Government Pensions subject to 'Good Behaviour'

Lt. Gen. H.S Panag (retd.) in The Print

On 31 May, the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, which is headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, issued a gazette notification amending Rule 8 — “Pension subject to future good conduct” — of the Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules 1972. The amendment prohibits retired personnel who have worked in any intelligence or security-related organisation included in the Second Schedule of the Right to Information Act 2005 from publication “of any material relating to and including domain of the organisation, including any reference or information about any personnel and his designation, and expertise or knowledge gained by virtue of working in that organisation”, without prior clearance from the “Head of the Organisation”. An undertaking is also supposed to be signed to the effect that any violation of this rule can lead to withholding of pension in full or in part.

There are 26 organisations included in the Second Schedule of the RTI Act, including the Intelligence Bureau, Research & Analysis Wing, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Central Bureau of Investigation, Narcotics Control Bureau, Border Security Force, Central Reserve Police Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and Central Industrial Security Force. These organisations are excluded from the RTI Act. Ironically, the armed forces, which are responsible for the external and at times internal security, are covered by the Act.

In 2008, Rule 8 was first amended to make more explicit the existing restrictions under the Official Secrets Act by barring retired officials from publishing without prior permission from Head of the Department any sensitive information, the disclosure of which would “prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State or relation with a foreign State or which would lead to incitement of an offence.” An undertaking similar to the present amendment was also required to be signed.

The scope of the 31 May amendment is all-encompassing and its ambiguity leaves it open for vested interpretation and virtually bars retired officers who have served in the above-mentioned organisations from writing or speaking, based on their experience in service or even using the knowledge and expertise acquired after retirement. There is an apprehension that in future, the rules of other government organisations, including the armed forces, may also be amended to incorporate similar provisions. 

The motive behind the amendment

All governments are legitimately concerned with safeguarding national security. Almost all countries have laws for the same. However, political dispensations often use these provisions to stifle criticism of the government, particularly by retired government officials who, based on their domain knowledge and experience, enjoy immense credibility with the public.

Originally, Rule 8 allowed withholding/withdrawal of pension or part thereof, permanently/for a specified period if the pensioner was convicted of a serious crime or was found guilty of grave misconduct. “Serious crime” included crime under Official Secrets Act 1923 and “grave misconduct” also covered communication/disclosure of information mentioned in Section 5 of the Act.

There was no requirement of prior permission before publication of any book or article, and prosecution under Official Secrets Act was necessary before any action could be taken. No undertaking was required to be given by the retiree officials. There is no noteworthy case in which this provision was invoked.

The motive behind the 2008 amendment by the UPA and the present amendment by the NDA, was/is to crack down on dissent by retired officials without the due process of law. This, when despite recommendations of the Law Commission and Second Administrative Reforms Commission, no effort has been made to amend the 98-year-old Official Secrets Act to cater for current requirements of national security. The only difference between the two amendments is that the latter makes the rule more absolute by adding the ambiguous rider regarding publication without permission “of any material relating to and including ‘domain of the organisation’, including any reference or information about any personnel and his designation, and expertise or knowledge gained by virtue of working in that organisation.”

The amendment to Rule 8 is unlikely to withstand the scrutiny of law. The Supreme Court and the high courts have repeatedly upheld the principle that “pension is not a bounty, charity or a gratuitous payment but an indefeasible right of every employee”. The government cannot take away the right merely by giving a show cause notice to a retired official for having used “domain knowledge or expertise” while writing an article/book or speaking at any forum. Any application of this amendment will be thrown out by the courts. No wonder that there has been no known application of the amended rule since 2008. There has been no alarming increase in cases under the Official Secrets Act. Between 2014 and 2019, 50 cases have been filed in the country and none against a government official. And if a government official is actually guilty of violating national security, then is withdrawal of pension an adequate punishment?

What does the government then gain by this amendment? Simple, the new amendment acts as deterrent against criticism by retired officials. Which self-respecting retired government official would like to seek permission from her/his former junior or fight a prolonged legal battle to get his pension restored? The government’s will, thus, prevail not by the wisdom of its decision but by default.
 
