Scammed - Confessions of a Confused Accountant

Book Review

Anonymous. (2011). Scammed - Confessions of Confused Accountant. Bangalore. Grey Oak Publishers. Pages: 175. Price Rs. 175/-

Auditing and business consulting cannot be combined just as oil and water do not mix. The reasons for this are simple. Auditing is retrospection. It deals with hard, cold facts. It advises against adventurism and advocates conservation. Caution is its watch word. On the other hand business consulting is prospective in nature. Optimism is its mantra. It functions in uncertainty. Its principle is gung-ho adventurism. It favours exploration of new ideas and new markets. ‘The only safe ship is the ship in a port’, business consultants wryly quote! Therefore the twain cannot meet. The split and demise of Arthur Andersen LLP is attributed to the firm’s overweening ambition to ride the dichotomy between auditing and business consulting at the same time. Eager to compete with its (own) business consulting arm, Andersen Worldwide in revenue generation, Arthur Andersen compromised on accounting standards, as a result of which Enron, the Texas-based energy firm sank. Along with it the original accounting firm Arthur Andersen broke up and its regional fragments merged with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG, three of the ‘Big Five’ Accounting firms (which included Arthur Andersen) and Grant Thornton. In order to ward off the stigma attached to the name Andersen, Andersen Worldwide is now renamed Accenture.

However auditing firms jockeying into business consulting is not new. James Oscar McKinsey a Professor of Accounting at the Chicago University founded McKinsey & Company in 1926. McKinsey was hired to turn around Marshall Field & Co a company manufacturing and marketing readymade garments that ran into the doldrums during the great depression of the 1930s. Many decades before words like ‘downsizing’ were heard, McKinsey proposed that Marshall Field & Co do exactly that to turn the company around. Unable to implement his radical suggestions the company brought him in as CEO and charged him with implementing them. McKinsey was initially successful but because of his overbearing nature, made potential enemies. As he ventured into areas he knew nothing about and his mistakes caught up with him, the pressures of work finally got him and at the age of 47 McKinsey died of pneumonia.

If we delve into the history of businesses and accounting firms, we are likely to come up with many more such cases. Do we learn any lessons from these stories? The answer is ‘no’ going by the experience of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. (Satyam) and its auditors PwC – well, the Indian ‘member firm’ of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited (PwCIL) anyway. The two were charged with fudging accounts for several years and a partner of PwC along with the Founder Chairman of Satyam and some others of the two firms were arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy to defraud the public. The charge-sheet ran into 55000 pages. Did the story of Satyam and PwC inspire Anonymous, the author of Scammed ­to write the novel? It possibly did. The setting of the novel is Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. (The British, who could not pronounce Visakhapatnam, made it Vizagpatam and then shortened it to Vizag. For several years now the state has reverted to its original Telugu pronunciation but the author seems to have not noticed it. He insists on calling it Vizag). Its characters  ‘speak with a thick South Indian accent’! (What else would you have them do?)

There was a time when literary critics in the West dismissed fiction by authors like Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace as pulp fiction, meaning really not serious literature. This of course leads to the question whether literature should really be as sombre as a Russian novel to be considered serious literature. While authors like Somerset Maugham were hailed by critics in their life time, others like Jane Austen achieved this distinction only with passage of time. Although Indians have been writing in English for a long time it was only in the last few decades that they have really made it big on the international scene. At the same time the Indian approach to learning, writing and speaking English has been dramatically changing. There was a time when people who could speak and write grammatically and idiomatically correct English were in a minority. The purists lament that as the numbers of English speaking and writing people multiplied, there has been a dilution of standards. There is less exactitude with regard to grammar and syntax. Fastidious adherence to the ‘English pure’ gave way to colloquial Indianisms. This is because the curriculum of English teaching in the country has also been changing. Instead of studying Shakespearean plays, Milton’s poetry and Johnsonese, students are taught, what has come to be known as business communications in English - writing letters, advertisements and notices etc.

In the literary arena, it all started (perhaps) with Shobha De who introduced Hinglish in her writings. She was not taken seriously (or kindly) by critics at first. But as her novels acquired popularity – from those readers who did not have a stomach for more serious authors like Nirad Chaudary, V. S. Naipaul or Salman Rushidie – her publishers recognised her as a saleable author. If one can say De marked a turning point in Indo-Anglican literature, she opened up the market for more authors who catered to the needs of a certain type of burgeoning English-speaking class.

