The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

EDITORIALS

Helpful, if not hopeful

DAY One of President Pervez Musharraf’s visit has breathed some life into the summit meeting. Off he has gone to Agra as has Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee with less pessimism and lesser despondency. Media reports from across the border had suggested that Pakistan had stepped up its hawkish rhetoric, rejecting the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration as mere scraps of paper, postponing the visit of the Indian DGMO (Director-General of Military Operations) and contemptuously describing all pre-summit gestures from this country as peripheral. That was being unfair if not hostile to the very aim of writing a new chapter or creating history, as the General said. On the first day of the three-day meeting, the visiting side worked overtime to clarify the situation. Pakistan Foreign Secretary Inamul Haq told the media that President Musharraf had merely said that the two earlier pacts had not produced results and the two countries should seek a different framework. The DGMO will be invited later and the so-called peripheral issues found a surprising mention in the Pakistan President’s banquet speech at Rashtrapati Bhavan. All this shows that either the media has horribly gone wrong or the visiting party is setting matters in a new perspective. Clearly, the second assumption carries greater weight.

There were some more compelling signals. President Musharraf wrote in the visitors’ book at Rajghat that never before was the need for nonviolence and peace greater than now. Is he the same Kargil architect or one hard pressed to set the neighbourly relations on an even keel? The suppressed peace-seeker in him peeped out again in the evening when he met the Hurriyat leaders. He asked them to be flexible, pledged support to the people of Kashmir (and not just to the Hurriyat) and, this is the key to his thinking, declared that there could be no military solution to the Kashmir problem, but only a negotiated one. Something unexpected happened at the President’s banquet. Both Mr K.R. Narayanan and his guest brought in Mohammed Ali Jinnah in a different context but to drive home the same message. The Indian President admitted that there is an unfinished agenda of Partition but it is not Kashmir as Pakistan incessantly says, but establishing friendly relations between the two countries. This is what the founder of Pakistan actually said immediately after the country came into being. The visiting President quoted Jinnah again to make the same point but from a speech he made in New Delhi a few days before he flew to Karachi. Now speeches are written days before and it proves that there is a broad consensus on normal ties in the bureaucratic and political circles. All this is helpful if not exactly hopeful. An assessment of Indo-Pakistan relations has to be laced with cautious optimism. And the Agra summit warrants a good dose of it.

B’desh: waiting for new govt

BANGLADESH is in the process of perfecting an interesting system of holding a general election. When a government completes its five-year term it makes way for a caretaker regime and Parliament is dissolved. Thus, in accordance with this constitutional practice the Sheikh Hasina government has gone and new Parliament members are to be elected within 90 days by the caretaker government headed by Chief Justice Latifur Rahman (retd). However, for the interim regime this time it is going to be a more difficult task than it was in 1991 and 1996, when Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed (today President of the country) and Justice Habibur Rahman, respectively, looked after the transitional arrangement. Bangladesh is faced with a crippling economic crisis and passions are running high. An indication of what may happen between now and the day of election was available on Friday when the four-party opposition alliance led by Begum Khaleda Zia's BNP observed the day as the end of the "autocratic rule" and took out a midnight march and the ruling group headed by Sheikh Hasina's Awami League began what it called "Democracy Festival". The result was countrywide violence in which at least 10 persons lost their lives and hundreds suffered serious injuries. Any laxity on the law and order front may paralyse the system throughout the country.

Justice Latifur Rahman, who heads the interim government as Chief Adviser, will have to grapple with the situation in a firm manner, the only way to effectively immobilise the law-breakers operating as party workers. A large number of party workers and sympathisers belonging to the two leading alliances are in possession of illegal arms. Unless these "political terrorists" are brought to book and their arms and ammunition are seized, it may not be possible to hold peaceful elections. The interim administration's moves in this respect will be watched with anxiety. At a massive rally last Monday Begum Khaleda Zia had made two demands, in her opinion essential to ensure smooth and peaceful polling. One is that local observers should be allowed inside polling stations and the other is that the army be accorded judicial powers for the purpose. Sheikh Hasina is opposed to the first demand and her argument is that this will lead to lawlessness at the polling booths. Who is right or wrong is not the question. The problem is that the interim regime may be accused of sympathising with either of the two political alliances, threatening the efficacy of the fragile system. So far as the issue of judicial powers for the army is concerned, the Awami League leader wants the troops to be deployed at the polling stations but under civilian authority. The serious decline in the law and order shows that the use of the armed forces is unavoidable for a peaceful conduct of the elections.

