W’end Links: Subramania Bharati, Rahul baba and Richard Reid

Start your weekend with this ruling by Judge William Young while sentencing Richard C. Reid, the “Shoe Bomber” (Thanks to Sh Krishen-ji for alerting me to this)…

Next read, They Killed My Lawyer – a horrifying story from Russia by William Browder

Move on to Aroon Raman’s sketch of Subramania Bharati…

and finally dwell on Tavleen Singh’s tutorial for Rahul baba.

Excerpts from all the four links below, as always.

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*** Excerpts from “Ruling by Judge William Young: Sentencing of Richard C. Reid” ***

…We are not afraid of you or your terrorist conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. You are not an enemy combatant, you are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature.

…You are a terrorist, and we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not meet with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice, so war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow, but are not that big. You are no warrior, I have known warriors. You are a terrorist, a species of criminal that is guilty of multiple attempted murders.

…I have listened respectfully to what you have had to say, and I ask you to search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to do what you are guilty of doing…

And I have an answer for you. It may not satisfy you, but as I search this entire record, it comes as close to understanding as I know. It seems to me that you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose.

Here in this society, the very wind carries freedom. It carries it everywhere from sea to shining sea. It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here today in this beautiful courtroom so that everyone can see, can truly see that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely.

..We as Americans are all about freedom. Because we all know the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bear any burden, pay any price to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom and mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here today. The day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten. But this, however, will long endure.

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*** Excerpts from “We say Vande Mataram: Bharati” by Aroon Raman ***

On a warm day in June 1921, a man stood by the gopuram of the Parthasarathy Temple in Chennai, feeding the temple elephant. The worshippers hurrying by would glance at him and move on, noticing nothing unusual except for a turban worn in a manner unusual for Tamils. The man’s erect carriage was in stark contrast to signs of a certain privation; an unmistakable fragility of form, the sunken face showing up the cheekbones. Only the luminous eyes blazing out at the world showed something of the man within.

The elephant squealed and suddenly swung its trunk, hurling the man to the ground. People ran up with cries of alarm but none dared go near the beast for fear of being trampled till a corpulent Vaisnavite Brahmin dashed up to the animal and scooped the fallen man to safety. The unconscious victim’s name was Subramania Bharati, and though he recovered briefly, by September 1921 he was dead at the age of 39.

Much has been written about the literary legacy of Subramania Bharati. He looms over 20th century Tamil like a titan; the man who broke with centuries of Tolkappiam tradition to create a new voice – modern and passionate – yet with a deep feeling for the past. Bharati’s songs have become perennial favourites, incorporated into that hallowed institution – the kutcheri.

Though his voice continues to reverberate through his popular songs and poems, it is the man that eludes us, a subject both enormously interesting and controversial to this day.

…Bharati’s life can be sketched briefly through four main punctuations. Born in 1882 in Ettayapuram in Tirunelveli district of today’s Tamil Nadu, the boy named Subramanian lost his mother at the age of two, was married when he was 11, and when his father too died shortly thereafter, was sent to Benares to live with his aunt. Significantly, in this early period in Ettayapuram, the young Subramanian displayed such facility in Tamil that the local Raja conferred upon him the title by which he would become forever known? ‘Bharati’, or one blessed by the goddess Saraswati.

Benares formed Bharati. He entered this ancient city – then, as now, the melting pot of India’s vast and diverse Hinduism – in 1898, a precocious but gauche village youth. By 1902, at the age of 20, he emerged a lettered man?proficient in Sanskrit and English. But there were also several life-changing encounters. In one incident, he is repulsed by the sight of bulls being sacrificed at a Kali shrine, the gutters running red with blood. In another searing scene, he sees child widows tonsured and taken away to live out the rest of their lives alone and uncared for in a widows’ home.

These and other experiences changed Bharati forever. He became convinced that Hinduism, while remaining sublime in essence, had become debased in practice. There, on the banks of the Ganges, he renounced two powerful symbols of his Brahmin identity: he cut off his tuft and threw away his sacred thread. Benares had made a radical of Bharati.

The second punctuation covers the years 1902 to 1908, when Bharati threw himself into journalism…

Those were heady days. In the company of friends, he roamed Madras spreading the message of equality through ‘samabandi bhojanam’ or the eating together by all castes and creeds. Then, after a full day at the editorial desk, the political rallies and meetings would begin. There is a moving contemporary account of a gathering on Madras’ Marina beach by the English journalist Henry Nevinson around 1908. Amidst a crowd of 5000, against the backdrop of waves rushing upon the shore, Bharati’s voice is raised in song:

Vande mataram enbom engal

manila thaiyai vanangudu menbom

(We say vande mataram, our

Respectful mother we salute)

“Through it all, there is utter peace in the gathering. There is not a policeman in sight,” writes Nevinson.

Read  the two-part series in full here.

