Govt Concealing Two Decades of Defence Corruption to Protect Rafale Deal; Revisiting Gandhi & Santhanam Committee as SC Examines Electoral Bonds
Pollution turns Delhi air sepia, Pak repatriating Afghan refugees, maybe lakhs of Indians illegally entering US, Mann ki Baat impact assessment fictional, YouTuber and snakes arrested from Noida rave
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal
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Snapshot of the day
November 3, 2023
Pratik Kanjilal
As Bhutan nears a resolution to its border issues with China, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck arrives in India today on an eight-day visit with his government officials. “The visit would provide an opportunity to both the sides to review the entire gamut of bilateral cooperation and to further advance the exemplary bilateral partnership,” says the Ministry of External Affairs.
Gautam Adani’s flagship Adani Enterprises Ltd’s quarterly profit has been halved as coal revenues dwindled, slowing its recovery from a series of adversities, starting with the short-seller Hindenburg Research’s report.
NewsClick founder-editor Prabir Purkayastha and HR head Amit Chakraborty, who were arrested in October, have been sent to judicial custody for a month. “Among allegations detailed by the Special Cell in its FIR against Purkayastha were attempts to show Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh as ‘not parts of India’; discrediting the Indian government’s fight against Covid; funding the farmers’ agitation; and ‘putting up a spirited defence of legal cases’ against Chinese telecom companies such as Xiaomi and Vivo. Apart from the first charge, which is unproven, none of these is even regarded as a crime.
The documents that the Enforcement Directorate got from Rajiv Saxena, who turned approver in the AgustaWestland case about Sushen Gupta, have explosive material about defence deals going back to the 1990s. Why hasn’t the Modi government pursued them? The Caravan reports that it is “covering up two decades of defence corruption to save the Rafale deal”.
In October, India’s manufacturing sector showed the slowest growth in eight months, primarily due to reduced demand for consumer goods. New orders bottomed out and cost pressures rose. “The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) fell to 55.5 in October from 57.5 in September, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Though the October PMI manufacturing data was above its long-run average of 53.9, it was the slowest rate of expansion recorded since February,” reports LiveMint.
In Bangladesh, two were killed and more than a hundred injured in clashes between anti-government demonstrators and police on the first day of a three-day protest to push for the resignation of PM Sheikh Hasina. The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) called for the blockade of roads for three days in response to clashes between party supporters and police in which one policeman was killed. Three senior Opposition figures including BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir have been arrested in sabotage cases. The violence may have cost the BNP some credibility, says Pranab Kumar Pandey in the Dhaka Tribune.
Right behind Raktabija, Hydra, AAP enters the lists. “You will arrest Kejriwal, but how will you arrest thousands, lakhs and crores of Kejriwals spread across the entire country,” asked Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of the crowds at Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh, where he had gone to campaign instead of answering a summons of the Enforcement Directorate.
TMC MP Mahua Moitra has written to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla saying that she was subjected to the “proverbial vastraharan” by the chairperson of the Ethics Committee:
The Chairman asked me, “You call “so and so” a dear friend. How dear is he? Mentioning his wife’s name, he said and does his wife know? He says, you can answer yes or no. Then, he says, who do you talk to late at night and how many times? Can you give us a log of your late night calls in the next 24 hours? And if you want you can say no. So I turned around and asked him. I said do you mean to tell me if you ask me, are you a prostitute? And I said no, that there’s nothing wrong with that. All the opposition members said that “we don’t want to be part of this”. All the BJP members were quiet, there were two female MPs too, but they didn’t say anything. Then he asked me for the details of where all I traveled to in the last five years. He even asked “which hotels I stayed in and with whom?” At that point all the five Opposition MP’s walked out.
The committee said that her outrage was a way of evading questions. She countered that the questions which mattered were not asked.
Following a meeting with four state ministers and two retired judges, Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange-Patil ended his fast on Thursday, postponing his deadline for a blanket Maratha reservation to December 24. Beyond that date, Jarange-Patil threatens a blockade of Mumbai: “Then the people of Mumbai won’t even get vegetables.”
Lakshadweep’s sole MP Mohammed Faizal has been reinstated to the Lok Sabha for the second time this year. His two suspensions stemmed from being convicted in an attempt-to-murder case in January.
In Pakistan, general elections will be held on February 11, the country’s poll body informed the Supreme Court, putting an end to months of uncertainty. Its counsel Sajeel Swati said the process of demarcating constituencies would be completed by January 29, paving the way to polls.
