|
|
|
|
|
Murder and after
Haryana growth on track |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Higher education
“Jasmine” calls alert China
Dear Khurshid
JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: BOON OR BANE?
|
Murder and after
Tuesday’s
broad daylight murder of a girl student of Ram Lal Anand College in South Delhi’s Dhaula Kuan area has stunned the people in the national Capital and elsewhere in the country. Even 48 hours after the crime having been committed in the busy morning hours the police had no definite clue about the murderer.
Though it released a sketch of the young man, who is believed to have been harassing her for a long time, the police has failed to get an eyewitness account of the murder. The police somehow prepared the killer’s sketch after conversations with family members and friends of the 20-year-old victim, Radhika Tanwar, but it is surprising that no one has come forward with an eyewitness account.
And it is unbelievable that there would be no eyewitnesses as the girl was shot dead in full public view while walking on a footbridge near her college. She remained unattended to for 10 minutes. The precious time was lost when she was taken to hospital by a police constable. The incident clearly shows public antipathy towards the police. The general impression is that the police harasses those who come forward to help a person in distress or to provide information to the police about a criminal. Eyewitnesses, in most cases, have to suffer at the hands of both the police and the criminal involved in the commission of a crime. There is no credible system to ensure the safety of eyewitnesses. The crime graph may have come down in Delhi, as the police claims, but the growing distance between the police and the public is a cause for concern. This may eliminate the little gains the police has made. Once criminals are convinced of public indifference in helping the police, they may feel emboldened. In any case, effective policing without people’s cooperation is not possible, however stringent the law may be. This factor is as important as is the need to instil the fear of law in every segment of society.
|
|
Haryana growth on track State budgets increasingly avoid new taxes, which make politicians unpopular. Governments now take loans, which not many understand or oppose. Haryana’s debt will soar to Rs 52,701 crore in the coming fiscal year from the current debt of Rs 44,515 crore. The loan in Haryana is harsh but it is still half of Punjab’s and is manageable because of robust economic expansion and rising tax collection.
Haryana grows at about 9 per cent — slightly higher than the national GDP growth. Budgets are often loaded with dry statistics which make little sense to a lay reader. The costs imposed by projects taken up under the public-private partnership model are often ignored in calculating the burden on the taxpayers. Hefty amounts are collected for using roads and bridges. Reforms and technology are shrinking the role of the state. But government expenditure, and the consequent burden on the public, keeps growing, thanks to extravagance, populism and higher perks for politicians. The Haryana Chief Minister’s pre-poll sops of Rs 700 crore, a Rs 1,500 crore stimulus to the industry, a farmer debt waiver of Rs 4,200 crore and a Rs 4,000 crore burden of staff pay/pension hike had turned the state from being revenue surplus to a deficit state. Finance Minister Ajay Singh Yadav hopes to make the state revenue surplus again by the next budget. Barring the pre-poll aberrations, Haryana’s priorities have been unquestionable. The government is spending increasingly on power, irrigation and the social sector. Thirty-three per cent of the budget outlay is to be spent on building infrastructure. While health needs a significantly higher allocation, education and sports have got special attention this year. Social and economic disparities have widened over the years spreading unrest in a state, which otherwise boasts of having the second highest per capita income in the country after Goa. The Jats and the Dalits often clash and hold the state to ransom for a higher share of the cake. To end frequent road/rail blockades and ensure social harmony, which alone can fast-track development, equitable and inclusive growth should be high on the government’s agenda.