The explosion of communications through the IT, ITES and off-shoring of jobs truly Indianised English and there is no looking back. Employees of the Business Process Outsourcing Centres (BPOs, popularly known as ‘Call Centres’) have created their own patois - different of course from what they were expected to speak with their customers outside. In short, the expansion and proliferation of the English-speaking elite (?) has resulted in a ‘dumbing down’ of standards. Shobha De did not have serious competition for maybe a decade and a half till Chetan Bhagat debuted. He found a winning formula by precisely identifying his target audience. If the (Indian) English-literature consuming market is largely populated by the information technology guys (and girls) why not directly address them? This he did and was an instant success.

Scammed is in the Chetan Bhagat mould. Its setting is the accounting / business management industry. Its protagonist Hitesh Patel was entrusted by his accounting firm to audit a motor car company in Visakhapatnam, where he espies a lot of white-collar crime and siphoning of funds in it. While making a report of it to the principal board members he finds himself making some useful suggestions for the expansion of business. To an outside observer his formula of forward integration may not be very appealing. For example if a motor car company wishes to diversify into car-hiring business is it necessary that it should confine itself to cars manufactured by the parent company, unless it was for captive consumption? Be that as it may, the director was so impressed with the idea that he offers him a job at five times his salary to implement it. As fate catapults Hitesh into the big league of five figure salaries, five star hotels and of course beautiful girls he also willy-nilly gets sucked into a vortex of organisational politics, political intrigues and financial wheeling-dealings and finally financial offences. The novelist seeks to paint Hitesh as a self-righteous manager with only a weakness for a few girls. How else could he plant those steamy scenes so essential in a formula novel?

In Indish, the adjective ‘homely’ has a cultural connotation, quite different from what the word means in general English, and qualifies a woman as dutiful, home-loving and not coquettish. Therefore high-paid eligible bachelors look for ‘homely girls’ in matrimonial advertisements. In this story too after Hitesh had had his flings with attractive but unfaithful girls he finds succour in his ‘homely’ personal assistant Payal, whom he had ignored for long. As she dotes on him as a mother-hen he finally finds his soul-mate. She lends him a shoulder to cry on when he is down and generally offers him solace and succour. The characters are too linear and colourless but the book may be a good travel companion in a short journey. The novel could have done with some editing and proofing - its Indish notwithstanding. But the last two chapters seem to have been written by a more professional hand.

This review is part of the Book Reviews programme at Blogadda.com 

Lessons for all from Election 2012

“The one-eyed mollusc on the ocean floor and I have the same knowledge of the universe.” - Aldous Huxley (This could only be a rough approximation of what the great scientist had said of his knowledge of the universe as it is quoted from memory and may not be an exact reproduction.)

If Huxley had the humility to confess the limitations of his knowledge of the universe, our psephologists and television presenters should be humbled by hubris – at least in hindsight – for getting half of it wrong in their predictions of Election 2012. After all the number crunching, panel discussions and marathon debates, for most of them it was a story of hits and misses. The Congress (Indian National Congress) did not surge as predicted and the BJP was not relegated to the fourth position although it may have to rue some of its decisions. Whether it was due to the scientific accuracy of its calculations or by a fluke, the CNN-IBN team got it right for the Samajwadi Party. Be that as it may, what lessons do we draw from this election?

DON’T FRAGMENT POLITY FOR TEMPORARY GAINS

Firstly, the major lesson the Congress needs to learn from this election is the Muslim voters are not as gullible as they might appear to the party. Instead of focusing on good governance and development, the party concentrated on to holding out a poisonous carrot to them. A national party, a party which boasts India’s independence is its achievement, should have had better ideas. It was only sixty years ago the nation was divided based on religion and the nation cannot stare at another fragmentation for purely electoral gains of one party. A truly national party would have advised a religious group – any religious or other group – to partake the national pie by empowering it. It would have invested in providing educational and employment opportunities and enhancing the size of the pie so that everyone could have a share of it. If the Muslims felt that reservations were a panacea for their backwardness they would rather vote the Samajwadi Party which offered twice the reservation pie than the Congress, irrespective of whether it is practical or not. 

The second lesson that the Congress should learn - although it has not learnt it in sixty years - is its mistake in treating the Muslims as aliens. If the party treated Muslims as a part of the Indian nation it should have educated them that their best interests are in the security and progress of the Indian nation. If the nation has to take an international political stance for augmenting national interest they should understand and cooperate with it. For example if the best interest of the nation is in aligning with Israel in the ‘Israel – Palestine’ conflict they should be persuaded to go along with it. A strong India would serve the interests of Indian Muslims better rather than a rhetorical Palestine. Aren’t jobs, education and infrastructure in Azamgarh more relevant to the lives of Muslims in Azamgarh than a Palestine with or without East Jerusalem as its capital? How does India aiding democracy in Iraq and other Muslim nations harm the interests Indian Muslims? How does providing special status to Muslims in Kashmir advance the cause of Muslims in the rest of India? Would it not be in the interests of all - Muslims included - if Kashmir is integrated into the national mainstream?

