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Judicial overreach
Chiru in Congress
Power crisis looms |
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China factor in Colombo
Loo and behold!
Shortage of staff has adversely affected the prison administration in Rajasthan and other states. The jail population has gone up four-fold in the past 20 years. However, there has been no corresponding increase in the jail staff. The
Centre and the states need to give top priority to this important area in prison reforms.
Prisons as revenue-earning centres
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Judicial overreach
Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh made a pertinent point at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Hyderabad on Sunday when he observed that “while the power of judicial review must be used to enforce accountability, it must never be used to erode the legitimate growth assigned to the other branches of the government”. He obviously meant to point out that the three pillars of democracy — the legislature, the executive and the judiciary — have their clearly defined and separate functions as given in the Constitution. This constitutional scheme of things should never be disturbed in the interest of growth of each of these institutions. Each institution may have its failings, but under all circumstances “it has to be ensured that the basic structure of our Constitution is not subordinated to the political impulses of the moment or to the will of the transient majorities”, as Dr Manmohan Singh pointed out. He made these meaningful observations after Justice A. K. Ganguly of the Supreme Court described as “shameless” behaviour of the government in allowing Rural Development Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to remain in the Union Cabinet despite the apex court having passed strictures on him when he was the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. But this is not the only provocation that might have prompted the Prime Minister to remind the judiciary of how far it can go to exercise its right of judicial review. The government has been taken to task by the court while handling cases relating to the 2G spectrum allocation, the appointment of the Central Vigilance Commissioner, the Niira Radia tapes, the food security issue, etc. It is true that the government’s failures on various fronts have been responsible for judicial overreach, resulting in the situation in which the constitutional scheme of things is getting threatened. If the executive had played its role as responsibly as possible, what we find today would not have been there. But this argument can be given in the case of every key institution forming the bedrock of our democracy. There is need to discuss the issue threadbare so that our constitutional democracy continues to acquire more and more strength with its unwavering commitment to the rule of law.
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Chiru in Congress THE merger of the 18-member Praja Rajyam Party (PRP) with the Congress in Andhra Pradesh on Sunday is expected to save the Kiran Kumar Reddy government in the event of a split in the Congress Legislature Party. In the past few weeks, speculation has been rife that about 24 MLAs belonging to the Jagan Mohan Reddy camp might ditch the Congress when Jagan decides to float a new party in the state. It is common knowledge that Jagan has been bullying the Congress leadership ever since he was denied chief ministership following his father, Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy’s demise in a plane crash. Though he and his mother have finally left the Congress, Jagan continues to claim that the Chief Minister is able to survive purely “at his mercy”. The PRP led by matinee idol Chiranjeevi, popularly called Chiru, has a sizeable vote bank in coastal Andhra. That he is from the 1.5-crore-strong Kapu community, which supports Jagan, would have weighed on the Congress leadership’s mind while finalising the merger. More important, as Chiru wants a united Andhra Pradesh, his voice is being seen as a counter to the demand for formation of a separate Telangana state. In the 294-member State Assembly, the Congress has 156 members (eight more than the half-way mark), the Telugu Desam Party 91, the PRP 18, the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen seven, the BJP two, the CPI four, the CPM one and Independents three. It is expected that in addition to the PRP’s 18 members, the seven Majlis members will also lend a helping hand to the Kiran Kumar Reddy government in case the Jagan camp walks out of the government with 24 MLAs. When Jagan floats a new party in a few weeks, Chiru’s flock will come in handy for the Congress. Significantly, Chiru has declared that his party’s merger with the Congress is “unconditional”. However, there is speculation that he may be inducted into the Union Cabinet with a membership from the Rajya Sabha and that four of his MLAs will also be accommodated in the Andhra Pradesh Cabinet. Despite his charisma, mass appeal and capacity to draw mammoth crowds, Chiru understands his limitations, particularly after his party’s poor performance in the last State Assembly elections. As his slogan for social justice had very few takers, coupled with the exit of many leaders from his party, Chiru was desperately in need of the Congress platform. Sunday’s development will not only give a boost to his political career but also provide stability to the state government.
