Return of Sonia Gandhi
THE suspense is over. Mrs Sonia Gandhi is back as Congress president after one week of high drama, which must have been reassuring to party loyalists but somewhat puzzling to onlookers. But then politics in India is never a simple affair.

Upstarts as killers
A MINISTER'S son and his bodyguard were arrested in Lucknow for allegedly killing a boy working as a domestic servant at the minister's residence.

Kosovo: USA in the dock
THE US policy on the Balkan crisis is in tatters. It has been questioned by many thinkers, including two well-known foreign policy experts — former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

POLITY'S FRIGHTENING FLAWS
by Inder Malhotra
IT does not matter which way the current crisis in the Congress is getting resolved. If Mrs Sonia Gandhi has withdrawn her resignation from the party presidentship, it is because hordes of her heart-broken followers were begging her to do so.

Mixed outlook for the economy
by S. Sethuraman
ELECTIONS in the middle of the new fiscal year (1999-2000) have cast a shadow on the economy, which has already experienced low industrial growth and the loss of export dynamism for three years in a row.

Four years of Beant Singh assassination case
Awaiting Judgement
CHANDIGARH: If you chance to pass by the modern high-security Burail Jail in the ‘City Beautiful’ and hear in chorus such slogans as “Khalistan zindabad”, “Bhai Dilawar Singh Babbar zindabad”, “Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale zindabad” and “Babbar Khalsa International zindabad”, you can safely presume that the trial of the Beant Singh assassination case is in progress.

Marriage: a duet or a dual?
by Darshan Singh Maini
NO other human institution, I trust, has triggered so much poetry and parody, so much trust and travesty as that hoary thing called marriage. Indeed, this double aspect has at the philosophical and linguistic level spawned a whole school of ambiguities, ironies and aphorisms bordering on the sublime and the ridiculous.

75 Years Ago

The Prince and South Africa
THE analogy between the circumstances in which so many patriotic Indians wanted the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1921 to be postponed to a later date and those in which South Africa has just decided that the Prince’s visit to that country should be postponed cannot fail to strike any dispassionate and discerning student of contemporary history.

Return of Sonia Gandhi

THE suspense is over. Mrs Sonia Gandhi is back as Congress president after one week of high drama, which must have been reassuring to party loyalists but somewhat puzzling to onlookers. But then politics in India is never a simple affair. It is always guided by a spirit of mela and New Delhi has seen plenty of it in the past few days. In a way, it is part of Congress culture. Its operative mantra has of late been not high principles but leader-centric loyalty. Except the voices of dissent of Mr Sharad Pawar, Mr P.A. Sangma and Mr Tariq Anwar, most Congressmen throughout the country have publicly demonstrated where their loyalty lies. With this show of unity and solidarity, Mrs Sonia Gandhi returns to the party to take it over in a more reassuring frame of mind than probably was the case when the rebel trio raised some inconvenient questions, including the desirability of having a person of foreign origin as Prime Minister. Mrs Gandhi has given a spirited reply to this matter in her speech at the AICC special session. Her speech was both emotional and forthright. This should clear the anxiety of Congressmen who felt orphaned with her exit. For them, Mrs Gandhi occupies a special position not only because she has been part of the Nehru-Gandhi family but also as a charismatic person capable of getting them votes in the next election in September-October. The followers of the "charismatic leader" are invariably dependent on her for help in the process of actualising the electoral support in their respective constituencies.

The critical test for Mrs Sonia Gandhi actually begins now. She now has a party which is expected to go fully along with her. In the process, a personality cult is born. This means that the 114-year-old party has to swim or sink with its undisputed leader. The repercussions of these developments will be far-reaching, not only in terms of the future of the Congress but also in terms of the country's electoral politics. The seal of legitimacy affixed on Mrs Sonia Gandhi's leadership by the CWC and the AICC does not mean that the issue of foreign origin will just evaporate. If anything, this matter is bound to be exploited by the BJP and some of its allies as well as by Mr Sharad Pawar's group. In fact, it will be one of the live electoral issues. The one disquieting aspect of this matter is a further division of the already fragmented polity. How adroitly and tactfully the Congress handles this matter remains to be seen. A lot will depend on Mrs Gandhi's personal response. She has said that she will leave the question to the public for a verdict.

