Tarun Tejpal | The Man in the Mirror

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Source :- Live Mint

New Delhi: On a summer afternoon in London in 2007, the rooms of the Royal Society of Arts were packed with people attending the second day of a summit called The Challenge of India.

Among the speakers and guests, a tall, bearded man in an open shirt and a casual jacket strolled with confidence, his long hair pulled into a pony tail.Tarun Tejpal, the summit’s organizer, had been one of the biggest names in Indian journalism for around six years, ever since he’d started a website called Tehelka.com that had shaken the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government with its investigative sting operations.

The opening speech he’d made about the economic, social and cultural position of India was mostly upbeat but carried a note of caution. “The wonder story of India, by turns, skates on thick and thin ice,” Tejpal had said. “There are any number of factors from people to the environment that can derail it completely.”

Tejpal was skating on thick ice on that day, or so it seemed. The event offered an unusually rich crop of speakers, a heady mixture of Indian and international celebrities, intellectuals, businessmen and politicians. The previous day, visitors had heard Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh, J. J. Irani, a director of Tata Sons Ltd, andArun Maira, who was the chairman of Boston Consultancy Group India.

More than 1,500 people had attended an accompanying art auction at Bonhams the night before, where Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan and artist M.F. Husain unveiled a painting they’d made in collaboration.

“The halls are still packed and overflowing,” the magazine’s then executive editor Sankarshan Thakur wrote in his report from the summit. “There are people in a separate vault, having to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV because there isn’t enough room in the main auditorium. ‘Rare,’ remarked the lady at the RSA front desk. ‘Very rare to have a full house on a Friday afternoon. You’re obviously doing something right.’”

The proceeds of the Art for Freedom auction would go towards Tehelka, “in support of independent media”, the website said. One of Thakur’s own paintings was sold and he received 40% of the sale price, he said. “It was Tarun’s brainchild,” said Thakur. “He’s a great advertiser of his own causes.”

Not so rosy

Back at Tehelka’s offices in Delhi, things weren’t looking as rosy. Tehelka’s staff had begun to sense a mismatch between the stories they were hearing about the grand successes happening in London and the realities they were facing.

“The summit was a test of their reception in London,” said Jane Rankin-Reid, an Australian journalist who worked at Tehelka from 2005 to 2008. “I was quite shocked that it was so blatantly not what Tehelka was about. Everyone in Tarun’s family was off to London for this great shindig, a mass of them travelled, and while they were away, the staff salaries bounced. Then Shoma (Chaudhury, Tehelka’s former managing editor) was back in Delhi giving us all a briefing on how fabulous we were. I was astonished that Shoma didn’t even acknowledge it, let alone apologize.”

Today, as Tejpal faces charges of sexually assaulting one of his employees, and the Indian media watches with a mixture of schadenfreude and genuine shock, the man and his magazine seem synonymous to the extent that few see a future for Tehelka without Tejpal.

Chaudhury has resigned and several members of staff have quit in protest against Tejpal’s actions and his reactions to the allegations (he has publicly admitted to what he describes as “misconduct” and “light-hearted bantering”). Tejpal is now in police custody.

From a lowly beginning as a little-known website, to the days of the London summit’s successor, the annual THiNK festival in Goa, during which the alleged sexual assault took place, Tehelka and Tejpal have suffered similar fates. “Tehelka is 99.95% identified with Tarun and the other .05% is Shoma,” said Thakur, “In the public mind, Tarun and Tehlka are doppelgangers.”

If that is so, it is an eventuality to which Tejpal always aspired, said Thakur. “Tarun had this burning ambition to be a rock star, he wanted to become bigger than the biggest media barons, he would talk about it. His bail application reeks of hubris and pomposity,” he said. “I think he has been living with this mind-set so long that he genuinely believes he is untouchable. I think that when he looks in the mirror every morning, he thinks, ‘I am God.’ He was tempting fate.”

Small-town boy

Tejpal’s background was fairly modest. An army child, his family moved around during his youth and he attended DAV College and Panjab Univeristy in Chandigarh before getting his first job at The Indian Expressnewspaper, according to a contemporary of his from college, who didn’t want to be named. His friends agreed that he was driven by a desire to prove himself among the more privileged and the sense that he was an outsider.

“There was an element of a small town boy wanting to make it big, the rank outsider minus the Ivy League badge,” said Sunil Mehra, a long-term colleague of Tejpal’s over several publications. “He didn’t go to Oxford, he didn’t go to Stephen’s but he had passion, flair and intellect.”

Although Tejpal would tell his friends and colleagues that he dropped out of college, his batchmate thought the story was unlikely. “He always claimed so, but he at least gave his exams, more likely he never went to collect his degree,” the batchmate said.

“His rise has been dizzying from where he started to now rubbing shoulders with (V.S.) Naipaul and (Robert) De Niro, I knew a very different Tarun,” said Sagarika Ghose, another former colleague who is deputy editor at CNN-IBN. “I remember he was bright eyed about conquering Delhi. We all used to tease him about his social hangups. He was the boy from Jalandhar who wanted to take revenge on the Delhi elite.”

Later, however, Tejpal would come to speak about himself as a member of that elite.

In an interview he gave to the in-flight magazine of Kingfisher Airlines Hi! Blitz in 2010, he talked about himself in regard to India’s great thinkers and freedom fighters.