From November 1, Pakistan has been rounding up undocumented foreigners for repatriation, including about 2 million Afghans who had fled the Taliban. Of them, about 2 lakh have already returned home. The roundup is now proceeding with door to door searches helped by geofencing. Many of the people being deported have been in Pakistan for years and have no family, friends or support in Afghanistan, and some may be punished by the Taliban regime. Pakistan is blaming the Western powers for not helping to deal with Afghan refugees.
With anthropogenic climate change blamed for severe heatwaves, storms and floods in recent months, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlights the urgent need to fund adaptation measures. The report notes that developing countries are underfinanced and underprepared to adapt, said UNEP’s ‘Adaptation Gap Report’. The adaptation costs of climate vulnerable developing countries are 10-18 times more than they currently receive – 50% greater than was assumed before the study research began.
Today, the Information & Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry has authorised the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), besides its own officials, to seek the blocking or taking down of websites, apps or web links carrying pirated film content, in an effort to curb piracy worth Rs 20,000 crore every year.
WhatsApp banned 71 lakh accounts in India in September, in accordance with the new IT Rules. Of these, it acted against 25.7 lakh without user complaints.
In a front page article headlined ‘Will not Forget Manipur’, Catholicasabha, the mouthpiece of the Thrissur Archdiocese of the Syro-Malabar Church, influential in central Kerala, has attacked PM Modi for his silence on the ethnic strife.
Sri Lanka collapsed to the lowest World Cup total by a Test nation and the third lowest score of all time as they were skittled for 55 by India and crushed by 302 runs in Mumbai. The victory, India’s seventh consecutive win in the group stages of the World Cup, means that the hosts are now guaranteed to qualify for the semifinals. The power of India’s seamers, led by Mohammed Shami who took 5-18, backs up the claim that the country – always renowned for spin bowling – has never possessed such a formidable pace attack in an ODI World Cup.
In a survey conducted at Zydus Hospital in Ahmedabad on 243 heart patients, over one in three reported getting insufficient sleep.
The shoeshine workers in Mumbai’s suburban rail stations fear that a new licensing policy will oust them. The workers, most of whom are from a Dalit community in Bihar, and were permitted to work in stations by Jagjivan Ram. Scroll reports on why they have taken the matter to the Bombay High Court.
A YouTuber and reality show winner has been arrested by the Noida Police for organising rave parties featuring snake venom. Snakes found at the scene are also in custody.
IIM denies knowledge of Mann ki Baat impact assessment study
Quoting a study conducted by IIM-Bangalore and State Bank of India’s Economic Research Department, Prime Minister Modi tweeted that his monthly ‘Mann ki Baat’ broadcast has had a wide-reaching impact across the country, with the programme successfully popularising a host of policy initiatives directed at issues like the welfare of girls, yoga and the use of khadi. However, IIM-Bangalore had earlier replied to an RTI query stating that they have no acknowledgement of any study being conducted by the institute. Who did the study, then? WhatsApp University?
Air pollution has Delhi in chokehold
Indian Express says that air pollution has turned Delhi “sepia”. For the first time this season, the capital’s air quality plummeted to ‘severe’ levels yesterday. Relatively still air and the smoke from stubble burning are contributing factors. The city’s primary schools have been shut for two days.
“The temperature is not that low, but major factors now are transport level wind direction and speed that is bringing pollutants into Delhi — stubble-related emissions travel at half a km to 1 km above the surface,” Gufran Beig, founder project director SAFAR, and chair professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, told the paper.
Deccan Herald reports that English cricketers in the World Cup are using inhalers which are usually prescribed for asthma.
CERT-In probing Apple’s alert about state-sponsored attacks
CERT-In is probing why Apple sent threat notifications about state-sponsored attacks to Opposition leaders and media editors while claiming that their devices have cast-iron security ― that is essentially what Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar asked in a tweet earlier this week. The government has also sent a notice to Apple, whose cooperation it sought in the probe. The phone-maker has clarified that some alerts may be false alarms, and conversely, that some real threats may be overlooked.
Apple has sent the notification to users in about 150 countries in the past two years. It seems to have triggered government criticism only in India. The timing is inconvenient because India hopes to take Apple’s manufacturing capacity away from China. iPhone contract manufacturers in India should begin development of the iPhone 17 in the second half of 2024. This would be the first time the New Product Introduction (NPI) will start outside of China, says The Economic Times.
Elephant ‘corridor’ losing specific meaning
The Union government recently published a report titled Elephant Corridors of India, 2023, which spoke of 62 new ‘corridors’ in the country since 2010, bringing the total to 150 — a 40% increase. However, experts have raised concerns. Speaking with Down to Earth, Raman Sukumar says that the report is not inconsistent in the corridor definitions but this could lead to increased litigation and human-elephant conflicts. “The original meaning of the corridors has been lost and there is a tendency to call every place where elephants move as corridors,” he said, adding that the report has classified landscapes and habitats as corridors.
