Is it enough to have a heart of gold if your feet are made of clay? INN on a falling star who never quite gave up even as he gave in.
In a different Bombay, in September 1959, a man was pardoned for murder. The man, Lt Commander KM Nanavati, admitted to shooting his wife Sylvia’s lover, a “rich, swinging Sindhi bachelor”, three times through the chest with a revolver he had procured hours before the crime. There could be many reasons why the governor of Maharashtra pardoned Nanavati — that he was a well-connected, highly decorated officer; that he had acted in the heat of the moment; that he had committed a crime men could understand and women could forgive. There was no question that Nanavati broke the law, but an urban elite abetted by a compliant, scandal-hungry media insisted that he deserved mercy.
Unlike Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt, 53, is no upstanding naval officer. Nor can it be argued that his crime — the illegal possession of arms in a TADA-notified area — was provoked in one blind, hot moment of rage. But, like Nanavati, Sanjay Dutt seems a character out of Shakespeare or the Greek epics. He was born a blessed child, one to whom the gods had seemingly given everything. Tragic heroes though are afflicted by a fatal flaw, a faultline that brings an entire edifice down. In the end, it was himself that Sanjay Dutt could not escape.
Was this why the chairman of the Press Council, Retd Justice Markandey Katju, felt moved to invoke Nanavati as an argument for why Dutt should be pardoned? In a recent newspaper editorial, senior advocate Shanti Bhushan agreed that given the facts — that Dutt’s father was helping Muslims in a riot-affected area, that Dutt himself had received threatening phone calls — it was evident that there was “clear danger of a mob attack on Sanjay Dutt and his family”; and since “an attack by such a mob could not have been deterred except by the threat of an automatic weapon”, Dutt should be pardoned for procuring and keeping just such an automatic weapon, unlicensed or not, by his bed.
The crowd of supporters outside Sanjay Dutt’s residence at Pali Hill is growing. The A-listers hiding behind dark glasses, emerging from cars with tinted windows, agree with Katju. MPs Jaya Prada and Jaya Bachchan are calling for clemency. Mamata Banerjee believes that Dutt, who has already served 18 months of his five-year-sentence, has “suffered enough”. Somewhat inexplicably, Digvijaya Singh has described Dutt as “a great man”.
According to his apa Zaheeda, star of the ’70s, “Sanju is no Khalnayak, he is the kind-hearted, bumbling fool from Munna Bhai. He is innocent and has a heart of gold.” This is a familiar version of Dutt, the infantilised ‘Sanju baba’ forever evoking maternal responses from the women in his life. Even as one section of Bombay, still singed from the riots, sees no reason why Dutt’s fate should be any different from others convicted for their roles in the blasts, to another, he is a pitiable figure. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, Dutt has lived life with his face turned towards the past. What we perceive to be a chain of events, he sees as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet”.
But there is no denying his agency in causing that catastrophe.
Dutt first met underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in 1991, when shooting for Yalgaar in Dubai. Anees Ibrahim, Dawood’s brother, a former ticket scalper, soon became a frequent visitor to Dutt’s sets. Dutt, then 31, was tall, lanky, droopy-eyed and fast turning into Bombay’s new golden boy. His debut film, Rocky, about a Rambo-like youth who sets about avenging his father’s death, had done particularly well. For Dawood, Dutt held more star appeal than his co-stars Feroze Khan and Kabir Bedi. At a time before Bollywood finance had been san itised by banks, before the government had decreed it an industry, the underworld was a source of ready capital for filmmakers. The dons, living in their gilded cages in Dubai and Malaysia, enjoyed fraternising with the stars, and flying them out for Bollywood roadshows. Most of all, they liked turning their own black money white.
On 16 January 1993, Ibrahim drove a car filled with explosives and assault rifles from Gujarat to Bombay. This car made its way to Dutt’s tin-roofed garage, where accompanied by Dutt’s friends Samir Hingora and Hanif Kandawala, a man named Abu Salem handed the actor three AK-56s, ammunition and 20 grenades, altering the trajectory of his life for ever.
This life, by the accounts of many of those closest to Dutt, was already a troubled one. His parents, actors of almost celestial fame, had met while shooting for the iconic Mother India. Nargis had fallen in love with Sunil when he rescued her from a fire that had broken out on set. In Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, a collection of letters exchanged between the two, accompanied by entries from Nargis’ diary, she confesses that her disappointing romance with Raj Kapoor had left her contemplating suicide until she met Sunil. Finally, she had found someone who made her “feel normal”. Nargis, famous for her ethereal beauty as much as her temper and razor-edged tongue, said she confessed everything about her past “shamelessly” to him because she was certain that he would never abandon her.
She was right — Sunil never abandoned her, even as she drew her last breath at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital’s cancer ward in New York several years later. He did, however, like Kapoor, demand that she not work with other male actors. If Nargis resented this, she buried those feelings once Sanjay, the eldest of their three children, was born, spending all her time pampering her son. Indeed, so much did Nargis spoil him that by the time he turned 10, Zaheeda, Nargis’ niece, says Sunil began to worry “that his son was turning into a sissy”. “We would see him in the garden, having placed Sanju on a tall branch, telling him to leap off it — ‘Mamu kya kar rahe ho? Bachcha gir jayega,’ we would scream to no avail.”
