EDITORIAL: INDIAN CRICKET FACING 'CREDIBLITY CRISIS'

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

Ironically, the most shocking thing about the spot fixing scandal that has rocked the Indian Premier League is that it may not have come as a rude shock to too many in the game. For, the moral vacuousness of IPL’s agenda -- packaging dumbed-down entertainment as sport with the sole aim of making money -- had left plenty of room for shady dealings of this kind.

Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, the banality of evil, may not be out of place in the context of the popular League and the mephitic cloud of corruption under which it has prospered.

EDITORIAL: ALWAYS CHANGE IS BETTER IN DEMOCRACY

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

Time for a stable, effective government that can put Karnataka back on centre stage. The verdict is clear. The people of Karnataka have had enough of a regime accused of indulging in corruption and partisan misgovernance. By electing the Congress with a clear majority, the electorate has expressed its desire for a viable administration. After nine years of opportunistic coalitions and lack of good governance, it wants a dispensation that works not for cronies and ideological affiliates, but for the people at large. 

EDITORIAL: 'MADENNING' TRINAMOOL RUNS AGROUND

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

The collapse of Saradha Group, promoted by Sudipta Sen, is the greatest threat yet to Mamata  Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress regime in Bengal. It could also imperil the finances of millions of  people in Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa and eastern Uttar Pradesh. 
    
Trinamool’s blatant association with the bigwigs of Saradha, which raised vast amounts of money  from poor people before collapsing, is a potentially fatal political body blow. Saradha could drag  many more Ponzi schemes down with it. 

PONZI SCHEMES: WHY THERE WILL BE MORE SUCKER?

Despite tighter vigilance, Ponzi schemes have been sprouting like weeds in dirty patches. Our inability to punish the guilty quickly emboldens them. Ponzi schemes are keep coming back one after the other.

Only some time back we were talking about the Stockguru ponzi scheme. Before that the emu ponzi scheme and Speak Asia had been in the news. More recently the MMM Ponzi scheme and Saradha chit fund have taken up a lot of news space.

MMM India recently put itself into what it calls a calm regime where operations like money transfer will remain suspended and hence those who have put money into the scheme won’t be able to withdraw it. The Saradha Chit fund has collapsed.

EDITORIAL: WHY LAW ALONE WON'T DETER RAPISTS?

By M H Ahssan / Hyderabad

The nation is fooled into yet another rape-outrage-rape cycle.

As usual, Sonia Gandhi, the most influential woman in India, spoke like an opposition leader by saying that “action and not words are needed” while the responsibility to do it lay with her own party.

Her party’s home minister launched himself into another round of all-too-familiar officialese that is packed with promises of action and punishment.

Fighting fatigue of serial protests since the Hazare days, students, activists and angry citizens poured into the streets pushing down police barricades and demanding more punishment, more stringent laws and more hanging.

BANGALORE BLAST, A TERRORIST ATTACK OR POLITICAL PLOT?

The lone blast outside the BJP office in Bangalore yesterday sparked the usual flurry of media overkill. There was the usual, knee-jerk speculation about jihadis, Islamic terror, blah blah. This is, of course, par for course these days in the aftermath of a bombing, be it in Boston or Bangalore.

What makes the recent Bangalore incident an exception, however, is that it almost instantly triggered a flurry of political name-calling — an activity usually suspended in the immediate aftermath of a suspected terrorist attack. As wildly inaccurate rumours of multiple blasts circulated online, Congress party spokesman Shakeel Ahmad shot off his Twitter mouth: “If the blast near BJP’s office is a terror attack, it will certainly help BJP politically on the eve of election.” The allegation in turned spawned its BJP mirror, ie the Congress party staged the attack to consolidate the minority vote.

Wikileaks Cables: 'Real Evidence' Or 'Just Gossip' Of The Times?