OPINION

What happened to panchayati raj reforms
People’s movement need of the hour
C. Narendra Reddy

THE high hopes with which the 73rd Constitution Amendment Bill giving statutory backing to panchayati raj institutions was passed in 1992 by Parliament and had been made effective after endorsement by the states from April 24,1993, are already drying up. Three major reasons can be cited for this state of affairs. Firstly, the five-tier territorial constituency system for the panchayati raj set-up that it introduced has been found to have inherent structural weaknesses. Secondly, the practice of forming user- groups that have the support of the World Bank has created an alternative power structure for decision making and resource allocation at the grassroots level. Thirdly, the devolution of financial resources to the panchayati raj institutions by the state governments has been lethargic because of severe resources crunch they themselves are facing. If the contradictions presented by these factors are not sorted out, it might cripple the panchayat system altogether.

The manifesto issued by the Telugu Desam Party on the eve of elections to panchayati raj institutions in the middle of July has blamed the Congress party for its volte-face over the unanimous resolution that had been passed by the state assembly to revert back to the earlier three-tier system. All the parties had agreed that the experience of running the five-tier system in the last five years has been dismal. The system of separate territorial constituencies for middle and district-level panchayats and indirect elections to the presidents of these bodies, as the Telugu Desam Party manifesto rightly points out, has made them powerless in the discharge of onerous responsibilities thrust on them.

The Congress party leaders in the states are blaming Mr Mani Shankar Iyer, who never had any experience about the working of panchayats, for wrongly advising Rajiv Gandhi then and Mrs Sonia Gandhi now on the panchayati raj legislation. The most funny fact of the matter, however, is that the legislation had been screened by the Standing Committee of Parliament and approved by all the state legislatures. In their eagerness to breadth a new life into otherwise dying panchayati raj institutions, Parliament and the state legislatures had obviously overlooked the systemic defects in the new system they had approved.

The only states that had fully backed the five-tier system were West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. The Chief Ministers, Mr Jyoti Basu and Mr Digvijay Singh, had their ulterior motives. The new system had increased the number of paid elected representatives from territorial constituencies by more than 10 times. These paid elected members may not have any powers or responsibilities but they are available for party work. In the states where there is dominance of a single party, by capturing the panchayats they could feed their cadres from government coffers. It goes to the credit of Mr.Chandrababu Naidu that though his party had a decisive advantage, he had tried till the end to influence the Centre to bring about changes to the 73rd Constitution Amendment to revert back to the three-tier system.

The weaknesses in the panchayati raj structure has made some of the state governments like Andhra Pradesh to promote what is called the user groups. This has emerged as parallel centres of power and distribution of resources. The formation of these user groups for water management, managing educational institutions, executing small irrigation projects and women’s thrift and production groups got a boost because the World Bank has been actively supporting them. The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, has been boasting that the other states have been following his example of forming user groups. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mr Rajnath Singh, who had visited Andhra Pradesh in June, had publicly acknowledged the need to promote the user groups at the grassroots level. The World Bank is funding district poverty initiative projects in both these states.

The formation of user groups or common interest groups would weaken the panchayati raj institutions unless they are integrated and subordinated to panchayati raj institutions. But the World Bank has laid some conditionalities for that. The World Bank has clearly stated (Report No. PID 8323) that “ Some of the criteria for judging the inclusiveness of gram panchayats and for accepting their participation in the project’s investment programme would be: (a) the level of transparency and flow of information in relation to the budget and development programmes to all residents of the gram sabha; (b) the frequency of gram sabha meetings and the degree of participation by the poor; (c) the adult literacy rate, especially among women; (d) child labour and school drop-out rates among children; and (v) key elements of the track record of the sarpanch in promoting inclusiveness in social and economic activities.”

