Obsolete Laws And Absolute Rights- The Right To Privacy.

Obsolete Laws And Absolute Rights- The Right To Privacy.

If you read the news papers daily i am sure that you would not have missed (ok, maybe you did) a nifty little piece of news where the Government of India through its representative the Attorney General of India the honourable Mukul Rohatgi, senior lawyer,  questioned the very existence of a “Right to Privacy” in India. And he was absolutely right- there is no law till now- in India guaranteeing right to privacy. Neither in the original constitution nor in later enacted laws has the words “right to privacy” been given primacy anywhere at all. What we actually have is a collection of judgments from the various courts liberally interpreting the other fundamental rights- like Right to life and liberty under Article 21 and Right to free speech under Article  19 - as including the right to privacy of an individual as an integral part of leading a life of liberty. Or as put succinctly in the auto shankar case /r.rajagopal case - the right to privacy is just a right to be left alone- to just be.

And our various governments under a variety of political dispensations have grudgingly kept pushing the boundaries of these unwritten laws trying to gobble up an individual citizens right to be left alone. All under the radar to be sure, but nevertheless bit by bit nibbling does diminish the cake does it not? That is, right till now- when the government has taken a bold stand in the Aadhar case and told us citizens specifically- what rights are you claiming to be violated? you guys have absolutely no right at all- so shut the hell up and fall in line. Yes, the same political party which promised to trash the poisonous Aadhar scheme is now all set to trample on people’s rights once and for all to make the Aadhar scheme mandatory- never mind everyone and their grandmother pointing out how filled with loopholes the entire stupid Aadhar scheme is.

And not content with that the government is now planning to start DNA profiling- and this in a nation where you cannot even protect your customers with a mobile phone numbered registered on a “do not disturb registry” and still getting calls from telemarketers as face it, this is India, everything is for sale and whoever does get punished for violating such laws? God help the poor law abiding citizen who has to handover their fingerprints, iris scans and now even DNA to a bunch of petty crooks who collect data on contract basis for the government and get to use it first choice.

You are going to get royally, totally screwed,  by handing over all your bio-metric data- those little bits of self which makes you what you are- your entire personal identity. You can run but you cannot hide. And for all those bleeding heart liberals on social media who bleat about their right to privacy- what right? Go read the constitution- there is no right written there. And just because a couple of supreme court judges have said you have such a right- well its just their opinion of the constitution ok? If the government says you have no right- you have none- for the government is always right, isnt it? This is India – where the only right you have is – might is right.

The Common Man in the Real Estate Market.

The Common Man in the Real Estate Market.

(Disclaimer: I have no especial knowledge of economics, finance or on any of the subjects I talk below except for what I picked up from reading in the popular media- so the sources for this post are all out there in the public domain- in newspapers, magazines and television.) 

Suppose you want to buy a piece of land to call your own, to build your dream house where you can retire to in your old age (the dream of every working man and woman), what do you do to make it a reality? As a first step you go out with the so-called real estate brokers (which group includes pretty much everyone else except you nowadays) and you pick them up in your vehicle when they say, where they say and you grin and laugh at their inappropriate jokes and accompany them as they take you all over the city into places you never knew existed, while they keep eating masala dosas and drinking umpteen cups of tea in your name (this is for your work, isnt it?) and finally they deign to show you worthless pieces of property at humongous rates which you just cannot afford on your salary unless you are prepared to mortgage your unborn children and their unborn children too in the bargain. And every time you pass the bank where you took the home loan you are reminded of the evergreen classic movie “do bigha zameen” where the serf/farmer is tied to the hoe and pulls it himself instead of the draft bullocks- a burden which finally lays him under six feet of ground.

Seems an impossible situation right? You are given a choice of selling your soul to buy a house or going through the rest of your life dependent on the whims and fancies of your house owner. If the said house owner is barely tolerable – which means he doesn’t resort to midnight knocking at your doors to check if the noise he heard from your house was you drilling a new nail in his walls then you can count yourself very lucky. On the other hand there are other kinds of picky house owners who will give you every kind of exam (including a rectal exam if you let them) or sniff at your breath to test if you eat non-vegetarian (eggs and meat) food even if you swear on your favorite dead saint that you eat only dead plants and grasses like they do, if you ever go to them to ask to rent their house before maliciously declaring that they have now decided to let it out to only a certain specified caste or community and you sadly don’t belong to their choice of preferred denomination.