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*** Excerpts from “They Killed My Lawyer” by William Browder ***

Sergei Magnitsky was our attorney, and friend, who died under excruciating circumstances in a Moscow pre-trial detention center on Nov. 16, 2009. His story is one of extraordinary bravery and heroism, and ultimately tragedy. It is also a story about how Stalinism and the gulags are alive and well in Russia today.

…The precise circumstances of his death are still unclear. We do know Sergei died suddenly at the age of 37, after an 11-month detention. At first, the detention center where he died said the cause of his death was a rupture to his abdominal membrane, but on the same day the prison officials changed their story, saying he had died of a heart attack. They refused his family’s request to conduct an independent autopsy. His diaries are reported to be missing.

…Sergei wasn’t involved in politics, he wasn’t an oligarch, and he wasn’t a human rights activist. He was just a highly competent professional — the kind of person one could call up as the workday was finishing at 7 p.m. with a legal question and he would cancel his dinner plans and stay in the office until midnight to figure out the answer. He was a smart and honest man working hard to better himself and to make a good life for his wife and two kids.

The tragic events that led to his death began on June 4, 2007. That day, 50 police officers from the Moscow Interior Ministry raided Hermitage’s and Firestone Duncan’s offices, under the pretense of a tax investigation into a Hermitage client company. There was no reason for the raid, as the company they were investigating was regularly audited by the tax authorities, and they never found any violations.

In the course of the raid, the police officers took away all the corporate seals, charters, and articles of association of all of the fund’s investment companies — none of which had anything to do with their search warrant. The significance of these seizures would only become apparent later.

In mid-October 2007, we got a telephone call from a bailiff at the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court inquiring about a judgment against one of the fund’s Russian companies. It was a strange call because the company had never been to court and we knew nothing about any lawsuits or judgments in St. Petersburg.

We called Sergei right away and asked him to look into this call. After researching the situation, he came back to us with shocking news. He discovered that our investment companies had been sued by shell companies that we had never done any business with based on forged and backdated contracts. He also discovered that the fund’s companies had been represented by lawyers that the fund had never hired, and who proceeded to plead guilty to all the liabilities in the forged contracts. As a result, the fund’s companies were hit with court judgments for hundreds of millions of dollars.

…Most shockingly, when Sergei analyzed the forgeries and fraudulent re-registrations, he was able to prove that they could have only been executed with the documents seized from our offices by the Moscow Interior Ministry.

On the back of Sergei’s discoveries, in early December 2007, we filed six 255-page complaints outlining all the details of the frauds and the names of the police officers involved. The complaints were filed with the heads of the three main law enforcement agencies in Russia. However, instead of investigating, they passed the complaints straight back to the specific police officers named as conspirators. Those officers then personally initiated retaliatory criminal cases against Hermitage employees.

,,,By the summer of 2008 it still wasn’t clear why the police would be involved in such a complicated scam against us. If the intention was to steal the fund’s assets in Russia, they had failed because, by the time our companies were stolen, the assets had been safely moved outside the country.

To help us find the answer, Sergei sent out more than 50 letters to different tax authorities and registration offices requesting information on our stolen companies. Almost no one replied, but on June 5, 2008, Sergei received a letter that broke the case wide open.

According to the letter, which was from tax authorities in Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, our stolen companies had been re-registered in Khimki, and had opened bank accounts at two obscure Russian banks. Once we learned about the banks, everything started to make sense. At those banks, Sergei found a spike in deposits exactly equal to the taxes that the Hermitage Fund companies had paid in 2006. Apparently, the people who stole our companies did so to fraudulently obtain $230 million that the Hermitage Fund companies had paid in taxes in 2006 by claiming that the sham court judgments had wiped out their profits.

The refund of “overpaid taxes” — the largest in Russian history — had been granted by the Moscow tax authorities in two days on Dec. 24 2007. The date of the wire transfer showed that it was carried out in total disregard of the complaints the fund filed to the Russian authorities three weeks earlier.

Sergei didn’t start out as an anticorruption crusader, but when corruption stared him in the face, he felt compelled to do something about it. In July 2008, Sergei helped us prepare a detailed criminal complaint about the stolen tax money, which was filed with seven different Russian government agencies.

After our complaints were filed, the Interior Ministry officers who were involved in the fraud retaliated by opening criminal cases targeting all the lawyers who represented the fund. The pressure became so intense that six of our lawyers from four different law firms were forced to either leave the country or to go into hiding.

The one lawyer who didn’t leave Russia was Sergei. In spite of the clearly malicious activity by the police, he was sure that he was safe because he had never done anything wrong or illegal. He believed that the law of Russia would protect him.

…Just over a month later, three officers who directly reported to Kuznetsov went to Sergei’s apartment at 8 a.m. and arrested him. He was charged with being the director of two Hermitage Fund companies that allegedly underpaid taxes in 2001.

