Last Saturday, I found myself at an unusual sort of book release. This was the launch, at India Habitat Centre, of The Cobra Dancer, written by veteran Andhra journalist Devipriya. It is the somewhat curiously titled biography of former and legendary Central Election Commission observer K.J. Rao, who will always be remembered for giving us the cleanest elections in Lalu’s Bihar.
Of course, Rao has also become a very familiar face to us in the capital, as a member of the Supreme Court-appointed team of commissioners to oversee the demolition and sealing of encroachments and illegal constructions in the capital.
This event was different not only because it was so unlike the usual Page 3-type book release with celebs, cheese and wine. The audience was mostly Rao’s current and former colleagues, many senior citizens and some activists. There was almost no national or even local media. The only cameras I spotted were from some Telugu TV channels.
But there was some wisdom dispensed in that IHC hall that morning, and a reassuring takeaway as the speakers, with the exception of this writer, were all people who have built fame and admiration in not just leading our greatest institutions, but also developing them into the brands we feel so proud of: former Chief Justice of India J.S. Verma, former Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh and S.Y. Quraishi, who now moves into the top job at Nirvachan Sadan. It was something that Justice Verma said, while explaining the challenge of institution-building, that should get us all thinking. An institution can rise to its true strength, and truly play the role the founding fathers mandated for it, only if it is led by a person who has no past, and no expectation (of any reward) from anybody in the future.
Someone who has no past and no greed for anything in the future? Simple enough, you might think. But it isn’t as simple as that. It is tough enough to find many people with nothing to hide in their pasts, so they are not prone to blackmail, or pressured by IOUs conceded. People who can judge a case, run an election, prosecute a criminal politician, investigate a corrupt bureaucrat effectively and fairly.
But where do you find someone who, in addition to this, would be willing to retire quietly into obscurity? Our system is much too brutal and clever to let such rare people rise anywhere close to the top. That is why it is only providentially, rather than by choice, that one such is put in charge of an institution. And then the institution changes, and rises to its true power.
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How many of our institutions do we really feel proud of today? That we trust fully to protect our constitutional rights and liberty? Your count will not go beyond two, the Supreme Court and the Election Commission. In both cases, we were fortunate that just a couple of remarkable people came to lead them at some crucial junctures of our history. Justice Verma himself picked up the thread from the great judges of the seventies, a remarkable handful led by late Justice H.R. Khanna in a cruel and crucial decade for our democracy, to raise the Supreme Court to its true constitutional power, respect and glory.
Verma then also took the weight of the same moral authority to the National Human Rights Commission. T.N. Seshan showed the country and the Election Commission itself the power that the Constitution had intended to grant it but that his predecessors had never used, in the mistaken belief that they were merely another department of the government. The EC was fortunate again to get an even more formidable and not a fraction as controversial or idiosyncratic chief in J.M. Lyngdoh, who took its reputation and credibility even higher, burying a tradition of state-sponsored rigging and terror threats in Kashmir and defying Narendra Modi’s loaded James Michael Lyngdoh chants to hold another election in Gujarat on his own terms. Between the two of them, they built Brand EC to such a level that even the frailties of the odd lesser successor have not been able to dent it. Seshan himself failed to pass the second part of Justice Verma’s test, by his delusional quest for Rashtrapati Bhavan.
But to his credit, he had taken the image of the institution so high that the only stature his hubris damaged was his own. Of course, EC was fortunate that Lyngdoh, one of our sharpest and cleanest civil servants, followed soon in his wake. EC then survived many controversies and shenanigans, and at least one CEC who completely flunked the Verma test. Forget going into retired obscurity, he cadged a Rajya Sabha membership on a party ticket and then a ministry so insignificant that the only reason he is noticed is because of his unseemly turf wars with Suresh Kalmadi and a fellow Gill, of the Indian Hockey Federation.
Today nobody dares to mess with either the EC or the SC. One can still countermand an election in Bihar or Kashmir and the other can set the CBI on the Sohrabuddin case. Both have survived sabotage, subterfuge, allurements and vilification by the political class. All because a few, just a few, good men came to lead these at some providential moments of time.
Can you imagine how much stronger we would have felt as a nation if just two other institutions, the CBI and the CVC, had also been similarly fortunate? The sad fact is that the Supreme Court has repeatedly enhanced the powers and autonomy for both these institutions and the law places the CBI under the CVC’s superintendence, to give one autonomy and the other investigative muscle.
But neither has been blessed with a leader who would be willing to embrace this power of institutional autonomy. Instead, an entire succession of our CBI directors have only made news through rotten controversies, and have spent their tenures fixing cases politically, one way or the other. As for our CVCs, do you remember the names of any? They have been so ineffectual, such non-entities, and so inadequate for the job that their office has mostly been reduced to a post office where claimants for public sector jobs and their lobbyists or rivals write endless complaints against each other and ensure that these are duly leaked.
A clean-up of the CBI is probably too much to ask for in today’s political climate. But maybe, with some luck, if only we could get a strong and wise CVC. A formidable chief justice has taken over the Supreme Court. A CEC, Navin Chawla, has retired today after a distinguished tenure and he has been succeeded by S.Y. Quraishi. Both have worked together to enhance the EC’s reputation over the past five years. And as that gathering last Saturday morning showed, this city still has many people who will risk their lives and future interests for as little as Rs 12, 000 a month (which is all that K.J. Rao was paid when he cleaned up the Bihar election) and leave a brilliant legacy behind. The challenge is to find and empower them. Just a few of them. You cannot make a better investment than that for India’s sake.
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