one approach from the Kashmir valley which requires a trek up to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet, the Warwan had become a favoured transit point and shelter for foreign militants of various stripes. And there was one particular village there, Sukhnoi, which had been used by an earlier kidnap team. By the first week of August, the squad had figured out the rough coordinates of the hostages from the testimony of the villagers and itinerant cattle herders. It also had information of regular army patrols moving around the Warwan valley and wondered if a rescue attempt was feasible.

The reply from the security forces was simply that the village was impregnable and the hostages could be killed or caught in the crossfire if a rescue operation were mounted. By this time, the army too had possibly established the location of the hostages. Villagers informed the squad of frequent helicopter surveys over the Warwan and one occasion when the Norwegian Ostro had run out to shout and wave to the aerial patrol. Ostro seemingly had made three clear escape attempts and had since late-July been challenging his kidnappers, provoking them and undermining them at every possible opportunity. By early-August, he had worn his captors’ nerves thin. He was separated from the rest of the party and taken away by the Turk, seemingly with the intent to set him free at some point. On August 13, his decapitated body was found in a pine forest adjoining the road to Pahalgam.

Counter-intelligence was by now proceeding with full vigour. And the instruments of the Indian army’s operations were the “renegades”, or one-time militants who had broken with their outfits to form vigilante groups available for any cause. The Indian army had worked on the rivalry between the Movement and the principal Pakistan-backed militant outfit, the Hizbul Mujahedin, using the conduit of a renegade outfit led by Azad Nabi, or “Alpha”, a past associate of Sikander’s. As the harsh winter set in and the kidnap party was forced to abandon its relatively safe hideout in the Warwan, it was by all accounts, reaching the end of its tether. From the intelligence pieced together by the Kashmir police squad, Alpha seems then to have contacted Sikander to suggest a hostage handover to another renegade element, Abdul Rashid, or the Clerk, following which he could “take a break” and “regroup”. In the third or fourth week of November, the hostages were handed over for a sum of four lakh rupees. Days afterwards, Alpha managed to lure the Turk to a spot near Sikander’s home village, ostensibly for a conclave of militant commanders, where an army ambush lay in wait.

The elimination of the Turk and the army’s triumphal claims that Al Faran had been dismantled, fuelled renewed anxiety – and  speculation -- about the status of the hostages. But the army was not ready yet, to tell the full story, retracting spectacularly within days of this announcement, with the clarification that the Turk and his associates had been eliminated not in a hostage rescue operation, but in the course of a regular cordon-and-search. Contrary again to earlier claims, it said, Al Faran was still active, and had indeed added hundreds of fighters to its ranks to guard the hostages.

The Kashmir police squad believed differently. It was abundantly clear by now that the renegade strategy of turning the loyalties of key militant figures had fetched the army the prized trophy of the Turk. But the strategy had to retain its efficacy and its key executors protected for future deployment. As a witness to the renegade pact with the militants, Sikander’s elimination, the squad estimated, was just a matter of time. And that left only four remaining witnesses who would have reason to tell the story: Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk.

On December 24, 1995, according to an eyewitness the squad traced down, Alpha’s men led the four hostages into a thickly wooded area near the village where they were last held. They were shot and buried there. On February 17, 1996, Sikander was killed, ostensibly when a bomb he was assembling at a house owned by a militant colleague went off.

In a newspaper article written shortly after their book appeared to much critical acclaim, Levy and Scott-Clark speak of a radical change of mood on Kashmir, apparent on both sides of the Line of Control. Where at one time, the compulsion was to win at all costs, today there is a willingness to recognise the need for truth-telling, if Kashmir is to “move on”. For the wider public, memories of the early years of Kashmir’s insurgency have faded in this time and there has indeed been a mutation of the narrative, with the media now blazoning a story of a people willing to shut out the trauma of those years and move on to a future of promise. This book, which relies in ways both acknowledged and otherwise, on the revelations of the police officials who investigated the abductions, should serve as corrective for this dangerous delusion.

India’s motivation then was to portray Pakistan as the cradle of terrorism and global problem state number one. That narrative failed to win much credibility till after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. But now, with more countries and individuals willing to partake of the narrative, Pakistan’s future as a nation-state appears to be at stake. A catastrophic state meltdown in its immediate neighbourhood is clearly an outcome that the architects of India’s strategic response to the Kashmir militancy failed to anticipate. And a sober contemplation of the consequences should be sufficient reason to press ahead with the truth-telling process that this book inaugurates.

http://www.biblio-india.org/showart.asp?inv=3&mp=MJ12 

The Presidency: Game Play Over, Time for Hard Decisions

In the uncertainties of the political world, today’s prophecy is tomorrow’s folly. Game-changer one day, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee was transformed in public perception into a match-fixer the following day, and the big loser shortly afterwards.

Invited to consultations on a possible consensus choice as the next President, Mamata chose to breach the norms of discretion that are observed in such matters. In emerging from her meeting with Congress president Sonia Gandhi and announcing the two names that had been in circulation for at least a month as likely nominees of the party, Mamata only reaffirmed the obvious truth that it is futile to expect any process of high-level political consultations to remain under wraps for long. Her place in the headlines had to wait till a few hours later, when she proposed, after discussions with Mulayam Singh Yadav – another regional politician with immense leverage within the shifting numerical configurations of the Indian parliament – that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a candidate that she could support for President.

Her words threw political analysts into a frenzy of speculation and the Congress leadership into a deep and in many ways revealing, silence. The dramatic impact was not lessened by the two alternative names she put forward: former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, known to be a favoured candidate of the opposition BJP and some of its coalition partners, and former Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee, a CPI(M) stalwart since fallen from grace. Though no reasons were given for her refusal to accede to either of the two names the Congress had fielded -- Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari, in that order of preference – she had taken political cover. Chatterjee’s name was insurance against alienating native Bengali sentiment over her ostensible lack of enthusiasm for Mukherjee’s candidacy. And putting forward Kalam’s name was an obvious bargaining ploy, a thinly veiled warning that she would not hesitate to talk terms with the opposition if the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) continued ignoring her demands.

Mamata’s rather audacious proposition intersected in myriad ways with unstated opinions within the UPA, about the best options for the coalition to find its way out of a chronic state of crisis. That was clearly enough, the reason for the very visible initial disorientation of the Congress leadership. Her numerical clout in Parliament made Mamata a potential game-changer, with decisive power in any close contest. Her very loud suggestion that the Prime Minister who has looked increasingly at sea over the challenges of managing a fractious coalition, should move onto the gilded cage of Rashtrapati Bhavan, cast her as a match-fixer, seeking to bring to fruition agendas that dared not speak their names in the dynastic and personality-centred milieu of the Congress.

