These are the people who decide our fate!

This is the headline of many national news papers:

Yet another MP is convicted of murder
25 Jun 2008, , Dipak Mishra & Rajiv Kumar,TNN

BEGUSARAI/PATNA: A trial court on Tuesday convicted controversial Lok Janshakti Party MP, Surajbhan Singh, for killing a farmer over a land dispute 16 years ago.

He is the third MP from the state to be convicted. Apart from the three, a former MP and a former state minister — making it a total of five politicians — have been convicted by different Bihar courts in recent years. Shibu Soren, an MP from neighbouring Jharkhand was convicted of murder, but later acquitted.

Fast-track court judge Ravi Prakash Dhar Dubey found Surajbhan, MP from Balia, and two others — Jai Ram Singh and Radhe Singh — guilty of murdering Rami Singh of Madhurapur village in Begusarai in January 1992.

Special public prosecutor Shyameshwar Dayal said the Begusarai court will hear the prosecution and defence on Wednesday before deciding on the quantum of punishment.

Trials are on in at least five other criminal cases against Surajbhan. There was an uneasy calm inside the courtroom with the MP, in white shirt and trousers with a tilak on his forehead, standing quietly in the dock when the verdict was delivered.

Nitish govt played role in speedy trial

It was a long, eventful trial and the Patna high court had to intervene to complete it within a timeframe.

But the fast-track court's bid to expedite things received a setback when prosecution counsel Ram Naresh Sharma was murdered in November last year. Subsequently, Dayal, a Patna HC lawyer who was appointed by the state government as special public prosecutor to oversee all other cases related to the MP, took charge of this case as well.

The sitting MPs who have been convicted are: Pappu Yadav (Purnea), Mohammed Shahabuddin (Siwan), both from RJD; and Anand Mohan Singh, a former MP from Sheohar. Anand Mohan was sentenced to death for the lynching of then Gopalganj DM, G Krishnaiah. Shahabuddin has been convicted in at least three cases.

He was given life term for kidnapping CPI-ML worker Munna Choudhary with the intent of murder. Pappu got life term for the murder of CPM MLA Ajit Sarkar in 1998. Former Bihar minister in Rabri cabinet, Aditya Singh, and his son are in jail for killing two persons in Nawada.

If the law is catching up with the state's dons-turned-politicians, it has more to do with the Nitish Kumar government's move to ensure speedy trial in criminal cases. After these cases, including those against politicians, were transferred to fast-track courts some two years ago, 6,000-odd criminals have been convicted by various courts.

Starting off as a contract killer for UP mafia don Shriprakash Shukla (killed in an encounter by police) in the early 1990s, Surajbhan has of late been controlling most railway contracts and other PSUs in Begusarai and surrounding districts. Feared as a crack shooter who kills in cold-blood, Surajbhan in the mid-1990s led upper caste criminals in retaliatory violence against backward caste goons. In 2000, he was elected MLA from Mokama and his political clout helped him bag more contracts.


From YFE:
Are our leaders law abiding citizens? Nearly a quarter (23.2%) of the MPs has reported criminal cases against them. One out of two among them (over 50%) have cases that could attract penalties of imprisonment of five or more years. The states of Bihar, U.P., Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh that account for over 50% of the MPs with the high penalty criminal cases.

Though with Supreme Court order, it has become mandatory for candidates to declare the cases pending against them, it has hardly discouraged the political parties from nominating known criminals as their candidates. According to ‘Election Watch" in Bihar assembly election (2004-2005), each major political party has fielded 30% to 40% candidates with criminal background. The affidavits submitted by candidates just make some news headlines in English media. The information hardly reaches the voters. Ignorance of voters, caste and communal equations, large scale intimidation of voters and absence of middle and upper classes from voting make this declaration virtually ineffective. The problem becomes worse when all the major candidate in a constituency have criminal background. In absence of negative voting, one of them is definitely going to be elected.

Several organizations have repeatedly demanded that any person charged with any offence punishable with imprisonment for a maximum term of five years or more, should be disqualified for being chosen as or for being a member of Parliament or Legislature of a State till he/she is cleared of charges by the court. The same views have been endorsed by National Law commission, National Commission for Review of Constitution, and Election Commission of India. But when it comes to politicians to decide about it ( Read Standing Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Reforms), the outcome Is zero. They refused this notion on the ground that the candidates may be falsely implicated in criminal cases by the ruling party.

This is atrocious! They are protecting each other by posing a threat from each other. When it comes to sharing the spoils (of the nation), the present day political class is no better than a pack of wolves!

Almost 16mn Commercial Units Owned by OBC's

The other backward classes (OBCs), who have been granted 27 percent quota in government jobs and educational institutions for being socially and economically backward, own 15.92 million entrepreneurial units, says the official Economic Census for 2005, released Thursday.

People from the Scheduled Castes (SCs), another marginalised section of society with 15 percent reservation in government jobs and colleges, own 3.69 million units, while those from Scheduled Tribes (STs) run 1.52 million units, according to the 2005 data.