The Long Cable
Revisiting Gandhi and Santhanam Committee’s vision as SC examines electoral bonds
SN Sahu
Prime Minister Modi, who proudly says during his visits abroad, “Main Gandhi ke desh se hoon (I’m from Gandhi’s country),” should revisit the Mahatma’s apprehensions, which he expressed on September 17, 1931, that political parties would run the risk of using a lot of money only on managing elections. He described as atrocious a candidate spending Rs 60,000-1,00,000 in a poor country like India. Gandhi’s sharp observations on election expenditure were made in his speech delivered in the Federal Structure Committee of the second Round Table Conference held in London. Those apprehensions assume momentous significance when the BJP has got slightly more than Rs 52,000 crore from the Electoral Bond Scheme introduced by the Modi regime in 2017, while Opposition parties like Congress got only Rs 952 crore. Ninety-two years after he made those observations, India is witnessing the staggering amount of money collected by the BJP during the Modi regime and the huge quantum it spends for, in the words of Gandhi, “managing elections”.
The Prime Minister also extols Lal Bahadur Shastri and has never uttered a word against him in the the manner in which he criticises Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. He should also seriously revisit the report of the Santhanam Committee established by Shastri in 1962, during his tenure as Home Minister, to look into the magnitude of corruption in India and recommend measures to prevent it. It was the first committee in independent India set up to examine the gathering crisis of corruption and suggest remedial measures. The prescient recommendation of the Committee, that “…all political parties should keep a proper account of their receipts and expenditure and publish annually an audited statement of such accounts giving details of all individual receipts”, is of monumental significance in the context of the commencement of the adjudication of the Electoral Bond scheme by the Supreme Court.
The Attorney General of India has taken the bizarre stand that citizens do not have the fundamental right to know the source and volume of funds received by political parties. The Santhanam Committee made the far-reaching recommendation that there should be a law mandating political parties to disclose the details of funds received. It observed, “We do not see why any political party should object to this provision, and as it may not be easy to ensure compliance through voluntary agreement, simple legislation obliging the keeping of such accounts and its publication may be necessary.”
While the Santhanam Committee upheld in the early 1960s that there should be legislation requiring political parties to put an account of money received in the public domain, the Modi regime defends an opaque electoral bonds system through the instrumentality of law, and denies the right of people to know about those funds, which political parties use for participating in elections in order to get access to power.
It is worthwhile to dive a little deeper into the Santhanam Committee report and look at its farsighted observations on the root cause of corruption. It pointed out that “the public belief in the prevalence of corruption at high political levels has been strengthened by the manner in which funds are collected by political parties, especially at the time of elections.” Acknowledging frankly that “political parties cannot be run and elections cannot be fought without large funds”, it unequivocally asserted that “these funds should come openly from the supporters or sympathisers of the parties concerned.”
The Santhanam Committee’s stress on the point that accounts of political parties giving details of all individual receipts of funds should be published for the information of the people of India, and that such funds should be transferred openly, need to be flagged by the lawyers in the Supreme Court arguing in favour of transparent process through which political parties should get funds.
It is instructive to note that the Santhanam Committee, in fact, took the stand that corporates should be barred from funding political parties: “We consider that in Indian conditions, companies should not be allowed to participate in politics through their donations.” It observed that “after the matter was debated at length during the discussion on the Companies (Amendment) Act of 1960, it was decided to permit such donations subject to restrictions of amount and condition of publication.” However, it strongly opined, “We do not think that this is sufficient and feel that nothing but a total ban on all donations by incorporated bodies to political l parties and purposes will clear the atmosphere.”
It is educative to note that the Santhanam Committee suggested public funding of political parties, rather than corporate funding. It felt that if people would fund political parties, corruption related to election expenditure would be eradicated. It stated, “If even one family in three pays one rupee a year to a political party, the total annual contribution will be more than what is needed for all legitimate purposes of all political parties in India.” A novel idea, indeed. It then referred to the reluctance and inability of the parties to make small collections on a wide basis and described their desire to resort to shortcuts through large donations as the major source of corruption, and even the suspicion of corruption.
These are very profound observations, in the context of the massive funds the BJP got through electoral bonds and the possibility of a corresponding increase in corruption in India on account of that opaque funding. The legal and constitutional validity of electoral bonds should be examined keeping in mind the thoughtful observations of the Santhanam Committee.
