Read The Hindu Notes of 14th December 2018 for UPSC Civil Service Examination, State Civil Service Examination and other competitive Examination

The Hindu Notes for 14th December 2018
  • Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 14th December 2018

    • The fear of executive courts

    India urgently needs the return of a thriving legal culture that uncompromisingly calls out political posturing

  • On Monday, Justice S.R. Sen of the Meghalaya High Court observed in a judgment that “anybody opposing... Indian laws and the Constitution cannot be considered... citizens of the country.” The case involved the denial of a domicile certificate. Justice Sen, however, thought it fit to further note that in 1947 India “should ... have been declared... a Hindu country”, and that “our beloved Prime Minister” ought to legislate to grant automatic citizenship to (non-Muslim) religious minorities “who have come from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan”. He also noted that “our political leaders” in 1947 “were too much in a hurry to get the independence... thus, creating all the problems today”, and that “nobody should try to make India as another Islamic country”. In parting, Justice Sen directed the Assistant Solicitor-General to hand over a copy of his judgment “latest by 11-12-2018 to the Hon’ble Prime Minister, Hon’ble Home Minister, and Hon’ble Law Minister”.
  • It is tempting to dismiss this as an aberration, like the time that Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court observed that peacocks don’t have sex. Giving in to that temptation, however, would be a mistake. Justice Sen’s ill-advised and ill-judged diatribe is only the latest in a series of instances where judges have inserted themselves into fraught political controversies, and have deployed the prestige of judicial office to lend weight to one side of the controversy. This is an alarming trend.
  • We normally think about judicial independence as independence from the government. Our Constitution is designed to ensure that judges can do their work “independent” of government influence: fixed salaries, security of tenure, and an appointments process that — through the Supreme Court’s judgments — is insulated from executive control.

    • Judicial independence

  • Independence, however, means something more. It also requires that judges perform their constitutional role independent of personal biases, political and moral beliefs, and partisan ideologies. Of course, adjudication is a political task, and there is no doubt that a judge’s political vision will inform her work. That, however, does not authorise the judge to turn into a politician. At all times, she is bound to maintain primary fidelity to the law and the Constitution: to the text of legal instruments, to the canons of legal interpretation, and to the body of judicial precedent that holds the field. These are crucial checks upon judicial power.
  • Judicial independence, therefore, depends on judges recognising that law, while being influenced by politics, is not reducible to it. Law and adjudication must remain autonomous from partisan politics in important ways. And the more we strengthen judicial independence in its first sense — independence from the government — the more attention we must pay to independence in this second sense. This is because control brings with it accountability. Politicians, for example, remain “accountable” to the people in at least some sense, because they depend upon them in order to continue in office after five years. Judges who are insulated from any external control are accountable only to themselves, and their own sense of the limits of their constitutional role.
  • Accountability only to oneself, however, is a very weak form of constraint. The temptation to overstep is always immense, more so when such immense power has been placed in one’s own hands. It is here that legal culture plays a critical role in establishing judicial accountability. By legal culture, I refer to a set of unwritten, but clearly established, norms that determine what is or is not acceptable in the process of adjudication. And a legal culture does not spring up out of a vacuum: it must be created and nurtured by judges, lawyers, legal academics, the press and the citizenry.