And then there are those ultra-conservative landlords who swear that those who roam around in the nights are anti-social elements even if they are honest rent paying tenants and hence strictly lock their gates at eight in the night (an hour after sun down) to prevent the crime rates from rising. Not to mention ecologically-minded landlords who decide to act with a social conscience and conserve water by making sure that all the groundwater stays in the ground where it belongs and consequently their tenants don’t waste the two buckets or so water they are supplied through the taps every day at midnight. I could share more and more stories of such crazy, avaricious landlords but the point is made I guess, so I will move on with the rest of the post. which is about how every tenant, the “everyman” people talk about wants and yearns and dreams of the day he will be the sole owner of a piece of land to claim as his own where no else can come in and order him to behave himself, rent paid on time or not. I am sure you can understand the desperation of the hordes of people out there who are searching for such a piece of their own to own.

But if by accident you happen to switch on the television, especially the financial channels where men wearing suits and ties talk in big, big words about the economy, foreign exchange and stuff like that which goes way over your head, so what do you hear day in and day out from these self same knowledgeable economic experts and financial pundits? You hear them keep advising you that you are about to be cheated in the real estate market that is if you are stupid enough buy any land or an apartment, that the real estate market is going through an artificial bubble and once the housing bubble burst prices will drop down to the pavements- so dont buy land but go and put your money on stock markets - buy stocks like Enron, Satyam etc. their only financial advice seem to be to repeat the same two phrases “financial markets and stock markets”. If you believe them the only way to real wealth is through paper money where you are handed a piece of paper which says you own such and such a piece of company but where in reality unlike the directors and other owners of the company who drive around in luxury cars and dine in fancy restaurants all you get is a letter to attend a stockholders meeting where you hear the bad news that the depression is killing that sector of the economy so their annual dividends is once again in the red.

Well, if you are fool enough to listen to such experts and postpone your decision to buy that apartment then you are merely wasting time, for the situation does not change even when the economy tanks or a recession comes on us from America or even when the promised real estate bubble turns out to be just a stock market bubble and the stocks of much vaunted “rising sector” companies like Satyam which were heavily recommended by the same economic gurus were the ones which pop like soap bubbles. More than a working knowledge of economics what we need is commonsense in such conditions. We need to remember that land supply is limited and hence land is a valuable commodity. That’s why the real estate market is soaring even during recession times. But it brings us back to our original question, when there is a large gap between the average income and average cost of land what can we do to change this situation?  

Well you can take the conventional route and apply for a mortgage at the bank and hock your wife and children to pay the EMI every month and barely make the two ends meet for the rest of the month. But our wise bankers and economists and financial gurus will make sure that you the common man cannot take this easy way out to divert your money from its great role in saving the national economy and financial markets. They will get the RBI governor to increase the lending rates which means your local banker hands rubbing gleefully will increase your monthly EMI payment rates thereby making sure that you have two choices – either sell your mother-in-law if you find a buyer for her or just abandon your plan to buy a home. 

You can’t beat the system ever for our bankers are clever enough to even punish the wise guys who seek to sell some ancestral property left them by an ancient forefather to foreclose their loan- for the bank will penalize you with heavy penalties for early closure of the loan- the only instance in the world where you get punished for paying back the money you borrowed. And as an alternative the banks will provide with easy loans to play the stock market and inject money into the financial system. For what they hate is real wealth- wealth which does not come from the stock markets. And to facilitate this- all rules, all laws and everything which the entire political and financial system of our great country India does is to force you into putting all your money into stocks, bonds and mutual funds- at your own risk of course.

And yet if you look around you can find a busy property market where even second hand apartments are going for crores of rupees and lands are changing hands every day. How do they do it? Simple. They have the help of those great benevolent gods of our times – our politicians. If a politician decides so, he can help you buy your favored piece of land with no hassles. He flicks a finger at his favorite bureaucrat who issues a government notification declaring the land as “needed for essential government purpose” and forcibly acquires it in the name of the government. The landlord is paid a pittance as compensation and chased off his property. Then the land is declared surplus to needs and is thrown off into the auction pool where it is finally divided between the politician, the bureaucrat and you – if you are lucky enough to know one of the two and are prepared to pay them what they demand for it. That is the easiest way land changes in urban centers in India.

