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Pronounced guilty On right track |
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Preventive detention
Tibet uprising
Password privacy
Defence on a budget US, a superpower on the wane Sentiments of services hurt
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Pronounced guilty Suspended Inspector General of Police R.K. Sharma has earned the dubious distinction of becoming arguably the first IPS officer convicted of murder. He has been held guilty of hatching a conspiracy to murder Shivani, a newspaper correspondent, who had allegedly developed intimate relationship with him and was threatening to expose him. The conviction nine years later may silence those who say that the police can get away with murder, but at the same time raises a very vital question: what happens when a senior policeman decides to break the law. He has too many powers at his command to browbeat witnesses and affect the course of the investigation. In the Shivani murder case, as many as 51 witnesses turned hostile. Even an absurd but mischievous attempt was made to lay the blame at the door of her husband. The policemen may not exactly get away scot-free in every way but at least they can and do pull the strings. If an officer of an otherwise sterling professional record – Sharma had worked in the PMO and was also with the Interpol — can stoop to such a dirty level as hiring professional killers to eliminate a woman, the public is bound to feel fidgety. The same thing happened in the case of a former Haryana DGP. The girl who accused him of molestation, later committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Similarly, when the son of a DGP-level officer of Orissa was held on rape charge, the dutiful father did all he could to arrange his escape. Such activities by the men in uniform present the entire police force in a bad light. It is necessary to reassert that the rank or position of an accused is irrelevant in a police investigation. It is gratifying that it was conducted in a scientific manner in the Shivani murder case. But it is necessary that steps are taken to ensure that the influences of the kind exerted in these cases and also others like the Jessica Lal murder case involving the son of a senior politician can be precluded completely. Also, the justice in criminal cases should not take as long as it has taken in the Shivani murder case.
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On right track Unlike Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, where the political leadership resorts to populism, avoids tax hikes and squanders resources on a bloated administration, Haryana has better managed its finances. There are no giveaways like free power or atta-dal gimmicks. Comfortably placed Finance Minister Birender Singh has presented a Rs 3.80 crore surplus budget for 2008-09 and met the targets of the Fiscal Responsibility Budget Management Act ahead of schedule. Thanks to its proximity to Delhi, Haryana’s revenue has more than doubled— from Rs 900 crore it has reached Rs 21,695 crore — in three years. Like revenue generation, development is also uneven with Gurgaon, Faridabad and other areas in the NCR outshining the rest of Haryana. The urban-rural economic and social divide is widening. Unlike the neighbouring states, Haryana has prepared itself to take up the proposed burden of revised salaries of the employees. If the minister has further cut the stamp duty and given more concessions to women and the poor, he has also scrapped the local area development tax. Mr Birender Singh should avoid the levy of the proposed entry tax as it is a time-waster and slows the free movement of goods. But since both Punjab and Himachal have such a tax, Haryana is set to follow suit. The minister needs to be commended for introducing special schemes for women and children to rectify the skewed sex ratio in the state. The provision of institutional deliveries in villages has cut the mother and infant mortality rates. The state’s growth rate at 11.4 per cent in 2006-07 has been the highest in 10 years. The interest payment on the debt has been brought down to 12.6 per cent of the gross state domestic product, which is well the FRBM Act target of 28 per cent. The future too looks brighter for Haryana. The state has received foreign direct investment of Rs 10,500 crore and Rs 66,000 crore worth projects are in the pipeline. The state has got 92 proposals for setting up special economic zones. The state needs to strengthen its professional and technical education base so that youth are prepared to take up emerging jobs. |
