Duty or a devious plan?

Questions over the real motive arise

In normal circumstances, there is nothing wrong or illegal in either the government naming the next Army Chief two months in advance or appointing a special director in the Central Bureau of Investigation. But when such decisions are taken by a caretaker government right in the middle of the Lok Sabha elections, then questions over their ethicality, propriety and motives are but natural and justified.

The suspicion over the government’s intentions get further strengthened in view of its dubious past record of appointments to key constitutional and other high posts, whether it was that of a “pro-Congress” jurist to the Lokpal selection panel or the appointment of an additional director in the CBI ignoring the repeated recommendations of the Central Vigilance Commission.

In a major blow to the United Progressive Alliance government, the Supreme Court in July 2011 had quashed the appointment of P.J. Thomas as CVC. Mr Thomas was appointed CVC despite opposition from the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj.

Mr Thomas was an accused in the Kerala Palmolein case for offences under Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. Quoting an earlier judgment, the court said eligibility criteria would indicate that eligible persons should be without any blemish whatsoever and they should not be appointed merely because they were eligible to be considered for the post.

Almost two years later, the apex court questioned the credibility of the CBI probe into the coal scam, raised questions on the agency’s independence and called it a “caged parrot speaking in its master’s voice”.

The UPA’s plan behind announcing Army vice-chief Lt. Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag’s name is apparently to pre-empt what it calls any change in the line of succession that a possible Bharatiya Janata Party-led government may force. If at all any such succession chain exists, the moot question is why the yardstick was not applied in the recent appointment of Admiral Rabinder Kumar Dhowan as the new Navy Chief, superseding Western Naval Command (WNC) chief Vice-Admiral Shekhar Kumar Sinha, who is six months senior to him?

Admiral Dhowan was appointed since the ministry of defence felt Vice-Admiral Sinha had to take his share of the blame for the recent string of warship mishaps under the WNC.

If Admiral Sinha was “punished” on moral grounds, it needs to be recalled that in 2012, a discipline and vigilance promotion ban was imposed on Lt. Gen. Suhag for “abdicating responsibility” in “a most unprofessional and lackadaisical manner” while dealing with a December 2011 operation by an intelligence and surveillance unit under him, as then commander of Dimapur-based III Corps.

The then Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh had also forwarded a complaint to the CBI against Lt. Gen. Suhag over alleged irregularities in the purchase of parachutes during his tenure in the special frontier force.

Most of these posts are critical to governance and facing an imminent rout this time around, the ruling party is keen to appoint persons who may at least “keep them informed” or at least cause minimum embarrassment in the event of the new dispensation taking some investigative or punitive action against them.

It is important to preserve the independence and neutrality of our esteemed institutions and therefore insulate them against political interference in the larger national interests.

K.G. Suresh is a senior fellow with the Vivekananda International Foundation

UPA has legitimate powers

Given the pedigree of legal luminaries that the Bharatiya Ja-nata Party boasts of — Arun Jaitley to Ravi Shankar Prasad — their legal insights (rather the lack of it) on this subject baffles me. Perhaps, a cursory reading of the definition of a “caretaker government” — an arrangement put in place, when a government in a parliamentary system is defeated in a no-confidence motion or when the House to which the government is responsible (i.e. Lok Sabha) is dissolved, to rule the country for an interim period until an election is held and a new government is formed —  would have awakened the BJP to the fact that the current government is by no means a “caretaker” one insofar as it has neither fallen nor has Lok Sabha been dissolved by the President but has only been adjourned sine die.

What is more curious is the fact that in April 1999, after Atal Behari Vajpayee’s 13-month government fell, the then information and broadcasting minister Pramod Mahajan, pretending to be a full-fledged government capable of taking not just controversial executive decisions but even purely legislative ones, was on record to say “There is nothing called caretaker government in the Constitution and our government will be taking all the appropriate decisions in time!”

Don’t you find hypocrisy written all over this argument?

While he was right that the Constitution indeed does not define a “caretaker” government or its powers, surely by mere parliamentary and constitutional precedence, the Vajpayee govern-ment and not the United Progressive Alliance-2 government, by the virtue of its collapse and subsequent dissolution of the Lok Sabha, deserved to be characterised as a “caretaker government”.

What is more hypocritical is the fact that Mr Vajpayee’s “caretaker” minority government not only made several key, often controversial, appointments including that of the Delhi police commissioner during the time, but set the highest benchmark of constitutional impropriety by implementing the Telecom Migration package — a legislative decision that cost the exchequer a loss of over Rs 45,000 crore — despite the specific, written objection of the Cabinet secretary and President K.R. Narayanan.

So in light of this, we have the curious case of a party namely the BJP that sets the benchmark of constitutional hypocrisy and impropriety, advising the current government not to go about matters which it has been legitimately empowered to carry on, by no less than the Election Commission of India, which has clarified that making certain appointments, including the one relating to the Chiefs of the Navy or Army, are an administrative matter.

Curiously, the BJP lodged a protest with the EC on the proposed plan of the UPA to appoint Lt. Gen. Dalbir Singh Suhag, India’s first Jat Army Chief, only after its Ghaziabad Lok Sabha candidate and former Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh, picked up cudgels against it.

It gets even more curious, as readers would note, that if Gen. Suhag’s appointment does get scuttled, the direct beneficiary would be Lt. Gen. Ashok Singh, whose son is married to Gen. V.K. Singh’s daughter. Nice touch by the BJP to couch such a blatant conflict of interest under the veil of constitutional hogwash, isn’t it?

Shehzad Poonawalla is a lawyer-activist and was  formerly serving with the ministry of parliamentary affairs, Government of India.
The views expressed are his own.