The misfit

Crime and Compassion: Adventures in Tamil Nadu’s Crime Capital

Between August 2007 and November 2009, I published AntiMatters, an e-journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives. One day during this period I got a call from the de facto Secretary of the Ashram (“I’m just a clerk”) letting me know that I was going to receive a call from the Director General of Police, Tamil Nadu, India — presumably so that I wouldn’t get spooked by a call from the Police. A while later I got a call from Anoop Jaiswal (“I’m just a policeman”), who expressed his appreciation of AntiMatters and his desire to meet with me. It was the beginning of a greatly cherished friendship.

This year, Juggernaut Books published a book of “true crime stories” by renowned journalist and writer V. Sudarshan. All the incidents recounted in Tuticorin: Adventures in Tamil Nadu’s Crime Capital occurred between January 1981, when Anoop Jaiswal joined the Police Academy, and 1989, when his posting in Tuticorin ended. With Anoop’s and Sudarshan’s permission, I reproduce here an abridged version of Chapter 18, “The Misfit.”

The title of the book’s Tamil translation is Kuṟṟamum karuṇaiyum (Crime and Compassion). “The Misfit” may be the one chapter that is neither about crime nor about the protagonist’s compassion — his genuine desire to understand rather than to punish — but about the protagonist himself.

The teacher who terrified the students most was Mahatham Singh. He possessed the fastest and the most painful cane in the Government Jubilee Intermediate School in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. When he wasn’t caning them, he taught mathematics....

One day, he asked, ‘Any of you want to serve the country in the fauj (Indian Army)?’ Jaiswal didn’t know at the time that the question was going to change his life. The children had no concept of the army. The nearest they had come to thinking about it was during the NCC parades, which some children participated in by donning ill-fitting clothes. All kept quiet. Mahatham Singh taunted, ‘Oh. So, you are a classroom full of cowards. Not a single one is brave or bold enough to serve the country in the Indian Army?’

When he called them cowards, without thinking, Jaiswal raised his hand. On a piece of paper, Mahatham Singh jotted down his name, date of birth and his father’s name. Then he asked, ‘Anybody else?’ Two more hands shot up and their names were recorded. He said there would be examinations and that they should prepare for them....

A month or so later, Jaiswal was sitting in the classroom chatting with a classmate when he felt an iron rod sting his back. It was the cane. As was the custom, complete silence ensued. Jaiswal looked up to see Mahatham Singh peering down at him.

‘You are Jaiswal?’ he asked.

‘Ji, sir.’

‘Then why don’t you speak up? I have been calling out your name.’

Jaiswal kept quiet.

‘Get up. Get out of the class and stand in the field.’

Jaiswal went out of the classroom, and the mathematics teacher sent two more children out as well. On the road by the ground, an army truck was standing.

Mahatham Singh followed the children and ordered them into the truck. The truck was already full of children, and it went to the campus of another school. They jumped out of the truck, and on the big football field were about fifty children. There was also a blackboard, some chairs and a table standing next to them. Two men in uniform were sitting on the chairs.

The children moved to the table in a line and when Jaiswal got to the table, he found the army men were breaking pencils into two and giving each one half a pencil and an eraser, also cut in half. They were going to take an examination. On the blackboard there were about twenty-five questions. The boys stood in rows and copied the questions on the sheets they had been given. Then, they were sent off into the field to scatter and sit and answer the questions without talking....

A month later, Mahatham Singh called out Jaiswal’s name in the classroom and asked him to stand up and approach the teacher. And Jaiswal went up to him wearing his rumpled shorts and hawai slippers, his white shirt that had become blue with ink stains. The teacher looked at him and frowned. ‘This will not do, Jaiswal. You have been selected for the interview. It is on Monday. The army people will be coming. Ask your mother to wash your shirt and shorts and iron them properly....

A month later, Jaiswal was admitted to the Sainik School....  The school sat in the Kumaon hills at a height of 6,000 feet, and from the parade ground you could see Bheemtal, with its houses far below, nestling in the slopes and the valleys, strewn around among trees that looked tiny. You could also see the roads winding up and down the hills, and in the distance Bheemtal lake that reflected the blue skies. In the winter, snow stood around in little clumps on the parade ground, like little soldiers.