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Preventive detention The Supreme Court has rightly directed all high courts to examine petitions seeking quashing of preventive detention by detaining authorities with “extreme care, caution and circumspection”. The Bench consisting of Justice C.K. Thakker and Justice Altamas Kabir has ruled that the high court should not set aside an order passed by a detaining authority under the preventive detention law at the pre-arrest stage unless it is satisfied that there are compelling circumstances to do so. It sought to strike a balance between individual liberty and national security and held that sometimes personal liberty will have to be subordinated to people’s good. In the case in question, the Maharashtra government detained a person to prevent him from indulging in smuggling and blackmarketing of essential commodities. The Bombay High Court quashed the detention order. Allowing the state government’s appeal, the apex court ruled that the primary objective of preventive detention “is not to punish a person for having done something but to intercept him before he does it.” While there is no second opinion about the apex court’s concern for public order and tranquility, there is increasing public skepticism about the manner in which the state governments have been misusing the preventive detention law for narrow partisan ends. Consider how the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) had to be repealed following its flagrant abuse by the states. During the all-India railway strike (1974) and the Emergency (1975-77), the Maintenance of Internal Security Act and the Defence of India Rules were brazenly abused by the ruling Congress to settle scores with political opponents. The late Justice H.R. Khanna’s warning in the Supreme Court on the pitfalls of detention and the threat to personal liberty in the habeas corpus case (1975) still holds good. Adequate safeguards are needed to check the misuse of the law. Otherwise, personal liberty will be in peril. The apex court itself ruled several times earlier that the detaining authority cannot pass preventive detention orders for “extraneous reasons or on irrelevant and vague grounds”. There should also be no undue delay between the date of detention and the date of securing the detenue’s arrest. Otherwise, it would cause considerable doubt on the genuineness of the subjective satisfaction of the detaining authority. |
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You must do the things you think you cannot do. — Eleanor Roosevelt
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Tibet uprising
When
the Chinese People’s Liberation Army occupied Tibet in 1950, Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel wrote to Prime Minister Nehru on November 7, 1950 saying: “The Chinese Government has tried to delude us by professions of peaceful intentions. My own feeling is that at a crucial period they managed to install into our Ambassador (academic K.M. Panicker) a false sense of confidence in their so-called desire to settle the Tibetan problem by peaceful means”. Sardar Patel added: “(Throughout history) the Himalayas have been regarded as an impenetrable barrier for any threat from the North. We had a friendly Tibet which gave us no trouble….Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our side, but also include the important part of Assam… Chinese irredentism and communist imperialism are different from the expansionism or imperialism of the western powers, which makes it 10 times more dangerous. In the guise of ideological expansion lie concealed racial, national and historical claims”. China’s guise in concealing “racial, national and historic claims” soon manifested itself after the 1950 occupation of Tibet. The Tibetans were compelled to sign a Seventeen Point Agreement affirming Chinese Sovereignty over Tibet on May 23, 1951. This agreement contained explicit Chinese assurances that the Central Authorities would not alter the existing political system in Tibet. The Chinese also pledged that they would not alter the established political status, functions and powers of the Dalai Lama, with Tibetan officials continuing to hold office. Finally, the Chinese pledged to protect the freedom of religious beliefs and the income of monasteries and promote the development of the Tibetan language and culture. The Chinese violated all these assurances and Tibetan anger and frustration resulted in a full-fledged uprising in 1959, which led to the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fleeing to India. India also paid a very heavy price for disregarding Sardar Patel’s warnings on Chinese intentions. By 1954 Chinese incursions into Indian territory began along the U.P.