In the event, the disorientation of the Mamata moment was followed within twenty-four hours – just long enough for the news cycle to dissect its implications in minute detail – by blinding clarity. After wavering between two names for over a month and gaining the formal mandate of the party to determine who its candidate for president should be, Sonia Gandhi finally made her move. Pranab Mukherjee it was to be. Suddenly with almost mystical precision, the pieces all seemed to fall in place. Mulayam Singh signed on as did Mayawati, his principal rival in the regional context. The match-fixer now looked not merely isolated, but distinctly the loser.

Mamata has rarely in a stormy political career, shown serious discomfiture at adverse portrayals by the media or by political opponents. She reacted in character in her moment of isolation, vowing to fight on. The matter was not settled till the last vote in the presidential election was cast.

The Congress had won one round. It was an election that could potentially have been a bruising affair. And as the party leadership hesitated, squandering any possible strategic advantage it could have gained by quick and decisive action, media pundits were already bringing up images from the 1969 presidential contest, when Indira Gandhi rebelled against the official Congress candidate, preparing the ground for an epochal split in the party. Collective and individual political insecurities of the Congress satraps – and their voluntary thraldom to the “high command” – make a split an unlikely event today. But a large-scale desertion of UPA partners was a distinct possibility, as the Manmohan Singh government flounders in search of a credible response to numerous challenges. And the presidential election could have been a possible trigger for this mass shift of political allegiance.

Pranab Mukherjee’s nomination puts a seasoned political manager – the Congress’s man for every crisis – in line for the most weighty job under the Indian constitution. In that position, he could like the current incumbent, lapse into a phase of near invisibility. But circumstances are more likely to cast him as the decisive player in numerous situations of political uncertainty. His life and career as a staunch man of the party – except for a phase of oblivion during the Rajiv Gandhi years – were doubtless, the reason why the BJP had initial doubts. A man deeply steeped in the affairs of a particular party would likely have a strong partisan streak in him. It is to Mukherjee’s credit that at the moment of his nomination, he was seen more as the conciliator than the partisan.

With the presidency likely to be in the hands of a trusted insider, the Congress would have to turn its attention to numerous challenges, large and small. Ironically, the consensus on Mukherjee came on the precise day that by-election results in Andhra Pradesh were proclaiming the near complete erosion of the Congress’s most secure bastion among the major states. Andhra Pradesh is a state that the Congress won in a landslide in two successive assembly elections and in both 2004 and 2009, victory in Andhra Pradesh was the prelude to convincing performances in general elections to parliament. With the state now slipping out of its grip, the Congress faces the leadership deficit that is the inevitable outcome of years spent under the tutelage of the “high command”.

The line of succession to the party’s top spot remains clear, but the ascent of the presumptive heir is delayed – perhaps indefinitely -- by his continuing failure to make a dent in the politics of the Hindi belt. Yet since this element of the Congress’s destiny is written in stone, there is an active deterrent against the emergence of new and more credible leaders. The only solace for the Congress is the disarray in the BJP, which is perhaps even greater. It is a context in which the so-called “federal front” gains traction as a potential reality of the near future. Even for those who are philosophically reconciled to coalitions as an eternal feature of Indian politics, the “federal front”, which would be an alliance of regional parties without the solid substratum of a national party to bind them together, looks like a recipe for endless instability and misgovernance.

Key here would be the role of the president established through recent convention, to advise and counsel in the defence of constitutional and political propriety. Since the tenures of Shankar Dayal Sharma and K.R. Narayanan, general elections have not thrown up the kind of indecisive outcome that makes presidential discretion a factor. Between 1996 and 1999, three general elections were held and five governments sworn in. There may have been a miscued presidential intervention the first time around, with Sharma inviting by virtual mechanical reflex, the leader of the largest single party to form a government, only to see it fall within days. But the following four governments were sworn in only after sufficient commitments of stability were obtained from the main political actors. That these commitments were not honoured is another matter, which does not reflect on the soundness of the presidential deliberation that preceded.

There have been presidents who have at various times floated plans to deal with such contingencies. But these have seemed to intrude into the domain of executive action and possible political negotiation, instances that have in the judgment of constitutional experts, diminished the office. Instances when the power to counsel has been a salutary restraint on the rush to political excess could be cited in R. Venkatraman declining to sign an amendment to the law on MPs’ compensation in 1991, and in K.R. Narayanan urging the union cabinet to reconsider its advice on president’s rule in Uttar Pradesh, following a factional split within the ruling party in the state in 1997.

As he prepares for a presidential term, which now seems assured failing completely unforeseen political perturbations, Mukherjee would have an ample compilation of constitutional doctrine and practices to draw from. When Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP-led government fell on the basis of a solitary vote in the Lok Sabha in 1999, Narayanan as president deliberated long and hard over all courses open to him. The delay led to some restiveness and open accusations of partisanship by the BJP. The president’s response then was to issue a communiqué seeking to reassure the public that “all valuable comments from across the political spectrum” were being considered, and that “past precedents as well as new circumstances” were being reckoned with. The situation though was “without earlier paradigm in India” and necessitated minute examination.

As the proliferation of regional political forces changes the paradigm of politics in India, Mukherjee’s challenge would be to ensure that constitutional practice does not deviate seriously from the basic model of parliamentary democracy.

Supreme Infallibility and the Follies of the Media


The quest for a world free of error


Perhaps because the media touches several lives, everybody feels entitled to express an opinion on it and offer attentive and solicitous counsel. Or perhaps it is because of all the signs it displays of arrested development, of a failure to grow out of impetuous adolescence into mature adulthood. For these among diverse other reasons, the Indian media has had a surfeit of counsel in recent times on how it should conduct itself, some indulgent, some stern, some acerbic and scolding.


These informal lessons in fidelity to fact and moral rectitude never seemed likely to threaten the relative autonomy of the Indian media. There have been occasions when the social dialogue through the media has led to the perilous possibility of a withdrawal of citizen consent to the State – as with how the media brought home to the news consumer, images of the terrorist siege of southern Mumbai in November 2008 and the Anna Hazare movement of 2011.


Unsurprisingly, in both instances, there were loud murmurs in official circles that statutory regulation over the media was long overdue. Yet the threats were held in abeyance: in the former case, because the media industry brought in what seemed a comprehensive self-regulatory code and mechanisms to enforce it; in the latter, because the ire of elected representatives was easily diverted to the injudicious and intemperate language Anna Hazare’s acolytes had used. The principal offenders were easily identifiable and the role of the media in transmitting and amplifying their message, was forgotten because the political establishment seemed disinclined to open two fronts in the battle to salvage a badly bruised image.


