Illogical Adjournment

People and Institutions follow customs without understanding the logic behind it.

Take this case for example,

Parliament on Monday paid glowing tributes to veteran Congress leader Arjun Singh with the Rajya Sabha, of which he was a sitting member, adjourning for the day after the obituary reference. Soon after paying tributes to Singh, who died on March 4 at the age of 81, Chairman Hamid Ansari adjourned the Upper House for the day as a mark of respect to the departed soul.

I have absolutely no complaints about 'paying tributes' or 'mourning' the dead, even if it is a scum like Arjun Singh, one who took considerable leadership in destroying the integrity and probity in Indian politics. His last tenure as HR Minister was disastrous and he tried his best to destroy the social fabric of India. Let that be. All said and done, he was a long standing parliamentarian and part of the institution, and needs to be remembered.

 

My disagreement is with the Parliament adjouring for the day without transacting any business (I had written about this earlier too). This is atrocious. Last session, we heard people talking eloquently about how loss of each days functioning of the parliament results in a national loss of a few crores of rupees. The actual expenses incurred for running the Parliament Sessions (both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha) a day is Rs 7.8 Crores!!!

 

The original logic in adjourning without transacting any business or giving leave to the employees of an organization, one of whose colleagues has just died, is to facilitate them to visit the dead man's house where the body will be lying and to assist the relatives with the last rites and cremation.

 

But in this case, Arjun Singh died on 4th and was already cremated by the time Parliament met!!! 

 

So what purpose will be served by MPs not doing their work in the Parliament?

'In'Justice

There are 52,000 Cases pending in the Supreme Court, 40 Lakh Cases in the High Courts and hold your breath nearly 2.6 Crore Cases pending in the Lower Courts.

It takes an average 15 years to dispose of a case in India (and that if one is optimistic)

There are 3,000 vacancies for Judges in various courts across the country.

The biggest litigator is the Government, which is either a plaintiff or a defendant in 60% of the cases. This is  because various government officials either violate the law, or apply the rules unevenly or where the public violate government laws.

Then there are frivolous cases, that should never have been accepted in the first instances.

Our justice system do not have sufficient provision for the judge mediating a settlement. The scope for plea bargaining is also very limited in scope. Add to this adjournments taken by the plaintiff or defendant or their lawyers for ridiculous reasons ( I have first hand experience of this when I was a young Sales Officer with HPCL. My lawyer one day told me that he is taking an adjournment in a case involving my company because 'his 5 year old daughter had a parent-teacher meeting scheduled in her school'!!!).

The ratio of Judge to Population in India is the lowest in the world. We have just 10.5 judges per Million people, which compares poorly with 41.6 in Australia, 50.9 in UK and 75.2 in Canada.

Is there any wonder why our country is slipping into anarchy and lawlessness?

The obvious solution is to have more courts, appoint more judges, computerize the whole system, screen the filing of the cases and have a time bound appeal system.

But the Government which has to fund this is least interested as it suits them because they have a vested interest. In the 60% of the pending cases where the Government is involved, majority of them are cases where it is the defendant. It suits them to delay the case as the plaintiff gets plain tired of fighting the might of the Government and in many cases dies much before a verdict is given. We see the ridiculous situation of the country in a crisis due to a case that has not even come up for hearing in the case of the CVC for 20 years!!. The Godhra accused who were left off were in the jail for 9 years and there are thousands of undertrials who are languishing in the jail similarly till their cases are disposed off. Recently a Kerala Ex Minister was sent to jail for One Year Rigorous Imprisonment in a case that dates back to 1980s. And he was just given one year RI against the original punishment of 5 years RI because the SC said the case is 20 years old!! Eh! What has that got to do with reducing the sentence? We have cases where electoral malpractice cases are disposed off after the tenure of a particular Lok Sabha or State Assembly. We see MPs and MLA's being disqualified after they have ceased to be MPs and MLA's. What about the legality of the various laws passed using their votes in the Parliament and Assemblies, where they should not have been there in the first place? Then there are cases against Government Servants, Ministers pending for want of sanction from the Authorities. This sanction process was set up to prevent non serious complaints against them that can impede their work. But every crooked minister or govt. employee has taken advantage of this immunity. Recently CBI asked the case against Quttrochi to be closed because it has taken 25 years!!! The Bhopal Gas Compensation case is pending since 1983. The Sikh Riots cases are pending since 1984!!!

It is time a one time excercise is taken to dispose off uninmportant long pending cases on a war footing to clear the slate and make a new beginning.

The adage is that 'Justice delayed is justice denied'. But in India, we dont even claim that one will get justice even if it is delayed.

