New legislation on Judges’ accountability soon: Moily

The Centre plans to bring a “state-of-the-art” legislation in the Winter session of Parliament to deal with complaints of corruption against judges and ensure accountability in higher judiciary.

The Judges Standards and Accountability Bill will cover the “entire judiciary” and would not be a “one sided affair”. It would also provide appropriate protection to the judges so that “it will not be misused,” says Law and Justice Minister entire judiciary.

He said the Judges Inquiry Act of 1968 would be repealed once the proposed bill is adopted. “The Judges Inquiry Bill deals only with the impeachment process of judges. We want to replace it with a comprehensive Judges Standards and Accountability Bill,” he said.

The Government’s plan assumes significance in the context of growing complaints of misconduct against judges of the higher judiciary and a feeling that redress system was not effective.

The “forward looking” bill has been drafted after taking into consideration “the best of lessons” learnt from all over the world, including United Kingdom, France and the US.

“It would have clarity on all issues, including those related to prior the appointment and after the appointment of a judge,” Moily said, noting that it would cover the “entire judiciary.”

He, however, said the judiciary “cannot be kept in the same room with politicians. They cannot hold a press conference like politicians if something is said about them,” he explained.

Declining to reveal the salient features of the “most comprehensive legislation”, Moily said that the much talked about bill would soon be circulated to various ministries before being brought to the Union Cabinet.

The Untouchables: Bombay Police after 26/11

On a overcast April morning in the compound of a police barracks in central Bombay, a team of 6 young men in commando clothing, armed with AK-47′s and pistols, walked, crouched and lunged for our cameras. They simulated combat at close quarters: how to enter a building, guard its entrance, take control of the stairwell and burst into a room occupied by fictional terrorists. They were members of the Quick Response Team, or QRT, their existence a challenge to the much repeated cliché of a city police unprepared for the commando style attacks of last November. The QRT was created in 2003, after a series of bomb blasts in Bombay, precisely to counter a terrorist attack. Not to guard exits or form outer cordons or manage crowds, but to engage the bad guys. They were selected from among the constabulary for their youth and fitness. They trained with the army in Pune. They went to Manesar to train with the NSG. They have AK-47′s, 9mm pistols, bulletproof vests, imported helmets. They are divided into teams on multiple shifts, so that at any time of the day or night, one team of 12 commandoes is always on call, 24×7.

On their biggest night, they would barely fire more than a few rounds. By dawn, they were manning outer perimeters at the Taj and Trident. What went wrong? The answers are couched in that familiar, mystifying vagueness which has come to define Bombay police in its moment of reckoning: “We were called into action at ten pm. A team of 7 went to CST. We went from train to train clearing compartments. We surrounded a motor cabin on Platform 2 inside which two men were hiding. But it turned out to be false alarm. We realized by then the terrorists had left the station. We were told that they had gone towards Cama Hospital. As we left, we heard firing outside Metro cinema. We saw a Qualis with guns sticking out of the window. We fired at it. But by then it had sped off.” This from the team that went to the Trident Hotel: “6 of us entered the Trident. We saw glass, blood, bodies everywhere. A grenade dropped from one of the higher floors as we entered. We went up to the second floor going room by room. We didn’t know what we were looking for. We took turns in escorting guests to the exit. We thought we’d go right to the top and start clearing the floors, but we didn’t have enough numbers. We had been split up into very small groups. So we rescued guests and guarded the exits till the Navy commandos came.”

The exchange with the young commandoes of the QRT : S.I Vasave, S.I. Kerkar, constables Mhatre and Patil took place in a former complex of jail cells attached to the Bhoiwada police station, about 10 kilometers north of Victoria Terminus. Its walls are peeling, patches of damp everywhere. One of the now-empty lockups serves as the QRT’s main command post, with a roster sketched on a blackboard, and a wireless receiver propped on a table in the corner.  Flies buzz around puddles and mounds of garbage. On the iron bars of the cells, underwear and trousers are hung out to dry. This is where the city has chosen to house and headquarter its elite anti-terrorist force.