Early on the morning of September 21, 1965, six English Electric Canberra bombers flew low over Sindh, hugging the parched earth on a near-impossible mission to knock out Pakistan’s critical radar station at Badin. Badin’s monitored air traffic over Bhuj, Uttarlai, Jamnagar and Jaisalmer, crippling India’s offensive capabilities. Not surprisingly, the radar station was ferociously defended on the ground. The Indian Air Force pilots also faced lethal adversaries in the air. Pakistan was operating F-104A interceptors, the only type on both sides equipped with a radar, and F-86F jets armed with AIM-9B Sidewinder missiles. Incredibly, the raid succeeded.

Five years after the Badin raid, the IAF set about searching for a deep penetration strike aircraft to replace its ageing Canberra fleet—an aircraft that could hit targets deep inside Pakistan, until then sheltered by distance, without exposing its pilots to the incredible risks they faced.

Leaked United States diplomatic cables, purporting to show Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi acted as an “entrepreneur” or middleman for Swedish manufacturer Saab, have now sparked off a furious debate about how that critical aircraft acquisition was actually conducted.  The cables also record speculation that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was fronting for the BAC-111—a commercial jet then competing for a lucrative Indian Airlines contract.

For all the media fuss, though close reading of the cables shows they don’t actually tell us that much. Saab lost out on the combat jet deal, and the BAC-111 to the Boeing 737. There is lots of smoke, but no fire—not even, so to speak, the hint of a cigar.

The Saab cables consist of the kind of gossip and innuendo that swirls around all big business deals.  In the October 1975 cable naming Rajiv Gandhi, for example, a Swedish informant tells the United States embassy that the “decision would be between Mirage and Viggen”. The very next month, though, in November, 1975, a British high commission official told his United States counterparts that “the British Jaguar is still very much in running”.  In January, 1976, Defence Minister Bansi Lal discussed terms and delivery schedules with British high commissioner Michael Walker. Though Lal underlined the French were still in the running, he did not mention Saab. Now, according to the United States embassy, the Swedes were “the least optimistic”.

Washington decided in August, 1976, it would not allow Saab to sell to India, objecting to Sweden handing over the “advanced United States technology represented in the Viggen’s aerodynamic design, engine and flying controls, navigation system, electronic components and weapons systems”. It’s clear from the January, 1976, cable, though, it’s clear Saab was already pretty much out of the race by then.

The cables—which were actually been declassified since 2006, as their right-hand columns record, and have since been available on microfilm—also do not assert that Rajiv Gandhi was fronting for Saab.

In one cable, a Swedish diplomat tells the United States mission in New Delhi that that the “main Indian negotiator” was “Mrs. Gandhi’s ol[d]er son, Rajiv Gandhi”. Swedish diplomats, the cable records, “understand the importance of family influences in the final decision”. Based on this information, the cable’s author observed that this was the first time the United States embassy had heard of Rajiv Gandhi acting as an “entrepreneur”. “We would”, it adds “have thought a transport pilot [is] not the best expert to rely upon in evaluating a fighter plan, but then we are speaking of a transport pilot who has another and perhaps more relevant qualification”.

These remarks are editorial comments on information—snark, if you wish. They demonstrate an arguably prescient contempt for Rajiv Gandhi’s capabilities and probity, but nothing more.

France, the United States and Sweden all believed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her sons would make the final decision on the contract—not the Indian Air Force. New Delhi-based French diplomats asserted Indira Gandhi would make the decision on “polio cal [political?] grounds”. For France, this was good news: a long-standing Indian ally, it was seen by New Delhi as relatively independent of the United States. It should also have been good news for the Swedes if they had Rajiv Gandhi behind them—but the United States embassy’s Swedish informant “expressed irritation at the way Mrs Gandhi is personally dominating the negotiations”.

The totality of the cables, though, show the British assessment was the closest to the truth: the IAF was calling the shots. Walker, for one, was certain that the Jaguar was “the favourite of the IAF”.

Perhaps, like any shrewd negotiator, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, fed competitors with rumours about their prospects, inducing them to better their bids.  Her strategy, if that was it, worked.