|
|
|
Higher education
There
is a crisis in higher education in India, both with the quality of education being delivered to students as well as in the inadequacy of institutions of higher learning in the nation. Only 12.4 per cent of Indian students go in for higher education, and it is now clear that the government alone cannot handle the task of providing 800 more universities and an estimated 10,000 colleges in the next 10 years. It is in this context that the public-private partnership model is being envisaged, and indeed, encouraged. We have it on the authority of the HRD Minister Kapil Sibal that most of the private technical institutions in the country are not up to the mark, and indeed lack both the required infrastructure as well as qualified staff. The Minister, however, is not just expected to state the problem; he is empowered to provide a solution. Instead, in Parliament, recently, he lamented that a World-Bank funded Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme had failed to take off since none of the 130 proposals submitted by technical institutions fulfilled the criteria laid down for allocation of funds. Thus, these 130 institutions were not even of a basic level, where they would qualify for a programme that would help them attain excellence. With the economy growing steadily, more jobs are available. However, there are not enough institutions to educate students and train them. Many of the new institutions are inadequate. Students of such institutions find it difficult to get good jobs and this leads to discontentment. The HRD Minister must make the effort to monitor both government and private education institutions to ensure that they conform to the norms. Citizens have a right to not only education, but also, by implication, to higher education. It is the duty of the state to provide and adequately monitor institutions of higher education.
|
|
|
All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin. — Lord Byron
|
“Jasmine” calls alert China
The echoes of popular uprising against authoritarian regimes in the Arab world are reverberating elsewhere in Asia also. Though South Asia displayed its people’s power years earlier, from 2004 to 2007, when monarchies and military regimes were forced to take to the democratic path, the heat of the developments in Egypt and Tunisia was felt in Pakistan once again.
The international and local media started speculating if Pakistan will witness another popular uprising against the corrupt and inefficient government as well as the politically entrenched army. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had to publicly come out to deny any such possibility and reshuffled the pack of his ministerial cards to project some responsiveness in governance. Other than Pakistan, China was also alerted towards the possibility of pro-democracy demonstrations triggered by online anonymous messages calling upon the Chinese to stage “strolling protests”, in silence and with smiles on their faces, to press for political and economic reforms. These messages ridiculed China’s “corrupt leadership” and asked for the termination of its authoritarian “one-party rule”. Specific places like the Wangfujing shopping street in Beijing were identified in a number of Chinese cities for such protest gatherings for three consecutive Sundays, on February 20, 27 and March 6. The protests were aimed at targetting the meetings of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) which were scheduled to start their sessions on March 3 to deliberate and finalise China’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Responses to these calls have been disappointing to the unknown, perhaps foreign-based “jasmine” callers. While Shanghai and Southern Nanning witnessed a few hundreds of people gathering at the designated places, in Beijing there were only a few “curious onlookers”. Though the anonymous online organisers claimed that there was good response in about 100 big and small Chinese cities, no corroboration of these claims was available through independent sources. One reason behind this lukewarm response to the calls for “jasmine strolls” was the heavy state reaction to these calls. The Chinese authorities censored many of the suspected websites and popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Nearly a 100 lawyers and human rights activists were put under house arrest. One of them, prominent Beijing lawyer Teng Biao, had expressed support for “jasmine rallies” on Twitter. The whereabouts of some of them are still unknown. Massive security was mobilised at the designated places where both uniformed and plain-clothes police personnel handled in a heavy-handed manner the curious media persons, mostly foreign, gathered to report these “strolls”. Journalists, notably from Bloomberg TV, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, were roughed up and their video cameras damaged. The Foreign Correspondents Club of China condemned the “unprovoked attacks on journalists”. The Foreign Ministry’s official spokesperson reacted by saying that foreign journalists must “respect and abide by China’s laws and regulations” and that “Beijing is a very big city with a large population. It is important to maintain normal order”. Local authorities in Beijing are reiterating these warnings. It would, however, be misleading to assume that the “Jasmine Revolution” in China was thwarted only because of the strong State action. The situation in China is radically different from the Arab world. China is not governed by individual or dynastic dictators as has been the case in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Its leadership is imaginative, organised and responsive, and does not hold office in perpetuity. The calls for protests mostly started from overseas Chinese and not from within as has been the situation in the Arab countries. China has made impressive economic progress and the confidence of ordinary Chinese has grown in their future prosperity with the trickle-down of this growth. The international community has huge stakes in China’s stability and continued growth