Oh........for intellectual independence and original thinking!

For a country that has a civilization dating back to 5000 B.C, and which has given the world the concept of Civilization, Zero, astronomy, astrology, upanishads,vedas, arthasasthra, vedic mathematics ..... it is amazing that we have been reduced to a bunch of ordinary guys good at copying/importing concepts, ideas and technologies.

And we dont even bother to follow the Japanese 3A philosophy - Adopt, Adapt and Adept (Japanese are not original thinkers. What they are good at is Adopting ideas from elsewhere, then Adapting them to suit their/global needs to perfection, and then become Adept at using the adapted technology). We, in India, just use the imported concept technology/ideas as it is.

We have ceased to be original thinkers. Forget about the industrial sector (who have not spent enough on R&D), even our much vaunted IT sector cannot be accused of being innovative. At best they are sweat shops churning out programs and products which are nothing original or path breaking. When was the last time we heard of a truly original, earth shattering product concept emanating from Bengaluru or Cyberabad?

We claim that our ivy league institutions like IIT's and IIM's are at par with the best in the World (though of late the government has systemmatically tried to downgrade these institutions by increasing the number of IITs and IIMs rather than on improving the quality of the programs). But when was the last time these esteemed institutions have produced an invention? They have concentrated on churning out Engineers and MBAs by the numbers but have hardly seem to have done any original work. And sadly it has to do with the curriculum and the professors. We have  hardly seen any article of our esteemed professors published in Harvard Business Review for example. Nor have we created a think tank that shall develop an Indian Management Style. True that we had a leading management thinker from India C K Prahlad. But he became famous after he went to US, and we have little to do with his wonderful contributions. Occassionally we hear about some India specific technological innovations from an odd IITian, but none of them have become commercially successful.

The root cause of this problem had to do with India retaining the education system we inherited from the British.The British system was designed to create a bunch of people who will lack creativity, innovativeness but will work hard, long hours without questioning the system. It suited our political leaders to keep our population not dynamic, lest they become wise to the shenanigans of the leaders. And damn the consequences.

When the world is moving towards a truly knowledge economy, we, Indians, should have been the thought leaders considering our long history of original thinking, as depicted in Vedas and Upanishads. But a 'secular' education system, a fetish for following blindly the Western Education System (which was developed to suit the Western culture) ensured that we sacrificed our competitive advantage of universal knowledge and moral superiority at the altar of white man's self preserving interests.

Gandhiji got us territorial independence in 1947, but where is the messiah who will get us intellectual independence?

Who is running the country?

Who is running the Country?

It looks more and more like the Supreme Court is left with no option but to give executive decisions, due to the pathetic lack of ethics and governance by the Sonia/MMS led UPA Goverment.

The SC has to throw out P J Thomas, the CVC, who should not have been there in the first place.

The SC has to prod the Government to interrogate Hasan Ali, who owes the IT department a small sum of Rs 36,000 crores. Why the Government has not deemed fit to do that till now is a mystery, or perhaps not a mystery after all, for it is these money bags who are helping the powers that be to stash away thousands of crores, apart from bank rolling the Congress and other parties.

The SC has to step in to oversee the investigation into the 2 G spectrum scam, and but for its insistence Raja would not have been arrested.

SC is closely monitoring the CWG Scam investigation.

Though it is welcome that some action is being taken against the unethical and the corrupt by the SC, it should not be burdened with monitoring investigations. They are forced to do so only because the CBI and the Police are not doing their job properly or rather not allowed to do their job properly by their political masters. And there in lies the tragedy.

Caeser's wife must be above suspicion

"Caeser's wife must be above suspicion"

This is an oft repeated quote. Of late our PM had said this during a Congress meeting, emphasising his actions should be above reproach (that he has been caught with his pants down on the CVC case is another matter).

But what is the background to this quote.

One has to go back to 67 BC - the Julius Caesar era. His wife Pompeia Sulla held a festival called Bona Dea in 62 BC -- a festival that paid tribute to 'good goddess'. In this festival, held in Pompeia's house, only women were permitted.

But Publius Clodius Pulcher, a naughty, young and ambitious patrician, sneaked in dressed as a woman with an intent to seduce the beautiful wife of Caesar.

He was caught, well, pants down, and prosecuted. But during the trial, Caesar never acted or gave evidence against Clodius. The patrician was thus acquitted.

But days later, Caesar divorced Pompeia, saying "my wife ought not even to be under suspicion." This gave birth to the expression "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion."

Is there something similar in Indian History. You bet there is. And you can find it in Ramayana.