To understand the IAF’s thinking, context is key. The race for a Canberra replacement had begun in 1970, when the Soviet Union offered India the Tupelov-22—a medium-range supersonic bomber which had just entered service in 1962. The aircraft was capable of carrying up to 9,000 kilograms of ordnance almost 5,000 kilometres at speeds of up Mach 1.42. The Indian Air Force had earlier flown the Tu-22’s non-supersonic predecessor, the Tu16, using it as a modified VIP transport for Indira Gandhi.  Her relationship with the Soviet Union was excellent; the Soviet Union, moreover, accepted rupee payment.  In 1971, though, air-marshal Shivdev Singh visited Moscow to study the Tu-22—and found it wanting.

Not all in the government were happy with this call—but the air force judgment proved correct. The Tu-22 suffered from a number of technical problems, as well as serviceability issues. More than 70 of the 311 Tu-22’s produced crashed.

The war of 1971 hammered home the need to move forward, and fast: the Canberras, though excellent for their time, were too exposed.  From 1973 to 1976, the air force studied the options.  The gold standard, at the time, was the General Dynamics F-111, but India’s fraught relationship with the United States meant that option was closed.  With the Tu-22 out of the race, three combat jets were left in contention—the SEPECAT Jaguar, the Saab Viggen, and the Dassault Mirage F1.

Each aircraft had advantages. The F1 had better air defence capabilities—something appreciated by Canberra pilots, who had been forced to fly hugging the ground at night to avoid Pakistani missiles. The Saab was the first aircraft to incorporate both afterburners and thrust-reversers. From the air force point of view, says retired Air Vice-Marshal Kapil Kak, the Jaguar was however the top pick. Its two engines, like the Canberra, gave it range and payload advantages.

Three successive IAF chiefs—Om Prakash Mehra from 1973 to 1976, Hrushikesh Moolgavkar on 1976 to 1978, and IH Latif, from 1978 t0 1981—all backed the Jaguar. Their pressure proved decisive. Prime Minister Morarji Desai, who came to power in 1977, gave the final go-ahead  In February 1979, a team visited the United Kingdom to firm-up the deal.  The United Kingdom agreed to hold back equipping its own combat squadrons to meet India’s needs. Eighteen Royal Air Force Jaguars were loaned to the Indian Air Force, until production aircraft came off the assembly lines.  The first two loaned aircraft became operational on July 27, 1979.

In 1980, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi briefly threatened to review the deal, amidst swirling rumours that Prime Minister Desai’s son, Kanti Desai, had received kickbacks. She never went through with the threat, though.

So what do the cables tell us? For one, the New Delhi of the mid-1970s was a lot like New Delhi today: connections, or the appearance of connections, mattered.  They also tell us, though, that connections didn’t always swing things. Saab didn’t ever have a real chance of winning the deep penetration strike aircraft contract, and the Boeing 737 sailed through into the Indian Airlines fleet. It is entirely possible any of the winners would have passed on kickbacks to the ruling party—leaving it free to purchase the best equipment on offer.

There is one important thing, though, that the fallout from the release of the cables shows: how little evidence it now takes to persuade Indians that wrong-doing has occurred.  The media nudge-nudge reporting must get blame for this frenzy. However, Prime Ministers  from Indira Gandhi to Manmohan Singh must share the bigger part of the blame for engendering this culture of suspicion.

Editorial: The Importance Of Being Indian

Despite its warts, India’s democracy has fired global imagination for over six decades. It is not the politest thing to do, but it has to be done. We need to drop Brics, or at least not take it too seriously, and step out on our own. Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa may look a little like us, but deep down this resemblance is superficial. Brics is a catch-up club that turns to richer, fatter countries for inspiration, but India, in many ways, is inspiration itself. 
    
When India dared to birth democracy, many thought it was premature and that it would soon be history. Sixty-six action-filled years later, India’s democracy is now a little too old to die young. What is more, the world watches every move we make; in fact, cannot have enough of us. This is not because India is efficient and affluent – far from it. Rather, it is the way India goes wrong that fires global imagination. 
    
In any other country of comparative vintage and want, ethnicity, once introduced, would have run wild. Indian politicians too have repeatedly played this dirty trick, but our democracy has limited its appeal. The ultra corrupt may be ultra rich but because of India’s judiciary and the press they often wake up in jail to swill bad tea. Even army officers might face court martial if they mess with the rules. Political bosses, and their cronies, are forever bending and twisting the law, but for all their power and pelf, they can never quite ignore it. 
    