The World Bank must have been prompted by the reports of large scale leakage of funds in placing conditions for utilising the panchayati raj institutions in the developmental schemes at the grassroots level. That would be placing the cart before the horse. The right course would be as suggested by social workers in Rajasthan like Magsasay Award winner Aruna Roy to enact the right to information legislation in all the states and to encourage transparency in accounts. The Planning Commission in their mid-term appraisal of the Ninth Plan has expressed the hope that the relationship between the user groups and the elected panchayats will become stronger though at present the link is “somewhat tenuous”.

If an outside agency having funds at its disposal like the World Bank is suspicious of panchyats, the state governments that are facing serious resources crunch are even more cautious in transferring functions and funds to panchayats. The exceptions are Kerala and Madhya Pradesh. But pressure is building up in other states from elected panchayats to transfer schemes and the necessary finances to them. In the case of Andhra Pradesh, for example, Mr Chandrababu Naidu, who believed more in the concept of user groups and bureaucratic machinery to implement schemes at the local level was forced to transfer 16 out of the 29 subjects mentioned in the Eleventh Schedule of the 73rd Constitution Amendment Bill.

But several state governments have shown lip-service to the recommendations of the state finance commissions that had been set up to work out the devolution of funds to panchayats. The Planning Commission, while reviewing the reports of the state finance commissions, has cast severe aspersions on them. The Ninth Plan review states that “ The main deficiency of the reports lies in the fact that the recommendations are not based on clear statement of the spending responsibilities of local bodies. Indeed, the absence of attention to the elementary principle, that expenditure assignment must precede any tax or revenue assignment, has made most of the SFCs recommendations suspect.”

Similar is the case with regard to the setting up of planning committees at the district level. Some of the states have constituted local planning bodies, but the role of elected panchayat representatives in them has been minimised in several states, including Andhra Pradesh. The Left Front government in Kerala, on the other hand, had transferred 40 per cent of plan funds to panchayats and had undertaken campaigns for people’s participation in preparing development plans by the district planning committees. But despite that the government was voted out in the recent assembly elections. The high hopes that are raised by the local bodies could not be fulfilled in a medium term time-frame. In West Bengal, however , the CPM had a strong dedicated cadre down to the village level and could provide leadership successfully at the grassroots panchayat level.

Seven years after the 73rd Constitution Amendment Act came into force, the panchayati raj institutions in several states are struggling to survive. Several contradictions have surfaced. The two maladies, the lack of funds and the lack of sufficient authority, that afflicted the earlier experiments still persist. Only a people’s movement can infuse life into them.

The writer is a senior journalist and commentator.

MIDDLE

Every dog has its day
V. N. Kakar

WE have a lovely dark brown Labrador bitch. Just about a year old, it is well behaved, affectionate and responsible. Like all Labradors, it finds it difficult to stand the heat of Delhi. So, during summer, it sleeps in the upper floor bedroom of my son Prem and daughter-in-law Rita just below their airconditioner.

As morning comes, the newspaper boy throws up our papers, duly rolled and held securely with the aid of a rubber band, in the gallery which we share with an illustrious neighbour. That gentleman subscribes to one newspaper. We get three. Hence our bundle is bulkier than his. Anyone with eyes open can detect that without wasting any time.

The moment our bundle hits our door, Brandy rushes out, picks it up and takes it straight to Rita and Prem’s bedroom. Brandy knows what bundle is for what flat. It makes no mistake in picking the one intended for us.

Call it curiosity, senility or whatever else, lately it has invaded our neighbour. Sometimes he steals a march over Brandy, picks up our bundle, opens it, runs through the headlines in the papers to which he himself does not subscribe, rolls all of them back in position, though clumsily, and drops them quietly at our door.

Sometimes when Brandy takes longer to come down or when he finds something gripping in the papers which he himself does not get, he takes the whole lot inside his house.