“Gandhi, Nehru and Azad came from elite backgrounds, but they understood that the soul of India was a deeply damaged and impoverished soul,” Tejpal told the magazine. “That’s something I try to convey through journalism and writing to my own class...the more elite you are, the more you have to give back for the greater good, but that also doesn’t mean that we don’t lead a good life.”

In the same interview, Tejpal spoke on his father’s influence. “He gave us an idea of the big world. It was routine to discuss world history and affairs at the dinner table. When I was seven, I knew the names of secretary-generals of the United Nations,” and also his disinterest in a political career: “I was offered a ticket in the 2004 elections (I will not tell you which party). I thought about it for a very long time. I decided against it largely because I am an extremely idiosyncratic person. I like to live life on my own terms.”

Mehra also spotted that trait in his friend. “He won the war on his own terms, but the problem with success too soon is that hubris takes over,” Mehra said. “It makes me ineffably sad. He’d done it all: lived in a garret, in a flat, moved from one sphere to another. It’s tragic.”

Tejpal married young (when he was 21, according to Mehra), to a woman he had met while working on the copy desk of The Indian Express in Chandigarh. After working as the Punjab correspondent for The Telegraphnewspaper in Chandigarh, he and his family moved to Delhi, where he had a brief stint at a magazine called India 2000 (his batchmate says he clinched an interview with the separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, which earned him some acclaim) before joining India Today in 1988.

Tejpal seems to have been popular at India Today. In his editorial in this week’s issue, the editor and Tejpal’s former boss Aroon Purie (who declined to be interviewed for this story) wrote, “Dare I say, I liked him. He was a talented writer and he knew it. In today’s terms a ‘real dude’. Even at the age of 25 when I interviewed him for a job of a senior sub-editor he had an intellectual swagger about him and unabashed literary ambitions.” Years later, Purie would describe this bullish newcomer as “the Che Guevara of Indian journalism,” he wrote, “a kind of Indian Julian Assange”. Others have described him more recently, as “Icarus” and “Julius Caesar”, so rapidly has Tejpal’s reputation grown.

Tejpal ignites

In 1994, Tejpal moved to The Financial Express and then, the following year, to Outlook magazine, as managing editor. Mehra, who worked with him at all three publications, remembered his ability as an editor, “To date, I maintain that the kind of surgical intervention he could make would make a line sing. I don’t know many professional editors that could do that. Tarun could ignite you. He’d talk dirty just for the shock factor. He didn’t give a damn, he was devil may care.”

After publishing Arundhati Roy’s Booker prize-winning novel The God Of Small Things in 1997, through India Ink, a publishing house he’d started with a friend, the 34-year-old Tejpal’s literary reputation began to grow, said Rankin-Reid. “I met him through Sunil Khilnani, it was the night before the Booker ceremony in 1997 in a restaurant in London. What struck me was that he was not interested in imitating the ways of the West but simply in impacting it.”

Not everyone was impressed by Tejpal’s literary credentials. “He was a good Punjabi salesman with an astonishing felicity with words and language skills,” said a colleague from his Outlook days who did not want to be named. “When Vinod Mehta gave him the permission to start his own publishing venture, Tejpal misused it in a way. The money that came from Arundhati’s book was used to buy a haveli in Nainital. Three days a week he used to be in Nainital, Mehta sacked him from Outlook for non-performance. He simply stopped working and the editor got fed up.”

Mehta declined to comment for this story.

By 2000, Tejpal had started working on investigative stories with his colleague at Outlook, Aniruddha Bahal, who he’d worked with since India Today. After a successful expose on dodgy betting in cricket, the two men started an online site to continue their work. Tehelka.com was born in 2000 and its early dotcom days have become something of a legend among Indian journalists. The original venture was funded by Shankar Sharma and his wife Devina Mehra through their company First Global, a brokerage.

“It was fantastic, the best office I have ever worked in,” said Arnab Dutta, who joined as a trainee in 2000. At the time Bahal was at work on the investigation that would make both he and Tejpal famous, in unequal measure: Operation West End, a sting that exposed then Bharatiya Janata Party president Bangaru Laxman accepting a bribe for a defence deal from a reporter disguised as an arms dealer, and would lead to his resignation and that of then defence minister George Fernandes.

Dutta was put to work initially on the team transcribing the tapes that had been made by the undercover reporters. “We were cut off from the rest of the organization in a place with windows covered in black paper and we were told not to talk about the content of the tapes,” he said.

Dutta was being paid a tiny salary, he said, but he didn’t mind; the romance of working for Tejpal’s outfit kept him going. “Tarun was a fantastic boss. He’d allow us to chase any story we wanted. We all looked up to him because he was such a great writer, he was approachable. When he gives a speech you want to stand still and listen to him. He was a personal hero.”

Troubles start

All went well until the story was published in March 2001. “Within about four months of the story breaking, the office closed down, they stopped paying salaries,” Dutta said. “Officially I quit in July 2001 but a couple of us hung around and worked for them at nights. We couldn’t let Tehelka die.” Dutta also continued to do legal work for the brand.

Tejpal had his own share of troubles. He was told by the government that a group of assassins have been hired to kill him. “For about six years there were 24 armed policemen guarding me around the clock,” Tejpal would tell the GQ magazine in 2012. “Anywhere I travelled in India, I would be met at the airport by armed cops. I would be escorted day and night. My house was sandbagged. My office was sandbagged. It was a bit hysterical.” The experience inspired his second novel, The Story of My Assassins,published in 2009, but it also gave Tarun a reputation boost, said Thakur.

