Categories
India

After Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra, MP Begs Constitutional Reflection

With the resignation of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath yesterday after a mass resignation of 22 MLAs of his party, we are fast approaching a place where it becomes imperative for the constitutional experts to rethink the ‘Anti-Defection Law’ as an antithesis to the subterfuge of the mandate given by the electorate.

In 1967, the phrase ‘Aaya Ram Gaya Ram’ attained widespread circulation in Indian politics after a Haryana MLA Gaya Lal changed his party thrice within the same day!

The anti-defection law sought to prevent such political defections which may be due to the reward of office or other similar considerations.

The Tenth Schedule was inserted into the Constitution in 1985. It lays down the process by which legislators may be disqualified on grounds of defection by the Presiding Officer of a legislature based on a petition by any other member of the House.

A legislator is deemed to have defected if he either voluntarily gives up the membership of his party or disobeys the directives of the party leadership on a vote.

This implies that a legislator defying (abstaining or voting against) the party whip on any issue can lose his membership of the House.  The law applies to both Parliament and state assemblies.

There are exceptions under the law: The law allows a party to merge with or into another party provided that at least two-thirds of its legislators are in favour of the merger. In such a scenario, neither the members who decide to merge nor the ones who stay with the original party will face disqualification.

But, as illustrated yesterday in MP and earlier in Karnataka, the law proves inadequate in achieving its principal mission when the MLAs simply resign — thereby achieving the purpose of defection without defecting per se.

And yet, can any law ever stop an MLA from resigning? The query, of course, is rhetorical.

And what about instances like Maharashtra, when one part of the winning alliance breaks the alliance — an entity that does not have any constitutional validity —and joins hands with the opposing alliance to form a government? There is pretty much nothing that can be done about it constitutionally. It is, at the current juncture, merely a moral issue.

The subject of morality, however, opens another debate related to the issue.

The anti-defection law seeks to ensure the stability of the government of the day by making sure that the legislators do not switch sides (at their whims).

However, this law also restricts a legislator from voting in line with his conscience, judgment and interests of his electorate.

This, in essence, forces the members to vote based on the decisions taken by the party leadership, and not what their constituents would like them to vote for.

What, then, about the moral issue of doing what the constituents demand from their (individual) representatives?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Therefore, it becomes mandatory that representatives of all the stakeholders in the Indian democracy begin an urgent, earnest dialogue on the issue.

 

Categories
Cinema

Film Review: Dil Bechara Makes You Relive Your Most Glorious Loss

Excerpt: Cancer can be painful, in every which way. Death, for those around the severely pained, in contrast, can often be a case of pain alleviation. Because the loss, for them, makes way for the restoration of ‘the good in entirety’, which was being disfigured bit by bit, right in front of their fatigued eyes. Director Mukesh Chhabra’s Dil Bechara, an average film that is replete with cinematic licences, is precisely that restoration — the ‘reclaiming of the real memory’ of a bright young actor from amid the macabre talks around him at the moment.

Review: Based on novelist John Green’s 2012 bestseller The Fault In Our Stars (also a 2014 Hollywood hit of the same name), Dil Bechara is a story of Kizie Basu (debutant Sanjana Sanghi) and Immanuel Rajkumar Junior a.k.a. “Manny” (Sushant Singh Rajput), two young people leading life amid extraordinary circumstances. Kizie is fighting cancer while Manny has fought and beaten cancer a few years ago.

Mounted on technical finesse in the form of fabulous cinematography (Satyajit Pande), unforgivingly razor-sharp editing (Aarif Sheikh) and embellishing background score (A R Rahman), the contrived nature of the storytelling is best exemplified by a mesmerising single-take title song/dance number pictured on the breathtakingly-rhythmic late actor. Most admirers of the talented late star would want to, and definitely, play it over and over again. But there is absolutely no reason for the film to have that song!

And that stands true for many things about the film. Forced and less than believable.

The original story is good — poignant and enduring. But this film fails at times in adapting it to the Indian milieu (as in the ‘smashing windows with eggs’ after a breakup of Manny’s friend Jagdish Pandey (Sahil Vaid) sequence or the almost ‘pop culture’ cancer support group meetings), and at other times in providing the requisite gravitas to an aspect of immense/principal pertinence to the movie (as in the film’s integral track of Kizie being overwhelmed by a song, leading right up to the three-minute cameo by an established Hindi film star, or the struggles of Kizie and Manny in trying to live ‘normal lives’ amid the challenges).

However, when it does not try to change too much from the original, it breaks magic on screen — especially in the ‘obituary speech before death’ sequence. One silent place, three good friends, two of whom read the obituary of the third one.

