The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Politicisation of criminals
Need for a preventive remedy
by Rajindar Sachar

A recent judgment of the Supreme Court holding that Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which exempts a sitting legislator from vacating the seat if convicted of offences under sub sections (1), (2) and (3) of Section 8 (which prohibit a person from contesting elections to the legislatures) till his appeal is decided, is ultra vires of the Constitution. Surprisingly, there is less panic and opposition to the judgment than one would have expected — evidently because the judgment exempts from its applicability the existing legislators - thus the present members of Parliament and state legislatures going to the polls this year are not really affected.

The two-judge Bench side-stepped a five- judge decision in the Prasbhakar case which had categorically held that the two categories, one of persons who are not legislators and the other who are legislators, “is based on a well-established nexus with a public purpose”. The two situations are different — in the later course the vacation of a seat affects the House. As it is, the courts on their own have developed a universal practice of permitting the convicted member only to mark his presence to prevent his disqualification but forbidding him to take part in the proceedings or vote till his appeal is decided. So for all practical purposes a convicted MLA plays no part in the deliberations of the legislature.

This interpretation by the Supreme Court would have serious consequences for opposition human rights activists, trade unionists and political activists, who are so indiscriminately and partisanly prosecuted under various security laws or even when holding bandhs and demonstrations. In such a situation automatic vacation of the seat of a sitting legislator would empower the ruling party with an arbitrary uncanalised power. Consider the enormity of injustice to the elected legislator, who had no conviction at the time of getting elected, but getting convicted during his term would automatically have his seat vacated, notwithstanding that his conviction may be set aside in appeal shortly thereafter; but by then another person would have been elected, thus causing irreparable damage to the career of the political activist.

The court recognises the anomaly but opines that the legislator can ask for a stay of conviction by the appellate court and, if granted, he can continue. With respect, is this not leaving to the uncertainty of different reactions by judges prompting the cynical comment in English law that what is justice is measured by the length of the Chancellor's foot. I am afraid this process is so discretionary and would vary with individual decisions by different judges - hardly a satisfactory alternative to Section 8(4) of the Act, which had at least a practical object to see that the electorate choice is not nullified by an adverse decision of the trial court without giving an opportunity of it being corrected in appeal which is his statutory right. In order to avoid further delay (which is really the villain) it could be legislated that the seat would stand vacated if the first appeal fails - no further appeals or revision before the courts will prevent the seat from being vacated. It could also be provided that the appeal by a sitting convicted legislator will be mandatorily decided within three months. This alternative has the merit of removing criminality from elections and also the prevention of irreparable harm and injustice to the elected legislator.

No, I am not underestimating the danger of criminalisation of politics - personally I would call it politicisation of criminals because previously criminals helped candidates win, now criminals compete to become legislators themselves - a horrible undemocratic situation endangering clean democracy. A recent survey shows that at present 162 out of the 545 Lok Sabha members and 1,258 out of the 4032 sitting MLAs have themselves declared that criminal cases are pending against them. And this in spite of the warning given by the Vice President, Mr. Hamid Ansari, as far back as 2004: “Exactly 23% of MPs elected in 2004 had criminal cases registered against them — over half of these cases could lead to imprisonment of five years or more. The situation is worse in the case of MLAs… Are we not progressing?”

My opposition to the extreme interpretation by the Supreme Court resulting in a validly elected legislator losing his seat should not be interpreted as in any way minimising the danger of criminality in our legislatures. Rather the contrary. I feel that a more satisfactory mechanism to halt the politicisation of criminals is to have a law, long advocated by the P.U.C.L., that if six months before the polling date, a person has been charge-sheeted by a court, he /she would stand debarred from contesting the forthcoming election. This time-frame would give the person concerned sufficient time to have the charge sheet quashed by an appellate court, thus negating the doubtful defence put forth by political parties of false cases being lodged against political rivals on the eve of the nomination date.