“When West End happened, I mean the vicious manner in which BJP responded, the hounding of Tarun Tejpal was what made him,” Thakur said. “He seized upon this opportunity and turned adversity into something.”

By 2004, Tejpal had become something of a martyr to the cause of freedom of speech, according to Amit Sengupta, who joined him in the relaunch ofTehelka that year, in its second avatar: as a tabloid.

“We’d all followed the case,” he said, “we’d protested on the streets, journalists had marched from the press club, including me. I had a long discussion with Tarun on one of those marches and later he came to me and said, ‘We are starting a paper, come along.’” He did, along with a handful of other journalists, including Thakur and Hartosh Singh Bal.

“In those days, we were tired of big business journalism,” Sengupta said. “The idea was that this will be an independent, journalist’s paper, a non-profit sustainable idea. At the beginning there was no money, no salary was given to me for three months, then they had this idea of founder subscribers, who would donate money.”

Tehelka raised Rs.2 crore in 220 individual donations of Rs.100,000 each from Tejpal’s contacts in the business, political, art and literary worlds.

“We were full-timers,” said Sengupta of the early staff, “I mean, sometimes we would sleep on the floor of the office on newspapers, we ate fromdhabas because GK-II was expensive. We worked like dogs. It was very heady, Tarun was open, dogmatic, sharp. We felt like we could fly on the wings of these great suppressed desires we’d had. We’d do stories on the rights of cyclists week after week, how street hawkers were having problems. We weren’t doing the subjects that the rest of the media assumed the public wanted. We were not doing it to become saints, we were doing it for public interest.”

Money was a constant bugbear for Tejpal, according to the members of the start-up team. “A lot of people used to contribute from the outside, and there was a big issue that came about not paying them, there was just no money for a time,” said Thakur.

Shivam Vij, who worked for the magazine in 2006 and 2007, agreed. “We’d call people to say, ‘Please write for us,’ and they’d say, ‘Tehelka hasn’t paid me for months.’ I went to the accounts department and they showed me a bunch of cheques that were made out but hadn’t been sent.”

After a while, according to Vij and Shantanu Guha Ray, who worked atTehelka from 2008-10, advertising began to help matters. “DLF booked the back page for a year,” said Ray. “We got Coca-Cola and Seagram’s andHero too.”

Then the branding events began, starting in 2006 with the Summit of the Powerless, held at Jamia Millia Islamia university. “They became obsessed with access to power,” Vij said of Chaudhury and Tejpal. “The annual summits became a very important part of that. The Summit of the Powerlesswas meant to be a marketing event. The idea was to give visibility to theTehelka brand as the weekly paper wasn’t even easily available on newsstands.”

Marketable brand

“He wanted to make the idea of public interest journalism into a marketable brand, that was the problem,” Sengupta said. “It had become like a commodity. He’d said publicly that it would be like a public trust but it was run like a family fiefdom. It must have been tough for him, I can understand that you need money, but something really went wrong.”

In the days that have followed the rape allegations, another unsettling story came to light in the form of an article written by a former Tehelka employeeRaman Kirpal.

Kirpal made some startling allegations that Tejpal and his family as well as Chaudhury had been offloading shares at varying and inflated prices from 2006 onwards.

“The Tejpal family and Tehelka’s managing editor Shoma Chaudhury made a killing through a series of doubtful transactions. They sold some of their shares in one of their companies at mindboggling premiums to a nondescript company, pocketing large gains,” the story, published on Firstpost.com, said.

Kirpal declined to comment but his article came as a particular blow to the members of the founding team.

“We were getting lectures every day about the difficulties of doing good journalism on a budget and to think this was going on in the background is really shocking,” said Hartosh Singh Bal, who worked for Tehelka in 2004-06. “Now I look back and think about it, those two crore were raised from people who put up one lakh each, and that led to the foundation of a private limited company, now that sounds a bit bizarre to me. I think it should have struck us then that it was problematic.”

In 2010, rumours of a new investor, who would ease Tejpal’s money woes somewhat, reached Tehelka’s employees. K.D. Singh, who till 31 March 2013 owned a majority stake in Tehelka’s publishers Anant Media, is a Trinamool Rajya Sabha member.

“We had around 65% stake in Tehelka to begin with. We are going to exit the venture completely,” Singh told The Indian Express. “In the past one year, we have divested around 20% of it.”

Singh, who is from Chandigarh, is also known as India’s Chicken King after his restaurant franchise Republic of Chicken, part of his Alchemist Group of companies that have interests in real estate, pharmaceuticals, education, steel, tea and road technologies.

Guha Ray remembers Singh’s entrance into Tehelka. “We’d see K.D. Singh at events. Tarun would meet him at his farmhouse but he would never come to the office,” he said. “Tehelka did a series of conferences and at the opening of one K.D. Singh came in a Rolls Royce and Tarun made a speech saying, ‘All those who thought Tehelka was dead, this is to tell them that we are on.’”