    • The roots of the crisis

  • Where, then, has the legal culture failed us? The answer takes us back a few decades. In the 1980s, there was a rapid expansion of judicial power. This expansion was motivated by a sense that the judiciary had long been a conservative institution, taking the side of landed interests against “the people”. This needed to change. In order to accomplish this, the Supreme Court began to dispense with procedural checks upon its power. Some of these steps were important and necessary, such as allowing “public interest” cases to be filed on behalf of those who were unable to access the courts. Others, however, were double-edged swords, such as diluting the evidentiary standards required to prove disputed facts, and vastly expanding the courts’ discretion to shape and fashion remedies.
  • The 1980s Supreme Court was highly praised for this. Influential legal scholars — whose views continue to hold sway in law schools today — lauded the destruction of pesky “Anglo-Saxon” procedural rules, which stood in the way of “complete justice”. Judges were painted as crusading heroes. In words that might have embarrassed Louis XIV, the Supreme court was called “the last refuge of the oppressed and the bewildered”. By the 1990s and the 2000s, under the misleading label of “judicial activism”, the court was beginning to engage in a host of administrative activities, from managing welfare schemes to “beautifying cities” to overseeing anti-corruption initiatives. The constitutional court had become a Supreme ‘Administrative’ Court. This, too, was justified on the altar of necessity: politicians were corrupt, bureaucrats were inefficient, and things didn’t move. Someone had to come and clean it all up.
  • A combination of viewing the judiciary as an infallible solution to all social problems, and viewing procedure — that would otherwise constrain judicial power — as an irritant that stands in the way of a truer, purer justice has created the perfect storm that we see today. The first allows a judge to project her own social and political views as universally valid and beneficial; the second allows her to ignore the barriers that stand between her and the implementation of those views. Wrapped up in patriotic zeal, a judge does not stop to think whether he is authorised to compel all cinema halls in the nation to play the national anthem; another does not consider whether he has the power to mandate that every student in Tamil Nadu must study the Tirukkural; a third takes over the entire process of preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC), with nary a thought about whether the Constitution ever contemplated a task such as this to fall within the judicial domain.

    • A frightening prospect

  • The record of the courts in protecting civil rights has been a mixed one. In far too many cases, courts have tended to defer to the executive and the government. However, judgments like the national anthem order, the Tirukkural order, the NRC process, and Justice Sen’s recent foray raise an altogether more frightening prospect: that of an “executive court”. By an executive court, I mean a court whose moral and political compass finds itself in alignment with the government of the day, and one that has no compunctions in navigating only according to that compass. Instead of checking and limiting government power, an executive court finds itself marching in lockstep with the government, and being used to set the seal of its prestige upon more controversial parts of the government’s agenda.
  • We are not there yet. But we urgently need the return of a thriving legal culture, one that uncompromisingly calls out political posturing of the kind we have seen this week. And this legal culture cannot pick and choose, criticising regressive orders like Justice Sen’s, while exempting judgments that equally cross the line, but nonetheless seem to have achieved a “right outcome”. Only a principled consistency in requiring that judges must always give reasons for their judgment can halt the transformation of the constitutional court into an executive court.
  • Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer

    • The anatomy of a police station

    Lacking personnel, funds and motivation, the thana is not structured to enforce the rule of law

  • The death of inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, shot while trying to control a mob of cow vigilantes in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, is a vivid expression of the contempt of our ruling classes, and those aligned to them, for the rule of law. The increasing number of human sacrifices for the alleged protection of cows signals a steep rise in this contempt. These incidents shock us because they are graphic and indicate a discernible change for the worse. The shock turns into dread as the ruling elite fails to condemn and punish the perpetrators. Mob violence is growing, and the government’s efforts to contain it are wanting.
  • Underlying these shocking incidents is an equally terrifying lawlessness, which is quiet, insidious and pervasive. The stunningly casual statements from the establishment after the incident are a new development in a systematised attack on the rule of law. This is illustrated in my case study of an unobtrusive, sleepy looking police station in the tribal belt of central India.

    • Unable to enforce law

  • The police station was structured to perpetrate lawlessness in two ways. First, it was simply not enabled to enforce the rule of law. Manned by 16 people in all, with six of its 22 posts vacant, and headed by a sub-inspector, it was expected to serve 83 villages across 2,680 sq km. The police personnel were expected to investigate crime, maintain law and order, and were frequently deployed on VIP duty. The personnel rotated through it rapidly, as there was at least one transfer per month. The senior officers complained that postings were based on patronage, and it was not possible to deploy the best people for the most difficult tasks. The thana was always short of money, and personnel spent from their pocket on stationery and other needs.
  • The police personnel were extremely dissatisfied. They were entitled to 16 days of leave in a year, but this was never actually sanctioned. They reported being overworked, on duty 24 hours a day, with high stress. Their families were neglected. A head constable said that he had never attended a parents’ meeting in his child’s school. A majority of the constables lived in the nearby city because of lack of housing, schools and health facilities in that area. They travelled to the police station everyday, which is not how things should be as they need to be available in case of a crisis. This cost them around ₹5,000 per month. They saw themselves as underpaid and not respected.
  • To this demotivating background were added idiosyncratic working styles. Though a police station is expected to respond to the needs and events of the area, it was assigned targets, such as for seizing a certain amount of liquor and issuing a number of challans. Every year, the targets were increased. Sometimes they simply did not correspond to the situation. For example, it had problems achieving its targets for issuing challans in the case of people riding without helmets, because there were few motorcycles in the area and people simply did not have money to pay the fine.
  • Discussions with the police personnel showed poor understanding about enforcing the law. When violence against women was discussed, many said that women usually made false complaints. During the study, a mentally disturbed person was beaten up as he stood hallucinating, decrying imagined enemies. The shortage of personnel, the sorry working conditions and their ignorance created a system not capable of upholding the rule of law.

