Bailing out on Indian masses

Rajeev Dhavan

Arun shourie is the quintessential investigative journalist. Amiable. Tough. Uncompromising. When he targets people he does so with panache. In this list are B.R. Ambedkar, reservations, missionaries, the Gandhi family, India's lethal inexorable laws, secular agendas. He is best when he excoriates. 

The stories begin with his wife Anita, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease, being criminally hauled up again and again before the Faridabad courts for a house "we never built on a plot we did not own...for evaded summons that were never served". She could not take the journey but did so as the case transited to judge and into quiescence: The lesson: 'Don't build a house. Store your papers. Don't let government read them and if lightening is to fall on your head it will... Get free lessons in patience.' The poignancy of the case is that our legal system is merciless. I know of a case where a sale deed was registered well after the seller had died with a different photograph — a mess that took years to resolve.

It is a different story for those who can manipulate the system such as Jayalalitha and Sasikala. While trial judge D'Cunha was to be commended as well as prosecutor B.V. Acharya, that could not be said of the high court judge Kumaraswamy who reversed D'Cunha’s ruling and scrapped Jayalalitha’s chosen public prosecutor Bhavani Singh. The ability of the 'haves' to use the system are immeasurable — something public interest lawyers have learnt with acumen. But they are privileged over the countless poor who are dragged into court with doggedness on all sides to the bitter end. Settling and compromising is not in India's culture.

It is the failure of the system that in complex cases monitored by the courts, the orders suffer entropic decay. There are many examples of this, including the Bandhua Mukti Morcha case and the police reform case. The latter, in my view was overreach. But the pathology of the Indian legal system can be more rotten than its successes. What do we say to draft judgments of Income Tax tribunals being found in an accountant firm's computer. The Loya controversy is depicted by Shourie with exacting detail as also the medical school case, the Karnan imbroglio and the strange case of a Rs 15 lakh bribe for Justice Nirmal Yadav being sent to Justice Nirmaljit Kaur.

Shourie has his prejudices. All he has to say for Krishna Iyer is that he dictated a judgment in Shourie's presence with a thesaurus. Tulzapurkar's emerges heroic. Shourie and his wife Anita accompanied him to the train to Mumbai the day the judge retired. So exacting is he on reservations that he deals with Nagraj's case (2006) as a pro-reservation case while lawyers and government think otherwise. Somewhere the journalist in Shourie gives him a skewed historical understanding of the Supreme Court. This does not detract from his revelations using a scribe's style of using quotations and bullet points in more than one sense of the word.

Shourie toys with changes, including awarding costs. Is this for all, or the well off who throng the courts? He is cryptic in his examination of the bad and the terrible. In this spirit, he recalls how Justice Mahesh Sharma wanted the peacock to be the national bird and people to drink cow's milk as opposed to buffalo milk because it removes diseases, gives strength to the brain and heart; and because the Ganga resides in cow’s urine and cow dung could stop radiation in mobile phones. I was the amicus curiae in Baba Ramdev's case and had all but exposed that Sibal and Chidambaram had targeted the godman 

There are stories as there are story-tellers. We would be missing the wood for the trees if we depict Shourie as just a teller of stories. He is a bonafide seeker of his version of truth. He is deeply concerned about the governance of the nation. His expose is exacting and a must read for all whose destinies are imbricated in the rule of law. He has his prejudices. Who doesn't?