It™s an elementary canon of the science of jurisprudence: justice must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. Curiously, learned judges of the Karnataka high court seem blissfully or otherwise unaware of this dictum. If they are aware, it boggles the mind how they could have passed an order directing the BBMP (Bengaluru Municipal Corporation) to demolish 18 commercial complexes, seven apartment blocks comprising 140 residential flats, 178 temples, 15 churches, a government school, and a dental college and hospital sited on the dried-up Sarraki lake bed in J.P. Nagar, a fast developing suburb of the once garden city in which this publication is headquartered.
Before passing this patently unjust judgement, their lordships should have borne in mind that there™s the letter of the law and the law of equity. For one, they should have questioned BBMP as to why it didn™t prevent or stop construction of buildings which have sprung up on the Sarraki lake bed for 35 years. In the cause of dispensing justice with equity, the corporation™s prolonged inertia should have been interpreted as consent. Therefore the law of equity demands that BBMP and real estate builders should compensate bona fide purchasers of property in the area for their loss.
Holmesian skills and acumen are not required to discern that the notoriously corrupt babus of BBMP have conspired with real estate developers to sell tainted property to bona fide purchasers and vanish with their ill-gotten gains. In the circumstances, to pass judgement against innocent purchasers and let arch villains go scot free is a travesty of justice. Certainly, justice isn™t being seen to be done.
2:1 scoreline
Agreed. Everybody deserves a vacation. Certainly after a long and exhausting election campaign, and especially if one has received an unprecedented drubbing, as Rahul Gandhi (RG), the bright white hope of the 130-year-old Congress Party did in General Election 2014 following which the number of Congress MPs in the Lok Sabha plunged from 209 to 44. Therefore, it would be churlish to grudge him the mysterious 56-day vacation he unilaterally availed in March-April, when he disappeared from the national radar.
Nevertheless, certain inconvenient questions loom large and need to be posed in the public interest. Has anyone in a position of leadership and authority in government or the corporate world and elsewhere, taken a 56-day holiday in recent times? Certainly not your ™umble editor. Which also raises the inconvenient question of how RG has been able to afford a prolonged and inevitably hugely expensive vacation abroad given that his remuneration as an MP is Rs.50,000 per month.
Presumably, the Great Youth Leader drew upon his assets which according to the estimates of the Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms aggregated Rs.9.40 crore in 2014. But this again raises the inconvenient question of how RG, who has never held down a job or acquired a degree or professional qualification despite being enroled in Cambridge and Harvard, managed to build this impressive assets base which has inflicted an inferiority complex upon your correspondent. But there™s some philosophic solace in the awareness that some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. Even if not a clean 3-0, the Great Youth Leader has a 2-1 scoreline in his favour.
Bose: an alternative history
On September 16, 1985, a reclusive mendicant who had appeared out of nowhere and set up an ashram in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh some 30 years earlier ” and who locals insisted was Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, commander-in-chief of the rebel Indian National Army made up of British Indian prisoners-of-war captured in South-east Asia during World War II, and reported dead in an air crash in Taiwan in 1945 ” passed away. The worldly possessions of Gumnami (˜nameless™) Baba comprising 2,376 items packed into 23 boxes were stored in the district treasury under a court order. In 1999 Justice M.K. Mukherjee, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, was appointed to œlaunch a vigorous inquiry … to end the controversy … over the reported death of (Bose) in 1945.
According to Henry Purcell writing in History Today (November 2010), when Justice Mukherjee examined the possessions of Gumnami Baba, he discovered Bose™s trademark silver-rimmed oval spectacles, German binoculars and intriguingly, copies of Gulliver™s Travels, P.G. Wodehouse™s The Inimitable Jeeves, the scarcely available International Military Tribunal for the Far East, The History of the Freedom Movement in India, Moscow™s Shadow over West Bengal, and Solzhenitsyn™s The Gulag Archipelago ” surprising reading material for a mendicant. After thoroughly investigating national aviation records in Taiwan and Gumnami Baba™s effects, in his report of 2006, Mukherjee concluded that although Bose was indeed dead, he had not died in the reported air crash of 1945.
A plausible alternative history: Ideologically to the left of Nehru, Bose faked his death and made his way to the Soviet Union, then the Mecca of all leftists. Fearing a formidable political opponent in Bose in post-independence India, the Nehru-Mountbatten duo asked British prime minister Clement Atlee to persuade Stalin, his war-time ally, to incarcerate Bose who was banished to a gulag. But in 1956, Kruschev denounced the deceased Stalin and Stalinism and freed Bose ” who may have lost his memory ” and relocated him in Faizabad, where he transformed into Gumnami Baba.
Apprehending that if the CPM, which swept the West Bengal assembly election of 1977, discovered Bose and invited him to lead the party, it would sweep the General Election 1980, the then Janata Party government (in which BJP leader A.B. Vajpayee was foreign minister) and the opposition Congress suppressed all information about Gumnami Baba until he passed away in 1985 aged 109. Impossible? If so, why aren™t the Bose files declassified, even by the incumbent BJP government at the Centre?