    • Deep-rooted corruption

  • The second way in which the police station became an agent of lawlessness was corruption. Interaction with the community showed that the village people feared and avoided the police. They said that the police listened to those who had money. The usual dismal tales of police greed and brutality emerged. Constables extracted money from vehicles plying the highway, snatched away mobile phones of ordinary people and returned them only when they were paid money. When an FIR was lodged, the police evinced sympathy for the victims as well as the accused, and took money off both to solve the case. An attempted rape was ignored after money exchanged hands.
  • One police personnel admitted that it was difficult not to be corrupt, because everyone was. She had started her career determined to never accept bribes. But over time, her perspective changed, as she faced pressure from senior officials as well as local leaders to ‘help’ in various ways. The pressure from inside, she said, was worse. This problem was clearly systemic and not individual, as the police personnel themselves were not happy with their corruption. They tried to atone for their sins by ensuring proper last rites when bodies were not claimed by anyone after accidents, by spending their own money.
  • This dull-looking police station was not newsworthy, and its activities did not shock anyone. But it symbolises the pervasive lawlessness to which we are now habituated. It is out of this system of lawlessness that the more dramatic incidents like the death of Singh emerge. We remain apathetic to systemic callousness, which also needs scrutiny and action.

    • Theresa must

    Having survived a party challenge, the British PM should spell out London’s next steps

  • British Prime Minister Theresa May has survived a trust vote on her Conservative party stewardship. But there is little sign that the bitter infighting within the ruling party will abate. Nor is there any assurance that Parliament will back her government’s controversial Brexit deal with the European Union. The leadership challenge was suddenly triggered by a growing number of Tory rebels who felt emboldened by widespread opposition to the withdrawal agreement that has united Europhiles and Eurosceptics across parties. Their resistance gained momentum when Ms. May, deeply apprehensive about its approval by the Commons, decided to defer a vote on the deal. Following her victory in the party leadership battle, Ms. May hopes to secure more assurances from European leaders that Britain would not be permanently locked into a customs union with the EU. The customs union is the backstop arrangement meant to continue the open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, a lifeline of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. London has sought to sell the backstop as the best possible deal that could protect the U.K.’s territorial integrity. The EU insists the withdrawal agreement cannot be reopened for negotiations. The Remain and Leave camps want legal assurances that the customs union would at best be temporary, given the curbs it would impose regarding trade agreements with third countries.
  • It is possible that Brussels will adopt a flexible stance, despite its protestations to the contrary, to avert a no-deal scenario on the expiry of the Article 50 deadline on March 29, 2019. Examples of how the dilemma posed by the Danish rejection of the 1991 EU treaty, or Ireland’s ‘No’ to the Lisbon treaty were legally overcome are being cited in relation to the present difficulty with the Irish backstop. Clearly, the EU’s main concern is not to stretch the basic idea that the benefits of membership are limited to insiders. But the U.K. will have to show some flexibility, of deferring to the democratic mandate of the referendum, while recognising the practical imperatives of ceasing a long partnership. In that respect, it would be wishful thinking, to paraphrase former Prime Minister John Major, to want to dispense with the Irish formula that has been written into the withdrawal agreement. Tory rebels should rise above their narrow differences in the national interest and back the final agreement presented to Parliament in January. Else, they risk an extension of the Brexit deadline and even possibly a second referendum on the EU membership issue. The meaning of the 2016 referendum verdict has evolved from implying that a no-deal withdrawal was better than a bad deal to an acceptance that a soft exit is the more realistic option. Now, opinions on a second referendum are being openly voiced. It’s time London decided what it really wants.