-Tibet border, just after India signed the infamous Border Trade Agreement between “The Tibet Region of China and India,” on April 29,1954, which conceded Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. China’s occupation of Tibet was thus sanctified, without securing any assurance on the border issue from China. The Agreement also led to the handing over of Indian properties, the withdrawal of Indian military escorts and the handing over of telephone, telegraph and communications equipment and facilities in Tibet, to China. When Prime Minister Nehru took up the wrong depiction of borders on Chinese maps with the smooth and suave Chou en Lai in October 1954, he was assured that the maps in question “were really reproductions of old “pre-liberation” maps and that he (Chou) had not time to review them”. Nehru was also assured in 1956 that though Chou found the term “McMahon Line” repugnant, China would recognise this border with both Burma and India. Chou, however, had no more intention of fulfilling these assurances any more than he had of fulfilling Chinese commitments of May 23, 1951, to the Tibetans. The Chinese describe the Dalai Lama to be a “splittist,” determined to secede from China. The reality is somewhat different. In September 1987, the Dalai Lama proposed a demilitarised and denuclearised Tibet, while realistically recognising that independence for Tibet is no longer an option and that the most that the people of Tibet can aspire for is genuine autonomy, within a united China. In his address on the 49th Anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 2008, the Dalai Lama said: “Since 2002, my envoys have conducted six rounds of talks with concerned officials of the People’s Republic of China to discuss relevant issues. These discussions have helped to clear away some of their doubts and enabled us to explain our aspirations to them. However, on the fundamental issue there has been no concrete result at all. And during the past few years, Tibet has witnessed increased repression and brutality. In spite of these unfortunate developments, my stand and determination to pursue the Middle-Way policy and dialogue with the Chinese Government remain unchanged”. Tibet has since witnessed yet another uprising, which has been crushed by the People’s Liberation Army of China. China evidently believes that use of brute force and a massive settlement of Han Chinese, reducing Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland, coupled with its status as a permanent member of the Security Council, gives it the right to do as it pleases in Tibet. While addressing the EU Parliament in November 2003, India’s former Ambassador to Bhutan, Dalip Mehta has alluded to the continuous weakening of India’s position on Tibet. Referring to the assertion in the Joint Declaration signed during Prime Minister Vajpayee’s visit to China that the “Tibetan Autonomous Region of China is part of the territory of China, Mehta noted that by referring exclusively to the “Tibetan Autonomous Region”, India had further damaged the Tibetan cause, as Amdo and Kham, regarded by Tibetans as part of Tibet, were excluded, and by implication their absorption into neighbouring provinces of China accepted. Sensing India’s weakness, China has only upped the ante and stepped up its rhetoric that the whole of Arunachal Pradesh is a part of China, as it has historically been a part of “South Tibet”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in turn, was deterred from visiting Tawang during his recent visit to Arunachal Pradesh, quite evidently because of Chinese “sensitivities”. The Chinese, however, responded with an unprecedented protest on the Prime Minister’s visit to the State. Sardar Patel’s observations about Chinese ambitions are proving prophetic. New Delhi’s statement on the recent repression unleashed by China in Tibet is welcome. The government has forthrightly stated that India was “distressed by reports of the unsettled situation and violence in Lhasa and by the deaths of innocent people”. The time has come for India to state that while it regards Tibet as an autonomous region of China, it hopes that China will abide by the assurances it gave in the seventeen point agreement it signed with representatives of the Dalai Lama on May 23, 1951. India has to take an independent position on this issue, but not seen as a western cat’s paw. American policies on China swing like a pendulum and India has periodically been at the receiving end of Sino-American collusion during the Nixon, Carter and Clinton Presidencies. India will have to learn that the Chinese only respect others when they have national power and display a resoluteness to exercise it in the pursuit of legitimate national
interests.
