📰 What is plea bargaining and how does it work?
Will this practice help to avoid long trials? Why is it uncommon in India?
•The story so far: Many members of the Tablighi Jamaat belonging to different countries have obtained release from court cases in recent days by means of plea bargaining. Accused of violating visa conditions by attending a religious congregation in Delhi, these foreign nationals have walked free after pleading guilty to minor offences and paying the fines imposed by the court. These cases have brought the focus on plea bargaining as a practice by which time consuming trials can be avoided. Even though plea bargaining is available to those accused of criminal offences in India for over a decade, it is not yet common.
When was it introduced in India?
•Plea bargaining refers to a person charged with a criminal offence negotiating with the prosecution for a lesser punishment than what is provided in law by pleading guilty to a less serious offence. It is common in the United States, and has been a successful method of avoiding protracted and complicated trials. As a result, conviction rates are significantly high there. It primarily involves pre-trial negotiations between the accused and the prosecutor. It may involve bargaining on the charge or in the quantum of sentence.
•In India, the concept was not part of law until 2006. There has always been a provision in the Code of Criminal Procedure for an accused to plead ‘guilty’ instead of claiming the right to a full trial, but it is not the same as plea bargaining.
•The Law Commission of India, in its 142nd Report, mooted the idea of “concessional treatment” of those who plead guilty on their own volition, but was careful to underscore that it would not involve any plea bargaining or “haggling” with the prosecution.
•Plea bargaining was introduced in 2006 as part of a set of amendments to the CrPC as Chapter XXI-A, containing Sections 265A to 265L.
In what circumstances is it allowed? How does it work?
•Unlike in the U.S. and other countries, where the prosecutor plays a key role in bargaining with the suspected offender, the Indian code makes plea bargaining a process that can be initiated only by the accused; further, the accused will have to apply to the court for invoking the benefit of bargaining.
•Cases for which the practice is allowed are limited. Only someone who has been charge sheeted for an offence that does not attract the death sentence, life sentence or a prison term above seven years can make use of the scheme under Chapter XXI-A. It is also applicable to private complaints of which a criminal court has taken cognisance. Other categories of cases that cannot be disposed of through plea bargaining are those that involve offences affecting the “socio-economic conditions” of the country, or committed against a woman or a child below the age of 14.
•The applicant should approach the court with a petition and affidavit stating that it is a voluntary preference and that he has understood the nature and extent of punishment provided in law for the offence. The court would then issue notice to the prosecutor and the complainant or victim, if any, for a hearing. The voluntary nature of the application must be ascertained by the judge in an in-camera hearing at which the other side should not be present. Thereafter, the court may permit the prosecutor, the investigating officer and the victim to hold a meeting for a “satisfactory disposition of the case”. The outcome may involve payment of compensation and other expenses to the victim by the accused.
•Once mutual satisfaction is reached, the court shall formalise the arrangement by way of a report signed by all the parties and the presiding officer. The accused may be sentenced to a prison term that is half the minimum period fixed for the offence. If there is no minimum term prescribed, the sentence should run up to one-fourth of the maximum sentence stipulated in law.
What is the rationale for the scheme? What are its benefits?
•The Justice Malimath Committee on reforms of the criminal justice system endorsed the various recommendations of the Law Commission with regard to plea bargaining. Some of the advantages it culled out from earlier reports are that the practice would ensure speedy trial, end uncertainty over the outcome of criminal cases, save litigation costs and relieve the parties of anxiety. It would also have a dramatic impact on conviction rates. Prolonged incarceration of undertrials without any progress in the case for years and overcrowding of prisons were also other factors that may be cited in support of reducing pendency of cases and decongesting prisons through plea bargaining. Moreover, it may help offenders make a fresh start in life.
Do courts have reservations?
•Case law after the introduction of plea bargaining has not developed much as the provision is possibly not used adequately. However, earlier judgments of various courts in cases in which the accused enter a ‘guilty’ plea with a view to getting lesser sentences indicate that the judiciary may have reservations. Some verdicts disapprove of bargaining with offenders, and point out that lenient sentences could be considered as part of the circumstances of the case after a regular trial. Courts are also very particular about the voluntary nature of the exercise, as poverty, ignorance and prosecution pressure should not lead to someone pleading guilty of offences that may not have been committed.
Can it rejoin later? What is Iran’s stand on the issue? And what about the China link?