In the GQ interview last year, Tejpal expounded his theory of how to attract money from the wealthy patrons that Tehelka claimed to disdain. “There is so much bigotry, injustice, inequality and corruption to fight. You need the sort of hard journalism that we do at Tehelka, but nobody wants to pay for it. Sustaining it costs a lot of money. You have to be very smart and use a lot of sleight of hand. You have to be very seductive. You have to convince men of means that you’re a worthy cause and that they should back you. A lot of my work goes into that: ensuring that rich men fund the journalism which will finally hurt them!”

Accusation and denial

According to ex-employees, however, increasingly the kind of journalismTehelka was doing was not hurting the rich men who funded them. Kirpal had originally quit Tehelka after a dispute in which he claimed a story on Goa mining companies was held by the management while crucial permits were approved by the Goa government for the inaugural ThiNK festival in 2011. Tejpal publicly denied the accusation.

“Eventually compromises started happening because you need a lot of money, said Sevanti Ninan, editor of media website thehoot.org and a Mintcolumnist. “Whenever there was a sponsor involved for Think Fest, things would get murky for Tehelka and stories would be killed.”

Mint could not independently verify the accusations. Phone calls and messages to Ramesh Sharma, Tehelka’s interim editor, remained unanswered. Tejpal could not be contacted because he is in police custody. Tejpal was remanded in custody on Sunday after appearing in court on allegations of sexually assaulting a colleague in a hotel in Goa, the AFPnews agency reported.

Tejpal’s lofty comment to GQ on funding issues, explains why much of the media has turned so venomously on him since the rape charge was made. “The problem with him has always been that he always seemed to be the exact opposite of whatever he railed against—venality, social climbing, being material, using money and power, everything that he ever disdained is what you see him obliquely going for. It made you wary,” said Thakur.

Mehra agreed. “The lynch mobs are out for him and part of the reason is that he held up a mirror to the media houses earlier,” he said. “He made them feel venal and dirty and sold out, which is what he became. The financial shenanigans are surfacing now and this is the media’s moment to turn on its free radical creature.”

As Tejpal battles sexual assault charges, filings made by Tehelka’s holding company shows a negative networth with liabilities far exceeding assets. The corporate affairs ministry is yet to decide on whether to look into the issues regarding Tehelka and its related companies, the PTI news agency reported, citing unnamed people.

So far, the ministry has not taken any action on its own in regard to Tehelkacompanies, the people told PTI.

Anant Media Pvt. Ltd, which publishes Tehelka, has a negative net worth of nearly Rs.13 crore, according to the firm’s latest filings with the ministry, PTIreported.

Mint’s Aman Malik and Shauvik Ghosh, and PTI and AFP contributed to this story.

AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW : FEATURING UMA SHANKAR PANDA

AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW : FEATURING UMA SHANKAR PANDA

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

The living Icon of literary Orissa is Mr Uma shankar Panda. Translation is an area in which much attention has been paid. Most of the books into Oriya are translated into Bengali novels and many others. Almost all the prize winning works are available in Oriya translation. In a very cordial interview , Mr. Panda talks about his life and works.

Works of the author :

Umashankar Panda has been familiarized many western authors to the oriya reader. A great contribution by him . A poet, short stories writer, radio and television script writer and an incredible translators of regional and foreign languages books/novels/fictions.

Author’s inspirations :

Serious writers don’t wait to be inspired. Serious writers roll up their sleeves and get down to the business of writing. According to him “Being inspired” smacks of amateurish, daydream passivity, the notion that some supernatural presence must appear before us before the words can flow. He draws inspirations basically from nature, human psychology , and the human behavior . To be inspired by people is to be continually rewarded with story ideas. People are walking, talking stories. Everyone we encounter has the potential for contributing to our understanding of human nature—if we allow ourselves to be inspired by human nature in all its diversity. Inspiration matters because it prods us to traverse the full spectrum of human experience. An important part of what it means to be a writer is to become so turned on to the business of being alive, to be so completely inspired by life, that you will harvest ideas for writing everywhere—from books, from people, from music and other art forms, from the natural world, and most of all from your own inner resources.  There are ripples created in the mind and heart which is expressed in the themes of poetries and other prose writings such as stories, novels and plays.

When asked about the spheres of life he has worked on , he replied ,

I have worked on emotions and imaginations. The life around us i.e. all living creatures , cycle of birth to death and all the nature.

I asked him , “ in which languages do you write ? “

Basically , I write in Odiya.

Out if curiosity , I asked him , “ Did you belong to any literary movements? If so, Please describe.

He was very frank about it and declared openly ,

“In the early phase of my life I was a Communist/leftist thinker and was writing poetry for the masses , laborers and downtrodden. But afterwards , I shifted my writings to portray the human emotions and aptitude of the common mass and its effect on the day to day life.

In the second phase, I indulge myself writing poetry and prose analyzing the psychological mindset of various classes of people( Men and women) and their social behavior in different spheres.

I was the Vice Chairman of Odisha Sahitya Academy too.”

AWARDS :-

1.     Odisha Sahitya Academy Award in poetry.

2.   Bisuvaya Award in Poetry.

3.   Jhankar Award in Poetry

4.   Dharitri Upayan in Poetry

5.    Fakir Mohan Galapa Saman from Utkal Sahitya Samaj

6.   Akil Mohan Bisesh Kabi Saman

7.    Akash Vani Annual Award, New Delhi

8.   Utkal Pustak Sansad

9.   Ati Bhadi Jaggnath Dash Puraskar

10.                      Gangadhar Sammruti Saman

11.Pustak Mela Saman / Book Fair Awards across the states.

and many to his credentials.

