Supreme courts SPO order .

Siddharth Varadarajan has joyously tweeted an article hailing the supreme court's order banning special police officers in chattisgarh . The Hindu news paper being the leftiest of the countries newspapers is quite good at articulating it's feelings . The article tweeted by Siddharth Varadarajan is dated July 13th and it's author is Madhav Khosla . This piece is my counter-point .The sentences in quotations are from the article .

"The Court travelled considerable distance to attack the State's ‘amoral' economic policies and the “culture of unrestrained selfishness and greed spawned by modern neo-liberal economic ideology." The amoral or neo-liberal economic policies is an euphemism for the free-enterprise based economy that this country has been spawning ever since 1991 . Prior to that we were a socialistic country and we followed socialistic policies for 43 years . Socialistic policies as all those leftists know are supposed to bring an equal society but for some unknown reason those policies have brought this country to the verge of bankruptcy . In 1991 India had to mortage it's gold for a loan for Rs 500 crores . The story of socialism is no different anywhere else in the world for us to believe that we have got it wrong , everywhere in the world socialism have failed to uplift people out of poverty and infact worsened their economic situtation .The enterpreneurs and business man who creates job , organize the means of production and extract efficiency out of it are the so called selfish people and all those leftist punks who only keep talking about equality but have never done anything so far are philanthropic . In those days of licence raj when government had monopoly the psu's suffered losses and had to be closed down ,, please dont laugh , can you believe a company suffering losses when it is the only one to operate in that space . Indian PSU's gulped valuale tax payers money before they were closed down .Neither socialism nor the supreme court could explain that . But we capitalists can , it takes the animal instincts of an enterpreneur to build , sustain and redefine an enterprise and there is that one man who at the helm affairs is in line if he fails to deliver and the responsibility that individual urge to deliver , build and create is what creates real economy . The spirit of competition ensures that consumers get a fair deal .

"Thousands of tribal youth were being appointed by the State as SPOs, and allegedly being called to battle" .What's wrong if the state uses a flexible policing approach ?The state government has very properly recruited locals for intelligence gathering and also inorder to ensure that tribals are not forced to join the maoists against their wishes they are being armed to thwart maoist terror . It is so naive of supreme court to believe that poorly trained SPO's are being used in the battle .Indian security forces are quite huge in number and the state does not need to do such things . But it is very likely that SPO's might be accompanying the forces to provide guidance and their life definitely is in danger but this is being done voluntarily by the SPO and i tend to believe that he is doing out of his belief in our democracy over maoist ideology .SPO's are invaluable in intelligence gatheric and providing information and they are paid money because it acts as an inceptive , invoking article 14 of equal oppurtunity is outrageous .Those are temporary jobs and the executive should have the right to objectively pick people for the jobs .This battle against the guerillas cannot be fought without the help of locals and it is obvious that locals will have to face the wrath of maoists and it is very appropriate to arm them .In case the SC disagrees SC should suggest innovative ways of protecting informers who are routinely killed by maoists .

"the Court rejected the State's argument that the SPOs were being armed for self-defence on, inter alia, the ground that they did not even possess the necessary judgment to determine instances of self-defence." The court means to say that you need a degree to realize that your life is in danger .The is the gem of the entire judgement ,, no comments needed .

The court invokes the article 21 , the right to life of SPO's . The chattisgarh government has argued that SPO's are not being used for combat operations , if at all it is found by the court that SPO's are being used for combat operations then the SC should have set guidelines for their training instead of summarily ordering to disband the SPO group . I am not in a position to clearly say if chattisgarh used SPO's for combat operations but i strongly believe that SPO's are mainly used for intelligence ,guidance of local terrain . It is necessary to arm them as they will inevitably come under the thumb of maoist forces if they cannot defend themselves .Arming a group of people to ensure the communities protection is a legitimate and a completely objective approach in a conflict zone .It might be true that salwa judum might have indulged in some excesses , it is the state's responsibility to prevent those excesses and to appropriately bring those salwa judum cadres involved in such crimes to book .The army and even the legitimate forces in this country are found to have committed excesses , we dont disband them for some people's mistakes we rectify those mistakes .Disbanding a well functioning organization which works in the interest of state for some operational inappropriatness is in least a lack of nuance and in worst an ideologically driven judgement .

Read more...