The QRT was orphaned almost as soon as it was created, the casualty of yet another departmental turf war. It was meant to be part of the crime branch of the city police, but was then brought under the command of the Anti Terror Squad. The ATS itself is a bastard child; it’s raised from the Maharashtra police, but the chief of the ATS reports to the Bombay police commissioner. That night, says S.I. Vasave, as we went from location to location, we had no one to guide us. The man who is meant to be in charge of the QRT, himself caught up in the anarchy of the night, called them just as they were setting off: “This is your first chance to prove yourself”, Hemant Karkare told them. “Kuch karke dikhana hai”. Just over two hours later, they would discover his body in a pool of blood in a lane behind Cama Hospital.

Bombay turns you into a crime reporter. It is home to the most storied police force in the country. The only police force where a sub-inspector (Daya Nayak) can inspire a clutch of Bollywood thrillers. The only force which has a celebrity sniffer dog: Zanjeer, the golden labrador that scented out the hidden caches of RDX in Thane and Mumbra in 1993. Zanjeer was sent off with full honours when he died in 2000. Not long after we moved to Bombay in 2003, on my first visit to police headquarters, I lingered on the magnificent wooden staircase that leads to the police commissioners office. On the wall curved a gallery of the city’s khakhi celebrities: Ribeiro, Soman, Samra, Mendonca, Singh.

On that day, I was on my way to meet Commissioner RS Sharma. The Telgi stamp paper scam had just broken. Sharma and several others, including the encounter specialist Pradeep Sawant were charged with bungling the investigation into Telgi, a forger of stamp paper. Over the next few weeks more than a dozen policemen – officers like Sharma and Sawant, but many others of varying ranks – were suspended, arrested and sent to jail. Later, Sharma was discharged and released. He said his release proved his case: that he was the victim of murky departmental rivalries. Many saw the Telgi purge as one of the worst moments in the history of the force. Worse than the 1992-93 riots, when the police was seen as nakedly communal? I asked an officer who was with the crime branch. Worse, he said.

In August of that same year, two blasts went off in the city – one at the Gateway of India, another in Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded marketplace in central Bombay. 54 people died. Acting on the basis of a tip off from a taxi driver, and using their network of informants, the  cracked the case within two months. One of the main accused was shot in an ‘encounter’. Three others were arrested. (They were recently sentenced.)

I had been in Bombay for only 6 months. I already had a taste of the fame and notoriety that is the legacy of its police force.

The city’s first police chief, an East India Company buccaneer called James Tod, was tried and sacked for corruption in 1790. “The principal witness against him (as must always happen)” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “was his native receiver of bribes”. Charles Forjett, who became Commissioner almost a century later, was the police force’s first moderniser. He laid the ground for Bombay police’s high standards of detection. Forjett was Anglo Indian, and often moved around the city undercover to unearth crime, (“..the strong ‘strain of the country’ in his blood enabled him, when disguised, to pass among natives of India as one of themselves”), a technique he used to expose the Bombay chapter of the mutineers of 1857. The mutineers were strapped to cannons and blown to bits on the Esplanade.

The weight of so much history needs a suitable setting. Wander through the streets of south Bombay and it’s a fair chance that some of the finest Victorian and Gothic architecture is police property: the Commissioner’s office in Crawford Market, the late-18th century ATS headquarters in Byculla (which was the earlier Commissionerate, in Forjett’s time), the Old Bazaar Gate Police Station (now the headquarters of DCP Zone 1), the Colaba Police station, built in 1906, and the Maharashtra Police Headquarters at Apollo Bunder, a grand old Gothic pile of blue basalt, once called Sailor’s Home. All these buildings are a stone’s throw away from the Taj, CST, Cama Hospital, Leopold’s, Nariman House. Unknowingly, the terrorists of 26/11 had wandered into the heart of police Bombay. As the gunmen from Pakistan killed, lingered, reloaded, and killed again, they would unravel the reputation – and the troubled core – of the country’s most celebrated police force.

