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Undiplomatic conduct
Time to go |
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The cost of crime against women
How much does one need at the end?
A victory that went beyond the battleground
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Undiplomatic conduct THE arrest and handcuffing of Devyani Khobragade, Deputy Counsel General of India in New York, has rightfully led to strong protests from New Delhi. Khobragade’s arrest on visa fraud charges, while she was dropping her daughter to school, has come as a major diplomatic embarrassment to India. The 39-year-old 1999-batch IFS officer was handcuffed at the time of her arrest. She was later released on bail. South Block has responded strongly to the undignified treatment of its diplomat by calling Nancy Powell, US Ambassador to India, and protesting against the “humiliation”. The charge that Khobragade faces stems from a facility given to diplomats to engage their own domestic staff and get visas for them. She had engaged a housekeeper who, the US alleges, had been given less-than-fair wages. Diplomats, on the other hand, maintain that the minimum wages in the US cannot be considered as a fair wage in such cases since these staff members get housing, food and medical cover with employers taking care of their air travel too. The issue of conflict between what the domestic staff of diplomats is paid and the US labour department guidelines is an old one. It affects many countries that have diplomatic offices in the US. There had been such cases earlier too, involving diplomats from various countries, including India. Devyani Khobragade is a consular agent. The US is arguing that she is not entitled to diplomatic immunity, relying on a narrow interpretation of the Vienna Convention. The fact remains that she is a diplomat. She has been dealt with in a humiliating manner by the US authorities. The issue of permitting diplomats to bring in their domestic staff is one that needs to be sorted out, especially the aspects where it clashes with the local labour laws. Given that this is a facility extended to all diplomats posted in the US, it surely is not too much to expect the US authorities to handle the issue diplomatically rather than stage a high-visibility arrest of a foreign diplomat.
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Time to go THE clamour for the removal of Justice Ganguly is growing. Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj and Trinamool Congress members demanded his removal as the Chairman of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission in Parliament on Friday. A committee of three judges of the Supreme Court had indicted Justice Ganguly for “unwelcome behaviour” and “conduct of sexual nature” towards a woman law intern in a five-star hotel room in Delhi in December 2012, prompting demands that action under the criminal law should be initiated against him. The apex court has washed its hands off the matter, saying Justice Ganguly retired in 2012 and the intern was no more on the rolls of the court though legal experts are of the opinon that the court is empowered to ensure that the law takes its own course. The standoff in this case is setting a bad precedent. As Justice Ganguly continues to head the WBHRC, it is clear despite the legal reforms, laws can be twisted and evaded by the powerful entrusted with the constitutional duty to enforce these very laws. The relationship between Justice Ganguly and the young intern was that of “guardian and ward.” When society demands and the law obliges with the death penalty to be awarded to a 19-year-old, poor, socially backward boy for a gang rape, what should be the punishment for a grandfather-like figure holding high position in the justice system? As he claims to be “a victim of circumstances”, the Additional Solicitor General of India has demanded in a letter written to the Prime Minister that necessary action should be taken against the tainted judge. She has suggested that the President should make a reference to the Supreme Court to begin proceedings for his removal as the head of the WBHRC under the Protection of Human Rights Act. Justice Ganguly can clear the air about his “circumstances,” but first he should step down to uphold his constitutional duty.