    • Time after time

    In Telangana, the TRS banked on its regional appeal to keep the Congress out again

  • In continuing with its politics of regional identity, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi won a second term in office in India’s newest State, pushing the national party, the Congress, to a distant second. TRS leader K. Chandrasekhara Rao, sworn in again as Chief Minister, had made a calculated gamble by advancing the election, which was due along with the Lok Sabha election. The motive was clear: he did not want to fight the Assembly polls alongside the Lok Sabha election, in which the Congress would have been a strong contender at the national level. The gamble paid off handsomely, and the TRS has added 25 seats to its 2014 tally of 63 with an increase of 12 percentage points in vote share. For the second time, the Congress failed to capitalise on its role in carving out Telangana from Andhra Pradesh, allowing the TRS a runaway victory. While it did not get any credit in Telangana for bringing the State into being, it had to take all the blame in Andhra Pradesh for the bifurcation, where it conceded space to its breakaway party, the YSR Congress Party. Mr. Rao is now firmly entrenched in government, and his son, K.T. Rama Rao, is a parallel power centre. In the last five years, far from being able to challenge the TRS politically, the Congress appears to have slipped in voter estimation.
  • Some of the Congress’s failures will have to be attributed to the national leadership, which hurriedly entered into an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party. Although the TDP does enjoy support in Hyderabad and surrounding areas, it is seen in the rest of Telangana as essentially a party of the neighbouring State of Andhra Pradesh. Congress president Rahul Gandhi may have been looking at the bigger picture when he welcomed the TDP as part of a broad Opposition alliance, but Telangana voters took a cynical view of the coming together of the two parties that were principal rivals just five years ago. Although the People’s Front of the Congress and the TDP drafted a common programme, and held a joint campaign, this was not enough to challenge the TRS, which moved to poll mode several months in advance. The result could also have implications for the Assembly election in Andhra Pradesh next year, as the TDP might be wary of being identified too closely with the Congress, which is still seen as having facilitated the bifurcation. The TRS, which talks of maintaining equidistance between the Congress and the BJP, is more likely to back the BJP than the Congress in the post-election scenario. And given that the TDP, until a few months ago, was an ally of the BJP, any which way the Congress looks at it the twin States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh remain a difficult terrain.

    • Is it time to abolish the death penalty?

    The death penalty is error-ridden, arbitrarily imposed and unfairly targets the poor

  • As a punishment, the death penalty makes no sense: how does killing a person who has killed a person show that killing is wrong? Most of the civilised world has abolished it. India certainly does not need it as it serves no purpose. No study has shown that the death penalty deters murder more than life imprisonment. The evidence is all to the contrary. For deterrence to work, the severity of the punishment has to coexist with the certainty and swiftness of the punishment. The death penalty has not deterred terrorism, murder or even theft. For over a century, stealing attracted the death penalty in England, where spectators at public hangings often had their pockets picked!

    • Problems with death penalty

  • The death penalty is error-ridden. Between January 1, 2000 and June 31, 2015, the Supreme Court imposed 60 death sentences. It subsequently admitted that it had erred in 15 of them (25%). Can this system be trusted to take a life? And that too based on evidence collected, or fabricated, by a police force not known for its probity or efficiency?
  • The death penalty unfairly targets the poor and marginalised. Those without capital get the punishment. Penurious prisoners on legal aid get it the most, while others with private lawyers remain untouched.
  • The death penalty is impossible to administer fairly or rationally. The Supreme Court has repeatedly admitted that it has arbitrarily imposed this most extreme punishment. Executions occurred in 5.2 cases for every 1 lakh murders. Such a selection cannot but be freakish. It depends overwhelmingly on the adjudicator’s personal beliefs. Judges opposed to it never gave a death sentence; those in favour doled it out. Abolitionist Presidents (S. Radhakrishnan and A.P. J. Abdul Kalam) refused to reject mercy petitions, while others, differently inclined, readily denied clemency. Should the killing of a human being depend on the philosophy of a particular individual?
  • Abolishing the death penalty will ease, not enhance, the tax-payer’s burden. The annual cost of maintaining a prisoner is about ₹30,000. The hangman is paid more, and we also save on the protracted litigation that death cases involve.
  • Constitutional, legal and policy issues cannot be determined by the victim’s understandable hunger for revenge without leading to a frenzy where the death penalty is demanded, as it often is, for wholly inappropriate cases (accidental deaths, cheating, etc.). If life imprisonment sufficed for the 99.99% of victims’ families, why not for the minuscule fraction in whose name the death penalty is demanded?
  • Punish, yes, but why in the same cold-blooded, premeditated and brutal manner as the prisoner killed his or her victim? Punishment should not imitate crime. We do not rape rapists, or maim and disfigure those who have done this to others. Why do we have to kill killers?