The Economic Census released here by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) of the statistics and programme implementation ministry said as many as 41.82 million establishments were in operation in 2005.

Out of a total of 6.08 million establishments in the farm sector, the share of OBCs was 2.81 million or 46.24 percent, while that of SCs was 0.61 million or 10.08 percent. STs accounted for only 0.38 million or 6.32 percent.

'Over 93 percent of these units owned by OBCs, SCs, and STs were in rural areas,' said S.K. Nath, director general of CSO, which conducted the Economic Census that gives not only an insight into India's economy but also intends to meet the requirements of planners, policy makers and researchers.

The census says that 100.9 million people were employed in 41.83 million establishments in India in 2005, out of which 25.54 million units were in rural areas and 16.29 million in urban areas.

Five states accounting for about 50 percent of total employment in organised and unorganised sectors were Andhra Pradesh (11.20 million), Maharashtra (11.31 million), Tamil Nadu (10.06 million), Uttar Pradesh (8.15 million) and West Bengal (10.03 million).

The Centre Just cannot hold

The Fourth anniversary of UPA government has been celebrated and why not. The election victory in 2004 was a total surprise and even more so was the innovation that the leader of the largest single party did not become prime minister and she appointed a trusted and talented man as ‘her’ prime minister. There has been little friction between the two, and everyone knows that while he is honest and hardworking, she makes the crucial decisions. Until something goes wrong. Then he takes the blame as with the nuclear deal and with the recent inflation upsurge.
But there is more to coalition dharma than just personalities. India has drifted over the last 20 years to become a softer state than it used to be. The Centre still has constitutional primacy and often uses it to mischievous partisan ends. Thanks to the fruits of liberal economic reform of the PM when he was FM and the current FM’s work with building a prudent and efficient tax collection machinery, the Centre has money to throw around at problems it is too lazy or powerless to solve — farmers deaths’, oil price rise, reservations in apex elite institutions of higher education. The money may never get there but at least gestures are made.
But terrorism cannot be and will not be bribed away. Jaipur has shown how flimsy the anti-terrorism fight has become in India. Rather than worry about protecting the citizens or even finding the culprits, the first worry is to ‘avoid Gujarat’, say nothing which will antagonise the Muslim (why use the weasel word ‘minority’?) community. The simple fact is that no one is saying All Muslims are Terrorists. Only that today all, if not most, terrorist activity aimed against urban India as indeed against urban areas around the world is instigated by Muslims who have embraced the Islamist creed of Osama Bin Laden. Most Muslims are victims of this nasty philosophy as are the non-Muslims around the world.

It is a lazy security service which blames Pakistan or Lashkar-e-Toiba or SIMI even before a single investigation has been carried out. In the UK, painstaking surveillance has been used to stop plots to blow people up in their tracks before the plotters get a chance. Mobile telephones and emails and websites are monitored ceaselessly to get the evidence to convict potential terrorists. Meticulous care has to be taken to search the crime scene for any and all forensic clues. One cannot afford to clean the area up for a VIP visit as often happens in India where the 10 minutes kowtowing at the feet of the VIP is worth far more for a policeman’s career than saving a thousand lives.

The fact is that be it the surrender at Kandahar or the appalling and repeated incidents of terrorist activities which have occurred and will recur, nothing shames the political leadership of UPA, NDA or any other concoction. They’d much rather score points against each other than protect the public. They are safe behind their triple Z security and citizens can go hang. Even where people are caught, no one gets even presented to court much less convicted, for decades. Even in communal riots, the same sad story is told. No one can be blamed if there is a single member of any of the 200 political parties who can claim to be related to the culprit. Trials can be postponed or shifted or just botched.

There is no shortage of bodies, commissions, reports, initiatives, panels upon panels of experts and yet no safety for citizens. The Centre has become non-functional in internal security as the tragic farce over Naxalite insurgency shows. Parties sympathetic to terrorists, be they Tamil nationalists of Eelam or left wing fellow traveller terrorists, can be safely in power, if not in office, at the Centre. They have only to profess to be anti-communal; to be anti-terrorist is not required.

It is difficult to see when and how this situation will be reversed. If the political system is not willing to crack the whip and take internal security seriously, then no amount of new legislation or central agencies will matter. The system is divided in the way it perceives citizens. The idea that all Indians are citizens subject to the same laws has eroded since Independence. Each individual has value to the extent of the votebank to which she belongs. If you’re not part of a votebank, tough luck.

Whenever general elections happen, there will be no resolution of this problem. There will be no single party majority government and another fractured coalition will take office. This coalition will also boast of some philosophy — Hindutva or secularism or anti-imperialism — but it will be stuck in the same spineless attitude about threats to internal security. Maybe there is not enough money to be made for politicians fighting internal terrorists as there is in buying defence equipment or in starting SEZs or bossing over drug companies or spending infrastructure funds. It is even more fun running the cricket board and T-20 league than in caring about hunger and food supplies.

As the anarchist jibe says whoever wins the Government always gets back. Stay alive if you can.

Email:m.desai@lse.ac.uk
By Megnad Desai in DNA Newspaper, Page-11, dated 01/06/08