Indian politicians err time and again, but their overbites serve as object lessons because procedures hold. This not only pulls us out of periodic crises with a just-backfrom-the-dentist feel, but also tells the world, the advanced West included, how easily democracy can be lost. If India had been another underperforming tin-pot dictatorship, it would not have been the thought experiment it is today. 
    
Take a look at the following: 
Corruption, assaults and political conspiracies happen worldwide, but when they strike India they excite the mind like nothing else. For example, South Africa is 
a serious centre of gang rapes, or “jack rolling” in the local lingo, but that does not cause an international stir. Yet the news of the December rape and murder in Delhi ricocheted within minutes across the world. 
    
This was not because the protests were passionate, or because the police should have gone to a finishing school. What was being observed was whether our Constitution would hold. Eventually it did; false cases were withdrawn and, boorish cops notwithstanding, no bullets were fired. 
    
Ethnic intolerance again is an international affliction. When Putin tells Russian minorities to put up or shut up he gets a standing ovation at home and hardly any press abroad. In Burma, Rohingya Muslims foxhole themselves in fear, but that does not make big news. With India it is different. If the western world was horrified with the 2002 Gujarat killings, it was because our free press and civil society, also gifts of democracy, brought things out in the open. 
    
Corruption in China is monumental. It periodically fells bridges and schools, killing hundreds. Brazil has a homicide rate three times higher than India’s and political violence in Russia is just too bad to be true. The world may condemn all of this, and it does. However, it is only when India goes wrong that tongues wag the mind just about everywhere. 
    
That India can make this happen again and again is what makes us special. Had we been too perfect, we would be Scandinavia, and nothing unique. On the other hand, had we been too violent, we would have been just another Honduras, or maybe Zimbabwe. But because our stubborn democracy has held to its frame, our leadership blunders light up the sky. This is our real USP! 
    
India’s imperfections make for its significance. In terms of economic underdevelopment and dodgy politicians, we have a fair amount in common with many troubled nations, some of whom are our neighbours. But even in the darkest of times, we hardly expect military coups and mass arrests, as they do. To their credit, millions of Chinese bloggers also noticed that Delhi’s anti-rape agitations did not turn Vijay Chowk into a Tiananmen Square. 
    
Advanced democracies too owe us a debt of gratitude. For years India has acted as a not-forprofit laboratory so that they might remember the fundamentals of citizenship that made them rich and kept them that way. It is now payback time and they should tell us how exactly they set up universal health and education that served their citizens so well. 
    
When democracies reach out to each other this way, the world becomes a better place and friendships stay secure. This is something that neither G-20 nor Brics meets can do as it is in the nature of the economic beast to cross wires and compete. For starters, South Africa is as unhappy with Brazilian chickens flying in as it is with China’s promiscuity with other African countries. The distant hope of a Brics Development Bank or of currency swaps will not blow these fears out of the water. 
    
Indian politicians could also do us a favour by occasionally learning from their mistakes. The importance of being Indian would then become obvious to all. 

Sanjay Dutt - The Tragic Arc Of A Falling Star

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.

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.

Liyaqat Case, And A Flawed Idea Of Special Courts For Muslims

It didn’t need the drama over the arrest of Liaqat Shah, who is caught in a tug-of-war between the Delhi Police and the Jammu and Kashmir government authorities over whether he was returning from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to plot terror or start his life anew, to remind us of a problem in our security agencies’ response to terror attacks and conspiracies.

The problem is this: anecdotal evidence of innocent people being framed or falsely implicated in terror cases is abnormally high. In Liaqat Shah’s case, even if one acknowledges that the truth of his circumstances is yet to be established, the two versions that have been trotted out are so widely contradictory that it is evident that one of them is a pack of lies.