Meanwhile, Sanju baba, who had taken to smoking the ends of cigarettes his father’s friends threw around, had also begun to show signs of the generosity everyone attributes to him even now. Being driven past a group of poor boys, Dutt would start wailing, until the driver stopped and bought the boys the same beverage he was drinking. In an interview before his death, Sunil recalled how Sanjay once threw a tantrum at a wedding, insisting that his mother give away his jacket to a young beggar shivering outside the shamiana. Finally, the senior Dutt decided, as irate parents often do, that his soft-hearted son should be sent away to a boarding school where he could be toughened into a man.
One of the reasons his supporters cite while asking for pardon for Sanjay Dutt is that while the law should not privilege a celebrity, neither should it punish a person for being one. In April 1993, a report found that several MLAs and politicians were also guilty of possessing arms supplied by Dawood Ibrahim. One of these was the Shiv Sena MLA Madhukar Sarpotdar. Sharad Pawar, chief minister then as he is now, revealed that suspects interrogated for the Bombay blasts had coughed up several names but that “charges hadn’t been pressed against everyone involved”.
The book When Bombay Burned reveals that two months before the blasts shook the city, as riots broke out in Nirmal Nagar on the night of 11 January, Sarpotdar was detained by the Army and found to have two revolvers and several other weapons in his car. Although Sarpotdar’s gun was licensed, his son’s was not; besides, they were both breaking the law by carrying weapons in a ‘notified area’ during a riot. A man named Anil Parab also accompanied Sarpotdar that night. Parab turned out to be Dawood’s main hitman. Yet, Sarpotdar, who had committed the same crime as Dutt, was never tried in a court of law.
In an email to this reporter, Suketu Mehta, the author of Maximum City and the last journalist to have written about Dutt’s childhood, excused himself from providing details about his interview with Dutt. Mehta, who currently resides in New York, suggested that a mutual friend had been angered by his depiction of Dutt in the book and it would be uncharitable to exacerbate the situation further, especially at a sensitive moment. This polite stonewalling echoes the reactions of Dutt’s immediate circle. Unsurprisingly, his sisters, his closest colleagues and friends have refused to speak to the press, some on the advice of Dutt’s lawyer Satish Manshinde, and others at their own discretion. An investigative report published in INN in March 2007 (How the Star Managed to Escape TADA), had captured Manshinde on a hidden camera, admitting that he didn’t “have an answer” should the Supreme Court ask him why his client did not deserve to be convicted under TADA.
Guarded conversations with Dutt’s dormitory mates and friends from Sanawar reveal that in boarding school at least his celebrity background was a liability. “It was like 10 of us would do something and he would be the one who got punished until he’d dislocated a shoulder,” a friend said on the condition of anonymity. “School teachers everywhere can be sadistic, but they really had it in for Sanju, as if they had to make a point of proving that they did not care who his parents were.” In Mehta’s book, a particularly grisly passage describes how Dutt was made to crawl up a gravel slope until his hands and knees bled. The next day, his bandages were torn off and he was made to repeat the exercise.
While Dutt is hardly unique in suffering corporal punishment, a form of torture school children across the country still undergo daily, one can imagine how far removed this world must have felt from the one inhabited by parents, cousins, aunts and helpers, in which he was universally adored and indulged. When he finished school, he described feeling a resentment he had not previously known. In 2007, speaking to family friend Simi Garewal on her talk show, he said, “When parents send a kid away to boarding school, he has to learn to be independent. When I came home to find that they wanted to tell me what to do, it irritated me.” Back at home; Dutt was soon hanging out with friends who took recreational drugs. What began as “a little bit of weed”, he told Mehta, turned into nine years of hell. Dutt tried “every drug in the book” but soon developed an addiction to cocaine and heroin.
Nargis chose Zaheeda — a natural confidante for Dutt because she was younger than his mother, but old enough to play a maternal role — to confront her son about his drug habit. He was still naïve enough to believe his family was unaware of his addiction because his parents had never seen drugs. But Nargis and Zaheeda had witnessed a distant uncle lose his son to addiction. “Apa would frequently say to our uncle,” Zaheeda says, “‘had this been my son, I’d have scratched his eyes out.’ When she started seeing the same signs in Sanju — he would sleep erratically, stay locked in his bathroom all the time — she felt as though she had failed.”
Zaheeda offered to take Sanjay for a drive and a treat. Sitting in an ice-cream parlour, she asked him if he was on drugs. Dutt denied it, but Zaheeda warned him, “Your mother knows. You think she cannot see it, but she knows what’s eating you up inside.” One day, Dutt woke up from a heroin binge and began looking for something to eat. Seeing him, a servant began to cry — “Baba, you have slept for two days straight. Everyone in the house has gone mad with worry.” Dutt took one look at his distorted face in the mirror and went into his father’s study. “Dad, I’m dying. You have to save me,” he said.
Sanjay was taken to Breach Candy Hospital’s detox centre in Mumbai and then sent to a rehabilitation centre in Texas. Not wishing to cheat the producers who had already invested money in his son’s debut, Sunil Dutt informed them that his son was an addict and that he would soon clean up his act to return to work. Once out of rehab, Dutt discovered that he didn’t want to return. He had struck a friendship with a cattle-rancher named Bill and invested in a longhorn cattle ranch of his own. Out in nature, living by himself, Dutt said he found a peace he had never known in Bombay. He began to construct a new life for himself: a down payment on a small flat in New York and a dream to run a steak house to rival the best in the city. Two months later, it was Sunil Dutt who went to his son with a plea.
