In India, whenever a significant object – a bridge, a canopy, a streetlight – related to the government succumbs to gravity, the COVERUP policy is triggered, under which an official enquiry is ordered. In almost all cases, as befits scientific enquiry, the examination goes far beyond the immediate nature of the incident and focuses on the more fundamental underlying theories. The date of the next election, the popularity of the current administration, and the amounts of little pieces of paper passed under tables, for example.

For something as important to the national image as the CommonWealth Games, however, it is occasionally pointed out that nobody actually listened to the order and an Enquiry Commission is set up to handle the enquiry. In special cases Commissions for Ordering Enquiries have also been set up to set up Commissions of Enquiry that can be ordered to institute said enquires.

Not much scientific progress, however, has been recorded as legions of Indian Civil Service men and women spend weeks, months and years pondering over the root causes of objects transitioning from high to low, up to down. The ever-present ghost of Newton, yelling, ‘It was gravity!’ in their ears goes unheard. That changed today as a bright young recruit turned in his report in response to an enquiry merely two months after it was ordered, beating the previous record by several decades.

The report, titled “Principia Incompetencia”, also has a subtitle, “Don’t Do It”. While the author freely admits deriving the title from Newton’s seminal research, he denied that the subtitle borrows from Nike’s motto. “They stole from us,” he said in a prepared statement. “The Indian Civil Service has been following Don’t Do It for centuries.”

The report, as always, is long and mostly incomprehensible, but in a startling departure from the norm; the prologue summarizes the thesis in nearly understandable language. Bureaucratic efforts, it says, follow three simple laws of stagnation.

The first law, “Work that is not done will continue to not get done even though unreasonable amounts of external force are being applied.”

The second law, “The material progress in any project is inversely proportional to the sum of the number of babus and their close relatives in the sub-contracting business. The financial cost, on the other hand is exponentially related to the same number.”

The third law, “All government action is a rumour.”

As the nation ponders this explanation of its affairs, the author of the report has been accused of circumventing the vetting process for commission reports and an enquiry has been instituted into the same.

The Fake But Possible News Network understands that reading beyond the subtitle of an official report violates journalistic codes of conduct. However, our editor is on leave and couldn’t correct the error before press time. We seek your understanding.

There are just so many things wrong with this.

It is downright cowardice to imply that if we somehow lack the resources or motivation to fight crime, we should instead accept it. Especially a crime as degrading, as humiliating as sexual harassment – humiliating not only to the criminals but to the society at large – not long ago, Mumbai used to pride itself on being a “safe” city, one in which a lady could walk alone at night unafraid. And now, even if a couple of girls are walking in the company of men they know, they still aren’t safe. As a democratic society, we have laws against such behavior, and if the police aren’t competent enough to fight it, they just need to be better.

Actually, this wasn’t blown out of proportion enough. The reason this became visible was that media men happened to be at the scene and recorded the proceedings. I wonder how many other cases of harassment or molestation, or worse, happened that night that went by unnoticed because the victims were too scared, too uninfluential, or just too ignorant to report what happened. It’s not like we do not know that this is a problem – we just like to cover it up.

It’s hypocritical to say that this happens everywhere, so lets just put up with it. The Mumbai police are so proud of their offensive against drug abuse that these days they put up neon signs on intersections congratulating themselves for jailing X number of drug users. How come they could find the resources to fight drugs but somehow can’t find resources or even the will to start a fight against harassment? Behind drugs are the most powerful resources that organized crime has at its disposal, because drugs earn them money. Comparatively, street harassment ought to be much easier to combat.

Finally, is it that hard to take a stand and say “No, we do not accept this”? If so, that means we’ve just given up, or worse, sided with the perpetrators. That does nothing but encourage these people to behave in this way. That such a despicable act occurred in Mumbai is partly due to the “look-the-other-way” silence of a society that somehow condones such crimes. Is it surprising that the villians feel increasingly free to encroach upon their victims until their ethics and morals start to define of our society? We don’t want to let this continue, and part of that process is awareness, part of that process is to face that this indeed is a social disease that we’ve failed to cure.

We either work towards awareness and a cure, or the crimes get worse; and history holds our entire society responsible.