as the factory of the world’s cheap consumer goods. Then why did the Chinese authorities over-react to the “jasmine” calls? This is because China feels internally vulnerable to any popular demands for political reforms and change. The Chinese Communist Party seems determined not to lose political control of the State. The State knows that it is not transparent, nor relaxed on issues like human rights, freedom of expression and organisation and open and healthy competition for power within. It has not preferred the rise of democracies anywhere in its immediate neighbourhood. The restive population in Tibet and Xinjiang reinforces the State’s internal sense of insecurity. The experience of Tiananmen also alerts the State apparatus that it can be taken by surprise anytime. The Chinese leadership realises that faster economic growth has been regionally imbalanced, resulting in economic inequality and environmental degradation, costing the quality of human life for many under-privileged Chinese residing in the rural areas, including hinterland. This was clear in Premier Wen Jiabao’s report to the NPC. Economic inequality was starkly highlighted by the presence of the ever-increasing number of billionaires in the country’s highest legislative bodies. The rural poor cannot bear the costs of health services and education, nor are they free to move in search of greener pastures. The frustrations of the rural poor are reflected in the increasing number of tensions and conflicts in rural areas. China needs to generate 12 million jobs to cope with the unemployment pressures. China’s fast growing urbanisation is also leading to new tensions between the urban population and rural migrants as the latter suffer discrimination in their new places of work. The internal economic and social pressures are forcing the Chinese leadership to be sensitive to the demands of political reforms. They also cannot ignore the changing global mood in favour of liberalisation and freedom. The word “democracy” and the demands for a multi-party system with greater political space for non-communist groups and organisations are heard more frequently and loudly even in the deliberations of the national legislative bodies. In a way, these voices are allowed to be raised occasionally to tactically diffuse internal pressures and create an ambiance of reform and change without altering the basics of political structures. It is a real challenge for the Communist Party of China to maintain its political hegemony in the midst of these uncomforting noises as they gradually gain momentum. The present leadership being rooted into the hard social reality has been able to meet this challenge. But they realise that pressures for opening the political system and responding to the demands for economic equality will grow faster than expected. Greater budgetary allocation, more than even on defence modernisation, for internal security is a clear evidence of the concerns gripping the leadership. It remains to be seen if the new leadership that will take office in 2012 will be able to display the present grassroot-embedded leadership’s degree of resilience and tact. It will also be interesting to watch what happens if the challenge of unequal and imbalanced economic growth is not tackled fast for a society that is technologically exposed to diverse and radical ideas of political freedom and pluralism from the world
around. The writer is Visiting Research Professor, Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore.
|
|||||
Dear Khurshid
Dear
Khurshid,
It started when we used to cross each other and smile and nod and when you stopped one day and asked if this “silsila” would ever go beyond this casual greeting. Then there was the postcard telling me that you would be returning to Lucknow on the 20th or the 21st of December. When you got off the train on the 21st and found me waiting on the platform you asked: “Were you here yesterday?” And when I nodded my head, you smiled and said: “I knew you would be.” That was the beginning of the most glorious and wonderful relationship of my life. You were always with me. You were the prime mover in that unhappy attempt at a runaway marriage and when it failed you were even more heartbroken than I was. You were such a help when I did finally get married and set up house. You were by my side when I lost my first born, holding my hand and doing your best to make me understand that the world had not come to an end. You stood by me all through the trauma of the breaking up of my marriage and did your best to shore up my self-esteem by convincing me that it wasn’t all my fault. And more recently, when my house burned down around my ears you flew in from Australia and helped me get over it by repeatedly telling me that they were only things that had been destroyed, that I should be glad to have got rid of all that useless clutter. I know in today’s world our relationship would be dubbed a gay relationship. I don’t know if it was. But I never did desire you physically though I will admit that whenever I was tired and weary I longed to be with you. But then something within me died, perhaps killed by all the buffets that my life had received and by the fact that I was now too old to take them in stride. I did what I had not allowed myself to do over all these long years I let time and distance take you away from. There was the odd phone call but increasingly these phone calls became further and further apart. And now there was your mail. I know that those 20-page letters will never be again. But now that evening shadows draw so close, do you think we could do better than an email every six months? I remain as always
|
|||||
JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: BOON OR BANE? The issue of judicial activism has again come to the fore following the pro-active role of the Supreme Court. It quashed the appointment of P.J. Thomas as the Central Vigilance Commissioner, directed the Centre to unearth black money stashed in foreign banks and put Hasan Ali Khan under custodial interrogation. Experts debate the pros and cons of judicial activism.