The Delhi Police stands by its claim that Liaqat Shah was returning from PoK via Nepal to India in order to unleash urban jihad in Delhi on the lines of the November 2008 attack on Mumbai.  But as INN has noted, the Delhi Police narrative is so full of holes that it is hard to take it seriously. Yet, their officials continue to trot out “incriminating evidence” that makes a mockery of their claim: the latest  they have is that Liaqat Shah had  known Hizh-ul-Mujahideen militants on speed dial on his mobile phone.

Jammu and Kashmir authorities on the other hand insist that Liaqat Shah was returning with his family under a ‘rehabilitation’ scheme for reformed ‘militants’. If that version bears out as true – and Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has promised an investigation by the National Intelligence Agency to establish that – it’s fair to say Liaqat Shah is being framed under false pretences.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem of security agencies influencing investigations into terror cases with their own agenda – or, at any rate, of being less than professional. Far too often, the kneejerk response of police and investigating agencies is to round up the “usual suspects”. As INN has noted, this has led, in many cases, to innocent Muslims being falsely implicated on terror charges. As happened in the Mecca Masjid blast case of 2007, the entire evidence against those who were arrested and had served jail term was a house of cards that collapsed in court. And yet, right after the blasts in Hyderabad in February this year, investigators were looking to round up the “usual suspects” again.

The Union Home Ministry’s decision to set up special courts to conduct speedy trials in cases where innocent people are falsely implicated in terror cases is, therefore, not without intrinsic merit. Even given the challenges that security agencies face in investigating terror cases, falsely implicating  innocent people in terror cases is a perversion of the law. Even if, in the end, the courts acquit them and establish their innocence, nothing can take away from the injustice of being incarcerted in jail for years – and the taint of being branded for years as a suspected terrorist.

The Home Minister has noted that arresting innocent people and keeping them in custody – knowing that they were innocent – is a serious a crime.  He has also promised strong action against officers responsible for such false cases. So far so good.

But where the Union Home Ministry, or the Minority Affairs Ministry (which proposed the establishment of special courts), err is in limiting these proposed special courts to take on only the cases of innocent Muslims. Even if one acknowledges that the preponderance of such cases relate to innocent Muslims – and investigative reports in the media have established that beyond doubt – a proposal to establish special courts for Muslims alone certainly tests the limits of constitutional propriety and makes for bad political optics.

As this editorial points out, the intended special courts and the mechanisms that sustain them ought to be carefully thought through so that nothing transpires to boomerang on the good intent that underlies it. These courts “should be aimed primarily at clearing a backlog, not serve as a long-term prophylactic against future mis-steps by the law enforcement and investigating agencies.” And the intent of framing such a measure must be to catalyse administrative and police reform by ridding the system of social prejudice, and upgrading investigative procedures.

Far too often, political considerations have led parties to embrace potentially unconstitutional positions as a quick-fix to address what are genuine problems in society. That way only lies ruin, and the possibility that a flawed approach can undermine the larger objective.

Constitutional propriety demands that special courts that take up the cases of innocent people arrested on false charges in terror cases should be blind to the religious background of the falsely accused. By narrowing the focus in the way it proposes to, the government is guilty of the same social prejudic that investigators and law-enforcement agencies stand accused of.

Bypass Surgery: Harder Operation, Safer Option

New Study Says Bypass Surgery Is Better Than Angioplasty For Heart Patients With Diabetes. Surgery or stent? Bucking the popular trend, a comprehensive study shows surgery is better, particularly for diabetics suffering from advanced coronary heart disease (CHD). Such patients are more likely to live longer, healthier lives after a heart bypass than after an angioplasty. The finding is particularly significant for India, the diabetes capital of the world, where one-third of all heart patients are diabetic. 
    
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) following a trial funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The trial, one of the largest till now on the subject, involved 1900 patients with diabetes, all in their early sixties. While half of them had bypass surgery — medically known as coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) — the rest underwent multivessel angioplasty with drugeluting stents (also known as percutaneous coronary intervention or PCI). These patients were followed up for five years. 
    