David Kirkland had come from Coventry, England, as a voluntary teacher under the Volunteer Service Organisation (VSO) programme. He taught physics and mathematics. When Jaiswal was in class eight or nine, those were his favourite subjects. With Kirkland as his teacher, they became his obsessions....

In his classes, Jaiswal knew the answers to all the tricky questions Kirkland kept posing, and his hand would usually be the first to go up. Kirkland told the class one day, ‘I have taught in England. I have taught in France. But I have not seen a brain like Anoop Jaiswal’s.’...

When Jaiswal made it into the air force as a cadet, he was on the flight path to becoming a class one gazetted officer. He could sign with green ink. Mohra Samogar [his village] was stunned. His father [belonging to the Vaishya or business community] invited all the people from the village for a banquet.... Men from the Kshatriya [or military] community were also there. Some of their children had joined the police, mostly as constables. Nobody in Mohra Samogar had reached the level of a sub-inspector yet. But even being a constable — wearing a uniform, going around on a Bullet motorcycle, carrying arms — was a big deal.

At the dinner, a person belonging to a Kshatriya family remarked, ‘It is the sign of Kaliyug that a Vaishya’s son is going to become a fighter pilot, flying fighter planes, while the Kshatriya’s sons are hunting for jobs.’ He emphasized the word ‘fighter’ more than the word ‘pilot’. Jaiswal’s father — he did not know what got into him — shot back, ‘Aaj kal ki ladayi mein bhi padhai ki zaroorat hoti hai!’ (You cannot fight today’s war without education.) His father added, ‘I see the Kshatriyas are carrying arms and doing sword practice, but where is the education in that?’

At the National Defence Academy at Khadakvasla, Jaiswal felt stifled, crushed. It was more rigorous than the Sainik School life. He was not even fifteen days into the NDA when the worst thing happened. In the science class, an officer from the army education corps was teaching physics. He wrote out a problem on the board to be solved, thinking that it was a difficult problem.

The problem was a long one, and it dealt with conservation of momentum. The answer to the question was in inverse proportion to the question, a simple one-line answer, keeping conservation of energy also in mind. Jaiswal could see where the question was going, even as the teacher wrote it out from one end of the long blackboard to the other, the chalk squeaking with excitement. Jaiswal had the answer in a jiffy. He wrote it in his notebook and went to show it to him. The teacher took the notebook and looked at the answer and how he got it and frowned, and then said, ‘Don’t do it like this. Solve it this way. You have done it the wrong way. This is the right way.’

Jaiswal said, ‘But this is the right way, sir. The answer is right.’

‘No, I am not interested in your answer.’

Jaiswal insisted that he was right, and the teacher kept saying Jaiswal was wrong.

‘Cadet Anoop Jaiswal, stop being insolent and stand on that chair!’

‘Sir, I am not insolent!’

‘There you go again. You are answering back! Stand on that chair!’

‘But, sir, I am right! Why should I be punished for that?’

According to the teacher, Jaiswal had talked back, not once but twice. For that, not only did he have to stand on the chair, he was given ten days’ restriction — which meant that while all the other cadets played football or hockey, Jaiswal had to practise parading and running in the evening, for two whole hours.

He was aghast that a disagreement in physics class could turn into a punishment. He was in turmoil that night, and the next day he told the authorities in the NDA that he wanted to leave and wouldn’t continue.

They told him that he was a minor. Unless his father gave them an application in writing, he could not leave. Jaiswal wrote a panicked letter to his father that morning, begging him to please let him come back home; he didn’t want to continue in the NDA. In the afternoon, he wrote another letter to his father with the words, ‘Please take me back.’ In the evening, he wrote yet another letter to him, filled with the same entreaties and emotional appeals.... His father read the three letters and finally came to take him away....

