C O N T E N T S
CARAVAN
THE
VOLUME 7 ISSUE 5
May 2015
Founder: Vishwa Nath (1917-2002)
Editor-in-Chief, publisher & printer: Paresh Nath
The Lede
8
Long-Term Investment | NIKITA SAXENA
Making a business of recovering forgotten
ancestral assets
R E P O R TA G E
10 Web Masters | MADDY CROWELL
The Indian stewards of Wikipedia
26 Talk of the Town
How Arun Jaitley wins friends and
inﬂuences people
12 The Way to Love | SANJAY PANDEY
An ageing bachelor helps build a road
PRAVEEN DONTHI
Letters From
14 Scotland | ROSS ADKIN
Independent Will
The SNP is set to become a pivotal power in a country
it wants to break from
Reporting and Essays
REPORTAGE
Perspectives
48 The Avenger
How Ujjwal Nikam became Maharashtra’s most
popular lawyer | MENAKA RAO
18 Farm and Factory
The Modi government isn’t laying the necessary
foundations for its manufacturing ambitions
HARTOSH SINGH BAL
62 To Ashes
Behind the scenes of India’s tobacco industry
ROCCO RORANDELLI
PHOTO ESSAY
20 Off the Rails
Fast-track courts fail to address the real problem with
bringing sexual violence to book | SAURAV DATTA
23 Sceptred Sway
A war in Yemen exposes the chinks in Pakistan’s
relationship with Saudi Arabia | OMAR WARAICH
18
62
MAY 2015 | THE CARAVAN | 03
C O N T E N T S
80
92
Books
Arts and Reviews
REVIEW
74
FEATURE
The Road Not Taken
Revisiting Kalidasa in the modern age
VIJAY NAMBISAN
92
REVIEW
100 The Bookshelf
80 White on Green
The chequered history of Pakistani cricket
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
A Passage to Shimla
The hill town’s popular but elusive presence in ﬁlm
MANIK SHARMA
102 Showcase
106 Editor’s Pick
Fiction and Poetry
FICTION
86 Jihadi Wedding
FATIMA BHUTTO
POETRY
90 Kataragama Sutras
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
86
04 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2015
90
R E P O R TAG E
TALK OF
THE TOWN
How Arun Jaitley wins friends and inﬂuences people
PRAVEEN DONTHI
| ONE |
I
n 2012, two years before Arun Jaitley became the most
important minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet, the
news that the ruling United Progressive Alliance’s allocation of coal blocks may have cost the government
thousands of crores and unfairly beneﬁtted private
interests, incapacitated the parliament’s monsoon session.
Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentarians threatened to resign en masse, and Jaitley, then the BJP’s opposition leader
in the Rajya Sabha, aggressively spoke out against what he
called “the biggest scam in independent India.”
As the stymied parliament session ground to a halt that
August, Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, his counterpart in the
Lok Sabha, released a ﬁerce joint statement. “We used this
session of Parliament to shake the conscience of the people
of India,” they wrote. “This is not merely a political battle.
It is a battle for safeguarding the economic resources for a
larger public good.” In a press conference, Jaitley called the
allocation process “arbitrary,” “discretionary,” and “corrupt,” “a textbook case of crony capitalism.” In an opinion
piece in The Hindu, titled “Defending the Indefensible,” he
wrote “the government was so overenthusiastic in continuing the discretionary process in allotment” that it did not
institute the “competitive bidding mechanism” that would
have ensured a more just process of allocation.
A few years earlier, Jaitley had offered a different type
of opinion to Strategic Energy Technology Systems Private
Limited, an ambitious joint venture between Tata Sons and
a South African ﬁrm, in his capacity as a practicing lawyer. When applying for coal blocks in 2008, SETSPL, one of
the biggest beneﬁciaries of the allocation process, sought
Jaitley’s advice on whether it could avoid sharing a certain
part of its proﬁts with the government. Jaitley provided the
company with a 21-page legal opinion, via the law ofﬁces of
his college friend Raian Karanjawala, recognising that “the
Govt. of India is entitled to adopt a procedure for allocation
26 | THE CARAVAN | MAY 2015
of coal blocks,” and that the company was not legally bound
to share the proposed proﬁts with the government. Jaitley’s arguments in support of SETSPL indicated that he had
been well aware of the prevailing coal block allocation process despite his hue and cry about “the monumental fraud.”
