Last updated : MONDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2008

A Light Sentence
There is no denying that the wheels of justice grind very slowly in India. Otherwise we would not have had crores of pending cases in our courts – some of them for decades – and no prospect of any remedy in sight. The Sanjeev Nanda case of hit-and-run drunken driving that caused the death of six persons on January 10, 1999 is one such criminal case that dragged on for well over nine years and that could have been cited as just another example had it not been for the fact that judgement was finally delivered last week. But even that would have consigned the case to the very long list of similar criminal cases where justice has been delayed by many years. This particular case deserves special notice because of what the judiciary was able to achieve in spite of what wealthy and highly placed persons almost succeeded in doing to thwart the entire course of justice.
To recapitulate very briefly, Sanjeev Nanda, grandson of Admiral (retired) SMNanda and son of Suresh Nanda, was driving a BMW car in a drunken state on the night of January 10, 1999 in Lodhi Colony of New Delhi when he knocked down and crushed six persons to death. Three of them were policemen on duty. When the car sped away after the incident, some of the victims entangled under the wheels and dragged away cried out, but the car did not stop. Sanjeev’s friends Siddharth Gupta and Manik Kapoor were also in the car. The car, leaking engine oil, was immediately taken to the house of businessman Rajeev Gupta, Siddharth’s father, where it was washed to remove the bloodstains and bits of human flesh sticking to it. The police arrived while the cleaning up job was in progress. The police video tape had it all well recorded. And yet the charge-sheet was filed only on April 7, 1999 – almost three months later – and the court framed charges only on August 3, 1999. By then, most of the key witnesses had been bought over, and they turned hostile. The only witness who could not be bought over was Sunil Kulkarni. So the prosecution, that had started colluding with the defence by then, dropped him on the plea that he had been won over. On May 30, 2007 – eight years after the tragic incident – a sting operation showed that Nanda’s counsel, RK Anand and prosecutor IU Khan had been colluding to subvert justice by bribing Kulkarni. Khan was asked to withdraw as prosecutor the next day. Delhi High Court also issued contempt notices to both senior lawyers, and three months later, found both of them guilty. Only the other day, both senior advocates were debarred from attending court for three months. The court has now found Sanjeev Nanda guilty and sentenced him to imprisonment — but for only five years for killing six persons! The court ruled that Nanda should have known the consequences of hit-and-run driving, since he had got his driving licence in the US.
Despite the long delay in delivering justice, there are good reasons for kudos to the Judiciary. First, it has managed to contend with the high-power initiatives of the rich and the influential to derail the course of natural justice. In fact, the sting operation had revealed that two very senior advocates of Delhi (one of them a former legislator as well) had colluded to bribe Kulkarni, the only witness who had not turned hostile. In fact, it was because Kulkarni could not be bought over that the prosecution had dropped him as witness in September 1999. Secondly, the judge did not hesitate to bring contempt charges against senior advocates since they had been colluding to derail the due process of law. Thirdly, the judge did not fail to place on record his views about the way trials could be “hijacked by the rich and influential” accused. “The entire criminal justice system should sit up to find effective ways and means to tackle a situation where wealthy and highly-placed persons are able to thwart the entire course of justice and later claim benefit of the doubt as a matter of right,” he said. Given the prevailing situation where trials can be hijacked in this manner, it was a minor miracle that justice could be done against someone who had learned his management skills at Wharton and also had very rich and influential parents and grandparents to try and hijack the process of justice.

Gross Waste of Funds
We have a government that does two contradictory things in the same breath. On the one hand it talks about the agenda of development and progress that it is following with the outlay of crores of rupees as an indicator, and on the other it indicates its lack of funds by failing to pay poor teachers their monthly salaries and by holding up dues to small contractors for months and years on end. And yet, it is this very government that now proposes to spend crores of rupees from the exchequer on buying 25 bullet-proof cars. It is also guilty of waste of funds on a large number of plastic pedestals for traffic policemen acquired at a cost of over Rs 5 lakh each that are all lying unused. Likewise, there have been kiosks installed by the city traffic police with the sign “May I help you?” all over Guwahati. They too are always empty. Foreign tourists have occasionally walked up to these kiosks, pretending that there is someone there, and carried on the charade of asking for instructions and then had a good laugh. The Home Department, of course, never sees such amusing incidents. All this, including the bullet-proof cars, represents reckless waste of public money. After all, bullet-proof cars are needed only in the kind of adverse situations created by the government itself. Who are the beneficiaries apart from the suppliers? Certainly not the public.