Jaiswal then enrolled in Delhi University to pursue an honours course in physics.... By the time he finished his MSc Jaiswal had become highly disillusioned with science as a subject. The passion that had once been ignited by David Kirkland was comprehensively doused by the professors of Delhi University. The conversations in the corridors and the faculty rooms of the university were about the kind of jobs they were likely to get, the pay and the perks that would come with them, or how they could get out of the country and go to some foreign country where they could become scientists. Many professors advised that if science or academics were to be chosen as a career, the students should shun subjects like general theory of relativity or quantum mechanics, as those were theoretical subjects, which very few colleges or universities encouraged.

It was better to embrace engineering, which had straightforward technological and practical applications. Like a pincer, this dull and aching reality caught Jaiswal and effectively crushed his dream of becoming a scientist. He felt a compulsion to find a job.

By that time, he had met Neelam. Neelam, his wife, had been his classmate in the physics honours course at Hindu College in Delhi University. He had known her for nearly five years before they were married. Mutual attraction was immediate, though they were opposites in their approach to academics. She was meticulous, very conscious of the syllabus, and paid attention to what was taught in the classroom. She often told Jaiswal that he was only a dreamer who did not see the realities of life. Jaiswal never paid attention to the syllabus and studied whatever he liked. The number of classes he bunked was more than the ones he attended. To marry her, however, he needed to find a job. He couldn’t make her wait indefinitely. They belonged to completely different strata of society, community and caste....

Jaiswal sat for various examinations, including the ones related to banking. Both he and Neelam became probationary officers — Jaiswal in the State Bank of India in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and Neelam in Andhra Bank, Delhi. She was posted to the Karol Bagh branch, near the place where her parents stayed. Their jobs made the marriage possible. Jaiswal continued to take various examinations, including the civil services examination, where he opted for mathematics as the main subject. He was selected for the Indian Police Service.

At times, a thought would ripple through, somewhere in the back of his head — if he was fated to wear a uniform, then it should have been the air force uniform. He didn’t want to become a police officer.

His first brush with the police had left him with an unpleasant memory. In 1971, he had been in the tenth standard. From school, a batch of sixty-five boys, and about seven teachers, went to Ootacamund (now Udhagamandalam). An all-India camp of Sainik School boys was being held there. From Nainital, they came down the hill on a bus to Mathura, where two special railway bogies, a three-tier bogey for the students and a first-class one for the officers and teachers. The bogies were attached to various trains as they travelled deeper south.  Forty-eight hours later, early in the morning, they arrived in Madras. The train to Coimbatore, from where they had to change trains to go up the Nilgiris, was in the evening. They had the whole day to themselves. The practice was they would take their luggage out on the platform and take turns guarding it while they waited for their coaches to get shunted to the next train. The guard duty changed every three hours. Having piled their luggage on the platform, Jaiswal, along with four friends, Subash Chandra Rai, R.P. Sahi, and two others, decided to go and see the sea. They had never seen the sea before....

[They went for a swim. Later they rested in the shade of some trees.] A few minutes had passed when one of them eagerly pulled out a pack of cards from his pocket. They could play a game!

Suddenly, a couple of policemen were standing over them. Their shadows fell diagonally across the sunlit patch where the boys sat. A third policeman joined them. They were all wearing khaki shorts.

One of them pointed to the cards and said something in Tamil. The boys immediately stood up. One of the policemen seized the cards. The boys tried to tell the police they were not gambling, but they didn’t seem interested in what they were saying. Come to the police station, they kept repeating. They had no choice but to go along. The prospect of going inside a police station frightened them. Maybe playing cards was a crime. Would they be sent to jail from the police station?...  They panicked and began to plead with the policemen. One policeman checked their pockets. They were looking for money....

