Post-independence India’s democratic experiment — its only major achievement of the past 68 years — is slowly unravelling. 

Because of the reckless indiscipline and private agendas of the country’s politicians of all ideological hues, the parliamentary democracy system is dissolving before our very eyes. Both houses of Parliament are not being “allowed to function” by opposition Congress party MPs trooping into the well of the houses and chanting slogans, making any debate — the raison d’etre of Parliament — impossible.  

Likewise, the once much-admired judiciary is also in a condition of permanent decline. The reluctance of their lordships of the bench and learned counsel of the bar to rewrite the archaic criminal and civil procedure laws has slowed the wheels of justice to a crawl. Moreover, there’s a newly emergent tendency within the judiciary to pander to vindictive and corrupt politicians, policemen and bureaucrats, even when they blatantly abuse their office to harass law-abiding citizens.

A case in point is the persistent CBI hounding of indefatigable human rights activist Teesta Setalvad for technical violations of the Foreign Contributions Regulations Act, 2010. Instead of passing severe strictures against the agency and the Union government for frivolous and vexatious litigation, high and apex court benches are lending patient ears to them. Similarly, in Karnataka instead of sternly chastising bureaucrats of several government departments who have filed a rain of frivolous cases against the Bangalore Club, whimsically disputing its land title 150 years after it was established, their lordships are carefully weighing the vindictive persecution of its members (your editor included).    

Indeed, slowly but surely, the pillars of Indian democracy are crumbling. 

RIP Comrade

Perhaps the only people who believe India’s communist parties — the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and the Communist Party of India (CPI simpliciter) — have a future, are their delusional leaders stuck in a cold war time warp and given to emoting the imported class struggle rhetoric of a bygone era.

These ruminations have been prompted by the tragic demise of journalist Praful Bidwai, one of the most articulate advocates of the lost Left cause in the country, who choked to death while dining in distant Holland on June 23. Although on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, I knew Praful well and gave this IIT-Bombay dropout his first job as assistant editor of Business India (BI), the country’s first business magazine and champion of private enterprise and free markets.

Even though without previous journalistic experience, Praful learned the ropes quickly, and indeed brought BI international recognition when he wrote a detailed cover story exposing gross management negligence in the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Bombay, which had resulted in workers suffering grave radiation injuries.

Of course, he didn’t last long in BI and when asked to balance a lead feature on the pharmaceutical industry which he wrote entirely from the workers’ perspective, he went AWOL at the last minute, leaving your editor to pick up the pieces. Subsequently he moved to Delhi and emerged as a well-respected columnist for several national dailies, in which he reiterated the numerous failings of India’s bourgeois democracy.

All this notwithstanding, unlike most lefties, Praful was well-read, possessed logical argumentative capability plus a sense of humour — rare among jholawalas. Some years after EducationWorld was promoted (1999), he was persuaded to write for this publication from the national capital. But by then, he had transformed into a typical Cadillac communist who despite costing the then struggling EW a tidy sum, failed to deliver the promised content.

Despite this second let-down explained away as affordable by your capitalist publisher, it was difficult to harbour ill-will towards Praful, given his disarmingly black and white perspective of the world. Be that as it may, the Left has lost a valuable advocate of a lost cause. RIP in the Workers Paradise, if any, Comrade.

Quis custodiet?

How deep and wide the cancer of corruption has spread within contemporary Indian society is highlighted by the slow-motion destruction of the country’s strongest Lok Ayukta (LA) or people’s ombudsman appointed in the state of Karnataka.

In 1984, the state’s Janata Party government headed by the late Ramakrishna Hegde enacted the Karnataka Lok Ayukta Act to “improve the standards of public administration by looking into complaints against the administrative actions including cases of corruption, favouritism and official indiscipline in the administrative machinery”. Under the Act, two people’s ombudsmen, the Lok Ayukta and Upa Lokayukta — the former a retired Supreme Court judge or high court chief justice and the latter a high court judge — were appointed to investigate, prosecute and sentence government officials for corruption and maladministration, the chief minister, cabinet ministers, MLAs and class I civil servants included.

But after three decades during which seven Lok Ayuktas discharged their functions with commendable probity, this institution itself has become infected with the ubiquitous corruption virus. A mountain of evidence indicates that Justice Bhaskar Rao, a former chief justice of the Karnataka high court who was appointed Lok Ayukta in 2013, is complicit and/or has been turning a blind eye to his son using the LA’s office and investigative machinery to extort huge sums from “hundreds” of corrupt bureaucrats with assets disproportionate to their incomes. But despite calls for his resignation, Justice Rao has stayed put, sparking a constitutional crisis in the state.

Yet it’s a measure of the depth and magnitude of corruption in Karnataka that almost all politicians and civil servants are vulnerable to blackmail. Meanwhile, the state’s hapless citizenry is pondering ancient Roman satirist Juvenal’s timeless query: quis custodiet ipsos custodes (‘who will guard against the guards themselves’).