Republic of Shame~I
Source: By Govind Bhattacharjee: The Statesman
Welcome to the Republic of Shame where people in positions of authority exercise absolute control, without accountability, over citizens’ lives with the power to destroy individuals, their reputations and their families, to watch over molestation and rape of helpless minor girls entrusted to the State’s care, to implicate innocent individuals in fabricated cases to send them to jail, or to grant free licence to fraudulent individuals running sham financial institutions to fleece the nation.
Republic of Shame guarantees them lucrative positions, monetary and other rewards and continued gratification after retirement. I invite you on a tour through a few of the numerous by-lanes of shame in this Republic. The first leads us to Muzaffarpur in Bihar, the land of the Buddha, to a State-funded shelter home called “Balika Grih” run by an NGO called, “Seva Sankalp Aur Vikas Samiti”, where 34 minor girls were dehumanised, brutalised and systematically raped night after night for years after drugging or whipping them. But for a report prepared by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the abuses perpetrated daily by the owner of the NGO ~ a highly connected Brajesh Thakur ~ and his accomplices, would never have come to light.
Since May 2018 when the case had shocked the nation into revulsion,11 people have been arrested including Thakur, and his beaming face while being escorted by police after arrest testifies to the glory of the Republic of Shame. The shelter home used to run an operation theatre where girls who became pregnant after sexual abuse were forced to undergo abortions. Bihar’s Social Welfare Minister, Manju Verma had to resign after the media reported intimate links between Thakur and her husband, who used to visit the home regularly. Brajesh Thakur was an astute powerbroker who knew how to manipulate the levers of power using money, muscle and media power. He owned three newspapers.
His NGO ran five centres including the “Balika Grih”, all of them funded by the Bihar government’s Social Welfare Department, the annual grant being of the order of Rs one crore. It was the department’s duty and responsibility to ensure that the shelters were run properly, but like the proverbial monkey, the babus ignored the irregularities and continued to release the grants. One babu, an Assistant Director, even defended his silence by pleading helplessness against the system despite being aware of the despicable activities, apparently to protect his job and family. To silence his conscience, he took to writing poetry. The poetry-starved country has of course gained a poet, but many of the 34 hapless girls have lost their ability to speak, and are permanently traumatized.
They will carry the indelible scars for as long as they live, because the people who were paid by the State to ensure their welfare and protection, to see that the shelter homes were safe places for them, failed utterly to discharge their duties. Any civilized society would hold them accountable for criminal negligence and punish them severely, but not the Republic of Shame. The fact that such dreadful atrocities were going on for such a long time under their very eyes also makes them complicit in these acts.
A Minister has now been forced to resign temporarily, and five lower-rank officials, such as Assistant Directors have been suspended as scapegoats. They are sure to be reinstated in due course of time. But what about the welfare department officers who had reportedly inspected the shelter some 60 times and found nothing amiss, the members of the state and District Child Protection Committees including the DM and other senior officers of the department, who failed to exercise due oversight? The Republic of Shame does not recognize the word “accountability”, so they will continue to get their promotions, plum postings, and in due course, fat pensions.
They will live a life of glamour and affluence, and who bothers if a few dozen brutalized girls live their lives in utter hopelessness, misery and trauma? In any case, what is their life worth after all? Let us proceed next to the “God’s Own Country”, Kerala. Here in Thiruvananthapuram, in October 1994, Mariam Rasheeda, a Maldivian student, was arrested allegedly for obtaining secret drawings of ISRO rocket engines for selling to Pakistan. Next month, Kerala Police followed up by arresting the highly respected space scientist, Nambi Narayanan, Director of ISRO’s Cryogenic Project along with D Sasikumaran, Deputy Director, and K. Chandrasekhar, the Indian representative of the Russian space agency Glavkosmos, with which India had a collaboration agreement, besides a labour contractor and another Maldivian woman.
In the media, the Kerala Police planted a fanciful story alleging that Narayanan and Sasikumaran had been honeytrapped in a sex racket by the Maldivians who extracted secret ISRO papers from them. Since they were privy to the sensitive secrets, the scandal rocked the nation. In police custody, they were tortured brutally for extracting confessions. Mr Narayanan does not want to recall that torture because “I really collapsed from it.
I will break down reliving that torture, even though it happened 18 years ago. They inflicted physical, mental, every kind of torture that you can imagine. They threatened that they will bring my son, my wife, my daughter, and beat them up unless I accept what they are saying.” The Interrogating Officers plucked Chandrashekhar’s beard with pliers while raining blows upon his face, and threatened to torture his wife and mother. They spent the next 50 days in jail before being released on bail in January 1995.
Even the Maldivian women were not spared from torture; they continued to languish in jail till 1998. The people who ordered the arrest, inflicted the torture and framed the charges included S Vijayan, Inspector, Special Branch, Siby Mathews, DIG (Crime), head of the Special Investigation Team that was set up, K K Joshua, DSP, and IB officers Matthew John and R B Sreekumar. CBI subsequently took over the investigation and filed a report in April 1996 unambiguously stating that the espionage case was false without any evidence at all to back the charges, whereupon the Court discharged all the accused.
In May 1998, the Supreme Court finally dismissed the case and discharged all the accused. CBI’s closure report had also recommended disciplinary action against the rogue police officers which the Kerala Government refused, a decision that Mr. Narayanan challenged in the apex court. In September 2018, the Supreme Court awarded Rs 50 lakh compensation to 76- year-old Mr. Narayanan for being subjected to mental cruelty in the ISRO spy case.
Referring to the harm caused to the scientist’s reputation because of the case, the Supreme Court observed that the “reputation of an individual is an insegregable facet of his right to life with dignity”, fundamental to Article 21. The order further said, “There can be no scintilla of doubt that the appellant, a successful scientist having national reputation, has been compelled to undergo immense humiliation. The lackadaisical attitude of the State police to arrest anyone and put him in police custody has made the appellant to suffer the ignominy…The Court cannot lose sight of the wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, the humiliation and the defamation faced by the appellant”.
Mr Narayanan has finally been vindicated, but considers the consequences of the false spying charges levelled against a reputed scientist by these senior cops. Having perfected the PSLV, ISRO was exploring ways to develop the more powerful GSLV to hoist payloads to the geosynchronous orbits in which a cryogenic engine was required to power the rocket, and in 1994, ISRO launched a project for this with Narayanan, who had a distinguished career at ISRO with expertise in liquid propulsion, at its head.
With his incarceration, the Indian Space Programme got delayed by several years, if not decades. As Sasikumaran says, “national interest has been sacrificed because of someone’s thoughtless, stupid actions. It is not just a few individuals who have suffered because of these actions. The whole country has suffered. The Indian space programme got delayed by so many years.” Sasikumaran had retired, having lost his enthusiasm and creativity. Mr Chandrashekhar lived the life of a recluse and died recently in Bengaluru, a pauper, unable even to settle the hospital bills.
The Supreme Court has also set up a committee under a former SC judge to “find out ways and means to take appropriate steps against the erring” police personnel. But going by the Republic’s impeccable past records, there is little hope that the cops, who are happily retired now and enjoying their highly deserved pension, will be penalised. In any other governance system with a semblance of accountability, their pensions would be forfeited, court-ordered compensation recovered from them, besides making them pay for destroying lives and reputations of respectable innocent scientists, besides compromising national interest, but in the Republic of Shame, they will be safe and honoured.
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