The rank and the file

THERE’S been, understandably, considerable glee in the country over the US talking of freezing the assets of Osama bin Laden and 27 terrorist organisations following the World Trade Centre attacks. After all, for many years, the US has been unsuccessful in trying to freeze the assets of various charitable trusts which front for these very organisations. Besides, wasn’t it many years ago — see Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban — that the US tried to freeze bin Laden’s assets. Clearly, the gloat goes, the US isn’t that Almighty — a ‘fact’ proved by its huge intelligence failure and lax security.

But why bother about the US, after all only a small Indian sect (the H1Bs) lives there, the rest live here? Our own track record in bringing terrorists to book is less than pathetic. As this newspaper reported earlier this week, 17 years on, charges are still to be framed in the 1984 transistor bombs attack on the Red Fort in Delhi. And, in the Jain hawala case, while two people were arrested in 1991 for laundering funds for militants, the channels of militant funding have still not been unravelled. In other words, why blame the US for not paying enough attention to our terrorism problem when we aren’t doing too much about it either.

A large part of the problem, most say, is that of inordinate delays in Indian courts — see disinvestment minister Arun Shourie’s Courts and their Judgements that’s just out. The ultimate chronicler, Shourie tells us that the Supreme Court took five years to give a judgement on the Narmada project and it cost the project Rs 3,900 crore in interest alone. In another case, 13 textile mills were nationalised in Bombay in 1983. The High Court said the takeover was illegal. But by the time the Supreme Court upheld the takeover, it was January 2001! The ultimate combination, Shourie argues, is when the judiciary and the executive’s decisions reinforce each other.

In the late 1960s, the engineers of the electricity boards of Punjab and Haryana launched an agitation demanding higher emoluments and got them. So, engineers in the Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking also followed suit, and in 1971, the Sivsankar Committee was appointed to look into their demands, and conceded them. So, the electrical staff of the NDMC demanded parity, and got it... the non-electrical staff then demanded the same hike, took the matter to the Supreme Court which ruled in their favour... the safai karamacharis of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi then demanded they get the same as their counterparts in the NDMC, but since this was rejected by the Mehrotra Committee, they filed a case in court arguing discrimination, Article 14 of the Constitution, and so on. The employees of the Delhi Jal Nigam then followed suit, and a single judge of the Delhi High Court has ruled in their favour.

But an equally, if not more, serious problem that Shourie details is the frightening story of what’s best called The File. That’s the file in various government departments that ultimately decides the fate of an individual or a project, never mind the high promises of those in office like, say, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee — someone said the other day, Vajpayee’s the most ‘promising’ PM he’s seen in a long time. Some stories from The File:

An IAS officer, ‘X’, in Maharashtra is to be suspended for corruption, and a permission is sought for prosecuting him from the central government in June 1985. The file then does the rounds between various departments of the Union government — on April 24, 1989, the Central Vigilance Commission agrees with the state’s recommendation that ‘X’ be dismissed. Around 140 such steps (in the Union Government alone) and 15 years after the case began, the additional secretary in charge of security and vigilance put an end to the case. On February 14, 2000, he wrote to the Chief Secretary of Maharashtra, requesting him to modify ‘X’s penalty from dismissal from service to compulsory retirement, with a 10 per cent cut in his monthly pension. This order, he clarified, is in compliance with the September 7, 1998 judgement of the Central Administrative Tribunal’s Mumbai bench (!)

On March 5, 1989, the Vice Principal of Government Boys Secondary School in Kanti Nagar in Delhi asked that a teacher ‘Y’ be transferred out as he was coercing students to take private tuitions from him and brought in goondas to terrorise them. Seventeen steps later, on September 7, 1992, the Director, Education, signs a file terminating ‘Y’s service. ‘Y’ appeals against this, gets a stay order, and 66 steps later, on February 22, 1994, the Director, Education, signs an order that ‘Y’s increments be withheld for two years. Another 73 steps later, on July 21, 2000, ‘Y’ gets his arrears in his bank account after the case is dismissed. Was ‘Y’ guilty or not? Who cares, either way, a 11-year wait for justice is frightening. These examples can be multiplied a million times, but who’ll chronicle them?

In such a scenario, when the highest ranking in the country (such as Prime Minister Vajpayee) keep promising more reforms, what meaning do they really have? Ultimately, after all, isn’t everything hostage to The File?

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