“I didn’t want to return home, I didn’t want to do films,” Sanjay confided in an interview soon after his return, “but my father said, ‘Do it for me, do it for my name,’ and I couldn’t refuse. I promised myself I’d make some money and return to my dream.” Sanjay finished work on his debut film. Three days after Rocky was released to the world in 1981 and a new star was born, Nargis died of pancreatic cancer. In 1993, Dutt was 33. He was too old, too buffeted by grief and experience to still be called ‘baba’.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by the riots of 1993 had forced India to confront the question of its religious identity once again, and in horrifyingly brutal fashion. Did being Hindu mean causing harm to Muslims? Or did it mean extending support to those who needed help? Dutt’s father, as popular a social worker and MP as he was an actor, had decided in favour of the latter. Hindu-Muslim marriages were not too unusual, particularly within the Hindi film industry. At the time of the riots, Sunil Dutt, by then a widower for a dozen years, could be found helping violence affected families in the Muslim neighbourhood of Behrampur. He had the constant support of his youngest daughter, Priya. All three children were aware that their father was growing older, frailer. Priya spent more and more time taking care of him while he took care of others.
It wasn’t just Sunil Dutt’s health that was waning. He seemed to have lost the respect of his fellow politicians. In a particularly humiliating instance, Sharad Pawar made Dutt wait for him in a lobby for over three hours. Thugs, displeased with his pro-Muslim work, had begun to threaten the Dutt family. Following an attack on his person that January, Sunil Dutt asked for extra security detail to be posted outside his house. But Sanjay thought his father might not be able to do enough to protect the family. Threatening phone calls had been made; his sisters, he was warned, were targets for kidnap and rape. It was enough to make him want to buy another gun — a fourth, unlicensed automatic weapon to add to his three licensed firearms — one that, as Shanti Bhushan believes, would be “better suited to dealing with a mob”.
Despite the immense difference in the magnitude of their crimes, an uncannily similar instinct had spurred the two men at either end of this supply chain of weapons into action. Dawood Ibrahim too was goaded by the ostensible desire to protect his sisters. Hussain Zaidi, the crime reporter and author of Black Friday, described a package Dawood had received full of red and green bangles. The tinkling glass came with a note —“jo bhai apne behno ki hifaazat na kar sake, use yeh tofha mubarak”.
On 16 January 1993, Hanif Kandawala and Sameer Hingora, proprietors of Magnum Video and Dutt’s friends, arrived at his house with a man named Abu Salem and told Dutt they would bring him new weapons. The next day, the three men returned with another companion. From their car, which they had parked in Dutt’s tin shed, they produced three AK-56 rifles, magazines and about 250 rounds, with some hand grenades. Accounts of this meeting differ among the men who were present. Hingora alleges that when they reached Dutt’s house, the actor was on the phone with Dawood’s brother, Anees. He further claims that Dutt enquired about the arms concealed in the car, showing knowledge of the plot to smuggle weapons into Bombay. Dutt’s lawyers have denied both these counts. However, INN earlier investigation unearthed that Dutt had in fact admitted to calling Anees, a confession that the CBI inexplicably decreed irrelevant, erasing the MTNL call records from Dutt’s landline to a number in Dubai.
From the safe harbour of the present, however, it’s easy to forget just how plagued Bombay was in the 1990s by gang violence, kidnapping and extortion. Film journalist Rauf Ahmed describes the atmosphere that had gripped the city as a “fear psychosis”. “You’d wake up and hear that Gulshan Kumar, whom one met at all the parties, had suddenly been shot dead outside his office. Manisha Koirala’s brother was killed. Hrithik Roshan’s father was shot at. It was all to show the royalty of Bombay who really was the boss.” That said, it couldn’t be denied that the film industry and the underworld were dancing a particularly intricate pas de deux.
Film makers mined the lives of gangsters for material. For them, Sanjay’s stories from jail — he served 18 months — of how the underworld recruits shooters from the children’s barracks were gold. As late as 2000, seven years after Dutt had first been implicated in the Mumbai bombings, shortly after he had served time and had been let out on bail, he was back in touch with gangsters. The transcripts for a drunken exchange involving, among others, Dutt, Mahesh Manjrekar and Chhota Shakeel are available online. Dutt has little to say to the gangster beyond such banalities as Govinda being a “chutiya”. Shakeel probes listlessly, “Aur kya chal raha hai?” Sanjay responds, “Bas chal raha hai bhai.” Neither wants to hang up, both star struck in their own ways.
In a section in Maximum City, Mehta describes how Sanjay, close to Abu Salem, had managed to get a friend, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, off the extortion hook with a single phone call. In his call to Salem, Dutt had allegedly said of Chopra, “This is the one man who stood by me when I was in jail. You can’t touch him.” In a text message to INN, Chopra, who is currently in London, said he was “not qualified” to comment on the man who saved him from Abu Salem. Mehta’s description of Dutt as “brontosaurus-sized” and overly fond of “guns and muscles” and the masculine image of the Marlboro Man appears to fit in snugly with the impression from that drunken phone call: of a troubled, immature movie star playing with dangerous toys for kicks.
Amateur psychoanalysts would keep turning to Nargis’ death, in the days after what should’ve been the high point of her son’s triumphant return home, drug-free and on the verge of bona fide movie stardom. When Dutt has been down, life has rarely refrained from kicking. In 1987, nearly six years after his mother’s death, he married Richa Sharma. “It was nice to come home to someone,” he told Garewal. Two months after the birth of their daughter Trishala, Sharma was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She died in 1996 and their daughter moved to the US to live with her grandparents. Dutt had already been found guilty by then of illegal possession of arms.