Loss to the nation

All major democracies make optimum use of the experience of their retired government officials. While some become part of the government, others contribute by educating the public and throwing up new ideas/suggestions for the consideration of the government. The domain expert keeps a check on a majoritarian government facing a weak opposition by publicly speaking and writing. All governments try to hide failures and scrutiny for inefficiency. With a weak opposition and government-friendly media, the Bharatiya Janata Party dispensation is more worried about the perceived threat from the retired officials with domain expertise than an ill-informed opposition.

Given the Modi government’s obsession with respect to national security and its lackadaisical performance in its management, it is my view that in the near future, the government will incorporate similar provision in the pension rules of other government departments and the armed forces.

A case in point is the attempt by the Modi government to deny/obfuscate the intelligence failure and the preemptive Chinese intrusions. To date no formal briefing has been given about the actual situation in Eastern Ladakh. Doctored information has been fed to the media through leaks by government/military officials. Three retired defence officers, including the author, brought the real picture before the public through articles and media interviews. All were careful to safeguard operational security. A concerted campaign was launched to discredit these retired officers through government-friendly media and pliant defence analysts until the events overtook their detractors to prove them right. The author extensively used his knowledge of the terrain in Eastern Ladakh to bring the truth before the public. In a similar situation in future, these officers may well be battling in courts to safeguard their pensions.

Imagine a situation that in future when no historical accounts of our wars, counter insurgency/terrorism campaigns and communal riots can be written by retired government and armed forces officers. No retired official will be eligible to head our security related thinks tanks or speak in international forums about our experience. Despite provision of Section 8(3) of the RTI Act to declassify documents after 20 years, the government never does so except to score political points as in the case of Netaji Files.

The amendment to Rule 8 of Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules 1972 is nothing more than a blatant, overarching and draconian gag order against retired officials to manage the public narrative for political interests under the garb of safeguarding national security.

It safeguards the interests of the political dispensation and not the nation. It must be challenged in the courts and in the interim disregarded with contempt.

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

 Thomas Frank in The Guardian

‘My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month.’ Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
 

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

*

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties. 

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

*

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

Main Bhi Kafir, Tu Bhi Kafir by abducted teacher, poet and activist Salman Haider

Salman Haider reciting Main bhi Kafir, Tu bhi Kafir

History of the muzzling of the freedom of expression in Pakistan - by Hamid Bhashani

No jokes please, we’re Indian

Editorial in The Hindu

Sometimes the reaction is the real joke. The police force in India’s financial capital have sought legal opinion to check if they have grounds to file an FIR against a comedian for a video he recently posted on the messaging application, Snapchat. The Mumbai police were following up on a complaint from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a political party with a remarkably low threshold for taking offence. And the MNS was not the only party outraged by the post by Tanmay Bhat, a comedian fairly well-known for his “roast videos”, or takedowns of celebrities. Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena, for instance, decided to make it clear that people like Mr. Bhat “should be whipped in public”. Using the “face swap” feature on Snapchat, Mr. Bhat had spoofed Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar, with jibes about his cricketing ability and her long singing career. It was certainly not polite. It could be argued that locker-room chatter goes with the roast territory, and that it is in the nature of the beast to push the boundary of how much political incorrectness can be deemed passable. The point here is not to applaud his sense of humour — or to condemn it. It is to spotlight the speed with which the system mobilises to shut any expression of mockery targeted at the well-known.

That the effect is to stifle freedom of expression, to force the next person to look over her shoulder before mocking the next public figure, is obvious and intended. To be mocked is the most trying way of being critiqued. One can ignore evenly stated takedowns — not spoofs that make folks laugh. To deal with mockery in a democratic society, one needs to be committed to a public culture of engagement, of openness to questioning. India’s public figures are clearly not. Politicians and celebrities (mainly film and cricket stars) have failed India not just by using the strongest arm of the law to curb expressions of humour aimed at them, thereby forcing self-censorship on what we may laugh about. They have failed it by not enabling sensitisation on what should pass as good humour and what may not. When jokiness is curbed so menacingly — and for all the brave front they may put up, cartoonists and comedians are lonely people against the might of the state — the only response is to rally to defend freedom of expression. In an environment where possibly personal jokes are seen to warrant scrutiny and police action, no space can be available for shared humour, for comedy to evolve sufficiently so that the larger community internalises what is truly, even rockingly, funny and what’s not so progressive.