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By:

Prasad Dixit

11 October 2024 at 1:09:23 am

The Questions Left Behind at Jantar Mantar and Ranchi

India’s examination crisis is real. But the politics around Jantar Mantar and Ranchi risks obscuring the harder questions about education. Soon after Jantar Mantar finally heaved a sigh of relief after weeks of agitation and sloganeering, its sequel began unfolding in Ranchi. The two episodes together they raise an uncomfortable question: are the real issues getting lost somewhere between the politics of protest and the politics of counter-protest? Much has been said about what the government...

The Questions Left Behind at Jantar Mantar and Ranchi

India’s examination crisis is real. But the politics around Jantar Mantar and Ranchi risks obscuring the harder questions about education. Soon after Jantar Mantar finally heaved a sigh of relief after weeks of agitation and sloganeering, its sequel began unfolding in Ranchi. The two episodes together they raise an uncomfortable question: are the real issues getting lost somewhere between the politics of protest and the politics of counter-protest? Much has been said about what the government could have done better over the NEET paper-leak controversy and its handling of the agitation at Jantar Mantar. Videos, photographs, narratives and counter-narratives have filled the media for weeks. One point, however, should not be difficult to concede. The government, the ruling party and its student wing failed to gauge the extent of frustration and anxiety among students over repeated examination irregularities. Opposition parties and their student organisations were hardly more perceptive. They too spent much of the agitation playing catch-up, trying to remain politically relevant. Warning Sign The genuine concerns of students, and the insensitive handling of those concerns, resonated with ordinary people across political affiliations. That should be a warning to governments of every ideological hue. Good governance and responsiveness to public sentiment are not luxuries to be deployed when convenient. They are the basic minimum expected of a government. But there are harder questions, involving not merely the government’s failures but also the hypocrisy of sections of the political and intellectual establishment and the gullibility of a generation that these same people claim to represent. Demanding the resignation of ministers, compensation for families of students who died by suicide, or withdrawal of FIRs against agitators may make for compelling political slogans. They do not, by themselves, amount to educational reform. The country already recognises that competitive examinations require fundamental changes. A national task force of technology experts has been constituted for precisely this purpose. Printing lakhs of question papers, transporting them to thousands of centres across hundreds of cities and securing them at every stage is a logistical exercise almost designed to invite human failure and, potentially, criminal intervention. Technology-enabled and secure examination systems are therefore an obvious part of the way forward. This is where the politics becomes particularly revealing. Parties that strongly backed the Jantar Mantar agitation have, in other forums, demanded that elections should abandon technology-led voting and return instead to something resembling the paper age: billions of printed ballot papers transported to roughly a million polling stations. Thus, technology is celebrated as the solution when it suits a particular argument and condemned as a threat when it does not. Double Standards Hypocrisy, however, is not confined to technology. What happened in Ranchi makes the double standard still harder to ignore. Political parties and organisations that were highly visible at Jantar Mantar, championing the student cause and, in some cases, appearing willing to condone targeted attacks on the police and foul language directed at them, have been conspicuously less visible when similar questions of accountability have arisen elsewhere. Accountability cannot be a principle that changes with the political colour of the government involved. The Education Minister was not accused by the Jantar Mantar protesters of personally leaking an examination paper. Yet his resignation was demanded as a means of establishing political accountability. That is a legitimate political argument, provided it is applied consistently. But those demanding accountability for the government’s failures were far less willing to apply the same standard to failures occurring in the midst of an agitation they had helped assemble. In Ranchi, even an independent investigation by the CBI has apparently been contested, let alone calls for ministerial resignations. Credible agitators and their supporters must have the courage of conviction to demand accountability wherever it is due. Otherwise, accountability becomes little more than a weapon for political convenience. The same double standard appeared in television studios, where an agitation involving a few thousand people at Jantar Mantar was routinely presented as the authentic voice of India’s entire “Gen-Z student community”. That proposition deserves the same scrutiny that politicians routinely apply to other claims of representation. The BJP may have contested and won elections in the name of Hindutva, but even its critics correctly argue that it cannot claim to represent every Hindu in India. By the same logic, a gathering of a few thousand students cannot, by any stretch, claim to speak for an entire generation of students. The overwhelming majority who did not join the agitation have a voice too. Their silence should not be mistaken for consent any more than protest should automatically be mistaken for universal opinion. Then there were the more curious arguments. The educational background of the Prime Minister was dragged into the debate, as though a leader who does not possess the desired academic credentials cannot understand higher education or govern it effectively. This is a remarkably narrow understanding of leadership. By that logic, a leader who has never experienced poverty could never understand poverty or formulate policies to alleviate it. Leadership is not a competitive examination in which personal experience is the only qualifying criterion. The use of the Indian Air Force to transport question papers during the examination crisis also generated some remarkably shallow commentary, including suggestions that China should have been emulated in the use of military power. Such arguments conveniently ignore the rather different way China manages public protest. One cannot selectively borrow an authoritarian state’s logistical efficiency while overlooking the methods by which it maintains order. Debate Needed The deeper problem lies well beyond the question-paper leak. India needs a serious debate about the role of the state and the private sector in education and, indeed, in healthcare. The retreat of the state and the resulting expansion of commercialisation, from schools to highly sought-after professional courses, has created incentives that are increasingly difficult to defend. How many doctors, engineers and other professionals does the economy actually require? In which disciplines and in what numbers? How should professional shortages in rural areas be addressed? Why should affordability so often outweigh merit? These are not questions that markets can simply be expected to settle. Parents and students are increasingly treated as customers to be persuaded to chase a handful of expensive and prestigious courses at almost any cost. The inevitable disappointment comes either at the entrance examination itself or later, when the coveted degree does not produce the expected career. The result is a peculiar imbalance. India can have an extraordinary concentration of ambition around examinations such as NEET and JEE while simultaneously producing large numbers of highly educated but unemployed or underemployed young people. That contradiction cannot be solved by fixing the examination system alone. Nor can democracy function indefinitely on the assumption that every protest is legitimate simply because its grievance is genuine. India needs a clearer distinction between freedom of expression, the right to protest and mobocracy. Every political party, including the BJP when it was in opposition, has at times flirted with agitation that came perilously close to the last of these. But a party that has spent the greatest number of years in power cannot forever use the conduct of its predecessors as an excuse. The Congress, in particular, has an opportunity - and an obligation - to demonstrate what a responsible opposition looks like, both in Parliament and on the streets. Changing one’s position on a fundamental issue according to who occupies the government merely produces an endless cycle of whataboutery. There is also a difficult balance for the government and law-enforcement agencies. The morale of the police must be protected when they confront anti-social elements and violence. But democratic protest cannot become a licence for excessive force. Political parties owe citizens a common understanding on where that line lies. The silent majority of Gen-Z will be watching. It was not necessarily present at Jantar Mantar, nor will it necessarily be visible in Ranchi. But it is paying attention. It will judge political parties not merely by the slogans they shout but by the safety, fairness and opportunities they can offer its future. (The writer has worked in the Information Technology sector. Views personal.)

