For a consensus on CTBT
IT is a routine reiteration, but can still be the first step to building a national consensus on security in the post-Pokhran environment. Prime Minister Vajpayee told Parliament on Tuesday that India would sign the CTBT if other countries too entered it.

Disturbing signals from Iran
THE recent killing of four Iranian intellectuals has understandably put a question mark on President Mohammed Khatami’s reforms agenda. The killings are evidently part of the plan of the hardliners to force Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist policies on an unwilling people.

A burning sensation
MONDAY's incident in which three persons set on a fire a woman corporator in a Mumbai slum area is too gruesome for words. That all this happened over the putting up of a water tap in the locality makes it all the more reprehensible.

MILITARY AND POLITICS
by Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
CHINA’S current exercise to create “a revolutionised, modernised and regularised People’s Army with Chinese characteristics”, to quote the Defence Minister, Gen Chi Haotian, who visiting India a few months ago and was recently in Singapore, would have been less intriguing if it had not been for the enigmatic hoary old Newspeak of Beijing’s international diplomacy.

Denationalising the insurance sector
by S. Sethuraman
IF the Vajpayee government finally succeeds in securing parliamentary approval to its omnibus legislation to end the state monopoly in insurance, and open up both life and non-life business to competition, it will be the biggest reform measure since economic liberalisation was launched in 1991.

Did only kinship save Amartya Sen?
By G.S. Bhargava
WAS Amartya Sen to be booked as a Naxalite? According to Ranjit Gupta, former Inspector-General of Police of West Bangal — identified with indiscriminate hunting down of young persons as Naxalites in the late sixties — he did not comply with “a requisition” for Amartya’s arrest issued by the Delhi police.

Compensation & criminal justice
by G.S. Grewal
THE Criminal Procedure Code (Cr. P.C) regulates the criminal justice system in the country. It contains 484 sections. Almost the whole code is full of provisions to protect the rights of persons accused of offences. There is hardly any provision to protect the rights of the victim of the offence.

A point to ponder!
by Niti Paul Mehta
MY daughter-in-law was angry. She was shouting at her five-and-a-half-year-old son, Varun. The child has a limitless capacity to provoke his mother. Sensing trouble, the boy bounded and with a neat “hop-step-and-jump” landed straight in my lap and, panting, clung to me. “Maregi! (She’ll beat me)”, he gasped. “You must have done something wrong. What did you do to annoy her?” I asked. “Did you spoil something?” “Nop!” he shook his head innocently.

75 Years Ago

Dispute about a Bunga
THE Mahant of the Malvai Bunga, Amritsar, handed over the charge of the Bunga to the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee some time back. Long before that, several shops now alleged by the SGPC to belong to the Bunga, had been sold to private citizens over which they exercised all the proprietory rights.

For a consensus on CTBT

IT is a routine reiteration, but can still be the first step to building a national consensus on security in the post-Pokhran environment. Prime Minister Vajpayee told Parliament on Tuesday that India would sign the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) if other countries too entered it. And he promptly secured the support of the Congress, indicating that there is a broad agreement on this. His prepared statement was packed with bureaucratic jargon but put across India’s stand unambiguously. On the central issue of the CTBT, he was merely referring to his UN speech, including the mild protest against the unilateral US curbs on transfer of dual-use technology. This time though he did not present it as some kind of a trade-off. Simply put, India will readily sign the treaty, as it should as one of the 44 nuclear or nuclear threshold countries, once endorsement to it becomes clear. The Congress support is significant since the party had earlier criticised the treaty as discriminatory and faulted it for not bringing steady nuclear disarmament on its radar screen. Of course, in the initial hours of euphoria after Pokhran II even the BJP had piled on conditions and demanded changes in the treaty to sign it.

The other points the Prime Minister made related to producing fissile material and nuclear weapons, testing and deploying intermediate range missiles and legislating stringent controls on export of nuclear or missile technology. The USA has been relentlessly leaning on India to stop both the production of nuclear weapons and missiles while stressing the imperative need to sign the CTBT. He has now made it clear that India will go ahead with arming itself with a credible nuclear force that can sustain an initial attack and still be potent enough to retaliate with adequate power. This has been interpreted by analysts to mean that India plans to tip its missile battery with nuclear weapons and base them all over the country so that even if some of them are destroyed in a pre-emptive strike, there will be enough of them to mount a counter-attack. Hence the need to go in for both nuclear weapons and missiles.