(SN Sahu served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India KR Narayanan)
Reportedly
The Finance Minister has said that GST collections for October 2023 reached Rs 1.72 lakh crore, a 13% year-on-year increase and the second-highest collection ever. However, she has chosen not to reveal the revenue growth figures pertaining to goods imports. Similarly, the customary information regarding revenue growth patterns among states and Union territories in the monthly GST revenue statement has been withheld. This raises questions about what information or data the Finance Ministry may be withholding from the public.
Deep dive
Requiem for a lost Israel and Palestine: Shail Mayaram writes about subjectivities that comprise a different order of experience which is in contrast with the geopolitical, which is both calculative and inherently violent. “Israel’s war against Palestinians has been severing the bonds between Israeli Arabs and Jews and is producing genocidal politics.”
Prime number: 96,917
That’s the number of Indians detained by US Customs and Border Protection while trying to illegally enter the US between October 2022 and September 2023. This is a fivefold increase over figures for the period twelve months earlier. However, this may be a tenth of the number who successfully entered the US. Almost no one leaves home without a strong compulsion, so these figures may be a comment on conditions in India.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
After almost 10 years of BJP rule with Narendra Modi and Amit Shah at the helm, the RSS has now discovered that wokeism is posing a serious threat to family and societal life in India, says Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd.
“Some of the most egregious examples of disinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict have come from Indian accounts, particularly those associated with the BJP,” writes Carol Schaeffer.
Suhasini Haidar says that while journalists were earlier expected to interview terrorists, 9/11 and the murder of Daniel Pearl revealed that they were now seen as soft targets and anyway, governments were no longer interested in the views of terrorists.
The BJP is riding the reservation tiger in Maharashtra. Getting off will be a whole new adventure, says Girish Kuber.
Qatar’s treatment of the eight Navy vets jailed there warranted intervention from New Delhi’s top echelons early on. Now, amid the Israel-Hamas war, given that Qatar is a major foe of Israel and the sailors are (reportedly) accused of spying for Israel, things don’t look so good for them, Rohit Khanna warns.
Does a foetus enjoy autonomous moral status? Does it have legal standing? Is it capable of exercising constitutional rights? Suhrith Parthasarathy on how the Supreme Court has enabled the abridgment of fundamental rights of women to determine reproductive choices and, in a bizarre twist, confers rights on non-existent citizens (foetuses).
Nikhil Kumar Gupta analyses the far-reaching implications of political memes.
Listen up
In an interview with Scroll, one of a series on the writers on the long list of the JCB Prize, Vikramjit Ram explains how he wrote Mansur ― by looking deeply into miniatures.
Watch out
Making a clear distinction between journalism and propaganda, Hartosh Singh Bal, executive editor of The Caravan, says that journalism and democracy go hand in hand and the crackdown on the last remaining bastions of independent media does not augur well for India’s democratic future.
Over and out
The New Yorker has carried a version of Salman Rushdie’s acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, in which he asks himself, “What does the world of fable have to tell us about peace?” It’s complicated, and not altogether reassuring.
Justice Radhabinod Pal’s dissenting judgment at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal is well known. Less well know is the racist treatment he was subjected to at first by the British. Gary J. Bass writes in his new book, Judgement at Tokyo:
“While Pal’s judicial robes showed him as an equal member of the bench, some observers marked him by the color of his skin. Although he was supposed to reside at the Imperial Hotel with all his colleagues, the Indian judge was conspicuously omitted from an edict from General Headquarters about British Commonwealth personnel which specified that the British, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand judges could remain at the Imperial Hotel for the duration of the Tokyo trial. Only after those four white judges bluntly protested “this discrimination” was Pal was allowed to settle in.”
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.
Someday when the history of our time is written the Indian judiciary will inevitably be seen as complicit in many if not most of the crimes of the Indian state post 2014. In some cases our courts have been more than complicit, it’s they who actually facilitated some of those crimes, even if they didn’t commit them themselves. And the entire system is broken, and it’s dishonest to blame all the failures on the lower courts, for the higher judiciary has actually done more harm than the rest. I am thinking of the release of the Bilkis Bano rapist-murderers, the SC’s bizarre about-turn in the Manis Sisodia bail matter, the SC’s mulish obstinacy in refusing to even hear Umar Khalid’s bail plea, the outrageous judgements delivered in the demonetisation, same-sex marriage and the Babri Masjid cases and many others. And the number of cases cases where the courts simply refuse to engage with important issues is legion. And with such a dreadful report card our top court never yet tires of delivering pious sermons every other day.