There is a story the officers of Bombay police like to tell: of brotherhood, risk and the fight against evil. But it is a story that unfolds far away from Bombay, in the jungles of Vidharbha. Many of the officers in the ‘frontlines’ of 26/11 had done postings, often overlapping, in Maharashtra’s naxal-affected districts: Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Bhandara. This, I am told again and again, is not a coincidence. “You see who was the first to rush to the spots that night.” Hemant Karkare (S.P. Chandrapur 1991), Sadandand Date (A.S.P. Bhandara 1995) and Ashok Kamte (A.S.P. Bhandara 1991) were at Cama, Deven Bharati (A.S.P Gadchiroli 1996) and Hemant Nagrale (A.S.P. Chandrapur, 1992) were at the Taj, Parambir Singh (S.P. Bhandara 1995) at the Trident, KP Raghuvanshi (SP, Gadchiroli, 1992) at VT. “You get that killer instinct when you are in the jungle. We used to sleep with our AK’s”, one of them tells me. In the context of the November attacks, this may seem ironic, even mildly absurd. But this is a force looking for redemption. The successes of Maharashtra’s police force in containing naxalism in Vidharbha in the early to mid-nineties are generally unchallenged, unlike the events of 26/11. There is a nostalgia for that time in the forest; many of them straight out of the Academy, thrust into a sort of Boy’s Own world of adventure and danger, away from the politics and intrigue of headquarters.

When I met Hemant Karkare for the first time in August last year, the walls of his office were mounted with tastefully polished driftwood in interesting shapes – a crucifix, a stag’s head – picked up from the jungles of Chandrapur. He was precise, almost formal. But that evening he was incensed. Both the ATS and the Crime Branch of the Bombay police were chasing a key informant, a car thief called Afzal Usmani, a crucial link to the Bombay module of the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The IM have been blamed for the series of bomb blasts across India in 2008. The Crime Branch got to him first. Usmani led them to the entire local IM module, and then, when the ATS asked for his custody, he ‘vanished’. The IM case had gone out of the ATS’s hands. (The Crime Branch says they had nothing to do with the disappearance of the informant.)

Karkare wanted to complain to the DGP, AN Roy. But Roy was fighting his own battles. His status at DGP faced a number of legal challenges. And, going by the buzz in police circles, he was said to be locked in a factional war with Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor. Roy’s admirers, most of whom served under him when Roy was Bombay’s police commissioner, found Gafoor uncommunicative and bureaucratic, not a leader of men. Gafoor’s supporters claimed this was untrue, that Gafoor was competent, but less publicity-seeking than Roy.

Sikh protestors block rail tracks in Ludhiana

 

Protesting the Centre’s alleged inaction against the 1984 riots accused, more than 200 activists of various Sikh outfits on Friday blocked rail tracks on the Ludhiana-Delhi section.

A group of protestors led by Surjit Singh, president of a Sikh group, Danga Peerat Association, squatted on the rail tracks in Ludhiana and raised slogans against the government.

As a result, the New Delhi-bound Shatabdi Express, which was scheduled to leave the city at 7 am, was detained by the railway authorities at the station.

The super fast train was later sent to the national capital via Dhuri, railway sources said. Demanding justice to the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and action against the guilty, Sikh groups have been holding protests in Punjab

Date named for rail line takeover

National Express will hand the running of the East Coast Main Line to the government at one minute to midnight on Friday 13 November.

The government said in July that it would take over the route, which runs trains between London and Edinburgh.

Ministers had refused National Express’s requests for its contract with the government to be renegotiated.

National Express said it did not expect passengers, services or employees to be affected by the handover.

The company has been struggling with the franchise since it turned out that the amount it agreed to pay to run services on the line was too much.

National Express agreed in 2007 to pay £1.4bn over seven years to run the line.

Staff transferred

The transport group stressed that its two other rail franchises would not be affected by the transfer of the East Coast franchise, although the government had threatened to take them back when National Express decided to hand back the East Coast franchise.