The only other scene — apart from the naturally dramatic scenes of illness and physical pain (well-created, nonetheless) — that helps lift the film to its potential is the late-night interaction between Manny and Kizie’s father, played by legendary Bangla cinema actor Saswata Chatterjee, where the former opens up about his successful but very costly fight against cancer.

Everything else, for some reason, is either rushed or imposed. Fortunately, with it being just 1 hour 40 minutes long, you can blame it for anything but being a drag.

Sanjana Sanghi is adequate. In a movie in which she is present from the first to the last one, in which even the narration is by her, and in which the character of the lead star is also defined by his interaction with her, she doesn’t emphatically grab the opportunity by the throat. She is good; but, perhaps, just about that.

With the country still not completely out of the shock of Sushant’s death, dissociating cinema from real life in many scenes of the film becomes nearly impossible.

There’s even a dialogue in the film (NOT by Sushant): “Khud ko maarna saala illegal hai, toh jeena padta hai [It’s illegal to kill yourself, so you’ve to live].”

The late star is enchanting when playing the hyperactive loverboy and exhilarating when being a silent sufferer. He would be remembered for this film for a long, long time. Albeit, it might also be because of irrational reactions (too) from all the viewers to his performance in the light of his passing. For that precise reason, this review too would not be writing more about his, what felt like, a stellar performance.

Verdict: Quite like the biggest opening for a movie streaming on Disney-Hotstar platform and a ridiculously high 9.8/10 rating on IMDB, the memory of Sushant Singh Rajput lords over everything in the film. And for that reason alone, you might want to watch his swansong. It helps that he is his usual good.

Categories
India

A Just Culmination

Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at 05:30 AM on March 20, 2020, giving closure to the family of a young medical student who was gang-raped and tortured on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012.

Recollect what happened on that appalling night on December 16, 2012, to realize how the culmination of the justice process was a just one:

“[…] drunk men dragged Nirbhaya to the rear of the moving bus and took turns to rape her. As she fought back, one of the attackers – a juvenile – inserted a rusted, L-shaped rod – used with a wheel jack – into her private parts, pulling and ripping her intestines apart. Her medical reports later revealed that she had septic injuries on her abdomen and genital organs also.

Done with the savagery, the attackers then threw her out of the moving bus and even tried to run the vehicle over the half-naked blood-soaked woman…”

Appalling as it may sound, and while we completely agree with their hanging, the crime —in the current context — can barely be considered “rarest of rare”.

As per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, if more than 68 girls and women were raped every day in 2012, the number increased to 91.38 in 2018.

In other words, such cases are no longer ‘rare’ because these gruesome crimes are happening all through the year, every year.

As statistics point out, during that long period (2012-18), while the number of girls raped in India jumped by 33%, India’s most talked-about case kept dragging on under the weight of the sorry state of affairs of the judicial system in India.

No wonder then that celebrities like Preity Zinta took to social media to not only welcome the hanging but also point out that if the hanging was carried out in 2012 itself, the rising cases of murder might have been kept in check.

There, of course, cannot be any method of arriving at that conclusion. However, it is human nature to avoid getting on the wrong side of a ruthless law-enforcing agency/administration. Test the theory in Singapore, if you must.

The most common and largely rational argument against capital punishment is that sooner or later, innocent people will get killed, because of “mistakes or flaws in the justice system”; and that where capital punishment is used such mistakes cannot be put right.

But then, while long processes like that in the Nirbhaya case invariably take every possible precaution, “mistakes or flaws in the justice system” can also result in the most brutal rapist and/or killer to escape the clutches of law — and even get a sewing machine and cash from a slimy chief minister.

The idea should be to get a Nirbhaya Case justice process done as early as possible.

Every step that was taken in this extremely thorough process needs to be fast-tracked. Of course, some steps can’t happen any faster. But most can be. And that’s what needs to be done. Today.

Else, be prepared for either the number of rapes crossing 100 per day or people showering flowers on Hyderabad police after they eliminate the brutal rapists “who were trying to run away from the police custody”.

Or both.

Again, we wholeheartedly support the hanging of the four in the Nirbhaya case. It was a just culmination of the process of law.

Categories
Cinema

Film Review: Bachchan And Lucknow Pull The Quaint Gulabo Sitabo

Excerpt: The thing with character-driven films is that they often expect the characters to fill up for the story itself. Sometimes it works, most often it does not. In Gulabo Sitabo, it works only in those parts where either Amitabh Bachchan or the Lucknawi essence holds us by the arms. Some years from now, those are the only two things that we might remember about this whimsical film. And therein lies its principal shortcoming.