Matters may have remained at this uneasy stalemate had not the media then gone on -- with its boisterous and bumptious conduct -- to irk the highest judicial bench in the country. For reasons that still remain to be studied in depth, the media has been much more deferential towards the authority of the robed eminences in the judiciary than those who muddy themselves seeking to win popular endorsement through the electoral process. In part, this is a reflection of the power to punish for contempt, a weapon that the judiciary holds in reserve, much like legislative privilege remains uncodified and susceptible at all times to arbitrary interpretation.


Despite the deference it has always enjoyed, the Supreme Court decided at some point, that it had just about had enough. This fervour for reforming media practices was provoked by the complaint lodged by a senior Supreme Court lawyer, over reports in February which gave out details of a plan that the finance and real estate conglomerate, Sahara, had submitted to the market regulator – the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) – on how it intended to secure investor interest on a bunch of public deposits. The matter was in appeal before the Supreme Court, following a June 2011 order by SEBI, upheld by the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) in October, ordering Sahara to refund some Rs 17,400 crore to the public after evidence emerged of the deposits being unauthorised and since being diverted to undeclared uses.


As it began hearing the appeal, the Supreme Court was told by the counsel for SEBI, that Sahara had floated a newly minted financial instrument – which it called the optional fully convertible debenture (OFCD) – through two group companies that did not have adequate capital to service liabilities incurred. On January 20, the Supreme Court directed the Sahara group to explain within three weeks how it intended to ensure the security of the funds mobilised. Two options were given: to either furnish a bank guarantee for the sum involved, or set aside a sufficient quantum of otherwise unencumbered assets. Evidently, the Sahara group chose the latter option and set out a list of its assets together with their valuations in a communication to SEBI, which would in the normal course, have found its way to the Supreme Court registry, to be placed before the bench hearing the case.


Sahara felt aggrieved when some details of this supposedly privileged communication were broadcast by a news channel. Petitioned for redress, the Supreme Court sternly reprimanded SEBI for its breach of propriety without really seeking the identity of the offending official. It then went on – without a clear warrant – to seek a written complaint which it intended to use as basis for evolving norms on media reporting of matters under judicial consideration.


From a public interest point of view, the reaction of the Supreme Court was strange and mystifying. Considered in its bare essentials, the Sahara-SEBI matter was one rife with several asymmetries. On one side was a regulator distracted by a multitude of cases in an environment of extreme market volatility and lax standards of corporate accountability. On the other was a corporate entity with a large advertising budget and ample recourse to other forms of “hidden persuasion”: such as a long-term sponsorship deal for the Indian cricket team. At stake were the savings of an estimated 24 million investors who had, on the basis of media reports and the efforts of Sahara’s sales force, chosen to put funds into a savings instrument of uncertain provenance.


When the media narrative is itself, in ever increasing part, constructed under the stimulus of the advertising outlays provided by the corporate sector – and by the undeniable allure of cricket as an environment within which to frame the most lucrative advertisements – there is reason to believe that it may not afford sufficient protection to investor interests. The larger context is of a volatile market where fortunes are made and unmade in days and savings multiplied or wiped out. And within this context, the principal sponsor of Indian cricket had also introduced a financial instrument of rather befuddling complexity, and insisted that it was outside SEBI’s jurisdiction in not being a “security” in any defined sense. The only redress available in the circumstances was a slow-moving judicial process which could ultimately be relied on to do the right thing, but could not secure against potential damage to investor interests in the interim.


Clearly, every glimmer of light in the obscure world of high finance would serve a purpose in raising public awareness. The putative damage that the Sahara cause suffers in the judicial forum is to be offset against the public interest served. Unsurprisingly, while eager to seek restitution for his client, the senior counsel representing Sahara, Fali S. Nariman proved amply sceptical of the judicial ambition to leverage his specific and purely contingent complaint into an overarching set of rules governing the rights of the press. The argument was very simple: press freedom was a guarantee under the fundamental rights and any abridgment proposed in the principle would involve a conflict with the “basic structure” of the constitution. Enacting a specific law for the press moreover, was not within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. To the argument from the bench that the Supreme Court was not embarking upon the path of legislation, but merely laying out a comprehensive set of rules, the riposte was very clear: rules involving punitive sanctions against the press would be equivalent to laws, which were beyond the powers of the Supreme Court to lay down.


By this time, a Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, S.H. Kapadia, had swept up all complaints received about media practice over recent, remembered history and assembled them into a common docket. In August 2011, senior counsel Harish Salve had protested before the Supreme Court about reports appearing over two successive days, which grossly misrepresented his arguments in a matter under active judicial consideration. Appearing for Vodafone in a matter involving potential tax liability after its takeover of the Indian assets of another global telecom player, Hutchison Whampoa, Salve argued that his client had done no more than prudent tax planning or “avoidance”. This had been rendered in reports attributed to the news agency, the Press Trust of India (PTI), as “tax evasion”.


The agency in question responded to the judicial stricture by issuing a retraction and an apology. Informally, the PTI management also sent word that the reporter who had bungled his rendering of the fundamentals of taxation, had been taken off the Supreme Court beat.


Another matter that the Supreme Court chose to resurrect involved senior counsel K.K. Venugopal’s complaint to the bench in January 2010, that his arguments on behalf of a senior bureaucrat whose appointment as Chief Vigilance Commissioner was under judicial review, had been characterised as “absurd” by the Times Now channel. The Supreme Court had asked for a written complaint which was reportedly not submitted following an apology from the news channel.


In resuming its consideration of these seemingly settled matters, the Supreme Court has clearly signalled that ex post remedies – apology, retraction and administrative correction by impugned media organisations – are of little use when media freedom becomes a potential hazard to the administration of justice. What is required, in the perception of the highest judicial bench, is a set of rules that would impose prior conditions on modes of media reporting.


In part because of the expansive scope of the agenda the Supreme Court had taken on, its hearings stepped very rapidly beyond the narrow confines of the grievances of senior lawyers and wealthy corporate litigants. Another family of cases was drawn into the orbit, related explicitly to the rights of individuals facing criminal trials. These included media coverage of the Aarushi Talwar double murder of May 2008, which was seen to have prejudged the guilt of the parents of a murdered child.