National Express East Anglia runs trains from the east of England to London Liverpool Street as well as operating the Stansted Express, while c2c operates in the south of Essex, with trains going into London Fenchurch Street.

The East Coast franchise will now be operated by a government-controlled group called Directly Operated Railways.

Staff currently employed on the line by National Express will transfer to the new company.

It is expected to stay in government hands until 2011 when there is likely to be a fresh auction.

East Coast rail change confirmed

The East Coast Main Line will be transferd to a government-controlled company at one minute before midnight on 13 November, it has been confirmed.

National Express has given up the loss-making franchise for train services between London and Edinburgh.

The new public company East Coast, set up by the Department for Transport, will be headed by transport expert Elaine Holt.

Ms Holt has worked for the First Group and British Airways.

East Coast Main Line services pass through Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland.

Assam rebels ‘arrested in Dhaka’

A separatist group in India’s troubled north-east says that Bangladeshi police have arrested two of their top leaders.

The United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) said armed men in civilian dress entered their safe house in Dhaka and took away the two men at gunpoint.

Dhaka has arrested Ulfa leaders in the past. Separatist commander Anup Chetia served almost 12 years in jail there.

The group was founded on 7 April 1979. The rebels are fighting for a separate homeland for the Assamese people.

There has been no comment from the Bangladeshi authorities as yet.

Safety plea

Chitrabon Hazarika and Sasha Chaoudhary were taken from a house in Dhaka just past midnight on 2 November, senior Ulfa leader Raju Barua said in an e-mailed statement.

Mr Barua said the two leaders were told they were being taken for questioning.

He appealed to Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to ensure their safety.

“We are living in Bangladesh as law-abiding citizens, so why should we be harmed in their country,” Mr Barua said in the statement.

Ever since the Awami League party came to power in Bangladesh in January, the Ulfa and other north-eastern rebel groups have been under pressure to leave the country or face action.

Some rebels have been arrested and sent back to India on charges of illegal entry into Bangladesh, while others have been held for questioning to secure information on rebel hideouts.

India: Job prospects bleak in next 3 months

Job prospects are going from bad to worse as majority of job consultants in a survey projected a bleak outlook for the next three months.

 

“Eighty-four per cent job consultants turned negative on the outlook for the short term (three months), significantly up from 16 per cent earlier,” financial services provider Edelweiss Capital said in a note citing its pan-India survey.

 

The survey interviewed 80 recruitment agencies in National Capital Region, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore covering four industry sectors, including information technology and IT enabled services (ITeS), banking, financial services and insurance, and others.

 

While 84 per cent of the total respondents expect hiring to slow down over the next three months, there has been a marginal positive shift witnessed in case of outlook over the next one year, the survey observed.

 

Fifty-three per cent of consultants expect the situation to stabilise over the next one year.

 

“Sixteen per cent of the consultants have changed their outlook on recruitment from negative to stable over the next one year,” the survey said.

 

It pointed out that 93 per cent of the respondents believe recruitment has decreased in the past three months and the number of unemployed has increased in the same period.

 

“The bleak job outlook will keep property demand subdued  weak job generation is likely to keep demand for homes and offices subdued,” the survey noted.

 

However, ITeS sector emerged as the most optimistic sector throughout India where all the consultants expect recruitment outlook to stabilise in a year’s time, keeping the residential demand from this segment upbeat.

Kasab’s mother to come to India to visit him

The mother of Ajmal Kasab , the lone surviving gunman in the Mumbai terror attack case, is coming to India to meet him, as the stage is set for the start of the trial of the Pakistani national in Mumbai on Wednesday.

 

External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee referred to the visit of  Kasab’s  mother while stressing that Pakistan should not delay investigations on the pretext of clarifications, a day after Islamabad sought more specific information from New Delhi on its probe into the Mumbai attacks.

 

Kasab is currently lodged in a high security central prison in Arthur road in Mumbai.