They had almost reached the wide road that fronts Marina Beach. The boys talked among themselves in Hindi. Rai said, ‘Let us run away at the count of three, and he started to count, ek, do, teen…’ They fled, ran as fast as they could, but the policemen came behind them, running as well. There were two of them, and they were gaining up on the boys. Running with slippers was proving difficult, and Rai said, ‘Chappal phek do, aur tej bhago!’ (Do away with your slippers and run fast!) They threw their slippers away and ran even faster. They ran for their lives. Over the Napier Bridge, with the gleaming white spans of its wide footpath, the Cooum river was darkly still below them and the sun blazing over them. Only when they crossed the Napier Bridge did they stop to check where the policemen were. They were struggling now, with their boots on, and had fallen behind, but the boys kept running, covered in sweat, till they reached the central station. All they wanted to do was merge into the crowds. And drink water, lots of water....

Jaiswal signed up for the Indian Police Service in 1980. There were more drills and parades and outdoor activities, which proved to not be an issue, Jaiswal having been in Sainik School. He did well. However, in the classroom where senior officers came and gave lectures, it was another matter. Any questioning, any disagreements, were frowned upon and taken adversely. The subtext was that wisdom came only with hierarchy. Accordingly, the director of the academy was the wisest....

B.K. Roy, the director, was teaching two sections of the Indian Penal Code — Section 379, simple theft. If you stole something from a person, a watch, car, cycle, or something, it amounted to a simple theft. This was punishable with an imprisonment of up to three years. The next section was 380, which dealt with theft from a tent, building or vessel. If you entered a building and stole something, for example, from inside the building, you could be punished with imprisonment up to seven years.

Jaiswal thought about this and then raised his hand. The director looked at him quizzically but gave him permission to proceed.

‘Sir, there seems to be a contradiction in these sections.’

‘Contradiction, eh?’ The director looked alarmed. ‘What contradiction?’ He peered at Jaiswal through his oversized thick black-framed spectacles, pursing his thin lips.

‘Suppose, sir, there is a boat in the harbour. . .’

‘Well, get on with it.’

‘Sir, if I enter the boat and take away a transistor lying in the boat, sir, it amounts to a theft from a vessel. And under Section 380, I will be liable for imprisonment up to seven years, correct?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Sir, what if I entered the boat and took away the boat, along with the transistor? That would be theft of a vessel and not from a vessel and hence, according to Section 379, I will be given imprisonment of only up to three years?’

For a moment, the director did not say anything. Then he carefully asked, ‘Are you making a joke? You want to make fun?’

‘No, sir. It is a genuine doubt.’

‘You want to make fun of everything, eh? You think you know the law better than others?’

‘No, sir. I do not know anything about the law, which is why I am asking.’

‘Are you being sarcastic?’

‘No, sir. While you were teaching, this doubt flashed in my mind, that’s all.’

‘Why should it flash only in your mind? So many other cadets are sitting here and listening to me. It has not flashed in their minds, has it?’ He looked around the classroom and asked, ‘Has this flashed in any of your esteemed minds, eh?’ A fog of silence enveloped his query. Then he stared at Jaiswal.

‘You are the only genius in class, eh? I have been hearing reports about you. I have been hearing not very nice reports about you. Adverse reports, in fact. You want to make fun of everything and everybody, eh?’ ...

It was the month of June. At half past six in the morning, the cadets would go for physical training. They usually woke up at five in the morning got ready and were in the lobby by six fifteen. There were four squads of about twelve cadets each. They would then be made to march in the parade ground for PT, or physical training.

That day when they gathered in the lobby, it was pouring. There was some talk as to where the parade would be held — In the auditorium? Or in the field? As it was being debated, a trainer ran up holding an umbrella over his head, while blowing a whistle and shouting, ‘Run to the field for PT! Run to the field for parade!’

Some cadet shouted, ‘Send us a bus. It is raining!’ They remained in the lobby until the rain came down to a drizzle and they could hear the whistle being blown again and again insistently. They ran to the field. Jaiswal was one of the first few to reach the ground and report for the parade.

All of them were issued memos. All fifty, asking why they were late for the parade. Orders had been given, and those orders had been disobeyed. Being late was being viewed as insubordination.

