CBI, the saviour?

On 22 June 2017, fifteen-year-old Junaid Khan -- with Rs 1,500 in his pocket -- left his home in Khandawali village of Haryana along with elder brother and two friends to buy clothes, shoes, and gifts for the coming Eid.

The next day, the Indian Express (IE) reported: "On their way back in a Mathura-bound train, Junaid was stabbed to death by a group of men after an argument .... The men allegedly mocked the boys, tugged at their beards and accused them of eating beef. This was before they threw them out of the train at Asaoti station, where Junaid bled to death on his brother Hashim’s lap."

The government and the ruling party immediately swung into action. CCTV cameras in Asaoti station mysteriously conked out and NO RAILWAY EMPLOYEE HAD SEEN ANYTHING, although it was a bright and sunny day.

Therefore, although the case has reached a lower court in Faridabad, and is being tried as "State of Haryana Vs Naresh Kumar", only people like me who are insanely optimistic would expect a conviction.

Be that as it may, let's appreciate what the Additional District and Sessions Judge, Y S Rathore, who is hearing the case, has just done.

According to the IE, he evicted the Additional Advocate General of Haryana from his court because he was assisting the counsel of the main accused during cross-examination of witnesses. The judge said that the government lawyer was “suggesting questions to be put to the witnesses” during hearings on 24 and 25 October.

Expectedly, the evicted law officer told The IE it was a "wrong impression” that he was assisting the defence counsel. He happened to be there and had innocently helped another lawyer in matters unrelated to the case!

The Additional Advocate General is the second highest law officer of the state and must be an awfully busy bloke. Yet, his love for the accused criminal's counsel was so deep that he had to be at the lowest court on two consecutive days! The excuse simply doesn't hold water. He is a government pleader, and has no business to assist the lawyer of the accused, against whom his own government has filed a case.

Incidentally, Junaid’s father, Jalaluddin has filed a petition in the High Court "seeking transfer of the probe from the Haryana Police to an independent agency such as the CBI, as well as security for his family and the prosecution witnesses."

His lawyer has appealed, “It is the grievance of the petitioner that the statement of all the witnesses has been deliberately distorted to introduce ambiguity, discrepancies and contradictions, with the calculated interest of benefiting the accused.” He also said a person who was among the attackers was made a witness to help the accused. (IE)

That is how the BJP government in Haryana Government is ensuring justice for the victim's family! And the Jalaluddin family are so helpless that they have to seek investigation by the "caged parrot" called CBI, which has proved its neutrality beyond a shred of doubt while hounding Teesta Setalvad and in numerous other cases, and has also exhibited their superb efficiency in the recent fiasco in the Talwar couple’s case.

Our wretched governments are doing everything possible under the sun to destroy the criminal justice system in the country. They have to. Otherwise, how will India become the banana republic of their dream?

30 October 2017

(Photo courtesy the Indian Express, 2 July, 2017)

Maldives

I was working in Trivandrum and once when my father came, I took him to the famed Kovalam beach nearby. It was in the late Seventies, and Kovalam was almost pristine then. I have to add the modifier “almost” because, although the hideous shacks selling trinkets to coconuts that are there now hadn’t come up then, some religious thugs had just built an ugly pink mosque right on the beach then, which damaged the harmony of the place immensely. On the contrary, the ITDC Hotel, a simple minimalist white structure with red tiles on the slope of a hillock, merged with the backdrop of the blue sky and millions of green coconut trees seamlessly. And barring the mosque, the empty semi-circular beach and the turquoise blue waters with silhouettes of dark fishermen on catamarans returning from a dipping golden sun were fascinatingly beautiful.

After reaching there, my father turned his back to the sea and started smoking a cigarette. Surprised, I asked him, ‘How do you find Kovalam?’

‘All seas are the same,’ he answered absently.

I had had no clue that my father, who had keen interest in lots of fine things in life, was a complete philistine as far as nature was concerned.

As I walked out of the Velana airport, I saw a sparkling sapphire sea which merged into a deep cobalt blue in the distance, colours that I hadn’t seen in my short young life. I recalled the incident in Kovalam and felt even my father wouldn’t have been able to turn his back to these magical waters.

The Maldives consist of over 1100 coral islands, but there are humans on only 188 of them. And I guess most of them have resorts, hotels and liveaboards frequented by tourists, mainly from the West. You can get a sense of the size of the tourism industry there if you consider that this tiny country has four international airports, one for every 100,000 people. (France, Spain, and Sri Lanka have three each.) For our destination, the gateway was Velana Airport, on an island with nothing but the air strip, offices / counters of fifty plus resorts, and a few eateries selling American junk food.

After a short wait, we were on a speed boat to an island which had nothing but the resort. The reception office, the dining hall, an open-air bar, and a store selling knick-knacks at exorbitant price were near the jetty where we got off. In that egg-shaped island, a pathway goes around which you could cover in 20 minutes of leisurely walk. Between the pathway and the beach, there are three two-storey buildings on the western side and two on the east for guests. The space within the elliptical pathway houses the back offices and living quarters for the resort employees. But the entire area is covered by a deep green foliage, you wouldn’t see any of these if you passed by the island on a boat.