The third and most important lesson for the Congress – whether it will learn it at all is a moot point – is the imperative need to decouple Muslims from the international terror matrix. It might seem surprising but the party does exactly the opposite every time it rushes to defend Azamgarh after every terror incident or use the phantom of Hindu terror as a counter-weight. Instead it should let the law enforcement agencies to do their work without political interference. Except a microscopic minority, the majority of Indian Muslims is as interested as the rest in ordinary things as pursuit of a family, education and jobs to eke out a livelihood – the components of a normal social life. They look up to the state to provide an atmosphere that empowers them to pursue these seemingly mundane interests. It is the microscopic minority, with a vested interest in keeping the community backward, that is holding the larger Muslim community and the rest of the Indian polity to ransom. Of course this is a feature it shares with the rest of identity politics but the Congress as a national party should have shunned the microscopic minority instead of pandering to it for temporary political gains.

DON’T HIDE ASSETS

The ‘perceptual reality’ of ‘Rahul Gandhi as a youth icon’ or ‘Narendra Modi as communal politician’ is perhaps a creation of the media; a blatantly partisan English language media at that. The Congress fell for the self-reinforcing myth which spiralled upwards to deliver it a mammoth goldbrick. As the party lays great store by its dynastic assets it is not going to learn any lesson from its shattered fantasies, at least not in the near term. It is however the BJP that should rue its decision to keep Narendra Modi out of its election campaign. He is the party’s most valuable – if controversial – asset. He is a great orator. He could have explained to the electorate in UP (and other states) the kind of developmental activities that he is undertaking in his state. The electorate would have easily seen the inescapable comparison. As he has been repeatedly stressing in all his public addresses, the fruits of development are not just for the benefit of one section of society. They are for everyone. This would sink in sooner or later. 

Finally, it is not clear why the BJP did not bring in on board the JD (U), its alliance partner in Bihar to contest the elections together. If the party thought that UP was its prized real estate and hence could not be shared, that was in the 1990s. The JD (U)’s social justice plank and the governance record of the duo in the neighbouring state could have convinced the electorate of what the combine could deliver. In such a scenario the JD (U) being the junior partner would have been less prone to objecting for a campaign by Narendra Modi. It would then be difficult for the JD (U) to disagree to extending this arrangement to Bihar later

A decade of secular lies!

‘Godhra’ the mnemonic is a decade old. The secular vultures are out in full force again. Words like genocide, pogrom and even holocaust are bandied about without the least concern for truth. It was an occasion to mourn the dead in the post-Godhra riots; not those who were brutally burnt to death, mind you. For in a secular world, the Hindu-dead are not mourned. There were no wreaths for the fifty nine unfortunate Karsevaks. To understand the kind of inferno they had endured before praying the good lord to end it all, click here: A Requiem for Godhra. 

The disdain with which the human rights activists and Booker Prize winning novelists treated the inhuman tragedy of the unfortunate Karsevaks is appalling. This is what Teesta Setalvad was reported to have said immediately after the train burning incident:

“[w]hile I condemn today's gruesome attack, you cannot pick up an incident in isolation. Let us not forget the provocation. These people were not going for a benign assembly. They were indulging in blatant and unlawful mobilization to build a temple and deliberately provoke the Muslims in India.” 

This telling quote from the warped mind of an alleged social activist accused of perjury is from an unimpeachable, independent source. To see the original, click here: Mob Attacks Indian Train - Victims Had Visited Disputed Temple Site

As ever disdainful of India’s democratic institutions and judicial system, the one-woman-republic (should we refer to it as ‘it’ or ‘she’?) fabricated lies to lend poignance to her narrative. She invented unborn daughters and had them stripped and burnt alive. Iqbal Eshan Jaffri who was killed in the Gulmarg incident had only one daughter - not daughters - and she was mercifully in New York on the fateful day Arundhati Roy had her stripped and burnt alive. Click here to read her fiction: Democracy - Who's she when she's at home? . To read more about the Gulmarg society incident, click here: Gujarat riots and the ‘secular’ Galahads of justice!