Also brought within the hearings was a petition moved against the weekly newsmagazine India Today, for publishing a purported interview with one of the accused in the string of urban terrorist strikes of 2008. The person concerned – who fought the recent municipal elections in Delhi from jail -- had been picked up by the police after the September 2008 “encounter” at Batla House in Delhi, in which two others from his putative “terrorist cell” were eliminated. India Today’s story, which appeared at a time when the arrested person was being denied family access and legal counsel, was seen to be doctored in accordance with the diktat of the police force and to seriously undermine his chance of a fair trial.


The logic of the judicial quest for a media domain free of error, impelled a further expansion of the hearings, into the consideration of a civil society organisation’s petition seeking restraints on the telecast of content with explicit images of sex and violence. Having assembled this unwieldy docket, the Supreme Court was told by a galaxy of senior lawyers that it was engaged in a futile quest. Shanti Bhushan suggested that the most constructive course for the Chief Justice would be to dissolve the bench, as a predecessor, A.N. Ray, had done when his effort to write the doctrine of the “basic structure” out of the constitutional scheme floundered in 1975. Other senior lawyers – Anil Divan and Rajeev Dhavan – were emphatic in underlining the lack of a constitutional mandate for the Supreme Court’s effort to narrowly define and circumscribe Article 19, which guaranteed the right to free speech.


Senior advocates P.P. Rao and K.K. Venugopal provided qualified endorsements of the Supreme Court endeavour. Rao pointed out that the mandate of the Press Council of India (PCI) established the principle of self-regulation by the print media, which needed to be extended to the electronic media. Venugopal offered the opinion that the rights assured by article 19 could conceivably be regarded as less than absolute when there was a perceived conflict with the rights to life and liberty, guaranteed under article 21. The PCI in an institutional intervention, affirmed that the positive value of a code of conduct would stem from its moral rather than punitive force.


A crucial element that was missed out in this ensemble of legal wisdom, is the distinction between prior restraint and post facto correction. Prior restraint of any sort on the right to free speech is considered to be the indispensable prop of an authoritarian political dispensation – indeed as the first step towards censorship. Post facto correction in accordance with clearly defined legal norms, in contrast, is an indispensable element in any democratic system, where liberty is exercised with responsibility.


Unfortunately, just as the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about its intent to introduce a media code, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court issued a decree which seemed suspiciously like a prior restriction. Hearing a petition from ironically enough, a “right to information” activist based in Lucknow, the bench banned any form of media coverage on the January 16 military exercises conducted by units of the Indian army based in Hissar in Haryana and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. These had been reported in an overblown and highly colourable fashion by the Indian Express on April 4, as evidence of serious strife between the military command and the civilian political leadership.


In the furore that ensued after the Indian Express report, the newspaper was held guilty at worst, of extreme gullibility and poor editorial judgment. The source of the alarmist report was identified – accurately by all accounts – in elements within the intelligence services, which had established a dubious alliance with sections of the higher military command to bring down a serving chief of staff of the Indian army. In decreeing its ban on any further reporting on the matter, the Allahabad High Court held that the “issue of movement of Army troops is not a matter of the kind which requires public discussion at the cost of official secrecy and the security of the country”.


The immediate impact of the order was to prohibit considered analysis or reporting on the public spat in the higher military command and its possible ramifications for the integrity of defence procurement decisions. A matter of legitimate public concern, was through a panicky and hyper-sensitive judicial order, rendered into a state secret.


Reactions to the Allahabad High Court order have not rendered the scenario any clearer. PCI Chairman Justice Markandey Katju, resolved to challenge the order in the Supreme Court, but in a talk-show on primetime news -- where he frontally challenged a former army chief, V.P. Malik, to “grow up” -- conceded that it may have merit, even in peacetime, when involving troop movements in border regions.
This picture of what is right and wrong, rendered by the PCI chairman, is rather vacuous because it is innocent of fact. Under a protocol agreed in 1988 to ensure that mutual misconstrual does not end in an outright shooting war, the first agency to be notified of peacetime Indian troop movements on the border would be the Directorate of Military Operations of the Pakistan army. Further, all media reports on troop movements and peacetime military exercises are based on attributable briefings by spokesmen of the defence forces. The Indian Express report of April 4 was a conspicuous exception because of its origin in an unsavoury contest between rival factions seeking to control defence procurement procedures. To ban media content on the matter is to ban legitimate citizen engagement with decisions on defence procurement, made on the backs of loyal taxpayers.


To retain any level of public support for its project to enact a media code, the Supreme Court would need to firmly put down this effort by the Allahabad High Court to silence legitimate debate. That matter though, will not swim within the span of attention of the highest bench, till it is forcibly introduced. And in this legal vacuum, several other modes of silencing legitimate public debate have flourished, which have utilised archaic provisions of the law, such as “official secrets”, “sedition” and various others.


“Reasonable restrictions” on the right to free speech were introduced under the first amendment to the Indian constitution. Yet till date, there is no clear or consistent norm laid down by the judiciary on how “reasonableness” is to be assessed. In this conceptual vacuum, a variety of abuses have flourished against legitimate press reporting and exercises of the right to free speech.


In June 2008, the commissioner of police in the city of Ahmedabad, brought charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy against two journalists and the Times of India. This followed a series of reports in the newspaper, noting serious complaints against the newly appointed police official and indicating that the inconclusive inquiries that had followed, made him ineligible for the top post in the city. The two journalists and the publisher were granted bail pending the full hearing of the case. Evidently, the purpose of the aggrieved police official was not to punish, but to silence the public discourse. It was a form of censorship through legal injunction, which the Gujarat High Court, as this article goes to press, has quashed, though the longer term implications remain to be determined.


K.K. Shahina, then a reporter with the weekly news magazine Tehelka, was charged with criminal conspiracy to intimidate witnesses, after a story she published cast doubt at the prosecution of a prominent Islamic cleric and political figure on terrorism charges in December 2010. Shahina’s story was based on interviews with key witnesses cited in the case made by Karnataka state police against Abdul Nasar Mahdani, an Islamic cleric who heads the Peoples’ Democratic Party, active mainly in neighbouring Kerala. Mahdani has been arrested and charged by Karnataka police for conspiracy to detonate a series of low-intensity bombs in Bengaluru city in July 2008. Shahina’s story cited several of the witnesses named by the Karnataka police as saying that their testimony has been misinterpreted or distorted in making out the charges against Mahdani. An example of investigative reporting in short, was transformed into the basis for criminal prosecution against the journalist who had done the hard work to bring this abuse of power to light.