Go look at any of the large IT parks where software companies have raised multistoried buildings and parks and food courts in acres and acres of land. Ask their owners how they were bought or acquired and you will find this tale behind every one of those land-allotments. Multinational companies and IT/ITES companies whose incomes from foreign remittances range in the billions of dollars- all of them get their land for free from the government as part of software parks and industrial corridors. No one pays a single paisa to the original owners except as bribes to the politicians and bureaucrats who sanction these land allotments under their discretionary quotas. This is a universal truth known to everyone but we keep our eyes closed to it willfully.

Every single company which prides itself on its clean corporate governance and is held up as an ideal for its probity and whose CEO’s and CFO’s are feted by our media is part of this fraud on the ordinary landowner and common man- the aam admi- you and me. There has never in the history of Indian IT industry or manufacturing history been a company which refused land from the government but bought it straight from its real owners. Why should they when they have the might of the law to do their dirty work? And that’s why everywhere you go around the cities and their suburbs you find large software parks and multinational factories- there is no greenery, no wetlands, no water bodies nothing but the concrete dust of large construction works. Amidst all these riches of land is the irony of the common man searching for a small plot of land to call his own. Of such contradictions is our great country India made. Will it ever change? What do you think? Will the common mans dream to own land remain forever a dream? Tell me your thoughts.

That Elusive Freedom of Expression

That Elusive Freedom of Expression.

I am sure that everyone by now would have read the news about the Publishing house Penguin withdrawing a book because they wanted to avoid the hassles of legal complications. And if you open the morning papers you can read the news about groups of self appointed culture guardians shaming couples who were indulging in a little PDA on Valentine’s Day. If you switch on the TV you can see the regularly roaring TV anchors mewling like pet cats when it comes to political interviews of future prime ministers. Even on the sports channels you can see that fearless batsmen of yesteryear's are now turned gentle spin-specialists when it comes to speaking the truth about the powers that be which run the sport – even after they have been caught red handed flouting all the rules. Everywhere you look there seems to be a general dumbing-down of criticism and comments. Self censorship has become ubiquitous. And free speech has been sacrificed at the altar of safety and political correctness.

The situation is such that not only free speech people are even afraid of free thinking and prefer to go along with the crowd. And for every such act of conformity the blame is laid on the archaic laws of the Indian Penal Code and the Defamation clause 294-A. If the courts don’t support us when we speak our minds then why should we risk our necks by speaking the truth seems to be the general excuse of people who should know better. So is it true that all the blame for this assault on free thought and speech in modern India lies on our laws? Is there no more a culture of encouraging free speech in our country?  

Any story about the freedom of speech has to start with the British rule in India. The British who ruled India for around two centuries were the first to systematically suppress free speech among the native populace. They did it because they were afraid that a free press would undermine their rule over the natives by pointing out its illegitimacy and oppressiveness. Media spin was its highest when in the accounts of the Sepoy mutiny the news about the starvation of Englishmen and women were widely reported while the systematic decimation and depopulation of entire native Indian populations in savage reprisals were never mentioned at all in the popular press (British owned and published) of the time. Any attempt by the Indians to tell their side of the story was ruthlessly suppressed with laws and laws and many more laws which made free speech a luxury unaffordable. What the British could not achieve by violence they often achieved by enacting laws and saying they were just following the rule of law and anyone who broke such laws was an anarchist and instigator of violence. Seems familiar?

It was indeed ironic that when such savage attacks on the vernacular press was going on in India; at the same time the British press at home was a vociferous supporter of free speech and often took liberties which would have fetched immediate transport to the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands if tried out in India by Indians. The Englishman then as now was always the epitome of hypocrisy, preaching what he never practiced which does raise the question of how the Americans can be so different, honest and forthright, when they came from the same stock basically. But that’s digressing from our topic, so back to freedom of speech.