I am more disturbed by the second judgment holding valid Section 62(5) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which prohibits any person from voting if he is confined to prison even on a petty offence or is in the lawful custody of the police (say being a slum dweller, a poor rickshaw driver, and thus unable to obtain bail) while permitting rich accused persons like those involved in the Coalgate and telecom scandals if on bail, but denying the trade union workers like those of Maruti the right not only to contest an election but also the right to vote because the anti-labour state colludes to keep them in jail — would this not (against their better sense) provoke an ordinary simpleton citizen to tend to agree with Charles Dicken's favourite Character Bumble when he said, "If law supposes that — the law is an ass - an idiot", echoing in the same strain what provoked George Chapmen (1559-1634) to say: “I am ashamed, the law is such an ass.”

In the U.K. the right to vote is only denied if a person is convicted and sentenced to 12 months. In Israel even a convicted person in jail is allowed to vote. The United Nations as far back as 1955 resolved “that unconvicted prisoners are presumed to be innocent and shall be treated as such”.

Also why is it that the political parties, which are so upset at the latest Supreme Court ruling, are mysteriously silent and inactive at not amending the election rules to give the voters the right of negative voting, by carrying out the unanimous recommendation of the Election Commissions to the Central Government so as to provide an extra button of negative voting in the electronic voting machine? Are they afraid of facing the searing answer of the electorate in the voting machine of “None of the above”?

The writer is a former Chief Justice, High Court of Delhi

MIDDLE

Portrait of a policeman
by V.K. Kapoor

A policeman on duty is the symbol of government authority. Reality on the ground is totally different.

A policeman is denounced by the public, berated by newspapers, ridiculed by movies, and unsupported by prosecutors and judges. He is shunned by the respectable. He is condemned when he enforces the law, and punished when he does not. We resent him when he enforces the law in our own case, yet demand his dismissal when he does not elsewhere. We offer him bribe and yet denounce his corruption. A policeman is supposed to possess the qualification of a soldier, a lawyer, a diplomat and an educator with remuneration less than that of a daily labourer

For most of the policemen at the ground level life is an archive of unhappiness, cynicism and frustration. He has to deal with vast lumpenisation of society, bizarre crime and dehumanisation of life. Life at the ground level is raw and elemental. Those who demand the most, give the least. The small want to become great, the strong want to denominate the weak, and use the police as an instrument.

There is a crisis of leadership in the police. Senior policemen easily become puppets in the hands of their political masters. An episode is still etched in my mind. I was heading the state Intelligence. I used to brief the political boss early in the morning. After I finished my briefing, the politician called the policeman who was waiting to meet him. He came, saluted him and instead of sitting on the chair, he sat on the floor. When the CM asked him to sit on the chair, he replied: Main aap ka itna samman karta hun, Aap ke samne main kursi par nahin baith sakta (I have so much respect for you that I cannot sit on the chair in your presence)

Some of the officers are very dignified, straightforward, and highly professional. Their number is small, and in due course of time, they get marginalised. While training the Delhi Police for Commonwealth Games, I talked about the police leaders. One Inspector remarked that they licked above and kicked below.

The police has to deal with politicians at very close quarters. A politician expects complete servility. Unfortunately, Indian politicians are of a very low calibre. Politics is becoming the refuge of criminals and scoundrels.

There were complaints against a senior officer. He was very close to top politicians. When clamour rose about his removal, the top politician told one of his confidants that he was not going to do it. Yeh to apna paltu kutta hai (He is my lap dog). Later on the officer got into trouble with a woman, and spent, some time in jail. It's these "lap dogs" who toe the political line and create problems for subordinates and straightforward officers.

There is a lot of stress and strain in the police. Research has shown that policemen die eleven years earlier than people in other professions. They die unsung and unmourned. Duty hours are very long. There is housing problem and a policeman has to work in a generally hostile atmosphere.

While in the MHA, once I suggested to the Home Minister that the police should be put under the Supreme Court. The Home Minister asked sharply “why do you want to go under the judiciary?” I told him that a Judge did not have to fight the elections. He laughed.

Relations in the police are not task-focused but personality-focused. Subordinates are not bound to perform but to please their superiors. The politician does not want performance, he wants conformance and top officers are ready to play the ball. A politician is the Mother Dairy of mischief and illegality.

A corrupt policeman represents the delinquency in society. A clean society will get a clean police force. There is no twilight zone in integrity. The police deserves more respect in society.