The study concluded that for diabetic patients with advanced (predominantly three-vessel) CHD, bypass surgery was superior as it significantly reduced rates of death (10.9% vs 16.9%) and heart attack (6% vs 13.9%). However, of those undergoing a bypass, 5.2% suffered a stroke compared to 2.4% of those who underwent an angioplasty. 

“These results are consistent with the findings of multiple previous trials comparing CABG and PCI in 
patients with diabetes,” stated an NEJM editorial on the subject. Prof Balram Bhargava of the cardiology department at AIIMS was one of the authors of the study. He says the trial, involving such a large number of patients and such a long follow-up, finally lays the debate — open heart versus stenting — to rest, at least for diabetic patients with advanced CHD. “Open-heart surgery is not as daunting an option as it used to be and has evolved greatly over the years. In AIIMS, we have 11 operation theatres where we do three open hearts per theatre or 33 surgeries every day. It is a robust alternative,” he says. 
    
An angioplasty specialist himself, Dr Bhargava points out that the study shows the importance of “team approach” in diagnosing and treating coronary disease rather than just the cardiologist deciding which patient he would send for surgery and which one he would do stenting on. It has to be a combined decision of the cardiologist and the cardiac surgeon, particularly in the case of diabetics, he adds. 
    

There have been major advances in stenting procedures. Yet, studies have consistently shown a trend towards more frequent “major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events” in diabetics who underwent stenting. In spite of this, the procedure is becoming increasingly the more preferred option, observed the editorial. 
    
Why is this so? “Many PCIs today are ad hoc procedures, performed at the time of diagnostic coronary angiography, with the same physician making the diagnosis, recommending the treatment and performing the procedure. There is little time for informed discussion about alternative treatment options, either medical therapy on the one hand or CABG on the other,” stated the editorial, adding that diabetic patients ought to be informed about the potential survival benefits of open-heart surgery for treatment of severe heart disease. 
    
Ideally, the discussion ought to start before the angiography so the patient has time to digest the information, discuss with family members and also with a multidisciplinary heart team before making an informed decision, advised the NEJM editorial. 
    
“The patient should not be taken in for an ad hoc angioplasty. At the time, he/she is under too much pressure to make an informed decision. It has to be a more elective procedure,” explains Dr Bhargava. 
    

But for now, most patients are harried and hurried by their doctors into getting one or more stents soon after an angiography. The profit margins may leave little scope for discussion. 

MATTERS OF HEART 

• LETHAL MIX - 61.3 million people over 20 are diabetic in India More than one-third of India’s heart patients are diabetic 
• TAKING THE BYPASS - First performed in India in 1975 In mid-1990s, 10,000 surgeries annually; now 1 lakh per year 
• BALLOONING OPTION - In 2011, 1.2 lakh angioplasties performed; 2 lakh stents placed Stent market growing at 22-25% per year in India Docs say chances of blockage recurrence higher in angioplasty than after bypass. In diabetics, chances 3 times higher Surgery considered better in cases where all three major arteries are involved

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The Age Of Innocence - 'Pre Marital Sex'

Pre-marital sex and teenagers fooling around is just not Indian, said the old men of Parliament as they set the age of consent at 18. But who will pay for our politicians’ coyness.

Three years ago, Akshay, a 14-year-old from a posh Delhi school, rolled his eyes at me when I asked him if he was a virgin. “These ideas are outdated man, what’s the big deal about sex? It made sense to me to do it, so I did it,” he had smirked. This week, it did become a big deal. Akshay, like several of the children I’d interviewed for INN cover story on the highly sexualised lives of urban schoolchildren, could go to jail for engaging in sexual activity below the newly appointed age of consent (AoC), 18.

In 2010, INN found that age was more than just a number to several young people — it was a ticking stopwatch in the race to outdo each other in the bedroom (and school toilets, parent-free homes, parked cars and occasionally hotel rooms). Through interviews across Delhi, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Mumbai, we met terrifyingly sexual creatures of all shapes and sizes — nine-year-olds who distributed porn in class (spiral-bound and printed in booklets), 12-year-olds already visiting shrinks for relationships that had turned sour (because their parents discovered them having oral sex), 14-year-olds who had photographed themselves in the nude, made videos of their accomplishments and passed them around for classmates to cackle over and 16-year-olds who had impregnated 19-year-olds (and knew exactly “how to take care of it”).

