Is the cost of standing up for principle too high? Of fact, procedure, and principle

by Peter Ronald Desouza in The Hindu

Is the cost of standing up for the principle too high, or is it necessary to stand up for them regardless of the cost since it would take society to new and higher morality?

Like all things Indian, small events appear to have large implications. The curious Indian, with a few thousand years standing behind her, finds connections and controversies in everything. Questions naturally appear. For example, does the Gopal Subramanium elevation controversy have wider implications for the polity? Must we see it as telling us something about our public culture or is it just a one-day spectacle, permitting us, now that it has passed, to go back to business as usual? Is the nonchalance on the issue because of fear or because of indifference? Because legal practitioners have dominated the debates so far, we have been cautious since this is a zone where angels fear to tread. But when the demons of doubt will not go away, the issues require detailing. These concern matters of fact, of procedure, and of principle.

The process

Let us begin with the facts. The practice followed by the collegium of the higher courts, before a candidate is recommended for elevation and a panel of names is sent to the government for appointment, is as follows. The Chief Justice initiates a consultation with the legal fraternity. Speaking in confidence to senior advocates and fellow judges, to both the bar and the bench, a long list of possible candidates for elevation is prepared. Based on these recommendations the Chief Justice then invites the candidates to determine their willingness to be considered. If the candidates are willing then they are required to furnish details about themselves, such as their contributions to the law especially with respect to important cases, the extent of their legal practice, their annual income, their legal history, etc. These details are then processed by the court administration, during which time, I suppose, the court gets inputs from relevant investigating agencies about whether they have any legal proceedings against the candidate, etc. other inputs that may make them ineligible for consideration.

Based on (i) the recommendations of the legal fraternity, (ii) the willingness of the candidate, and (iii) the hard data relating to the legal practice and public standing of the individual, the file is placed before the collegium. The collegium then scrutinises the information on record and, based on the highest standards of judicial scrutiny, arrives at a decision on whom to recommend and whom to ignore, from the names before it. Not every name that comes up through this process gets the approval of the collegium. The shortlist prepared by the collegium is then sent up to the government for its approval. This I am told is the standard process that is followed. Gopal Subramanium’s case, I suppose, went through the same process.

There are many issues that need clarification now. Let us list them here. Let us begin with the issue of sequence. (i) When was the collegium’s due diligence completed? (ii) When did it send its recommended panel of names? (iii) When did the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) give their reports which made him ineligible? (iv) Was it before the collegium considered the file, or after? (v) If before, were the intelligence reports presented to the collegium? (vi) If yes, then assuming that the reports were considered by the collegium, can they be regarded as germane to the appointment after the panel is sent to the government? (vii) If not, why were they concealed from the collegium? (viii) Does it constitute contempt by the CBI and the IB of the Supreme Court? (ix) When was the file sent to the President for his seal of approval? (x) How long did he take to grant approval? (xi) What were the reasons he gave to segregate the names into those he had approved and those that were to be kept in abeyance? (xii) Since this act of segregation has constitutional implications, did the President consult constitutional experts, as is the practice, or did he rely on his own wisdom? (xiii) If he did consult constitutional experts, who were they and what was their advice, and if he did not why did he not do so?

Fair and transparent

The principle for such empanelment was enunciated by the Supreme Court in the case of P.J. Thomas, nominee for the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), whose candidature was rejected in 2011 when it described in detail the process to be followed in the appointment to a position of authority. Appointments to the Supreme Court, I expect, fall into this category. Here is what the judgment said — (vi) The empanelling authority, while forwarding the names of the empanelled officers/persons, shall enclose complete information, material and data of the concerned officer/person, whether favourable or adverse. Nothing relevant or material should be withheld from the Selection Committee. It will not only be useful but would also serve larger public interest and enhance public confidence if the contemporaneous service record and acts of outstanding performance of the officer under consideration, even with adverse remarks is specifically brought to the notice of the Selection Committee. (vii) The Selection Committee may adopt a fair and transparent process of consideration of the empanelled officers.

Complete information, including fair and adverse comments, is a necessary condition. Also fair and transparent process. I suppose the collegium, the government and the President followed these guidelines.

Separation of powers

Assuming complete information was available to the collegium, we now have to consider the contrasting positions of the collegium and the government. Based on the same facts considered by the collegium, the government is at liberty to give an alternative reading and argue for the unsuitability of a particular candidate. This is legitimate since the political lens of the government may be at variance with that of the collegium. The disagreement, at this stage, has to be on political grounds and not on facts. The procedure then requires the government to place its disagreement before the collegium which can either restate its earlier recommendation or revise it in the light of the arguments made.