Three years previously, he had been shooting in Mauritius when he heard he was going to be indicted under TADA and the Arms Act. He had asked a friend, Yusuf Nulwalla, to remove his AK-56 from his house, and Yusuf together with another friend, the steel manufacturer Kersi Adajania, saw to it that the gun was melted and thrown into the sea at Nariman Point. The police recovered the spring and some cartridges from the rocks. In the end, it was Sunil Dutt who had the moral courage to turn his son over to the police. He tipped them off about Dutt’s return from Mauritius and on 19 April, he was met at the airport by 200 commandoes.
When he saw his father again, Sanjay was in police custody. Sunil Dutt must have felt his back pressed to a wall when he gave Sanjay up to the police, but he still hoped his son was innocent. Had he done what the police accused him of, he asked. His son’s answer must have bewildered his already aching heart. “I have Muslim blood in my veins,” Sanjay said, “I couldn’t bear what was happening in the city.” It was a dramatic and, frankly, strange declaration. Dutt belonged to a thoroughly mixed family and his religious identity was equally mixed.
After his conviction, he was seen with his forehead daubed with a giant red tilak, his Muslim identity now in abatement. Was this tactical, an attempt to distance him self in the public eye from a dark event? Or was it a tribute to the support of the Thackerays and the Shiv Sena? (Support that has now been reversed.) It might just have been neither. Having grown up around Zaheeda’s love for Sai Baba, Dutt spent four hours each day of the 18 months he spent in jail praying to God. Which god he prayed to and what kind of deliverance he asked for is unclear. Later, he spoke of time spent befriending the sparrows, ants and rats that would appear in his 8×8 cell. He was also angry, self-recriminating. In a fit of rage, he banged his head against the bars of his cell until he had to be removed from solitary confinement for fear that he would kill himself. He could not have slept easy knowing the fates of the other accused — Zaibunissa, Manzoor, Yusuf — all tried under TADA, unlike Dutt.
Dutt has described his lowest moment as the day he was in jail and his father informed him that there was nothing more he could do to help him. Unknown to Sanjay, Sunil had prostrated himself before Balasaheb Thackeray, a man whose divisive politics he had always despised, to ask for his help in getting Sanjay out of prison. Each time Sanjay has crawled out of a hell of his own making — drugs, or prison; he has worked harder than before as if to prove each time to his father that he could take pride in his son.
“He came back from his junkie phase with Saajan and Sadak,” says Rauf Ahmed, “he came back after the initial trial with Khalnayak, then there was Daud, Dushman, Mission Kashmir. Except for Sanju, only Amitabh Bachchan has faded so far from the limelight and been able to come back with a bang again and again.” After Mission Kashmir was screened at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mehta quoted Dutt, shortly after the President shook his hand. “I will sleep tonight like I have never slept before, India loves me,” he had nearly wept.
In the 20 years since Dutt first left prison on bail till today when he is about to return, he has been to jail thrice, been married twice, had two children, shown up for innumerable court proceedings and lost his father. In 2008, he married his present wife Manyata Dutt (then, Dilnawaz Sheikh) at a private ceremony in Goa. So private that he failed to inform his sisters that he was getting married. Rauf Ahmed, who was working on Dutt’s biography with Random House, a highly sought-after project, gave up on the book when Dutt informed him that Manyata would now be handling all his creative dealings.
Off the record, his friends speculate about her chequered past, gossip about her political ambitions, how she convinced him to join the Samajwadi Party instead of the Congress, how she was allegedly a bar dancer. Perhaps, as Nargis felt with Sunil Dutt, Manyata feels she too has found the man who makes her feel normal, to whom she can speak “shamelessly” about her past. Dutt appeared to have found a new lease on life. He was once again a box office success and happy to let his new wife control the finances as the CEO of Sanjay Dutt Productions. At 50, he became a father again, of twins.
Now Dutt stays up nights to complete unfinished projects before he goes to prison. Trade estimates say he has about Rs 250 crore worth of projects riding on his shoulders. He is driven by the thought of a lasting legacy, a film he will be remembered for, one that might dwarf his enormous mistake. His most spectacular success, earned in recent years, came with the Munna Bhai films. In Hirani’s candy-glazed world, Dutt was Munna, the lovable ‘bhai’, unacquainted with the cruel ways of the world, solving problems with a generous dose of love, laughter and jhappis. The irony is incandescent.
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Amid the emotional clamour for Dutt (or is it Munna?) to be pardoned, his old friends, the Bhatts, stay loyal but also clear-eyed. Pooja, who acted opposite Dutt and whose brother found himself bizarrely linked to David Headley, is phlegmatic. “We were shooting for Tadipaar in Mysore one day when dad came up to us and said, ‘Baby, Sanju is in big trouble.’ We laughed. It was funny because Sanju had always looked out for me and the idea of him being in ‘big trouble’ was ridiculous. But it’s been 20 years, and we’re still talking about his troubles.” Mahesh, who is inordinately fond of Dutt, has struggled to find ways to help his friend cushion the blow of the Supreme Court’s verdict. Should I fuel him with hope of pardons, he wondered, or should I help him reach deep into himself with great calm and seek atonement. Face the flaw and redeem the man. See this as time to recover his best self.
Maybe Dutt can be sustained by that knowledge too, the understanding that if this time he does not chase the easy road —the urgent interventions; the uneasy pacts — at the end of these three years he will, for the first time in a very long time, enjoy an uninterrupted view of his future.