I liked to think that she was working to restore sanity in Pakistan. Obviously, there were people who did not agree. But what is clear is that whatever she was doing, it was with the full knowledge that this could happen at any time. This wasn’t a totally unexpected happening; this wasn’t even the first time she has been attacked. Yet she continued her campaign fearlessly. Much to admire, respect and learn. Working in the face of death at any moment is the bravest of all states, one I can only imagine.

May her soul rest in peace. Although we can hope otherwise, it seems clear that peace will elude her country for a while.

Indira Jaising has a very interesting column about the issue:

Let us remember that in the Supreme Court, the discussion is confined to a handful of Constitutional ‘experts’, making it very undemocratic. While this is acceptable for matters of legitimacy in the domain of the judiciary, it is not acceptable for larger social justice and policy issues.

While Justice A K Mathur and Justice Markandey Katju commented that there have to be limits to judicial activism, Justice S B Sinha retaliates the following day refusing to decide the issue whether women prisoners in jail are being denied their rights. Further, the high court retaliates by refusing to decide a petition relating to beggars, for being chastised by the Supreme Court in entertaining all petitions in public interest.

And while the judges fight it out, justice suffers.

The other side of this debate may be summarized by viewing the comments on the above article; however, being the usual Rediff comments, they are couched in language and attitude too abysmal to quote. Essentially, the Supreme court has the status of a hero with many people (including, to some extent, me) – with its popular stance on many issues such as reservations, ragging and human rights. And of course, all Indians complain that the legislature of this country does absolutely nothing. Scarce a week in session passes by without near violence in Parliament, and recent reports of of MPs slacking don’t help. There’s long been a feeling of tiredness with our elected representatives; and we can’t help but applaud when an institution with a semblance of matched power steps in firmly and seemingly on our behalf. The people of India would like someone, anyone, to fix their problems, while they focus on how much money they can make now that the Sensex has gone above the 20,000 mark; and the judiciary seems a not wholly inaccurate approximation to what we need.

Nevertheless, Ms. Jaising’s argument and the judiciary’s self-reproach must be taken seriously. The judiciary isn’t there to do the dishes and clean up Parliament’s mess. Multiple branches of government exist to provide checks and balances, not backups. The parliament being lousy isn’t enough reason to have the judiciary start making national policy.

The scary thing about democracy is we get the government that we deserve. While I’d like for someone, maybe even myself, to just go in and fix some glaring issues in this country, I wouldn’t trade it for living in a democracy. At the end of the day, it’s the voters who must do the hard work for progress. As they say, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Convincing a conservative judge appointed by George Bush to rule that Intelligent Design is not science and shouldn’t be taught in science classes is no mean task!

You can watch the thing online here.

Here’s another:

Looks like our two esteemed world leaders have decided to make love, not war. The happy couple are, of course, to be applauded except that I wish they would, maybe, find a room? And no thank you, Rediff, one can do without the images.

As Mr Rogers explains: “There’s a saying in Washington: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

And here’s another priceless jab from another article in the same survey:

There are lots of energy-efficiency regulations in place already, and they are being tightened. Incandescent light bulbs are the top target at the moment. Both the European Union and Australia said earlier this year that they are planning to ban them. But the man in the vanguard of this green revolution is Fidel Castro, who started phasing them out two years ago.

Using military force to kill unarmed, neutral, civilian diplomats from the UN? And that too after the UN peacekeepers called the Israeli forces ten times before the killing blow, each time only to be assured that the shelling would stop?

It is fast becoming a world where might is right. As a penetrating infographic from the independent shows, on one side there are the “mostly United Nations” – some 189 of them asking for unconditional ceasefire by both sides; and three nations who don’t want it – Israel, USA and UK.

It’s almost ironic that I am going tomorrow to attend a talk by Shashi Tharoor entitled “The future of the UN”. For now, it looks bleak indeed.

One of the reasons cited for this is that blogs are apparently being used by terrorists to communicate and spread information. I think this is not only draconian, but quite ineffective: you can’t block out the whole net, terrorists can easily set up blogs outside of the standard services, and there are workarounds to the ban that have already been posted. Worse, if the identity of the alleged misinformation blogs were to be revealed, this move would only increase traffic to that site. It appears that the government only requested for a few particular blogs to be banned; however some private ISPs have reacted over enthusiastically and shut down entire blogspot or geocities domains.

Links: Amit Varma, Blog Censorship wiki, Censorship Google group.

If you are accessing from India, I’d appreciate if you leave a comment and let us know if your access is being blocked.