Having won one Booker with her ‘adultery-incest’ theme, Arundhati Roy might have been as well writing another novel with ‘stripping-raping-burning’ theme. Only in this case she was dealing with real lives, not characters in a novel. The atmosphere was incendiary and ready to explode without much provocation. (Perhaps the restrictions set out in Article 19 (2) of the constitution are inapplicable to this champion of free speech!) When accosted with the truth she nonchalantly apologized citing a K. S. Subrahmanyam, a former IGP of Tripura as a source of her misinformation. Click here to read Arundhati's utter disdain for truth & insincere apology And click here to read about the lecherous activities of K. S. Subrahmanyam who was part of the fact-finding mission that submitted a report on the riots: Narendra Modi, Godhra, Gujarat Riots: IBN-Live 'Disregards' Truth! (The article primarily deals with Indian media’s utter disregard for truth in making up a narrative.) To understand the true story behind the Godhra train carnage, click here: Godhra: The True Story By Nicolo Elfi

For a decade now, ‘Hang Narendra Modi’, has been the battle cry of the secular vultures. For them the truth is an inconvenience; the judicial system an abomination. The hunger of secular necrophilia could only be satiated by hanging Narendra Modi! 

Before arraigning Narendra Modi for everything that happened in Gujarat immediately after the barbaric burning of fifty nine Karsevaks, let us look at two snippets of history that tell their own tale about the role of the ‘vanguard of secularism’ that typified him as a ‘merchant of death’. (Click here to see a detailed analysis of some of the worst communal riots in India between 1950 and 1995: Many previous riots top Gujarat in unfortunate casualties)

GUJARAT 1969

In 1969 Gujarat saw some of the worst communal riots the country had ever seen. During the riots which lasted six months, 500 people were killed in Ahmedabad alone and an estimated 10000 - 15000 people were killed in the state. There were many causative factors for the riots. The atmosphere was steeped with prevailing social tensions caused by long-simmering religious strife. It was an ambience that perfectly suited uber-secular Indira Gandhi (head of the Congress-I faction of the original Indian National Congress) to settle scores with arch-rival Hintendra Desai and bury his splinter Congress-O once and for all.

The riots occurred before two of the country’s most popular television faces - who made their careers out of the dead bodies of post-Godhra Gujarat 2002 riots – were born. Narendra Damodardas Modi was a ten-year old lad, then.

ANDHRA & KARNATAKA 1990

In 1990, Rajiv Gandhi was out of power thanks to the Machiavellian V P Singh. His party was in power in only three major states, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, ruled by Marri Chenna Reddy, Veerendra Patil and Sharad Pawar respectively. The three Chief Ministers held a conclave in Tirupathi. We do not know what if anything of significance transpired in the conclave, but Rajiv Gandhi construed that it was held to undermine his authority as the party’s high command. He turned to his trusted acolytes, the secular Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), state party president in Andhra Pradesh and the secular Jaffar Sheriff, party president in Karnataka. Sharad Pawar was considered invincible and left alone for the nonce. YSR, with some help from the secular MIM party engineered riots in Andhra. Jaffar Sheriff simultaneously did the same in Karnataka. The riots continued for weeks and stopped – as if a switch was turned off – as soon as Chenna Reddy and Verendra Patil resigned, obviously with some persuasion from the high command. This after Marri Chenna Reddy regained power for Congress from N. T. Rama Rao, quite a significant political feat. Some four hundred people lost their lives in the Hyderabad riots alone. In Karnataka, the riots were diffused throughout the state – because of its diverse religious composition unlike Andhra Pradesh where the Muslim population is mainly concentrated in Hyderabad and some pockets of Rayalaseema.

Narendra Modi

The riots occurred eleven years before Narendra Modi became chief minister in far away Gujarat. He was a simple RSS pracharak then. He did not even have an inkling that he would be asked to lead a state that had seen the most vicious communal strife for more than 200 years. 

The unfortunate events of February-March 2002 are being investigated by a Judicial Commission. A number of trials related to incidents of the time are underway in judicial courts. The courts have pronounced their verdicts in some cases and others are on course. The vicious, relentless campaign to nail Narendra Modi continues. Not a shred of evidence – of omission or commission - to link him in any way to the riots has been found. Yet the secular vultures wouldn’t give up. They continue to lie, lie and lie.