If these stories make you balk, you should be even more worried because, as of 2013, you may never hear them again. That the forbidden held an irresistible lure for children trying hard to be adults (as well as for childish adults) was no surprise even then. But the anti-rape Bill passed in Parliament this week, which sets the official AoC at 18 years of age, will not, as the government hopes, prevent statutory rape. Nor will it, as several parents are praying, stop children from having sex. Instead, it will teach children to be more ‘adult’ than before by teaching them how to hide their crimes better.

While the question of what the correct age of consent should be has perplexed countries more liberal than ours for years, it has rarely affected individual decisions to engage in sexual activity. Deciding on an age of consent purports to protect the young from sexual predators by decreeing that a person below a certain age is too vulnerable to provide consent, therefore any kind of sexual act performed on them is done, most likely, through physical force, intimidation or emotional manipulation. Though the frightening picture of Humbert Humbert coaxing Lolita into sleep with his “purple pills” might rouse the mind to rightful indignation, it is harder to define how (and if at all) the law should step in when the picture involves two hormone-crazed young people furtively discovering each other’s bodies in the dark cool of a movie theatre.

In 2012, a survey revealed that 40 percent of our population was below the age of 18. As a result of this alarming statistic, combined with the epidemic of child abuse in India, a panicked judiciary set about drafting the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), revising its definition of a child to an individual below 18 years of age from 16, which had been the AoC according to the Indian Penal Code (IPC) since 1983. Soon after, the AoC was revised to 16 once again until, following the outcry after 16 December 2012, a blustering ordinance set about remedying anti-rape laws by raising the AoC back to 18.

The reason that confusion ensued — bleeding straight into last week’s Parliament session on the anti-rape Bill — is because the age of consent has very little to do with the horrific incident that caused the initial furore over rape laws. According to the IPC, sex between two individuals, if proved to be non-consensual, would result in the perpetrator being tried for rape regardless of his age. If the rapist was a minor, as in the case of Accused number 6 in the Delhi gangrape case, he would be tried under the Juvenile Justice Act. Therefore, as activists realised, the only possible fallout of raising the AoC to 18 would be to legitimise self-appointed moral custodians like the Sri Ram Sene goons, Operation Majnu thugs and Shiv Sena activists telling young people how they ought to live. In a protectionist culture high on victim-blame, this could only alienate the young and sexually active further, making them soft targets for more violence and social ostracisation.

Things were further garbled by what lawyer Rebecca John calls a “shrill electronic media”, which turned the AoC debate into a campaign that encouraged pre-marital sex. “Suddenly, the issue became whether or not we should let our young daughters have sex. Women’s groups were depicted as encouraging rampant juvenile sex. What we really needed to address was — if our children do have sex, should they be thrown into jail for it?” says Kirti Singh, a human rights advocate. Singh, whose primary area of study has been tracking how developing nations arrived at their official Ages of Consent, and how these have been indicative of their changing social attitudes, believes that raising the AoC to 18 is “a deeply conservative political move”, since most countries in the world have agreed on an AoC between 14 and 16 years of age. 

Others, like Canada and the UK, are currently debating whether the AoC should be lowered further, keeping in mind the fact that children now attain puberty faster than they did 10 years ago, and therefore, start becoming sexually curious much before they are able to rightfully consent. While David Cameron has famously rejected the suggestion as being “outrageous”, given the increasing number of teenage pregnancies in the UK, healthcare practitioners have begun to feel that, alternately, lowering the AoC might give children much needed access to contraception and sex education from an earlier age.