This second stage is constitutionally sacrosanct since contained in it is the core principle of the separation of powers. The collegium has to deliberate on this contrary opinion of the government and decide whether, by accepting or rejecting it, the independence of the judiciary is eroded or enhanced. The decision that emerges from this review must indicate where the power of decision in the last instance, lies, with the government or with the court. Both parties must give clear reasons for their positions so that the final decision taken can educate the public on the core issue of separation of powers. The government’s reasons and the collegium’s views, as well as the facts of the matter, should be made public to serve, as the Supreme Court in the P.J. Thomas case said, the larger public interest.

We now come to the question of suitability. Was Gopal Subramanium unsuitable because of some “actions” of his, which were not kosher, i.e., meeting persons that he should not have met when he was Solicitor General, or was he unsuitable because of a “disposition,” i.e., shutting his mind out for an hour and praying as he was alleged to have done when he was investigating the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple gold case? From leaked reports in the press it appears that both “actions” and “disposition” made him unsuitable. This is puzzling. How was he then the lead counsel of choice for both the IB and the CBI? How was he amicus curiae for the Supreme Court in several cases such as the Bachpan Bachao Andolan case, the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, and the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple case. If he was good enough to be amicus curiae, why is he unsuitable now?

Basic issues for democracy

Three basic issues for our democracy emerge from this controversy. The first is the issue of public attitude. Are we prepared to let it lie, to blow over because another headline has grabbed its place or are we prepared to interrogate it further? This is not a partisan issue, of UPA versus NDA, since it perhaps points to a growing disregard for our constitutional culture. When the confidentiality of the collegium’s recommendation is treated lightly, when the intelligence reports are leaked, when the President’s confidential actions are public knowledge, we have reason to be concerned about the disregard for constitutional propriety. Will those who leaked information be punished to restore the sanctity of the process? Or are we moving toward what Paulo Friere calls the “culture of silence”?

The second issue concerns the doctrine of separation of powers. By segregating the names, did the President give primacy to the executive over the judiciary? Was this a question of political expediency trumping constitutional principles? With whom should the final decision, on who should be elevated, lie? The executive or the judicial fraternity? Since the Emergency, when it had touched its nadir, our democracy has been struggling to restore the balance between the executive and judiciary. Does the Gopal Subramanium case suggest that the pendulum has begun to swing again?

The third issue concerns Gopal Subramanium’s withdrawal of consent. By resigning he prevented the issue from developing into a constitutional face-off between the executive and the judiciary. Ronald Dworkin, the great legal and political philosopher, in Taking Rights Seriously, recommends such a face-off since he believes that only in such a situation will we be able to distinguish between just and unjust laws. We hope that the moment has not passed for the collegium to enunciate on the principle of finality. Mr. Subramanium’s withdrawal also highlights one of the knottiest problems of political philosophy. Should he have been pragmatic, and withdrawn to fight another battle, or principled, since a foundational principle was at stake? Is the cost of standing up for the principle too high, undermining other values that are also important, or is it necessary to stand up for them regardless of the cost since it would take society to new and higher morality?

Aung San Suu Kyi did not go to England to see her husband who had terminal cancer, when she was offered the choice, because she would have had to abandon the political struggle and leave the country. He passed away. She did not meet him. Yudhisthira told a little lie and won the war.

How to make hard choices : Ruth Chang

The real enemies of press freedom are in the newsroom

The principal threat to expression comes not from state regulation but from censorship by editors and proprietors

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 30 June 2014 20.48 BST

‘A political monoculture afflicts much of the press. Reports that might reveal a different side of the story remain unwritten.' Photograph: Tetra Images/Corbis

Three hundred years of press freedom are at risk, the newspapers cry. The government's proposed press regulator, they warn, threatens their independence. They have a respectable case, when you can extract it from the festoons of sticky humbug. Because of the shocking failures, so far, of self-regulation, I'm marginally in favour of the state solution. But I can also see the dangers.

Those who cry loudest against the regulator, however, recognise only one kind of freedom. In countries such as ours, the principal threat to freedom of expression comes not from government but from within the media. Censorship, in most cases, happens in the newsroom.

No newspaper has been more outspoken about what it calls "a chill over press freedom" than the Daily Mail. Though I agree with almost nothing it says, I would defend its freedom from state censorship as fiercely as I would defend the Guardian's. But, to judge by what it publishes, within the paper there is no freedom at all. There is just one line – echoed throughout its pages – on Europe, social security, state spending, tax, regulation, immigration, sentencing, trade unions and workers' rights. Labour is always too far to the left, even when it stands for nothing at all. Witness the self-defeating headline on Monday: "Red Ed 'won't unveil any policies in case they scare off voters'." Ed is red even when he's grey.