Jaiswal was singled out, and was told that not only had he come late for the parade, but he had had instigated others not to go to the parade also. In his reply, Jaiswal wrote, ‘Dear sir, as far as my being late for PT by ten minutes, I sincerely regret the lapse. But the other charge that I instigated the others to be late is baseless, without a single iota of truth. I request the authorities to have a thorough enquiry into such an allegation because I have never had such a plebeian mentality.’

The director summoned each cadet into his room individually, and each one of them was made to say, ‘I apologize for being late’. The director went through that with all of the forty-nine cadets, one after the other. Jaiswal was the last to be called in. When it was his turn, the director turned a baleful eye on Jaiswal and burst out, ‘You! You talk a lot! Can’t you apologize?’

‘Sir, I have apologized in my written reply.’

‘No, no. You only said you regret the lapse. That is not an apology, and that too, after you instigated the whole lot.’

‘No, sir, that is wrong. I will never agree with it. I will never apologize for it.’

‘You are talking back!’

‘No, sir. We get up at five in the morning, and we are on the parade ground soon thereafter. Where is the time to instigate others and why should others get instigated?’

‘This is what we hate about you. You talk back. You are insolent.’

‘Sir, think of what you are asking. You are asking me to apologize for something I have not done.’

The director stared at Jaiswal for a long time and then abruptly spat out the word, ‘Go!’

Jaiswal saluted him and went out. The matter ended. Or so he thought....

[Several months later, when Jaiswal was resting in his room, there was a knock on his door.] ‘Who is it?’ he asked. The postman said, ‘There is a letter for you. Registered letter.’ Jaiswal signed for it and opened the envelope. It said, ‘The Government of India is pleased to discharge you from service under the orders of the President of India.’ ...

Jaiswal went to the office building, showed the superintendent the letter. He looked at the letter and looked at Jaiswal and said, ‘Get a good lawyer and fight it. They have removed you from service.’

There was a deputy director, Mr. Luthra. Jaiswal entered his room in a daze, and asked him, ‘What is happening, sir? What kind of punishment is this? And for what, sir?’ ‘No, Jaiswal. This is not a punishment. He paused before he chose his words. It is just . . . how do I say this . . . it is just that you are not suitable for police service. It is not good for you to continue in a service where you are not suitable. It suits neither you nor the police.’ He patted him on his shoulder. ‘You are young. You will find another job. I am sure.’ ...

He went to the director’s office and sought an appointment. His PA said he would tell the director and let Jaiswal know. Jaiswal went back to his room and began to pack his belongings. The Hindi teacher, Pandeyji, came to his room in the evening and told him that the director had asked him to go to his residence at half past six in the evening for a cup of tea, not to his office. By six twenty, Jaiswal was at the director’s residence. He asked the orderly if the director was in, but apparently he wasn’t, he was told. Inside, the lights were burning bright, as if festivities were about to start. He paced outside the director’s official residence for over an hour. At half past seven in the evening ... Jaiswal turned back to return to his room. As he was walking back, he met Pandeyji on the way and told him, ‘Director saab toh nahin aye.’ (The director was still not at home.)

Pandeyji said, ‘No, I was with him. Wait, wait, he is coming. He is feeling very bad. Actually, mujhse poocha (he asked me) how to face the boy now?’ Apparently the civil trainers had been arguing with the director over what had happened. Nobody had ever found fault with Jaiswal....

The director came a little later and made him sit down and offered him a glass of lemonade, and asked, ‘Jaiswal, who was against you in this academy?’

‘I don’t know. All of you, my teachers, are my father’s age. I can’t think of anybody being against me.’

He said, ‘Look, I am writing to the Government of India. It happened in the heat of the moment. We realize we have judged you very harshly. I am requesting the Government of India to revoke the order. If you can go to Delhi quickly, to the Ministry of Home Affairs, see that they act on my letter revoking the order...’ The following day, Jaiswal left for Delhi....