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Password privacy
IN a big newspaper office where the attrition rate is considered quite high, it is not possible to meet, let alone be acquainted with, all the colleagues. I would not have even met Shivani but for an additional assignment the editor had given me at that time. As the unofficial Ombudsman or the readers’ editor of the newspaper, my responsibilities included attending to all complaints from readers. If the complaints were frivolous, I would not refer them to the reporters concerned as the wastepaper basket was large enough to accommodate them. But if a complaint seemed genuine, I would ask the reporter to give his/her comments on it. One such complaint came to me about a story filed by Shivani. Prima facie, it seemed genuine warranting at least a correction. Dutifully, I sent a copy of the complaint to Shivani for her rejoinder. Days passed into weeks and yet I did not get her comments. Exasperated, I called her several times on the phone. She was seldom at her desk. Mobile phones had not yet become common as the outgoing call rates were as high as Rs 16 per minute those days. Few journalists could afford the luxury. I could make out that Shivani was trying to dodge me. Finally, I got through to her. She had umpteen excuses to proffer, though they did not make any sense to me. In desperation I told her that I would be compelled to publish the complainant’s version without her reply if I did not get it in a couple of days. Within a few minutes of my “threat”, she sent me her reply in which she merely said that she stood by her story. What I expected from the reporter was a point-by-point rebuttal of the complaint. My idea was to publish an edited version of the complaint with a reply of the reporter so that the readers could reach their own conclusion. Though I was annoyed with her initially, I realised that most reporters tend to avoid giving clarifications because they fear to be exposed. Every reporter wants the editor and the readers to believe that all his/her stories are painstakingly and meticulously researched. Not long afterwards, the shocking news about Shivani’s tragic death was splashed on the front pages of all newspapers. We all thought it was a blind murder case. The newspaper we worked for did everything possible to put pressure on the police to unravel the mystery and punish the guilty. One day a police team visited our office and they diligently pored over every document in Shivani’s drawers. Our computer engineers assisted the police in their work. It was found that her password which gave access to all her files in the computer was the nickname of a senior Haryana-cadre IPS officer, who at one time held a senior post in the Prime Minister’s Office. It was a crucial piece of evidence that ultimately led to his conviction on Tuesday. We, her colleagues, had to suffer for her act of indiscretion. The office began insisting that every employee should disclose his/her password to the authorities concerned. The office also insisted that every time the password was changed, it should be notified to the office. In other words, password privacy became a thing of the past as we all mourned Shivani’s tragic
death.
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Defence on a budget The
union budget presented by the Finance Minister has been received enthusiastically by everyone, from farmers to the middle class,to the corporate honchos. If there is gloom, it is only in the corridors of service headquarters, as allocations for the defence forces have been reduced to less than two per cent of the GDP, for the first time in decades. No doubt, in fiscal terms, the allocations have crossed the one lakh mark, but the increase barely covers normal inflation and is way below ‘military inflation’, which is always exponentially higher than routine inflation. In simple terms, it means that while routine revenue expenditure on maintenance and replacement of existing stores and equipment, training, fuel, clothing and rations would get covered, the defence forces would be seriously handicapped in modernising the forces, where the limited allocations for the capital budget, meant for new acquisitions, are grossly insufficient. The defence budget is pegged at Rs 1,05,600 crore, which consists of Rs. 48,007 crore for capital expenditure and Rs.57, 593 crore as revenue expenditure. The revenue growth, which was 6 percent last year, has fallen to 5.1 per cent. The capital outlay last year was Rs 41,922 crore. It has been increased by Rs.15,671 crore. Another feature of the defence budget is that every year the services are unable to spend their complete allocations and surrender major amounts. This year too, the services have reportedly surrendered Rs.4,217 crore, despite a major overhaul of the procurement system and solemn promises that delays would be eliminated. In the last five fiscal years since 2004-05, defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP has been declining. The same is the case with percentage of total central government expenditure. The defence expenditure for the fiscal year 2007-08 was only 2.1 per cent of the expected GDP. This year it is worse, as it has now fallen below 2 per cent, to 1.98 per cent of the GDP. These declining trends are in sharp contrast to the commitment made by the Prime Minister that the defence budget would be gradually raised to three per cent of the GDP, in the backdrop of strong economic growth. In comparison, China spends 4.5 per cent of its GDP on defence, even if we only take the official figures, which are well known to be much less than the actual. This has