In May 2011, Tarakant Dwivedi, alias Akela, then a reporter with Mumbai city’s morning tabloid, Midday, was arrested under India’s Official Secrets Act, after he reported on poor security conditions in the metropolis’ main railway terminus. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (referred to in common local parlance as VT), a hub of both suburban and long-distance railway traffic, was among the first targets to be hit in the terrorist attack on Mumbai that began on November 26, 2008. Soon afterwards, the Government Railway Police (GRP), tasked with maintaining security at all major facilities of the Indian Railways, procured an array of sophisticated weaponry to deal with extreme future contingencies. On June 28, 2010, the daily Mumbai Mirror published a report under Akela’s byline, headlined “Leaks in CST armoury put new anti-terror arms under threat”. The report documented how newly procured equipment was being stored in a room with a leaky roof, making their efficacy in an emergency situation highly questionable. Akela’s arrest, itself conducted under highly suspicious circumstances, was believed to be direct retribution for this reporting.


Silencing the media discourse is not so much the issue here, as allowing it more freedom and space. When the judiciary proves unable to curb censorship through criminal prosecution of public-spirited journalism, but shows inordinate concern over its own image as projected through the media, it ceases being an institution acting for the larger good. And it could well take into account the dictum that the only remedy for the abuse of free speech is to allow even freer speech. There is no better antidote to the irresponsible exercise of free speech by the corporate media than to accord the right to those denied it.

Religion, Nationalism and the State

Cease the Hostile Rhetoric Against Sri Lanka’s Journalists

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and other global press freedom bodies have strongly condemned the escalation in hostile rhetoric against some of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists and human rights defenders.

Suffused with dire threats of reprisal, the rhetoric has risen several scales since the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva adopted a resolution on March 22, censuring Sri Lanka for possible war crimes during the last phase of its long civil war and underlining the need for credible steps towards reconciliation between the country’s main ethnic groups. Amplified through the state-controlled media, this chorus of denunciation, could pose a clear and present danger to the physical security of the many journalists who courageously argue the case for national reconciliation.

Similar such outbursts of verbal aggression contributed to a wave of attacks and a climate of intimidation so severe that several of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists went into exile during the first half of 2009, as the civil war entered its final phase.

On March 23, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Public Relations, Mervyn Silva addressed a public demonstration against the UNHRC resolution, threatening to “break the limbs” of any of the exiled journalists should they set foot in the country. Among the journalists mentioned was Poddala Jayantha, who suffered a brutal assault in Colombo city in June 2009, leaving him with permanent disabilities. General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association at the time, Jayantha and has lived in exile since January 2010.

Silva has been known for several bruising encounters with the media in recent years and was in July 2009, reported to have publicly claimed credit for “fixing” both Jayantha and Lasantha Wickramatunge, the Sunday Leader editor murdered in January that year. Though he later disavowed the statement, Silva’s record as a media baiter has always caused deep unease. In what seemed a deliberate affront to journalists, President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2010 appointed him Deputy Minister for Mass Media and Information, before a storm of protests compelled his transfer to another portfolio.

Government officials seemingly began the latest phase of verbal warfare when the possibility emerged early this year that Sri Lanka’s dismal human rights record could lead to international censure and the withdrawal of trade concessions. On January 26, senior minister Keheliya Rambukwella was quoted in Dinamina, the Sinhala-language daily from the state-owned Associated Newspapers (or Lake House) group, describing exiled journalists campaigning for human rights and reconciliation as “traitors” who were bringing the country into “disrepute”.

Later, the English-language daily from the Lake House group, the Daily News, reported that human rights defenders, including press freedom campaigner Sunanda Deshapriya, were betraying Sri Lanka and continuing to work with the terrorist rump of the defeated Tamil insurgent group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In an editorial on March 16, Dinamina described human rights defenders as “degenerates” and denounced Deshapriya as a “mouthpiece of the LTTE”. It warned that in a country like Iran, “these kinds of bastards would be stoned to death”.

Veteran media trade unionist Dharmasiri Lankapeli has been targeted by the state-owned media in attacks that have become particularly harsh since the country’s main professional associations and journalists’ bodies joined hands for a “black January” observance this year, to protest against the continuing climate of impunity for attacks on free speech. The attacks have also extended to social scientists and political commentators such as P. Saravanamuttu, Nimalka Fernando and Sunila Abeysekara, and prominent figures of the church who have argued for national reconciliation. The IFJ has learnt that vivid photo-montages have been circulated by various political actors, which represent journalists and other prominent human rights defenders as terrorists and traitors, working at the behest of alien forces.

The dangers are clear and imminent and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has issued a public warning against reprisals that target Sri Lanka’s journalists and human rights defenders.

Evidence has recently emerged from the citizen journalism website Wikileaks, of high-level culpability in some of the worst atrocities against the media during Sri Lanka’s civil war. In January 2006, S. Sukirtharajan, a photographer with the Tamil daily from Colombo, Sudar Oli¸ was shot dead by assailants on motorcycles, just days after he published photographs suggesting that five Tamil students found dead in the eastern city of Trincomalee had been victims of an execution by state security agencies. A cable from the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka at the time has now come to light, which records Basil Rajapaksa, brother and senior advisor to the President, expressing his belief that the “Special Task Force” of the Sri Lankan military carried out the killing of the five students.

Sukirtharajan was probably killed because he got the story right.

In August 2006, the Jaffna office of the Tamil daily Uthayan – part of the same group as Sudar Oli – was attacked with fire bombs and seriously damaged. As narrated to the U.S. ambassador by Basil Rajapaksa, this attack was in all probability carried out by the Sri Lankan Navy, in league with a Tamil political party that is close allied with President Rajapaksa.

The report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), a body appointed by President Rajapakse, was published late-2011 and offers certain compelling observations in the limited space it devotes to media freedom. It records that it has been “deeply disturbed” by persisting reports, even after the end of the war, about “attacks and obstacles placed on journalists and media institutions”. These difficulties have been experienced even by “news websites”. Taking note of a record of murderous violence against journalists, the LLRC remarks that the failure to “conclusively” investigate and bring “perpetrators” to justice does little credit to the Sri Lankan government.

The LLRC’s recommendations include the recognition of the “pivotal role” that “freedom of expression and (the) right to information”, play in “any reconciliation process”. “Restrictions placed on media freedom”, the LLRC records, “would only contribute to an environment of distrust and fear within and among ethnic groups”. The five specific actions that the LLRC urges, include “deterrent punishment” against those who attack media personnel and institutions; the proper investigation of such incidents from the past; the assurance that media personnel would have freedom of movement through the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka, which bear the deepest scars of the war; and the enactment of a law protecting the right to information.

