Parliamentary system
in grave danger
by T.V.R. Shenoy
WHAT happens if death or dishonour drives Bill Clinton out of the White House? The American constitution explores the eventuality in detail.

End of a summer
of discontent
by Sunil Sethi
PICK UP the phone in anniversary week to make a call and a rather stern voice flatly announces “Vande Mataram”. Open the papers and the front pages come sprinkled with titbits about the nation’s 50th year coming to a close.

. Two Judges who have created history by Harihar Swarup TWO judges have created history and caused political tremors. Justice M.C. Jain’s interim report on the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi threw the United Front and I.K. Gujral’s Government in the dustbin of history and the final report exposed the vulnerability of India’s security.

75 Years Ago

High plague figures
SIMLA: Plague returns for the week ending last month show that the epidemic is still raging in all the provinces, being the highest in the Punjab and the lowest in Bengal.

Parliamentary system in grave danger

T.V.R. Shenoy

WHAT happens if death or dishonour drives Bill Clinton out of the White House? The American constitution explores the eventuality in detail. The Vice-President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury ... the list of successors stretches down quite a long way.

The man who framed the law of succession apparently didn’t care if a Democrat were succeeded in the highest executive office by a Republican or vice-versa. But they were quite clear on one point: there would be no mid-term election if they could help it.

Now, ponder over this: who shall unfurl the Tricolour over Red Fort on the 15th of August, 1999? I defy anyone to offer a totally convincing answer. The political situation is so fluid that it could be just about anybody.

Atal Behari Vajpayee is the fourth man in four years to mount the ramparts of Red Fort on Independence Day. We had Narasimha Rao in 1995, Deve Gowda in 1996, Gujral in 1997, and now it is Vajpayee’s turn. It is painful to recall that Clinton has been in office through each of those four years, and may still be around next year too.

The political fun and games that bring down one Prime Minister after another offer wonderful grist to the journalistic mill. But we can’t get away from the fact that Atal Behari Vajpayee is as much India’s Chief Executive as Clinton is that of the United States. How on earth can we expect good government, or even any kind of governance, if the chief executive isn’t assured of a reasonable term in office?

I notice that there is a long-running controversy in the media about the advisability of offering a two-year contract to the coach of the Indian hockey team. Why isn’t anybody thinking of giving at least that to a Prime Minister?

A Lok Sabha election can, in fact, be interpreted as a contractual relationship. The electorate at large puts out a tender, the various parties return their quotations, and it all ends with a five-year contract. That is the way it used to be, but the system obviously isn’t working properly any longer.

There is no point blaming Jayalalitha. The Arithmetic of the 12th Lok Sabha makes her plays for power all but inevitable, just as the contours of the 11th House foretold Sitaram Kesri’s manoeuvres. (Only Narasimha Rao’s compulsions kept the Congress quiet for a while.)

Nobody sniggered when Mulayam Singh Yadav, who has only 20 men in the Lok Sabha, openly proclaimed his readiness to be Prime Minister. Jayalalitha commands at least 18 Lok Sabha members; she is just as entitled to dream of supreme power.

“Elections are the pulse of democracy,’’ the current Prime Minister once said. “Too many of them lead to a heart-attack, too few signal death.”

A little over 20 years ago, Indira Gandhi extended the term of the Lok Sabha during the Emergency. This slowing of the “pulse” almost sent Indian democracy into a coma. Today, with threats of the third general election in three years crowding the headlines, the parliamentary system is in equally grave danger of collapsing outright.

I noted last week that India marks the golden jubilee of the Constitution in 1999. But the paper has frayed over the years. It is time to take a second look at the document that has served India so far. Prakash Ambedkar, son of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, is now a member of the Lok Sabha. Would he, perhaps, care to take a lead in examining how his father’s work can be salvaged, with suitable amendments to take us into the next century. I hope so, because I for one don’t want to stand at the booth during yet another Lok Sabha election before the next millennium dawns!

End of a summer of discontent

by Sunil Sethi

PICK UP the phone in anniversary week to make a call and a rather stern voice flatly announces “Vande Mataram”. Open the papers and the front pages come sprinkled with titbits about the nation’s 50th year coming to a close (actually it’s the 51st but that’s typical of how the government gets the essentials wrong). Flick through the TV channels and there are any number of special programmes and films slated to mark the occasion. Go through your mail and the tub-thumping continues — even the Ministry of External Affairs contributes its mite with a film, The Nation Celebrates, followed by cocktails in a de luxe hotel.