Many previous riots top Gujarat in unfortunate casualties

The unfortunate communal riots that followed the barbaric burning of 59 Karsevaks at Godhra on February 27, 2002 were painted as the worst ever communal riots in the history of India by the ‘secular’ polity. The objective of this malicious campaign was to camouflage facts and malign Chief Minister Narendra Modi. A larger covert objective could also be read into the game-plan of these forces inimical to national unity.  It is to malign the Sri Ram Mandir movement itself by association with the tragedy; to influence public opinion against any reconciliation for re-construction of the Mandir and sabotage ongoing judicial processes to ensure a negative verdict. However, the machinations of these saboteurs of India's national unity were belied by data collected by independent researchers and theses carefully constructed over time. No one can accuse Ashutosh Varshney (of the University of Michigan) and Steven Wilkinson (of the Duke University) of colluding with what the ‘secular’ polity likes to call the Sangh Parivar. These researchers have collected and collated statistics relating to Hindu-Muslim Violence in India between the years 1950 and 1995 and published the raw data as “Varshney-Wilkinson Dataset on Hindu-Muslim Violence in India, 1950-1995, Version 2”. The research was carried out under the auspices of the “Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Science Research (ICPSR)” and designated as document ICPSR 4342. It may be accessed from: http://swd.ucsd.edu/india.pdf Steven Wilkinson who subsequently wrote his 'Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India' (2006. Cambridge University Press) has this  to say of the general nature of communal violence in India:

“[...] one can think of not one or two, but many instances when the ruling party was not the anti-Muslim BJP, or its analytic equivalent, the Shiv Sena, but deadly Hindu-Muslim riots nonetheless took place. […] at one time or another, Congress politicians have both fomented and prevented communal violence for political advantage. Congress governments have failed, for example, to prevent some of India’s worst riots (e. g., the Ahmedabad riots of 1969, the Moradabad riots of 1980, and the Meerut riots of 1987) and in some cases Congress ministers have reportedly instigated riots and have blocked riot enforcement. […] in the post-independence era Congress has at times benefited electorally from Hindu-Muslim violence and I find that we can identify no robust statistical relationship between Congress rule and the level of riots, a result I attribute to the widely varying communal character of the party and its leadership across time and place.” (Wilkinson, Steven I, 2005, Communal Riots in India, Communalism Watch, November 11, 2005, (reproduced from The Economic and Political Weekly, October 29, 2005), communalism.blogspot.com/2005/11/communal-riots-in-india-steven-i.htm)

Kiran Kumar S (@KiranKS) delved into data tweeted by @centerofright (the Varshney-Wilkinson Dataset mentioned above accessible from http://swd.ucsd.edu/india.xls) and has come up with startling revelations. Read more…

If we compute the worst 10 or 20 riots of India since independence, where does Gujarat 2002 fit in? I did some research on the "Worst-20" hall of shame riots since 1947. I am still having a hard time figuring out if 2002 riots, in terms of victim count, even makes to the hall of shame list. Since the victim counts are so drastically varying based on the sources I read, it is tough to ascertain. Here is the most comprehensive list of Indian riots (1192 riots listed from 1950 to 1995):  

This very comprehensive list of riots in India, counts mostly communal ones, from January 1950 till July 1995. But strangely doesn't include 1984 Anti-Sikh riots and 1983 Anti-Bangladeshi Nellie riots. The spreadsheet was referred by friend @centerofright on twitter.  Download the spreadsheet here: http://swd.ucsd.edu/india.xls

But here are some interesting things, which is guaranteed to cause heartburn to anyone who jumped on the Modi=Riots, Riots=Modi bandwagon for 10 long years. Since any discussion on riot in India, invariably involves the politicians, I must make a note of them too.

a) Between 1950 & Jawaharlal Nehru’s death, 243 riots were documented in 16 states... and for this ‘governance’ he got “Bharat Ratna”

b) During Indira Gandhi’s rule (66-77 & 80-84), 337 riots were documented in 15 states... and this 'governance' got her “Bharat Ratna”. Indira by far takes the shield for being the worst administrator of India when it comes to domestic security of its citizens

c) During Rajiv Gandhi’s rule, 291 riots documented in 16 states, including the barbaric Sikh slaughter by his party's goons... and this ‘governance’ got him “Bharat Ratna”! And he gets another trophy for having the 2nd largest number of riots “under his belt”, even though he ruled for just 5 years!

d) There were 1,194 communal riots documented in India from 1950-1995. Out of these 871 or 72.95% were during Nehru, Indira & Rajiv’s PM-ship!

e) And for those who were stuck like broken gramophone in 2002, between 1950 and 1995, 245 (yes Two Hundred and Forty Five) riots were documented in the state of Gujarat. Yes, long before Narendra Modi!

