Assisted suicide, crazy Britain etc

All countries are crazy to some extent. But the British, they have elevated craziness to an art-form. This-

As a piece of legal grotesquerie, the attempted arrest of the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has its funny side. The biggest joke lies in the role of the UN. It was the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the report by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone on the Gaza conflict, in which Israel as well as Hamas was accused of war crimes.

The fun lies in the membership of this august body, and guardian of all our rights. Currently those empowered to sit in judgment on the Israeli democracy include Cuba, China, Russia, Kirghizstan, Djibouti and Qatar. In a non-democracy, of course, Ms Livni would have had no bother; with no elections to dislodge her she would still be a minister, and so exempt from arrest. There must be a lesson there.

[...]

How well I remember sitting through finger-wagging lecturettes on how to achieve a truly ethical foreign policy, given to our Foreign Secretary in private meetings in the interstices of UN debates by drug-running South American prime ministers or presidents, bribe-grabbing Arab princelings, or the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the twist in whose lips, an English tabloid was disrespectful enough to suggest, had come about through an incurable addiction to lying.

Under our pristine, ultra-democratic system (any politically motivated Joe can apply for an arrest warrant under the International Criminal Court Act, 2001) and indulgent lawyers, Britain is a soft touch for propagandistic exercises like the one we have seen. And whatever the real reason that Tzipi Livni didn’t in the end come, the ruse most certainly succeeded.

Their minds filled with selective TV imagery of the Gaza conflict, the reaction of many a fair-minded Brit to the idea of seizing a former Israeli minister will be: “Why not? They’re trying the Serbs, aren’t they? And it’s the UN, isn’t it?”

and this-

A businessman who fought off knife-wielding thugs after his family were threatened has been jailed for 30 months.

The case prompted renewed debate over the level of force that house-holders can use against raiders.

Munir Hussain, chairman of the Asian Business Council, was praised by a judge for his “courage” in defending his wife and three children from an attack — but then jailed for the violence of his response. One of his attackers was spared a jail sentence.

The incident occurred when the Hussain family returned from their mosque during Ramadan to find three intruders wearing balaclavas in their home. Hussain was told that he would be killed. His family’s hands were tied behind their backs and they were forced to crawl from room to room. Hussain, 53, made an escape after throwing a coffee table and enlisted his brother Tokeer, 35, in chasing the offenders…

Walid Salem, one of the intruders, suffered a permanent brain injury after he was struck with a cricket bat so hard that it broke into three pieces.

Did the dacoit deserve to have his head bashed in? Probably not. But once you attack someone and issue death threats making it a “your life or mine” case, you shouldn’t expect the victim to serve you tea when the tables are turned. This isn’t a case of some kid stealing trinkets or a hungry man stealing bread, but a home invasion involving death threats and assault. Though the judge is right-

“If persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”

he should have considered that the beating was part of a single event, not calculated revenge. Such judgments, and varied judgments at that, can lead to a chilling effect on self-defense.

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I don’t know when the SC will come to its senses on the question of “right to life.” In the Shanbaug case, it asks the lawyer-

“Do you mean right to life includes right to die?”

Of course it does! But the lawyer, probably apprehensive about the case based on previous “pro-life” decisions says-

“She is going through a torture of a life. Is this human rights? Should the medical authorities not be activated to do something? This is not a case to be left aside and forgotten. The apex court must lay down some guidelines.”

and-

“Is not keeping the woman in this persistent vegetative state by force-feeding violative of her right to live with dignity guaranteed by Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution?”

There is only one thing the court should worry about in “right to die” cases: that the request, whether current or left as part of a living will, is genuine and that murder (for whatever reason) is not being disguised as suicide. The right to life is all encompassing—absolute.

What needs to be done in cases where no such wish exists but the person is in a vegetative state is an open question, and even though ET writes that-

the woman … does not want to live any more. Doctors have told her there is no chance of any improvement in her state. So she, through her ‘next friend’ … decided to move the SC with a plea to “direct KEM Hospital not to force-feed her.”

I don’t see how a brain-dead person could make such a request (there are conflicting reports on the same). Which suggests that this really isn’t a “right to die” case but a “put her out of her misery” one. Without a request from the person in question, this is an ethical dilemma and one cannot simply side with “human rights activists” making a “humans rights” case. If it is the latter, the SC should concentrate on that aspect of the case and not walk down a blind alley. If it is the former, the answer should be a resounding yes. That might be expecting too much from it, but miracles do happen.

