The verbal roasting that Italian Ambassador Daniele Mancini got from the Supreme Court yesterday was well deserved. Saying it no longer had faith in his word, the court also peremptorily rejected Mancini's claims of diplomatic immunity.
Chief Justice Altamas Kabir said: A person who has come to court as a petitioner, I don't think he has any immunity. Some people are writing that we are nave. What do they think about our judicial system? We don't expect the Republic of Italy to behave like this. He (the Ambassador) has lost the trust.
However, given the weight of international opinion and our own domestic legal opinion on the sanctity of diplomatic immunity under the Vienna convention, neither the Supreme Court nor the Indian government can afford to continue in this vein. The only way forward is for India to play power politics - assuming it has the guts to do so.
This is what it could do.
First, the government has to convince the court that Mancini should not get anything more than a verbal censure. After that he should be declared persona non grata and the Italian mission in India shut down. India should end all diplomatic relationships with Italy and allow a small desk in Switzerland or France to handle India's Italian ties.
Once Mancini is out of India, the Supreme Court should issue a contempt notice to him and declare him an absconder if he fails to turn up without immunity.
Slower government approval for testing new medicines is threatening India's aspirations to be a fast-growing, low-cost hub for clinical trials, and has prompted some drugs firms to shift operations elsewhere, adding to their costs.
While India's drug regulator and the health ministry's medical research body deny any slowdown, interviews by Reuters with pharmaceutical companies, lobby groups, industry watchers and healthcare activists tell a different story.
Drugs firms complain that sluggish bureaucracy in New Delhi and a lack of legal clarity on how to conduct clinical trials have created a climate of regulatory uncertainty in the market.
That has been exacerbated by a high profile case in the Supreme Court between the regulator and health activists, who allege that companies used poor people as human guinea pigs to trial unsafe drugs without their knowledge or consent, and without proper state scrutiny. They have asked the court to suspend all trials for new chemical entities (NCEs) - substances that may be turned into a new drug after tests.
Drugmakers, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the case has made government officials more cautious in considering new approvals, asking more questions and being tougher to convince.
The situation was never quite easy in India, said Siddhant Khandekar, a healthcare analyst at ICICI Direct brokerage in Mumbai. But with the Supreme Court case the scenario has worsened and getting new approvals has become more time consuming, he said.
ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
The legal case has prompted Piramal Enterprises. a $1.8 billion Indian drugmaker, to look abroad to trial new drugs, its vice chairperson Swati Piramal told Reuters, warning that India was losing its innovation edge.
The approval time for initiating drug trials in India typically stretches to 6-8 months, compared to just 28 days in Europe and Canada, said Piramal. Post the Supreme Court case, certainly companies like us will look anywhere in the world to see if we get good trials, she said.
Gyan Chaturvedi, a famous Hindi writer of this era, makes a very interesting point in the introduction to his 2004 book Marichika . He writes jungle ke apne niyam hote hain aur wahan kissi tark ka koi sthan nahi hota (a jungle has its own rules and there is no space for any reasonable arguments to be made there).
Nobody understands this much better than politicians operating in the jungle of politics. They rush to save their own skins and keep justifying what they had said earlier, despite evidence to the contrary. My position is right because I had said so in the past, is the logic on which they operate. There is no scope for a reasonable argument there.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal's jubilant reaction to the Supreme Court's opinions on the Presidential Reference to it asking for broad-sweep clarifications on its policy of allocating natural resources is a very good example of the same. We welcome the Supreme Court (SC) opinion. SC has confirmed what the government has been saying, Sibal said yesterday.
This comment came after a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court answered the questions it had been asked by the government of India on 12 April 2012. Among other things the government had asked the Supreme Court to clarify whether the only permissible method for disposal of all natural resources across all sectors and in all circumstances is by the conduct of auctions.
This question had arisen in light of the Supreme Court judgment cancelling the licences given to 122 telecom companies in 2008, when A Raja was the Telecom Minister. The government had given out these licences, allegedly on the basis of the first-come-first-served (FCFS) principle rather than auctioning them, and thus causing a huge loss to the exchequer. That Raja may have played ducks and drakes with the FCFS system is another matter.
In what cannot but be seen as a brazen attempt to violate the spirit of the Supreme Court's orders on the return of investor funds only after due verification of the documents, the Sahara Group is reported to be continuing to make direct refunds without Sebi's consent.
On 31 August, the Supreme Court directed two Sahara group companies - Sahara India Real Estate Corporation (SIREC) and Sahara Housing Investment Corporation (SHIC) - to refund an estimated Rs 24,000 crore raised from investors through optionally full convertible debentures (OFCDs) by 30 November. The payment has to be made directly to Sebi, which then has to verify the documents of investors and get the payments organised only to bonafide claimants.
But even as the deadline for payment approaches, the Sahara Group appears to be cocking a snook at both the regulator and the Supreme Court by asking its commission agents to make refunds clandestinely.
Business Standard said today that Sahara agents have been asked to collect sehmat patras (consent letters) from OFCD holders indicating that their money has been returned. The newspaper reports attempts by Sahara or its agents to doctor the documentation, by pre-dating the consent letters to dates as early as April - well before the Supreme Court verdict.
The newspaper, after talking to some unnamed Sahara agents, says that the agents have been ordered to collect these letters, failing which their commissions are being stopped. A chunk of the money has been transferred to the Sahara Q-Shop plan, another money raising plan being marketed as a retail venture.
Indian Hindu Shiv Sena party activists wave flags as they celebrate the Supreme Court verdict on Mohammed Kasab in Mumbai on August 29, 2012. India's Supreme Court on August 29 confirmed the death sentence handed down to Mohammed Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed. Pakistan-born Kasab, one of 10 gunmen who laid siege to India's financial capital in attacks that lasted nearly three days, had appealed against the sentence claiming that he had not received a fair trial.
Indian Hindu Shiv Sena party activists wave flags and light fire crackers as they celebrate the Supreme Court verdict on Mohammed Kasab in Mumbai on August 29, 2012. India's Supreme Court on August 29 confirmed the death sentence handed down to Mohammed Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed. Pakistan-born Kasab, one of 10 gunmen who laid siege to India's financial capital in attacks that lasted nearly three days, had appealed against the sentence claiming that he had not received a fair trial.
