Be careful what you wish for

In the days following the Delhi gangrape in December last year, a justifiably outraged public rightly demanded swift action by the police. When 5 men were arrested and charged with the crime there were calls for a swift trial followed by the death penalty. Some commentators even called for summary execution.

Yesterday the news broke that Ram Singh, one of the 5 accused, was found hanging in his Tihar cell. Job done and justice delivered? Or was it another example of the failings of India's crumbling, corrupt and decrepit system for administering criminal justice?

No one, least of all those who had called for the death penalty, should rejoice at this turn of events. Ram Singh's death in custody is as much a tragedy for India's justice system as the original crime was a brutally grim reminder of how we as a society treat our women. Before we condemn him with loose comments to the effect that he got what was deservedly coming to him anyway, lets not forget that he was accused of a major and horrific crime, not yet convicted by a proper court of law after due process.

This matters to each and every citizen of India. When the police investigate a crime they often arrest a suspect. Just as any of us could become the victim of crime so too can any one of us be picked up as a suspect. A suspect - potentially one of us, remember – has a right to his day in court, to answer to the charge and to test the prosecution's case that he is guilty. During the time that the suspect is in custody his - or her - safety and welfare is the responsibility of the police, the courts and the rest of the state apparatus that make up the criminal justice system.

And when the suspect dies under suspicious circumstances in jail before his trial has concluded it is not summary justice. It is a tragedy for everyone involved: for the original victim’s family because they have been denied knowing for certain that the right man has been convicted and punished; for the justice system because it has failed to deliver justice in an open and transparent  way; and it is a tragedy for all of us because our trust and faith in the ability of the police to do their job properly is eroded.  

How Ram Singh came to meet his end is now the subject of another investigation. But the fact of his death under suspicious circumstances when in custody, in theory at least the safest place possible, is unacceptable and shocking. Any number of possibilities come to mind but it is difficult to believe that the system that allowed this to happen will be capable of getting to the truth of what happened in that jail cell.  

Mr Modi's speech - misleading or harmless embellishment?

I saw and heard Mr Narendra Modi’s 6 Feb speech to students in New Delhi – it was carried live on all the major news channels and I caught it in Nagpur. It was widely billed as Mr Modi’s bid to be the BJP’s candidate for Prime Minister should they win the next general election.

It was an impressive performance: using no notes he held the attention of his young audience by focusing on his priorities and what he would offer as a future prime minister. Development and good governance: he had achieved that in Gujarat, he argued, and could repeat the performance for the country. Development to him meant progress on 3 fronts, farm productivity and growth, industrial sector reforms and service sector expansion.  Conscious of his audience he argued persuasively his belief that the future belonged to the young people of India. (Note 1)

He did not once mention Hindutva or the Ram Mandir issue – clever move. Nor of course did he mention Godhra – again good move. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that sorry episode, it is well behind us and some would argue time to move on (I disagree but many in India have moved on).

I was getting increasingly convinced that India needed someone like Mr Modi to provide strong leadership and push hard on development.  Until that is, he narrated, towards the end of his speech,  a story that sounded so positive and so heartening that I decided to look further into it.

Some years ago, Mr Modi said, a young man, diffident, a Canadian of Gujaratai origin, not a gifted communicator, saw him in his office with a somewhat rambling story of his plans for building a busisness. Mr Modi soon felt that he was a bit of a time waster and so brought the meeting to a close by referring him to the District Collector of some part of Gujarat.

Some 40 months later ( later on in the story this became a year later) this young man once again sought an audience with me, said Mr  Modi. He almost tried to wriggle out of another potentially pointless meeting when his PA told him that the young man wished to invite Mr Modi to an inauguration of a new factory.  The young entrepreneur also asked Mr Modi to reserve a date in his diary for 6 months later when there would be a product launch – the first output from this factory.

By now of course everyone in the audience was agog to know more about this young man and his impressive business acumen. Mr Modi never revealed the name of the entrepreneur but told his audience with  all the flourish of a stage performer that the product of this factory in Gujarat was well known to his student audience – they were the coaches of the Delhi Metro!