[When Jaiswal later told his father what had happened, he could see that he] was stunned, although he did not say much. He had faith in his son’s sincerity. Both sat in silence, his father with his account book open and his pen resting on it. Then he got up, pulled his shirt from the rope that ran across the room from one side to the other, where his towel, his banian and his washed clothes were hanging. He, then, opened his almirah, pulled out a bundle of papers and asked Jaiswal to accompany him. They got into a rickshaw. Jaiswal asked him where they were going. They were going to meet Panditji, the principal of the Sanskrit Rawat Pathshala.

Panditji was also a renowned astrologer. He knew his father well, and as his father sat before him, Panditji saw Jaiswal and smiled and asked how he was doing. His father gave Panditji the papers he had brought along. It was Jaiswal’s horoscope. Panditji opened it and pored over it for a while. Then he looked at Jaiswal’s father and said, ‘Oh! Very dark clouds have come upon your son now.’

‘Is there a remedy?’ his father asked. Panditji scrutinized the horoscope again, wordlessly. Then he said, ‘The clouds will be there for two years. There is nothing you can do about it. Thereafter, the sun will tear through the clouds and smile.’

Jaiswal’s father made a wry face, and told Panditji, ‘But Panditji, my son has already been dismissed from the academy. So where is the question of the sun smiling?’

‘I don’t know the ways of God. The ways of God are different. I am telling you what your son’s horoscope is saying. For two years, he has to suffer.’

Jaiswal went to the Delhi High Court. This was sometime in 1982. The court had to decide whether the case could even be admitted. In 1983 it came up before Justice Talwar of the Delhi High Court. When the case was called out, the government pleader got up. The judge got worked up when he heard what the government pleader said.

‘Don’t waste the court’s time,’ he said. ‘He is a probationer. He was found unsuitable. He was thrown out. It is good that such persons are weeded out. What can this court do about this? It is because of us judges that there is so much indiscipline in the police force. If he can prove malice, then, yes, he might have something. But I am not entertaining this.’ He flung away the file....

To make matters worse, on the heels of the Delhi High Court incident, the new director who succeeded Roy at the Police Academy in Hyderabad gave a press conference, making Jaiswal seem a rebellious sort of person; that Jaiswal came from a very well-to-do family and that he had joined the IPS just for the heck of it. The new director added that it was feared Jaiswal had extremist links. It was all published in the local press and someone brought them to Jaiswal’s notice. He collected all the cuttings, and with the help of a very junior lawyer, they filed a Special Leave Petition (SLP).

The Sunday magazine, which was published out of Calcutta, carried a two-page article on it. India Today, which was then a fortnightly, carried a small article. The local press was full of it. On 30 August 1983, the SLP was immediately admitted but by a very difficult bench — a two-judge bench by Chandrachud, who was the Chief Justice, and Venkataramiah, who would go on to become Chief Justice.

Those days Jaiswal used to travel very often between Delhi and [his hometown] Gorakhpur to pursue the case. Either the hearing would get postponed, or a date would be given but the matter would not come up for hearing. It would be listed, but when he reached, some previous case would take up the time and his hearing would get deferred....

When the matter came up in the Supreme Court in September 1983, the government lawyer was asked, ‘Isn’t it the case where someone was dismissed for not attending a yoga class?’

The government lawyer immediately said, ‘Your Honour, all press reports are incorrect.’ ...

The bench asked Jaiswal, ‘So what are you doing now?’

‘Who will give me a job with such serious allegations against me, Your Honour? Who will give me a job when I am being falsely painted and my name besmirched, Your Honour?’

The judge asked the government lawyer, ‘If the reports are untrue and you are declaring it as such, did you publish a denial?’

The government lawyer did not say anything.

‘Did you or did you not publish a denial?’

‘We will come back on that, Your Honour,’ the government lawyer said.

In the counter affidavit filed by the government, they had committed a major error. They had written that Jaiswal had been dismissed from the Indian Air Force but had not revealed this fact to the Union Public Service Commission or to the Government of India. In his rejoinder, Jaiswal had stated that this was a totally and blatantly false allegation and that he had never been dismissed. He had resigned on his own within twenty days of joining. The records in Air Headquarters and the National Defence Academy would reflect that.