This suggests either that any article offering dissenting views is purged with totalitarian rigour, or general secretary Paul Dacre's terrified minions, knowing what is expected of them, never make such mistakes in the first place.

A similar political monoculture afflicts much of the press. Reports that might reveal a different side of the story remain unwritten. A free market in news is not the same as a free press, unless freedom is defined so narrowly that it refers only to the power of government, rather than to the power of money.

The monomania of the proprietors – or the editors they appoint in their own image – is compounded by an insidious, incestuous culture. The hacking trial revealed a world, as Suzanne Moore notes, of "sleepovers, dinners, flowers and presents ... in which genuine friendship is replaced by nightmare networking". A world in which one prime minister becomes godfather to a proprietor's child and another borrows an editor's horse, and an industry that is supposed to hold power to account brokers a seamless marriage between loot and boot.

On Mount Olympus, the gods pronounce upon issues that afflict only mortals: columnists with private-health plans support the savaging of the NHS; editors who educate their children privately heap praise upon Michael Gove, knowing that their progeny won't suffer his assault on state schools.

It doesn't matter, the defenders of these papers say: there are plenty of outlets, so balance can be found across the spectrum. But the great majority of papers, local as well as national, are owned by exceedingly rich people or their companies, and reflect their views. The owners, in the words of Max Hastings, once editor of the Daily Telegraph, are members of "the rich men's trade union", who "feel an instinctive sympathy for fellow multimillionaires". The field as a whole is unbalanced.

So pervasive are these voices that they seem to dominate even outlets they do not own. As Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, said last month, BBC News "is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers ... if we think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this, we should. It's part of the culture."

An analysis by researchers at Cardiff University found a deep and growing bias in the BBC in favour of bosses and against trade unions: five to one on the 6 o'clock news in 2007; 19 to one in 2012. Coverage of the banking crisis – caused by bankers – was overwhelmingly dominated, another study shows, by interviews with, er, bankers. As a result there was little serious challenge to their demand for bailouts and their resistance to regulation. Mike Berry, who conducted the research, says the BBC "tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world".

Last week, a brilliant and popular columnist for the Times, Simon Barnes, was sacked after 32 years. He was told that the paper could no longer afford his wages. But he wondered whether it might have something to do with the fierce campaign he's been waging against the owners of grouse moors, who have been wiping out the rare hen harriers that eat their quarry. It seems at first glance ridiculous: why would someone be sacked for grousing about grouse? But after experiencing the furious seigneurial affront with which a former senior editor at the Times, Magnus Linklater, responded to my enquiries about his 4,000-acre estate in Scotland and his failure to declare this interest while excoriating the RSPB for trying to protect hen harriers, I'm not so sure. This issue is of disproportionate interest to the rich men's trade union.

The two explanations might not be incompatible: if a paper owned by a crabby oligarch wanted to sack people for reasons of economy, it might look first at those engendering complaints among the owner's fellow moguls. The Times has yet to give me a comment.

Over the past few weeks, Private Eye has published several alarming claims about what it sees as censorship by the Telegraph on behalf of its advertisers. It says that extra stars have been added to film reviews, and that a story claiming HSBC had overstated its assets was spiked from on high so as not to offend the companies that pay the rent. The Telegraph told me: "We do not comment on inaccurate pieces from a satirical magazine like Private Eye."

Whatever the truth in these cases may be, it does not take journalists long to learn where the snakes lurk and the ladders begin. As the journalist Hannen Swaffer remarked long ago: "Freedom of the press ... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to." Yes, let's fight censorship: of the press and by the press.

NGOs of the mind

Shiv Vishvanathan in The Hindu

The NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity and it is this double-edged nature that puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. The recent Intelligence Bureau report on NGOs against development has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion

Jairam Ramesh, the former Union Minister of Environment, once playfully, in fact factiously, commented that the word ‘Intelligence Bureau’ (IB) is an oxymoron. He was warning us that often, instead of collecting information, the IB projects the current fears of the state. It plays out the current politics of anxiety about security and development. What intrigues one is that such suspicion now acquires numeracy. The IB estimates non-governmental organisation (NGO) resistance as negatively impacting GDP by two to three per cent. Seen as a mirror inversion of a Human Development Report, the report becomes surreal. One wonders what the IB will estimate as the price of a dead myth or an extinct waterfall. One is not asking for the source of the estimate or its methodology but the idea itself conveys a false sense of objectivity about the acts of intelligence gathering.

One must also recognise that the NGO as an expression of voluntarism is a Janus-faced entity. At one level, it acts as an extension counter of the state, engaging in acts of humanitarian and social work. At another level, it is a political and cognitive entity challenging development paradigms and arguing issues of governance and democracy. This double-edged nature of the NGO puts it in a perpetual state of suspicion. Yet, we have to recognise that civic epistemologies and civil society creativity are crucial for democracy.