OPED SOCIETY

Even though urban spaces breed disintegration at multiple levels, they attract a large number of migrants for their liberalism and the economic opportunities they offer
Maximum city — maximised people
Rajesh Gill

The largest of cities have continued to attract the rural as well as urban migrants, their unlivable conditions and congestion notwithstanding. 'City' for every one; a rural migrant, an academician, a policy maker — primarily means a big city, usually a million-plus or a mega city, with a huge population, skyscrapers, glamorous malls, institutions of higher education, expanded markets, seats of power and a rich infrastructure. When, for instance, a student in a remote village of India after completing education plans to try his luck for a job in a city, s/he thinks of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta, Chennai and not of Rohtak or Hoshangabad or Agra.

The academic fixation on the largest cities is similarly evident from the preoccupation of our policy makers with these cities. "…much of the current policy debate and media discussion on the problems of slums and deficiency of amenities is restricted to a few large cities. The fact that greater attention is paid to these cities in the policies and programmes for poverty alleviation and provision of amenities can possibly be explained in terms of strong vested interests in favour of larger cities. These cities have greater visibility and consequently get selected for slum improvement and poverty alleviation programmes by international and national agencies." Says a report by Amitabh Kundu and Sutinder Bhatia

Big cities mean big money

In the era of liberalisation, both private and public investments have further been concentrated in the large metros, leaving the small towns in a greater state of neglect. Given the fact that life opportunities are positively associated with the size of the city, it is but natural for such cities to experience a burgeoning growth in population. The substantially better financial status of the municipal bodies of metros is another important factor leading to a top heavy urban structure in India. Having established by numerous studies that the wages go on rising as one moves higher in urban hierarchy and further with the coming in of ICT revolution, there is a craze among youth, in search for well paid jobs, heading for the metro cities, if not across borders. It is the largest of the cities that continue to fancy everyone, i.e. the rich and poor, men and women, skilled and unskilled, educated and illiterate, rural and urban, and so on. Further, since these cities also happen to be the seats of power, in political, cultural and financial terms, they tend to grab a large chunk of State and Central government funds for infrastructural development.

Consequently, these cities land up with the best of roads, schools, colleges, universities, courts, markets, malls, cinemas, industries, banks, hotels etc., making them still more preferred. It is ironical that despite their enormous contribution to the environmental havoc created by heavy traffic, industrial pollution, heaps of garbage etc. the large metros happen to be the torchbearers for the international agenda of Green Cities.

Despite the persistent emphasis by urban planners upon the expansion of small and medium towns, rural migrants have continued to throng the largest cities, rendering the phenomenon of step-migration, so characteristic of initial phases of urbanization redundant.

Cities and cultural flavour

Toennies in his masterwork "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft" talked about the (large) city characterised by disunity, rampant individualism and selfishness in contrast to the village characterised by social cohesion and communitarianism. According to Toennies, within the Gesellschaft character of the modern city, there existed a rational and calculating attitude among inhabitants, primarily concerned with their own self interest, to "look out for Number One." Toennies' ideas of the modern city get very well reflected through a poem of Robert Crowley,

"And this is a city, in name but in deed

It is a pack of people that seek after meed (profit)

For officers and all, do seek their own gain

But for the wealth of the Commons, no one taketh pain

And hell without order, I may it well call

Where every man is for himself and no man for all."

In his remarkable work "The Metropolis and Mental Life" Georg Simmel describes the impact city life has on the mental temperament of the individual. He argued that due to the multiple stimuli offered by the city, there is an "intensification of nervous stimuli" with which the urban dweller learns to cope. Just like Toennies, Simmel too treats city life as more rational and calculating. Simmel wrote as early as in 1964:

"If all the clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time."

Due to the very large population and density, Simmel argued that urban dwellers developed an indifferent and apathetic attitude, conceptualised by him as "blasé" attitude, full of detachment. He felt that people in a city responded with their "head" as against their rural counterparts who acted with their "heart". He further wrote:

"….under certain circumstances one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd."