Visits to builders in the past one year has revealed why, at least one reason why, housing prices make the dream of owning an apartment in Mumbai evaporate.
It is the corruption in the business from the word go.
And the money the buyer pays for the apartment over and above his ability to pay—the ability involving the mortgage which ties him up in debt for his entire working life—is to fill someone else’s pockets.
One nice way the builder recovers these business costs is to charge for the space to park a car. It is now mandated that in the Mumbai metropolitan region the builder has to provide one parking slot per apartment. Period.
The flat sizes are shrinking, and some are small enough as not to be adequate to park a car. But the car park costs money. Some builders do not even bother to allot them with the flat. That onerous task is left to the cooperative society formed after all the flats are sold. A flat and a parking slot are not linked in the sale deed.
The normal assumption is that the cost of the parking space is worked into the price of the flat. But that is off the mark. The price, for instance in Thane, is Rs 5 lakh per spot.
Some 18 months ago, it was Rs 3 lakh apiece for car parking. The apartment prices are on a plateau because of buyer resistance to prices, but parking slots cost more already.
This was the price for the parking slot quoted this Friday morning. And no, there would be no receipt for it; it has to be in cash. Yes, it can be included if the buyer desired in the value at which the sale documents are registered.
The value stated does not mean that it is exact price of the flat. After all, flats costing lower than the ready reckoner for any area are registered at the reckoner value. Value is different from price paid and received, it is argued.
Those who don’t want that, either the builder or the buyer, have to pay for it in cash and wait for the flat with the attached parking space. It does not matter if it is open or space under and on a podium. It is explained that providing a parking space does not mean it costs as much to create.
The arithmetic is as follows: a tower of 20 floors, not uncommon these days, with six apartments per floor and a parking space at the rate of Rs 5 lakh per apartment is clear Rs 6 cr.
That cash is what goes to pay the bribes.
No builder likes to shell out from his margins. These days, one claims, even this illegal payments sought and received are not enough. Some are forced to even part with a flat, benami, of course.
These days, notwithstanding the unearthing of scams, the public anger expressed loud and clear at Ramlila Ground and Janpath in New Delhi, the waving of placards at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, the demand is for higher sums of grease money.
There is a route along which the bribes are dispersed and mostly it is at the various tiers of the civic body in whose jurisdiction the property is being developed.
The payment starts from the moment a plan is proposed and it is called a ‘hearing fee’. Thereafter, at every step, a fee has to be paid. So much so, in another city in close proximity to Mumbai, the civic officials do not even visit a site to see if the plinth has been laid only after the pile was on place. The bribes, it is said, make for comfortable working life; no site visits, no trudge on the construction site.
Till the building is ready, a flunky goes to the civic offices from the builder’s. When it is all done, then the bargaining starts for the commencement certificate. It is here that every step the file moves up, the payoff increases.
But the need to build a coffer for these starts from the moment a land is located and is registered if it is not a three-way contract between the builder also known as developer, the land owner and the buyer. Land deal involves cash exchange and which ends only after the builder leaves for a new project.
However, the illegal sale of parking space is not the only war chest. The cost of inputs – rubble, sand, cement, everything else thereafter, are inflated. This over-invoicing helps ensure ready cash for one does not know, new and extra demands from the babudom.
That is why, periodically, the builder-developers keep telling potential buyers that come a cut-off date, the prices per square ft would rise. That is said to be one way to persuade a likely buyer to plump for the offer but those increases are not to neutralise inflation but keep the ready flow of money.
Now you know, why flats remain a dream for many and for those who realise it, it costs more than it ought to. It is not the builder alone who makes them dearer, the officialdom too has a hand in it – including from the office of the registrar of stamps.
The builder-developer shells out Rs 5,000 per sale agreement as ‘scanning charges’ which is the way of telling you that it costs that much to get an appointment and register the document without having to wait in a long queue. Without that, one may as well wait for ever.
The other day, a real estate broker was saying that the registration office in Thane was done up by the brokers. It is a fact that Thane Municipal Corporation’s town planning department offices’ computerization was funded by two builders in Thane. In October last, Loksatta had reported how the builders lobby had set aside Rs 1 cr for ‘development work’, an euphemism, indeed, for getting things done, in Thane.
However, let it not be said that Thane is the only place where these things happen. Look deep in any city and there would be a cesspool. No city is free of it. It is a universal urban phenomenon.
The war on Syria has not only caused tens of thousands of casualties but something much worse is going on. Syrian girls, some as young as 12, are being sold to rich Saudi men who are often in their 60s or 70s. There is a thriving business underway in Jordan that has some 440,000 Syrian refugees.
Conditions in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp are extremely harsh but the Jordanians do not provide help and prevent outside charities also from doing so.
Syrian mothers, their husbands and sons either dead or engaged in war, are unable to earn a living to provide food for their children. The Jordanian regime does not allow them to work despite being part of the gang of conspirators that are supporting the war on Syria. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are providing money and weapons to the rebels, while Jordan offers its territory to be used to train them. British and French mercenaries are actively involved in training al-Qaeda mercenaries to continue their crimes in Syria. The US has also joined this criminal enterprise.