…Sergei was brought to Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 5 in Moscow, but within months he was transferred to a temporary detention facility with much harsher conditions, and then he was moved seven times between four more detention centers until he was moved to Matrosskaya Tishina prison.

Each move was progressively worse, and we started to get word that he was being kept in very harsh conditions….Most disturbing of all, we got news that he was starting to lose weight precipitously. Since his arrest, he had lost 40 pounds.

On July 1, 2009, at Matrosskaya Tishina, Sergei was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones…on July 25, 2009, he was abruptly transferred to Butyrka prison, a maximum security facility known to be one of the toughest in Russia.

At Butyrka, Sergei’s condition deteriorated sharply, and he developed excruciating stomach pains…At one point the pain became so intense that he couldn’t even lie down. His cellmate banged on the door for hours screaming for a doctor. When one finally arrived, he refused to do anything for Sergei, telling him he should have obtained medical treatment before his arrest.

We did what we could do to help him. We testified in front of the U.S. Congress about Sergei; we asked the U.S. State Department and the British Foreign Office to bring his case up with the Russian Foreign Ministry; we reached out to the professional associations; and we constantly provided information to journalists to write about his situation. But none of it mattered within Russia. While we were lobbying from the outside, they were putting more and more pressure on Sergei from the inside.

His tormentors wanted to pressure him to withdraw his testimony against the police officers and make false statements against himself and his client…Most cynically, they specifically wanted him to take responsibility for the theft of $230 million that they had been stolen from the state. As a lawyer and someone who believed in justice, there was no way he would be pressured into perjuring himself no matter how much pain he had to endure

…The more Sergei complained, the more the pressure increased. He was moved to cells where sewage would spew up from the hole in the floor that served as the toilet. He was put in cells with no glass in the windows to protect the inmates from the frigid Russian weather. The prison authorities denied him any opportunity to shower, or simply access hot water. Worst of all they denied him any visits from his wife or mother, or even the possibility to speak to his two young children on the telephone for the 11 months he was in detention, which must have been truly heartbreaking for a man so committed to his family.

Despite all this and more, he was never broken. During his 358 days in detention, Sergei and his lawyers filed more than 450 complaints documenting all of the breaches of Russian law, and the violations of his human rights. He wrote on behalf of himself and on behalf of other detainees. Few people could have managed such a prodigious effort while being subjected to such physical torment. Sergei didn’t have access to an office, library, or a computer. He managed to do all this without even a table to write on.

…In the end, Sergei died suddenly in prison on Nov. 16, 2009. He entered prison a healthy 36-year-old man, and 11 months later he was dead…Sergei was an ordinary man who became an extraordinary hero. If we all could only show a fraction of the bravery and fortitude Sergei did, the world would be a much better place. Sergei, his heroic fight, and the ideals he stood for must never be forgotten.

God bless Sergei and his family.

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*** Excerpts from A tutorial for Rahul baba by Tavleen Singh ***

…Let me begin by admitting that the reason why I have rarely written about Rahul Gandhi in this column is because I find it hard to take him seriously.

…The subject of this week’s column is Rahul Gandhi because I have been overwhelmed by the articles and TV programmes in recent days that have hailed Rahul Gandhi as India’s saviour. He was compared to Barack Obama as India’s ‘yes we can’ man, praised for breaking the ‘bonds of dynasty’ to bring democratic practices to the Congress Party and eulogised as the harbinger of an Indian ‘renaissance’. Such tributes cannot be ignored so I set about doing some research. I spent hours trawling the web and delving into archives for old speeches. At the end of this exercise I concluded that Rahul had indeed said some things of importance to the Congress party but almost nothing of importance to India.

As someone who believes that poverty is our biggest, ugliest problem and that the tools to defeat it lie in a massive restructuring of public education and healthcare, I searched for Rahul’s thoughts on these subjects. I came up with nothing. Not even when he made his speeches to University students did he say anything that indicated that he had understood the enormity of the problem leave alone be in a position to offer us new ideas. This is disquieting in a man who wants to change India by using young people as his main resource. It is worth pointing out that although more than half our population is under the age of 25, these young people are useful only if they are educated.

The average government school in India is so bad that if a child can learn to write more than his name it is something of a miracle. Learning to read and count is too much to hope for.

If state schools and colleges have gone from very bad to very much worse, the situation with healthcare is even more terrifying…In rural India, sickness is the main cause of debt. In poorer families the situation is so appalling that sick girl children are often allowed to die because medical costs are too high. Anyone who hopes to become Prime Minister must think of solutions to these problems.

From Rahulji we have heard a lot of loose talk about ‘empowerment’ without any explanation of what the word means to him. Occasionally he explains that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)is his idea of empowering the poor and this is most worrying. The NREGS is a form of dole for the unemployed and unemployable and dole cannot ever bring empowerment.

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Bonus: Don’t miss Atanu Dey’s piece inspired by Tavleen Singh’s article

Past weekend readings are here.

Have a restful, safe weekend.