Indian Judiciary: Credibility at stake

The primary duty of a nation state is to give justice to its citizens. The preamble of Indian Constitution reads: “We, the people of India resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic and to secure to all its citizens: Justice…., Liberty….., Equality….., and ……Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” But anyone who had a first hand experience of dealing with the labyrinthine Indian judicial system would attest to a wide chasm existing between what is enshrined in the constitution and what is the ground reality. It takes aeons before judgements are passed and in the process one has to face corrupt officials of the lower courts. The Economist reports: "This week, the government's press department reported that the number of civil and criminal cases pending before India's courts has exceeded 30m, up from 20m in 1997. Among the reasons are a shortage of judges—just 11 for every 1m people, compared with 51 in Britain and 107 in America..... Cases are not assigned to a particular judge for their duration, and are often adjourned. Advocates may take several briefs on the same day, not turning up for some, causing yet more adjournments. " At this rate, as per some calculations by experts, it would take some 360 years to resolve these cases at the current rate of disposal.

This is time for the Supreme Court and the Law ministry to do some deep introspection and take quick remedial actions to clear the backlog of cases. I know it is not an easy task, but then great nation states do not evolve easily. I am not competent to proffer suggestions in this matter, but am sure the experts in the field will have some solutions in mind. They say, 'justice delayed is justice denied'. So, let not the Indian citizens suffer denial of justice.

I am reminded of Swami Vivekanand's words, which are applicable to an individual as well as to our government: "We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act. "

What India needs: a PM or a CEO?

It has been a much debated topic that a nation ought to be run like a business. No doubt there are plausible reasons in favour of such a notion but we should remember that a business is all about making profits whereas a government cannot be run on such a parochial dictum. What is needed is an amalgamation of sound politics with astute business sense.

Indian government has recently announced a meeting with the chief secretaries of all states in early July, where drastic changes in the way the Government and the public interact will be incorporated. [Coming soon: CEO, Government Inc] This is easier said than done. I don't want to cast aspersions on government's motive behind this initiative, but lot of sincerity is needed before such an effort fructifies. It is high time that our leaders realize that beneath a thin veneer of India's economic marvel lies a cesspool of corruption, poverty, and callousness. It is their bounden duty to help extricate Indian masses from this cesspool. Sooner the government implements policies to ensure efficiency, transparency and accountability in administration, better it would be for democracy to flourish in India.

Towards a less corrupt India

In one of my previous posts I had written about the 'Institutions: Their Role in shaping societies'. I had further written that: Douglass C. North, the '93 Nobel prize winner, who has done seminal work in the field of Economic Performance through Time says, "Societies that get 'stuck' embody belief systems and institutions that fail to confront and solve new problems of societal complexity.

India, since Independence has been a strange case of one step forward and two steps backwards. Today if you ask an honest Indian what is the single obstacle in India's road to glory, she/he is bound to answer -- CORRUPTION. [btw, India fairs poorly in the Corruption Index formulated by Transparency International (an anti-graft watchdog)]Corruption, institutional and individual, has been sapping the vitals of our society. We could have been a different nation altogether but for this malady.

But not all's lost. It is heartening to note that "a group of top former bureaucrats, police officers and officers from the armed forces have come together to form a group called the India Rejuvenation Initiative (IRI). Their aim is to tackle corruption." [Read on IBN-CNN The Rising: Corruption watchdog on the prowl]

Here's wishing this group every success in their endeavours to contain corruption in India.

Mahatma Gandhi: A youth idol?

Read with interest the newsitem "S Africa wants Gandhi to be youth idol" on IBN-CNN website. It is heartening to note that Mahatma's life and teachings are considered relevant even today. I would recommend to those interested in the subject Youth, Nonviolence And Gandhi, a short essay by Dr. Savita Singh.

Will an Indian make it to the top post at the UN?

India on Thursday nominated UN Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor for the post of the UN Secretary General. Mr. Tharoor, given his long & successful association with the UN, is a good choice for the top post.

Wikipedia informs: "Since 1978, Tharoor has been working for the United Nations, serving with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose Singapore office he headed during the "boat people" crisis. Since October 1989, he has been a senior official at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where, until late 1996, he was responsible for peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia. From January 1997 to July 1998, he was executive assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In July 1998, he was appointed director of communications and special projects in the office of the Secretary-General. In January 2001, he was appointed by the Secretary-General as interim head of the Department of Public Information. On 1 June 2002, he was confirmed as the Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information."

Born in London in 1956, Shashi Tharoor was educated in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi (BA in History, St. Stephen's College), and the United States (he got his PhD at the age of 22 from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University). Tharoor has written numerous articles, short stories and commentaries in Indian and Western publications, and has won several journalism and literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

But it won't be a cake-walk for Mr. Tharoor. There are other able candidates in the fray.

Announced Candidates:

* Shashi Tharoor

* Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean diplomat

* Jayantha Dhanapala, Sri Lanka's official candidate

* Surakiart Sathirathai, Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand

Unannounced Candidates:

* Jose Ramos-Horta, Foreign Minister of East Timor

* Kemal Dervis, a Turkish economist and politician

* Niranjan Deva-Aditya, Sri Lanka's Ambassador-at-Large

Here's wishing Mr. Tharoor Goodluck till the final decision on the candidate for the top UN post is announced in October.

Faster than the speed of Light!!