These do-gooders, while talking up the plight of Syrian refugees and using them to whip up hatred against the Bashar al-Asad government, refuse to help the refugees. Instead, by keeping them impoverished, they force Syrian women and girls to be sold to rich Saudis, Qataris and Jordanians. The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily, no friend of the Syrian government, published a front-page story titled ‘They want beautiful girls, the younger the better,’ about the plight of Syrian girls in Jordan. Tales of horror of how young Syrian girls are exploited would send shudder down the spine of any decent human being.
Saudi men, some as old as 70, leer at young girls for a small sum, sometimes as low as $2 to see whether they like them to take them away permanently. The terrible conditions in which the refugees are forced to live, leave the women with little choice but to seek the highest bidder for their young daughters. This disgraceful behavior is being actively and openly promoted even as hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions are spent on waging war against Syria.
Lecherous Saudi men have swarmed into Jordan. They come loaded with cash in search of flesh, the younger the better. In the past, the Saudis gained notoriety when they went to India to fetch 12-year-old brides. Poor Muslim families in India sold their daughters in hopes of a better future for them. These girls were often abused and then discarded. Now, the Saudis have found something closer to home. Syrian girls are pretty and speak with a soft Arabic accent—the best in the Middle East—and the crude Saudis and Qataris with their thick set hands and protruding bellies are salivating at the prospect of finding young Syrian beauties.
Muslims filled with hatred for the Bashar regime should ask themselves: why are their sisters in Syria being forced into prostitution by the very regimes that claim to be supporting the Syrian rebels? Why are the Saudi, Qatari and other Arab regimes not providing financial help to support the refugees if they are so concerned about the plight of Syrians?
One cannot help but contrast the terrible condition of Syrian refugees in Jordan with those in Lebanon where Hizbullah has provided generous help to all refugees. The Hizbullah does not ask about their political affiliations, unlike the Turks and Qataris. There are nearly 430,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. They are not only provided decent shelter but also food and medical care. The hate-filled rebels in Syria consider the Hizbullah an “enemy” yet this enemy is acting in a far more noble manner toward Syrian refugees than their Saudi and Qatari sponsors.
The Syrian rebels, their political leaders and Arabian sponsors—Saudis, Qataris and Turks—have much to answer for.
Early polls are inevitable, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said on Friday, dismissing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh‘s assertion that the government would complete its five-year tenure.
“…The government will not last its full term and and mid-term elections seem to be inevitable,” BJP leader Balbir Punj said.
“Irrespective of what Dr Manmohan Singh says, there is an atmosphere of instability around the government… That is why you have this speculation about mid-term elections,” Punj told reporters.
“This government has lost its mandate to rule the people long back and now its numbers in Lok Sabha are also low. The country is passing through a phase of social and political instability,” he said.
The BJP’s comment comes a day after Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav said at a party meeting that the Lok Sabha polls were likely around November.
However, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he was confident that the government would complete its term, which comes to an end next year around May.
Congress spokesperson Rashid Alvi reiterated the prime minister’s statement to reporters on his way back from Durban.
“Our government is very stable,” Alvi told INN, adding that elections would be held on time in 2014.
Asked about Mulayam Singh’s comments, he said: “It may be his own opinion but it is our considered opinion that elections will be held at the right time.”
The government has been in a tight spot after Trinamool Congress pulled out of the United Progressive Alliance and withdrew support to government last year. The trouble only increased when the DMK announced it withdrawal from the UPA over the issue of Sri Lankan Tamils.
The government is at present dependent on outside support of the Samajwadi party and the Bahujan Samaj Party for its survival.
The government has also dismissed the idea of formation of a Third Front. Congress leader Manish Tewari Thursday called the idea of Third Front an “enduring mirage” of Indian politics.
While the Samajwadi Party has always been a tricky ally, vacillating over its decision to keep supporting the UPA, the buzz that they might finally withdraw support has been getting stronger.
Mulayam Singh Yadav had first raised the chorus after union minister Beni Prasad called him a ‘dacoit’ and ‘terrorist’. A Parliamentary meet was convened which remained inconclusive and the SP issue was overshadowed by the news of a CBI raid on DMK leader Stalin’s properties.
However, Congress seems to be extending an olive branch to the Samajwadi Party given its support is of utmost importance to them if the numbers are anything to go by.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram at a public meeting was heard saying that the UPA is in full support of Uttar Pradesh’s growth plans.
“I had a long discussion with Mulayam Singh Yadav. I told him that the UPA will always back the UP government. We talked about a lot of issues. I have promised to go back to Delhi, discuss them at length and figure out what would be the best possible measures for UP’s development. Following that we will call Mr Yadav and UP officials to Delhi,” said Chidambaram.
Congress minister Manish Tewari added to the UPA’s chorus by calling Mulayam a valuable ally. “We will always support the Uttar Pradesh government. However, Mulayam Singh has to decide whether he wants to be with communal forces or secular forces,” he said.
The latest activity comes even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted that there was a possibility that the SP would withdraw support from the UPA coalition in Parliament.
With the rift between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party out in the open, SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav has said that Lok Sabha elections could be held as early as November this year.
Addressing party workers in Lucknow, Yadav had said: “I have come to know about a confidential report which says that elections will be held in November. You people start preparing for them.”
The statement comes mere hours after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh formally admitted that the SP could withdraw support from the UPA, but reiterated that the government would complete its full term.
The Prime Minister speaking to reporters on Air India One, said ““Well, obviously coalitions face issues. Sometimes, they give the impression that these arrangements are not not very stable arrangements and I cannot deny that such possibilities don’t exist”.