Now over to the hall-of-shame worst 18 (apart from 2002) using info someone already computed for us:

WORST riot: 1947 Communal riots in Bengal | 5000-10000 Killed | Ruling party happened to be Congress

Riot 2: 1969 | Communal riots in Ahmedabad | More than 512 Killed in the city. 3000 to 15000 range in the entire state | Riots for 6 months | Ruling party happened to be Congress

Riot 3: Oct 1984 | Communal riots in Delhi | 2733 Killed | Ruling party Congress | Almost 100% casualty were Sikhs, which makes this a Rajiv Gandhi led genocide on India's minorities | Followed by “Big Tree falls” justification too from the Prime Minister!

Riot 4: Feb 1983 | Communal violence in Nellie, Assam | 2000-5000 killed | PM – Indira Gandhi (Congress party) - India's worst slaughter of Muslims in any single riot (just 6 HOURS)

Riot 5: 1964 Communal riots in Rourkela & Jamshedpur | 2000 Killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 6: August 1980 | Moradabad Communal riots | Approx 2000 Killed | Ruling Party Congress

Riot 7: October 1989 | Bhagalpur, Bihar riots | 800 to 2000 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 8: Dec 1992 - Jan 1993 | Mumbai, Maharashtra riots | 800 to 2000 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 9: April 1985 | Communal riots in Ahmedabad, Gujarat | At least 300 Killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 10: Dec 1992 | Aligarh, UP | At least 176 killed | Ruling party Congress (President's rule)

Riot 11: December 1992 | Surat, Gujarat | At least 175 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 12: December 1990 | Hyderabad, AP | At least 132 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 13: August 1967 | 200 Killed | Communal riots in Ranchi | Party ruling again Congress

Riot 14: April 1979 | Communal riots in Jamshedpur, West Bengal | More than 125 killed | Ruling party CPIM (Communist Party)

Riot 15: 1970 | Bhiwandi communal riots in Maharashtra | Around 80 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 16: May 1984 | Communal riots in Bhiwandi | 146 Killed, 611 Inj | Ruling party Congress | CM – Vasandada Patil

Riot 17: Apr-May 1987 | Communal violence in Meerut, UP | 81 killed | Ruling party Congress

Riot 18: July 1986 | Communal violence in Ahmedabad, Gujarat | 59 Killed | Ruling party Congress

Here's why I said numbers vary drastically. The figures listed for 1969 riots in Gujarat above shows 512 tragic victims. But the link here (http://www.gujaratriots.com/32/gujarats-bloody-history-of-violence/), tells a very different story. Maybe Ahmedabad city had that count, but overall in Gujarat, the count was 5000 officially ... 15000 or so unofficially. Of course, the main reason quoted is the political struggle of Indira Gandhi PM (CON-I) and Hitendra Desai CM (CON-O). Justice Reddy Commission identified 2398 instances of communal violence in Gujarat between 1960 and 1969 - that is THREE riots every FOUR days during the decade. 

Most likely the effort to “fit-in” 2002 into the worst-10 hall of shame might even FAIL if we do proper research on the skeletons in the closet

At the end of the day, it’s not just a number game, but human tragedy … reflects badly how fractured our society is/was. It is also worth recounting that there has not been a SINGLE major riot in Gujarat since 2002, which speaks volume about the most favourite ‘punching’ bag of ‘seculars’. Some learn from a mistake and turn around … while some other “Bharat Ratnas” just kept on scoring double & triple centuries :(

Federalism and National Security

No one can deny that the US has greater federalism than most nations and more certainly than India. Each of its fifty states is fiercely independent and zealously guards its turf. The US also has the strongest anti-terror laws in the world and sees no contradiction between federalism and national security. In the aftermath of a rare terrorist attack on US soil in September 2001, the US administration strengthened its intelligence gathering organs. The enactment of the PATRIOT Act in 2001 was the first step. In fact ‘PATRIOT’ is acronym for ‘Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism’. This was followed by enacting the Homeland Security Act in 2002. The objective of these acts is to collect, collate and process intelligence and prevent terror related activities. The upshot of all this is, not a single terrorist incident occurred in the US since 2001. 

However, in India no sooner than the central government announced the setting up of a ‘National Counter-Terrorism Centre’ (NCTC) all hell broke loose. The first protest came from the Bengal chief minister, whose Trinamool Congress is a coalition partner in the Centre and followed by four more chief ministers. Opposition leaders too chipped in. By evening the numbers added up and counting. This is surprising in a nation that has seen terrorist violence with unceasing regularity. By nightfall television channels had a field day. Imaginations run riot. National security was sidelined. The question some television journalists asked was whether there was more to the four chief ministers crying wolf in unison than a shared dread of the new security act. Were they in fact pitching in for a new political formation and the open revolt against NCTC only an excuse?