One fallout is clear. The USA is not going to be amused and the next round of talks between Mr Strobe Talbott and Mr Jaswant Singh may be as fruitless as the earlier ones. Which also means that the USA will not lift economic sanctions and is sure to armtwist the multilateral lending institutions to deny any assistance to India. Here comes the second likely fallout. A foreign exchange crisis, not as severe as the one Pakistan is going through but a crisis all the same. This year exports are falling and one rough calculation projects the current account deficit as high as about $ 20 billion. India today has a reserve of about $29 billion, but some of it is hot money and may take flight at the first sign of trouble. This looming danger was brought out by Mr T.N.Chaturvedi, a sober man not given to melodrama. He deserves to be heard.

Disturbing signals from Iran

THE recent killing of four Iranian intellectuals has understandably put a question mark on President Mohammed Khatami’s reforms agenda. The killings are evidently part of the plan of the hardliners to force Ayatollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist policies on an unwilling people. They are virulently opposed to the official policy of building bridges with the USA and the rest of the world. The victims of the wrath of the fundamentalists were among six prominent secular writers summoned before an Islamic revolutionary court in October. They were trying to revive the independent writers’ and journalists’ union which was disbanded by Imam Khomeini after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Logically, however, the targetting of liberals should not be seen as the beginning of the end of Mr Khatami’s laudable attempt to end Iran’s political and economic isolation at the global level. He was known for his liberal views when he stood for election and the victory sent out a powerful signal that the majority of the Iranians were with him. The fundamentalists who are still well entrenched in key positions in the power structure are not going to give up without a bloody fight. They were primarily responsible for the humiliation of the pro-Khatami Mayor of Teheran who was charged with embezzling public funds. When the Iranian President announced that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie stood officially revoked the hardliners raised the amount of bounty for the author’s head. The source of funding of the unidentified groups for stepping up the hate campaign against the liberal and secular forces in Iran is not known. The activities of the Osama bin Ladens of the world are usually financed by Saudi Arabia. But why should Sunni Saudi Arabia provide overt or covert help to Shia fundamentalist groups in Iran unless it turns out to be a case of the devil providing assistance to anyone willing to implement his agenda of death and destruction?

Of course, Mr Khatami deserves praise for not going back on his promise of establishing a “civil society” based on law and order. What he needs is the unqualified support of the global community for pulling Iran out of the dark days of the Khomeini era. The USA is placed in a better position than most other countries for providing moral and political support to President Khatami in the unequal fight against the forces of evil in Iran. President Bill Clinton, who in spite of his domestic troubles over the Monica Lewinsky affair has played a remarkable role in keeping the West Asia peace process alive, would only add to his stature if he were to play an equally positive role in Iran which stands at the crossroad of following the Khatami path of reason and the Khomeini path of religious bigotry. The plea of some Palestinian girls wanting the release of their fathers from Israeli prisons brought tears to his eyes. He should be equally moved by the plight of Iranian writers and journalists who helped Mr Khatami win the election last May. They have petitioned the Iranian President for protection after the killing of four of their colleagues whose crime was that they supported the right to freedom of speech and secular way of life. These are principles which the USA and the rest of the civilised world holds dear. President Clinton should take the initiative of mobilising global opinion in favour of Mr Khatami and even advocate the gradual easing of sanctions for saving the agenda for reforms from being destroyed by a handful of hotheads in Iran. Such an initiative would help Mr Khatami silence his critics in Iran and give strength to his campaign against fundamentalism.

A burning sensation

MONDAY'S incident in which three persons set on a fire a woman corporator in a Mumbai slum area is too gruesome for words. That all this happened over the putting up of a water tap in the locality makes it all the more reprehensible. The perpetrators of the crime were reportedly supporters of the Congress (while the corporator was from the Shiv Sena). Despite that, there is every possibility that an attempt would be made to make the incident look like a case of public anger over the alleged failure of the leader to fulfil their demands. Even if that were the case, the three persons had no justification whatsoever to react the way they did. Condemnable that the incident is, it is an inescapable consequence of the growing hooliganism in the State Assemblies and even Parliament. After all, local-level leaders pick up their cues from the state and national leaders. When an MP grabs another one by the collar right there in Parliament, and an MLA throws paperweights and mikes at his colleagues, the local-level leaders seem to develop the wrong notion, that he can go even further. It is now for society to tell these people that they have already crossed all limits of civilised behaviour. Giving a political colour to the incident won't be right because the Shiv Sena itself has not set any high standards of public decency. The fact of the matter is that almost all parties have aided and abetted hooliganism by their supporters and bloody turf wars have come to be recognised as authentic political activity. Still, in such a situation, one expects more restraint from a sober party like the Congress. Even if this crime was only an aberration by certain wayward followers of the party, the message should go down to everyone that anyone indulging in similar frenzy would be disowned instead of being protected in any way.