The IFJ and its global partners conclude with extreme regret that the Sri Lankan government’s continuing disregard of these wise counsels of moderation, suggest not a desire for national reconciliation, but its very opposite.

Judicial Populism and Political Expediency: How the Quest for Virtue has Damaged Institutional Integrity

In the early years of what is today called the “European enlightenment”, the political philosopher Montesquie famously identified “virtue” – or respect for the law – as the widely shared spirit within a society that made democracy as a system of governance possible. Even if widely shared, virtue is a frail and delicate attribute, which needs to be securely enshrined in institutions that would be immune to abuse. Virtue would surely perish if power were to be exercised arbitrarily and the law abused. And since excessive power, vested in any individual or institution is the surest road to the collapse of democracy, the separation of powers is essential to safeguard virtue. Every institution of governance would enjoy autonomy within its own realm, but no licence to intrude into another’s territory. In their mutual independence and adversarial tension, the executive, legislature and judiciary would ensure a system of administration that upheld the sovereignty – and nurtured the virtue -- of the citizen.

Indian democracy seems set on a rather different course. Virtue is seen not as a widely held attribute but the monopoly of a chosen few. Far from honouring the separation of powers, legislature, judiciary and executive are seen, in a self-serving and sordid deal, to be making accountability the principal casualty.

The Anna Hazare movement, which caused spasms of anxiety in the political establishment through three visitations in 2011, was a powerful representation of elite disgruntlement at the state of governance. Its dominant motif was a forthright sense of disdain, loudly proclaimed, at the functioning of the institutions of representative democracy. And its programme was to secure democracy against a reign of iniquity by endowing the virtuous few with powers that trumped all others.

Anna Hazare promised messianic deliverance from the difficulties ordinary people face. But the sea refused to part as his chosen people were led to the water’s edge and the constituency for messianism remains unappeased. The residual impact still remains on the institutions of governance, which feel compelled to respond to the elite clamour by making sweeping decisions that jump across institutional boundaries.

The recent Supreme Court ruling assigning culpability for the abuse of power in the gift-wrapping of a valuable public resource – the telecom spectrum – for a clutch of companies of dubious credentials, addressed questions of political accountability in a rather strange fashion. While identifying the individual who held the telecom portfolio in the Union Cabinet at the time, the Supreme Court bench absolved the Prime Minister of all blame. It did however, censure the Prime Minister’s office for the numerous acts of omission and commission that contributed to the epic scandal.

This lesson in political morality abounds in curiosities. It shreds the principle of collective responsibility which is a fundamental premise of the Cabinet system of governance. And in this respect, it holds out a lifeline to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has for long taken the alibi that “coalition compulsions” prevent effective oversight over ministerial malfeasance. It was a rather weak argument but one that found traction with sections of the media that seemed anxious to protect Manmohan Singh, as his credibility went into free fall following a severe indictment of the spectrum sale by the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG).

Viewed dispassionately, Manmohan Singh’s alibi would appear to be a gigantic evasion. The rules of engagement in a coalition government, he was in effect arguing, involved granting every partner a certain degree of latitude. By implication, even if there was a gross abuse of power, individual rather than collective responsibility would apply.

If coalition compulsions necessitate a dilution of the principle of collective responsibility within the Union Cabinet, the Prime Minister’s office clearly is a very different kind of space. This is where the Prime Minister enjoys the virtually untrammelled privilege of nominating key aides and officials. In holding the Prime Minister guiltless in the abuses that his handpicked staff colluded in, the Supreme Court constructs yet another peculiar notion of political accountability.

The spirit that suffuses the Supreme Court’s recent findings on the 2G scam is expediency rather than principle. That same attitude was evident in the intervention of P. Chidambaram, then the Union Finance Minister, who for long insisted that an auction involving all those seeking to launch second-generation (or 2G) telecom services would be the right procedure, but then acquiesced in the decision made by a Cabinet colleague, to sell the spectrum in terms of a dubious “first come first served” policy. In a recorded minute in his hand, he urged then that the matter be treated as “closed”. Chidambaram was in other words, disinclined to enter into conflict with a Cabinet colleague, because the consequences could possibly destabilise the ruling coalition.

A judicial forum is no place to settle questions of political morality. The Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the allocation of blame in the 2G scandal, honour this principle. But they also explicitly endorse the dubious construction of political morality – in terms of its limitations in a context of coalition governance – that has emerged from the government of the day. They seek to offset these expedient concessions to the morality deficit of the Manmohan Singh government, by decreeing with a self-righteous flourish, the cancellation of all telecom licences granted under the 2G spectrum allocation.

Even those absolutely convinced of the righteousness of the decision must harbour a certain disquiet at the manifest failure of due process here. The Supreme Court has basically rendered a judgment that penalises entities that were not named in the petition it was hearing, without so much as giving them the opportunity to be heard.

Summary justice, for a constituency that seeks messianic deliverance, may seem the need of the hour, when political institutions have loudly proclaimed their failure. Above all, this is a failure of credible oppositional politics. Political morality is determined within the realm of politics, in the contestation between ruling and opposition factions. Since the first whiff of the 2G scandal, the political opposition has been seeking extraordinary remedies. It paralysed the functioning of Parliament when the ruling benches refused to institute a joint committee to investigate the 2G scandal before a thorough debate on the CAG report. It has since sought to shelter behind the maverick effort by Subramanian Swamy, a renowned political adventurer with distinctly dubious political commitments, to enforce morality through the courts.

That effort suffered a setback with a Delhi court refusing Swamy’s insistent plea to sanction the criminal prosecution of Chidambaram, the incumbent Union Home Minister. The trajectory however, has been set, and the opposition is unlikely to retreat from its confrontational posture, which sinks politics into further odium.

The unappeased constituency for messianism clearly, is unlikely to sit back and allow this dubious political morality play to proceed. A swift resumption of the elite rebellion against representative politics is virtually foretold. And this quest for a virtuous order free of all irksome burdens of representative democracy, is likely to inflict lasting damage. In place of a detested political order, this uprising of the privileged will substitute a regime of absolute authoritarianism.

Syria in Turmoil: Prelude to Wider Battles in the Arab World

Early February, the U.N. Security Council’s effort to stamp its approval on an Arab League peace plan for Syria foundered on the dual veto of Russia and China. Fears were freely expressed that Syria was sliding towards civil war. Using terms rarely heard in recent diplomatic exchanges, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. vented her “disgust” at the collusion in the Syrian bloodbath of two global powers. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced the stance of the two Security Council recalcitrants as a “travesty”. “Freedom-loving” people everywhere, she declared, should join the effort to sustain and arm the Syrian liberation struggle.