When Brandy comes out and finds our bundle missing, it sniffs around to detect where it has gone. And then it rushes back to see if Sushma, our cook, has not already taken it there.

No, that is not the case. Brandy comes back, sniffs around again, knocks at the neighbour’s door with its front paws and out comes the bundle in a huddle through the window. Brandy stares at the gentleman’s flat angrily, picks up our bundle and takes it straight to the bedroom.

Diamonds may be for ever, but not wrong things. The Lord won’t allow that. One fine morning, our call-bell, fixed at the door-frame but connected to the kitchen, started ringing non-stop. It sounded like a siren announcing another Indo-Pakistan war. Thinking that Sushma was perhaps in the bathroom, my son came down, opened the door and found our neighbour standing there with a mighty grievance on his lips. “What is it, Uncle?” the boy, a doctor, asked him, thinking perhaps that an acute pain had suddenly gripped the man’s head or stomach. “It looks,” said he , “that your dog has taken away my paper as well.” The boy explained to him that to the best of his knowledge, Brandy was not prone to do that kind of thing. As a rule, it picked up its own papers only and brought them straight to him.

Brandy was summoned. Whenever it does some mischief, it hides itself under the dining table. It came out, looked at the man, measured him from head to foot, went up, brought his solitary paper from wherever it had kept it and threw it at him with utmost contempt. The gentleman said nothing to it. What could he say?

Months have elapsed since that episode. Our papers no longer disappear from where the newspaper boy throws them up.

POINT OF LAW

Governor no rubber stamp but emblem of dignity
Anupam Gupta

“(A) Governor can do a great deal of good if he is a good Governor and he can do a great deal of mischief, if he is a bad Governor, in spite of the very little power given to him under the Constitution we are now framing.”

Even as a fatigued nation struggles to find its way through the now unctuous, now inflammatory rhetoric of Indo-Pak relations, we would do well to remember — in the context of the recent crisis in Tamil Nadu — these words spoken in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 by one of our founding fathers, the then Prime Minister of Bombay and a powerful provincial voice, Bal Gangadhar Kher.

Half a century after that debate in the Constituent Assembly wherein the tallest of them who made the Constitution — from K.M. Munshi to Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar to B.R. Ambedkar to Jawaharlal Nehru — participated, the role and position of the Governor under the Constitution has sprung back into focus following the Centre’s decision to recall the Tamil Nadu Governor, Ms Fathima Beevi, and her resignation on July 1.

A former judge of the Supreme Court — an office of great distinction in which she never really managed to distinguish herself or leave anything for posterity — Fathima Beevi was sworn in as Governor of Tamil Nadu in January, 1997.

“(I)n the glitzy, larger-than-life-world that is South Indian politics,” wrote T.N. Gopalan in The Indian Express on July 2, “the former Supreme Court judge lived the life of a virtual recluse, confining herself to the Raj Bhavan and not interacting much with even the Chennai elite.”

A tame Governor, by all accounts — a Chief Minister’s Governor, to put it more precisely — her only notable achievement during Mr Karunanidhi’s regime was grant of sanction, in case after case, for the prosecution of the Chief Minister’s arch political foe, Ms J. Jayalalitha.

No one, not a single soul in the whole wide world, questioned her credentials as she did so even though it was apparent to anyone, who was familiar with Tamil Nadu politics and not blinded by moral populism, that political antagonism and not any finer conceptions of justice was the ultimate motive underlying the prosecutions.

Then, in a turn of events that made all pollsters blush and legal pundits wince, the victim turned victor and Jayalalitha’s AIADMK trounced Karunanidhi’s DMK at the hustings two months ago, securing 197 of the 234 Assembly seats in Tamil Nadu.

As promptly as she had obliged Karunanidhi by sanctioning Jayalalitha’s prosecution, Fathima Beevi — bowing to the popular verdict — now obliged Jayalalitha by swearing her in as Chief Minister in his place, leaving the larger debate about a convict’s eligibility to be Chief Minister or Minister to the institution to which she had once belonged, the Supreme Court.