There is an even more sinister dimension to the increasing violence. There is an attempt to justify such savagery by saying that it was an unplanned, spontaneous outburst of public anger. There is no doubt that there is a lot of frustration and desperation among the common people over the failure of the successive governments to provide them with even basic amenities. But it has been noticed that the disenchantment is made to cross the threshold of civilised behaviour by political parties in most cases. This tendency must be eschewed by every party. If that is not done, the long-term consequences of this free-for-all situation can well be imagined. As it is, few honest people dare to enter the political arena today. If the fire is not doused soon enough, politics will come to be recognised as a profession too risky for the decent sort.

MILITARY AND POLITICS
China’s intriguing exercise
by Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

CHINA’S current exercise to create “a revolutionised, modernised and regularised People’s Army with Chinese characteristics”, to quote the Defence Minister, Gen Chi Haotian, who visiting India a few months ago and was recently in Singapore, would have been less intriguing if it had not been for the enigmatic hoary old Newspeak of Beijing’s international diplomacy.

The 18th century Emperor Ch’ien Lung famously interpreted King George III’s request for diplomatic and trade ties as an appeal to pay tribute and place England under the protection of his/celestial empire. Similarly, when Ch’ien Lung’s 20th century successors assert that China “has never invaded other countries” and “does not station any troops or set up any military bases in any foreign country”, they take a highly subjective view of what is “other” and “foreign”. For instance, no “military expansion” is involved in building naval structures in the Spratly Islands which are claimed by six other countries, because the Nanshas (as the Chinese call the archipelago) have belonged to China “since ancient times”.

Plans for a smaller, streamlined and highly efficient force that can fight “local wars under high-tech conditions” using lasers to destroy satellites, and other state-of-the art intercept, direction-finding and jamming equipment have to be assessed in the light of this individualistic world-view. Historically, China has not recognised any global peer, dividing other nations into tributaries and barbarians. The promise that “China does not seek hegemonism” acquires a different significance in this context.

It is because of this intense nationalism that China’s neighbours cannot afford to ignore plans to create a lean and mean fighting force, even though General Chi stresses that the People’s Liberation Army will be cut by 500,000 and that, while Japan spends $42.2 billion on defence, and the USA $254.9 billion, China’s expenditure is under $11 billion. One-third of even this goes on maintenance, salaries and equipment. But what he glossed over was that the military earns enough money from commercial enterprises to contribute more than $25 billion annually to supplement the official military budget.

Not for nothing is the 3.2-million strong PLA called PLA Inc. Once, it was inspired by the ideal of “living off the land”, supposed to grow its own grain and raise its own livestock. But the PLA gave an ironic twist to that old spartan ideal by seizing massive plots of prime urban property during the Cultural Revolution and going into real estate in a big way. Some trace this freebooting tradition to the warlords of the Manchu twilight, but moneymaking in real earnest was probably sparked by Deng Xiaoping who reduced troop strength from 4.2 million, and ordered his countrymen “to go forth and make money”.

The military did just that, long marching its way into one of the world’s biggest business empires, encouraged by the politicians who saw in it a means of bridging budget shortfalls. From hotels to hospitals, coal mining to cosmetics, copyright piracy to cellular networks, transport to textiles, piggeries to pharmaceuticals, the PLA has a finger in every pie. Its reach extends to airlines, shipping, karaoke bars, prostitution, arms smuggling and military equipment. President Jiang Zemin could do so little to protect American intellectual property rights because the PLA owned most of the factories that turned out fake cassettes.

Apparently, the military had only 200 enterprises in 1982; there are now something like 65,000 businesses and factories, with a million enlisted soldiers and 70 per cent of PLA facilities devoted to moneymaking. The General Logistics Department, which is supposed to oversee the military’s business ventures, admits that it does not know the actual number of units. Assessments of value also vary, but according to one estimate, PLA Inc contributes 3 per cent of China’s $1 trillion gross domestic product.