 

Mukherjee told media persons in Jangipur in West Bengal that it was a reality that many people were killed in the Mumbai attacks, one terrorist had been arrested and that he had made certain confessions.

 

His mother was also coming to Mumbai to meet him, he said. “These are the realities. These are the facts. If somebody wants to evade and avoid these facts, what can we do?” he asked.

 

“The matter should not be delayed on this or that issue, or on this or that clarification. We are prepared to give them any information that they want, provided we have the information,” Mukherjee said.

AP may decide who rules the country

Andhra Pradesh may emerge as the key state which will determine the outcome of the Lok Sabha election and decide who will rule from Delhi. This is not the first time that the southern state will play a crucial role in government formation in Delhi.

 

It all began in 1989 with the then chief minister N T Rama Rao helped form the National Front to provide an alternative government to the Congress. In the wake of the Bofors scam, he forced the en masse resignation of 106 opposition MPs. Though he himself lost power in the assembly election in 1989 and his party’s strength was reduced to two seats in the Lok Sabha, NTR anointed V P Singh  as the National Front prime minister with the support of both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Left Front. It is another matter that the NF experiment lasted a year, eventually leading to mid-term polls in 1991.

 

In the 1991 election, that were overshadowed by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress managed 25 Lok Sabha seats in AP. P V Narasimha Rao, who emerged as a consensus candidate for taking over the Congress leadership, became the first Telugu leader to ascend the prime minister’s gaddi. He headed a minority government, but successfully completed the five-year term. But the Congress fortunes plummeted in the backdrop of the Babri Masjid demolition and the hawala scam.

 

After the 1996 general election, the Telugu Desam Party, led by then chief mnister Nara Chandrababu Naidu, took the initiative in installing the United Front government under H D Deve Gowda’s stewardship with the ‘outside’ support of the Congress. Naidu played the kingmaker as convener of the United Front which saw two prime ministers, including Inder Kumar Gujral, in two years. Then Congress president Sitaram Kesri forced another mid-term poll on the country when he pulled out Congress support for the government.

 

The TDP went to the polls with the Left parties in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. But, post-poll, Chandrababu Naidu quietly dumped the United Front and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance. On the strength of the 12-member TDP’s letter of support, the then President K R Narayanan invited Atal Bihari Vajpayee to form the government. Naidu once again played the kingmaker role under the NDA dispensation.

 

When withdrawal of support by J Jayalalithaa’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam resulted in snap Lok Sabha polls in 1999, the TDP-BJP alliance bagged 36 seats from AP and helped the NDA retain power in Delhi. The NDA, thus, enjoyed power at the Centre for six years, thanks mainly to the TDP’s pivotal support from ‘outside.’

 

Naidu prematurely dissolved the AP assembly in 2003 and the NDA too advanced the general elections in 2004 to cash in on the so-called ‘India Shinning’ factor.

 

However, the Congress-led alliance swept the 2004 polls in AP and their 37 MPs from the state allowed the United Progressive Alliance to wrest power from the NDA. The reverses suffered by TDP-BJP alliance in AP could be attributed to the anti-incumbency wave against the Naidu regime and total failure of India Shining campaign of the BJP. Soon, the TDP and BJP parted company and Naidu left the NDA.

 

Much water has flowed down the Krishna and Godavari rivers since the Congress regained power in AP and the UPA came to power at the Centre. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti broke its alliance with the Congress and pulled out of the UPA in protest against the Congress failure to deliver on its promise to carve out a separate Telangana state. The Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India-Marxist, too, deserted the Congress and launched a virulent campaign against its ‘misrule’.

 

In this scenario, AP goes to the 2009 general elections with completely altered political equations compared to 2004. The Congress is fighting these polls single-handedly. The TDP, TRS, CPI and CPI-M have come together under a Grand Alliance with the avowed aim of dislodging the Congress from power here and in Delhi. Telugu megastar Chiranjeevi’s  newly-launched Praja Rajyam Party is contesting its maiden election on the plank of ‘social justice.’ A totally isolated BJP is waging a solo battle against all odds.