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Power crisis looms THE
fiscal deterioration in Punjab State Power Corporation Ltd (PSPCL) is hardly surprising. Surprise, if any, is at the pace at which it has slipped into the red so soon after the bifurcation of the Punjab State Electricity Board. The electricity board was unbundled as part of the half-hearted power reforms which the state government was forced to undertake after the Centre had refused any further extension for the implementation of the Electricity Act, 2003. Since the state government did not write off the accumulated losses of the two entities formed after the board’s split, the two were handicapped right from the start. Their future was doomed. Last season a good monsoon came to people’s rescue as power consumption was less and the outgo on power purchases was manageable. The situation has worsened since then. If power cuts could happen in a lean season like winter, imagine what the summer would be like when demand is at its peak! And there is not enough cash to buy power. An in-house document of the corporation has painted a grim picture of its finances and warned of a default on the committed expenditure. The government’s depleted treasury does not inspire any hope of a bailout. Bank loans too have been exhausted to the maximum limit. What is worse, instead of launching a state-wide drive to realise arrears from the defaulters, especially farmers, the Badal government reintroduced free power with an eye on the coming assembly elections. The government itself avoids paying in cash the subsidy for free power given to farmers and sections of the poor. It often adjusts its dues against the loans it had advanced to PSPCL. As a result, the revenue-expenditure gap has widened to alarming levels. The management is non-assertive and the political leadership is non-visionary. The in-house stock-taking does not touch core issues like free power, greater operational autonomy, non-payment of dues by influential customers and government departments.
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The key to happiness is having dreams. The key to success is making your dreams come true. — Anonymous
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Corrections and clarifications
Despite our earnest endeavour to keep The Tribune error-free, some errors do creep in at times. We are always eager to correct them. This column appears twice a week — every Tuesday and Friday. We request our readers to write or e-mail to us whenever they find any error. Readers in such cases can write to Mr Kamlendra Kanwar, Senior Associate Editor, The Tribune, Chandigarh, with the word “Corrections” on the envelope. His e-mail ID is kanwar@tribunemail.com. Raj Chengappa
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China factor in Colombo THE fourth Eelam war ended some time back. But how is India placed vis-à-vis Sri Lanka today after all the diplomatic and material support given by it to the Colombo government during and after the vanquishing of the LTTE? President Rajapakse of Sri Lanka has made a number of scheduled as well as unpublicised visits to India. Bilateral relations are good and apparently friendly. However, Chinese presence in various spheres of Sri Lankan activities has become more visible and penetrating and looms large over India-Sri Lanka relations. It is time the Government of India put in place a well-conceived long-term policy in respect of Sri Lanka. It is necessary to ensure that our basic interests are not compromised while Sri Lanka works out its bilateral policies with other nations, particularly China. China has developed a multipronged approach to Sri Lanka involving assistance in the latter’s developmental activities, strengthening of bilateral trade and military cooperation. Examples include the construction of Hambantota port on the west coast of Sri Lanka, improving and expanding the island’s rail network and strengthening the Sri Lankan naval base at Trincomalee on the east coast of the island. China is expected to be authorised to use the port facilities in both Triconmalee and Hambantota apart from those at Colombo harbour. The Indian Navy will definitely find itself under pressure because of the Chinese presence through men and material at various ports and harbours of Sri Lanka. The island country is strategically placed astride the sea routes passing through the northern and equatorial region of the Indian Ocean. By virtue of the enabling facilities made available to China in Sri Lanka, the India Navy’s ability to dominate the sea-lanes within at least 1000 nautical mile radius of Kanyakumari will be affected. Surveillance on Indian military establishments like INS can be mounted by Chinese personnel on their naval platforms in the Bay of Bengal when docked at Sri Lankan ports as well as during crises in Sri Lankan territorial waters. During times of conflict either with China or even with Pakistan, extra efforts will be required by the