Truth as it is
ON THE SPOT
Tavleen Singh
Nothing is more important in today’s world than a public debate on the growing threat of Islamism and its evil cult of death and destruction. It is a huge problem not just for us on the Indian subcontinent but in the whole world; so I am happy to talk about it any chance I get. And, because most Indian columnists are too politically correct to discuss the problem, I get labeled anti-Muslim.
I bring up the subject this week because of a letter I received in response to my column last week on the death of the poet Ahmed Faraz. The gist of that piece was that it was tragic that 60 years after Independence we remained so colonized that Indians writing in English got all the credit and recognition while our best writers wrote in Indian languages but remained un-translated and ignored. Personally, I thought it was a harmless bit of musing but it provoked a correspondent by name of Ghulam Muhammed to accuse me of not acknowledging Urdu as an Indian language. It was a bizarre conclusion for him to draw since nearly every writer I mentioned wrote in Urdu. But, Ghulam Muhammed’s main purpose in writing his letter was to charge me with causing damage to ‘‘the Hindu-Muslim unity of the nation by her (my) warped line of communal writings’’.
Happy to engage him I wrote back saying it
was he who was guilty of communalism
because he sought to link Urdu with Islam. It is because Pakistan did this when it came into being that Urdu was replaced by Hindi in India and not given the importance it should have been except in Bollywood where it remains till today the language of Hindi cinema. It has been given renewed life by Hindi television channels who long ago abandoned AIR shudh Hindi for Hindustani. But this is not a piece about Urdu, it is about my ‘communal writings’. Ghulam Muhammed responded to my letter by writing a long, insulting letter which he circulated by e-mail to everyone he knows. Its too long to reproduce here but contact ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com and I am sure he will send you a copy. He charges me with ‘demonizing’ Muslims while not speaking out against ‘violence of the Hindutva kind’, of using my ‘poison pen’ to ‘succour and sustain the communalism of the majority’ and of an ‘obsessive hatred of Muslims’. It is journalists like me he says who will be responsible for the ‘disintegration’ of India.
These charges are made all over the world against anyone who dares raise their voice against Islamism. Writers far more famous than I have been killed for daring to speak out, and some like Ayaan Hirsi Ali have been forced into permanent hiding because of their courageous stand against Islamism. Meanwhile, the popularity of Islamism among supposedly moderate Muslims all over the world continues to grow as can be seen from the change in Islam that has come about in formerly liberal Islamic countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.
In India we see the change everywhere. Liberal,
moderate schools of Islamic thinking are losing
the battle to those of the Darul Uloom variety who remain mired in 7th century Arabia. Anyone who doubts this needs to make a quick trip to the Darul Uloom’s headquarters in Deoband and see what it looks like and the kind of Islam it preaches to its students. It was the ideology preached in Deoband that gave birth to the Taliban and it is this same ideology that in our land of happy heathens has given birth to nasty organizations like SIMI (Students Islamic Movement of India). There are those who defend SIMI on the grounds that the allegations of terrorism against their members remain unproven. Perhaps. But, what about their ideology that is based on the principle that the values of Islam have to be imposed on India and that such values that India cherishes like secularism and democracy are nonsense. Surely it is this kind of ideology that produces the evil cowards who wander about our country killing innocent people in the name of Allah.
If saying this is ‘demonizing Muslims’, I plead guilty. If stating that religion must stay out of the public square is an attack on Islam, then I plead guilty again. Whenever Hindutva has raised its evil head, I have attacked it in exactly the same words I use to attack the jihadis. And in the days of Bhindranwale I was among a small handful of journalists who openly opposed the fanatical Sikhism he was preaching. I was put on a hit list for my pains and continue to be on a Hindutva hit list — so I must be doing something right.
Anybody who believes that the Islamism is not the main threat to the existence of India as we know it, need only examine what has happened in Kashmir. Fifteen years ago the movement for azadi was secular and the militancy did not have the hint of jihad in it. Today, the ‘secular’ leaders of Kashmir have been forced to follow jihadis who have no hesitation in shouting Islamist slogans in public and making their hatred for Hindu India known. They speak openly against ‘Indian culture’ and have turned Kashmir into a place where going to the movies is considered a sin. Islamism works ideologically and through terrorism. It has to be fought on both fronts.

