The scandal about Satyam just refuses to die down. There are so many questions that remain open, and there is the major feeling that even though the Central Government took quick action once Raju had come out with his confessional statement, the state Government of Andhra Pradesh is not being so open. Before Raju had made his statement, the Chief Minister, Rajshekhar Reddy had made a statement to the effect that the aborted merger was over, and people should get on with their lives. No reassurance about watching out for a company that was the star of Andhra Pradesh and employed 50,000 people. And just a few days after the Chief Minister dismissed all warnings, the Satyam Chief went ahead and wrote his confessional note. And after this, the Chief Minister had nothing to say.
Now, there are so many open questions that it seems that there are so many mysteries to resolve, and the former Satyam Chief is sitting in jail, with some police investigators getting access to him. For some arcane reason, SEBI investigators are unable to get access to Raju, currently in jail (The Andhra High Court has refused SEBI the permission to do so even though a huge amount of investor money went down the drain).
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In India, there are very few things most people dread higher than a sudden arrest by a police officer. And instances of policemen hauling away people to jail happen often enough (if you read newspapers, you will find enough stories of people being arrested and led to jail for being accused of various crimes). These powers of the police, typically without restraints or responsibility, have led to rampant misuse. The power of arrest is also used as a way to force people to take certain actions – so, for example, if they want to arrest a criminal, the police has in many cases arrested family members in order to force the accused to surrender; another case is the dowry and women laws, where the threat of police action forces settlements (and is in many cases used by women when they want to get settlements in their favor or harass their family members).
So, now there is a recent amendment to the law governing the power of police to arrest for crime where there is a sentence below 7 years (this includes a number of crimes such as outraging a women’s modesty, the 498A, robbery, kidnapping, assaulting the President, and all offences where the applicable punishment is less than 7 years). What does this amendment actually do ? It prevents the police in normal cases from arresting the accused unless the crime was committed in front of a police officer, or if the police believe that the accused being out of prison could affect investigations. In all other cases, the accused will be presented with a notice to be present, and only if the person does not present himself / herself, then the arrest will happen:
Corruption in the judiciary is a difficult issue for the Government and for other investigative arms such as the media to handle. The judiciary has a much higher respect that most other arms of the Government, and the judges are also armed with contempt laws that can scare most people. So it has been the stuff of rumors and whispers, this entire talk about corruption in the judiciary. It is exceedingly hard to remove a sitting judge, especially when the judges are in the higher courts. The first such case that reached the stage of Parliament was the case involving Justice Ramaswamy in 1990 (Parliament ultimately did not vote to impeach him since the Congress MP’s decided to abstain).
Corruption in the judiciary takes 2 main forms – one form is when judges are accused of deciding cases based on extraneous factors or under some influence (and the related case is similar to the case in Chandigarh where a huge amount of money was delivered at the doorstep of a judge); the other case is when the judges are accused of misusing money to augment their lifestyle – consider this case where the judges misused the Provident Fund money (the hard earned money that goes towards the pension needs for workers)