When the British finally left us and we got our independence from them, the founding fathers of our republic, stalwart leaders who had seen first-hand the need for a strong law to protect our freedom of speech included the right to free speech in the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, of course with certain exceptions for the rarest of rare cases. But politics being what it is, very soon the politicians who ruled us realized that free speech was antagonistic to their continued well-being and used those rare exceptions commonly to assault our freedom till every single free newspaper and independent media started towing the establishments’ line. But things didn’t stop with that.

As our republic matured we began to see more and more attacks on our freedom with the difference that instead of free speech there were now gags on even free thought. Any citizen who expressed what was on his mind was expected to face the music which had the natural effect of damping free thought among the general populace. The few people brave enough or stupid enough to go against such restrictive rules were hounded in courts with multiple cases filed against them for hurting the sentiments of this or that group. If you write about the Prophet the Muslims are offended. If you write about the Hindu gods then the Hindus are offended. You call a poet or a film maker as not worthy of praise then his or her state mates are offended. Hell, you don’t need to talk about anyone else but just celebrate Valentine’s Day, everyone around you is offended. And they just have to file a complaint at the local police station, to have the police arrest you immediately, have the media sensationalize your arrest and finally make you spend years and years living in the courts fighting the cases filed against you.

This getting offended and feigning thin skin kind of legal approaches which are now routinely being supported by the courts has had the unfortunate effect of playing right into the hands of the extremists and narrow parochial interests (with venal politicians behind them at every instance) who exploit laws made for genuine reasons to achieve their base interests. The situation has deteriorated even more with the explosion of social media- after the Facebook status arrests and Twitter trolls attacks people are even afraid to express their minds on-line for fear of being arrested at midnight by the police force which has nothing else to do in a land where murderers and rapists walk around in broad daylight with impunity.

All of this begs the question - are we really a free nation now? When the people have no choice to speak or even think for themselves do we really deserve the right to call ourselves free? If every two-bit political group can claim hurt interests can the courts continue to support them and punish free citizens? Is the freedom to think for ourselves disappearing completely from our society? Is being politically correct all the time the only way to save our skins? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But I am both angry and scared that I live in a country where my thoughts have to be automatically censored to avoid being bodily harmed by ruffians and rowdies who don’t think the same way as I do.

And to have all this supported by the courts (and the authority of the law) which instead of guaranteeing free speech for every citizen is automatically taking the side of the lumpen elements is more and more scary. I have heard of the term banana republic (places where people can be hung by mobs for uttering the wrong word) before and I am afraid I am seeing one being formed right before my eyes. I grieve for my nation, for its lost ideals and disappearing freedoms. And I am angry at the judges, courts and laws for supporting this assault on free speech and free thought. When will the law stand up for the rights of the common man? Whither my country?

Why Blame It On Alcohol?

Why Blame It On Alcohol?

There is a rule in psychiatry called McNaughton rule. This rule applies to anyone who is accused of committing a crime and then claims that he was mad or insane when he did the alleged act. This rule was first introduced almost 150 years ago in England when a guy called Daniel McNaughton tried to kill the then British Prime Minister Robert Peel but instead shot dead the PM's private secretary Drummond whom he mistook for the PM. When the assassin's lawyer later claimed that he was mad and hence should not be hanged but sent to a hospital for treatment- the McNaughton rules was formed. These are a bunch of criteria which determine whether someone is really insane or just feigning insanity after the criminal act. It includes criteria like checking to see if the criminal was already undergoing treatment for his condition before the crime or if it is just a newly developed condition (thought up after the crime) to escape justice.

I am not a psychiatrist and I don’t remember much of the rules (refer to Wikipedia for full details) but suffice it to say that the rule in McNaughton helps in preventing false alibis and avoiding responsibility for crimes committed. The general public in India is very familiar with McNaughton's rules (even if they don’t know the actual name) because we are used to seeing our politicians get sick (mostly of heart disease) whenever they are accused of a crime and are about to be arrested. Almost every single politician immediately suffers from chest pain and gets admitted in hospital doesn’t he? And by the time they get discharged from treatment the initial media scrutiny goes away into yet another “breaking news" and so they are never held responsible for their actions and crimes.