BOB’S BANTER
By Robert Clements
Mauled by a Mall!
Malls! They’re rising from every corner, huge and looming, sneering at nearby slums, laughing gaily at tall high rises, and seductively filling themselves with millions, nay zillions of shoppers, who trapeze from floor to floor, entering shop, leaving shop, burdened with brimming bundles, crammed cartons, big boxes.
We are becoming infested with malls!
I found myself in one yesterday.
‘‘Slippery flooring!’’ I told the wife as I gently allowed my feet to slide along glassy floor.
‘‘What are you doing?’’ asked the wife.
‘‘Slithering along!’’ I said, ‘‘So I won’t tire my feet!’’
‘‘Don’t!’’
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘Security are watching you!’’
‘‘Where?’’ I asked and bumped into a plastic mannequin, ‘‘You the security? You look too pretty to be a guard!’’
‘‘That’s a mannequin and stop looking foolish talking to it!’’
‘‘So where’s the security?’’
‘‘TV cameras!’’ said the wife pointing to one, which seemed pointed at me.
‘‘Invasion of privacy!’’ I shouted waving at the camera. The wife disappeared into a store quickly and I walked to the mannequin, ‘‘How long you been here?’’ I asked.
‘‘Mannequins don’t talk!’’ said a child nearby.
‘‘Of course they do!’’ I said, ‘‘don’t you?’’ I asked the mannequin.
‘‘Of course I do!’’ said the mannequin, startling the child who didn’t know it was my voice.
‘‘Ma! Ma!’’ screamed the child staring at the mannequin and then at me.
‘‘What happened, beta?’’ asked a young mother, appearing from nowhere, grabbing her little one and looking suspiciously at me.
‘‘It’s okay ma’am, we’ve been watching him,’’ said the security who seemed to have popped out of the camera. ‘‘Come with us, sir!’’
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘We have been watching you! We saw you stealthily creeping up to that woman inside that shop, then the mannequin, now the child!’’
‘‘I was not creeping, I was slithering,’’ I explained, ‘‘it helps instead of walking, especially when you’ve got miles to go!’’
‘‘What is it, officer?’’ asked the wife appearing from inside the shop.
‘‘He was following you, madam! We are arresting him!’’
I slithered out of the mall with the wife and passed another mannequin. ‘‘Don’t!’’ said the wife sharply, ‘‘It was bad enough telling them you were my husband, and then hearing you were making a pass at a mannequin!’’
‘‘Bye!’’ I told the mannequin as the wife looked at the cameras and pleaded with security that we were leaving.
‘‘Didn’t you shop?’’ asked the kids at home, seeing no boxes or bundles.
‘‘Dad’s not a mall person,’’ said the wife wearily.
‘‘I was mauled by a mall..!’’ I said winking at the small shopkeeper next door.

Russia-NATO: Return of the Great Game
Ilya Kramnik
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, many intellectuals in Russia and the West announced ‘‘the end of history’’. It seemed that the United States’ complete domination of the world was not disputed by anyone.
The subsequent decade, during which Russia lost its foreign policy positions, and its former satellites and even provinces became US and NATO allies, seemed to have buttressed this idea.
The first signal that the situation was changing came on September 11, 2001, when it appeared that US domination did not guarantee Washington absolute security.
For the first time since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the US had to bargain in order to guarantee the loyalty of its allies. With the start of the Iraqi conflict, US domination was called into question even more openly, despite obvious successes in the post-Soviet space such as the admission of the Baltic nations into NATO and permission to use bases in Central Asia.
In the second half of the first decade of the new century, a new trend has become visible. Russia’s consolidation, buoyed by a favourable economic situation and political stabilization, raised the issue of spheres of influence, at least in the post-Soviet space and Eastern Europe.
The issues of missile defence and the Kosovo problem proved the Rubicon of East-West relations. The West demonstratively ignored Russia’s position, and this was bound to evoke response. Russia had to face military confrontation and settle disputes in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to its own benefit, without looking to the West.
Almost as soon as Mikheil Saakashvili came to power, many observers began to see Georgia as the most probable arena of an armed conflict with Russia. All the prerequisites for this were in place — Georgia’s conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the presence of many Russian citizens in these republics, and Tbilisi’s open desire to subjugate the rebellious territories.
There is no need to describe the history of the five-day war again. Its main geopolitical result is not the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia but the return of political confrontation between Russia and the West.
What could it lead to?
Nobody wants a military solution to the conflict, which could be fatal for the whole world. Both sides will have to prove their cases by political and economic means.
Russia’s integration into the world economy over the last 15 years has led to a situation where the West cannot inflict serious damage on it without hurting itself as much, if not more.
As a result, Russia’s main lobbyists to Western governments are the Western companies, for which a quarrel with the eastern neighbour could be financially ruinous.
Apart from oil and gas, there are agreements on the supply of Russian titanium spare parts for the world’s biggest aircraft-builders, the Russian market for cars and other hardware, and many other spheres where cessation of economic cooperation will deal substantial damage to Western interests. And there are political, as well as financial, interests that would be damaged by confrontation with Russia.
Space cooperation between Russia and the United States, the air corridor granted by Russia for NATO flights to Afghanistan and some other programmes are not as obvious as oil and gas supplies, but are too important to be jeopardized over Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
What will global confrontation be like now? It is clear that the point of no return has already been reached. Russia is not prepared to renounce its positions as it did in the 1990s. The West may be indignant, but it will have to face reality — it has become too expensive to risk.
Where will the next round of confrontation after Georgia take place?
It is hard to predict with certainty, but it is likely to be in Ukraine, where not only the destiny of the Black Sea Fleet but also Russia’s influence in Eastern Europe is at stake. This round will be bloodless. At any rate, one would like to hope that Ukraine is not going to oust the Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea by force.
However, the propaganda confrontation will be much more intense than in Georgia. A world event is not the one in which 10,000 take part, but the one which is being filmed by 10 TV cameras.