 

Post the death of Ravana, and the coronation of Rama, there appeared a murmer amongst the people regarding how chaste Sita was, for she had spent nearly 10 months in Ravana's custody. Despite the fact that Sita was pregnant, Rama did not hesitate to ask Lakshmana to take Sita to the Forest and leave her there. For he felt that as a King, his and his family's conduct, character and actions should be above reproach (I don't personally agree to this conduct of Rama, but I just pointed out this incident for the sake of comparison. However it is worthwhile noting that Ramayana, said to describe the era approximately 600 BC predates Caeser by a long way).

Good Riddance

Pride and Arrogance goes before a fall!

Just before the Kurukshetra War, Lord Krishna went to the Kauravas to mediate in order to avoid war. He started by asking the Kauravas to give back half of the Kingdom to Panadavas, which was their due. Duryodhana refused. Krishna progressively brought down his offer, from 5 states to finally 5 villages.

"I will not give them the space to stick a needle" , thundered Duryodhana, partly due to his arrogance, partly due to his pride and based on a false sense of infallibility.

The rest is history.

When the appointment of P J Thomas as Chief Vigilence Commissioner came up to the panel comprising of the PM, Home Minister P Chidambaram and the Opposition Leader Sushma Swaraj, the opposition leader pointed out that P J Thomas has a corruption case pending against him, the details of which was not in the dossier in front of the panel. She objected to the appointment saying a tainted person cannot be the CVC, a post that requires spotless integrity. Added to it, P J Thomas was the telecom secretary who objected to a Vigilance Enquiry in the biggest corruption case the country has seen - the 2 G Scam. His candidature was absolutely untenable. The panel met on a friday, and Sushma Swaraj asked for 24 hours time from the other two to verify the fact and meet again. Anyway the CVC had to take oath only on Tuesday next. The PM and HM, in their arrogance, bluntly refused the legitimate request of the Leader of Opposition. Sushma also said, she will agree to anyone shortlisted in the panel other than P J Thomas. But like Duryodhana, our PM arrogantly pushed his nomination through on a 2-1 vote, with Leader of Opposition noting her dissent.

Now with Supremen Court striking down the appointment as illegal, the PM and HM has no place to hide.

This raises many questions.

Why did the PM insist on P J Thomas and no one else but P J THomas? It is inconceivable he was unaware of the tainted past, as he heads the Ministry of Personnel Affairs.

Since he has no stake in P J Thomas becoming the CVC - the PM is personally clean - it is obvious he was doing it at the behest of someone else. 

And there is only one person who can string the PM along - Sonia Gandhi and she has many skeletons in her cup board.

The needle of suspicion points firmly to Sonia Gandhi.

But let us thank the Chief Justice and the Supreme Court for upholding the fact that ethics, morality, honesty and integrity should be paramount while selecting constitutional functionaries. The Country owes them a great debt.

P.S : The PM did not apply his mind. The FM did not apply his mind. But why did the honourable President of India, who appoints the CVC on the panels recommendation, not take note of the Opposition Leaders dissent. She has taken the oath to uphold the constitution. She should have sent the recommendation back to the panel to reconsider, but she chose not to. This is the problem with electing a Rubber Stamp nincompoop as President

1+1 just don't add up

Something about the budgetary figures dont add up.

Though the FM claims that the fiscal deficit this year will be 5% + as against 6%+ of last year, the truth is that this reduction is mainly because of the money received from the sale of 3G spectrum.  This is a one time sale of family silver, and do not reflect a serious effort on the part of the Government to reduce deficit through financial prudence. If you take this amount away, the Fiscal deficit for the current year will be back to 6.2%. Since there is no 3 G spectrum sale money available next year, the projected 4.6% deficit target for the next fiscal appears to be a bit too optimistic. This is bad news for those who want inflation to be controlled.

Another notable point is the projected rise in Government expenditure at just 3%, as against 19% last year. This too tests the common wisdom. With Government spending considerably reduced, one should witness a slowing down of the economy. But the FM claims the GDP growth will be 9% next fiscal. Reduced spending and higher growth rate?? Tough to believe. And reduced spending is bad news for the unemployed.

We need to take some harsh steps to reduce the fiscal deficit as it is adversely affecting our Real GDP growth in a big way. We were hearing about reducing the Fiscal Deficit to 2% not long ago, but no one even dare mention it these days. The rot started about 5 years ago, when we should have curbed non-plan expenditure, but we missed the bus and are paying the price for it.

Reduced Government spending and increased GDP growth? It means only one thing - The growth is to be funded by Black Money. And that is bad news for inflation.