I was so engrossed with his works and life , that I could not help but asking  about his opinion regarding the young generation writers.

His tone seemed to be very optimistic. He replied , “ A progressive trend is flourishing. Mindset style of work is gradually changing with the influence of social, political and life style of the countrymen at present.

The Young talents are bright and conscious of their own position in the social frame. They are faithful and true to their emotions. They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young. “There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising,’ when in fact they are peaking.”

Lastly , I dedicate this question to our dear readers  . I asked this great personality to  leave a message for you all and here is it , from our very own Umashankar Panda :

“ The readers should have a wide mental set up and neutral in judgement while reading books. They should have their own impressions and freelancing aptitude while commenting on the latest work of literature.”

 Lastly , a treat to our readers : A Poem by Umashankar Panda

‘The White Flowers ‘

In this bosom . . . 
I must carry a basket 
of flowers 
for you 
as the flower 
is a kind of fire 
that burns the unconcerned bee 
and helpless butterflies. 

Shameless 
is the wicked wind 
that makes you naked 
any moment. 

If I meet Grief 
this time 
I shall ask — 
what is its intention 
to come so suddenly 
like the lonely girl 
carrying white flowers in her hand 
alone 
as if a magic wand ? 

( Interviewed by – Siddhartha Mishra )

Price hike a major issue, 16-30,2013, NOV , JUST IN PRINT

Price rise is one of the most ticklish current problems. Whenever we go to make some purchases in the market, we learn to our great disappointment that the prices of most of the commodities have risen. And sometimes quite exorbitantly. There are several reasons for this steep rise in prices.

Prices of all commodities are rising almost daily. For what you buy a commodity today, you cannot have it on the same price a few days after. The hardest hit on this problem is the salaried class. The businessmen and the traders meet out the problem of dearness by earning larger profits.

The labour class too charges high wages and has a low standard of living, so they, too, anyway cope with the rising prices. But the salaries often remain fixed. The rate of increase in dearness allowance is so low that it hardly meets the rate of rising prices. The condition of the salaried class in the private sector is all the more problematic.

An onion, today being compared with diamonds indicates its value for an normal household budget. Though price rise of all the essential commodities, inflation and depreciating rupee are making headlines these days but rise in the price of onion is catching everyone’s eye, as it is an essential ingredient in almost every food item prepared at Indian home daily. Owing to this, price rise of onions quickly becomes a political issue and a vote fetching agenda by the opposition.

After China, India is the second largest producer of onion and enjoys 19% share of the global onion production. Maharashtra and Karnataka are the chief onion producing states in India and contribute near about 45% of the total production of onion in India.

But this year again the situation is same. Speculations are going on that traders might have increased the price to earn profit. They are actually exploiting and taking advantage of the seasonal shortage in supplies. Maharashtra, the chief state producing onion has been asked for a regular supply of onion. It should intimate if there is any obstruction in the supply chain.

Stocks are low after a drought last year in Maharashtra state, the top onion producer in the country. And there have been reports that this year’s crop is damaged in some pockets because of heavy rains , but that’s just a few thousand hectares.

It is getting so bad that the government has had to cease its mantra of buy less, export more for other costly commodities and import onions for Indians to cook their classic dishes.

Television channels and other media have hyped the 100 rupees per kg fear this month, busy reporting how onion prices are bringing tears across the country. That prompted consumers to buy more and advance purchases. The consequence of this unchecked rise in prices has been disastrous for the people. The wage earners have been hit hard by this rising trend of prices.

The exorbitant prices of essentials commodities including the local vegetables are ruining the lives of people from the low income and middle income group. Consumers have faced a sharp rise in prices of staple food items such as pulses, sugar and edible oil.

Besides the rise in prices of almost all essential commodities, the hike in prices of LPG, kerosene and petrol has added to their woes.

Consumers allege that prices of essential commodities goes on changing every month in the market and the common men are in a fix over frequent change in prices of commodities.

Rising prices of essential commodities like wheat, rice, sugar, ghee, mug dal, masur dal including groceries and vegetables have thrown family budgets of the common man and people below poverty line into disarray. There is dissatisfaction among the common men with the fact that the prices of some of the essential commodities have been revised further.

Prices of varieties of vegetables in the vegetable markets were soaring. Prices of Brinjal, onion, cucumber, bhendi besides fruits have also gone up. Common men have started feeling the pinch of the price rise in vegetables and other essential items and those who have nothing to cushion the effect are cutting down on their monthly intake on other eatables.

There are several causes for this continuous price rise. Firstly, the population of the country is increasing while the agricultural and industrial production is not keeping pace with it. The inevitable salt is that the demand for various goods has increased. Secondly, unscrupulous businessmen create artificial scarcity by hoarding goods and selling them in black market. Thirdly, there are occasional droughts in some parts of the country resulting in shortages and floods in other part of the country and consequently the rise in prices. Frequent strikes and lockouts adversely affect the industrial production. The hike in the price of oil products from time to time contributes to the rise in prices by pushing the cost of production up and also increasing transport charges of goods.

The government has been trying to hold the price line. It has taken over the wholesale food grain trade. Rationing system has been introduced to assure the supply of food grains, sugar and edible oils to all the people. Consumer cooperative stores and super bazaars have been opened to stabilize prices. The results, however, have not been very encouraging. The government has now armed itself with powers to detain the hoarders and black marketers without trial under the Essential Commodities Act but this too has not shown any tangible results. The correct remedy is to increase production both of agriculture and industrial goods.