 

The 2009 election assumes importance for several reasons. For the third time in two decades, the Lok Sabha polls in AP coincide with assembly elections. In the 1989 simultaneous elections, the Congress wrested power from the TDP led by the legendary NTR and drastically reduced its tally to just two seats in Lok Sabha. In the 1999 simultaneous polls, the TDP-BJP alliance retained power in the state and at the Centre. In the 2004 simultaneous polls, the Congress turned the tables on both the TDP and NDA.

 

Incidentally, for the seventh time in three decades, the state is poised to witness triangular contests. In the 1978 assembly election, the Congress foiled a serious bid by the Janata Party and wrested power from the Reddy Congress led by then chief minister Jalagam Vengal Rao. In the 1994 assembly polls, the TDP-Left alliance trounced the Congress while the BJP finished a poor third.

 

In the 1980 Lok Sabha election, the Congress made a clean sweep and the two factions of the Janata Party failed to open their account. Similarly, in the 1991 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress bagged a majority of seats in a triangular fight with the TDP alliance and the BJP.

 

In 1996, the polls were four-cornered with the Congress and the TDP beating their rivals the NTR-TDP led by NTR’s second wife Lakshmi Parvati and the BJP. Again, in 1998, the Congress trounced both the TDP-led alliance and the BJP in a triangular fight. However, in these polls, the BJP emerged as a ‘third force’ in state politics by polling 18.3 percent of the total votes and winning four Lok Sabha seats.

 

In the 2009 election, the Congress is making a determined bid to retain power both at the state and Centre. The TDP-led four-party alliance is engaged in a no-holds-barred battle to trounce the Congress. The PRP, which has been strengthened with the merger of the Nava Telangana Party of former state home minister T Devender Goud, hopes to beat both the Congress and the Grand Alliance. The BJP is testing the waters by fielding candidates in all assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.

 

Understandably, all the three main contenders for power are making tall claims. AP Chief Minister and Congress strongman Dr Y S Rajasekhar Reddy exudes confidence about the Congress retaining power. He predicts 36 Lok Sabha seats and 234 assembly seats for the ruling party. On the other hand, TDP supremo Chandrababu Naidu is cocksure about the Grand Alliance sweeping these polls to put TDP into the saddle in the state and to bolster the prospects of the Third Front to lay claim to power at the Centre.

 

PRP founder Chiranjeevi is also confident about his party’s prospects of storming into power in the state and playing a key role in installing a ‘secular coalition government’ at the Centre. Chiranjeevi has, however, revised downwards the number of seats that his party expects to win. Notwithstanding its nationwide prospects, the BJP should be lucky to open its account in these polls.

 

It is too early to assess the prospects of the three main contenders vis-a-vis one another, but the broad indications from the ground reveal that all is not lost for the Congress with very weak signs of anti-incumbency, while the Grand Alliance and the PRP will have to strive very hard to pose a formidable challenge. Dr Reddy already claims the ‘gold medal’ for the Congress and says that the Grand Alliance and the PRP are fighting only for the ‘silver and bronze medals’.

5,000 employees quit Satyam since Sept

Mumbai:Fraud-hit Satyam Computer, which will soon have a new owner in Tech Mahindra, has lost about 5,000 employees during September-March period of the past fiscal.

 

“At the end of Q4, the company employee strength was 48,000. Out of these, 43,500 were employees of Satyam Computer stand-alone, and the rest is subsidiaries, contractors and sub-contractors,” Chairman of the government-appointed board of Satyam Kiran Karnik said after announcing the highest bidder for acquiring 31 per cent in the IT company.

 

However he added that at the end of second quarter, Satyam had 53,000 employees.

 

“In Q3, about 2,000 associates left Satyam making it 51,000. When the government nominated board took stock of things, it was 51,000 comprising of 45,000 Satyam’s stand-alone employees and the remaining from subsidiaries, contractors and sub-contractors,” he added.