Wow! That was some story. It captured at once the industrial enterprise of Gujarat and the role of young people in economic development.  But could it be too good to be true? I decided to dig around a bit.

A Google search tells you a great deal of the design and procurement processes of the Delhi Metro. By and large it is a success story having delivered the Metro ahead of the planned time table and within budget. The main factor responsible for this remarkable achievement – esp given that it was delivered in that cesspit of corruption known as New Delhi – witness the mess that was the Commonwealth Games of 2010 – was Mr Sreedharan, the boss of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. He insisted on and won absolute freedom from political interference  and meddling in the procurement process.  

The trains were sourced from more than one company. Those that are manufactured in Gujarat are the MOVIA cars that the Canandian company Bombardier Transportation was contracted to supply for 3 of the Metro’s Phase II lines. Bombardier set up a dedicated manufacturing facility in Savli, Vadodara (Note 2)  for this purpose. Bombardier Transportation is of course not new to the rail transportation industry In India. They have long had a presence in the manufacture of components for India’s state owned railways.  Other companies involved in the Delhi Metro are Hyundai and Mistubishi for Phase I. The first 60 0f Hyundai’s trains were made in their Korean plants but all the others are manufactured in BEML’s plant in Bangalore.  

This is quite a different narrative from Mr Modi’s version of a sole entrepreneur achieving something big. When a big international firm wins a contract to set up a manufacturing unit for an infrastructure project of the national profile of a brand new metro system in the nation’s capital, it is unilkely the charismatic and business friendly chief minister of the state lucky enough to host the factory will first hear of it through a young,  wet-behind-the- ears, entrepreneur.

So why the needless  embellishment of what would have been a success story even if more simply presented. The narrative that "Gujarat was chosen as the site for a brand new manufacturing facility to make trains for the Delhi metro – because we have the skilled manpower and the infrastructure" - that in itself would have been some story to boast about 

His speech was not scripted, of course – most Indian politicians tend to speak extempore without notes, especially  when making speeches at mass gatherings. It could be he got carried away by his own rhetoric – he was after all emphasizing the role of young entrepreneurs and wanted to use the example of Bombardier’s investment in Gujarat.

I have no doubt  that Mr Modi did not intend to deceive, but in emebellishing a story that needed no spicing up, he may have fallen prey to a temptation politicians find hard to resist - to say whatever will please the crowd.    

Notes

1. See http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/slideshows/people/10-punch-lines-from-narendra-modis-speech-at-srcc/slideshow/18370143.cms  

2.  See Projects Monitor Press notice on Nov 17 2008. http://www.projectsmonitor.com/detailnews.asp?newsid=17375

‘Bombardier Transportation India, the domestic outfit of US-based Bombardier Inc, inaugurated its new railway coach manufacturing plant on November 12. Located at Savli in Gujarat's Vadodara district, the plant will be India's first fully foreign-owned railway coach manufacturing unit.
Initially, the unit will manufacture 340 Movia metro cars for the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. The cars, valued at Rs 2,360 crore ($590 million), were order by DMRC in July last year. The cars will be delivered ahead of the Commonwealth Games to be held at New Delhi in October 2010. Bombardier also won a follow-up order in March this year for supplying 84 Movia cars, valued at Rs 548 crore.
Bombardier already has a production site at Vadodara, Gujarat, which has been in operation since 1996 for the manufacture of a range of converters, electronic controls for trains, communications for three-phase propulsion technology, as well as circuit breakers and tap-changers. Bombardier's signalling office and software development centre are also located at Vadodara, where it develops software for signalling and traction applications, catering to the software requirements of Bombardier Transportation worldwide.’

For  information on Savli, Vadodara see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savli

The wrong question

Public anger following the December 2012 rape, assault and murder of a young New Delhi woman focused attention on the scale and horror of violence against women in India. The incident seemed to have awakened a new struggle for the right of girls and women to be free from the fear of sexual harassment and violence. The anger, while understandable and perhaps even desirable, must not however lead to mistaken policies that might do harm without doing anything for the cause of women’s safety.

The Government set up a 3 member committee chaired by retired Supreme Court Chief Justice JS Verma to consider ‘amendments to the criminal law so as to provide for quicker trial and enhanced punishment for criminals, accused of committing sexual assault of extreme nature against women’.