•The story so far: The inauguration of a track-laying project from Iran’s Chabahar port to Zahedan on the border with Afghanistan on July 7, has ensured that Chabahar — which literally means “four seasons”, named for its salubrious weather — is once again in the middle of a storm over the fate of India’s investment there. The port project along Iran’s southern coast in the Sistan-Baluchistan province has been a part of discussions between New Delhi and Tehran since their first agreement to develop it, in 2003. State-owned Ircon International Limited (IRCON) was associated with the rail project even as India acted quickly to develop Chabahar port facilities. Over the years, the Chabahar project has grown, and now envisages a port, a free trade zone, the 628-km railway line to Zahedan, and then the little over 1,000-km track to Sarakhs on the border with Turkmenistan.
What ties India to Chabahar?
•The Chabahar project is ambitious and will require deep pockets, but New Delhi has always weighed its strategic benefits above the costs. India-Iran relations are historic and New Delhi has sought to maintain these ties in the face of opposition from Iran’s adversaries, namely the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Chabahar project ties India and Iran together as New Delhi deals with its difficult neighbour to the west, Pakistan. A major trade and connectivity hub on Iran’s coast not only gives India an alternative route to Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan, but also has the potential to provide an Indian strategic counter to Pakistan’s Gwadar port being developed by China right next door to Chabahar. The Chabahar trade zone could be an important weigh station for India’s energy imports and food and material exports coming from Kandla and Mundra ports. And the rail project will allow India an independent corridor not only to Afghanistan, which Pakistan has denied it, but also to Central Asia and Russia someday.
What happened to the rail project?
•While the Chabahar port development has moved forward in the last five years, the railway line languished. After several threats and appeals to India, Iran said it was moving ahead to build the Chabahar-Zahedan line on its own this month, with approximately $400 million from the National Development Fund of Islamic Republic of Iran.
What was the hitch?
•Despite the attractions, India’s investment in Chabahar has always been held hostage to international policy shifts on Iran. U.S. policy in particular has swung wildly in the last two decades. It placed heavy sanctions on Iran until nuclear talks between the P-5+1 (the U.S., the U.K., France, China, Russia and Germany) that began in 2006, ended successfully with the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015. As a result, while India continued to negotiate for Chabahar, it was not until after the sanctions were lifted that talks could make headway. In 2016, the Chabahar agreement, which included the Trilateral Agreement on Establishment of International Transport and Transit Corridor between Afghanistan, Iran and India was signed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It also included the port project and the railway line to be built and funded by IRCON for $1.6 billion. In 2018, however, U.S. President Donald Trump overturned the JCPOA, and re-imposed stringent sanctions on Iran. This meant India’s energy imports from Iran, which was its third largest supplier, had to be dropped to zero. Bilateral trade, which depended on a rupee-rial exchange mechanism also stopped. The U.S. gave Chabahar port and rail line a special waiver or “carve-out”, but the sanctions made it very difficult for companies dealing with the U.S. to participate in the project.
Are other projects hit too?
•The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has disclosed that India’s ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) has been cut out of the development of an Iranian gas field project, Farzad B; both sides had been in talks since 2009. The project, which will now go to an Iranian company, had also floundered due to a combination of U.S. sanctions, Iran’s changing conditions and fluctuating prices, as well as India’s delayed responses. On the Chabahar-Zahedan rail project, the MEA said IRCON had completed its feasibility studies by December 2019, three years after the memorandum of understanding was signed, but that it had not heard back from Iran. In the meanwhile, Iranian Railway authorities have begun laying tracks. An Iranian official told The Hindu, “In the absence of an active Indian engagement and partnership, it is currently under construction by Iranian funding and engineering capacities.” Both New Delhi and Tehran have left the door open for IRCON to return to the project at a later date, but for the moment, India is not a part of the railway construction.
What is the China angle?
•The announcements on the two projects come even as news filters in of a China-Iran 25-year partnership for $400 billion to build infrastructure and energy resources in Iran, giving the impression that Iran may be relying more and more on Beijing.
Has India lost an opportunity?
•India’s stakes in Chabahar remain strong, and no matter who builds the railway line, Indian trade could still find its way to Afghanistan and Central Asia. India’s monetary losses are minimal, as it had not invested money or material on the rail line yet. However, there is the worry of reputational damage from the idea that India gave in to U.S. sanctions, a departure from the past. China’s growing inroads in Iran could make Indian projects there more unviable. The largest worry is that Chabahar, the enduring symbol of India-Iran friendship, could become collateral damage in a larger proxy war between the U.S. and China.