Text of suspicion

The recent IB report has to be reread as a part of a new text of suspicion. It combines issues of environment and defence, internal and external security, and security and sustainability to create a new monster, a threat called “NGOs against development.” The report focusses more on the initiation and delay of projects rather than the suffering caused by these projects through acts of displacement. Development is a benign act of the sovereign state. The NGO and social movements are seen as over-obsessed with acts of suffering. In that sense, it is an upstream rather than a downstream critique of the NGO. The delay becomes the act of sedition and it is these delays that contribute negatively to GDP.

The NGO is then read as a surrogate ploy for the alien or outsider. Behind each NGO is a foreign national or a grant-giving agency. The foreign hand, once legendary in the era of the Cold War, now returns not as CIA but as grant-giving agency. The language of human rights becomes a veneer for a new opposition to the state and serves as a cover for such disruptive activity. In fact, anti-development becomes the label for a network of conspiracies between the local NGO and foreign agencies to keep India in a state of underdevelopment.

Before one responds to the details of the report, one must confess that NGOs are not angelic groups. Many have become institutions which have turned seriatim protest into a career. One creates a trajectory from Bhopal to Narmada to GM foods oblivious of one’s last battles. Many of these groups have advocated transparency and responsibility but failed to apply it to themselves. If the report is a demand for self-reflexivity, one can sympathise with it, but when it clubs NGOs into one bundle and treats them as seditious, it threatens civil society as a space of freedom, dissent and creativity. Once one realises that development has created more refugees than the wars we have fought, one senses that development is more problematic than the IB report can imagine it to be.

‘Anti-development’ label

The report creates anti-development as problematic and especially turns Greenpeace into a monster. One must admit that it is easy to caricature Greenpeace. The organisation’s style is theatric, which often upsets the stuffed-shirt state, used to a sense of dignity. But Greenpeace raises critical issues, confronts the silences of development with a melodramatic, even overstated, eloquence, which is effective and attention-grabbing. It is seen as people-centric rather than government-centric and this focus is regarded as unpardonable. Because it amplifies marginal voices, it is seen as disruptive and yet as a critic said, “If Greenpeace did not exist it would have been invented. It is an early warning system on development and peace issues.” But the real sore point is not the Greenpeace style but the set of issues Greenpeace and other NGOs have raised.

The fourfold resistance of NGOs focusses on nuclear energy, coal-fired plants, genetically modified organisms (GMO) and anti-extractive activities in the northeast. All four are seen as attempts to protect livelihoods, local freedom and obtain fairness. The IB argues that because of this, India has become vulnerable in international forums, unable to voice its usual pieties of peace and development.

The report observes that international agencies earlier used “caste discrimination, human rights and big dams as items to discredit India.” These same forums have graduated to new embarrassments around growth retarding campaigns such as the anti-bauxite, anti-coal, anti-nuclear, anti-GM issues. It is their style and focus that make them so devastating. The IB reads each NGO as a pressure group which creates a specific scenario. It sets an agenda, creates debates in the media, lobbies diplomats and governments generally seeking to create a network of embarrassments. The keywords used are camouflage words, their democratic content hiding a malign intent, a strategy of disruption and delay, restricting development in key sectors. Each NGO is backed by foreign funds, each infiltrates a local group, commandeers a local issue to embarrass and delay the development projects of the regime.

These arguments seem reasonable, the scenario believable till one examines the array of people cited. It is the roll call of the best and brightest in the country. They include S.P. Udayakumar, Suman Sahai, Kavita Kuruganti, Admiral Ramdas, Paranjoy GuhaThakurta, Aruna Rodrigues, Surendra Gadekar. Because they criticise the development project in its specificities, they do not become anti-national. In fact this report should become an early warning system for civil society to gear itself for battles. Whether it is the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is clear that development without jitters is a priority. Dissent becomes an activity frowned upon. In fact, one must recognise there is an NGO in all of us. One must also recognise that the well-being of the nation requires that the demand of the nation not be confused with the imperatives of the nation-state. Nations can allow for diversity, while nation-states seek uniformity and official diktats.