    • A safer country

  • India’s murder rate has declined continuously since 1991 and is at present the lowest in our recorded history except for 1963. Fearmongering aside, we are safer today than our parents or grandparents ever were. And this is not thanks to the death penalty whose infrequent and arbitrary implementation has made no real difference. It may as well have not been there. Studies show that a more equal sex ratio has more to do with declining murder rates than killing murderers.
  • Nobody wants to undergo the trauma of administering the death penalty — not the higher courts and not the hapless prison staff who have to see a human being die gasping at the end of a rope. Governments kill prisoners to show that they are tough on crime. There is nothing muscular or tough about killing a man who is at your mercy.

    • The SC will have to answer whether absence of political will is sufficient to override the right to life

  • The moral foundation of judicial killing has been questioned and it has been judged untenable in many countries. In 2007, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on the administration of the death penalty by the 59 countries that still retained it. India is one of them, even if it does not employ it as frequently as countries such as Iran, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.
  • Only a few political parties have demanded the abolition of the death penalty in India, including the Communist parties and the DMK. B.R. Ambedkar, in the Constituent Assembly debates, opposed it on the principle of non-violence. The Congress opposed it in 1931, after Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were executed, but has not moved for its abolition during its multiple terms as a ruling party.

    • Constitutional scepticism

  • An eye for an eye has ancient appeal. Following the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012, amendments were made to the Indian Penal Code adding the death penalty for certain categories of rapes and repeat offenders. This year India introduced the death penalty for those who rape minors. The polarised debate that surrounded Yakub Menon’s execution in 2015 was yet another reminder of the pervasive popularity of the idea.
  • In 1962, the Law Commission supported the death penalty stating that India’s particular circumstances were such that it could not “experiment” with its abolition. In 1991, the Supreme Court cited its use in defending law and order as the reason for its continuance. Its alleged usefulness extends from being a potential deterrent to serving as a primordial need for retribution.
  • That said, India has looked to the judicial administration of death with greater constitutional scepticism. In 1980, in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, a Constitution Bench articulated the “rarest of rare” threshold stating that “judges should never be bloodthirsty”. Death must only be imposed where the alternative option is unquestionably foreclosed. The question is, under what circumstances are the retributive and deterrent effects of a life in prison so certainly insufficient that death is the only answer? And can such an answer be delivered without human error?

    • Problems in implementation

  • Implementation of the death penalty has also been deeply problematic. As the recent Death Penalty India Report by the National Law University, Delhi, indicates, the structural flaws in our criminal procedure and criminal justice system are most pronounced in death penalty cases. Due to biases in criminal investigations, the marginalised — whether by religious and caste denominations, or class — are disproportionately subject to the death penalty. And delays in the criminal justice system disproportionately affect those who suffer the tyranny of the uncertainty of their life. India also retains the death penalty as an option for non-homicide offences where the instrumentality argument is the most attenuated. Even so, the Supreme Court upheld it, as recently as 2015, for kidnapping with ransom.
  • In 2015, the Law Commission called for abolition of the death penalty for ordinary crimes, and activists continue to argue for abolishing it altogether. Political will in India is still bound by populism. However, the constitutionality of the death penalty will continue to be challenged and, sooner or later, the Supreme Court will have to answer whether absence of political will is sufficient ground to override the right to life.

    • Life can only be seen to be protected if those who take it away are proportionately punished

  • The death penalty has been criticised for far too long without an understanding of its nuances. It is criticised mainly on three counts: arbitrariness, irreversibility and human rights. However, the punishment passes muster on all accounts. Its constitutionality has not only been upheld in India but also in the bastion of liberal democracy that is the U.S. The retention of the death penalty is not a reflection of “uncivilised” polity in theocratic states that have come to be defined by violence but a creation of the individual geopolitical circumstances of each state.