A couple of interesting court cases

The big one, from the Supreme Court-

The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Centre whether it could legalize prostitution if it wasn’t possible to curb it.

“When you say it is the world’s oldest profession and when you are not able to curb it by laws, why don’t you legalize it? You can then monitor the trade, rehabilitate and provide medical aid to those involved,” Justices Dalveer Bhandari and AK Patnaik told Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam.

The court said legalizing sex trade would be a better option to avoid trafficking of women and pointed out that nowhere in the world was prostitution curbed by punitive measures.

[...]

“They (sex workers) have been operating in one way or the other and nowhere in the world have they been able to curb it by legislation. In some cases, they (the trade) are carried out in a sophisticated manner. So, why don’t you legalize it?” the judges asked.

The other is a Bombay HC judgment, a correct one, but based on the wrong premise-

In a path-breaking judgment, the Bombay high court has held that even a single dissenting member of a cooperative housing society cannot be thrown out by a builder based on a mere development agreement with the society and a majority of the flat owners in it for redevelopment of the building.

Expressing serious concern at the “disturbing trend of developers approaching the court and seeking eviction and dispossession of non-cooperating members of housing societies’’, Justice S C Dharmadhikari held that any redevelopment activity “should not compromise the rights of members and must safeguard the existence of the society’’.

“It is the developer who comes to court on the basis of rights conferred in his favour by the society, including that of FSI/TDR. Thus, the society not only loses the existing structure completely but is divested of its right to the land itself. If all such arrangements are accepted at their face value, then the existence of the cooperative housing society itself is threatened…’’

[...]

In the final analysis, the court said the “cooperative society movement is a socio-economic and moral movement. It is to fulfil the constitutional aim of distribution of wealth. It is not a profit-making activity not is it a tool for power politics. Its true role cannot be forgotten or else commerce will displace service.’’

The only things that should have mattered were “property rights” and “contract.”

Society and State

I watched the election results and the “negotiations” that followed with some interest. It shows you the true nature of democracy in the country.

Sushilkumar Shinde is one of the many ministers in the MMS cabinet and he was on a news channel last week. He said, when he was asked about it that the “dalit” label follows him everywhere – he lost from a general constituency last time (I think) and stood from a reserved constituency this time round. A lot of what he says is the truth, and that is reflected in the cabinet formation and the way news channels are reporting the process – x faces, y faces, z faces.

The massacre in Vienna a couple of days back and its effect on Punjab is proof, again, of the deep divisions that casteism has created in the country. When you have “lower castes” among Muslims, Sikhs and Christians – religions that supposedly eschew such practices, it is no longer a religious issue, but a societal one. And I don’t think the damnable practice is going to end anytime soon. That’s why most upper caste protests on issues like reservations – I don’t support affirmative action – seem to be of the opportunistic I-want-my-pound-of-flesh kind rather than a principled one. And I have no sympathy for that.

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The Supreme Court has once again affirmed its anti-property, anti-natural rights and pro-State credentials-

The SC on Wednesday said the state has a responsibility to maintain high standards of education and is hence competent to regulate admissions even in unaided private professional colleges.

I have to pick up a magnifying glass to find “high standards of education” in government run educational institutions; the IITs and IIMs being exceptions (I don’t know how long that will continue). The judges obviously have a different opinion. But then, they are the guardians and interpreters of the constitution, and when the constitution says that Indians have no rights and that thanks to the “directive principles” which are superior to any rights, the citizens of the country are slaves of the State, they will obviously pass the judgments they do, rights, common sense etc be damned.

The basis of democracy

KG Balakrishnan, the Chief Justice of [the Supreme Court of] India says about the general unrest and terror strikes in the country-

People should feel secure. They have a fundamental right to live in secure atmosphere where they should feel that their life and property are safe. That is the basis of democracy.

Indians don’t have a fundamental right to life or property. Indian politicians and the Supreme Court have managed to make the concept of rights irrelevant-

No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law. (Fundamental right under Article 21)

No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law. (Plain vanilla right to property under Article 300A)

Who has the unlimited power to amend the constitution in a manner of their choosing and passing laws that they fancy? The politicians. Who watches on as this is being done? The judiciary.

Democracy by definition is the rule of the mob. So mobs – not security; not rights; not justice – are the basis of democracy.