The Samajwadi Party with 22 MPs and BSP with 21 are providing crucial outside support to the government and bailing it out in times of crisis.
The Congress however, seem to be done pandering. On Thursday the party hit back at SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav for accusing it of being “cheat and clever” as it reminded him that he had shared the dais with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when the UPA’s report was released in 2012.
It asked Yadav, whose party is supporting government from outside, to decide whether he was with secular or communal forces as it questioned his praise for BJP veteran LK Advani. “We do not want to comment on the remarks of Mulayam Singh Yadav. He, himself, can explain it best. But only a few months back, Yadav shared the dais with the Prime Minister when the UPA’s report card on its three-year performance was released (last May).
“Now all of a sudden, he is criticising Congress and its leadership and appreciating LK Advani and the NDA, whereas the fact is Advani and other BJP leaders had a role in the demolition of Babri Masjid and the communal riots at Ahmedabad and Godhra that took place during NDA rule,” party spokesperson Rashid Alvi told.
At a time when India has passed a landmark anti-rape bill to curb the growing menace of sexual violence against women, the grim reality of tribal girls from Chhattisgarh shows that the situation on the ground is far from ideal. INN investigation revealed how tribal girls were routinely sexually abused in government run schools and ashrams in remote corners of Chhattisgarh.
Girls were raped and physically abused by the hostel authorities in several cases, the girls admitted on hidden camera. The shocker came when medical tests in January 2013 confirmed 11 girls were sexually abused in Jhaliamari Kanya Ashram in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh.
The ashram came into the news after the death of a 12-year old in the school hostel. Official reports suggested that the girl had died due to a severe case of jaundice though on hidden camera the concerned doctors admitted that the girl did undergo a pregnancy test.
Eight arrests were made after the death of the young girl sparked an outrage. Among the arrested were the teachers, hostel warden and the security guard of the Jhaliamari Kanya Ashram.
Not just that, a 17 year old girl from the same ashram was forced into a sex racket by her own hostel warden Anita Thakur. Incidentally, Anita Thakur was awarded the best hostel warden award in 2013 by the Raman Singh government. It was only after there were protests from several quarters that the police arrested and filed an FIR against her.
What is alarming is the fact that routine sexual abuse went unnoticed for four years when hostel guidelines clearly specify weekly medical check ups for the young students residing in the hostels. The IBN7 investigation revealed that there was no monitoring mechanism at the district level regarding the health check up of these students.
And yet these ashrams were touted to be model hostels and a safe haven for tribal children when they were launched in 2007. This project – Adarsh ashram and chhatravas yojana – received huge funds from the Central government.
The government has promised that a fast track court will be set up to resolve the issue as soon as possible. But the parents who send their children to these schools are not satisfied. “If it can happen to other children today, can the school authorities ensure that it does not happen with my child tomorrow?,” a concerned parent said. With school wardens themselves turning perpetrators, there is little hope that they can cling on to.
Over the past few months, one crisis after the other has gripped India. The problems of coalition politics have paralyzed the reforms process. A campaign against rampant corruption in the government and bureaucracy has brought decision-making in New Delhi to a standstill. Ministers are worried that anything they do -- even a minor policy change produces winners and losers -- will be given the color of corruption later.
The fiscal numbers signal trouble. The GDP growth rate in the January-March quarter has slipped to 5.3%; the earlier expectation was around 8%. The growth in the index of industrial production (IIP) in April was just 0.1%. Interest rates remain too high, choking investment and growth. Rating agencies are taking notice: Standard & Poor’s warns that India could become the first "fallen angel" among the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and Fitch has cut India's rating outlook to negative. All indicators of business confidence reflect the growing gloom. Dilip Gadkar, editor of Macro Viewpoints and CEO of G-Square Capital Management, a hedge fund advisory firm in New York, argues in this opinion piece that these problems are the result of populist politics combined with unsound economics – but India could bounce back faster than the pessimists fear.
India’s perplexingly sudden fall from its growth pedestal is the topic du jour among analysts and reporters. The unkindest cut came from the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s (S&P) which warned that India could be the first BRIC country to be downgraded to “junk.” The S&P report was direct in placing the blame: "The division of roles between a politically-powerful Congress party president [Sonia Gandhi], who can take credit for the party's two recent national election victories, and an appointed prime minister [Manmohan Singh] has weakened the framework for making economic policy, in our view."
We say “perplexingly” because analysts and reporters seem surprised by the fall. Frankly, in our opinion, it was guaranteed. The reality is that the story of today’s fall of the Indian economy was written in 2009 and it so happened.
The May 2009 Election
The 2009 election was a huge victory for Sonia Gandhi, president of India’s Congress Party. For the first time since 1972, the incumbent party and prime minister were re-elected. This election delivered absolute power to Sonia Gandhi. She reappointed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but restructured the rest of the cabinet. Most analysts missed the message that the policies of India would now be Sonia Gandhi’s policies and not those of Manmohan Singh. And Sonia Gandhi’s policies were a modern version of Indira Gandhi’s economic policy after her huge election victory in 1971.
Yet, analysts and observers kept waiting for Prime Minister Singh to introduce economic reforms that would free up the private sector. They are still waiting. They should have remembered the 1971 campaign slogan of Indira Gandhi -- “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty). That is exactly what Sonia Gandhi set out to do.