This huge empire would not have been possible without the Chinese practice of quanxi (networking) which enables the military to tap high-level contacts in other branches of the government. Hence, for instance, the diversion of subsidised defence fuel to commercial undertakings like China United Airlines which is run by the air force and offers cheap flights (on old Soviet-made jets) to cities without civil airports. Naval vessels run a civilian passenger service. The Posts and Telecommunications Ministry sanctioned the PLA’s joint venture with a foreign company for civilian cellular phones. Two military-backed stock brokerages merged after a high-level inquiry claimed that senior civil and defence leaders had been bribed.

But Beijing is now uneasy about a commercialism that erodes discipline and encourages smuggling and other forms of corruption. A blanket ban on all business ventures would have impinged on Deng’s legacy of subordinating military modernisation to commercial considerations, and forced the government to make up the huge loss of earning. In any case, it would have been unenforceable. In 1994, therefore, Beijing barred the PLA from certain activities such as smuggling, stock market speculation, real estate, restaurants and karaoke bars, and tried to tighten financial supervision. But orders were not seriously enforced in a sprawling country where, as the saying goes, heaven is high above and the emperor far away.

The change came in July this year when, addressing military commanders during a campaign to suppress rampant smuggling, Mr Jiang ordered the PLA to wind down commercial operations that amount to a parallel mini-economy. The timing and motive of his speech, fleshed out later by the State Economic and Trade Commission (SETEC) which will take over military businesses, intrigued observers who argued that China’s pervasive corruption could have been tackled through other measures. Hence the conclusion that Mr Jiang’s real aim is a streamlined fighting force that places more emphasis on training, skills and technology. It is no secret that the PLA’s commercial involvement was thought to undermine its military morale, interfere with war preparedness, affect specialisation, erode discipline and encourage factional rivalries over business ventures and profits. In future, as General Chi says, instead of earning its keep, the PLA will have to eat the grain from the emperor’s bowl.

Many difficulties are still cited. Mr Jiang will need money to modernise, to the tune of an additional 30 per cent of the current military budget, according to one report. Revenues from the enterprises to be transferred from the PLA to the SETEC might contribute to this if the military does readily relinquish such a mammoth prize goose, which is by no means certain. Many checks, audits and investigations will be needed. Massive personnel transfers must take place, and new corporate executives will have to be found. The process is bound to be slow even if it moves smoothly.

But Mr Jiang is bent on distancing the military from politics and on establishing his own credentials in the armed forces. Both aims might be more easily achieved once he is able, in cooperation with a new generation of more professional commanders, to cut away the PLA’s fat and trim it down to an efficient high-tech fighting organisation. That will enhance his authority as well as the power projection ability of a country that can afford to say it “does not seek hegemonism” or want to be a super power since it has always seen itself as the centre of the world. Mr George Fernandes may have been right all along.

Denationalising the insurance sector
by S. Sethuraman

IF the Vajpayee government finally succeeds in securing parliamentary approval to its omnibus legislation to end the state monopoly in insurance, and open up both life and non-life business to competition, it will be the biggest reform measure since economic liberalisation was launched in 1991.

The Prime Minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, mustered political courage in overcoming stiff resistance within the Sangh Parivar to the entry of foreign companies in insurance business and standing by his Cabinet’s decision to set a ceiling of 40 per cent for foreign investors, FIIs and NRIs, limiting foreign equity to 26 per cent in an “Indian insurance company”.

The Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA), set up by the former Finance Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, in January1996, will now be made into a statutory body with extensive powers to regulate the investment of funds by insurance companies and the maintenance of solvency margins, audit their businesses, and protect the interests of policy-holders.

When the piece of legislation comes into force, the state monoliths, the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) and the General Insurance Corporation (GIC) — creatures of life and general insurance nationalisation in 1956 and 1971, respectively — will have to begin competing with a host of private companies, mostly joint ventures with foreign equity participation.

Some 18 Indian business groups have already lined up joint venture partners, mostly from the UK and the USA, Australia and Germany. More companies are waiting in the wings to float similar ventures and partake in what is regarded as one of the world’s mega markets with a potential of Rs 250 million.