That is a pretty narrow remit, and even if a) the committe comes up with sensible and practicable proposals to change the law; b) the Goverment agrees and Parliament enacts the necessary legislation, and c) the new law is implemented, it is unlikely that women will feel safer knowing that should they be attacked there will be swift punishment for their attacker.

I think this venture is destined to fail whatever suggestions Justice Verma comes up with. 

The Committee’s seeks to suggest ‘changes to the criminal law’ and its target is 'crimes of extreme nature against women’.  

The trouble is not with the law as such but with how the police deal with and investigate criminal complaints, including allegations of rape and sexual assault. There’s no point changing the penalty for a crime if the victim can be dissuaded from making a complaint or withdrawing an allegation. Criminals are not deterred by the severity of the sentence that awaits them should they be convicted. If at all they are deterred by the justice system it is the likelihood of being caught and brought to trial (1).

It is hard to see how the police response to crimes against women can change without a general change in the attitude of the police towards citizens. There is still a widespread and justified distrust of the police. They are generally poorly educated, badly trained, inadequately resourced, hardly if at all accountable to the citizenry, in hock to politicians who in turn regard them as mere extensions of the party in government, and widely regarded (and with justification) as corrupt. And worse they seem to have a hangover from colonial days of being in some way not the guardians of citizens’ rights and liberties, but their masters (2).

The judiciary – with respect to Justice Verma and his Committee - is little better. A judiciary that  presides over a criminal justice system that has tolerated - and indeed allowed - delays of the kind that makes India unique,  measured as it is in decades rather than years, deserves no respect for its professionals standards and ethics.  The legal profession is equally complicit in what Bernard Shaw described as a ‘conspiracy against the laity’.  The system appears to exist not to dispense justice to aggrieved citizens but to exploit people’s ignorance while pretending to serve them.

Justice Verma and his committee would be better employed looking at the following questions.

A) How can the police service be reformed to make it responsive to the needs of citizens, independent of political interference, and accountable to the public?  

B) How can the justice system and the courts (at all levels and both criminal and civil)  be reformed to make it efficient, fair, responsive and timely?

C) Is it right for us to continue with an adversarial system of justice inherited from colonial times, with 2 sets of lawyers slugging it out in front of a judge, sitting without a jury? Is there a case for moving to an inquisitorial system with an independent and well resourced Magistrate Service that receives, records and registers complaints from the public and where an investigating magistrate directs the police investigation into (at least to start with, major) crimes? (3)   

If India aspires to make this an Indian Century then we can hardly carry on with the present decrepit system collapsing under its own inefficiencies and corrupt practices. A fast track court for the trial of the 5 accused in the Delhi rape and murder case might well assuage public anger but what about the other 24,206 rapes in 2011 alone (page 83, Crime in India 2011, NCRB)? Or the other 256,329 violent crimes (page 50) reported in the same year?  

Here’s my prediction. The Justice Verma Committee will achieve little of substance. Let's look back at this in 5 years time and if I am proved wrong I’ll happily donate INR 20,000  to charity.

Notes

1. There’s the additional factor of the balance between what the criminal has to lose by being caught and punished versus what he stands to gain from the crime should he escape detection. But that’s a subject for another essay.

2. ‘A check of the complaints register at any police station usually reveals hundreds of unregistered cases. Nobody is punished for such lapses. Law and order gets priority over crime and corruption thrives. Graft is so endemic to the force and the opportunities for retail corruption so many, that bribes are paid for recruitment. Three months ago, the Andhra Pradesh CID arrested five police sub inspectors for using impersonators to clear their recruitment test. In 2008, nearly 40 sub-inspectors morphed photographs of post-graduate students onto their hall tickets and paid each student Rs.4 lakh to write their test.’

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/terror-strikes-ill-equipped-corrupt-police-force-india/1/151582.html

3. ‘The main feature of the inquisitorial system in criminal justice in France and other countries functioning along the same lines is the function of the examining or investigating judge (juge d'instruction). The examining judge conducts investigations into serious crimes or complex enquiries. As members of the judiciary, s/he is independent and outside the province of the executive branch, and therefore separate from the Office of Public Prosecutions which is supervised by the Minister of Justice’.