Ethics of intervention, memory

The activists listed link the ethics of invention and the ethics of memory. Tradition and change are linked not through sentimentality but through ideas of livelihood and empowerment. It is not only a rights discourse, it is a battle for survival arguing that the development discourse cannot be indifferent to voice, livelihoods and its roots in community. Riding roughshod over democracy is not a criteria of development. Delay is not the only criteria of evaluation. Time as plurality, history, myth, an ethic of memory, as a guarantee against obsolescence and triage are also relevant criteria. Delay speaks the language of growth without an articulate idea of responsibility and it is on this point that the IB report errs in its witch-hunt against “anti-development”. The politics of delay needs an aetiology, a discourse on causes. Delay is an intermediate stage in the development process. Delay comes because the government fails to talk to people about the location of a project, its implication for livelihoods and life in a locality. When people discover that the black box of national interest has trumped local empowerment they have to resort to politics desperately. What is often dismissed as sedition is mainly a crisis of empowerment, a failure of dialogue. A development that begins with diktats is bound to be delayed. The presence of a foreign hand often becomes a pretext for ignoring local voice and local issues.

The IB report emphasises that these NGOs are a threat to the national, economic security of India. But their understanding of security is restricted. It has no sense of seed security, or forest cover, no sense of trusteeship of the future. What is seen as sedition is often an attempt to combine an ecological sense of sustainability with a classical idea of security. In fact the IB’s sense of security allows for paranoia but not pluralism. A critical response has to deconstruct the categories of its official discourse, the 19th century suspicions that it stirs, and still show that civil society is adding a life-giving content to these categories. Suffering and sensitivity to suffering have to be a part of such measures and these the NGOs manage to do. The other issue the NGOs attempt to raise is the debate around choice of technologies and this the nation-state and its experts resent. A refusal to debate options for the future threatens the future and such stubbornness bordering on illiteracy cannot be conflated with security.

NGO transparency

To create the climate for such a debate, the NGOs have to spring clean their bureaucracies, show that foreign grants do not colour local issues. Second, they have to account for grants and any sub-grants they might make. The trajectory must be transparent to prevent suspicions clouding a crucial debate. Third, they have to demonstrate to the rest of the society that beyond protest, they are seeking to create new epistemologies of knowledge which adds to the quality of livelihood and thus reveal that obsolescence and displacement are not inevitable for the margins. One has to see this report as an anticipation of things to come, a symptom of a society that has become sceptical of some NGO battles. Dissent in these circumstances is going to demand both a heroic inventiveness and a quiet patience.

In reading such a document one has to be careful of labelling it a Modi ploy. It is as much a Manmohan Singh complaint. He was fed up with NGOs opposing nuclear energy. The politics of regimes might be different but their paranoias are the same — security being threatened by local groups. Both would love a discourse which subsumes sustainability under security. Moreover, suspicion and paranoia need a scapegoat. The funder abroad as invisible hand, the Greenpeace as the more visible hand become easy candidates. One cannot deny that foreign groups might help stir the political pot. Their behaviour often warrants suspicion. The challenge before these NGOs is to create a public space where three things are clear. First, they have to create systems of audit which are both rule bound, time bound and transparent. Foreign funds are not cornucopia to be showered on all and sundry like confetti. Second, one has to communicate the vitality and the life-giving nature of the issues. It cannot be left to the experts and the bureaucrats of the state. Third, one needs an ethic of responsibility which includes professionalism as ascetic lifestyle, a precision of articulation which carries greater conviction. The battle of competing rhetoric will not do. It is a challenge to create a public space around the silences of the state and include the margins of the nation. One needs a space which allows for dissent and debate, which is both cathartic and constructive and which incorporates the future as a constituency. It is not defensiveness that we need but a confidence to experiment, to debate, to create alternatives, The state could be afraid of the foreign hand but what states often found even more alien is the process of empowerment, the attempt to create a different democracy.

The IB report is right in emphasising the critical nature of the four issues. But what is equally critical is the synergy of democracy that NGOs need to create around these issues. Each struggle has to be a fable for the future. To do less would make the report more real and true over time. Civil society has to make sure that this IB report does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No Second Wife Please - We're Indian Muslim women

Jyoti Punwani in the Hindu

Will the Muslim personal law make polygamy illegal?

When the Bhartiya Mahila Muslim Andolan started working on codifying Muslim personal law, they weren’t sure whether to ban polygamy, or make it conditional. Senior lawyers pointed out that despite bigamy being an offence, Hindu men continued to take a second wife. These women didn’t enjoy the status of a wife, whereas even the fourth wife of a Muslim man had that status.

But the final draft of the new ‘Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act’, released in Mumbai on June 18, makes polygamy illegal. How come? “That’s what Muslim women wanted,” says Noorjehan Safia Niaz, co-founder of the BMMA. “We played the Devil’s Advocate with them, asking them wasn’t a second wife necessary if the first couldn’t conceive, for example. Their reply always was: ‘No. No second wife. No woman should have to share her husband with another woman.’”