Unless power supply position is improved, industries will not be able to run to their full capacity. Again power is needed in agriculture also. The immediate need of the country is to have consumer resistance movement which should see that the retailers and the wholesalers reduce their margin of profit.

Rising prices encourage hoarding, profiteering, black –marketing and corruption. They discourage export. They cause devaluation of currency. Lastly, they seriously disrupt equitable distribution of wealth. Exploitation,hoarding,speculation all in the absence of an assuring regulatory for all essentials,food,oils,foodgrains and even vegetables for the common man.This should be demanded by us in the manifesto of the parties in future elections.

Now let us come to the contentious issue which is common to all the commodities price rise and bone of contention between the government and opposition parties that is forward trading. Now some people will criticize me of knowing very little of the commodity trading, but my only point is why do you need speculative trading on the essential commodities, when you could have such trading on nearly each and every finance vehicle like equity shares, currency exchanges etc. The forward trading increases the speculation in markets and people who are really not in the supply chain of these commodities get into it and unnecessarily disrupts the chain leading to disparity in normal price mechanism of these commodities.

The main reason for sky-rocketing of prices is the unabated rise in population at an alarming rate. All this expenditure pushes up the rate of living. Those who can afford, also purchase luxurious items like the refrigerator, air conditioner, desert cooler, geyser and other such gadgets. There is also a lot of wastage on parties, dinners, inaugu­ration and other functions and on canvass­ing, publicity and propaganda during elec­tions. The hoarders, stockiest and black- marketers also push up prices by causing artificial scarcity in the market. Wars and arms race also lead to shortage and price- rise.

It is a pity that even more than forty five years after independence, most of the Indians are still leading a dog’s life. Only some lucky ones roll in luxury. The government should take some drastic steps to keep prices under control.

The problem is very intricate and horrible. Drastic efforts shall have to be made by all concerned. Unless political parties, government, farmers, laborers, government employees, traders and the businessmen and the consumers all give up their narrow selfish ends, the problem cannot be solved.

Increasing of agricultural and industrial production, proper distribution of the commodities, safeguarding them in the stores, paying taxes to the government without any evasion some of the measures which if applied honestly will not only check the trend of rising prices but also bring them down.

Let the government take initiative to bring down the prices. Deficit budgeting and floating of paper currency should be stopped and such arrangements should be made which would ensure the proper supply of things so that tendencies of hoarding and profiteering may be eradicated. The price rising then shall stop.

Siddhartha Shankar Mishra,

Sambalpur, Odisha

Criminalization in Indian Politics , 16 - 30 , 2013 NOV, JUST IN PRINT

India, the largest democratic country and also home to the fair and regular elections.

Elections aim at providing the power to select the one by whom we want to be governed. Looking the present statistics, are we really choosing the adroit body to govern us or the candidates are besmirch to the constitution, the elections, and the Indian freedom struggle?

The country is struggling hard to make its mark as the emerging leader in terms of economy and development but the blemish to its own image is the gigantic number of abet and aberrant leaders having the heinous charges of rape, theft, dacoity, murder, extortion etc.

On 28th August 1997, the Election Commissioner Krishnamurthy made a startling annunciation. According to him, of 1, 37,752 candidates who had contested the General Election to the Lok Sabha in 1996, nearly 1500 had criminal records.

Moreover, the number of candidates with criminal records among our ‘elected representatives’ is steadily increasing. In 2004 Lok Sabha, there were 128 MPs with criminal background; and in 2009 the number rose to 150.

UP hits the list with 520 such candidates, succeeded by Bihar with the count of 350. The eleventh Lok Sabha reportedly had 40 members, who had criminal background, 700 MLA's out of 4722 in the country then were involved in crimi¬nal cases and trials were pending against them in 25 states and 2 union territories.

In the special session of Lok Sabha, on the auspicious occasion of completion of 50 years of Independence, the house passed a resolution on 31st August 1997 saying that, "more especially, all political parties shall undertake all such steps that will attain the objective of ridding of our polity of criminalization or its influence". But it just remained a resolution without implication

If we quote some notorious leaders, the picture will decipher a colorfully tainted image of not just one party but several parties -

Mohammad Sahabuddin was elected to four successive terms in the Indian Parliament from 1996-2008 from Siwan constituency Bihar on RJD ticket. In 1996, Sahabuddin was named as a Minister of State for the Home Ministry in the H.D. Deve Gowda government. He is currently serving a life sentence for kidnapping with intent to murder and as many as 34 cases of serious crime are pending against him.

Mukhtar Ansari won the Mau seat in the Uttar Pradesh Elections, 2007 as an Independent while lodged initially at Ghazipur jail.

Arun Gawli is one of the most notorious criminal turned politicians who is based in Mumbai. With his operations center at Dagdi Chawl in Bayculla he now enjoys the position of MLA. However, he has not been convicted of any crimes but has spent almost ten years in prison.

Shibu Soren is another politician who was the chief minister of Jharkhand and was found guilty of murder of his secretary.

Raja Bhaiya is a SP leader who has royal ancestry; however he is a criminal and has spent considerable amount of time in Jail under the POTA (Prevention of Terrorist Activities) Act.