It’s a pejorative phrase This is part of the judicial function of the court. Therefore, to say that because the government has not succeeded in these matters the court has stepped out of its crease would be a totally erroneous assumption. —
Fali S. Nariman,Eminent jurist
Judiciary is doing its duty However, there is a difference. While earlier, judicial activism was restricted to lower level offices, now its scope has expanded to higher authorities. While doing so, the judiciary is only carrying out its onerous duty as mandated by the Constitution. Courts are not encroaching upon the domain of either the legislature or the executive. For instance, with regard to Mr Thomas' appointment as the CVC, he should not have been appointed in the first place in view of a charge-sheet pending against him. It's because the executive erred in appointing him that the Supreme Court had to quash it and declare it null and void. The Constitution is supreme and no organ — the legislature, the executive or the judiciary —can claim supremacy. If any organ crosses its limits, there must be an instrument like the judiciary to set it right and protect the Constitution. Judicial review is nothing but asking the legislature and the executive to act in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution. The judiciary has a constitutional obligation to undo the wrong and uphold the rule of law. It will be failing in its constitutional duty if it doesn't step in. —
Justice Rajindar Sachar,Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court
THE ONLY choice The objective behind judicial intervention is not just to protect larger public interest or safeguard the well-being of individuals but to restore people's faith in the justice delivery system. People’s confidence in the judiciary has to be safeguarded from erosion with the tool of judicial activism. At times, it becomes essential for the Judges to look beyond the immediate, to scratch more than just the surface, to dig deep, to carry exhaustive study, to hold inquiries and see if there is more than what meets the eye. After all, the courts, as custodians of law, cannot shut their eyes to illegalities, malpractices, violations, discrimination and arbitrariness. Judicial activism has seen justice restored on the track, innocents being saved from the gallows, scandals being exposed, the famished getting a square meal, the jobless landing up with means of subsistence, and even children finding their way to the schools through the dark lanes of ignorance. Compensations have been paid, non-deserving ones have been removed from posts, strictures have been passed, and directions issued to set things right. Any argument against judicial activism can hardly be justified. —
Justice Mehtab Singh Gill, Former Acting Chief Justice,Punjab and Haryana High Court
War on black money, graft Most of the important cases in which the judiciary has passed orders recently are about corruption in one sense or the other. While the case relating to the Commonwealth Games was financial corruption, the litigation over the appointment of Mr P.J. Thomas as the Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) was related to corruption because the CVC is a vigilance institution and is the supreme watchdog of the anti-corruption establishment of the Government of India for its employees. Who will save the institutions if the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene at the right time? Black money is also a facet of corruption because it is used essentially for illegal and corrupt practices. —
Mukul Rohatgi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court
Protector of Human rights The judiciary has, in fact, assumed an activist posture, and has construed the constitutional provision in a broader possible sense with the intent of safeguarding the basic civil liberties and fundamental rights. It’s for this larger public interest that the Indian judiciary has moved a little from the conventional and self-imposed limitations on its own jurisdiction. No wonder, judicial activism has covered every aspect of life with a human touch — from checking child labour, illegal detentions, torture and even custodial deaths to rehabilitating slum dwellers, payment of minimum wages and a better deal for the bonded labour. The judiciary does play a major role in the quality of the country's governance; an independent judiciary has become an essential feature of a democratic set-up like ours. The judiciary has taken upon itself the task to enforce the basic rights of the poor and vulnerable sections of society and rightly so. It has proved to be a saviour and is here to stay. — Mohan Jain, Additional Solicitor-General of India