A nation bursting into spontaneous celebration somehow suggests drum-beating all day and dancing in the streets at night but that is not the mood that seizes the Indian populace this week—or has for many, many weeks. Despondency and gloom mark the end of a summer of discontent. Buffeted by indecision, blackmailed by its allies and deafened by the alarms of deepening economic woes, the BJP Government hops about like a chicken whose head has been cut off—there may be some signs of life left but, for all practical purposes, it is dead. The Congress in the Opposition (to carry the simile further) faces a chicken-and-egg situation—if it quickly eats the headless chicken to form another government, it may turn out to be just another eggless wonder.

Beyond the continuing power play in New Delhi, several unanswered questions loom large over the horizon. Any celebration of Independence only seems to highlight how dependent India, in fact, is on the world outside. It was the fallout from the nuclear tests that demonstrated this first. Now it is the fall of the yen and other Asian currencies that have contributed to the value of the rupee hitting an all-time low. A political crisis within the country has been immeasurably exacerbated by the financial crisis outside. India is an independent, sovereign, democratic republic (and 50 years old to boot) but it remains vastly confused about the responsibility that autonomy and democratic governance entails. We remain an inward-looking people, yet fail to be introspective in the proper sense of the word.

Let me give a small example: during US Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott’s recent visit to Delhi, his embassy hosted a dinner for the visiting delegation to meet a fair representation of Indians—politicians, industrialists, activists and journalists. At one table a well-known State Department official kept up the flow of conversation by asking the Indian guests leading questions—on public reaction to the N-tests, the problems of the Indian economy, the future of the coalition government, particular Chief Ministers, Centre-state relations, and so on. The Indians answered intelligently, insightfully, eloquently. But later the official was heard remarking that he only wished he had had some equally penetrating questions thrown at him about his country and its policies. No one bothered to ask him anything at all.

Indians are great ones at talking about themselves, and ready, always, to furiously point out the political and moral failures of others. But they are less furious about their own failures, not just the gigantic ones of poverty, ignorance and disease that afflict the country 50 years later, but the overriding failure of Indian Governments to provide basic of governance. Last week, a special pre-Independence Day Parliament session to discuss human rights—questions such as child labour, women’s rights and custodial deaths—was postponed and MPs were being cajoled back to the Capital from their constituencies to attend the August 15 ceremony with allurements of allowances and fees to attend various parliamentary committee meetings.

Sensing a serious case of anniversary blues, the government’s feel good brigade went into overdrive in an effort to stoke the dying embers of enthusiasm—with the promise of pop singers, special TV programmes, film screenings and telephonic tapings of Vande Mataram. But the prevailing mood of disenchantment and dejection seemed too severe to be cured by last-minute quackery. Its effect is a bit like offering palliatives to the terminally ill. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the great poets of our time, summed up the same symptoms fifty years ago, in his famous Ode to August 1947:

Yeh dagh dagh ujala,

Yeh shab-e-guzeeda sahr,

Woh intezar tha jiska,

Yeh woh sahr to nahin...

(“This sullied dawn/This night-bitten daybreak/Surely this is not the dawn we longed for/In the quest of which we had set out once....)

Two Judges who have created history

by Harihar Swarup

TWO judges have created history and caused political tremors. Justice M.C. Jain’s interim report on the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi threw the United Front and I.K. Gujral’s Government in the dustbin of history and the final report exposed the vulnerability of India’s security. Mr Justice B.N. Srikrishna’s report into the Bombay riots and serial bomb blasts six years ago sent shock waves in political circles and caged the tiger, Bal Thackeray.

The final of the two commissions came within a gap of seven days. While the Jain Commission was appointed in 1991, within six days of the dastardly crime that shook the nation, the Srikrishna Commission was set up two years after, in January, 1993. Justice Jain took seven years to complete his work; Mr Justice Srikrishna completed his probe within five years. A proposal was mooted in the Union Cabinet stipulating winding up of the Jain Commission in February, 1994. The Srikrishna Commission was actually scrapped in February, 1996, but revived following insistence by Atal Behari Vajpayee during his brief term in the prime ministerial office in May, 1996.