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know. — W. H. Auden
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The Punjab Legislative Council
At the next meeting of the Punjab Legislative Council on the 20th instant the Hon. Colonel R.S. Maclagan and the Hon. Mr. H.J. Manynard will take the oath of allegiance to the Crown. Rai Bahadur Hari Chand will ask the questions which at the Simla session were not put owing to his absence. Mr. Shafi will ask a number of questions on the Anglo-Indian agitations against the appointment as Civil Surgeons of medical men not belonging to the I.M.S. and about the Walker Hospital at Simla. Mr. Shadi Lal will ask four questions on the disabilities of the Provincial Civil Service officers in regard to their undertaking courses of legal study in England. Mr. Kashi Ram will ask a number of questions on the proposed High Court, the banking situation and the sub-divisional system. Sardar Gajjan Singh (who we note is no longer a ‘Babu’) will ask for information on rain and opium gambling, employment of more veterinary assistants, pasture lands in the Chenab Colony and the Sirsa river fatality. The fisheries Bill and the
Punjab Courts Bill will then be considered and passed. Amendment of the Negotiable Instruments Act
The latest issue of the Gazette of India contains the Bill which is further to amend the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881. It adds a second clause to Section 13 as follows: “(2) A negotiable Instrument may be made payable to two or more payees jointly, or it may be made payable in the alternative to one or two, or one or some of several payees.” Similarly a second clause is to be added to Section 16 as follows: “(2) The provision of this Act, relating to a payee, shall apply with the necessary modifications to an endorsee.” The following explanation is given in the statement of objects and reasons: “It has long been the practice in this country to endorse negotiable instruments, particularly Government promissory notes, in such a way as to make them payable to two or more payees jointly, or in the alternative to one or some of several payees”.
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The cost of crime against women
A
year ago India had the tryst with Nirbhaya. While much light was shone on that incident, heinous instances continue to pour regularly from all corners of the country. Crime against women is not restricted to daily instances but casts a long shadow on the adverse sex ratio. It is very tragic to note that even mothers have shown preferences for sons (Pande and Malhotra, 2006) and thereby contributed to the adverse sex ratio, prevalent now for centuries in North India. In the modern world, in addition to sociological and humanitarian reasons, crime against women has economic implications. There is substantial research, especially in the OECD countries showing that gender equality, particularly in education and employment, contributes to economic growth. Empirical evidence suggests that women are more responsible in financial and monetary matters, an assumption serving as a bed-rock of the micro finance movement and self-help groups, not just in India but across the world. Recently a study by Tax Spanner concluded that women are better tax planners than men in India. Another case study in Italy by Barbara Kastlunger (2010) showed that women were more tax compliant than men. Unfortunately, according to Robert McGee (2012), that may not be true for India. There have been numerous sociological studies which have established that crime increases with an adverse sex ratio. The cost of such crime, for the victim's family or be it the stalling of Parliament, or maintaining law and order is borne by innocent citizens and taxpayers. Most importantly, for a developing country like India international credit ratings, respect for law and order and judiciary, foreign investment and thereby job opportunities and finally growth are potential areas which suffer. Now, a year later, though the social organisations are more aware of the grim situation and the government is initiating some measures, concrete efforts, inspiring confidence, are lacking as crime against women is unabated. In addition to providing security on the streets, it would be more important to investigate psychological and social reasons why such crimes continue to occur regularly. In this context, the role of religion is an important aspect which needs to be examined. In the Vedic times the role of a woman was considered important in social order but was reduced to utter subordination and a dismal state during later periods mainly because of a long history of invasions. In the past, efforts to improve the status of women in India had been made by many social reformers and religious leaders. Guru Nanak, in the early 1500s, had observed: “From woman, man is born; within woman, man is conceived; to woman he is engaged and married. Woman becomes his friend; through woman, the future generations come. When his woman dies, he seeks another woman; to woman he is bound. So why call her bad? From her, kings are born. From woman, woman is born; without woman, there would be no one at all.” India is a progressive country and believes in gender equality. Illustratively, women were never discriminated against in suffrage unlike many advanced countries like Switzerland where women were only allowed to vote in 1971. But work