The only hope of the nation Activism of any kind is always welcome, especially from the judiciary. For it is the only institution in which the citizens continue to repose faith. Sadly, all other institutions have failed to live up to people's expectations. — Tushar
Mehta, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court
Examples of good law Some judgements including those on the CVC and euthanasia are great examples of good law. Every time the Supreme Court lays down a good law it does not mean judicial activism. Good judgements are always welcome. The cry of judicial activism for the past few weeks is misplaced. — Rajeev
Dhavan, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court
onerous responsibility The court, being part of society, is discharging its duty by taking cognisance of such cases. —
Mahabir Singh, Senior Counsel for defence personnel As told to R. Sedhuraman in New Delhi,
How can the judiciary decide on the criteria for appointing a CVC? Will Judges now go on to make prescriptions for appointing the Chief of Staff, the Home Secretary or the Defence Secretary?...It will finally come down to how Judges theselves are appointed. —
Somnath Chatterjee,Former Speaker, Lok Sabha Policy matters, fiscal, educational or otherwise, are best left to the judgement of the executive. The danger of judiciary creating a multiplicity of rights without the possibility of adequate enforcement will, in the ultimate analysis, be counter-productive and undermine the credibility of the institution. Courts cannot create rights where none exists nor can they go on making orders which are incapable of enforcement or violative of other laws or settled legal principles. Far from accepting the limits on their legitimacy, judges sometimes confuse the divinity of the judicial function with individual divinity or personal infallibility. — Justice
A.S. Anand,Former Chief Justice of India — Justice V.R. Krishna
Iyer,Former Supreme Court Judge
|
|
|
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Letters | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
This is not judicial activism. Judicial activism is a pejorative phrase. The orders that have been passed by the Supreme Court in recent days are not at all an exercise in judicial activism, but judicial propriety because the Judges have examined the legality of the orders passed by the government and pronounced on them. 
Judicial review is a part of the constitutional set-up. If anything wrong has been done or is being committed, the judiciary is bound to intervene and undo the wrong. Judicial activism has been there for decades and it is wrong to say that it is a new phenomenon. 
Judicial activism is more a matter of compulsion than choice. It's only when the other wings of the administration shy away from carrying out their responsibilities and performing their statutory duties due to political considerations, populist compulsions, vested interests or just secretarial negligence that the judiciary has to step in. 
This is not activism in a wider sense. It seems the Supreme Court is taking on corruption and issues related to this. The Chief Justice of India has stated on many occasions that corruption cases must be fast-tracked. 
Justice is no more a distant dream even for the most vulnerable strata of society. And that's just one of the many contributions judicial acti-vism has made to Indian democracy. The past two decades have seen the judiciary go deep into issues not just for safeguarding the rights and freedom of the individuals but even to protect the environment and redress related concerns. 
It is a constitutional duty which the Supreme Court owes to the nation as corruption has become society's enemy number one.
The role of the Judge is that of a referee. I can blow my judicial whistle when the ball goes out of play; but when the game restarts, I must neither take part in it nor tell the players how to play…Judicial whistle needs to be blown for a purpose and with caution. It needs to be remembered that courts cannot run the government…
Broad guidelines should be followed by the courts in dealing with public interest litigations. There is the danger of inexperienced, indiscreet or embarrassingly naïve use of judicial power whereby PIL becomes a menace to public administration or an illusion for the people. Judicial usurpation erodes constitutional division of powers among the different instrumentalities. Our country has not entrusted governance to justices or legislation to courts.