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system

The silent bystander – why did no one help?

Among the many question being asked after the horrific and fatal rape and attack on a young woman and her survivor friend is this – why did no one help?

Many people have commented on the apparent lack of basic humanity in urban India. The badly injured and barely clothed victims were not dumped on some remote isolated spot. They were left on a flyover. Many people passed by that road and yet, despite pleas for help from the man who survived, no one stopped.  

What has become of us? is the question many have asked as in this blog post.

Rupa Subramanya, co-author of Indianomics – making sense of modern India, provides an interesting take on the question, one that most of us will intuitively recognise as, at least in part, true.

Essentially the argument goes something like this. To step in and help someone in distress – a Good Samaritan act – is an act of altruism. Benefits in kind accrue to the Good Samaritan; the gratitude of the person helped, the innate sense of well-being that comes with having done a good deed. But that has to be balanced against the costs of intervening. Time, expense may be and the uncertainty of when the Good Samaritan act can be regarded as finished, allowing the helper to move on with his own life.

In most cases the costs are minimal and most of us would likely help someone in trouble. In the specific case of the New Delhi incident there was the added complication of the criminal nature of the attack that led directly to the need for help. Whoever stepped in to help would have had to contend with the police. And the police in India are known not for their humanity, kindness and intelligence. On the contrary, they have a justified reputation for venality. (In the movie No one killed Jessica, the investigating poilce officer admits receiving a bribe of 1.5 lakhs just for not beating the suspect during interrogation.)   

So if you buy this argument, we don’t need to beat ourselves up over our apparent insensitivity to a fellow human being in distress. People who do not intervene to help a victim of crime may be acting under the compulsion that to do anything else would be irrational.

Despite that we need a huge change of attitude among ordinary people so that more of them act out their innate altruism. But more importantly we need an even bigger change in the mindset of petty officialdom and especially the police – a change that that would lower or hopefully even eliminate the costs associated with being a good Samaritan. 

Unintended consequences

I have a serious issue with how public anger at recent events in India is being channelled.

Take for instance the demands for a quick and speedy trial of the 5 men accused of the rape and murder of the 23 year old student whose tragic case has become the focal point for understandable anger and widespread protests at women’s lack of security and of freedom from violence and fear.  

Calls for a quick trial are understandable but the cause of natural justice is far more important. Unless we are prepared to live under a system of rough justice at the hands of a baying mob, we need to tarry a bit and do it right. If justice for ‘Amanat’ is what we wish to see then we have to ensure the system is robust enough to deliver it. A quick trial and a speedy execution may satisfy the immediate demand that ‘something must be done’, but it will not solve the wider issue of the decrepit state of the criminal justice system in India. Indeed it would be in the interest of the politicians in charge to appear to give in to the public demand for quick justice in the hope that the protests die down and they can get back to ‘business as usual’.

The lawyers association in New Delhi has said that none of their members will represent the 5 accused. Their spokesman told NDTV that this was their way of showing support for the public anger at what happened.

But this is unprofessional and unacceptable behaviour. Justice must not only be done but must also be seen to be done.  How do we know that the 5 men currently in custody are indeed the men who carried out the rape and assault? How can we be sure that the real culprits have not got away? The police have lots of forensic evidence we are told but the evidence chain has to be established clearly before an open court and must stand up to scrutiny and challenge by the defence team. We are told that the accused men have confessed. That maybe so, but convicting on the basis of uncorroborated confession is dangerous. How do we know that in response to public anger, the police picked up 5 men and coerced or beat them into a confession?  A proper trial may take time but it will be better than a trial that leaves doubt as to the safety of a conviction.

The public are angry at the inordinate delays in rape and other criminal cases, especially where politically powerful men are in the dock. They may well look upon a lawyer acting for the accused as contributing to these delays. But consider this: the extraordinary delays that so bedevil criminal cases in India’s courts have nothing to do with the defence team doing a proper job, and everything to do with corruption, inadequate training, lack of resources and poor case management by judges.  