participation of females in 2011 is very low at 29 per cent compared to nearly 60 per cent for Switzerland and the US. In labor-force participation the male-female ratio is low at 36 per cent compared to above 80 per cent for the US and Switzerland. Concerted efforts can yield results, as illustrated by positive results consequent to social movements like Nani Chhaan, in improving the numbers of the girl child in Punjab in 2011 when compared with 2001. A change in social mores and behaviour takes a few generations to become effective and therefore the need to start early for India to gel with the modern world. To discourage crime against women, there would be need to empower them socially and economically, as evidenced in the case of the literate and matrilineal society of Kerala. To empower women, The Central and state governments have been making efforts like provision of free education for the girl child. The government could further consider fisc-neutral measures like gender-based increased quotas in government colleges and government and public sector work places/jobs; concessional housing; and higher pension for a family that has only a girl child. Society has an important role to play in providing a secure environment to women. To ensure efficient policing and quick justice, army pensioners and retired officials from the judiciary, including judges, for fast-track courts could be considered. In India we have a large number of goddesses who have trounced evil by the use of force like goddess Kali or Durga. Guru Nanak observed that “Women have become meek, and men have become hunters.” According to some estimates, women constitute only 3 per cent of the police force in India and a small number in the Indian Army. In contrast, female soldiers account for nearly 16 per cent of the US army and military service is mandatory for females in Israel. Similarly, women play an important role in armies of many countries, including China, Russia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. To embolden women, similar to Bhartiya Mahila Bank, the government could consider more women in the Indian Army, and more women battalions in the state police and para military forces. Interestingly, there was the all-women Rani Jhansi Regiment in Azad Hind Fauj. Sainik and military schools/colleges could be opened to female students and women encouraged to join the National Cadet Corps. There could be a provision for a large number of all-women police stations. If India is aspiring to be a superpower in the world, then it is necessary to ensure a secure environment at the workplace for half of its potential workforce, the women. As Nirbhaya fought back the perpetrators of the heinous crime and still her memories are alive, the women of today probably have to continue the same struggle. In an increased work participation of women will be found the seed of India's high economic
growth. The writer is the RBI Chair Professor of Economics, IIM,
Bangalore. The views are personal
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How much does one need at the end? He asked me what I was doing and what plans I had for my future, professionally and personally. I told him about what I had in my mind about my life, how I wanted to make big bucks and travel across the world and own the best of everything. “Are you unhappy with what you already have?” he asked. “Not really. But I wish I had more.” “Let me tell you something. In the end, life comes down to 200 rupees.” I was very surprised. I asked him how that was possible. And then he recited a story that made more sense about life than anything else I had heard or read before. “I was at a construction site when a worker came to me and told me that there were some tools that needed urgent repair. Since I did not have much to do, I decided to take them to the repair shop myself. I drove down to the nearby village and found the repair shop. The helper at the shop pulled out a chair for me and told me that it would take a while and I could sit and wait there. I dragged the chair under a nearby tree and sat down, enjoying the sun and contemplating about my life. A little while later, a man dressed in a crisp white kurta-pyjama got down from a car and told the shopkeeper, “Arthi ka samaan de do” (Give the things required for a funeral). “The shopkeeper asked his helper to collect the material and hand it over to the man and asked for 200 rupees. He sat in his car and drove away but left me thinking. That’s all? That’s all a man requires when he is dead? Two hundred rupees! “Just before the man had arrived, I was thinking about how much more I wanted from everything and how I wanted to expand my business even further and buy another car and settle down in Chandigarh. But that man left me thinking: what for? Isn’t what I have already, enough? All through our lives we run after materialistic things. We hoard money as if it would give us a cushion against all odds of life. But it still can’t save us from the inevitable — death. And when that happens, all that we take from the luxuries we have accumulated is two hundred rupees, which too used for making the chariot for our final ride to places unknown. Wish for more, hope for more, work for more, but don’t make it a purpose of your life. The bliss that can be seen on a poor child’s face when he gets a balloon is far more precious than what can be seen on the face of a child playing on a play-station.