Why reservation will never work

The market – which is profoundly hated by socialists and communists for its ‘irrational’ behavior – is one of the greatest achievements of mankind. It is the market which allows humans access to things that they want to purchase as long as they can afford it. In fact that is its only function. As long as governments legislate sensibly, the market works rationally. The moment governments start getting into the moral sphere, that part of the business which is now illegal will go underground, but will not disappear. And no one can do anything about it. That is the reason markets work anywhere, regardless of whether the country is a democracy or an autocracy. If RTO officials won’t issue licenses without a bribe, a new market, managed by touts, will emerge to take care of the situation. The bribe here, is the service charge for processing the request without delay. The customer is happy because he gets what he wants. And so are the middleman and the official. And this will happen in every sector where government makes it difficult for the average person or business to go about their work. What is the relation between the market and the quota system? To figure that out, one needs to understand how employers go about looking for workers.

Businesses in the job market are looking for one thing and one thing only – the best possible talent at the lowest possible price. They know the condition of the education system in the country and also the quality of output of every institution. Since the reputation of institutions is kept alive by the performance of its alumni, any institution that begins churning out half baked graduates will soon lose its aura. This is the reason we have so many unemployable graduates and post-graduates in this country, across the caste spectrum. Their unemployability stems from this very lack of quality that substandard colleges and universities teaching outdated syllabi suffer from. No one will touch them because even after 5-10 years of education, they are skill deprived. This has happened because the government is loathe to let go of its hold on the education sector. A completely open education sector will result in an increase in the number of private schools, colleges and other institutes of higher learning. Investment will come into the sector, teachers and professors will be made accountable, and the syllabi will be linked to what the industry demands. The quality of education will increase because if schools and colleges don’t do that, their business will crumble. But instead of doing this, the government is hell bent on destroying every sector of education right from primary level to post graduate level through lack of investment and general apathy.

The idea that reserving seats in institutes of higher learning will help backward castes come up is flawed. I don’t say that they won’t come up (intelligence and caste are not correlated; education and caste are not correlated; and most important, intelligence and education are not correlated). I say the idea is flawed. By amending the constitution, what parliament has done is to try to pry open the gates of IIM, IIT and AIIMS to those OBCs who would not otherwise have got in. That is the basic intent of the constitutional amendment – it is a fight for about 10,000 seats. But businesses are not stupid. Where previously they would accept any two IIM graduates as near equals, depending on their educational record, now they will also ask for information on how they entered the institute. If the government thought that by relaxing entry norms, it can cloud the issue, that is surely not going to happen. Of course it depends on the quality of the candidate. If the candidate is someone who missed out because there were fifty others who scored better than him, then it won’t make much of a difference because if there had been three more IIMs, or more seats in the existing ones, he would have gained admission without going through the reservation nonsense. But if the candidate is one who is a long way off educationally, and he is able to leapfrog 10,000 people because of reservations, that is not good. And employers will take note of that.

Reservation or no reservation, businesses are only going to employ those people who are going to make money for them, and no reservation policy is going to change it. If they find that the system is messing up their measurement scales, they will come up with their own methods, as lots of IT companies have had to do to filter out the millions of applications they get each year. Some people argue about a bias against candidates from the backward classes in employment. While you can’t completely deny this (after all, people are people, and some of them are going to be asses), it is not in the interest of any business to dump a candidate on the basis of his caste or religion if he meets the other criteria.

In the face of all this, the only way the government can ensure that those admitted under the 27% quota do get jobs similar to their non-quota mates is to move forward and impose reservations on jobs in the private sector. And the cynic in me warns that this is going to happen sooner or later. The SC verdict is only going to embolden the quota brigade. But this step will be radical, and its impact will be felt worldwide, because services provided by Indian companies are not restricted to India alone. It will have to be seen what the world has to say on this.

Reservation won’t work. It is not about willingness or investment or any such thing. It is simply that the concept is seriously flawed and it is time people realized that. If at all people want to work for uplifting of backward classes, what stops them from starting their own schools and colleges and hiring the best minds to do the teaching? Or if some companies want to help, what stops them from reaching out? In any case there is a fundamental problem in the concept of a constitutionally mandatory and hence legally enforceable reservation system which most people miss. It is that such a system is an assault on the principles of equality and freedom. But, when the law is used to cure social problems, freedom is bound to suffer. And that will happen again and again and again, till governments realize that they do not exist to sell milk or vegetables, or to control the viewing habits of people, or to cure social evils, or to enforce minimum wages, or to run business empires; but that they exist to do two things only – protect people from violence, and to see that contracts are enforced – which, history proves, most of them have been thoroughly incapable of doing.

There is only one moral stand that can be taken on any enforced reservation – against it. All those spineless people who go about saying we are not against reservations but… should consider what Ayn Rand had to say on this behavior – there are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.