Any Simon Wiesenthal for Gujarat?

Binu Alex

Delhi, Mumbai, Bhagalpur, Gujarat. No, these are not the investment destinations but down the memory places as we read the death of Simon Wiesenthal

A number of movies all over the world depict how one man can change the system or the world. Well, that is not as easy task as depicted in movies. You cannot have a screen Arnold Schwarzenegger in real life. But there are people who try and try till they live. Simon Wiesenthal was one of those fighters who died at the age of 96.

He lived and died for a cause. He was a holocaust survivor turned Nazi-hunter. He brought to book many Nazi war criminals who would have otherwise got unpunished. But on the sidelines, it is also true that many of the survivors or their generations were least bothered about the pain and agony their forefathers have gone through. A few of the concentration camp survivors followed Wiesenthal in his mission. Though there will be hardly any Nazi war criminals left to be punished, the fact that many of them went without any punishment is itself a blot in the history of justice.

That was during World War II. Information age was yet to catch up during those times. But today at this modern age where religion, caste, nationality ceased to exist in a competitive world, we still have Adolf Eichmann and Franz Stangl types around us, alas we don’t have a Wiesenthal to enact a rewind.

If Eichmann and Stangl were some of the architects of the Holocaust we have far too many today.

Take the case of Sikh Massacres in 1984 or the Gujarat genocide of 2002. Those who perpetuated the crime have gone without a trace. The government in power helped them to get away by putting up commissions after commissions that never gave a true picture of our indigenous holocaust. The best way to get away from justice is to set up a judicial commission. The commission is nothing but Employment Guarantee Scheme for retired judges.

If anyone had the chance to visit any commission hearings, they will agree to this. The latest hearing is in the Nanavati-Shah commission where there are thousands of affidavits to be heard and cross examined. Prosecutors, one after the other, put up questions as if they are conducting an interview for a civil services examination. Many witnesses are dummies created by the government and those survivors who muster courage to come up for the examination cannot withstand the onslaught. Days, weeks and months and perhaps years, the commission drags on and gradually people forget what had happened to them and life gets back to normal until one day the commission presents its reports, mostly decades after the incident, and it becomes a tool for the opposition parties to play with for a short period of time.

That is democracy at its best. A democracy cannot provide justice to victims of such holocaust. What it can do at the best is to give the country people like Justice B N Srikrishna but at the same time trash his report on the riots in Bombay.

It is sad for Gujarat that it could not produce a Wiesenthal. The state has so many bonsai models but no body could come near to his stature or commitment to justice.

Public memory is short. That is the reason that the victims of holocaust forgot that they endured the worst crime ever possible to humanity. But Wiesenthal did not. He slogged and slogged to bring the war criminals to justice.

But then how come the victims of Indian holocausts, whether it is Delhi, Bhagalpur or Gujarat, forget so easily. The main culprit is our political class. As long as the vote bank politics continue in India, there cannot be any justice to mass murders.

“You can forgive crimes committed against you personally, but in my opinion you are not authorized to forgive for others.”

These are the famous quotes credited to Simon Wiesenthal and how true it plays in today’s world is evident from the fact that we have forgiven – knowingly or unknowingly- all our criminals. So much so that some of them have contested and won elections. More than 89 of Wiesenthal’s’ family members - including his mother, stepfather, stepbrother and his wife - died in the Holocaust and perhaps this gave him the inner courage to fight. But compare that to the Indian scenario. It is not the survivors or the victims who are fighting for justice but rather people who have not lost anything in the mindless violence. Perhaps the survivors may not endure to fight in the melee of a huge number of NGOs who look for such opportunities to make name, fame and money. In the deluge of such unscrupulous organizations, genuine NGOs sink with no trace to know which one is genuine and which one is not.

Wiesenthal’s efforts bore fruit. Jewish Documentation Center was established in Vienna with the aim to track down war criminals. In 1960 Eichmann was caught tried, convicted and executed in Israel and Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany in 1967 and died in prison. But we may not be able to replicate it in our lifetime.

If we can produce a Wiesenthal, then we may perhaps avoid producing Eichmann and Stangl type of villains or else we need to produce a Schindler on whom we have to depend heavily to prepare a long list.

© Binu Alex

Health shops Vs Beauty shops

Dial for Health, Planet Health, Health Conscious. These are some swanky shops that sell medicines – oops, sorry, they don’t sell medicines but beauty products.

I think everyone of you have gone through this experience of getting into one of these chain of shops to buy a life saving drug and then returning with a shampoo, soap or a napkin. Yes, because the chances are they may not have the drug you have asked for. They are just an extension of the big mall culture that is coming up in the country. You will need to go to the medicine shop nearby your home or office to buy that tablet.