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A victory that went beyond the battleground
Exactly
42 years ago on 16th December 1971, Lieutenant General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi, who headed the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, signed the Instrument of Surrender to India’s General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Army Command, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora, in Dacca (later renamed Dhaka). That one-page landmark document signed at the end of a 13-day-war marked three simultaneous historic events — a spectacular Indian military victory over an abject Pakistani defeat, the territorial break up of Pakistan leading to the creation of Bangladesh as an independent sovereign nation; and an ideological defeat of the idea of Pakistan with the ripping apart of the Two-Nation theory that stipulates a Pakistan for the Muslims and an India for Hindus. By the end of the war, 93,000 Pakistanis had surrendered to Indian forces marking the world’s largest surrender in post World War-II military history which remained the case until the large scale surrender of Iraqi forces to the US-led coalition in the one-sided 1991-92 Gulf war. All this by a nation that had attained freedom after being partitioned by the British colonialists only 24 years earlier. The 1971 India-Pakistan war was the third war India had fought in a preceding short span of nine years, one of which had resulted in a humiliating territorial defeat to China in 1962 and a second that had resulted in a lost victory to Pakistan in 1965. In all previous post-Independence wars and military engagements, the Indian armed forces had fought to either defend or consolidate the territorial integrity of the country. And thus this Bangladesh War, as it is known, was the first ever military intervention by India in a sovereign country. Indeed this war presents a fascinating study of war preparation and military tactics and, yet, a lack of strategic thinking; a spirited fight given by the Pakistani soldiers in the face of all odds and despite sound logistical planning by the Indian Army; some delicate diplomatic balancing with the great powers; and both international and domestic power politics. Just how well India handled both the run up to and the conduct of the war is borne by the fact that most western scholars, especially Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose in War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh, have acknowledged the Bangladesh war to be a sound example of implementation of all the key principles under the Just War theory or justum bellum – the jus ad bellum and jus in bello clauses which, respectively, are about the ‘circumstances’ and ‘conduct’ of war.
East-West differences Differences between East and West Pakistan, which were separated by 1,200 miles across a large Indian land mass, had begun immediately after Partition with a strong lingual grievance after Mahomedali Jinnahbhai announced in his first and also the last visit to East Pakistan on 21st March 1948 that Urdu would be the national language of Pakistan. This eventually led to the February 1952 language riots that resulted in police shootings and deaths. While this provided the initial spark, the long list of severe dissimilarities and grievances were all too pronounced – lingual and cultural differences, lack of representation of Bengalis in both the government and the military, uneven economic development between East and West Pakistan, failure of the government to make a constitution that lasted, and, subsequently, electoral mismanagement. The point of no return came after the Central government in West Pakistan reneged from its announcement to convene the post December 1970 election for national assembly in which the Awami League would have, with its numerical majority, formed a government with Mujibhur Rahman as Prime Minister following a first ever free and fair election. What followed instead was a severe military crackdown on the night of 25/26 March, 1971 which turned out to be, as described by no other than Niazi, ‘a display of stark cruelty more merciless than the massacres of Bukhara and Baghdad by Chengez Khan and Halaku Khan or at Jallianwala Bagh by the British general Dyer’. The magnitude and extent of the repression was subsequently acknowledged and detailed by Pakistan’s Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report and by even General Agha Yahya Khan, the President-cum-military ruler at that time. The military crackdown had continued throughout the year leading to massacres that claimed between a conservative 26,000 to a staggering 3 million lives.
Repercussions for India These incidents had serious repercussions for India which eventually led it to militarily intervene. India was forced to play host to a massive 10 million refugees (9,899,305 to be precise) that were accommodated in 825 relief camps spread over 2,800 km across several states bordering East Pakistan making it perhaps the largest influx of refugees after World War-II and the 1947 British-facilitated Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Of these 10 million refugees, as many as 7.2 million had entered India within a short span of four months. The refugees, who cut across all religious persuasions and every strata of society, were accommodated at tremendous cost (US$ 500 million followed by another US$ 700 million as calculated by the World Bank which is valued much higher today) and accounted for less than half the world’s refugee population that stood at 27.6 million at that time. Yet, as the International Commission of Jurists noted, the UN did not take note of the large scale human catastrophe and treated it as an Indo-Pak issue. The huge refugee problem considerably added to the adverse economic, social and political strains in the already overpopulated, poverty stricken and trouble-torn north eastern states where Pakistan had been allowing Chinese operated training camps in East Pakistan for Naga and Mizo rebels. Economically, in addition to considerable drain on resources, the influx of refugees was affecting the job market in an overcrowded labour market thereby depressing wages and inflating prices with 3 million refugees having entered the job market. The Left parties had been quick to exploit some of the legitimate complaints in West Bengal and Tripura over the economic impact of this influx. On the sociological and political front it was threatening the internal stability of a complex political system in the tribal north eastern states which pitted indigenous communities with the ‘outsiders’ and added fuel to the Nagas and Mizos fighting its secessionist battles.