But to be fair, the opponents of NCTC have a point. It was not mere paranoia. There has been a long record of the central government interfering in the affairs of the states, from the time Jawaharlal Nehru had Kerala’s communist government dismissed in 1957. His daughter Indira dismissed governments at will, destabilised opposition governments with the help of pliant governors and was the infamous author of a draconian emergency that suspended fundamental rights. It is no secret that over the years India’s intelligence organs were used not for strengthening internal security but for spooking on political rivals and state governments ruled by opposition parties. It is perhaps due to such misuse that every time there is a terrorist attack, our home ministers proffered the ready excuse of ‘intelligence failure’ for failing to prevent it! From the ‘ineffective’ Shivraj Patil to the seemingly effectual if ‘intellectually arrogant’ Chidambaram, they all cried ‘intelligence failure’ while wringing their hands and mourning deaths after terrorist strikes! Even the National Investigation Agency (NIA) which was constituted with much fanfare in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist strike on Mumbai in November 2008 scored ‘love’ in four years in terms of crimes solved.

What the opponents of NCTC found most objectionable in its notification was the organization’s power to detain, arrest and interrogate. The local police are informed but that is about it. Vesting shadowy, secretive organizations with sweeping powers to detain, arrest and – especially - interrogate is a scary thought. In Britain, neither the Security Service (MI5) nor the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) has any powers to arrest. If they want to arrest a suspect they have to seek the help of the local police or Scotland Yard (London’s metropolitan police force), which will officially conduct the arrest. The reason for this is, ‘civil’ police do not resort to arbitrary arrests and detentions. When they detain a person, they have to follow the due process of law, such as informing him of his rights, recording the date and time of arrest and most importantly producing the ‘suspect’ in a court of law within twenty four hours. If a more stringent law like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is applied the period of detention may extend up to ninety days but the arrest and detention is under the gaze of the judicial system. It is the judicial system that decides the merits of the case and, sanction detention and interrogation.

Such open processes help prevent disastrous consequences of what Malcolm Gladwell calls erroneous ‘intuitive judgements’. In his seminal work ‘BLINK’, on the ‘power of thinking without thinking’, he recounts an incident that occurred in New York in 1999. In the early morning twilight of February 4 that year twenty-four year old Amadou Bailo Diallo was returning home when Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy,  four plain clothes officers of the NYPD passed by. Diallo was a Guinean immigrant who came to New York to study biochemistry but ended up becoming a sidewalk vendor. In the half light, the policemen thought he resembled a serial rapist they were looking for. They asked him to stop but the sight of the four officers and the patrol car so frightened Diallo that he turned and ran into his apartment. At the entrance he turned and pulled out a black object from his coat. As the officers chased Diallo, McMellon stumbled on the steps and fell. The other officers mistook that Diallo shot McMellon and opened fire. They fired 41 rounds 19 of which entered Diallo’s body. As they approached Diallo’s dead body they could see the black object which they mistook to be a gun was just his wallet. In all probability Diallo pulled out his wallet as he wanted to ‘square up’ with the policemen. It was a case of racial profiling and an error of ‘intuitive judgement’ horribly gone wrong.

Coming back to the NCTC, if the home minister is serious about strengthening intelligence gathering organs and anti-terror operations, the best course would be to apprise state governments of his intentions and take them on board.

Kashmiri Pandits: A Forsaken Minority

Another anniversary of the exodus that made the Kashmiri Pandits orphans of history stared at us on January 19. The Pandits, were uprooted from their home and hearth and cast about as refugees in their own homeland. The tragedy and tribulations that befell this unfortunate community for the last twenty two years include some of the most heart-rending stories. Theirs is a story of humanitarian disaster of unprecedented magnitude since the Holocaust, but strangely, had gone unnoticed by the rest of the world and more importantly by their own countrymen here in India. As K.P.S. Gill, former police chief of Punjab who rid his state of separatist militancy put it, “[...] one of the reasons for the apathy [of the rest of the world] could be the non-violent nature of the community itself.” They have stoically suffered their fate without even a single retaliatory act of violence.

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Our intellectuals and media crib and caw about the settlements in West Bank and Gaza and the injustices done to Palestinians but not a whisper from them about the fate of the exiled Kashmiri Pandits. No group of prominent public figures petitioned on their behalf; no celebrity authors cried in their defence. They were once the elite of Kashmiri society. The community produced artistes and artisans, poets and musicians, doctors and lawyers of amazing wisdom. At the turn of the century there were about a million Kashmiri Hindus in the state of Jammu & Kashmir. At the time of independence the proportion of Hindus in Kashmir Valley was 15% of the population. By 1991 it came down to less than 1%.