Atiq Ahmad was a member of Lok Sabha from the Phulpur Lok Sabha Constituency in Uttar Pradesh. He is currently in prison facing trial in 35 criminal cases including several cases of murder. In the Indian general elections, 2009, he was allowed to contest in election since he is yet to be convicted in any case.

Now, Lalu Prasad Yadav who  was accused and charged in Fodder scam was sent to jail and had to resign his CM"s seat which was given to wife Rabri Devi. But Congress led UPA made him Railway Minister. So a criminal remained India's minister. This shows there are flaws in our laws and our corrupt leaders misuse and abuse the process of law to help their allies in politics. There is utter and urgent need to amend the defective constitution such that only honest are allowed to rule.

A case started in 1996 and sentence to be yet delivered on 3 Oct but the Court has finally declared these accused as convicts in this case What away these people have developed the systems to delay the results to such an extent so that the people involved as well the victims are tired out of these long drawn cases 17 years and would have yet been running had it been not struck down by the SC .The maximum sentence for each convicts and their assets confiscated sooner and made to honour all the guilt done on the Society.

The radical cause of increasing criminalization of politics is nexus of muscle power, money power and politics. Criminalization of politics is actually a mysterious enigma.

The statutory limit is- Rs 15 lakhs for a Lok Sabha seat (depending on the constituency and the number of voters), Rs 3 to 6 lakhs for state legislatures (depending on the area), and Rs 75,000 for municipal corporations.

The political parties and the candidates appraise and spend a huge amount compared to the meagre limits. They incur the capital through funds and donations. The questions pings, who furnishes such funds and donations? These funds generally come from underworld or the business bizarre. After becoming the MP or MLA they become altruist and venerate to the supporting factors before the elections and victory.

The criminals and mafia thus dwell and flourish under the aegis of these MPs and MLAs. This nexus is the real shoot in arm to the criminalization of politics or in other words ‘Bemired politics’. Indian politics is not a philanthropic activity instead it has become a means to accrue power by the avid and abhorrent leaders.

On May 2, 2002, the Supreme Court gave a historic ruling following public interest litigation by an NGO.

It ruled that every candidate, contesting an election to Parliament, State Legislatures or Municipal Corporation, has to declare the following along with the application for his/her candidature: 1) A Candidate’s criminal charges , 2) The Candidate’s financial records, 3) The candidate’s educational qualifications.

If the candidate fails to file any of the above three declarations, the Returning Officer will have the right to reject his nomination papers. The Supreme Court has ruled that all the three declarations will have to be true.

The Election Commission had sent a notification on June 28, 2002, to all State Election Officers with a view to enforcing it. The Supreme Court's thrust has been that the people and the voters have the right to know about the candidate's criminal record, assets and liabilities and educational qualifications. The Returning Of¬ficer has to publish these declarations for the voters' knowledge.

The Election Commission under T S Krishnamurthy proposed in its 2004 report that Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 should be amended to disqualify candidates accused of an offence punishable by imprisonment of 5 years or more even when trial is pending, given that the Court has framed charges against the person. In the report the Commission addresses the possibility that such a provision could be misused in the form of motivated cases by the ruling party.

To prevent such misuse, the Commission suggested a compromise whereas only cases filed prior to six months before an election would lead to disqualification of a candidate. In addition, the Commission proposed that Candidates found guilty by a Commission of Enquiry should stand disqualified.

The above stated reformative measures are just a drop in bucket. A complete renaissance is needed to clean the politics, the gravity of matter can be deciphered with the fact that almost all political parties are up a blind allay to win elections.

In a TV show an affluent politician had said “people say that politics is not a good career option for amenable youngsters. If good, flawless, educated youngsters would not come to politics then be ready to be ruled by the aberrant leaders.”

Silence signifies our acquiesce.

Many commission and committees have been framed for amelioration of politics. But this is just a political gimmick. We are the choosers then why not to come in the forefront and vote against the candidates possessing the criminal allegations. Why are we waiting for a reformer, an august to help us get rid of this circumstance?

The number of political parties in India has been phenomenally increasing. The mushroom growth of political parties is not the result of improvement in political standard; nor is it because more qualified and service-minded persons are entering the field of politics, determined to serve the country and its people. On the contrary, it is a definite indication of political standards going down to abysmal levels. The field of politics nowadays does not attract selfless gentlemen, eager to use their expertise and time for nation-building; it attracts rowdies and criminals with proven record of hooliganism, who want to become rich quickly and dominate the officials and law-abiding citizens. Subject to rare exceptions, in short, the politics in India has become a profitable business for rowdies.

The political parties do not pay attention to inculcate noble political values and principles of citizenship in the people. They do not promote patriotism and commitment to nation-building. They do not want to unite the people of nation by stressing the importance of harmonious living. On the contrary, they perpetuate the differences among the people and make full use of those differences for creating conflicts among them.

The decency ,decorum and sobriety once considered inseparable from the public offices are thrown to the wind; these elected representatives would stoop down to any level, for achieving their personal political aims or the interests of their parties. From village panchayat meetings to Parliament, the common behavior includes selfish quarrel, cheap arguments, disrespect to authorities, violation of healthy conventions, and waste of time.