Looking beyond, much will now depend on how Mrs Sonia Gandhi in her new avatar reorients the party and takes up the real issues facing it and the country at large. She has to insulate herself against sycophancy and coterie politics which have been the bane of the Congress for quite sometime. At one time the Congress drew its strength from its grassroots support. Things are not all that reassuring for the party on this count. Laurels from the loyalists are fine but they can hardly be a substitute for mass support and a sense of direction for tackling the problems that affect the man in the street. It will be worthwhile for Congress leaders to do introspection and draw an honest balancesheet of the desirable and not-so-desirable happenings of the recent past. Mere euphoria cannot win them the crucial election ahead.

Upstarts as killers

A MINISTER'S son and his bodyguard were arrested in Lucknow for allegedly killing a boy working as a domestic servant at the minister's residence. In Etawah, Anupam Yadav, son of Samajwadi Party Rajya Sabha member Ram Gopal Yadav, was arrested for allegedly shooting his younger brother. About a fortnight ago in another bizarre incident a DSP's son killed an ice cream parlour attendant for not giving him the flavour of his choice. Add to these incidents the "BMW killings" involving the grandson of a former naval chief and the recent murder of a high society model by the son of a Chandigarh politician and the picture which emerges is as frightening as the one which is haunting American society. The Littletown school massacre forced President Bill Clinton to make a public statement although opinion on the easy availability of guns is still sharply divided. However, there is a vital difference between the "factors of violence" in the USA and the acts of senseless killings in India. America is evidently paying the price for discarding the time-tested family values in favour of a permissive lifestyle. In India the roots of the problem lie elsewhere. The democratic process has given birth to a new political class which for centuries was at the receiving end of the power structure. The new bureaucratic, political and business elite is finding it difficult to cope with its self-discovered and self-sustained sense of importance. It results in an upstart youth mowing down pedestrians with his BMW and makes a young man from a well-connected political family put a bullet through a model's head for refusing him a drink.

What should be a source of worry for civil society is the obvious lack of interest of the law enforcing agencies in at least ensuring the conviction of the upstarts for the sin of throwing their weight around all the time and killing if necessary. Someone has rightly observed that in the 50 years since Independence India has moved away from swaraj to "connection raj". In each one of the recent incidents of senseless killings the suspects are from well-connected families. The ice cream parlour killing in Lucknow took place next to the office-cum-residence of the District Magistrate. He was himself a guest at the wedding where the DSP's son was caught by the video camera to be literally performing a "revolver dance" before he had the uncontrollable urge to visit the parlour. First reports suggested that the domestic servant was thrown from the sixth floor by the minister's son with the help of the bodyguard. The servant was first beaten up to make him confess to having stolen Rs 15,000. The new police version is that the servant jumped out to escape the beating. Initial reports had it that Anupam Yadav had shot dead his younger brother. The new version is that the gun went off accidentally while Anupam, a nephew of Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, was cleaning it. While the progeny of the well-connected go about killing people at will, the Indian Prime Minister has other urgent issues to discuss rather than debate the sins of the "connection raj". That is the difference between American democracy and the one which India claims to be practising.

Kosovo: USA in the dock

THE US policy on the Balkan crisis is in tatters. It has been questioned by many thinkers, including two well-known foreign policy experts — former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Dr Kissinger, who came to be referred to as Man Friday of the late President Nixon, during whose tenure the impasse in Sino-US relations came to an end, has taken the Clinton administration to task for its failure to foresee the limitations of airstrikes, even if by the combined military might of two-thirds of the world's firepower — that is what NATO represents today. In his latest article in Newsweek magazine, if he calls the strategy of "graduated escalation" in air attacks as a futile thinking he is not unjustified. Even after two months of NATO action — it began on March 24 — against Yugoslavia there is no sign of its President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, approaching any of the NATO leaders begging for peace, as was expected by at least Mr Clinton and his Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright.