Of the seven years taken to arrive at this draft, two were spent talking to Muslim women, most of them poor, uneducated and living in ghettos. It was these women who were desperate for a change, urging the BMMA to “quickly change the law, get us justice.”

But the middle class, supposed to be the pioneer for reform, left Noorjehan disillusioned. A US-returned Muslim in Hyderabad baulked at the BMMA’s proposal to make 18 and 21 the minimum age of marriage for women and men respectively. “It should be 18 for both,” she suggested. Muslim male lawyers in Karnataka saw nothing wrong in a 13-year-old getting married as long as she had attained puberty. But in the bylanes of Bhopal, uneducated Muslim women suggested 21 and 25 instead. “Our daughters graduate at 21,” they pointed out.

“Middle class Muslims kept saying: ‘Don’t tamper too much with the shariat.’ They have well-off families and education to fall back on; the unjust decisions of qazis don’t affect them much,’’ explains Noorjehan. What kept the BMMA going was the response of poor women.

Consultations with these women were held across 10 states where the BMMA has been working, training paralegal workers as arbitrators and providing legal aid. Men would attend their public meetings, and a few would invariably object to their attire (“you are wearing a sari, you haven’t covered your head, you aren’t wearing a burqa — so you aren’t Muslim”), or to their lack of qualifications (“you are not aalims”). One man in Ranchi who objected vociferously to everything, later told Noorjehan, “I agree with everything you say, but if I don’t object, I can’t face my jamaat.” The BMMA took a decision not to consult the All India Personal Law Board and the religious organisations. “They have shown they don’t want change.”

The starting point of this long process was the condition of poor Muslim women, victims of the unIslamic and unjust decisions of maulanas and qazis. The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937 has no specific provisions to be followed, leaving every qazi free to rule as per their understanding of the Sharia. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 lays down grounds on which a woman can approach the court, but few can afford to do so.

Because of this, reformists such as the late Asghar Ali Engineer campaigned for years for the need to codify Muslim personal Law as per Quranic injunctions, which grant women more rights than any other religion does. All Islamic countries have put in place modern personal laws. But in India, the move has always been resisted on three grounds: 1. The Sharia can’t be touched; it is divine. 2. It will be impossible to decide which of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence should be followed in codification. 3. This will be the first step towards enacting a Uniform Civil Code (UCC).

As Engineer never tired of explaining, the Sharia is based on the Quran, it is not the Quran. In India, the Shariat Act was drafted and enacted by the British. The BMMA worked with Engineer on its draft, choosing to base it on the Quran itself. The draft contains verses from the Quran to back its provisions.  

Thus, to decide the minimum age of marriage, the Quranic injunction of ‘maturity’ of the spouses was interpreted as emotional maturity in addition to physical. “Besides, in Islam, marriage is a contract, and a contract can only be between two adults,” says Noorjehan.

The draft makes many common practices illegal, including underage marriage; unilateral, oral and instant talaq; making the woman give up her mehr (dower) and halala, the practice by which you remarry your divorced wife only after she consummates her marriage with another man and is then divorced by him. “This has no mention in the Quran, it’s become a prostitution racket in places like Lucknow,” says Noorjehan.  

Is this the right time to release this draft, given the new government’s emphasis on the UCC? “We oppose the UCC. But we also want to know, when will the right time come to get justice for women? Twenty years back, we were asked to wait as the Babri Masjid was demolished, the community was under attack. Aren’t women part of the community? Ten years back we were told the Gujarat pogrom had taken place. Can these leaders give us a guarantee that 10 years later, there will be a really secular government, and the community won’t be under attack? Secondly, who decides this hierarchy of issues? Let’s tackle all issues: discrimination, security and also women’s rights. Besides, how many of these leaders have worked on these other issues at the grassroots level? It is groups like us who have done so, tried to get the Sachar Committee recommendations implemented and also campaigned against Modi.”

Noorjehan knows it will take the efforts of many groups to get the government to accept the draft. “Let the community debate our draft first. At any rate, for us, the process was as important as the result.”

The difference between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair

Gordon Brown is back, and may be the man to save the union

He was reviled after he lost the 2010 election, but the former PM is now reframing the Scottish independence debate

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • Follow @Freedland Follow @guardian
  • The Guardian, Friday 27 June 2014 19.23 BST

‘Gordon Brown retains a standing in Scotland which he never really had in England. He is seen as a national heavyweight.' Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

Tony Blair was on the front page of the Financial Times this week, as the paper brought word of the former prime minister's plan to open an office in "the increasingly assertive oil-rich emirate" of Abu Dhabi. The FT explained that Blair is expanding his portfolio of business and other interests in the Middle East, which already includes a contract to advise Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi's mighty sovereign wealth funds.