Indian Navy to counter the surveillance threat or interference with our strategic communication facilities. Indian defence forces have a significant level of interaction with their Sri Lankan counterparts. This is by virtue of the training imparted to Sri Lankan officers in our establishments like National Defence College, New Delhi, Counter-Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School at Vairengte, Mizoram, and the training establishments at MHOW, Dcolali, Belgaum, etc. Such interactions could be suitably leveraged to ensure that it is India which is looked up to for strengthening Sri Lankan military facilities rather than China. More than the Sri Lankan military, it is the political leadership of the brother of the President, Defence Secretary Basil Rajapakse, and a politico-administrative clique which have decidedly embarked upon the Chinese-supported route. Therefore, India has a difficult task at hand. India and Sri Lanka both need each other, not only in times of political crisis but also on a continuous basis. They as neighbours have a shared past. The Sri Lankan polity has a framework to an extent similar to ours. Both are constitutional republics, have a civil service-based administrative structure and, above all, social, cultural and religious strands and multiplicity which can co-exist. While the Indian polity has given space to diversity in respect of various elements, Sri Lanka has not been able to do so for various reasons. While there is a similar or near-similar milieu in India and Sri Lanka, there is no such compatibility between Sri Lanka and China. It is cold political calculations which appear to have driven President Rajapakse to China for assistance. The Sri Lankan President wants to extract more in every sphere from India. Colombo wants New Delhi to provide lethal arms to the Sri Lankan military, make its trade balance with India less adverse and provide more concessional assistance in respect of its northern and eastern war-ravaged provinces. The China factor is always made to loom large, to pressurise India to provide more resources and aid to Sri Lanka. The reality, however, is that Sri Lanka will always like to have an external major power trying to negate India’s influence on Colombo. While attempts may be made through trade and commerce and by providing outsourced services and expertise from India, to develop a Sri Lankan stake in India, there should be no compromise on our basic security interests. The Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar should be emphasised as an exclusive zone to be secured by the Sri Lankan and Indian forces on agreed terms and conditions. Concluding an appropriate treaty without violating international conventions on maritime jurisdictions could be explored. This will automatically exclude hostile forces and may be achievable in the near or long term. India-Sri Lanka relations cannot be on a totally stable footing for all times to come. The Lankan scenario also affects Tamil Nadu politics. The recent incidents of the Sri Lankan Navy’s firing on Indian fishermen will have an impact on the coastal districts such Cuddalore, Ramanthapuram, Pudukottai and Tuticorin, and may influence the fishermen’s votes in the forthcoming Tamil Nadu Assembly polls. Unless the basic issue of devolution of power to the Lankan Tamils is sorted out, there can be no lasting peace in the island. Thus, India-Sri Lanka bilateral ties will also have periodic ups and downs unlike what the urbanised elitist leaders like Srimavo Bandaranaike, Junius Jayavardene, Gamini Dissanayake and Chandrika Kumaratunga think. Mahindra Rajapakse is truly a son of the Sinhala soil. He hails from the Sinhala heartland, the southern Galle area of Sri Lanka. He could effectively mobilise the Sri Lankan peasantry, the rural folk and the lower class Sinhalas to a very high patriotic fervour and commitment to raise the morale and support to the Sri Lankan Army in its campaign against the LTTE in the last phase of the Eelam war and obtain a decisive military victory over the LTTE. The very nature of his support does not leave any scope to President Rajapakse to concede substantial devolution of powers to the Tamil-inhabited areas. Thus, a stable framework of India-Sri Lankan relations is unlikely to be achieved in the near future. Nonetheless, India’s security has to be maintained. A high level of military deployment of floating platforms by India around Sri Lanka appears to be unavoidable. This will also serve as a signal of deterrence to China. The option of acquiring military staging and usage facilities both in ports like Kankesanturai in the North and Trincomalee and Galle should also not be ruled out. The level of engagement with Sri Lanka has to be maintained by New Delhi at a high level covering different areas, making it suitably nuanced and responsive to the dynamics of Sri Lankan
politics. The writer was the Financial Adviser to India’s High Commissioner in Colombo during the IPKF deployment.