The USA along with other NATO powers intervened to tackle the Yugoslavian crisis citing the pretext of large-scale human rights violations in Kosovo, the rebel province of the Balkan country. But with the NATO entry into the arena, the situation has only worsened. Lakhs of people have been rendered homeless. In over 26,000 sorties NATO jets have brought about unimaginable devastation in Yugoslavia, using more than 15,000 bombs or missiles so far and killing at least 312 persons. Yet there are no reports of the shattering of the morale of the Yugoslavian troops. That is why Mr Gorbachev, in a radio interview, says that NATO has failed to cripple Yugoslavia though it has broken "all its teeth" in the process. If this is what NATO could achieve while dealing with a not-so-strong Balkan nation, it will suffer greater humiliation in the event of a military engagement with Russia, China or India. Mr Gorbachev is not wide off the mark when he declares that it is a moral and political defeat for the USA and other NATO powers.

The US strategists are finding it difficult to come out of the Balkan morass. While there is dwindling public support for the air campaign (a decline of 9 percentage points since April), any negotiated settlement at this stage may not be to the satisfaction of the US policy managers. This is one clear message from the G-8 countries’ latest efforts, yet to reach the stage of fruition. If the G-8 initiative results in a fiasco, there will be the only option left for NATO: the use of ground forces. This will be unavoidable to achieve the creation of conditions for the return of the refugees to their native place, the primary objective of the USA under the circumstances. But that will mean sending back home bags full of bodies of American soldiers, the most dreaded scenario for the Clinton administration. Hence its reluctance to such a course, though the so-called NATO consensus is showing cracks mainly on this issue.

POLITY'S FRIGHTENING FLAWS
Division, sycophancy and hate
by Inder Malhotra

IT does not matter which way the current crisis in the Congress is getting resolved. If Mrs Sonia Gandhi has withdrawn her resignation from the party presidentship, it is because hordes of her heart-broken followers were begging her to do so. She could have stuck to her decision to go on working for the party without accepting any office in it, a resolve born of “deep hurt” over her patriotism being questioned because of her birth in Italy. In any case, Indian polity will not be the same as it was before May 15.

Mrs Gandhi’s refusal to return to the Congress gaddi could have much graver consequences for the party and for its plans to bring the country back to its time-honoured secular and pluralistic moorings. It could, in fact, lead to the Congress’ defeat at the hustings, if not to its disintegration before the polls. Even if she has heeded the plaintive pleadings of her partymen, who made no bones about the fact that they were feeling “orphaned”, much of the damage already done to the Congress would remain irreparable.

To say this is not to pretend that the “revolt” of Mr Sharad Pawar, Mr Purno Sangma and Mr Tariq Anwar, inevitably followed by their summary expulsion from the party, has dealt an unbearably shattering blow to the Congress or would necessarily lead to a vertical split in it. How many adherents Mr Pawar and his two cohorts attract outside Maharashtra remains to be seen. But whatever erosion they might be able to cause cannot be dismissed with a flippant wave of the hand by a party whose share of the national vote had plummeted to the historic low of 25 per cent 14 months ago.

Moreover, the exodus from the Congress, as in the late eighties, can now be staggered. The distribution of the party ticket at election time invariably converts the disappointed ones into “migratory birds”, to borrow Mr Arjun Singh’s felicitous phrase.

At the very least, the “post-expulsion” situation has aggravated the besetting flaw of Indian polity, its frightening fragmentation, beginning in 1989, that has assumed alarming proportions since 1996, as painfully underscored by quick fall of four governments in succession in just three years. There is no way this gnawing problem can be evaded.