A few hours later, Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, came to London to advance some business of his own. Brown was in the capital to attend a series of unpaid meetings in cramped rooms, pressing the case for Scotland to remain part of the UK. He was rewarded with a cup of canteen coffee.

The contrast between Britain's last two prime ministers could hardly be sharper. They were always unalike, but now they inhabit different worlds. Blair has morphed into Adam Lang, the permatanned, globetrotting ex-statesman-for-hire at the centre of Robert Harris's novel The Ghost. Brown refuses the pension owed to him as a former prime minister. The jacket of his latest book, My Scotland, Our Britain, discloses that any profits will be given to charity. When he wrote recently for the Guardian, he declined the (admittedly modest) fee. As far as anyone can tell, he lives with his family at home in North Queensferry on his MP's salary. By his actions, he declares himself the unBlair – a man determined not to profit from his public position.

So while Blair has the sleek glow of the expensively dressed elite, Brown pitches up in a suit whose years of heavy-duty service are visible: there's a tiny hole in his sleeve. But the difference goes deeper. While Blair is unembarrassed, eager to sound off about the future of the Middle East – when others might have held back, given how things turned out in Iraq – Brown has proved more reticent. After his defeat in 2010, he allowed the coalition and its allies to trash his reputation, to pretend it was Brown's profligacy, rather than a global financial crash, that had ballooned the deficit. Privately, he told friends there was no point trying to defend himself, as people were in no mood to listen. Defeated leaders like him have to "go through a period when they're reviled, that's just the way it is".

He still holds to that vow of silence, more or less, on UK-wide politics, letting Labour's new generation have the battlefield to themselves. But in recent months he has broken his own golden rule and stormed back into the public square, to play his part in a contest he says differs from normal politics because its outcome could be irreversible. His fellow Scots are about to vote on independence, and he wants them to say no.

He is campaigning vigorously, speaking in Aberdeen today on the contested question of North Sea oil, packing out halls and addressing rallies day after day. "He's now a key part of the conversation," reports the Guardian's Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell. So omnipresent has Brown become that observers describe him as the most prominent, commanding Labour figure in the campaign, stirring the faithful in a way that Alistair Darling – who leads the cross-party Better Together group – cannot.

Much of this is down to the well-worn observation that Brown retains a standing in Scotland he never really had in England. North of the border he is seen as a national heavyweight, the last of a leadership class that included the late Donald Dewar, John Smith and Robin Cook, and is therefore automatically granted a hearing. But there's more to it than that.

Whatever Brown's flaws – and even his closest friends cannot pretend he was temperamentally suited to the top job – few doubt his analytical gifts. The reason he remained in command of Labour strategy for so long was his knack for understanding and framing a political argument. With the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, he understands that every battle is won before it's fought. It's won by choosing the ground on which it will be fought. And this is the key contribution Brown is making to the no campaign.

He diagnosed a key error in the way the argument had been framed. It had become Scotland v Britain, with Alex Salmond and the Scottish National party arguing for Scotland and everyone else championing Britain. That, says Brown, might be fine if the entire UK electorate had a vote on 18 September. But they don't. Only Scots vote in this referendum, which means this has to be framed as a choice for Scots: which Scotland will flourish, one that retains its political ties to the other three nations of these islands or one that severs those links?

It's such a simple point, it seems extraordinary anyone had to make it. But Brown is right. When David Cameron delivered his big speech on the topic in February, not only did he do it in London, he rested his case on why the union had been good for Britain. That answered the wrong question. Given the electorate involved, the only question that matters is: is the union good for Scotland? Framed like this, every issue looks different. Take the vexed business of currency. Brown reckons George Osborne walked straight into a nationalist trap when he declared that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to keep the pound: it was London at war with Edinburgh, Britain bullying Scotland.

The right way to argue it, says Brown, is to ask what's best for Scotland: to use the currency of a country you've just left and whose rules you no longer have any say over or to retain your seat at the table, with some control over your own money. The former would be a "semi-colonial relationship", says Brown, Scotland using a currency shaped by officials in faraway London. Framed like that, it's suddenly Brown who's putting Scottish interests first and, oddly, Salmond who's left defending a supine relationship to London.

The way Brown describes it, the union is no longer an imperial hangover that represses Scotland but a neat set-up for distinct and proud nations to club together, sharing resources and pooling risks. That arrangement has served Scotland rather well: why on earth would you throw it all away?

The nationalists have an answer, of course they do. But Brown's version makes it a much harder question. Now other no campaigners are following his lead, adopting the frame he constructed. On the ground, among Labour's core vote, it seems to be working; some detect a stalling in momentum for Yes. They all laughed when Brown accidentally claimed to have saved the world. But, who knows, he might just save the union.