been the consistent practice of China for the last two decades. Mercifully, the share of the army in the defence budget, which had been declining since 2002 and had come down from 57 per cent in the year 2002-03, to 47 per cent last year, has gone up by six percent in the budget. The allocation amounts to Rs. 36, 270 crore. The other two services have also received hikes of 4.6 (navy) and 4.8 per cent (air force). Consequently, the overall decline in the army budget has been only marginally corrected. This will obviously have adverse implications on the modernisation of the army. Have threats to the country receded? Has someone given us a security umbrella? Has the insurgent / terrorist threat to the country, not only in J&K and the north eastern states, but also in all parts of the country, decreased? The answer to all these queries is obviously in the negative. Terrorist infiltration in J&K continues and will surely go up as the snows start melting along the LC. The peace process with Pakistan is stuck on account of the instability prevailing in Pakistan for nearly a year now. Incursions by the Chinese army across the LAC have increased and they have become bolder in the last few months. China is also intruding into Bhutan, from the Chumbi valley and the already narrow Siliguri corridor is getting increasingly vulnerable. Infrastructural improvements in Tibet, including bringing the railway to Lhasa and extending it further in the hinterland; major road construction; and improvements of airfields have vastly increased the potential threat to our northern borders. Internally, the influence of the Naxalites and Maoists is expanding. With the phenomenal growth of the country’s economy and increased regional and global importance, our area of interest has increased vastly, stretching from the east coast of Africa to the Malacca Straits and including both west Asia and central Asia in its ambit. The growth of the Indian Diaspora, particularly in west Asia, and our increasing assets and footprint abroad necessitate India having a tri-service rapid reaction force. These are only a few security issues, but it seems the government is oblivious to these expanding threats. During the run up to the budget presentation in Parliament, the Finance Minister had discussions with a wide variety of individuals and groups, as well as representatives of political parties, corporate houses and so on, to ascertain their aspirations, hopes and problems. No one from the military and if I am not mistaken from any of the others who deal with security issues was consulted or even called up to ascertain at least the priority weapons and equipment which the military needed urgently. There were no inputs from the National Security Council either. There must have been the routine demands submitted by the service headquarters at both the BE (Budget Estimates) and RE (Revised Estimates) stages, put together by the headless (no CDS appointed till date) integrated joint staff, pruned down by the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence, who can barely distinguish a rocket from a missile and then further cut arbitrarily by the Ministry of Finance Defence, before forwarding them to the Ministry of Finance. The latter seem to have a fixed plan of increasing the defence budget by seven to ten per cent every year. I need hardly add that this is not the way defence budgets are prepared by major or even lesser powers. It is wonderful to hear the strides being taken by India in the economic field, but great powers are not made by economic growth alone. Take the case of our biggest neighbour China. The growth of the PLA, their military, has been proceeding unhindered along with their stupendous economic growth, even though military growth has been dubbed the fourth modernisation! The writer is a former Vice Chief of
Army Staff
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US, a superpower on the wane Even
now, here in the US, if you turn off the radio or television blaring the latest news of financial apocalypse, you can pretend that it’s still business as usual. Incredibly, those unsolicited loan and credit card offers continue to pop through the letterbox, offering the American dream on the never-never. Do you feel it’s time for that oft-postponed home improvement, or that richly deserved holiday you’ve been putting off? Or are you simply having trouble getting credit? Just call this number and within 15 minutes a qualified officer can approve a loan of $30,000 for you, interest free for the first three months. Of course, what sounds to be too good to be true, is. But you used to have to wade through the fine print on the back to discover that. Now you just turn the TV back on. To say so out loud would be an offence against American optimism, but the unspoken truth is that the good old days are gone, probably for a very long while. Like its predecessors, this particular financial meltdown has brought fear verging on panic. The difference, however, is that it is destroying not only wealth. It is also destroying illusions. The US has long inhabited a world of make-believe – of a war that demands no sacrifice, of a consumer boom that demands no payment, of a power and prosperity that seemed America’s birthright, whatever events in the real world. Now those fantasies are yielding to the truism coined by Herb Stein, a top White House economic adviser in the 1970s. If something can’t go on for ever, it won’t. You have to be in your 80s to have a real memory of the 1929 crash and its devastating consequences. Today, however, the spectre of the Great Depression is everywhere – and not just because the