India waits to lasso diamantaire Mehul Choksi

Mumbai: India rubbed its hands gleefully as the Belgium Police honoured its request to arrest the absconder diamantaire Mehul Chinubhai Choksi – more than seven years after he, along with his nephew Nirav Deepak Modi - allegedly duped the Punjab National Bank of nearly Rs. 13,800-crores.

 

The scam involving the ‘Mehul Mama-Nirav Bhanja’ erupted in Jan 2018, after the PNB lodged a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

 

By then the kin, along with many of their family members, winked and slipped out of the country, leaving a rattled India rubbing its palms in disappointment.

 

A political-cum-financial storm raged, embarrassing the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year before the Lok Sabha elections.

 

Multiple agencies launched a multi-pronged probe into what became the biggest banking scam in the past quarter century – and almost four times bigger than the stock market-cum-banking fraud the late Big Bull Harshad Mehta had inflicted on the Indian economy 33 years ago (in April 1992) – when it was just opening up.

 

In Belgium

According to official reports, Choksi was living with his Belgium citizen-wife Preeti in Antwerp, a global diamond hub, presumably for the past 18 months on a ‘residency permit’ acquired through questionable means, for medical reasons.

 

Earlier, he shot to the headers (June 2021) while being taken in a wheelchair to a court by the Dominican Republic's Police on charges of sneaking into the small country in the Caribbean Sea, North America.

 

Interestingly, as the Antigua & Barbuda government initiated the process to cancel his citizenship acquired through an investor visa, Choksi had suddenly gone ‘missing’ till he surfaced in the Dominican Republic.

 

The April 2025 action by Belgium followed a request by India’s CBI and the financial frauds specialist Enforcement Directorate (ED) to nab Choksi as the InterPol had revoked his Red Corner Notice in 2023.