In any case the potential for delay must not be an excuse to compromise the quality of justice. If speed is all important then why not dispense with a trial altogether and take the police at their word. They say they’ve got the men who did it, they have the evidence of guilt, and what’s more they have a confession. Hang them now and be done with it!

But that is precisely a system that corrupt and powerful people can exploit; they can commit whatever crime they like – and many powerful people have been accused of rape, let’s not forget -  and then fix the system so that some poor hapless guy takes the rap for it. The perfect crime is not when the criminal avoids detection but when someone else is convicted.

And that is precisely why we need a robust system that allows the defence team to examine and probe the evidence so that there is a much better chance of not convicting in error.

We talk of the accused ‘being on trial’ but in reality it is the prosecution case that is being tried. Does it stand up to scrutiny? Does the evidence consistently and beyond reasonable doubt persuade us that the person accused is indeed guilty?   

To do anything less would be to place too heavy a reliance on the integrity and intelligence of the police and the criminal justice system. 

If we could afford  to do that then we might not be where we are and Amanat might have remained an anonymous student safely and securely using New Delhi’s buses however late the hour.

Amanat's obituary

Amanat, 23, an ordinary Delhi girl who would ordinarily have remained unknown beyond her family and friends died on 29 Dec 2012 probably of septicaemia and multiple organ failure. She underwent major abdominal surgery in New Delhi, probably a total ileectomy and colectomy, followed by a spell of  intensive care before transfer to a tertiary unit for a last ditch attempt to save her life.

 In her last moments she was surrounded by all the high tech gadgetry of a world-class hospital in Singapore known for its track record in multi-organ transplant surgery. The hospital itself was surrounded by the usual media pack tracking and reporting, even sometimes making it up, every heart beat of the girl and every sob of her family. Back home in Delhi and elsewhere in India the news coverage of her plight, ever since she was found on a flyover beaten (we now know, to death) and raped, rose to a new crescendo.

In life she was content with the anonymity of an ordinary citizen. In death her coffin was met at the airport by the country’s prime minister and the leader of the ruling party. A surreal fame that she did not seek and could not possibly have desired but a status that the media pinned on her like a bravery medal on an unwilling conscript.  

Amanat was of course not the first victim of violence against women nor sadly will she be the last. In a country known for its poor record of equal rights for women, why her case rose to such prominence remains a question that many will ponder and few will adequately explain. But the fact is she did become a focal point for protests in New Delhi and across the country.

What would she have wanted to come out of all this? For her it was a personal tragedy of unimaginable horror, for her family the anguish has become deeper, for the country this was a crime that aroused a whole generation of young Indians demanding change. They would all have wanted a safer, fairer society where such crimes are rare, hopefully even unknown, and where, when they do occur, justice is swift but fair with regard for the due process of law. And yet the portents are not bright that meaningful change will emerge.  

Her alleged attackers have already been identified, tried and found guilty by the High Court of Television and Newspaper. Crowds of protesters were baying for a swift trial followed by capital punishment. Politicians too weighed in with their own demands for and promises of tougher laws and fast track courts. (They probably failed to spot the irony that many among them had more in common with Amanat’s attackers than the girl they appeared to be mourning). The country is a democracy and people usually get what they wish for if they ask loudly enough.

As a future doctor, Amanat would have recognised that prevention is better than cure, that prevention is hard work, takes longer, is less immediately gratifying but ultimately more satisfying since it delivers better results than the quick fix of swift and seemingly decisive action after the event. She of all people would have known this because she experienced firsthand the ultimate futility of high-tech medicine to fix the frailty of torn intestines and mangled viscera.

Applying these principles, she would have asked some searching and uncomfortable questions. Was she just tragically unlucky to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time to have fallen prey to a gang of psychopaths? Or was her’s a disturbingly extreme example of what happens when a whole society tolerates a callous disregard of the rights of women and girls? 

Why is the criminal justice system so inept that cases drag on for years, decades even? Are our judges trained, fair and impartial?   

Can the police be trusted? Are victims safe from the depredations of policemen drunk with the power they wield over ordinary citizens?   Do they have the education, training, and resources to do their job, free of political pressure? And are they accountable for their own actions and misdeeds?  

Are the politicians up to the job of reform? Can they – will they- accept that we are nothing if we cannot be a nation of laws?