The urban divide

An enormous body of literature points out at the futility of using 'city' as an insulated category while in fact it is a highly differentiated space, contextual in character, offering different things to different people residing in it. For instance, the recent report on 'State of the World's Cities 2010/2011, Bridging the Urban Divide' by UN HABITAT (2008) forcefully underlines the phenomenon of 'urban divide', more visible in relatively less developed countries of the world. It says that the spatial divide in the cities of developing countries does not just reflect income inequalities among households; it is also a byproduct of inefficient and poor urban planning. It further states that the access to "urban advantage" is greatly determined by the socio-cultural factors apart from the formal land and labour markets.

The urban divide between the rich and the poor, between those who enjoy the ‘shopping malls’ and those who are penniless, has thus gradually led to social exclusion, by pushing the poor and marginalised to the periphery not just in terms of spatial city but even in terms of access to life opportunities offered by the city. Such an unequal access to the 'urban advantage' especially in developing countries has led to the challenging of the exclusionary urban development, asking for "right to the city". In some places, it has been used as a theoretical and political framework focusing on enforcement, empowerment, participation, self-fulfillment, self-determination and various forms of human rights protection at the city level.

A layman's perception of 'City'

Quite interestingly, a lay person's perception of a city in terms of 'large' or 'small' has no connection with the size or other formal census categorisations. For instance, Chandigarh, which is now a metropolitan city as per Census-2011 and is the most modern and planned Indian city, was treated as a small town till recently, not because of its size but primarily because it did not have the social and cultural flavour of a large city. For the youth it was and still is a dead city while for the professionally qualified it is no match for cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai. At the same time however, Chandigarh remains an attractive destination for the rural youth of Punjab and Haryana, primarily from humble backgrounds, due to the glamour and ‘fast’ life that exists here.

To conclude, cities continue to be the preferred destinations for migrants primarily because of the relatively secular and anonymous ambience offered by them. As one scans through the popular conceptions of cities being a breeding ground for broken families, increasing divorces, gender violence, child abuse and social disparities, one is led to assume as if smaller urban settlements would be just the opposite, a heaven to live in. But empirical evidence does not substantiate this assumption and the fact remains that it is the same cities — full of crime, insecurity, apathy and social disorganization, that continue to pull migrants towards them, either for the better money offered here, or the relatively secular ambience where one can breathe more easily than in a village or a small town. Despite these cities being projected as a case of 'urban divide' or 'dual cities' for the huge disparities existing within them in terms of access to urban opportunities, these continue to be a haven for those struggling to get rid of their age-old social disabilities.

The writer is Professor, Department of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh

City liberates
The ethnographic accounts of people in their reading of towns in cities are varied.

I love to be a part of this crowd!

For a group of women, married to men living and working in Mumbai, hailing from Punjabi families, mainly in and around Delhi, Mumbai is the place they love to be in. They hate the thought of going back permanently to Delhi and getting settled there due to its ‘small town’ culture. Since most of their kinsmen stay in and around Delhi, especially those of their husbands, they feel imprisoned once they land there, completely robbed off their liberty and freedom. While in Mumbai, they feel free. They could wear and eat anything they liked, remain out of home any time of the day or night, without any fear of being quizzed. They loved this freedom of a metro, which was absolutely absent in the small town culture of Delhi.

A Heaven called Chandigarh

For scores of young agile boys who have been born and brought up in remote villages of Punjab; who have been sweating out in the scorching sun while working in the fields, fascinated by the glittering urban world on television and cinema, Chandigarh is the destination. For them, living in Chandigarh means enjoying freedom from the shackles of village life, the toil and sweat; it also implies eating noodles, pizzas and burgers and wearing western attire and enjoying dating. For them, Chandigarh is an ideal city.

Creating new identities

It is only the largest of the cities where a migrant having been burdened through generations by the caste, income and occupational stigmatized identities can escape into a state of individual freedom. For thousands of men and women coming from remote villages and small towns of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhatisgarh or even Punjab and Haryana, having grown up under the clutches of caste ethnocentrism and poverty, a metro offers a space where it is possible for them to create a new identity. The Universities and Colleges of Indian metros are today brimming with thousands of such young boys and girls struggling hard to get out of their traditional social handicaps and write their own biographies.