Moreover, recent events, especially their tone and tenor, have rudely shaken the hope that many Indians were trying to nurture. Fragmentation of Indian polity, they believe, is unavoidable. The hope of a single-party majority in the Lok Sabha, leave alone the development of a two-party system, they hold, is unrealistic. But they were drawing some comfort from the expectation that the country might be moving towards a pattern of two loose coalitions, one around the BJP — or more accurately, around Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee — and the other around the Congress, headed by Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the two charismatic leaders constituting the two poles of the polity.

Some plausibility was invested to this belief by what happened during the turbulent week when the Vajpayee government fell by the wafer-thin margin of a single vote. Notwithstanding lucrative inducements the two rival and evenly balanced combinations, with all their internal contradictions, did manage to remain intact.

This state of affairs is unlikely to last. Already, several of the BJP’s allies, such as Ms Mamta Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Mr R.K. Hegde’s Lok Shakti and Telugu Desam, have openly welcomed the prospect of talking turkey with Mr Pawar and eventually coalescing with him. Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party is delighted at the prospect. The AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, abandoning “Sonia Congress”, may join hands with Mr Pawar’s formation. In short, the revival of the Third Front, which appeared a pipedream a week ago, is a distinct possibility, which means that the incipient bipolarity of the polity looks like turning into a return to a triangular pattern of politics. It was this pattern which led to the felling of Mr V.P. Singh’s promising regime at the hands of the BJP. This was well before the Congress brought down successively the luckless governments of Mr Chandra Shekhar, Mr Deve Gowda and Mr Inder Gujral.

Instability of this kind, and the prospect of its continuance even after the September election, is bad enough. What makes it daunting, indeed dangerous, are two other major flaws in the Indian polity (sadly mutually reinforcing) which have been brought to the fore forcefully by the inflamed and often bizarre events surrounding the “revolt” within the highest echelon of the Congress and its “ruthless” suppression of Sonia loyalists, under the ugly mob pressure and in sheer disregard of established procedures for taking disciplinary action in a party which is 115 years old.

Of the culture of sycophancy displayed for days on and around the complex in Lutyen’s Delhi where both Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s residence and the AICC headquarters are located the less said the better. Since Indira Gandhi’s heyday this coarseness has become an integral part of the Indian scene. In fairness, it must be added, however, that the cult of “one party, one undisputed leader” may be most noticeable in the Congress even if it is by no means confined to this party alone.

How is the situation different or less off-putting in the AIADMK whose members prostrate themselves before Ms Jayalalitha with the same gusto which Congress stalwarts display during their daily genuflexion to Mrs Sonia Gandhi? Nor are things much different in parties like Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP or Mr Laloo Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. Come to think of it the doctrine of “sole” leader or vote-getter is not confined to political parties alone. The country has reconciled itself also to the notion that but for Sachin Tendulkar there can be no cricket team, just as, in the words of Mr Arjun Singh and other leading lights of the party, without Mrs Sonia Gandhi there is “no future” for the Congress.

It is in this context that the third disastrous, indeed catastrophic, flaw in Indian polity stares us in the face. The Congress’ complaint to the President, and Prime Minister, Vajpayee’s broad agreement with it, that because of a “hate campaign”, the already high threat to Mrs Gandhi’s life has increased manifold is a cruel reminder that sycophancy on the one hand and hatred on the other are fast becoming the two sides of the same coin.

The Congress alleges that the “same clique” that assassinated the Mahatma is now plotting to eliminate Mrs Sonia Gandhi. The government’s reply is that it is cognisant of the danger, that it was Mr Vajpayee who had conveyed the intelligence “warning” to her, and that her security has been “beefed up”. That is good as far as it goes. But can this be a foolproof answer to the grim problem. After all, both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were also supposed to be heavily protected. Moreover, how is the lunatic fringe expected to behave when respected political leaders make a 180-degree change in their long-held positions merely because of their implacable personal hatreds?

This having been said, one must add that Congress leaders must also do some introspection. The kind of mob intimidation, hooliganism and violence (including the burning of effigies of not only the “rebel trio” but also of Mr P.V. Narasimha Rao) they orchestrated is a blot on their copybook. The bashing up of Mr Sitaram Kesri, a former party President, must make every Congress leader hang his or her head in shame. On her part, Mrs Sonia Gandhi must enforce discipline among the thugs masquerading as her “loyalists”.