Both Judges were, at one stage, disgusted because of lack of cooperation by their respective governments as they went through cumbersome proceedings, examining witnesses and writing chapter after chapter of the voluminous reports. Yet Justice Jain and Mr Justice Srikrishna showed remarkable patience and perseverance and produced reports without bias or any prejudice. The Jain Commission examined 110 witnesses and got a dozen extensions while the Srikrishna Commission confronted 500 witnesses and secured 10 extensions. What they got in return were only brickbats.

Though both Judges have made history, they come from entirely different background; Justice Jain retired as Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court eight years back while Mr Justice Srikrishna is a sitting Judge of the Bombay High Court. Spirituality has, however, been the common link between the two Judges having an age difference of 11 years; Justice Jain is 68 and Mr Justice Srikrishna 57.

As Justice Jain was planning to settle down to a quiet life after retirement in 1991, the Supreme Court requisitioned his services to head the commission being set up to unravel the conspiracy behind Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. Mr Justice Srikrishna was asked to head the commission three years after he was appointed a Judge of the Bombay High Court. He was senior counsel in the High Court when in 1990 he was elevated as Judge.

While Justice Jain came to the portals of justice through a circuitous route, Mr Justice Srikrishna took to the legal profession right from the days of his law college. His area of operation has since been the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court.

Justice Jain was initially associated with the CPI and unsuccessfully tried his luck in politics. He then took to teaching and worked in Government College, Ajmer. Teaching job did not charm him and finally he decided to take a plunge in the legal profession having already obtained a master degree in law from Rajasthan University. He handled civil, criminal and revenue cases in the early stage of his career and practised in Jaipur, Jodhpur and Ajmer.

Having acquired enough experience as an advocate, Justice Jain decided to enter judicial service and his first post in 1970 was of Additional District and Sessions Judge. Within a couple of years he was elevated to the post of District and Sessions Judge and subsequently became a Judge of the Rajasthan High Court. His career as an honest, efficient and uncompromising Judge, having deep insight into legal matters, qualified him to be elevated to the prestigious post of Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. He hit the headlines in the national press having handled the case relating to the split in the Janata Dal following the fall of the V.P. Singh Government and formation of the Chandra Shekhar ministry with outside support of the Congress.

Though born in Bangalore, Mr Justice Srikrishna is a full “Bombayiate”. He is, perhaps, luckiest of eight children of his parents and followed the footsteps of his father, Mr B. Narayan Swamy, who also practised at the Bombay High Court.

Initially his father’s profession—labour law — did not interest him. He had a scientific temper and preferred physics and mathematics as his subjects in Bombay’s Elphistone College. Mr Justice Srikrishna’s father had other plans for his son which diverted him from science to law and the young man entered the precincts of Law College with the aim of specialising in labour law; a subject in which his father was also proficient.

Mr Justice Srikrishna inherited spirituality from his father and mother and combined his knowledge of mathematics with higher elements of religion and the Vedanta. He studied Sanskrit to enable him desipher the verses of the Vedanta. Side by side the Russian language interested him and he learnt that too along with other Indian languages.

Judged in the light of Mr Justice Srikrishna’s background and righteousness, his report into the Bombay riots cannot be dubbed as anti-Hindu. As an eminent jurist observed: “To denounce his report as anti-Hindu is highly ironical. Hinduism cannot be brought at par with Hindutva”. The Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray, and the Maharashtra Chief Minister, Manohar Joshi, would do well to understand this distinction.

75 YEARS AGO
High plague figures

SIMLA: Plague returns for the week ending last month show that the epidemic is still raging in all the provinces, being the highest in the Punjab and the lowest in Bengal.

During the week, seizures stood at 6,241 all over India of whom 4784 died.

Punjab’s loss was about half of the whole India being 2460 deaths against 3049 seizures.

The United Provinces came next with 984 deaths against 1066 seizures. The position in other provinces during the week in case of seizures and deaths respectively was: Delhi Province 264 and 173; Bombay 479 and 339; Madras 354 and 149; Behar and Orissa 216 and 185; Central Provinces 434 and 239; Burma 87 and 82 and Mysore 65 and 44.

In Bengal Presidency only Calcutta records 10 deaths. The principal towns affected are Delhi, Bombay, Rangoon, Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi and Bangalore. Sialkot and Jhelum districts of the Punjab record the highest deaths during the week.