Planet Health claims it is a niche distributor of natural health products selected for their quality, reputation, innovation, ethics and philosophy. But I don’t see any of these. I always got a no to any sundry medicine I asked for. Instead they push for their membership card saying it has lot many benefits.

Dial For Health says they will deliver the products home. But the pity is that they don’t have any health products. They have beauty enhancing products instead. Go to any shop and you can yourself see how much space is consumed by health and how much by beauty. The biggest problem, as I see, is that many of these shops are owned by pharmaceutical companies. Dial for Health is by Zydus Cadila. But the irony is that even their own products are not available in these shops.

Who benefits from a Pay Commission?

Since the First Pay Commission was established in 1956 it is generally believed that all government employees benefit from it. Their salaries are revised and determined from time to time, here in this case for a ten-year period. But who are these government employees who benefits?
It is the creamy layer of the government employees who benefit from this pay rise. Take the case of a Chief Commissioner of Customs or Income Tax. The new pay commission will fix his salary at around 80,000 per month plus the perks like official car, accommodation and the usual extra income that comes unofficially. Now what is his work? No body has really examined what work these creamy layers of large organizations like Income tax or Customs are assigned or function. Their primary job is to waste at least a dozen employees at their disposal. There will be two peons, a driver, an officer on special duty to him and the staff under him and his personal secretary and junior personal secretary. He signs hardly two files a day but chats for hours with colleagues all over the country and perhaps orders service tea on an hourly basis. A service tea basically serves for at least three people and so the peons take the advantage of the rest of the tea and milk. Some of them pack the sugar and tea daily home or else it goes waste.
Now imagine a scenario without this post. His salary would employ at least a dozen employees and he already has a dozen. So altogether each top officer wastes twenty-four employees. Believe me we don’t have a dearth of such top-level officials in any department. Consider this. The number of Chief Commissioners of Income tax in Gujarat is more than the number of Lower Division Clerks in that particular department. Out of 3.3 million employees who will benefit from the implementation, 80 percent of the money will go to seven percent of this workforce. What a waste?

That is also the reason why the federal government's wage bill for serving and retired employees shot from Rs 218.85 billion in 1996-1997 to Rs 435.68 billion in 1999-2000 after the Fifth Pay Commission recommendations were implemented.

These are the creamy layers for whom the pay commissions work. And who threatens the government with dire consequences for setting it up? The poor class three and four employees. A World Bank report indicates that Indian government employee strength may not be too large but lacks balance in the skills. It pointed the Fifth Pay Commission as the 'single largest adverse shock' to India's strained public finances. The report says 93 per cent of the civil service comprised class III and class IV employees which means only seven percent takes away more than what they deserve. So 93 percent will strike work to serve for seven percentages!

Many wondered after the disbursal of arrears of the last pay commission why there was no improvement in the functioning of the government servants. Well it was because the creamy layer took the chunk of the money and it is anyone’s guess why its implementation destroyed the finances of the central and state governments.

But then why no corrections are made even after decades of such anomalies? That is primarily because the creamy layer group is so powerful that they lobby the government decisions in their favor year after year, commissions after commissions. Want an example to that? The Fifth Pay Commission's recommendations for reducing the government workforce by 30 per cent (which included the creamy layer too), abolishing around 350,000 vacant posts(which included the creamy layer too) and reducing the number of pay scales from 51 to 34 were never implemented.

On the contrary, the retirement age was increased from 58 to 60. Any government employee retires even before his retirement. During the period from 58 to 60, he prepares for the retirement and hardly is involved into work, especially the creamy layer. These creamy layers, during this two period, makes retirement plans in various ways which includes how much they can gather as quickly as possible, how much stationary they can get before they relinquish their office, how much tours they can undertake officially with their family to tourist places and how they can place themselves on a top position in any private firm after retirement so that their incomes that is shown mainly as agricultural incomes from non existent farms can be made legal.

If at all the government introduces a law to bring agriculture into the tax net, it will not be the big farmers – who take immense benefit from this – that will be objecting to this. It will be the creamy layer of the government service because if that option is done away with, it will be hell of a job for these babus to hide their wealth and at the same time show it in their property returns.

Another recommendation of the fifth commission or for that matter any commission will never be implemented is to link salary hikes to efficiency and administrative reforms. So another pay commission may not be the answer to the burgeoning problem of this disparity. What we need is a study of efficiency and working style of the government employees and how well they are placed to work and how much work each person is doing and whether it is justified. That will solve the problem forever.

Binu Alex