Shortly after the coal scam broke, the legal opinion was
made available to the press by one or more UPA ministers.
As the BJP fanned the ﬂames of protest against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—alleging that he had allowed controversial allocations under his watch as coal minister—the
leaked opinion, a potential hot tip, became a hot potato. The
document was passed around between journalists, including senior staff at the Times of India, the Economic Times,
Headlines Today, NDTV and CNBC. But in each case, the
story of Jaitley’s inconsistent outrage was withheld.
A mid-level journalist at Headlines Today said that the
ofﬁce of P Chidambaram, the union home minister at the
time, gave the channel the story of the leak as “an exclusive,” and that it ran once before being taken off the air. The
journalist was told by his senior, who said he had spoken
to Jaitley, that though he believed in “the merits of the story,” Jaitley had argued the leaked document was “a private
opinion.” “I have always believed what the editor thinks is
right,” the journalist said, smiling, “so I said okay.”
Another journalist who had the document told me that
Jaitley wrote a letter to the vice president, who is chairman
of the Rajya Sabha, complaining “that the intelligence agencies were trying to tarnish his reputation. The vice president’s ofﬁce had conﬁrmed it to me,” the journalist said.
“The bureau chief wanted Jaitley’s comment, but he wasn’t
willing to talk about the issue at all. So the story was not
opposite page: In 1999, Arun Jaitley was made BJP party
spokesman, a job well-suited for a politician with his network
of contacts and ability to hold court.
ATUL LOKE / OUTLOOK
R E P O R TAG E
THE AVENGER
How Ujjwal Nikam became Maharashtra’s most popular lawyer
MENAKA RAO
I
n February this year, a special court in Mumbai
convicted the extradited gangster Abu Salem, along
with two others, of the 1995 murder of the builder
Pradip Jain. The public prosecutor on the case, appointed by the Maharashtra government, was the
61-year-old Jalgaon native, Ujjwal Nikam. At one point
in the trial, Nikam argued that Salem deserved nothing less
than the death sentence for this murder. In aid of this, he
invoked the landmark cases of Bachan Singh and Macchi
Singh; like the crimes under trial in those instances, he said,
this counted as a “rarest of rare” case. (Case laws require
that every aggravating and mitigating circumstance be listed and weighed before considering a case “rarest of rare,”
which, in turn, is necessary to pronounce a death sentence.)
The reporters in the room sighed. They had heard exactly
the same arguments in at least two other cases Nikam had
handled in the last year. A journalist joked that she could
just have used her previous notes, instead of coming to
court. Only the name-calling changed. Nikam called Salem a rakshas avtar—a demon in human form—and a sadist.
The court typist asked him for the spelling. “S-A-D-D-I-ST,” Nikam said conﬁdently. He went on to declaim Marathi
proverbs, a verse from Byron, and, to no evident end, the
“To be or not to be” monologue from Hamlet.
When it was his turn to speak, Salem’s advocate, Sudeep
Pasbola, pointed out that Salem had been extradited from
Portugal on the condition that no Indian court sentence
him to death. “I fail to understand whether they are legal arguments or for some other object,” Pasbola told the
court. “These arguments could make successful politicians
envious. The arguments were for the fourth estate, who
may not be conversant with the law regarding death sentence. These arguments are in the lines of retributive theory where the sentence should be maximum and no crime
should go unpunished.”
Nikam had made a “mockery of the prosecution,” Pasbola continued. “I am very much disturbed by these arguments. How can he make such elaborate submissions, cursing Abu Salem like he is Hannibal Lecter? What pleasure
my learned friend took I don’t understand.” There were no
ready answers to these questions. The next day, Nikam conceded to the court that the death sentence was not permitted in this case, and sought a life sentence. On 25 February,
the court sentenced Salem to life imprisonment.
O
n 20 March, on the sidelines of the International Conference on Counter Terrorism at the
Marriott Hotel in Jaipur, Nikam was talking
about biryani. The subject had previously come
up in 2009, when he served as special public prosecutor
in the trial of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving gunman responsible for the November 2008 attacks
in Mumbai. As the prosecution’s lawyer, Nikam was the
face—and voice—of the state’s case against Kasab, and in
front of the television cameras, he had appeared as a sort of
grand inquisitor. One day, Nikam told journalists waiting
outside the courtroom that Kasab was asking his jailors for
mutton biryani.
MAY 2015 | THE CARAVAN | 49