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A veritable furore took hold of the national discourse last week as the countrys second highest law officer, Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, spewed a barrage of appellatives for journalists, civil rights activists, a section of the legal fraternity and anyone critical of the Union governments handling of the coronavirus-induced lockdown. He alluded to journalists reporting on the miseries of common Indian citizensparticularly migrant workers and the pooras vultures. Rights activists, lawyers or political leaders concerned over the escalating humanitarian crisis were, according to the outburst, armchair intellectuals and prophets of doom who only spread negativity, negativity and negativity. The high courts, at least 19 of them, which have passed a slew of directives to state governments for redressing grievances of citizens, werent spared either. Those courts were running like parallel governments, Mehta said.

The SGs tirade came during a virtual hearing by the Supreme Courts bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, S.K. Kaul and M.R. Shah that had taken up a suo motu reference on the problems faced by migrant workers. While the controversy stoked by Mehtas comments was still raging, the SG landed in another storm after the Aam Aadmi Party-led Delhi government agreed to have him, and two other central law officersAdditional Solicitors-General Maninder Acharya and Aman Lekhias special public prosecutors representing Delhi Police in a case linked to the Northeast Delhi riots of February. The Delhi governments acquiescence to the Centres choice of Mehta as counsel was singled out by chief minister Arvind Kejriwals critics, mainly the Congress, as evidence of the AAP being a B Team of the BJP.

Also Read |Delhi Riots: Arvind Kejriwal Aiding Long Arm Of Law To Shorten Justice?

It is rare for law officers to become newsmakers for anything other than their courtroom adroitness. Though their appointments are made by the government of the day and are almost always credited to their proximity to top leaders of the executive, law officers seldom emerge as polarising figures. Often, after demitting office, it is difficult to even recall which partys government they served. Or, what their individual contribution was to the governments legal battles. The success or defeat is attributed to the government, as are the controversies that emerge during litigation. A simple test would prove the point. Mehta is the 23rd solicitor-general but how many people would recall his predecessors and the governments they served? Indeed, even a prolonged vacancy is rarely noticed, as was evident when the post of SG remained vacant for a full year between Ranjit Kumars resignation in October 2017 and Mehtas appointment.

If Mehta appears to be an exception to this rule, it isnt purely because of his recent utterances. Unlike most of his predecessors like Ranjit Kumar, the late Goolam Vahanvati, Gopal Subramanian, Mohan Parasaran, Harish Salve, Rohinton Nariman or Soli Sorabjee, Mehta was never a big name in the legal fraternity and certainly not in Delhi. His predecessors, even less famous ones like Kirit Raval and T.R. Andhyarujina, could boast of an impressive list of clients outside of their government practice, but for Mehta, the only high-profile client affiliation is Amit Shah, says a senior Supreme Court advocate, requesting anonymity.

A migrant workers family trudges in the darkness on the Mumbai-Nashik road. Solicitor-general Tushar Mehta alluded journalists covering the migrant crisis to vultures..

Photograph by Apoorva Salkade

So, how did a lawyer in Gujarat rise in a decade to become the countrys second highest law officer? Mehta started his legal practice in Ahmedabad in 1987. Yatin Oza, a senior advocate in the Gujarat High Court and former BJP MLA, has known Mehta for over three decades. He tells Outlook, Tushar used to work as a junior to K.G. Vakharia, a much respected senior advocate. Sometime in 1999, there was a major litigation between groups affiliated with Congress and BJP to take control of the functioning of Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank. Amit Shah was leading the BJP camp and wanted Vakharia saheb as counsel. Vakharia agreed to take the case after some persuasion, but told Tushar to appear for it. This was the beginning of a strong relationship between Shah and Tushar. Shah went on to become the banks chairman.

Yatin Oza, Gujarat HC advocate and former BJP MLA

Mehta was designated a senior advocate at the Gujarat Bar in 2007. Soon after, he was appointed additional advocate-general of Gujarat. This was also the time that legal troubles for Shah, then home minister of Gujarat, had begun to mount with allegations over his involvement in the 2002 riots. A former law officer of Gujarat says Mehta was among the handful of lawyers who stood by Shah during those hard times. In October 2010, the SC ordered Shah to leave Gujarat in order to enable a fair trial in the cases against him (he was later cleared in all of them). Shah moved to Delhi and Tushar followedWhen the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014, Tushar was appointed additional solicitor-general, says Oza.

