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EDITORIAL
Banned
Wagon
So now the Congress will wage war on Indira's biographer.
Deputy Chief Minister
Chhagan Bhujbal's assertion that the Maharashtra government is contemplating
legal action against the publishers of a new biography of Indira Gandhi
is typical of the Indian politician's congenital cussedness. With the
Congress-the party that heads the coalition of which Bhujbal is a senior
member-reportedly considering suing the Britain-based author, the life,
passion and tragedy of Indira Priyadarshini are in serious danger of being
reduced to farce. To write a professional biography of such a subject
is not easy. The paranoia with which the Gandhi family-indeed, any Indian
political clan-guards access to papers and documents is plain ridiculous.
Katherine Frank, Indira's biographer, has faithfully chronicled informed
gossip about the lady's personal life. For a people accustomed to hagiography,
this may seem heresy. Set against the standards of Kitty Kelly, America's
best-known exponent of the "unauthorised biography",
it is chickenfeed. Why the leading opposition party should waste its anyway
scarce energies on such trifles is a mystery.
 From
Nine Hours to Rama to Satanic Verses, the Congress has a history of outlawing
the written word. It only ends up making its victims look more creditworthy
than they are. There are really two issues at stake here. First, a growing
intolerance across the ideological spectrum-when Sangh Parivar hordes
disrupt Water, they have only to point to the precedent of anarchist communists
on the sets of City of Joy. Second, an unwillingness to allow a realistic
appraisal of national icons: a play sympathetic to Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's
assassin, is banned; to suggest Subhas Bose was married leads to public
violence; speculation on Nehru's relationship with Edwina Mountbatten
is "unpatriotic"; discussing Indira's essential femininity is
to insult her. Indians-particularly Congressmen-need to grow up.
Undertrial
and Error
Packed jails demand quick justice-not amnesty schemes.
The Supreme Court
is arguably anxious to find a remedy, however tentative, to the vexing
problem of curbing the
burgeoning population of undertrial prisoners, which has touched 1.8 million.
A two-judge bench of the apex court, while delivering judgement on the
bail petition of a life convict, directed that if an appeal in a criminal
case is not disposed of within five years for
no fault of the appellant, he may be released on bail. The order
will no doubt expand the horizon of human rights, for many of the undertrials
are caught in the web of an excruciatingly dilatory and often corrupt
judicial system. As this magazine pointed out as recently as 1998, many
undertrials languish in jail for periods longer than the maximum punishment
in the sections under
which they are charged.
 However,
the bailability of all convicts awaiting appeal verdicts for more than
five years has the risk of allowing at least some of them to revive their
potential to commit crimes. It may be by suppressing or destroying evidence
against them, silencing prosecution witnesses or by regrouping for anti-social
activities. If the ranks of the undertrials have swollen, it's due to
a delay in the delivery of justice, and not due to an unreasonably high
inaccuracy in its framing. The solution to the problem, therefore, lies
not in setting
a benchmark for clemency-five years in this case-but in speedy clearing
of the backlog of the 23.5 million cases pending in courts. While the
Government has for long been promising "fast-track courts" and
such unspecified wonders, the pendencies are due to tortuous arguments,
often in defiance of settled case laws. If the US Supreme Court can fix
a limit of 30 minutes for each side to argue its case, why does its Indian
counterpart need 30 days?
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