Cricket - Let's hear it for the unorthodox spinner

V Ramnarayan in Cricinfo

Sonny Ramadhin troubled England with his variations in 1950 but lost his edge on the next tour, and later confessed to having chucked during his career  © PA Photos

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Back in the 1960s, my college team had a "legspinner" - for want of a better description - PS Ramesh, who bowled legbreaks, offbreaks and straight ones, all with identical actions and no obvious change of grip. We played all our cricket on matting, and while Ramesh bamboozled most batsmen at that level, we did not find out how he would have fared on turf, as the selectors never fancied him beyond college cricket. These days he would probably have been taken much more seriously, and have played representative cricket, for his armoury certainly included the carrom ball, if not the doosra.

More than a decade earlier, West Indian crowds had first chanted the calypso about "those little pals of mine", Ramadhin and Valentine when the spin twins decimated England at Lord's to earn West Indies their first Test win in England. Bespectacled, nerdy-looking Alf Valentine was an orthodox left-arm spinner, but short and squat Sonny Ramadhin had a whole box of tricks that batsmen found hard to unravel. Bowling in long sleeves, he made the ball go this way or that at will, giving no hint of the deviation with his action. 

Ramadhin's spirit was broken seven years later, when Peter May (285 not out) and Colin Cowdrey (154) put on 411 for the fourth wicket in the second innings of the first Test at Edgbaston. While May counterattacked, Cowdrey showed he was a master of pad-play in an ultra-defensive display of attrition. Ramadhin never recovered.

Cowdrey's padathon probably played a role in the introduction of the new lbw rule that enabled the umpire to rule a batsman out to balls pitching outside the off stump if he offered no stroke and the umpire believed the ball would have gone on to hit the stumps. In 1999, Ramadhin sensationally confessed in the wake of widespread arguments over the legality of the doosra that he threw the odd ball in his time.

Were he playing today, Cowdrey could not have got away with the generous forward thrust of his leg in front of his bat to demolish the Ajantha Mendises and Sunil Narines of world cricket, considering umpires are ever so willing to give lbw decisions, unlike their 20th-century counterparts, many of whom had their hands firmly in their pockets except when the batsman was palpably in front - while playing fully back!

Perhaps the first freak spinner in Test cricket history was Australia's Jack Iverson, who gripped the ball between thumb and middle finger and bowled a bewildering array of offspin, legspin and googlies. The mystery of his bowling was, however, short-lived. He barely lasted five Tests.

I had the pleasure of watching a mystery spinner at close quarters. My Hyderabad team-mate, the left-arm spinner Mumtaz Hussain bowled Osmania University to a Rohinton Baria Trophy triumph in 1966-67. No batsman at that level had an answer to his wiles, as he sent down orthodox left-arm spin, the chinaman and the googly with no perceptible difference in the action. His prize scalp of the tournament was Sunil Gavaskar, who says in his autobiographical book Sunny Days:

"Their (Osmania's) left-arm spinner Mumtaz Hussain, the hero of the tournament, proved deadly with his disguised chinaman and regular orthodox spin. In the second innings, Ramesh Nagdev and I were going strong after Naik's cheap dismissal. But Nagdev was not able to fathom Mumtaz Hussain's spin when he bowled the chinaman. I thought I knew, so in a purely psychological move I called out loud to Nagdev at the non-striker's end: 'Don't worry, Ramesh, I know when he bowls that one.' When Mumtaz heard this, he smiled mysteriously and tossed the ball up to me for the next few deliveries. I came down the wicket, but managed to hit only one four while the others went straight to the fielder. Mumtaz tossed up the last ball of the over slightly outside the off-stump. Too late I realized that he had bowled a googly and was stranded down the track, to be easily stumped."

Mumtaz was tragically converted to an orthodox spinner in first-class cricket, and though he had a very respectable career, he was never again the wonder bowler of his youth - at least not until he unfurled his magical wares again in his last two Ranji Trophy matches. Legspinner BS Chandrasekhar was luckier. In a land notorious for coaches who would try to fit every spinner into a single mould, it was a miracle that allowed him to continue to deliver lightning-quick missiles all his life, with no concession to orthodoxy.

A story similar to Gavaskar's, but probably apocryphal, involves Geoffrey Boycott and legspinner John Gleeson, who posed quite a few problems for English batsmen during the 1970-71 series in Australia. When one of his batting partners told him he was now able to distinguish Gleeson's googly from his legbreak, Sir Geoffrey allegedly whispered to him, "Don't tell anyone. I could always read him."

V Ramnarayan is an author, translator and teacher. He bowled offspin for Hyderabad and South Zone in the 1970s