By the standards of the last two decades, this has been a rare moment of discord among the Security Council grandees. Yet, the breakdown of the oppressive consensus that allowed the U.S. and its allies to interpret every U.N. resolution in a manner of their convenience was long foretold.

Estimates of the number of casualties caused by the year-long turmoil in Syria, even as the U.N. Security Council broke up in acrimony, stood at between 6,000 and 7,500. Of these, between a quarter and a fifth were thought to have been from the ranks of the state security forces. It was disproportionate warfare, but not quite as bad as the U.S. war in Iraq, which has killed just under 5,000 U.S. servicemen, while claiming upwards of a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians, not to mention an untold number of those who could be classified as “insurgents”. Yet the grim statistics from Syria would establish that civil war is very much the accomplished reality there, not merely the potential outcome of a failure to intervene.

A Conflict Without Witness

Syria’s civil war is a conflict without witness. Information has been sporadic and images sparse, allowing no basis for a considered judgment. The global community sees images of a country in turmoil with ordinary people fearful for their lives and no longer sure of their daily routines. The dominant global narrative puts this down to the desperate effort by the Syrian regime to suppress a wholly legitimate upsurge of political protests. Harsh repression has turned a peaceful mass movement into an urban guerilla operation, with poorly organised but highly motivated groups of partisans seeking to bring to account the seemingly eternal dictatorship of the al-Assad dynasty.

Inured to a high degree of control over citizen loyalty and having for long trusted in repression as a fair alternative to widening the circle of consent, the al-Assad regime for its part has responded to the new realities by striking heavy hammer blows at civilian centres, often targeting entire urban populations for collective punishment, as in the city of Homs. The strategy has served the regime well at least once before in its tortured existence, when Hafez al-Assad – father of the current president -- suppressed a revolt by the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (or Muslim Brotherhood) in the city of Hama in 1982 by calling in the air-force and the artillery to reduce it to rubble.

President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has in recent months responded to the new imperatives of openness, by taking out a few conducted tours for international journalists. These have been, unsurprisingly, tailored towards reinforcing the picture the regime has constructed, of a heroic homeland of Arab civilisational glory under siege from malevolent neighbours serving the agenda of a distant imperialist power. This account holds the attack on Syrian sovereignty as the desperate acts of isolated saboteurs who have infiltrated from hostile neighbouring states such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Those of infirm loyalty are wreaking their vengeance on Syria for its steadfast leadership of the “resistance front” which opposes a dishonourable Arab peace with Israel.

It would be reckless to deny the elements of truth in this story-line, though Syrian leadership of the “resistance front” has not been untainted by a number of sordid deals with Israel and the U.S. The incitement in Syria moreover, does not come from the near neighbourhood, since Jordan and Lebanon, strategically vulnerable and small, are merely staging posts for a wider game. Syria is now the cockpit of a large-scale collision of interests which obviously involves the U.S., because it is difficult for the global superpower to stay out of any intrigue in the Arab world. But with its capacity for direct intervention compromised since getting tangled up in a no-win situation in Iraq, the U.S. has to implement its diktat through proxies, with all the possible dilution in strategic intent that this involves. This accounts for the sudden metamorphosis of the Arab League – a decrepit body of squabbling potentates that has failed virtually every serious test of credibility in the recent and distant past – into a body that pretends to have the capacity to deal with the Syrian crisis.

A New Reactionary Blend

Behind the new and manifest sense of purpose of the Arab League is the growing insecurity of its richest regimes, which now find themselves strategically constricted, by the legacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the wave of popular rebellion sweeping the Arab world. The blend of military authoritarianism and Islamic orthodoxy, the ideological confection devised to stem the tide of rebellion, has proved of rather dubious efficacy. A whole year after the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship was toppled, with elections conducted and the Muslim Brotherhood securely entrenched as the most significant political force in the country, Egypt continues to be restive. Popular calls for overturning the military oligarchy and turning over real power to the people have been rebuffed by the Muslim Brotherhood, wedging further apart the diverse elements of the coalition that drove the Mubarak dictatorship out.

Unable to summon up sufficient resources of political legitimacy, the Egyptian military has conjured up an alliance with the Islamic parties, unleashing animosities along numerous other axes. Bitter street battles in October killed dozens among the country’s Christian minority as the state-owned media cheered the rioters on. And the football riots of early February furnish a sharper insight into the Egyptian army’s strategy of securing for itself a pivotal role by fomenting civil strife on a vast scale. As the first anniversary of the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt came around on February 14, a tense standoff was in evidence between the Islamic parties now in the ascendant and other parties that are insistent on an end to military tutelage over the political transition.

Neighbouring Libya, which has dropped out of the international headlines since the grisly lynching of longtime dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi and the public display of his decaying corpse, remains in a state of indecision and uncertainty. Squabbling tribal groupings have staked claims to sovereign enclaves and revenge attacks continue against those suspected of residual loyalty to the older regime.

For the many months in 2011 that the uprising against Muammar al-Gaddafi raged, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other allies among the cabal of oil-rich kingdoms, managed to keep their sponsorship of the rebellion a relatively well-guarded secret. The western powers soon stepped in, expansively interpreting a U.N. resolution as a mandate for offensive air sorties and political assassination. It was only after final victory was declared with Gaddafi’s murder that Qatar stepped up to claim responsibility in moral and material terms for sustaining the rebellion.

Democracy is a hazard that the oil sheikhs have taken ample precaution to safeguard themselves from. In March 2011, the movement for reforms in Bahrain was brutally crushed in a joint military operation directed by the reigning monarch and the Saudi Arabian dynasty. And the political reforms proposed by a subsequent inquiry into the unrest remain unimplemented for fear of the precedent that would create for the absolute power of sheikhs elsewhere. There was perhaps no inherent element of sectarianism in the Arab uprisings that began early in 2011. But the opportunism visible in abundant measure from the oil sheikhs has brought the sectarian element to the foreground, where it merges with a wider strategic rivalry between Shi’a Iran and the Gulf kingdoms. In turn, this factor compounds older sources of instability arising from the Palestinian issue and the implosion of Iraq as a state following the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Syria as Arab Recalcitrant

If Libya can be allowed to fester in anarchy and disorder, Egypt presents a very different picture, merely because it is the largest Arab country and borders Israel, the indispensable pivot of western strategy in the region. Syria is likewise of crucial strategic consequence as a frontline state with Israel, with a long unresolved territorial issue over the Golan heights, but also because it is a flank of the Arab world through which a deep fissure runs. That fissure in the Arab world could be papered over, even through years of Syrian support for Iran when it fought a brutal war with Iraq. But it has since the U.S. occupation of Iraq, acquired strategic dimensions that could spell potential danger for the entire Arab world’s sense of identity.