And even as she had acquiesced in everything that Karunanidhi did while he was in office, she now turned a blind eye to everything that Jayalalitha began to do on returning to it. From picking up Karunanidhi in the dead of night and throwing him in the same prison cell where she had once found herself eating out of a twisted aluminium plate, in the company of mosquitoes, to arresting two Union Ministers of DMK hue who suddenly constituted themselves into roving local commissioners on behalf of the Union, sitting in judgement over the State police and resisting them with all the physical force their frail frames were capable of.

Consistently and constantly — then in favour of Karunanidhi, now in favour of Jayalalitha — Fathima Beevi affixed the seal of gubernatorial convenience to the politics of partisanship and revenge that rules Tamil Nadu and distinguishes it from the rest of the Union.

Why then should the Union protest today, if it did not protest yesterday or the day before? Karunanidhi yesterday, Jayalalitha today, a weak and unquestioning Governor is an asset to any Chief Minister and that is all that matters.

As for the Constitution, it demands — if India is not Pakistan — permanent compliance, not temporary homage dictated by the interests and needs of the party in power whether at the Centre or in the States.

But what exactly does the Constitution demand of a Governor?

“The exact functions which the Governor of an Indian state is expected to perform and his duties and obligations are not generally well understood,” writes Mr B.K. Nehru, a distinguished former Governor of the North-Eastern states, Jammu & Kashmir and Gujarat.

“It is not surprising,” he says, “that there should be a lack of clarity and an abundance of confusion about this matter. For the role of the Governor of an Indian province changed so fundamentally when India became independent and changed further when the provinces became States, that the effects of the transformation were really fully grasped neither by politicians nor administrators nor lawyers nor even by members of the Constituent Assembly themselves.”

Historically, states Mr Nehru, the Governor of an Indian Province was a direct subordinate of the Governor-General and carried out the latter’s will. Even when Ministers were introduced in the Provinces under the system of dyarchy prescribed by the Government of India Act, 1915, the Governor was not bound to follow the advice of his Ministers even in relation to the subjects transferred to them.

Two decades later, the Government of India Act, 1935, established a federal polity and introduced provincial autonomy. “In so far as the Governor of a province is by or under this Act required to act in his discretion or to exercise his individual judgement,” Section 54 of the Act nonetheless stated, “he shall be under the general control of, and comply with such particular directions, if any, as may from time to time be given to him by the Governor-General.....”

It is ironical in the extreme that as many as 66 years later, the Government of free India should, as is so clearly evident from its stand in the Tamil Nadu case, expect from a Governor similar compliance with the Union’s instructions, written or unwritten, if not an attitude of complaisance.

Even though there is no provision in the Constitution even remotely resembling Section 54 of the Government of India Act, 1935.

But what about the Governor being appointed by the President, under Article 155 of the Constitution, and holding office “during his pleasure” under Article 156?

Does that not make him accountable and responsible to the Centre, if not its agent?

Not at all. At least not so long as the wisdom of the Supreme Court is the law of the land under Article 141.

It is no doubt true, says the Supreme Court, that the Governor is appointed by the President which means, in effect and substance, the Government of India. “But that is only a mode of appointment and it does not make the Governor an employee or servant of the Government of India.”

Nor is it material, adds the Supreme Court, that the Governor holds office during the pleasure of the President. That is a constitutional provision “for determination of the term of office of the Governor and it does not make the Government of India an employer of the Governor.”

The Governor is the head of the State and holds a high constitutional office which carries with it important constitutional functions and duties. He cannot, therefore, reiterates the Supreme Court, “even by stretching the language to a breaking point, be regarded as an employee or servant of the Government of India.”

An employee he may not be, but can’t the Union generally control the Governor, or direct him, or call him to account?

The answer, again, comes from the Supreme Court and in a manner that admits of no other view.

“(I)t is impossible to hold,” says the Supreme Court, “that the Governor is under the control of the Government of India. His office is not subordinate or subservient to the Government of India. He is not amenable to the directions of the Government of India, nor is he accountable to them for the manner in which he carries out his functions and duties. His is an independent constitutional office which is not subject to the control of the Government of India.”