The word “genocide” has been worn out in popular usage during the last decade. It has been so freely bandied about in public discourse that it lost its original meaning. If ever there was a context for it to be justifiably applied it was in the case of Kashmiri Pandits. ‘Genocide’ means, ‘the systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of an entire national, racial, religious, or ethnic group’. This is what happened to the ethnic identity called the Kashmiri Pandits.

Between 1989 and 1995 about 400,000 Pandits were forced to flee the Kashmir valley. Of these 300,000 have been living in refugee camps outside Jammu and another 100,000 in Delhi. According to the ‘Panun Kashmir Movement’ (PKM) an organisation of the exiled Pandits some 25,000 standalone houses belonging to the Pandits were burnt during the period. If the houses were situated in crowded localities where it was not possible to burn them they were simply occupied by others. PKM says the process of ethnic cleansing began in 1967 but gained momentum after 1989 when Pakistan sponsored militants arrived on the scene. Destruction of Hindu temples was also a part of the deracination process. Thus between 1986 and 1992 (prior to December) 79 Hindu temples were destroyed. In the immediate aftermath of the Rama Janmabhumi- Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992, 81 more temples were destroyed.

The 1989 exodus followed the brutal killing of Tika Lal Taploo a noted lawyer and national executive member of the BJP and Justice N.K.Ganju of the J&K High Court. In another incident Pandit Sarwanand Premi an 80-year old poet and his son were kidnapped, tortured and killed. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working in the Soura Medical College Hospital was gang-raped and beaten to death. In the days that followed warnings were sounded to the community over public address systems, either to flee or face death. The Farooq Abdullah government abdicated its responsibility and all but handed over the administration to the militants. Government offices ceased functioning, taxes were neither paid nor collected and the militants began running a parallel judicial system.

Life in the refugee camps has been physically and psychologically shattering for the unfortunate Pandits and may be described as sub-human. An entire family of 7-8 people had to share a small room. There are instances when three generations of a family were put up in one room, the room being partitioned by bed sheets. The combined effects of the undercurrent of terror, forced migration and sub-human living conditions made the community prone to a host of new diseases and syndromes. These include heat trauma, heart ailments, amoebic dysentery, tuberculosis, allergies, diabetes and sexual and reproductive disorders. Menopausal age in women dropped from 50-55 to 40-45 to 35-40. There was a steep drop in birth rate while mortality rates climbed. In one of the camps surveyed, which had 350 families, there were only 5 births between 1990 and 1995 as against 200 deaths. This is not all. The community became increasingly prone to a series of mental disorders ranging from depression, insomnia, anorexia, anxiety states, delusions, panic disorders, manias, phobias and schizophrenia. Women were the most affected.

Even more tragic than the suffering is the treatment meted out to the Pandits by the rest of the Indian polity and the central government. They became orphans of history, abandoned by their compatriots and condemned to live a life of deprivation and suffering. Governments have come gone, both at the state and the centre but nothing changed, not even during the six year BJP rule. K.P.S. Gill former police chief of Punjab who cleansed the state of separatist militancy, says one of the reasons for the apathy could be the non-violent nature of the community itself. The have stoically suffered their fate without even a single retaliatory act of violence. Writing in the ‘South Asia Terrorism Portal’ (SATP) he said, “[p]ogroms of a far lesser magnitude in other parts of the world have attracted international attention, censure and action in support of the victim communities, but this is an insidious campaign that has passed virtually unnoticed, and on which the world remains silent.” (2004. The Kashmiri Pandits: An Ethnic Cleansing the World Forgot.)

In 2004, Frank Pallone, a US Democratic Congressman expressed his surprise and shock that the new Indian administration did not mention the Pandits in its Kashmir policy. In his letter of August 23 to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Pallone urged him to “include the Pandits in any negotiations with Kashmiri constituents and in developing the future course of action in Jammu and Kashmir.” Manmohan Singh’s government sent a team of interlocutors to Kashmir last year but the Pandits did not seem to be on the radar of either the team or the government.

The Jews have a custom of greeting each other with ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ at the end of Yom Kippur and Passover feasts. They kept up the tradition for nearly two thousand years even though many of the exiled Jews never set their eyes on the city nor had a hope in the world of ever doing so. Will the Pandits of Kashmir have to wait for 2000 years for a semblance of justice to be meted out to them?