It is the size of the market, which is yet to be penetrated, especially in rural and semi-urban areas, that has enthralled foreign insurance companies, which want to encash the opportunities introducing new technology and products hitherto unavailable, covering areas and segments of people untouched by the LIC/GIC in four decades.

What has given urgency to insurance reform is the huge corpus of funds from which the companies could invest in long-term debt instruments to finance infrastructure, since savings of households held by insurers are long-term liabilities which could be converted into long-term assets. Contractual savings institutions (insurance, pension and provident funds) have been major sources of funds tapped by infrastructure investors in the developed world.

It may be five to six years before private insurance companies get into stride and mobilise savings substantially, and channel them into approved investments, as laid down in the law, as they will be competing with the well-entrenched LIC/GIC.

Insurance reform got steam with the 1994 report of the committee headed by the late Mr R.N. Malhotra, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank, which suggested the entry of the private sector as well as restructuring of the LIC/GIC to stand competition. Broadly, the government accepted the approach of the Malhotra Committee though the degree of privatisation and the limits for foreign participation were spelt out only by the Vajpayee government recently.

Understandably, the employees of the insurance corporations in the public sector are worried because they would be denied the comforts of functioning as monopolies where productivity and efficiency are secondary. Pressures of competition will certainly hit the LIC/GIC which, given their vast network and market experience, should be able to overcome but not without their repositioning themselves strategically and achieving economies of scale. This could mean some downsizing of the workforce or effectively redeploying them to better effect and for diversified products.

The LIC has been scaling new heights in its 40-year history and its life fund recently crossed the Rs 100,000 crore mark, from Rs 10,000 crore in the mid-1980s, representing “collective security” to the millions of policy-holders. About 85 per cent of the LIC’s investible funds had been invested in the public sector by March, 1998. Yet, the LIC has a long way to go in the coverage of lives of the insurable population. Pension and health business is minimal.

Contrary to the earlier expectations that the IRA would be an all-powerful body, the Bill has a provision which gives the government overriding powers such as that the authority should be bound by the directions of the Central Government on questions of policy, and that its decisions shall be final.

Having provided a playing field for foreign banks, India cannot logically shut out the insurance field for competition. But strict regulation is the norm everywhere for a high-risk activity like insurance, and the Bill would appear to have provided the necessary safeguards both for the health of the business and the interests of the insured. — IPA

A point to ponder!
by Niti Paul Mehta

MY daughter-in-law was angry. She was shouting at her five-and-a-half-year-old son, Varun. The child has a limitless capacity to provoke his mother. Sensing trouble, the boy bounded and with a neat “hop-step-and-jump” landed straight in my lap and, panting, clung to me. “Maregi! (She’ll beat me)”, he gasped. “You must have done something wrong. What did you do to annoy her?” I asked. “Did you spoil something?” “Nop!” he shook his head innocently.

He looked the very picture of a little angel. He always does when he has done something naughty. His mother was soon on the scene. “Papa, see what he has done”, she said with a look of annoyance as she handed me his notebooks. He had used his maths notebook to do his English homework.

Meanwhile, the child had collected himself and his wits together. “What’s wrong with what I have done?” he asked in the typical way the youngsters argue these days. “My maths notebook is my school notebook and my English notebook is also my school notebook....”

To my great relief, the argument was cut short and the quarrel ended with the arrival of my younger brother. He could not have chosen a more appropriate moment to come. I was saved the ordeal of being an arbiter.

“I’m going to the MCD office to pay the house tax bill”, said my brother. “I thought I might ask if you want me to carry your bill also for payment.”

He could not have thought better. And for a man who during the past 25 years hasn’t moved out of his house, there couldn’t had been a better offer. In fact, in the past two days I have often thought of requesting him to take my house tax bill with him when he went to pay his. Who says there is no such thing as telepathy?

After my brother had left, I looked around. The child and the mother had, after all, made up, at least till their next tiff. I could hear them laugh together over something. Fine and clear weather, at last!

And at last I was alone, alone and thinking. Imagine! an old man sitting all by himself and thinking with his old palsied head and thinking of what! Of what else but of potatoes, tomatoes and onions. You’d hardly call it high thinking or something worth thinking at all. I shook my head thrice to free my mind from the thought of these articles. How could such mundane things get hold of a person’s mind so completely? Surprising, but could these things be considered mundane when they were weighing so heavily on the mind of a whole nation, the onion in particular. It has made governments fall!