Likewise there are a lot of people out there who do things knowingly and then get away easily by blaming it all on alcohol. As far as I know ethyl alcohol when ingested in large quantities degrades fine reflexes, causes loss of balance and impaired (double) vision - which is why drunk drivers cause accidents. But alcohol in no way encourages crime- crime which was not previously in the persons mind before- to say so otherwise is to lie. Alcohol provides an alibi for doing many things, things which people lack the courage to do so but always want to do. It’s like the guy who is always afraid of his wife’s stinging tongue coming home drunk to beat up his wife and then blaming it all on his drunkenness - even while secretly enjoying getting even with her abuse.

                                                                                                         

It’s like getting inside a lift and cleverly pushing all the buttons of the lift to make sure that it does not stop at any single floor and then going down on your knees in front of a girl young enough to be your daughter (daughters classmate in this case) and after forcibly lifting up her skirt and pulling down her panties indulging in cunnilingus (oral sex) with her despite her attempts to escape from your grasping hands and your probing tongue violating her body. When it is such a difficult sexual act to perform for even sober men is it scarcely believable that a drunk man could do it with ease all the while physically controlling (with brute strength) a struggling girl? And how does an intelligent man expect other intelligent people to believe that it was all done in a state of drunkenness? If alcohol had a voice of its own it would be screaming in its defense. (And as a side point I wish someone would explain to me what real purpose is solved by the police insisting on a potency test when it was not a question of erection or penetration but oral sex? I know rules are rules but do they have to be applied so blindly all the time?)

Anyway the point of this post is that when people get drunk and do certain things - they do it clearly and soberly knowing what they are doing and enjoying the act of doing. In fact they may have even planned it and fantasized about it for long and were just waiting for the right set of circumstances to do it. Blaming alcohol for their actions is like pretending to be mad after assassinating the prime minister. Doesn’t wash. There are no drunken crimes- there are only crimes. And all of these crimes are committed by cowards who use alcohol as an excuse. So the next time someone blames alcohol for their actions- it means they are not brave enough to admit that they enjoyed what they did regardless of the consequences. And not because they were drunk. So any number of apology letters blaming alcohol for causing and I quote “ a temporary lapse” is just splitting straws and throwing chaff. Even without alcohol this one was waiting to happen given the right circumstances and it finally did. Isn’t that the truth? 

Inscrutable Land Laws And Non-Existent Property Rights

Inscrutable Land Laws And Non-Existent Property Rights

 There was a news report in the paper yesterday about people in Manali (a suburb of North Chennai) waking up to find that the water supplied by the Chennai Corporation's Metrowater department having a dark oily smell and being unfit to drink. On further investigation by intrepid journalists, it was confirmed that the drinking water line was contaminated from a leaking oil pipeline carrying fuel - crude oil- from the madras port to the refinery at Ennore. So in effect what those people that day in Manali had received through their taps was diesel and petrol.

This immediately brought to mind another story i had heard from a friend of mine about an uncle of his who lived in Perambur in the heart of Chennai and who having found that the erratic water supply by Corporation's Metrowater department was insufficient for daily needs had dug a bore well in his backyard to get extra groundwater. But not finding water at shallower levels -(the groundwater levels in Chennai having gone down because of competitive deep well digging from all those apartment complexes being constructed by breaking down individual residences)the poor man had dug deeper and deeper and had at last to his astonishment found his well shaft spouting crude oil, like something from Saudi Arabia.

The uncle being a prudent man had immediately instructed the work men to close up the well secretly and proceeded to dig a new well for the water. The explanation that he gave for closing that well was that if news had leaked out about petrol being found in his land he would be a beggar in two days for the government would turn him out of his house mercilessly and take over his property and break it down for the oil. This might have been a true story or this might be just an apocryphal story, i cant say, but it touches the crux of what I am going to discuss in this post - namely the Right to property for an Indian citizen.

There is a concept in law called Eminent Domain. The law of eminent domain means everything is the property of the state and the people are allowed to use it only under the indulgence of the government. This law has been with us since the time of kings and feudalism when people held lands because the king permitted them to do so in his discretion. If the king or the government required that particular land for their own use - say to construct a new road or a flyover through that land- they have first call on the land. They can take over the property from the owner and the individual cannot refuse to give it up.