Review: Director Shoojit Sarkar and story, screenplay, and dialogue writer Juhi Chaturvedi‘s Gulabo Sitabo is a story about ‘Mirza’ (Amitabh Bachchan), a 78-year-old epitome of greed, who is willing to move heaven and earth to get ownership of his obsession — an old dilapidated mansion (‘Fatima Mahal’) of his much-older wife ‘Begum’ (Farrukh Jaffar) in the heart of Lucknow.

In his path, however, stand not just his wife but also a group of tenants, especially ‘Baankey’ (Ayushmann Khuranna)’ a shrewd, sly and squatted tenant, who matches Mirza bit for a bit in their ceaseless bantering.

What follows is a wacky slice of life that escalates quickly from the shenanigans within the Fatima Mahal to the politico-administrative corridors of Lucknow city.

It is an interesting premise that also benefits from whispered handling of the milieu by the technical team comprising cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay, editor Chandrashekhar Prajapati and apt background score.

But that’s about that.

Because beyond that, it, at the risk of repeating oneself, is down to the characters — notably Vijay Raaz (ASI Officer), Brijendra Kala (‘Christian Lawyer’ who is better because “he speaks English at home”) and Srishti Shrivastava (Baankey’s sister ‘Guddo’) — to shoulder the journey towards nowhere in particular.

After a point, it indeed feels like you are on a journey towards nowhere in particular. Till a rather unexpected climax suddenly lifts up the storytelling to tell us that ‘greed’ is of many types — without feeling self-righteous enough to pass any judgements.

It is a good note to end on. Just as, the quirky and zippy establishment of the universe of the film was a good start to the story. Most things in between, alas, do not quite do justice to the two ends of the thread.

Ayushmann does an exemplary job with the ‘lisp’, where he manages what most actors fail to achieve simultaneously — impact with restraint.

However, beyond that, he doesn’t really exhibit much that is beyond (or above) his recent golden run of author-backed, socially-relevant roles.

In other words, while there is barely anyone, if anyone, in the industry who I believe could replace Bachchan’s impact in the role of Mirza, I could, perhaps, say that ‘a’ Rajkumar Rao or even Kartik Aryan might have done just about fine in the role of Baankey.

Director Shoojit Sarkar has said that the film is a satire. To live up to the description, he does include comments on the workings of government departments, the ‘place’ of the English language in our society and the living conditions of even those living in the ‘Fatima Mahals’ of the country.

But, though handled with understated care, there is not much new to those subjects — and those things, consequently, do nothing to the heart.

For the curious souls, the title Gulabo Sitabo is said to be derived from a form of traditional glove puppetry of Uttar Pradesh in which a man’s harried wife (Sitabo) and his pampered mistress (Gulabo) bicker endlessly. Clearly, the Amitabh-Ayushmann pair was supposed to be the bickering duo. They sure exchange words in the film. But their exchange is nowhere near the zing of the show that real-life puppeteer (Mohammed Naushad) performs at different points in the film.

Talking of Uttar Pradesh, it needs to be said that the film oozes with unabashed romanticism of Lucknow city — carrying postcards of all the ‘must visit’ places of the city, from Imambara, to Hazratganj.

Verdict: There is nothing in the film that is bad. And yet, watch it primarily for Bachchan to, yet again, illustrate the difference between “the boys and the men”. For everything else, either watch Ayushmann or Shoojit Sarcar’s some other movie or travel to Lucknow to do some real ‘Ganj-ing’.

Categories
India

Shiv Sena-NCP To Be Helped By Congress Abstaining From Trust Vote

MUMBAI (Maharashtra): Amid the high-voltage political drama going on with regards formation of the next government, the most likely scenario emerging is that of a Shiv Sena (SS) and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance government that is ‘supported from outside’ by Congress.

Congress abstaining would save both itself and Shiv Sena the blushes of making an ‘opportunistic alliance that goes severely against their stated and steady ideologies‘.

The magic figure of 145 rests on the assumption that all 288 legislators will take part in the trust vote. But if the 44 Congress MLAs decide to abstain from the trust vote, preferring to stay neutral, the effective strength of the Assembly will diminish to 244.

In this scenario, the ruling coalition will need the support of just 123 legislators. The Shiv Sena and NCP have 110 MLAs have of their own — while the rest of the numbers can be gained through enticing the many independents and smaller parties.

If that happens, Congress can loudly claim that it did not support the Sena-NCP combine — because of the presence of Shiv Sena — and yet ensure that the BJP is kept outside the power corridor.