I heard someone coming. It was my brother. He was back from the MCD office. He looked pale and dehydrated. “Had to wait in the queue for four hours”, he mumbled. “Was there no separate window for the senior citizens?” I asked. “Only senior citizens had come to pay the bills”, he said with a faded smile.

Here was another point to ponder!

Did only kinship save Amartya Sen?
By G.S. Bhargava

WAS Amartya Sen to be booked as a Naxalite? According to Ranjit Gupta, former Inspector-General of Police (IGP) of West Bangal — identified with indiscriminate hunting down of young persons as Naxalites in the late sixties — he did not comply with “a requisition” for Amartya’s arrest issued by the Delhi police. In a front page article in The Statesman about a month ago, Ranjit Gupta recalled the episode. Amartya Sen was then a professor at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). The charge was that “he was encouraging Naxalism among students”.

To quote briefly from the article, “apparently students would come (sic) to Amartya’s house for... discussions on politics. Amartya reasoned that it was quite possible some of his students at DSE talked about revolutionary politics which was then a fad.” But “somehow”, Ranjit Gupta was convinced that Amartya “couldn’t be a Naxalite and returned the warrant to the Delhi police. Since Gupta was then the DIG in charge of the Intelligence Branch in Calcutta his word prevailed”.

When I first read the piece I was struck by Ranjit Gupta’s statement that Amartya “looked shaken” when told of the charge and readily followed Gupta’s advice in meeting the situation. More recently, a correspondent, Debjani Kar, writing in the correspondence columns of the newspaper, recalled Ranjit Gupta’s reference to Amartya Sen being “his wife’s first cousin” adding “naturally, I was not anxious to carry out the order” of the Delhi police. Which prompts Debjani to contend, uncharitably perhaps but quite justifiably, that ... “it is vital in our country to be the first cousin of top Government executives’ wives to be able to keep out of harm’s way”.

For scores of bright young people who perished then, in many cases, due to being indiscriminately put down as Naxalites there was no such benefit of the doubt. Ranjit Gupta who had wisely refused to accept the Delhi police charge against Amartya Sen at its face value conducted himself differently in their cases. Was it only because of the kinship between the two? The way the incident was recalled by the former IGP, it also seemed, as alleged by Debjani, that he was trying to shine in the reflected glory of the Nobel laureate.

* * *

The way the news of displacement of S. Narendra as Principal Information Officer was handled smacks of news management by the Government . In the process, the Press Trust of India, the country’s principal English news agency, seems to have sullied its copybook of professional ethics. Five days before Narendra was bundled out, the agency put out a report quoting ‘official sources’ that he has been removed as PIO. Ironically, the PIO is the Government spokesman but the agency apparently did not care for his confirmation or denial of the report from “official sources” — which was extraordinary since it referred to his own position. If the agency learnt about it from Mr Naqvi, the Minister of State, then holding fort or less likely from Mr Pramod Mahajan who was in the process of taking over, it need not have been coy about owning it.

Further, he holds the rank of Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and there can be no superior “official source” in the nodal ministry. It is also normal for correspondents to get the IPO’s reaction to information obtained from “official” or “informed sources”. That Narendra had fallen from grace was clear but his actual removal as PIO did not take place for four days after the “leak”. Poor man, he had stoically braved the embarrassment of being a “removed” PIO. The gracelessness of the manoeuvre speaks poorly of the culture or the lack of it of the decision-takers.

* * *

The trouble with Sushma Swaraj, wrote Hari Jaisingh (The Tribune) a few days ago, is that she talks too much and makes promises with no intention of keeping them. So it was a chastened Sushma who returned to the Lok Sabha after her brief stint as Chief Minister of Delhi. According to The Times of India, she was uncharacteristically unprovoked when some MPs made taunting remarks. She merely responded with folded hands, the report said. But her Communist colleague, Gita Mukherjee, walked up to her and greeted with a warm handshake — a sign of culture.

* * *

The Guru Ramdas Academy at Dehra Dun, a hallowed place of learning, was the target of vandalism some days ago, causing echoes in Sikh religious circles in Punjab and elsewhere. The cause was said to be a dispute over ownership of “twenty bigha zamin” vacated by its Tibetan occupants. A Dehra Dun report in The Tribune disclosed that “certain local BJP politicians out to grab the vacated property” were behind the trouble.