No cake walk Even after getting about seven months to logistically prepare for the war and the fact that India had stopped Pakistani aircraft from overflying Indian airspace while blockading the sea around both West and East Pakistan, the Indian Army fought a tough battle which had in fact begun with Indian troops entering East Pakistan on 21st November, i.e. 12 days before West Pakistan declared war on India by launching air strikes on 3rd December 1971. Surprisingly, as brought out by Lt General Jack Fredrick Ralph Jacob in his book Surrender at Dacca: Birth of a Nation, there was no clear strategic aim and no considered overall strategy. Even until 13th December, i.e. three days prior to the surrender, Dacca was not on the agenda for capture. The focus was more on capturing towns and cities which until then didn’t make strategic sense. Even otherwise both Lt General Jacob and Lt General Niazi (The Betrayal of East Pakistan) bring out in their respective books that the Indian Army met considerable resistance and was forced to fight a tough war despite complete air and naval superiority over the Pakistani forces. The Indian Army, which lost 1,421 soldiers and 4,058 wounded with another 56 soldiers missing, presumed dead withdrew from newly created Bangladesh 13 days ahead of the scheduled date of withdrawal and before leaving assisted in quickly rebuilding bridges and roads, clearing mines, opening ports and repairing runways. On the western front India fought a relatively ‘holding’, ‘limited’ and defensive’ war and did not take advantage of the situation to settle the Kashmir issue by military means which has been met with some severe retrospective criticism. The Indian government looked after the prisoners far beyond the requirements of the Geneva Convention which has even been acknowledged by Niazi who narrates how the Pakistani prisoners lived in concrete barracks and according to their respective ranks while Indian soldiers lived in tents. In contrast, Indian soldiers were tortured, beaten and humiliated by the Pakistani army. Further, India refused to handover the captured Pakistani troops for trial to the leadership of newly formed Bangladesh despite knowing well that many had been guilty of perpetrating repression in East Pakistan. But the safety of the Pakistani prisoners was guaranteed under the Instrument of Surrender, a unique clause not found in most surrender documents.
Tight rope and no lessons learnt At the international level, India had to balance an anti-India Nixon-led US regime and a pro-Pakistan China to which India had only nine years earlier lost a war. A week after the war begun, a hostile United States despatched its naval Task Force 74 centred around its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal. The war ended shortly before its arrival but by then the UN was breathing down India to end the war. Only four months earlier, in a major balancing act, India had managed to sign a 20 year Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union which until then had been supplying light weapons to Pakistan but on India’s request kept vetoing UN attempts at ceasefire. Yet 42 years later, the shortcomings remain the same and continue to haunt. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) then lacked operational intelligence which remained the case in the subsequent military operations in Sri Lanka (1987-90) and the Kargil War (1999). Coastal security and capability of launching amphibious operations remains deficient (evident 37 years later during the 26/11Mumbai terror attacks) as does logistics preparation (evident during Operation Prakaram in 2001-2002) while the post of Chief of Defence Staff remains an illusion and strategic thinking a casualty. Indeed India remains an unenviable case study for the adage ‘those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it’.
Prominent turn arounds
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THE other day we had some family friends over for tea. The weather was pleasant and we sat down in our balcony chatting over hot cups of tea and snacks. The gentleman, whom I’ve met not very often, is a real estate developer and although a man of few words, is always a great person to talk to.