Mixed outlook for the economy
by S. Sethuraman

ELECTIONS in the middle of the new fiscal year (1999-2000) have cast a shadow on the economy, which has already experienced low industrial growth and the loss of export dynamism for three years in a row. It cannot be entirely a coincidence that these negative trends have persisted when unstable coalitions were in power at the Centre. Apex chambers have attributed the current woes of the economy to political instability.

Not that the United Front government (1996-98) or the BJP-led coalition in 1998-99 failed to give high priority to economic growth and reforms. While these governments were long on policy pronouncements, effective implementation became the casualty in most areas, notably the control of fiscal deficit, infrastructure building and financial sector reforms. They lacked in fashioning a strategy to reverse industrial stagnation and the export slowdown.

It is the dismal performance in industry and exports bringing down India’s competitiveness, together with the inexorable deterioration in fiscal balances in these three years, that have given rise to serious concerns about achieving a higher growth of the economy through essential policy reforms in the absence of a stable political regime at the Centre.

While long-term assessments about India emerging a major global player, given its potential in human resource and endowments, are highly favourable, the next decade will be crucial in setting in motion the processes of structural transformation of the Indian economy. Part of India’s present difficulties are relatable to the Asian financial crisis and the world economic slowdown which impact on trade and capital flows.

The coalitions of the last three years were in a state of dithering in implementing sensible — and less controversial — reforms in the areas of infrastructure, public undertakings restructuring, and disinvestment on which a commission had given a series of reports. Power and telecommunications have been the worst-affected sectors by procedural bottlenecks and departmental resistance. The Department of Telecommunications was allowed to become a stumbling block in implementing the telecommunications policy.

A new government — hopefully more stable than the recent dispensations — would have to face up to the challenges of putting together a new policy framework which would help India overcome its economic stagnation and move on to a higher growth path and at the same time of mobilising the resources for conquering illiteracy, providing basic health care and drinking water, and generating massive employment opportunities.

It is unlikely that such new policy measures as the post-election government might unfold in October-November would produce significant gains for the economy within a few months. Considering the limited vision of the 1999-2000 budget that the Vajpayee government presented at the end of February, 1999, and the inability of a caretaker government to push through more proactive policies, growth prospects for the current year are not rated high. This must be seen against the background of the unrelieved gloom on the industrial front during 1998-99 with manufacturing output down to 4.1 per cent from 6.7 per cent in the previous year.

Barring capital goods and consumer durables, other industrial categories recorded lower growth rates. The official data for March, 1999, released recently do not thus validate the government’s claim that industrial revival has begun.

Apart from the lowest industrial growth in five years, 1998-99 also saw a further setback in exports which totalled $ 33 billion, a mere 3.7 per cent increase. In the mid-1990s, with growth averaging 18-20 per cent, India was hoping to hit a 75 billion dollar target in exports by 2001.

According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), investments will continue to be minimal during a period of political uncertainty, but agricultural growth, low inflation and recovery in exports, noticeable in the early months of 1999, could make up for the lacklustre industrial performance in the current year.

Inflation has remained low for some months. Such low rates of price rise have to be viewed in the context of the decline in demand and the fall in global commodity prices. Foreign exchange reserves at $29 billion also provide substantial cushion for the economy.

The election year should inevitably worsen the fiscal position of both the Centre and the states which would go to the polls in the current year. With many states already showing huge deficits, a visiting IMF team has voiced heightened concern over India’s high fiscal deficit which it sees as a major constraint to the economy realising its potential to grow at 7 to 8 per annum. — IPA