When the British came to India and stated writing our laws for us poor ignorant Indians, they not only retained the law of eminent domain but even expanded it to make sure that when the government acquired any private property, the owner of the land had no say in it but to accept the compensation given- often meager amounts and leave silently. This law - the Land Acquisition Act was first passed by the British in the 1890's to make sure that the Indians followed their rules as per British law. As time passed the British Law was changed in Britain itself and the English people acquired rights over their property. But in India the same law was there till independence - in fact that same Land Acquisition Act is even now in existence in India - even after 140 years after it was first enacted.

During our freedom struggle there were lots of struggles for land all over India- even Mahatma Gandhi participated in one of them called Champaran- so when we at last got our freedom, our constitution drafting committee decided to include the Right to Property as a Fundamental Right under the twin Articles 19(1-F)and 31. But the intelligence of the Constitution drafting committee headed by Dr.Ambedkar was often negated by the stupidity of Nehruvian Socialism. The Socialists inside the Congress Government used the Land Acquisition Act/Land Ceiling Act to take over private property for public use by targeting the Zamindars and others who had excess land. This was the origin of the Benami problems as the large land owners often split their property into small bits and gave them to their benamis - like distant relatives- to escape their lands being taken over.

Meanwhile some of the religious trusts and swamijis who owned large temple lands in the name of trusts filed cases in Supreme Court against the government forcibly taking over their lands. The most famous of these cases was Swami Kesavananda Bharati's case where the Supreme Court had to interfere to control the government’s destruction of our original constitution with new amendments- especially in land cases. Because the governments started taking away private lands for more and more reasons there were a lot of cases being filed in the courts by the landowners who were affected. The courts often gave judgment for the landowners because under the constitution- individuals had a right to their own property as a fundamental right.

This irritated the then prime minister Indira Gandhi and in her autocratic way she used the Emergency to remove the Right to property as a fundamental right and included it as a legal right under Art.300-A - the difference being under the old law- right to property was inviolable- no one can take over your land without your consent but under the new law if someone takes over your land you can file a case in the court and ask  for compensation for your lost land and wait till the courts decide if you are eligible for compensation and how much to give you- a process which might take decades in Indian courts.

In addition to removing the constitutional right under Articles 19 and Articles 31 guaranteeing protection to private property the left leaning (commie-loving) Congress government proceeded to do a lot of damage to other Constitution and fundamental rights - some of which were set right by the Supreme Court subsequently after the emergency period was over and Indira Gandhi's Congress party was defeated in the next elections in 1977 and a new government under the Janata Party came to power. But like all politicians they too saw the advantages of having control over other peoples lands and opted to retain the same illogical laws changed during the emergency period.

So what it all comes down to in the end is that as per law of the land, your land belongs not to you but to the government. The government out of its good heart allows you to temporarily own and use the land- the land all its appurtenances - or ground and all its belongings- above the ground or below the ground. So if you happen to dig into your land and find diamonds or petrol don’t start imagining that you can soon become a South African diamond king or a Texas oil millionaire like they show on movies.

For that to happen, you have to live in a real democracy like the United States of America where individual rights are respected. Here in India, some nameless clerk in a office somewhere will make the decision to take over your land for a paltry compensation- say for example if the land in your area goes for around Rs.10,000 a square foot then the government will gave you a standard rate of compensation of rs100 a square foot for your land. If you had just bought a 1000 square feet flat/apartment in a posh area for Rs.One Crore and for your misfortune you happen to be sitting on an oil well, you will been given Rs.Ten Thousand and asked to get out of there. 

That’s what you get for living in a land where individual rights are sacrificed in the name of socialist ideals and community good. But all this idealism is only when you are the land owner, try being on the other side - being a land buyer and you will see that the same land rules will work differently again - as i will explain in my next post. So if you find an oil well on your land- close it. If you dig up diamonds in your land- bury it. If you find old pottery and bits of archaeological stuff- plant a garden over it and forget it all. That’s the only way to retain ownership of your land for yourself till you die.

To conclude, the law of Eminent domain is supreme in our land. If the king wants something- the king gets it. But the tragedy is that the king is no longer a single person- oh no, for we are far more advanced and we have now a democracy. Which means that every Politician and every bureaucrat is now a king in our great democracy and if they want your land - they will take it- legally, lawfully and fully as per rules and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. This is the stark reality of life in India under our land laws.