Noble Aims and the Credit Boom of 2009-2010
Recently, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, described the euro as a “noble but failed experiment.” These words could just as easily be used for Sonia Gandhi’s policies. Supported by her shadow cabinet of social activists, she launched programs that guaranteed monthly cash payments to hundreds of millions of India’s poor. These programs did not create jobs or much-needed infrastructure. They simply delivered cash.
This was easy to do in 2009 and 2010. The global rally in risk assets and the lure of secular high growth drove a flood of foreign capital into India. The distribution of free money worked well in the short term. Indians love to spend and rural spending drove up India’s growth rate. The uniqueness of the rural growth story drove more capital into India.
The intermediate-term consequences were becoming visible by 2011. Thanks to the distribution of free money, workers from poor states like Bihar refused to travel to prosperous Punjab to help in agriculture or to industrial states like Maharashtra for construction or manufacturing jobs. This undermined labor migration, an underlying strength of India’s economy.
Handing out monthly cash payments to millions of people is the time honored recipe for inflation, structurally high inflation. Not content with giving out cash, Sonia Gandhi’s advisers planned a food security program to guarantee a minimum level of food (or its price in cash) to about 61% of Indians. The mere announcement of this program launched food inflation into a higher orbit.
The years 2009-2010 represented good times with foreign capital flowing in and everyone in the Congress looked forward to an even greater election victory in the 2012 state elections and then in the 2014 national elections.
Rise of Inflation and the Credit Bust of 2011-2012
The combination of the credit bubble, unprecedented distribution of cash to millions of people, and the lack of critical infrastructure for food distribution led to skyrocketing food inflation in India. So the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) went into action in late 2010 with an aggressive campaign to raise interest rates. Not surprisingly, November 2010 marked the peak of the Indian stock market.
Unfortunately, that was like performing heart surgery to cure a kidney malfunction. The interest rate hikes slowed down India’s industrial production and led to urban unemployment. But the RBI and the Indian Cabinet were powerless to reduce Sonia Gandhi’s delivery of cash into the hands of millions. As a result, food inflation kept rising and industrial production began slowing as the RBI kept raising interest rates. The result is today’s stagflationary bust in India.
As the luster of India’s growth story dimmed and the stock market stopped delivering gains, foreign capital began leaving India. This created a very serious problem for the Indian government which relies on capital inflows to make up the balance of payment deficits. When Europe’s debt problems shocked the world in late 2011, the outflow of foreign capital from India became a flood and the rupee collapsed by 20% in one single month -- November 2011.
Unfortunately, India’s brains trust considered this rupee collapse as merely an accident. So did non-residents Indians and most foreign investors. To them, the fundamentals of India’s growth story were sound and secular. They sent in more than US$5 billion in capital into India in January 2012. Global investors went back into risky assets in the first quarter of 2012, the Indian stock market rose by 18% in the first seven weeks of the year, and the Indian rupee rose by 10% to recover half of its November 2011 loss. So India, ever complacent and self-rejoicing, decided the worst was over.
March 2012 Elections and the May Debacle
In pursuing these populist policies, Sonia Gandhi’s goal was to ensure the accession of her son Rahul Gandhi to the prime minister’s seat. The critical first step was to win the pivotal state elections in March 2012, especially in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. The expectation was that the electorate, especially the poor, rural electorate, would remember the monthly cash payments delivered to them and elect the Congress Party led by Rahul Gandhi. Unfortunately, he lost and lost big. Following the defeat, Congress Party members have begun to question the power of the Gandhi lineage. The result has been infighting within the Congress and the Indian cabinet.
The anger and fury had to be directed against somebody and the government needed revenue right away. The obvious targets were foreign institutional investors. The Government targeted Vodafone despite a Supreme Court ruling in its favor. The Government raised the specter of retroactive taxation on capital gains realized by foreign investors in prior years.
Just as India’s finance ministry began its ill-conceived attack on foreign investors, global markets began their downturn in May 2012. This time, everyone realized the long-term problems India faces.
Foreign capital again resumed its flight out of India. The rupee did not collapse this time, but it went on an unrelenting selloff, which was worse. The despair in India was palpable. The Indian growth story was officially over. To use S&P’s metaphor, the angel’s wings were clipped.
Growing New Wings
What could go right for India? Could the country, the first emerging market to fall, become the first to rise again?
I believe this could happen – for several reasons. Frankly, the steep fall in the rupee has been a blessing for India. The country is as much of a fiscal mess as any among Europe’s PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). But it has the flexibility of a free currency. There is no question that India is much more attractive at Rs. 55 to the U.S. Dollar than at Rs. 44.
A global slowdown might actually make India more attractive than other emerging markets that rely on exports, chiefly commodity exports. In contrast, India benefits from falling commodity prices. A fall in oil and agricultural commodities could cool down Indian inflation and allow the RBI to cut interest rates. These cyclical factors could add to the real structural strength of the Indian economy and boost consumer demand.
Contrast this with China where, according to a Financial Times article, “demand is fading fast.” The article states, “With demand weak… to many parts of the economy…[this] feels like deflation, as corporates appear to be losing pricing power….At this moment… the economy needs a new structural breakthrough.” Other emerging markets, dependent on commodity exports, could suffer from China’s waning demand. This makes India’s real, secular, structural consumer demand story both unique and attractive.
So India, the first BRIC and major emerging market to fall, could end up being the first to recover with a cyclically positive story of low inflation, falling interest rates and the structurally positive story of secular demand. America, the first country to suffer a credit bust in 2008, is widely recognized today as the first economy to emerge from the bust. India could end up being the first economy to come out of a global emerging market bust.
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