Marriage: a duet or a dual?
by Darshan Singh Maini

NO other human institution, I trust, has triggered so much poetry and parody, so much trust and travesty as that hoary thing called marriage. Indeed, this double aspect has at the philosophical and linguistic level spawned a whole school of ambiguities, ironies and aphorisms bordering on the sublime and the ridiculous. Alongside scores and scores of biblical utterances, one finds acres and acres of dark, barbed comments in each tongue, in each culture. Take up any book of jokes, epigrams or quips, and you’ll find an unending stream of wit and boisterous laughter. From the country “stories”, limericks, tappas (in Punjabi), wedding lampoons and erotic verses to the world’s great plays and novels, the theme of marriage provides at once a rich fare of fainy-food and a rich spread of spicy, juicy cracks. Also, a theatre of vanities, heart-breaks, tragedies. In sum, the Adam-Eve wedlock or deadlock, as the cynics would say, can in no way be fully summed up; it’s a trap, a cage, or what you have. But — and there’s the eternal rub — this wrinkled, battered and dowdy institution will continue to inspire great lore and lyricism, great mirth and mischief. We’ll never be quite done with it, whatever the new ethos of “live-in together” may offer to the imagination of romance. So, the old crone will continue to be a siren, tragedy or no tragedy.

However, it’s the drama of marriage inside one’s home that has always been the real story, as Henry James would have put it. No wonder, one of his seminal tales carries this title and has intrigued the reader and the critic into a bind, so to speak. And I may add that in all his 22 novels and scores of short-stories and tales, there isn’t even one truly happy marriage! And this goes for any number of great novelists from Hardy, Tolstoy and Conrad to Edith Wharton, Saul Bellow and beyond. The mystery and the enigma of marriage abide — and its ecstasy and agony! It’s perhaps only in Shakespeare that his sunny comedies are an ode to marriage, his tragedies a long howl or lament, and his late romances a bed at once of thorns and roses, of thought and vision. It’s a cycle to be pondered.

Since this piece has already taken a literary hue, I may as well walk into the marital parlour of D.H. Lawrence whose novels and tales are poetic variations on marriage in different keys. For the two eternal themes of love and matrimony constitute almost the entire matrix of his corpus. Strains of utter beauty and utter ravishment alternate with scenes of utter chaos and confusion. The Lawrence critics have written a great deal on his marital dialectic which almost suggests a long drawn battle of the spouses on the heights, as it were. The chemistry of married love finds one of its most exhilarating as also its most despairing or terrifying moments in these books. From the raptures of the body and the spirit, we soon swing to sudden and catastrophic experiences, showing a deep division in the entangled psyches. Of course, Lawrence’s own troubles with his German wife (incidentally, “stolen” from one of his university professors) has not a little to do with his “crockery-throwing” view of marital love. It appears, the marriage institution and its problematics and poetry had become his song from the very first novel, The White Peacock. No wonder, he noted caustically that marriage was “more of a duel than a duet”.

So, how do we see it, as a battleground, as a proving pad, or as “institutionalised estrangement”, to recall Donald G. Machae’s phrase?

Four years of Beant Singh assassination case
Awaiting Judgement

CHANDIGARH: If you chance to pass by the modern high-security Burail Jail in the ‘City Beautiful’ and hear in chorus such slogans as “Khalistan zindabad”, “Bhai Dilawar Singh Babbar zindabad”, “Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale zindabad” and “Babbar Khalsa International zindabad”, you can safely presume that the trial of the Beant Singh assassination case is in progress.

These provocative slogans are raised by some of the nine suspects in the case who have been languishing in the jail as undertrials for the past about four years to voice their anguish over the tardy progress of the trial. They are Jagtar Singh Tara, Jagtar Singh Hawara, Shamsher Singh, Paramjit Singh, Navjot Singh, Gurmeet Singh, Lakhvinder Singh, Balwant Singh and Nasib Singh. The DIG of the jail, Mr R.D. Sharma, says he cannot stop the slogan shouting. Since the slogans are raised in the courtroom, it is for the Judge to proceed against them, if he feels that their behaviour constitutes contempt of the court.

Immediately after the day’s proceedings were over on May 15, all the suspects in white kameez and pyjama and sporting kesri patka assembled outside the make-shift courtroom set up within the jail precincts. If the trial is conducted at the present pace, they say, it will not be concluded before a decade. “And if some of us are found innocent, who will compensate us for our youthful days we are forced to spend behind bars?”