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Loo and behold!
I
AM not a Peeping Jane but whenever I visit someone’s house, I love to look at the washrooms. This is because bathroom is one area that reflects the owner’s personality. At least that’s the way I like to justify my action. This fetish of mine is, perhaps, rooted in a chance peeping into the bathroom of the owner of Wild Grass, a tourist resort near Kaziranga National Park on Guwahati-Dibrugarh highway. Lined with well-stocked bookshelves, the bathroom was more of a library than anything else. Why did a man, who owns such a huge property, not make a personal library anywhere else? Is reading while lying in a couch any less comfortable than sitting in the loo and reading? I found an answer when my sister followed suit and fixed a bookshelf next to her bath-tub. She might have found the combination of a bubble bath and a racy book, indeed, a heady one. My peeping act took me to many a private bathroom and some of them made a lasting impact on me. For instance, a prominent city resident’s guest bathroom in which one needs the help of a navigator’s compass to find the loo amidst the antiques and family portraits or the one where one can be in touch with nature while enjoying jet stream massage in an oval jacuzzi. But nothing, I repeat nothing, had prepared me for the surprise I had in a private loo in one of the resorts where I had stopped during my recent trip to Delhi. The resort, which falls between Karnal and Panipat, offers a washroom area to its visitors in which the door of each cubicle has an LCD screen showing the latest Bollywood hits. My mouth was agape and I forgot the reason why I was there as I watched Sanjay Dutt and Akshay Kumar singing to their heart’s content. As I couldn’t enter the men’s section, I asked my son to do the peeping for me. Yes, there was no gender bias there. Each cubicle had a flat screen TV. It got me thinking again. Did I miss some research that established the relationship between a person’s bonding with the loo to that of his or her spending intensity? Why else would one encourage people to sit longer in the loo, rather than make them spend on food or buying stuff in their shopping arcade? I still have to find an answer to this one. Or maybe, at times it is wise to accept things as they come. For, there are things, which are logical and then there are things, which are
dillogical!
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Shortage of staff has adversely affected the prison administration in Rajasthan and other states. The jail population has gone up four-fold in the past 20 years. However, there has been no corresponding increase in the jail staff. The Centre and the states need to give top priority to this important area in prison reforms.
Staff crunch compromises jail security
IT'S
well known that across India jails are nobody's priority. Rajasthan is no exception. Prisoners, of course, suffer the consequences. But what is less well known is how badly this long neglect affects the men and women who make up the prison administration. About 108 facilities house over 17,500 prisoners the larger number of them awaiting trial. But in 2010 there are effectively less staff manning prisons than there were 20 years ago while the prison population has gone up four fold. Ideally, the general consensus is the guards to prisoner ratio should be one guard for every 24 prisoners. But at present the capacity is actually of one guard for every 54 prisoners or more which puts an enormous pressure on the prison establishment. Overall vacancies of security staff run at around 25 per cent of sanctioned staff which is less than the numbers really needed. But this is only half the story. At the Central Jail Jodhpur, the posting of prison security staff has most times been less than 50 per cent of the sanctioned strength and vacancies in sub-jails sometimes may even more. A couple of years ago, 250 security personnel were recruited after seven years. The government has sanctioned another 550 security warders now when their number has run into less than two-third of the sanctioned strength. Vacancies for the jailor's post perpetuate because of stringent rules that require an assistant jailor to have five years' experience before being promoted to the post of deputy jailor and a further five years to become jailor. Things are hardly better at the supervisory levels. Despite the heavily centralised decision making design of the department, the headquarters runs on two men - a Director-General of Prisons and his IG who push mounds of paper around, liaise with the ministry, supervise all categories, administer and oversee the budget, review the situation in each prison, administer budgets, scrutinise purchases, attend to the myriad complaints and concerns of prisoners and staff and must take the flack if anything goes wrong. Lack of personnel able to move up the ladder has led to a strange situation: the higher levels of the jail service are now almost inevitably manned by people drawn from the police (and not prison) service. The posts of DG, IG