There is not a word, literally not a word, in this judgement of the Supreme Court, the unanimous judgement of a five-member Constitution Bench in Hargovind Pant vs Raghukul Tilak (1979), affirming in appeal a Full Bench decision of the High Court of Rajasthan, that would justify or permit the kind of action that the Government of India took last fortnight on July 1 in respect of Governor Fathima Beevi.

A look at the High Court’s Full Bench decision reveals, incidentally, that the argument accepted and sanctified by the Supreme Court as law was first presented before the High Court by leading constitutional lawyer, Fali Nariman.

“He drew a distinction,” says the High Court, “between the functions of a Governor under the Constitution and those of a Colonial Governor, who was a representative of the Crown. Whereas a constitutional functionary like the Governor is nobody’s employee, a Colonial Governor was the Crown’s representative.”

That takes me back to Mr B.K. Nehru’s views as set out in his essay “The Role of the Governor under the Indian Constitution”, from which I had quoted earlier.

First published in 1974 in the silver jubilee commemoration volume of the Gauhati High Court , it is one of the few authentically original analyses of the Governor’s position that I have come across in my readings on the subject.

“The institution of Governorship,” Mr Nehru concludes, “has passed the stage at which it was merely a dignified ornament. Its occupant should not, and must not, ever become involved in the day-to-day problems of politics and administration. But he plays — and is likely increasingly to play — an important role while keeping himself in the background, furthering the interests of his State with the Centre, giving helpful advice to his Ministers without interfering with their sphere of responsibility, helping to ensure the stability of his Government and, above all, giving tone and dignity to the life of the State as a whole.”

But that is where not only Fathima Beevi in Tamil Nadu but a host of other Governors around the Union have miserably failed.

75 YEARS AGO

The Imperial Conference

THE Imperial Indian Citizenships’ Association has addressed the following telegram to the Private Secretary to the Viceroy:

The Association views with deep regret the omission this year to include in the Indian delegation to the Imperial Conference an Indian public man of acknowledged standing in the country, such as those in the previous deputations. The Council has nothing to say against the persons selected. The absence of an outstanding Indian leader is calculated to prejudice, in more ways than one, the cause of Indians in the eyes of the self-government Dominions, in which many of them are domiciled.

The Association hopes the Government will still consider the desirability of supplying this serious omission.

TRENDS & POINTERS

Students get ill to win good marks

SECONDARY schools are breeding stressed-out, overworked, materialistic and ill-educated students, according to a new study designed to uncover good news about the state of education.

Despite concentrating only on the children schools put forward as their happiest and brightest success stories, a leading educational expert found students were so overworked that they regularly participated in devious, deceptive and cruel behaviour to get the best grade possible.

‘Instead of fostering traits such as honesty, integrity, co-operation and respect, schools are promoting deception, hostility and anxiety,’ said Denise Clark Pope, America’s leading educationalist.

‘The students told me they didn’t want to act like this but they felt they had no choice if they were going to get the grades they needed to get to the colleges and, later, to the jobs they wanted.

‘The students admitted to feeling the need to manipulate the system and devise crafty strategies to get ahead. They felt compelled to betray their friends and deceive teachers, and they felt they had no choice but to compromise their integrity for future success.’

Pope’s book, Doing School, to be published next week, focuses on American schools but has been greeted with sad recognition by British experts.

‘I recognise every word in this study from our own schools,’ said Mark Hewlett, director of the UK Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools and a headmaster for 24 years. ‘This study addresses all the areas I have most concern about: overpressured students are a major feature of schools today and many of the students I feel most concern about are the over-consciencious, middle-class females who suffer stress-induced illnesses, including anorexia.’

Pope found the students she followed developed dishonest methods of managing their workload, including being sycophantic to teachers and developing cheating techniques.

‘Even if the students’ performance did not necessarily warrant an extra point or a higher grade, complaining loudly and regularly was found to yield better results from over-worked teachers,’ she said. — The Observer