In India, there are other, more fatal considerations that must be borne in mind before allowing young people to make a choice. All India Progressive Women’s Association secretary Kavita Krishnan confessed last week that she was worried about the ramifications the AoC would have on India’s high incidence of honour killings. “Every second day, I read about a father or a brother who has cut off a young girl’s head, brandishing it before the police with pride in the belief that he has defended his family’s honour. Raising the AoC gives them yet another reason, apart from caste and honour, to punish girls for choosing their partners,” 

Krishnan said in a video editorial. John, a senior advocate, activist and mother to a 16-year-old, says that she has lost count of the number of habeas corpus petitions lodged with courts daily by parents seeking to criminalise sexual activity between their teenaged children. Unsurprisingly, these parents are usually fathers trying to protect the virginity of their female child. “This is an age group where activities of this sort are almost always consensual. Raising the AoC to 18 is not, as most people seem to think, an ethical or moral decision, but a legal one. Do we want to treat all consensual sex between teenagers as statutory rape?” she asks.

INN cover story had found that while young people were highly cued into the sexual lessons that pop culture was feeding them — through Bollywood films, American serials or even Bhojpuri songs — they failed to pick up crucial lessons on safe sex practices and how to distinguish a ‘bad touch’ from a ‘good’ one. Child psychologists in the UK have argued that with an AoC as late as 16 or 18 children who have attained puberty at 13 or 14 and are experiencing sexual curiosity would be more vulnerable to abuse. Child psychiatrist Shelja Sen agrees that raising the AoC could make “already secretive teenagers” even more wary of seeking out medical advice or counselling, even if they are being abused, because “where they once feared merely their parents finding out, they will now fear being sent to jail for something they naturally assume is ‘their fault’.”

Unlike the tired trope that politicians peddle, that all sexual licentiousness is learnt from the West, what one could learn from countries like Australia or Canada is to protect children’s natural curiosity, expressed through teenage love and often sexual experimentation, while protecting them from abuse. It would help to realise that much like children have found ways to drink, smoke or drive their parents’ cars in spite of being told not to, they will find means to sexual pleasure. In which case, it might be better to help them assimilate the fragmented and distorted ideas of sex they receive daily through badnaam munnis, ads for vaginal tightening gels and newspaper reports on rape.

One way that western countries have found around criminalising the natural sexual curiosity of the young, which women’s groups in India are fighting for, is the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ defence, whereby sexual relations between two minors are only considered to be statutory rape if one partner is significantly (three-to-five years, depending on the country) older than the other. Yet, ironically, a recent example of how a culture hyper-vigilant about abuse and protecting the rights of the young could still go awry is the instance of the Steubenville boys. The all-star football players, with “bright and promising futures” had undoubtedly received enough information on what separates the ‘good touch’ from the ‘bad’. 

Yet, it did not prevent them from dragging an unconscious 16-year-old from party to party, raping her repeatedly while posting photographs of her, naked and helpless, on social media. Contrast these high-achieving delinquents with Accused number 6, reportedly the most brutal of that gang of six in New Delhi, who was also below the age of consent when he raped a 23-year-old girl. As the most notorious juvenile in the country, we know more and more about him than we care to — his father was mentally challenged, he had to care for five siblings all of whom were younger than him, he had run away from home a long time ago and was broke on 16 December, when he met the prime accused Ram Singh and set out on a joyride with his friends.

While none of these facts — the bright futures of the Steubenville boys, or the bleak one in store for Accused number 6 — alter their total disregard for the consequences of their actions, what is clear is the deep sense of alienation, entitlement and misogyny the young can imbibe if they do not receive sex-positive messages from adults around them. Niveda Deepak, a school teacher at New Delhi’s Amity International and the mother of two young daughters feels that the system puts too much pressure on whether or not the young are sexually active, when it should worry about whether the child has received enough atte ntion and support at home to be able to work through his urges. “What purpose could banishing a sexually active teenaged boy to jail serve, apart from turning sex into more of a taboo for him, and convincing him that it is something that must be snatched? How could it teach him to respect women when he will only live to hate the moment he had sex, maybe even the moment he was in love, as the moment that turned him into a sex offender for life?” she asks.

Playwright JB Priestley once wrote, “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.” It is apparent that our politicians have no sense of the culture of abuse and sexual violence that we are living in. But the boys from Steubenville and Accused number 6 do. They grew up steeped in it. The question we must ask ourselves then, is not whether our teenagers are ready or not, but are we ready for them?