housing market bust which provoked the current crisis is the most severe since the Depression. As for George W Bush, he now jostles at the bottom of the league table of American presidents. In a sense, Bush’s misbegotten war in Iraq and today’s financial earthquake complement each other. Both are evidence of how the world’s lone superpower is losing its dominance. Iraq has shown the limits of American military power. The limits of US economic power are visible in the tumbling dollar (now looked on askance even in countries where it recently served as a second currency) and in the inflation to which the dollar’s decline contributes. Ultimately, great powers are brought down not by military defeat, but by economic weakness. Take, for example, Tibet. Once Washington might have kicked up a serious economic fuss – but not when China is the biggest US creditor, and when a major bond market sell order by Beijing could send US monetary policy reeling. Paradoxically, if China did want to retaliate in that fashion, the most powerful argument for it not doing so is the Bear Stearns argument, that the ruin of USA Inc. would bring the ruin of the global economy, China included. But even if the US is “too big to fail,” this wrenching crisis will have huge consequences nonetheless. A backlash against the moguls of Wall Street – so greedy in good times, so quick to plead for the state’s safety net in bad ones – is already starting. The tide of deregulation will be reversed, and government, so often branded the enemy, will again be regarded as a friend. Financial mayhem, in other words, will hasten the leftward shift in America’s politics. But here, too, comforting illusions are being stripped away. Take the competing Clinton and Obama healthcare plans, costing $120 billion or $150 billion, depending on the expert you believe. But, assuming one of them is elected, where will the money come from? Either sum is dwarfed by the $200 billion-plus line of credit the Federal Reserve has already extended to Wall Street, with goodness knows how much more to follow, courtesy ultimately of the US taxpayer. On the Republican side, John McCain inhabits a similar fantasy land. In its current circumstances, can the US really continue to spend $12 billion a month on a war that has already cost $600 billion – when even that sum may pale beside the federal bailout of Wall Street and subprime mortgages? Engagingly, McCain admits that economics is not his strong suit. But even he understands that, just as with those loan offers still arriving on the doorstep, sooner or later the piper must be paid. By arrangement with
The Independent
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Sentiments of services hurt Chief
of Army Staff General Deepak Kapoor was recently criticised by the Leader of the Opposition Jaswant Singh on the floor of the Rajya Sabha, after the former had brought up the question of Chinese intrusions along the disputed Indo-Chinese border. The criticism brings to the fore the widening perceptional gap in what can be communicated to the public and what cannot, by the head of an Army, in so far as the politician is concerned. It is all the more surprising that a retired Major from the Armoured Corps, Jaswant Singh, has deemed it fit to term the COAS’s remarks as “irresponsible and unwarranted”, which, as we would see, is certainly not the case. The real problem is the misplaced belief in the mind of the average Indian politician that an Army Chief is supposed to just wear his ceremonial uniform and sword, take orders from the top (that is the politician and the bureaucrat), and keep his mouth sealed at all times on anything even remotely concerning national policy on a security matter. It is outbursts like the present one against an officer who cannot address the legislature, that leave soldiers shivering out in the cold and creates an adverse image of the senior leadership in the Services within their own commands, be it in the Army, Navy or the Air Force. There was nothing wrong in what General Kapoor shared with the public when he said that both India and China have different perceptions of the Line of Actual Control in the northeast along our international border. In the mid-1980s we had the famous Wangdung clash with the Chinese, because both sides had their own idea of exactly where the border lay. Later on in the 1990s, when this writer was the GoC of a Division in the same region, there were the perceptional differences about the exact alignment of the border on the ground, which sometimes did lead to difficulty in border patrolling by both the countries. In so far as Kapoor’s comments on Pakistan are concerned, all that the Chief had said was that with the elections having taken place, the security situation on this border should improve. Surely, since he handles our security on a daily basis, he would be the best man to know about these matters? No national secret has been given away. And how is Kapoor’s statement harmful to the dignity of his office, as Jaswant Singh has opined? Furthermore, to say that, “he is no authority to comment on these matters”, poses the question as to who then is that authority, and whether in the name of a democracy the voice of seasoned and mature Generals is not being muffled. It would seem that our politicians especially when they are in the opposition, just do not want soldiers to open their mouths and speak up. Most of them do not know enough about the Indian Army and only pay occasional lip service to the ‘izzat’ and dignity of those in uniform – but their mind is still conditioned by the army rule in the
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