📰 Arming India’s poor against the pandemic
Vitamins and nutritious food subsidy are indispensable in this fight
•There have been considerable discussions in scientific circles on the importance of vitamin D in these days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maryam Edabi and Aldo Montana-Loza have published a paper titled, “Perspective: Improving vitamin D status in the management of COVID-19,” in European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2020) 74:856-859; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-0200661, which points out how vitamin D deficiency can affect COVID-19 high-risk patients, particularly those who are diabetic, have heart conditions, pneumonia, obesity and those who smoke. It is also associated with infections in the respiratory tract and lung injury.
•Besides, vitamin D is known to help in having the right amount of calcium in the bones, catalyse the process of protecting cell membranes from damage, preventing the inflammation of tissues and helping stop tissues from forming fibres and weakening bones from becoming brittle, leading to osteoporosis. Thus, the levels of vitamin D (and calcium) in human (and animal) bodies need to be monitored and when necessary, and administered in appropriate doses and frequency, externally by a trained clinician.
Vitamin D and its prevalence
•The easy to read site <ods.od.nih.gov> describes vitamin D in detail. It is produced when sunlight (or artificial light, particularly in the ultraviolet region of 190-400 nm wavelength) falls on the skin and triggers a chemical reaction to a cholesterol-based molecule, and converts it into calcidiol (adding one hydroxyl group, also called 25(OH)D technically) in the liver and into calcitriol (or 1, 25(OH)2D) in the kidney. It is these two molecules that are physiologically active. It is suggested that the level of 25-OHD in the range 30-100 ng/ml is thought to be sufficient for a healthy body; levels between 21-29 ng/ml are considered insufficient, and levels below 20 ng/ml mean the individual is deficient in the vitamin.
•Since sunlight in important for the generation of vitamin D, tropical countries have an advantage over the northern countries. India, being a tropical country, one would expect naturally derived vitamin D levels to be good. Yet, it is not so!
•Indeed a paper by Sandhiya Selvarajan and colleagues, titled, “Systematic review on vitamin D level in apparently healthy Indian population and analysis of its associated factors” was published in September 2017, in Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2017; 21(5):765-775, free access directly or through http://www.ijem.in/text.asp?2017/21/5/7652/21/5/765/214773. The group did a thorough and exhaustive analysis of over 2,998 published papers and reports, and also data from studies done in various states of India (North Zone, comprising Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana; East Zone: Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal; West Zone: Rajasthan, Gujarat, Goa and Maharashtra; South Zone: Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu and the Northeast Zone: Assam, Sikkim, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh). Overall, these 40 studies provided a sample of 19,761 persons. The level of vitamin D from all these 40 studies ranged between 3.15 ng/ml to 52.9 ng/ml. Vitamin D level among south Indians is (15.74–19.16) ng/ml, yet below 20. Also, females showed consistently lower levels than males.
•The authors conclude that India, a nation of abundant sunshine, is surprisingly found to have a massive burden of vitamin D deficiency among the public irrespective of their location (urban or rural), age or gender, or whether they are poor or even rich. Hence, it is clear that vitamin D supplementation is necessary for most Indians to treat its deficiency.
Nutritive food
•The Central and State governments, as well as public-spirited foundations, companies and even sympathetic public have been very helpful in offering free food for crores of poor, particularly, migrant workers. In addition,almost all of them are extremely poor and have had to depend on such food. Their vitamin D levels must certainly be less (far less) than 10 ng/ml. Typically, these food supplies have included wheat or rice, and grains (chana, urad and the like), and some highly subsidised items of food (sugar, milk and such). Vegetables are not given — raw or cooked — though cooked meals are offered in cities and towns by the State governments and private foundations, at affordable prices. Also, the main government schemes of giving free mid-day meal scheme for students studying in government schools, and the feeding programmes for preschool children and pregnant women under the Integrated Child Development Services through angadwadis have been vital.
•Given the deficit in vitamin D (indeed in many other vitamins, and calcium), it is highly desirable for the governments to (a) consult nutrition experts and institutions to advise and suggest the type of nutritive items that can be added to the current ‘ration’ food given to the poor, and the meals given to school children, (b) in any case, supply free of charge, vitamin D, other vitamins and calcium, in consultation with medical and public health experts regarding the dosage, frequency and other details. There are excellent Indian companies that manufacture these. With these steps, India will have armed its poor against not just the current, but future pandemics as well.