From our ground-floor room, we can see the sun dipping on the western horizon beyond a beach of white sands through trees and bushes. It’s late afternoon, but some sun-bathers are still scattered on the shore. I can’t but reflect that although people from the West devour natural resources quite thoughtlessly, they are true minimalists when it comes to swimwear. The women were all in slender bikinis. And their clothes fitted the description that the great Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali once wrote, “You could stitch the panties of three girls with my tie.”

Apart from natural beauty, the clear waters in which you could see millions of corals and colourful fish, what I found wonderful were the people at the resort. Managerial positions were held mostly by Maldivians, and they were unfailingly polite, pleasant, and efficient. At the lower levels were some Maldivians, but mostly, Bangladeshies. They brought from home the famous Bangladeshi hospitality.

Suman, who was obviously at a lower end of the hierarchy, told me that he earned enough to send a decent amount home, and got a two-way ticket to Bangladesh every two years. If he wanted to go more often, he would get a one-way ticket every year. Suman, Sukur Ali, and most other Bangladeshi workers were happy souls and were happier to talk to us in Bangla. But not everyone was equally fortunate.

We met Ahmed (name changed), a deck-hand who accompanied us on the boat when we went dolphin watching. Ahmed had been imported from Bangladesh by another resort. He was treated shabbily, not paid wages, and harassed by his previous employer. He had to run away from that place – sans papers – and had found a temporary job with the boat owner. He too managed to send some money home, but lived with the risks associated with every illegal immigrant.

‘Are you married, Ahmed?’

‘Yes I am. Have a boy and a girl back in Khulna.’

‘How will you go home without a passport?’

‘I don’t know Sir, but Allah will help.’

It is amazing how the poor of the world depend on just one psychological counsellor who does nothing to help them. I have always felt that the most foolish of intellectual pursuits is trying to prove to the believer that god doesn’t exist. He may not exist, but they need him badly.

Bangalore / 21 October 2017

Asima Chatterjee and ...

It is wonderful to wake up and see Google celebrate the centenary of Dr. Asima Chatterjee, a scientist who is either unknown to or forgotten by her compatriots.

Asima Chatterjee is fortunate to have been just forgotten.

Subhash Mukhhopadhyay, a physician and a fellow Bengali scientist who independently created the second "test-tube baby" in the world almost single-handed in his primitive lab, was the target of intense envy of his fellow scientists and the all-knowing bureaucrats warming the chairs in the government secretariat in Kolkata.

Under the watchful eyes of a communist government lead by another "great" Bengali, a Commission was formed to verify the claims of Dr. Mukhopadhyay. The Commission, which included an atomic physicist among other luminaries, rubbished Mukhopadhyay's claims. Mukhopadhyay was humiliated as a fraud and transferred to a TB hospital. (I think, but will have to verify, the atomic physicist was the head of the panel.)

While we are proud that the world today recognises Asima Chatterjee's basic research in chemistry which has contributed to development of chemotherapy for treatment of cancer, let us also remember another Indian scientist of her generation who couldn't take it any more and committed suicide in 1981.

Durga, the baby who got her life thanks to Dr Mukhopadhyay, and Louise Brown of England, the first test-tube baby in the world, were both born in 1978, Durga 67 days later.

Twenty-nine years after Mukhopadhyay's death, in 2010, Robert G. Edwards, an English scientist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing the technique of in vitro fertilization.

23 September 2017

Stand calm and resolute

Statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Pietermaritzburg

These verses are from the The Mask of Anarchy by the English romantic poet Shelley. Gandhi once recited them to a Christian gathering in India.

As I woke up this morning in a country where hatred has become the dominating force in just a few years, I thought of the great man, and the lines which sum up his political creed.

Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,

Let them ride among you there;

Slash, and stab, and maim and hew;

What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise,

Look upon them as they slay,

Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame,

To the place from which they came,

And the blood thus shed will speak

In hot blushes on their cheek.

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!

It seems for us, Indians, the old chains of colonialism have been replaced by new shackles of meanness and mutual hatred. India always had many fault-lines like religious, social, and economic, which Gandhi managed to join, not seamlessly, but effectively nonetheless. And I believe our success, rather, our survival as a federal country largely depends on how well we manage these fault-lines on a continuing basis.

Astonishingly, at present, some Indians are working overtime to widen these fissures like never before in recent history. In fact, they are dividing the country far more effectively than our ruthless alien rulers could, except for the last two years of their miserable rule.

One hundred and forty-eight years after Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born, I think recalling these lines once again would be a fine way to pay tribute to the flawed genius, who perhaps was more a human with multiple failings (like you and me) than a Mahatma.

Bengaluru

2 October 2017

[Photo courtesy news24.com: Statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Pietermaritzburg. It is at this place in South Africa where Gandhi, while travelling to Pretoria, was thrown off a train at the instance of a white-man who objected to his travelling in a first class compartment, though he had a valid first class ticket. Did the makers of the statue "return in shame"?]