The court pointed this out to the lawyer. ‘How can you say dismissed? He says he resigned. Dismissal and resignation are two different things. We want to see the records for this. Are you trying to confuse the court?’

The government lawyer said he would come back on this point as well.

According to the law in those days, the appointing authority had the power to discharge any probationer, applicable to all services, without assigning any suitable reasons. Once you signed up, and you were under training, you were being judged. Jaiswal built the argument in his affidavit that discharging a person without assigning reason was one thing. But discharging a person without reason was another. Even if you did not assign a reason, the reason should exist somewhere in the file, tangibly and verifiably.

The judges asked, ‘How do you prove that it was without reason?’

Jaiswal said every fifteen days the guide officer met him and four other probationers in his room to review the progress that had been made in the previous fortnight. Never had there been an exchange of paper or even a word in the form of advice or caution between Jaiswal and the authority. No warning that he was not meeting the required standards or that he was weak in any subject. Jaiswal argued that it was not possible, therefore, to become unsuitable overnight. Unsuitability had to be noticed over a period and a chance given to make a suitable effort to overcome it....

[After more back-and-forth, Justice Venkataramiah ordered the government to bring the file, adding] ‘There is no argument in this. If he is unsuitable, the reason for it will be there on the file. You just bring it. The matter ends there.’

The government pleader got up and said he wanted fifteen more days to produce the file because the file was not traceable.

Justice Venkataramiah addressed the government pleader, ‘Oh, so you know that this bench is not going to sit for more than a week. So, you are not happy with this bench? Let a senior officer from the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is a stone’s throw from us, come and depose before us that the file is missing, and we will meet at two today.’

Somehow, the file managed to find its way to the court before 2 p.m. that afternoon. At the court, Justice Venkataramiah held up the file and waved it at [the government pleader] Manmohan Singh Gujral. ‘Now you know why the file was missing, don’t you? There is nothing inside it. It is empty!’

Gujral said, ‘No, Your Honour. It is not about what Mr. Jaiswal did or did not do. It is the attitude.’ He contended before the judge that Jaiswal was basically of a defiant nature.

They pointed to a matter of 1893 where an ICS officer had been discharged from service for an ‘unsuitable attitude’. The ICS officer had declared in a speech somewhere that England could not have true democracy so long as it held colonies elsewhere because democracy was a matter of spirit. By holding colonies, it showed that England was not democracy-minded. England did not consider everyone equal. When such was the reality, England could not have true democracy even in its own homeland. For holding and espousing such thoughts, the ICS officer was removed from service.

When Gujral had finished his expostulation, Justice Venkataramiah remarked, ‘It was the bad luck of this ICS officer that we did not exist then. Mr. Gujral, do you think the values espoused by the rulers of colonial India should also be held aloft in a democratic and free India?’

Jaiswal had made the argument that in the name of discipline what was really being demanded was servility. He was ready to be disciplined but was not ready to be servile.

The judge told the government pleader, ‘You are a Sardarji and you may not follow this, but in UP and Bihar there exists a common practice of touching a big man’s feet when you go to him for some favour. By touching his feet, it is not ensured that your work will be done. But if you fail to touch his feet, then it is ensured that your work will never be done. Do you think that the Supreme Court should take into consideration such things?’

They reserved the judgement for a day. The next day, the operative portion of the judgement was read out. As Anoop Jaiswal stood before the judges, the bench said, ‘Look, the government took away your job. It is the Constitution of India and the law of the land which is restoring it back to you. It is a lease given by the law to you. We hope you live up to that lease. Your loyalty shall ever remain to the law of the land and the Constitution of India, not to any people, party or government. It is incumbent upon the government to provide him all encouragement, so he will be able to become a public servant in the true sense of the expression.’

They also gave a direction orally that the judgement should be implemented within twelve weeks. The government had been asked to treat the entire period of Jaiswal’s absence as duty. Not only for service purposes, but he had to be given all pay, and allowances that he had been deprived of.

The date was 24 January 1984, two days before Republic Day, and roughly the time that the astrologer, Panditji, had predicted that the sun would shine again.