and DIG of Prisons and now both the DIGs at Jaipur and Jodhpur are drawn from the police department. This lack of any opportunity to rise to the top of one's profession demoralises an already demotivated service which is then easily tempted into time serving short cuts and corruption. Charge-sheet for small and big transgressions abound and that ensures that many are either not eligible for promotion or promotions have to be delayed. Given the work load and the need to be on site all the time, the present pre-1990 cadre has little exposure to new trends, in-career training and few technological skills or psychological training required to run an efficient correctional service. Pay parity of warders in the prison service and police constables was lost in the mid-90s when the police got a pay hike but inexplicably the prison staff did not. Despite recommendations from various high-powered committees, the situation has not changed and prison staff is deeply disgruntled by the unfairness of it all. Small wonder, the staff regularly asks for premature retirement as soon as their pension rights have become assured. The hardened ones can't be bothered with too much nicety and have even been known to court suspension for small misdemeanours because it means suspension at half pay for six months and then at three-quarter pay till reinstatement - all of which can augment other 'business activities' while off work. The strain and stress of the hellish environment in prison takes its toll on prisoner and jailer alike and the number of people dying young of natural causes in the prisons service may be three times that of the police. When a sensational jail break or gruesome custodial violence takes place, sudden largess gets thrown at a traditionally under-resourced department. Throwing money to solve a security problem or spurts of recruitment and repair may ameliorate the problem in the very short term but does little to improve the root causes that ensure that such incidents don't proliferate. For instance, it is useless to make hue and cry about avoidable deaths in prison when there are no really practical arrangements to take prisoners to hospitals in timely fashion or pay attention to them on a regular basis and diagnose an illness before it becomes acute. Short staffing means prisoners can't have some of the freedoms they could enjoy if there were more staff to supervise their recreation, family and lawyer's visits, and to run jail industry. Instead the only solution seems to be to lock up prisoners earlier and earlier in the day thereby leading to, disciplinary problems, simmering discontent and other darker problems that no one likes to talk about. Short staffing means security is always compromised. Unarmed jailors have been attacked and killed and prison staff becomes naturally risk averse. Inquiries then cite staff for not doing all they could to control a situation which, given the prevailing conditions, was near inevitable in the first place. It also means that convict prisoners in charge of a ward has a special power and play which is much more than should be tolerated. Induction of home guards and other untrained temporary manpower may seem to swell the numbers but hardly impact the wretched situation and in fact create more risk, as to augment meager salaries, ill-paid, ill-trained and ill-supervised staff, stray down avenues of complicity with prisoners to bring them in small necessities like smokes and mobile chips or more dangerous contraband like drugs and flick knives. Opportunities to collude without much risk means that money greases every wheel from how much food will come your way to whether you will get to court for a hearing that day or are left behind. Undoubtedly, conscientious administrators try to do the best they can in difficult circumstances but individual endeavor is no substitute for sustained attention to the system as a whole. Sudden raids to clean up this or that prison may cause some momentary setback to well established patterns of rent seeking but are double-edged in that the actions are ad hoc, and the discovery of every sort of contraband inevitably throws the deeper malaise into sharp relief, embarrasses the government, and leads to awkward questions for which no one has really worked through a long term plan. It is not that solutions have not been worked through by committee after committee or that money is so short that prisons must be denied their share. It is simply that prisons have no space in the public mind, are not going to change any election result and are places for the forgotten - be they the prisoner or his custodian. The writer is Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, New Delhi