More importantly, for Congress, it would give out the message — or, at least the Congress would like to believe and tell the world that it gives the message, to its largely minority-sensitive vote bank — that it did not support the ‘communal Shiv Sena’, even when its ally NCP did, and chose to sit in the opposition.

Therefore, it would be in power while sitting in the opposition benches; allying with a ‘rabid Hindu outfit’ while keeping the Muslims in good humour. It would be the quintessentially slick Congress style of ‘having the cake and eating it too‘.

The smaller parties include the Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (3 MLAs), MIM (2), Samajwadi Party (2 ), Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatna, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and the CPI(M) with one legislator each.

It has already been reported that the Shiv Sena has secured the support of eight independent legislators.

In any case, the thumb rule in Indian politics is that independents and smaller parties almost inevitably support the power gravy trail, or, whichever formation is more likely to form the government.

If, as per my belief, the NCP and Shiv Sena do come together to stake a claim, the first task would be the election of the speaker.

Since the entire exercise is because the Shiv Sena wants its chief minister, the Sena would most certainly give the post the NCP — a choice that would readily be supported by the Congress.

Remember, the elected speaker of the Assembly will conduct the trust vote in the house.

Categories
Sport

Match Prediction: 1992 Winners Pakistan Vs 1975, 1979 Winners West Indies

NOTTINGHAM (England): Pakistan, which has lost their last 11 ODIs on the trot run into a buoyant West Indies team that amassed 421 in their last match, a warm-up, against a formidable New Zealand side in the two sides’ first match of the ICC World Cup 2019 at the Trent Bridge in Nottingham on May 31.

But the West Indies captain Jason Holder isn’t giving much to the run-up of the past World Cup winners ahead of his side’s opening clash of the 2019 Men’s Cricket World Cup. “We just want to be as professional as we possibly can and not take anything for granted,” he told the official news site of CWC19.

“We just assess who we’re playing against, formulate our plans and look to execute them. You try to pinpoint particular areas that you can attack.”

“Us as a bowling group, we just want to be as disciplined as we possibly can. In the past, we’ve been a bit inconsistent and just generally when you’re just sitting back and analysing the game, we just want to be ticking our box in terms of being consistent and being ruthless,” he added.

In his opposite camp, some good news finally came in the form of pace spearhead Mohammad Amir being declared fit and available for selection for the match.

Amir, who missed the 2011 and 2015 World Cups due to a five-year ban for spot-fixing, was seen bowling using his full run-up in the team’s practice session.

There was speculation that the 27-year-old, who missed the last four matches of the one-day international series against England earlier this month, might not be able to make his World Cup debut at Trent Bridge.

His fitness, along with the arrival of veteran Wahab Riaz — who was the most impressive bowler in Pakistan’s losing effort against Afghanistan in their only played warm-up match — suddenly makes Pakistan bowling regain the old age. For, giving the two company would be the bowler of the tournament of the last Champions Trophy Hasan Ali and leggie Shadab Khan. Left-arm slow Imad Wasim, an all-rounder, too is in a good nick.

Does that make Pakistan’s bowling attack better than that of the Windies? It surely does. It easily does.

Unfortunately for Pakistan, that still might not be enough against a team that has packed on so many and so huge power hitters that even mis-hits by them are going to land deep into the stands. That huge power hitter could be Chris Gayle. Or Carlos Braithwaite. Or, what’s his name, yes, Andre Russell. And we’re not even allowing Lewis, Hope, Bravo, Shimron Hetmyer (explosive talent), Pooran and Holder in that list.

Yes, the Windies can spectacularly implode — just as they can fall to spectacular deliveries, like a reverse-swinging yorker by Wahab — but, going by the recent history between the two teams, it seems unlikely today.

Pakistan’s batting, on the other hand, barring opener Fakhar Zaman, is a steady and almost a steady, almost a solid ‘test match qualified’ unit. Imam ul Haq, Babar Azam (one of the world’s best batsman currently), Harris Sohail, veteran Mohammed Hafeez and captain Sarfaraz Ahmed make a lineup that scored over 300 in all the matches that Pakistan played against England in their recent bilateral series.

But can that ‘solid’ batting line up bat out an opposition? Nothing so far has suggested that they can.

And for that as one of the principal reasons, we predict that West Indies would comfortably defeat Pakistan in the two teams’ first match of the ICC World Cup in Nottingham on May 31.

Irrespective, Windies and Pakistan are both exciting teams and we hope today’s match is a more balanced one than the England vs South Africa opener.