(1888PressRelease)
March 23, 2007 - Their lordships of the Supreme Court apparently had Jawaharlal Nehru on their minds when they made a historic observation, and certainly not a pronouncement by any means whatsoever, that everyone wants to loot the country and the only way to get rid of the corrupt is to "hang a few" of them by the nearest "lamppost". Fifty or more years ago Jawaharlal Nehru had said about hoarders, profiteers and black-marketers making a fast buck and holding the poor people of India to ransom that they should be hanged by the nearest lamppost. It was indeed a popular idiom of the day applied to sinners and crooks. Sinners and crooks have indeed multiplied by the million in the past fifty odd years and they include the wide ranging corrupt whose rank and file has swelled not by the dozen but by the uncountable figure in arithmetic.
Indeed, the corrupt are holding the poor and not so poor people of India, if not the world, to ransom.
Yet the articulate supporters and self appointed spokesmen of the rulers of all hues have taken their lordships of the Supreme Court to task for their excesses in articulating their views, for exceeding their brief and for their failure to be circumspect. Judicial activism has been branded as treading the toes of the executive and legislative wings and criticized as populist manouvre. Populism is something that is the sole prerogative of those who profess to be the representatives of the people, elected or unelected.
The Constitution lays down and guarantees the freedom of expression of even those on the lunatic fringe, leave alone those who try to argue logically a totally illogical case or hold a brief for known criminals, known corrupt as well as those who break the laws of the land in the name of upholding it. The suspects or those charged are innocent until proved guilty. The practitioners of law are, therefore, entitled to defend murderers, robbers and looters and arsonists because of that legal presumption or fiction even as lawyers are supposed to assist the court as its officers in arriving at the truth, though they may, in fact, be hoodwinking the courts of law. But then even hoodwinking may well be considered a guaranteed prerogative.
One might well ask the politicians that even though they claim all the liberties and evenly routinely arrogate these liberties to themselves, if not reserve them for their own use, do they have the authority to question the right of the judges of the Supreme Court to express a mere opinion while clearly stating that they indeed could not order hanging the corrupt by the lamppost. It was not their judgment. It could indeed not be at a time when the death penalty is sought to be abolished in one country after another and is awarded in the rarest of the rare cases even in India.
The reason for the objection to the judges' expression of opinion is not far to seek. They were rejecting the appeal by a budget accounts officer of Bihar against his conviction in the Rs. 1000 crore fodder scam, in which the Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, is one of the accused. The official's counsel told the court that the man was a mere junior official and his sentence of five years should be quashed. The rejection touched a raw nerve because in the eye of the needle could be high and mighty, not just employees of the government. What next? Let's leave that to the doomsday of the case whenever the lower courts pronounce their verdict on it.
But their lordships' observation merits being quoted: "Look at that. You (the budget officer) are supposed to audit the funds, but see what you have done. …Everywhere we have corruption. Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot this country. The only solution for this menace is to hang some people in the public so that it acts as a deterrent to others…The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of you from the lamppost. The law does not permit us to do it, but otherwise we would prefer to hang people like you from the lamppost".
If Jawaharlal Nehru could say almost the same words, why are people's representatives forgetting them or have they lost their guts? Or, as the judges pointed out, corruption is a way of life and it should be accepted as a given, something that nobody can stop or get rid of. The best is to live with it. Is it because the political parties cannot live or function without very large resources and these funds, their magnitude anyway, cannot come by cheque or via the bank, so there is no way out of it. There are indeed known and unknown wheelers and dealers aplenty. There are great fund raisers, the greatest of them having been the late lamented Pramod Mahajan who introduced the BJP, a party supposedly of renunciates from the RSS mould, to the seven star culture. In Delhi, it used to be the former Chief Minister, Mr. Madanlal Khurana, who later became Parliamentary Affairs Minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government. He was a known friend of the hawala overlords. He even took his party president of the day to such overlords, but the case could never be proved; so he and his boss are innocent. Mr. Khurana was an advocate of four storey houses plus basements for the benefit of the builders' lobby. He may have left the party or been thrown out of it, but his proposal has come to pass and almost become law for all of Delhi.
One of the other great fund raisers was the late S.K.Patil, who was the treasurer of the ruling party in the 1950s. He was invincible for long, but some time in 1960s, the rabble rousing labour leader of Mumbai, George Fernandes, defeated him in elections to the Lok Sabha. George not only defeated, but took on the mantle of his mentor and even though looking modest and unkempt for decades, he appears to have a sheen and bright face today. He may be out of power, but his ruddy cheeks reveal that he is not having to live with the cares of office and the grind of being the convener of a harassed coalition. He is indeed a great socialist, who perhaps practices socialism only by the word of mouth by paying lip service; nothing more.
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