Internal bickering led to quitting of Rohtagi

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Internal bickering led to quitting of Rohtagi

Salve in line of suucession

Harish Gupta

New Delhi, June 12

With Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi declining to continue in the post “until further orders” decks are cleared for a shake up in the government’s legal officers’ team.

It transpires that the proposal for extending the terms of AG Mukul Rohtagi, Solicitor-General of India Ranjit Kumar and eight other Additional Solicitor generals of India was mooted almost two months ago.

has written to the Narendra Modi government, saying he is not interested in the continuation of his tenure as the nation's senior law officer and wishes to get back to private practice. Normally, such decisions are taken well in advance rather than delaying until the last moment. But in the instant case, the file remained pending somewhere in the Law Ministry or the Prime Minister’s Office.

Without waiting for the government to take a decision, Rohtagi wrote to the government that he was not interested in continuing with the job and wants to return to private law practice. 

Rohatgi, 61, had been appointed for three years and his term was to expire on June 18, 2017. However, Prime Minister Modi, before embarking on a foreign tour, issued a general order saying that the term of all law officers is extended until further orders. It is said that this was the crux of the problem as self-respecting Rohtago felt that he can’t remain an atmosphere of uncertainty and decided to call it a day.  Sources in the law ministry said they were "not aware why the Attorney General is not keen to continue".

"I have worked for five years as law officer under the Vajpayee government and now three years under the Modi government," Rohtagi said in the state. "I want to return to my private practice. I have a good relationship with the government... That's why I wrote to the government not to extend my term," he added.

A word is yet to emerge in respect of Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar whose term had also been extended until further order.

Sources in the law ministry said the present team of law officers was considered close to Finance & defence minister Arun Jaitley. It is also felt that Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was always uncomfortable with Rohtagi and even Ranjit Kumar. It is not known what will happen next because the entire government will now be stationed in Delhi for the next one week as various important decisions are to be taken in bureaucracy, law ministry and also Presidential elections.

Over the last three years, Rohatgi was handling the cases involving Aadhaar, judicial appointments for the government. His recent cases also involved the contentious triple talaq issue, the matter is being heard by a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court.

The son of former Delhi High Court judge Justice Awadh Behari Rohatgi, he earlier represented the Gujarat government in the Supreme Court regarding the 2002 Gujarat riots, and cases involving Zahira Sheikh and the Best Bakery. There are reports that leading lawyer Harish Salve may now be brought in a AG and Tushar Mehta, an additional solicitor general of India may be promoted.

Aadhar: The fear psychosis

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

The current brouhaha in the parliament, the media and the court over Aadhar, India’s unique identification card for citizens is typical of a nation witnessing a regime change, and its accompanying about-face on policy. It was the previous Congress-led UPA regime, harassed as it was by mounting subsidies and their rampant misuse through corruption, commissioned the services of IT wizard Nandan Nilekani to set up Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Insiders say it was Dr Manmohan Singh who came up with the idea and the government authority was created to administer the nation-wide 12-digit Aadhar card. The number touched 50 crores mark when UPA demitted office and shot up to 1.12 billion already. But always wary of upsetting the UPA vote bank—be they PDS cheats and assorted rent seekers—UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and the cabal around her put roadblocks on its use in one form or the other. The Aadhar actually remained a number, nothing else. The NDA, on the other hand, is keen to use the Aadhar platform for not only incidental operations like distribution of subsidised LPG cylinders but to replace the entire creaking PDS with a Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) architecture that may include issuing of Food Stamps.

But a countrywide identification system has its downside. If put in the hands of a draconian regime, its most fearsome use may be as an instrument of mass surveillance, much as the Nazis reportedly used an IBM machine way back in the 1933 census to identify the Jews in Germany. But, food and petroleum subsidy alone costing Rs 240,000 crore in 2016-17, and over 40 per cent of grains and sugar distributed across the Fair Price Shops either rotting in transit or getting pilfered, the gain from Aadhar far outweighs its imagined cost and fears. And the ‘cost’ is being cynically exaggerated by a section of leftist intellectuals in the former National Advisory Council (NAC) of UPA; it was popularly known as Sonia Gandhi’s ‘kitchen cabinet’. Jean Drěze, its economist ex-member, is particularly vocal against the NDA government’s plans with Aadhar. He is campaigning that the Aadhar Bill now passed in the Lok Sabha as a Money Bill (so bypassing the Upper House where the BJP is not in majority), is being built “as an infrastructure of social control”.

Last week, after the Lok Sabha cleared the Aadhar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reminded the House that it was the “culmination of seven years of discussion” over the Bill. It was a confession of sorts of the stiff resistance that the BJP gave to the passage of some features of the law when the latter was in the opposition. But Jaitley was unambiguous in its purpose. He said “it will empower the state to distribute resources to the deserving people and save the resources that undeserving people get”. It is obvious that the economy, plagued by tepid tax revenues and soaring costs of government wages and defence expenditure, is desperate to curb the pressure of subsidies on both economic and social services. Even after setting aside the ‘merit’ subsidies (i.e., the essential subsidies in primary education, health, sanitation and sewage, mid-day meal, etc.), the non-merit (or inessential state spend on the undeserving) subsidy works out to a hefty one-tenth of the GDP. It is anything but sustainable. And the intention to curtail it signifies the political shift from the left to the right that marks the 2014 regime change.

Before the bill’s passage in the Lower House, it went through the Upper House with a slew of amendments, all moved by Congress lawmaker Jairam Ramesh. His amendments sought to prevent disclosure of “biometric or demographic information” in the interest of “national security”. It was proposed that the clause be substituted instead by “public emergency” or “public safety”. There were a few other amendments that were all swept aside in the Lok Sabha, where Jaitley’s ‘money bill’ made short shrift of Ramesh’s suggestions, one of which was against the use of Aadhar number for any purpose not mentioned in the Bill (such as for filing of Income-Tax return).

However, a good question to ask Ramesh could be: why is he nettled by the term “national security”? It is evident that a fear is stalking the opposition benches that the Aadhar Bill, after it becomes a law, may be used by the government to throw open the dossier on every dissenter and everyone who refuses to toe the line, and get its finger on his location, correspondence history, tax details or personal life. In a world which is digitally vibrant, the twelve digits on the Aadhar card are like a screen to the secret police to every secret in one’s life. In South Africa under the apartheid regime, the 1950 population registration data was used to assign in the 13-digit national identification number, the penultimate (12th) digit, telling if its holder is ‘black’ or not. There is no doubt, therefore, that Aadhar can turn out to be a weapon in the hands of the government of the day fighting war on many fronts. Surely, individuals, groups, communities etc indulging in anti-social, anti-national activities may have a reason to be worried too. For students of recent history, the anti-Sikh massacre after the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 may be a haunting issue in this respect. The Nanavati Commission report cites a glaring succession of the lynch mobs identifying Sikh households in Delhi with unerring precision within 24 hours of the former Prime Minister’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Therefore, when a conspiracy drives mobs, it is not essential for them to act on a public identification network. There was no Aadhar then.

What is more relevant is the fact that the world has changed, and so has technology; and claiming privacy to be a “fundamental right” may be legally debatable but technologically laughable. Assuming that Big Brother is watching one’s movements, it makes sense giving everyone a number rather than making his wheat, or rice, get gobbled up by someone else.