The main reason for such downslide in political standard is the absence of reasonable restrictions to formation of political parties and admission of members to the political parties. For example, in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, 369 parties contested. And, totally 8070 candidates represented these parties. Out of 369 parties, 333 parties did not win even in a single constituency. Even among the remaining 36 parties, 19 parties won only in three or less number of seats! Why should there be such a large number of non-serious political parties and candidates, making a mockery of the election process?

In all political parties, these criminals are given red-carpeted welcome; because their ‘services’ are needed to these parties frequently for carrying on unlawful activities during the bandhs, strikes, rallies etc., organized by them. When such criminals become political leaders, they seek to achieve whatever they want without caring for rules and regulations; they would not hesitate to adopt criminal methods for attaining their goals; whether it is winning an election or elimination of rivals. For these hard core criminals, the offences like threatening officials, kidnapping and even murder do not appear bad.

The British followed the policy of ‘divide and rule’; after India became independent, our politicians have become past masters of the art of creating groups and inciting them against one another. They want to fish in the troubled waters and when the water is placid, they trouble it to achieve their selfish ends.

The corner-stone of democracy is objective discussion of the public issues by the people. The representatives of the people are expected to encourage such discussions, generate valuable ideas and take decisions in the larger interests of the people. But even the democratic forums like legislative assemblies and Parliament are not used for sincere discussions.

Political leaders can never be serious about change in the election system because in its present form it is tailor-stitched to suit the wrong persons reaching the legislature. Effective poll-reforms and strict rules for those in legislature are rather of prime importance than the much-talked about Lokpal.

If these are not affected to prevent wrong elements entering legislature to misuse the system, then institution of Lokpal may collapse under excessive complaints. Lokpal is just a curative medicine for acute disease of corruption while poll reforms and stricter rules are preventive medicines for the chronic disease of corruption in the nation's politics.

In an event that could bring a landmark change in Indian politics and governance, the Supreme Court asked the Centre to respond to a proposition that the law allowing Members of Parliament (MP) and Members of Legislative Assemblies (MLA) to continue despite being sentenced to more than two years' jail term upon conviction in a criminal case was discriminatory and encouraged criminalization of politics.

The PIL which was filed by an advocate Lily Thomas contended that an anomalous situation existed under the Representation of People Act, where one provision debarred a person from contesting election for six years on conviction in a criminal case with two years imprisonment while the other allowed MPs and MLAs to continue if they filed an appeal within three months of the judgment of conviction.

Senior Advocate Fali S Nairman, who appeared as amicus cure in the PIL cited several judgments of the apex court on this point and said that in one case, it had held that the presumption of innocence of a person ended after a trial court convicted him of an offence.

The Election Commission is powerless in preventing criminals from contesting elections. The Representation of People Act allows it to debar candidates convicted of certain crimes, but cannot prevent those under trial or whose appeals from their earlier convictions are pending for disposal before the higher court for multiple murders or rape or corruption or theft from the public exchequer from representing the people in the country’s highest legislative forums. There have been a number of cases where persons under trial have contested elections, while in jail and won. Unfortunately, no political party has taken any concrete step to curb this malpractice.


It is not difficult to see why political parties put up criminals as candidates. Given a situation in which the sanctity of elections is being increasingly undermined by rigging and booth-capturing, a criminal with muscle power has greater chances of winning than a clean and decent individual without such ‘capabilities’. And most often criminals do win, which is why they are increasingly present in the country’s representative institutions. The consequences of the trend, if allowed to continue unchecked, hardly deserve an elaboration and are seen in the increasing criminalization of the process of governance with ministers, legislators, bureaucrats and unscrupulous businessmen combining to plunder public funds and prey on the public.

In fact a new dimension has been added to the process by the criminalization of bureaucracy and the police. What makes the situation particularly dangerous is that a criminalized administration poses a serious threat to the country’s security even as Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism continues unabated. This is clearly reflected in the fact that agents of the Inter Service Intelligence [ISI] have no difficulty in getting passports and driving licenses and carrying out their deadly assignments in India. De-criminalization of politics should be the main issue in all elections in the country. While political parties have a serious responsibility not to put up criminals as candidates, voters have an equally strong responsibility of defeating candidates with a criminal record. 

Lastly, the Election Commission has taken noticeable measures to check criminalization of politics. It has already banned convicted people from contesting elections to the state legislature or parliament, at the same time; it has asked all criminally-charged persons to disclose all the charges they face, in the nomination paper. This information will be easily made available to the public. Cases pending against politicians should be settled as quickly as possible. It is found that cases against them remain pending for long and they keep winning elections while the cases remain pending. Later, with their ministerial power, they manipulate the cases in their favour. Withdrawal of criminal charges against some tainted ministers of the present government is a case in point.

This evil of Criminalization of Politics calls for special attention of the people because the subject revolves around the vested interests of politicians of all hues; as such the people can never hope that the politicians would take any initiative to rectify this evil. The prevailing trend is spreading like cancer. It is nullifying all the constitutional safeguards of democracy; that is, it is spoiling bureaucracy by making it partial; it thwarts press; and even threatens judiciary; and thus is destroying the foundation of democracy. So the people should wake up at once and force the political parties to mend their ways.

Let’s pledge to vote, vote against the criminal bugs who have percolated in the roots of politics of the country which has an aureate history of freedom struggle through ahimsa. Let’s fight another freedom struggle.

SIDDHARTHA SHANKAR MISHRA,

SAMBALPUR, ODISHA