I pity the 15-year-old kid who, instead of taking advantage of having received a Central Board of Secondary Education examination paper in advance, reported its leak to the CBSE’s head Anita Karwal. If history is any guide, he will live to regret his principled act. India is not kind to whistle-blowers, citizens who tell inconvenient truths and officials who do their job with embarrassing effectiveness.
Earlier this week, the tragic episode of Indians massacred by Islamic State thugs in Mosul, Iraq, reached its conclusion with the repatriation of remains of 38 of the 39 dead. Harjit Masih would have been the fortieth victim, but received only a flesh wound and managed to elude the killers by playing dead. On his return to India, he was taken into what the state calls protective custody, isolated from family and friends, and instructed to keep his version of events to himself.
He spoke up nevertheless, and the government branded him a liar. With Narendra Modi having monopolised foreign policy, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has built her brand by helping individual Indians in trouble in foreign lands. She was in her element dealing with the Mosul crisis, assuring family members of the missing men that impeccable sources indicated they were alive. Swaraj did the right thing by refusing to rely on a single source claiming to be an eyewitness. Sadly, she went further by repeatedly calling Harjit Masih untruthful.
Masih himself never deviated from a narrative that now appears to have been accurate. His reward was being arrested on the unlikely charge of human trafficking. He is out on bail, struggling to make ends meet as the lone breadwinner of his family, while storm clouds of the trafficking case hang over him.
The BSF whistle-blower
In some nations, media attention serves to protect individuals, since the state does not want to appear vindictive. That shield operates very weakly in India, as Tej Bahadur Yadav discovered. A Border Security Force constable, Yadav posted videos in April last year exposing poor living conditions for troops coping with hostile weather near the Line of Control. The videos received million of views, thousands of pledges of support, and made headlines on all television channels. After he was summarily sacked, Yadav discovered the superficiality of social media backing. The episode, like many others of its ilk, reminded me of an exchange between the Duke of Norfolk and Sir Francis Walsingham in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film Elizabeth. Christopher Ecclestone’s Norfolk, on being arrested, says, “I am content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.” Geoffrey Rush’s Walsingham answers, acidly, “No… They will forget.”
Gorakhpur travesty
In August, 60 children died for want of oxygen in Gorakhpur’s BRD Medical College and Hospital. Among those in charge at the hospital, Dr Kafeel Khan was singled out by families and the press for bringing in as many oxygen cylinders as he could, using his own money. His high profile proved his undoing, as the Uttar Pradesh administration charged him with a number of serious offences including attempt to murder and criminal conspiracy. Old charges against him from which he had been acquitted years previously were rehashed in the media. Also arrested was Manish Bhandari, head of a company that supplied oxygen to the hospital and had stopped the flow of the gas after a series of reminders about unpaid dues. The bizarre logic operating here is that the government can refuse to pay any private company the agreed amount for its product and still expect that company to continue providing that product, or face criminal charges for any damage accruing from lack of supplies. Rajiv Mishra, principal of BRD college, who had addressed a number of letters to the state health department about the same issue, is also in jail along with Khan and Bhandari. No bureaucrat from the state health department has been held responsible for the stoppage of oxygen.
Punishment postings
While every state government and every party stomps on the powerless and pursues vendettas, Adityanath’s administration stands out in its eagerness to punish officials who act in any way against members of the ruling party. Soon after a video went viral showing Shreshtha Thakur, a young deputy superintendent of police from the Uttar Pradesh cadre, taking on BJP workers who claimed they were being singled out for harassment, she was transferred to Bahraich near the Nepal border. Saharanpur’s senior superintendent of police Love Kumar and Agra’s senior superintendent of police Pritinder Singh also received punishment postings for taking on BJP and RSS mobs.
Communal tension is flaring across the north of India and, should the BJP perform badly in the upcoming polls, it might seek to polarise communities further by instigating violence. If that were to happen, I am certain administrations will follow the example set by Modi in 2002: Promote officers who allow Hindu mobs to run riot, and punish those who do their job efficiently and conscientiously. Since it has worked so well for Modi thus far, it is hard to see him or his party members deviating from the principle of speaking power to truth.