* * *

Finally, among the plethora of tributes to the late P.N. Haksar, a man of towering intellect, honesty and integrity, I found two “pieces” out of the ordinary. Ashok Mitra in the Deccan Herald called him “yesterday’s man” and an ‘Allahabad Nehruvian’ whose “traumatic devotion to Nehru — and to the Nehru household — was not obliterated by the interlude in England or association with deeper-hued Marxists”. C.R. Irani’s obituary in The Statesman was touching, rather than gushing, a homage from the heart, “I did once suggest to him”, Irani wrote, “that if he had not advised Indira to ask Sanjay to live separately because he was becoming a political figure in his own right, he would have been in place during the Emergency and this would have made him very uncomfortable.” It is on the lines of the question whether a person had stopped beating his wife but more convoluted and clever. No wonder, Haksar thought Irani ‘had put it rather well’.

Prof John Kenneth Galbraith’s reference to Haksar as “a mere baby” is what I enjoyed most. Some years ago, Haksar was chairing a meeting addressed by Galbraith who is now 99 if he has not turned 100. When Haksar mentioned his ‘old age’ in his introductory remarks, Galbraith retorted: ‘You are a mere baby. There is about fifteen years’ difference in their ages.

Compensation & criminal justice
by G.S. Grewal

THE Criminal Procedure Code (Cr. P.C) regulates the criminal justice system in the country. It contains 484 sections. Almost the whole code is full of provisions to protect the rights of persons accused of offences. There is hardly any provision to protect the rights of the victim of the offence. If a rape is committed, there are hundreds of provisions to protect the rights of the rapist but hardly any provision to protect the girl who has been victim of the beastly assault.

There is one Section 357 which says that when conviction of the accused is recorded then, besides passing an order of sentence, some fine can also be imposed upon him and part of the fine, if recovered, can be ordered to be paid to the victim also. The Supreme Court has said that liberal and adequate compensation should be granted under these provisions.

Unfortunately, when the police is preparing the challan against the accused, there are no rules or written guidance that the police should also collect the evidence regarding the financial loss caused to the victim. Evidence should also be collected on the complete loss to the family and the dependants. In a murder case, if the accused is convicted then the court should also impose heavy fine and compensation should be granted to the family of the deceased. Under the present system, evidence is only collected to prove the guilt of the accused and no attention is paid to the victim. Therefore, at the final stage of trial, even if the courts want to impose adequate fine against the convict, there is no material in the file to throw any light on the financial status of the victim and the extent of loss.

To achieve this object there is no need to change or make any law. Only administrative instructions can be issued and proper training is to be provided to the investigating officers regarding the collecting of such evidence. If this procedure is adopted, criminal justice will become more fair and it will save the victim from duplicity of going to civil court to claim damages.

Since the complainant will be hopeful of getting adequate damages at the conclusion of the trial, he would also take interest in the trial of the case from the beginning. That will improve the chances of conviction and less loopholes will be allowed to be left by the prosecution because of the vigilant eye of the complainant. The court should also encourage the complainant to assist the prosecution in all possible ways, the complainant’s participation will not delay the trial, it will only advance the cause of justice.

The law provides that trial, when it starts, should be held on day-to-day basis. Such provisions should be zealously enforced for speedy trial and effective justice.

The court decisions, besides being legal, should also be just and the system should assist the court in the pursuit.

(The writer is a former Advocate-General, Punjab.)

75 YEARS AGO

Dispute about a Bunga

THE Mahant of the Malvai Bunga, Amritsar, handed over the charge of the Bunga to the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee some time back.

Long before that, several shops now alleged by the SGPC to belong to the Bunga, had been sold to private citizens over which they exercised all the proprietory rights.

On taking over charge, the Secretary, SGPC, issued notices calling upon all who held possession of the alleged property to make it over to the Committee within a week, failing which the notice stated that the Committee would take steps to recover possession.

Alarmed at this notice two persons, Hira Singh and Kirpa Ram, have filed complaints under Section 145 Cr PC against Bhagat Jaswant Singh, Secretary, SGPC, alleging apprehension of a breach of the peace concerning the shops in their possession. The trying Magistrate, Sirdar Sahib Bhai Hardyal Singh, recorded the statements of the complainants and sent the same to the police for investigation and report.