If your Physics books told you that nothing travels faster than Light then better brush up the facts. Prof. Boyd of University of Rochester has "recently showed how he can slow down a pulse of light to slower than an airplane, or speed it up faster than its breakneck pace, using exotic techniques and materials. But he's now taken what was once just a mathematical oddity—negative speed—and shown it working in the real world." For details read on, Light's Most Exotic Trick Yet: So Fast it Goes ... Backwards?

As Boyd is eager to put Einstein to the test, we must remember what Robert Oppenheimer once said, "There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors."

Will India ever be able to Fly?

We have been reading a lot about the ongoing controversy about Indian government's proposed hike in the reservations for OBCs. With both the advocates and opponents of this policy engaging in rhetoric to prove their repective points, it is difficult to sift facts from make-believe. I am not against depriving someone of education or employment on the basis of caste, but I strongly object to India's reservation methodology. A better and more effective program/policy ought to be envisaged and based on it an affirmative action be taken to alleviate the misery of those living on the fringes of society. Our wily politicians have been using reservation as a tool to swell their vote-bank. This is what ought to be condemned.

Go through Karan Thapar's interview with Mr. P. Chidambaram Reservations have helped OBCs rise: Chidambaram. It's painful to see an intelligent person like him trying to defend government's wrong policy. When will India be freed from the clutches of the unscrupulous and sham politicians?

Amartya Sen on Indian Democracy

Here below are excerpts from Amartya Sen's Contrary India, which appeared in "The World in 2006".

“The frustrating thing about India”, I was told by one of my teachers, the great Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, “is that whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.” This will continue to apply in 2006.

Is India a successful democracy? Certainly. Its multi-party democracy with free elections, free speech and civil liberties has been functioning well, and it has had fine side-results such as the elimination of famines (a frequent occurrence in British India—the last, in 1943, was just four years before independence). But no, it cannot have been entirely successful, since democratic rights have not eliminated undernourishment, ill health and other deprivations. Is the Indian economy doing very well? Yes, it is growing fast and there is a lot of new income around. But poverty is still very grave. Is Indian education a great success? Yes, of course, India has a large, well-educated and highly trained population and it provides skilled labour for academia, for science, for technology, for literature, for music and the fine arts, for administration, for management, for medicine—both within India and across the world. Yet nearly a third of the population is still illiterate.......

Indian commitment to democracy is sometimes attributed simply to the impact of British influence. And yet if that were the primary reason, it would not be clear why such an influence should not have worked similarly for a hundred other countries which also emerged from the same empire on which the sun used not to set.

Democracy is, ultimately, the practice of public reasoning in the broadest sense. Voting is part of a much larger process which includes open public discussion and uncensored criticism. Traditions of public reasoning exist across the world and are not a monopoly of the West or of any other civilisation or culture. But India has been particularly fortunate in having a long and powerful argumentative tradition. Some of the earliest open general meetings in the world aimed specifically at settling disputes, through discussion between holders of different points of view, took place in India, from the sixth century BC onwards, in the series of so-called “Buddhist councils”, where adherents of different points of view gathered together to argue out their differences. Emperor Ashoka, who hosted the largest of these councils in the capital city of Patna in the third century BC, also attempted to codify and promote what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion......the first systematic public discussions in the world between holders of different religious views were arranged by the great Moghul emperor Akbar in Agra in the 1590s, at a time when the Inquisitions were still going on in Europe.

Democracy is already doing more in India than is sometimes acknowledged.....There is some significance even in the fact that a country in which more than 80% of the electorate happen to be Hindu has chosen a Sikh prime minister (Manmohan Singh), a Muslim president (Abdul Kalam) and a Christian leader of the ruling Congress party (Sonia Gandhi).

Important as public reasoning, political liberty, civil rights, consolidation of secularism and prevention of disasters (such as famines) are, democracy can, and must, do a lot more still, by bringing persistent inequalities and deprivations more into effective public discussion. This is beginning to happen, but it must go much further. It is in the public commitment to democracy and its extensive use that India—as it finds its feet in the world, and the world pays some attention—has something really important to offer to contemporary global ideas and practice.

India unshackled?

Editorial in The Economist's latest edition laments, "Despite its huge potential market of 1.1 billion people, despite its wealth of English-speakers and democratic institutions, despite its vaunted 15-year-old reforms, India has been a daunting place to do business, its entrepreneurs chained down by the world's most bureaucratic bureaucracy, lousy infrastructure and lousier Fabian economic ideas." Even after 15 years of following liberal economic policies & five decades of independence, more than half our population is poor by any standards and does not have access to proper housing, sanitation, electricity, drinking water, medical facilties et al. "It takes eight days, including 32 hours waiting at checkpoints and toll booths, for a lorry to crawl from Kolkata to Mumbai."

India presents a queer contrast between the 'privileged' & 'underprivileged' at all levels and every govt. at the centre is pursuing the wrong policies [i.e., subsidies, quotas etc. of various hues] to bring in socio-economic equity. I sometimes wonder as to why our political leaders can't sense things that are so obvious and keep raking up non-issues when the entire nation's energies ought to be focussed in realizing its true potential. The government must work towards providing basic standard of living for all its citizens not for the sake of getting a permanent seat in the Security Council nor to be labelled as developed nation but because this is what each & every Indian deserves and that is the primary reason a politician is elected for. Indians have put up with apathy of the political class for long; now is the time to assert the collective angst against the usurpers and the unscrupulous. The Ed concludes, "India has taken off. Just think how high its people could fly without all those chains."