Elaborating this point, Navjot Singh, a postgraduate in English from Panjab University and former employee of Ranbaxy Laboratories, asserts that until now the CBI has not produced before the trial court any incriminating material or even a single witness to prove his involvement in the crime and yet he has been languishing in jail for four years. He adds: “I am the only child of my parents who are in the evening of their life. Only I can imagine the trauma they undergo when they see me here.”

The suspects reveal that on February 5 this year three of them — Shamsher Singh, Nasib Singh and Navjot Singh — preferred a petition for bail in the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Although Mr Justice M.L. Shingal, before whom the case was listed for hearing the next day, did not accept their prayer for bail, he did direct the Sessions Judge, Mr B.S. Bedi, to hold seven to 10 hearings of the case in a month so that the trial could be concluded as expeditiously as possible.

The order said: “No ground to direct the learned trial court to conclude the trial within six months as the prosecution is to examine voluminous evidence consisting of hundreds of prosecution witnesses. After the completion of prosecution evidence, learned trial court will have to record the statements of the accused and then will have to record their defence evidence. In the reply to this criminal miscellaneous petition, the Central Bureau of Investigation has submitted that the learned Sessions Judge (trial court) took up this case at 2 p.m. onwards on a number of occasions and since sufficient number of days for the prosecution are not being allocated by the learned trial court, the trial is tardy.

The “learned trial court is directed to expedite the trial and conclude it as early as possible, keeping this case on seven to 10 hearings in a month.”

But what is the net result of this order? the suspects ask. It is true that in compliance with the High Court’s order, the trial Judge started holding seven hearings a month. But since each hearing does not last beyond an hour or so, the total time devoted by the court to this case comes to seven hours in a month or say 84 hours or seven days in a year. Judging by this token, the number of years the court will take to conclude the trial and pronounce verdict can well be imagined.

Mr S.N.Saxena, a CBI DSP, who is in charge of the investigation of this case, agrees. He explains that at times the court takes two to three days to examine one witness , if not more. Dr Inderjit Dewan, Professor and Head of the PGI’s Anatom Department, who had conducted autopsy on the bodies of some of those killed in the blast, was examined (hold your breath) for more than 12 days. Some of the witnesses, he adds, have to come from far flung places to depose in the case. They are forced to cool their heels in the city for days on end. This naturally causes them a lot of inconvenience. But it cannot be helped.

Mr Saxena reveals that the prosecution has lined up some 400 odd witnesses. Ever since the trial took off more than three years ago, only 85 witnesses have been examined.

Prominent among the witnesses examined are Mr S.K.Datta, a Delhi resident from whom Tara, a taxi driver, had purchased the white Ambassador car which was used in perpetrating the crime, Mr Surinder Sharma, a local Sector 7 painter who had painted the car, used in the crime, Mr P.K.Joshi, Squadron Commander of the NSG Task Force deployed outside the Secretariat, Mr Puran Chand, a one-room tenant in the Mohali house of Gurmeet Singh, a BPL Engineer and suspect in the case and some policemen who were associated with the investigation.

Mr Amar Singh Chahal, one of the defence counsel, however, does not buy the views of the prosecution and the suspects. He is of the opinion that none among the battery of defence lawyers can afford to spend the entire day in conducting the trial of this case. All of them remain awfully busy in other cases in the first half of the day. They can take time out only in the afternoon. He is satisfied the way the trial is going on.

Mr Chahal says that the Sessions Judge too cannot afford to spend the entire day on this case. He has to dispose of other urgent matters like bail petitions in the first half. If he does not hold regular court in the first half, the functioning of the subordinate courts will suffer.