Not until these questions are answered will Amanat rest in peace. Not until these questions are answered should any politician sleep easy at night. Not until these questions are answered should the protesters allow those in power to treat this as an isolated case that would be resolved once the accused are tried.

That would in all likelihood be Amanat’s prayer. All the fervent prayers of the protesters who gathered in Jantar Mantar for Amanat to pull through and survive went unanswered. But Amanat’s prayer need not go similarly unanswered if only because the answers for once lie in our hands.  

Amanat (not the young woman's real name), 23, died 29 Dec 2012. The events of the night of 16th december are here  with further commentary from Soutik Biswas

The Great Indian Blackout of 2012

The unprecedented breakdown in the Northern Grid between 30 and 31 July resulted in 600 million people across the north and east of India losing their electricity supply.

No lights, no fans, no air conditioning. Hospitals, trains, businesses, and schools shut down. Life as many knew it was dislocated.

  

Those who had them used diesel-powered generator sets. Most people simply sat it out; after all power cuts happen every day in most cities; we had regular load-shedding as far back as the mid 70’s; in any case vast numbers of poor people in thousands of villages are not connected to the grid anyway. That this particular power outage affected half the country’s population at the same time was merely a matter of detail. 

Or was it?

India’s image was tarnished worldwide. One of the BRIC economies, a nuclear power, a space exploring and satellite launching nation, India aspired to a seat on the Security Council and Great Power status. And we still can’t meet basic needs for electrical energy; forget about the level of per capita energy consumption of China, never mind Europe or America; a third of the population don’t have access to electricity even for a  light bulb or a socket to charge your mobile phone reliably.

The blackout itself was not the real surprise. What I found astonishing and disquieting was the response of Mr Shinde, the Union Minister for Power. On NDTV his replies to fair and balanced questioning by Barkha Dutt was breathtaking for its arrogance and disturbing for anyone hoping that this would be the beginning of the end of India’s power woes.

No, he did not see anything odd or surprising in his elevation to the Home Ministry. It was all planned weeks ago as part of a cabinet reshuffle because of Mr Pranab Mukherjee‘s election as President of India.

No, he said, it was not the fault of the Government. It was because all these states, you see, they were drawing more energy than their allocated quota. Why? Because, stupid, of the drought and the summer heat. That’s what caused the the grid to collapse, and then the blackout. Simple, don’t you see?,  it’s all the fault of the weather.

And by the way these things happen in America too, he continued. Remember the New York blackout? It took them 2 days to get power back on; we did it in under 6 hours! So there, we can do power supply better than the Americans, no need to beat ourselves up over a minor inconvenience of a few hours of loss of supply.

There wasn’t one word of acknowledgement that the Government was accountable for its part in the complex mix of underlying factors that are responsible for India’s chronic under-investment in power generation and poor management of distribution.  There wasn’t a whiff of an apology for the mess that is energy policy over which his Government had presided for the last so many years. There was not the least semblance of understanding of the changes that needed to be made if things are to get better.  Changes that would involve tough policy choices: from higher prices for those who can afford to pay to greater incentives for new producers to make the long term investments in power generation.

The Grid can be patched up and we can all limp along with a few more hours of load-shedding. But if India is to catch up with the rest of the world it needs to think seriously about fundamental changes to how we approach the most important parts of our infrastructure.  Keeping the lights on has to be a national priority.

And yet this may be the cataclysmic event we needed to shake things up. Things usually have to get pretty bad before everyone agrees that something dramatic has to be done to make things better.

Take for example, the experience of London. Today it is glittering in the glow of a successful Olympic games But in the summer of 1858 a great stink arose from the River in London – a stench so strong that London came to a standstill, Parliament shut down, and the Courts planned to move out of the City.

London, famed as the centre of global commerce, came to be seen as the world’s most filthy city.

But The Great Stench also led to reform. It provided the impetus to spend 10% of the country’s then GDP to build a massive modern underground sewerage system that started the great Victorian Sanitary revolution.

The question for India now is this: Will the Great Power Outage of July 2012 be the impetus for a national energy plan that ensures a secure energy supply for every Indian?