    • Geopolitical circumstances

  • The Law Commission of India has attempted to analyse the need for the death penalty on two separate occasions. While the 35th Report correctly called for its retention in order to see its impact on a new republic, the more recent 262nd Report could not recommend the punishment’s absolute abolition despite a rather desperate attempt to do the same for the first 240 pages. The exception to abolition came in cases of terror. Herein comes the first defence of the death penalty: India’s neighbourhood is not peaceful, unlike Scandinavia, and it does not form a supranational conglomerate of nations that facilitate common growth, unlike the European Union. On the contrary, every day vested interests attempt to destabilise the very idea of our nation from across every border it shares. It is this peculiar nature of India’s polity that must inform any debate for abolition. As noted by the Commission itself, cases of violent terror are constant reminders of the need to protect national stability by ensuring appropriate responses to such actions, and the death penalty forms part of the national response.
  • It is in this idea that there exists a moral support for the death penalty. A punishment cannot be judged by its impact on criminals but by its impact on those who are still innocent. Those who defend the death penalty often do it on the basis of retributive justice. However, the retention of the death penalty is far more fundamental than an arrogant state interest to seek revenge. On the contrary, the punishment itself is a reflection of societal mores. It determines that there are certain acts which the society so essentially abhors that they justify the taking of the most crucial of rights – the right to life. For, the state acknowledges that the sacredness of life can only be seen to be protected if those who take it away are proportionately punished. The hanging of Ajmal Kasab and Yakub Memon strongly affirms India’s commitment to the protection of life.

    • Rarest of rare cases only

  • The death penalty is also often criticised on its practical implementation. Some argue that it is arbitrarily meted out and others find its irreversibility repugnant. However, both these sets of criticisms are reflections of bad syllogism. The punishment is not arbitrary because it comes out of a judicial process. To term the punishment as arbitrary, one has to necessarily prove the process as flawed. However, in the cases of the death penalty, the courts have made sure that caution is exercised in giving the punishment. They are conscious of its irreversibility and have therefore restricted it to only rarest of rare cases that shock the conscience of society. This is reflective in the fact that in the last 13 years, only four people have been executed.

    • Idyllic no more

    The pursuit of solitude has led to the decline of Goa

  • A poet who recently spoke of the need for solitude as a precondition for writing said that solitude made life simple, for example in terms of how much cooking was needed to sustain the person. She added that only the very rich or those willing to shed all their accoutrements are able to access solitude and its corollary, simplicity.
  • Consider the case of Goa, which drew the hippy set in the 1960s. Goa was attractive because of its picturesqueness, unspoilt beaches, the simplicity of the local populace, the slow pace of life, and low costs. The secret of Goa spread farther each year and people began purchasing property, buying into what the hippies had discovered. Soon, the construction industry boomed, and an idyllic pace of life transformed into something far more frenetic. The Goans fought against the transmogrification of the landscape. The war was eventually lost but the skirmishes continue between the government and the people.
  • Why was this Pandora’s Box opened? Through the latter half of the 20th century, the professional lives of Indians became far busier. Many dreamt of walking away from a nine-to-five routine. A life that was cheap, unaffected by regimentation and unblemished by needless interactions was alluring. Early Goa was coveted because it offered this and more.
  • Some moved to Goa, others invested in property giving them an assured place on visits. Ergo, the image of Goa shifted from an idyllic getaway to a party town where beach, booze and boisterousness converged. Many prospered in this transformation, but the environment and Goan society suffered. Much to the dismay of those enjoying the good life that early Goa offered, their tranquil space shrank and was soon overrun.
  • Assuming everyone has within them a craving for some measure of solitude, it is inevitable that crowds will follow the early discoveries of new places of solitude. Yet what many perhaps forget is that their very presence vitiates that ecosystem. With an increasing population and incomes, very few places have escaped the human footprint. Today, this pursuit threatens the last vestiges of mostly untouched nature.
  • Goa is an example of the aftermath of finding this seclusion. Goa’s simple, idyllic life of the early years that drew the adventurous, jaded and those looking for a reboot has vanished. The desire for solitude and simplicity and its discovery has culminated in rancour and bitterness.
  • Goa’s decline proves that no frontier can remain an untouched outpost of nature. Solitude and simplicity do not spring from a place but from a state of mind and deliberate choices. The sooner we realise this, the better it will be for India’s villages, mountains, forests and for us too.
  • The writer is the author of 1400 Bananas, 76 Towns & 1 Million People