Notwithstanding all these arguments and counter-arguments, the main reason why the trial is proceeding so slowly is that the defence raised technical objections at every stage. For example, the then Sessions Judge (now elevated to the High Court), had hardly recorded the statements of a few witnesses when the defence moved an application seeking a long adjournment on the ground that the Jammu and Kashmir Police had arrested, Paramjit Singh who was wanted in the case, and proceedings should be deferred until he was brought to Chandigarh and lodged at Burail Jail. The defence also argued that there could be a joint trial of all the suspects, especially because they had been charged with the same offences.

Although the Judge allowed the request for adjournment, he turned down the prayer for holding a joint trial. He told the defence that it would be neither in the interest of justice nor in the interest of the suspects to start the trial afresh, especially because whatever progress the trial had made would go waste.

And when the trial was resumed after a lapse of eight months and the Judge passed an order for conducting the case on a day-to-day basis, some of the suspects moved an application saying they would like to change their counsel. This further bogged down the proceedings, as the Presiding Officer had little option but to grant this request.

This was followed by yet another objection by the defence. It sought dissociation of Mr S.K. Saxena, Special CBI Prosecutor, from the trial of the case on the ground that he was present at the time of interrogation of Shamsher Singh, one of the suspects, in the CBI office and had drafted his alleged confession. That the CBI demolished this charge and the court turned down this request of the defence is a different matter. The fact , however, remains that this contentious issue did waste several precious days of the court.

Again, on November 6,1996, there was a wordy duel between the defence and the prosecution over the nets tied by the suspects round their chins at the time of their identification in the courtroom.

According to the prosecution, the tying of his beard by Tara obstructed his identification by Mr S K Datta, a prosecution witness at whose house he ( Tara) had gone to take delivery of the Ambassador used in the crime. Therefore, it was pleaded that the suspects should be directed to remove the nets.

The stand of the defence, on the other hand, was that the court did not have any power to pass such an order. The Sessions Judge, however held that the suspects could not be permitted to hide their identity. He accepted the plea of the prosecution that they should not disguise their appearance.

There were other interesting developments as well. Two of the suspects Balwant and Tara confessed on January 25 and September 3, 1998, respectively, their involvement in killing Mr Beant Singh.

In a sensational revelation, Balwant made a statement before the court that “I and Bhai Dilawar Singh had killed Mr Beant Singh because he had murdered one lakh Sikhs in Punjab.” Dilawar Singh was the human bomb killed alongwith the Chief Minister. Tara, too, confessed his involvement in the killing for the latter’s alleged “anti-Sikh activities.”

While the prosecution and the defence are blaming each other for the delay in the trial, the people of Punjab, nay the entire nation, have been waiting expectantly for the outcome of the trial.

Acclaimed as Sher-e-Punjab for bringing peace to the strife-torn border state, Mr Beant Singh was killed on August 31,1995, in a meticulously planned bomb blast. The blast was so powerful that it had ripped off window panes up to the fourth floor of the multi-storeyed Secretariat. More than a dozen persons, including the personal physician of the Chief Minister, Dr Anil Duggal, and security personnel, were killed.

The blast was believed to be the handiwork of 13 persons. While nine of them have already been arrested and put to trial, four continue to be at large and have been declared proclaimed offenders. They are Wadhwa Singh, mehal Singh, Jagroop Singh and Barjinder Singh. They are said to have fled the country some time before the blast.

75 YEARS AGO

The Prince and South Africa

THE analogy between the circumstances in which so many patriotic Indians wanted the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1921 to be postponed to a later date and those in which South Africa has just decided that the Prince’s visit to that country should be postponed cannot fail to strike any dispassionate and discerning student of contemporary history.

In the latter case the ground on which the visit has been postponed is the possibility of the Prince’s visit being turned to political account during the turmoil of an impending general election. Was not this exactly the ground on which the proposal for the postponement of His Royal Highness’s visit to India was based, with only this difference that the turmoil in India was not over a general election but in connection with a political struggle of much greater import?

Indeed, it was just because this was so, no less than because of the obvious diserability of the future. The Sovereign being received by a happy, contented and unanimous India — that there were a good many even among high officials who wanted the visit to be postponed to a later date! And has not the event actually justified this view?