 

Mama and Bhanja

‘Mama’ Choksi is the founder-owner of Gitanjali Group while ‘bhanja’ Nirav’s Firestar plus other companies – and the duo, with some PNB officials hand-in-glove – conspired to make a ‘mamu’ of not only PNB, but other banks, as it subsequently tumbled out.

 

After making a quiet exit, Choksi was detected living in the verdant Antigua & Barbuda Isles (West Indies), then attempted entry to the Dominican Republic, was sent back to Antigua & Barbuda and then went to Belgium where he was nabbed on Sunday.

 

Similarly, Modi was found sauntering on the streets of London and nabbed in March 2019. He remains in jail there since India's extradition is still pending.

 

However, India is keeping its fingers crossed that it may finally lay hands on Choksi, bring him to India and face trial in the PNB scam, though it may take time.

 

Born in Mumbai (1959) and educated in Gujarat, Choksi, 66, and wife Preeti have three children.

 

The Rs. 13,800-crore PNB scam

In the modus operandi revealed after India’s second-largest PSU bank PNB admitted it was scammed, Choksi and Modi used fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) to get overseas credits or loans from Indian banks.

 

The PNB first informed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) of the fraud and then lodged a criminal complaint with the CBI in Jan. 2018, plus another CBI complaint in Feb, that led to a FIR against Modi and Choksi and their companies.

 

The ED entered the scene to probe the allegations of money-laundering through the LoUs – which they allegedly misused to avail short-term business finances from foreign branches of Indian banks.

 

The probe said that the duo were availing the LoUs from the PNB’s Brady House Branch from March 2011, and over the next six-seven years, managed to get a whopping 1,200-plus LoUs like a breeze with the help of some friendly bankers within.

 

Post-scam, the gold-diamond companies Gitanjali Group and Firestone Group with multiple operations in India and abroad have largely wound up, while some personal assets of the mama-bhanja have been auctioned to recover a part of the dues.

 

ED's plea to declare Choksi fugitive stuck for seven years

Even as absconding diamantaire Mehul Choksi, a key accused in the Punjab National Bank loan fraud case, has been arrested in Belgium, the ED's plea to declare him a fugitive economic offender has been pending before a court in Mumbai for nearly seven years.


Choksi, 65, and his nephew diamantaire Nirav Modi are the prime accused in the Rs 13,000 crore PNB bank loan fraud case. Choksi was arrested in Belgium following an extradition request by Indian probe agencies, official sources said on Monday.


The Enforcement Directorate had filed the application in July 2018, seeking to declare Choksi an FEO and confiscate his assets under provisions of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act.


However, the matter has witnessed repeated delays owing to a barrage of applications filed by the accused in the PMLA court and the Bombay High Court alleging procedural lapses in the Enforcement Directorate's plea.


"The court is kept busy with frivolous applications, and hearing on our application to declare him (Choksi) an FEO has been adjourned for the past seven years,” an ED officer had said after the hearing was once again deferred this February.


"The court should have continued the hearing and taken a decision on the future course of action once the application was moved," the officer had said.

He had urged the court to take note of the repeated filing of similar applications and to not entertain them.


Choksi's lawyer had informed the court that the accused was undergoing treatment for suspected cancer in Belgium and intended to file an application in connection with his health.


Under the FEO Act, an individual can be declared a Fugitive Economic Offender if a warrant has been issued against him for an offence involving Rs 100 crore or more and he has left India while refusing to return. Once declared an FEO, the person's property can be confiscated by the investigating agency.


Choksi had challenged the ED's application in the Bombay High Court, alleging that the agency "had not followed proper procedure before filing the application and, hence, it stands vitiated".


However, in September 2023, the High Court dismissed his plea, ruling that the ED had adhered to the prescribed format under the FEO Act. It also vacated a stay on the special court's proceedings.


Despite this, the hearing on declaring Choksi FEO could not commence, with Choksi continuing to file applications before the special court through his lawyers.


While most of these pleas have been dismissed, a few remain pending. His latest attempt to stall proceedings through a plea to recall the notice issued on the ED's FEO application was rejected in December 2023.


According to ED officials, Choksi left India under suspicious circumstances in early January 2018.


Shifting stance

Choksi's counsel has argued that the ED kept shifting its stance on the material grounds for declaring him an FEO and that the suspension of his Indian passport made it impossible for him to return for investigation.

The court, however, rejected this argument, stating that the notice was issued based on accurate information and not based on "wrong facts or mistaken assumptions".


ED claimed the accused left the country under suspicious circumstances in the first week of January 2018.


Nirav Modi has already been declared as an FEO by the special court. He has been lodged in jail in London since 2019.

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