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Prisons as revenue-earning centres JAILS in India may portray a picture of being a social burden and an institution making no contribution for the country. However, an in-depth analysis shows that Indian prisons are institutions which can promote economic welfare. Of course, the very idea of making prisons revenue-earning centres generates resistance and obstacles. According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), in the United States, a jail industry is defined as one that uses inmate labour to create a product or provide a service that has value for a public or private client and that compensates inmates with pay, privileges, or other benefits. If this definition is to be aptly interpreted, the prison industry must have a strong vocational training orientation going hand in hand with sustainability with profit a secondary motive. This will focus mostly on reform of prison inmates making them self-sufficient and ready for the outside world. India's comparatively small convict population can nevertheless be a viable workforce able to contribute to the economic progress of the nation. Ideally, industries in prison could be both profit making and socially useful in providing folks returning into society with a skill that will offer them a chance to earn a living and reintegrate. However, not-for-profit-not-for-loss models that merely break even or perhaps cost the state relatively small amounts are still most valuable given that training and production centres prevent recidivism, utilise hidden skills and unrealised talents and help in the maintenance of prison discipline. These are intangible but significant benefits. Of course, there are obstacles: space is limited or non-existent in our overcrowded prisons, paucity of funds, severe staff shortages, inexperience of supervisory staff and willing specialists to connect product to markets are just some. But the greatest spur to making new beginnings must surely lie in the possibility of making some money which can be ploughed back into the prisons themselves to make the dreary drudgery of life their a tiny bit better. A beginning can be made by re-assessing the available manpower, space and financial resources and rationalising its use. A bigger jail like Delhi's Tihar Jail having more inmates can generate an annual turnover of Rs 16 crore. However, though the same cannot be expected from small Central Jails as in Udaipur or Jaipur for less labour intensive quality goods production or piecework for some of the popular items like Rajasthani quilts and carpets, pottery, and glass look like possibilities worth exploring for bored and depressed inmates. The money generated from the prison industry can also be re-circulated into the prison industry instead of being deposited with the government in case additional funds are not available. Maharashtra's Yerwada prison earns a profit of almost Rs 55 lakh. A US-based study makes the argument that a 1-per cent increase in the proportion of inmates who work six hours or more daily would produce more than 11 million additional labour hours annually and if so there is a great deal of potential to be tapped. Across the country about 2 lakh convicts constitute a potentially large workforce. Today the majority are idle or non-productive. But there are good practice models which with a little effort and innovation could multiply. Many prisons in India engage inmates in bakeries, textile making, construction, wine making and clothing. Jail authorities also allow low security inmates do outdoor jobs like sweeping, loading and the like. Inmates in Amravati jails make rakhis. In Ludhiana, they are into the knitwear industry. In Tamil Nadu, they grow vegetables and learn horticulture in the bargain. Earnings are small for the individual inmate but it does make for some savings. Since a large percentage of the prison population is young, productive skills create an incentive to do better outside. True, captive labour can be exploited too easily. But this is no reason to abjure all the social and economic benefits that can flow from developing jail industry. This can only happen if certain parameters are established and if instead of just incorporating them in the prison manuals, jail authorities and others using prison labour work within well regulated parameters. Prison populations may be far from the everyday concern of the ordinary person on the street but prisons affect our lives in many ways. Unhygienic ill-kempt prisons release disease into local communities. Young bodies with idle minds and little to occupy them are easily lured into criminal apprenticeships on the inside which are soon practiced on the outside. Accumulated frustration, seething anger, and their own hopelessness and desperation often turn into street violence in our cities. Making the lives of the prisoners more meaningful and giving them an opportunity of rehabilitation negates all this and creates instead social assets for folk who in the Indian context are all too often caught in the administration of justice for no reason than their poverty, the inefficiencies of the system and lack of knowledge of law. Prisoners have every right to a second change and should not be deprived of this right to protect society from the consequences of not doing anything to assist them onto a better path. The writer is associated with the Prison Reforms Programme of CHRI
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