As he surveys the horizon from his besieged perch in Damascus, the Syrian President may find an element of comfort from the stated position of the Iraqi government that it will not be party to any manner of punitive actions against Syria. This is a significant change in strategic equations since Iraq and Syria could be counted on, all through the years that they were divided by the shared ideology of Ba’ath socialism, to oppose each other in every matter of consequence. Syria’s reward in 1991 for standing by and watching Iraq being pummelled into the stone age by the U.S. and its allies, was the tacit, though provisional recognition of Lebanon as its exclusive sphere of influence. It was a status that Syria had worked hard to win, beginning with its brutal suppression at U.S. and Israeli behest, of Palestinian freedom fighters based in Lebanon in 1976.

Syria has not in the eyes of the Palestinian liberation movement yet requited its guilt. Its patronage of the Hamas Islamic resistance, as against the Fatah movement favoured by the Gulf Arab states, has deepened the suspicion with which it is viewed in some circles. And in Lebanon, the growth of the Shi’a Hezbollah under its benign gaze has compounded its image as an Arab recalcitrant.

Matters may yet have settled into a permanent state of mutual suspicion had the turmoil in Iraq following the U.S. invasion, not led to a significant accretion to Iran’s strategic influence within the country. And when the new Iraqi constitution was promulgated in 2005, with its pronounced bias towards decentralisation and its provisions for sub-national regions to be constituted with a high degree of autonomy, there were serious worries in the Gulf states that the “Arab character” of the country was at stake, that indeed, Iraq could be taken permanently out of the Arab orbit.

Lebanon had meanwhile become another theatre of confrontation and the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005 caused an upwelling of sentiment that compelled Syria to withdraw its forces from the country. But Syria has continued to wield enormous clout through the Hezbollah, which had gained sufficient military capability to compel Israel’s withdrawal from a self-proclaimed security zone in 2000 and to repulse a massive Israeli air and artillery attack in 2006.

The Gulf kingdoms are aware that they need to neutralise the appeal that Syria retains by virtue of its supposed monopoly over the spirit of resistance in the Arab world. Syria’s principal constituency among the Palestinians, the Hamas Islamic movement, recently concluded a treaty with the Fatah movement, actively brokered by Qatar. Considerably discomfited by the developments in Egypt, Israel denounced the new alignment as a fatal blow to the prospects of renewed peace negotiations. The top leadership of Hamas, despite their dependence on Syrian patronage, then undertook a tour of Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all states seen to be ranged on the opposite side. But to ensure that it would not be accused of turning its back on more steadfast allies, the Hamas leader from Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh also visited Tehran and obtained an undertaking of continuing support from Iran.

The New Player: Turkey

This is just one among several rearrangements that have occurred on the Arab strategic chessboard in recent months. In Iraq, Vice-President Tareq al-Hashmi, leader of the Sunni bloc in the governing coalition in Baghdad, fled to the Kurdish region in the north of the country, after his arrest was ordered by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on charges of running death squads that carried out a number of political assassinations. Al-Hashmi has lived ever since in the northern town of Sulaimaniyah, under the protection of the Kurdish regional government dominated by Massood Barzani and his allied clans. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s tribe – which competes with Barzani for influence in the Kurdish region -- has endorsed the charges made against al-Hashmi and ordered that he be handed over to the authorities in Baghdad for trial.

These developments are all deeply immersed in the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And to complicate the scenario, a powerful third element has entered the picture in the shape of Turkey. Al-Hashmi has made it clear that he will seek refuge in Turkey if the Kurdish regional government in Iraq is compelled to withdraw the safe haven he now enjoys. This speaks of a new manner of relationship being forged within the region between Turkey and the sub-national Kurdish unit in Iraq, a strategic offset that Iraq’s Kurds are fashioning to growing Iranian influence over the Shi’a south.

For Turkey, which has for long fought an insurgency against its own Kurdish minority, this is a rather strange place to be in. Indeed, fearful of the consequences for its own internal stability, Turkey has for long bitterly opposed any hint of autonomy for Iraq’s Kurdish regions. But the shifting strategic alignments in the region now mean that it has to go beyond older formulae and seek advantage in an accommodation of convenience with the sub-national Kurdish unit in Iraq.

At least for the first six months of the uprising in Syria, Turkey was allied with the al-Assad regime, seeking stability on its eastern flank rather than an unending cycle of violence. But a flow of refugees into its territory may have set off calculations of strategic advantage, leading to a change of tone by about October 2011. Turkey then moved rapidly to garner the moral advantage of allying with the uprising in Syria, imposing unilateral sanctions on the regime and closing its territory for arms traffic into the country.

The two-way strategic contest between Iran and the Gulf states was in quick time transformed into a three-cornered competition, with the Kurdish region of Iraq, home to some of the country’s richest oilfields, a potential ally of Turkey. The Syrian regime has a comfort zone in the territorial continuum stretching through the Shi’a south of Iraq to Iran. It could also use its allies in Lebanon to send out a message to the Gulf states and the west. And any manner of activism by Hezbollah today would probably draw a response from Israel.

The atmosphere is not rendered any more congenial by the loud thinking currently underway in Israel about the most opportune time to mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear assets. While publicly distancing itself from the Israeli war talk, the U.S. has also been sending out a signal that it would be powerless to restrain Israel from unilateral action. The Gulf Arab states have stayed out of this conversation but Saudi Arabia was revealed in 2010, in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables exposed by the Wikileaks website, to have called for “smashing the head of the Iranian serpent” through a quick surgical strike against its nuclear facilities.

Iran for its part has responded to the rhetoric by vowing to hit at U.S. and Israeli interests at any place of its choice. With powerful and well-armed proxies in Iraq and Lebanon – not to mention Afghanistan – few would doubt Iran’s capacity to deliver on the promise. Clearly, the Syrian civil war is not merely about that country any more. If it continues for any further length of time, it could draw in virtually every country of consequence in the wider region. In this, it could well be the prelude to a civil war involving the entire Arab world. And that would be potentially, a fatal challenge to the key principles of western geopolitics in the region: to keep Iran out, Arab nationalism down and Israel on top.