A senior Supreme Court advocate who was among the batch of ASGs appointed by the Modi government in 2014 says, The entire legal team of the government was handpicked by the late Arun Jaitley because Modi and Shah were still new to Delhithe only non-Jaitley man on the team was Mehta. The senior advocate recalls that after Mukul Rohatgi resigned as attorney-general and the solicitor-generals post fell vacant following Kumars resignation, the government picked Mehta to appear in every important mattercases against P. Chidambaram, Rohingya deportation case and constitutional matters. Mehtas big moment came in October 2018, when he was elevated to SG. Soon after, a controversy erupted when Mehta put in a request with the Union law ministry to appear as counsel for Jay Shah (whose father is Union home minister Amit Shah) in a defamation suit he had filed against The Wire in a Gujarat court.

Sources say Jaitley, then finance minister, had wanted then ASG Maninder Singh to be appointed to the post of SG. The government chose Mehta and Singh resigned. It is interesting and surprising, says Oza, because until the ADC Bank case, Tushar was always recognised by his contemporaries in the Gujarat Bar as a staunch Congress supporter.

Kapil Sibal, former Union minister

Former Union minister and senior advocate Kapil Sibal sees striking similarities between the cognomens Mehta hurled at journalists, activists and others critical of the government and the acerbic attacks of right-wing forces and sympathisers on dissenters. If a law officer stands in the court and uses the kind of language that was used, it cannot be viewed as his individual opinion but must be seen as the statement of the government, Sibal says. As political commentators, academics and legal experts criticised Mehta for his language, the SG told a leading English daily that his statement before the top court was twisted out of context by some vested interests (Mehta did not respond to calls and messages from Outlook for his comment for this story). But, this wasnt Mehtas first rodeo. When the migrant crisis had just begun to escalate on March 31 and concerned citizens had sought judicial intervention to alleviate the problem, he had told the top court that there is not a single migrant on the road. A few days later, Mehta urged the top court that professional PIL shops must be locked down. While frivolous PILs are indeed a menace, Mehtas comments came at a time when the apex court was hearing only matters listed as urgent and the PILs he objected to raised substantial demands for relief for the poor and marginalised during the lockdown.

Editor's Take |If Journalists Are Vultures, I'm Happy To Be A Vulture-in-Chief

Sections in the legal fraternity believe that Mehtas vociferous defence of the Centre may be triggered by a larger goal. A former law officer says the SG could be angling for another elevation as the post of attorney-general is set to fall vacant on June 30 when the tenure of K.K. Venugopal ends. Of course, if such an elevation were to come his way it would not, in any way, break convention because several of Mehtas predecessors have been elevated as AGs in the past. With the lockdown now in the process of being unlocked, it is expected that hearing of important constitution bench matters that had been put on the backburner by the top court since March may resume in the coming months. These cases include challenges to the abrogation of Article 370 and the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, both politically sensitive matters. Would Mehta lead the governments charge soon as the countrys highest law officer?

See more here:
Once Congress Supporter To Fierce Govt Defender: The Transformation Of Tushar Mehta - Outlook India

Written by Kshitij Rawat | New Delhi | Updated: May 31, 2020 1:56:36 pm Swara Bhasker has been receiving calls for assistance on social media and is arranging transport for the needy. (Photo: Swara Bhasker/Instagram)

Actor Swara Bhasker recently took a page out of Sonu Soods book and decided to do her bit to help the stranded migrant labourers reach their homes.

She has been receiving calls for assistance on social media and is arranging transport for the needy.

After the lockdown was imposed by the government amid the coronavirus pandemic, labourers in metro cities like Delhi and Mumbai, as well as other cities, who more often not live in villages far from those cities, were stuck as the lockdown meant no buses or trains were running.

Several NGOs and individuals, like Swara and Sonu, have been helping those migrants. Swaras efforts, however, have been hampered by the trolls. She has to wade through tweets that are full of sundry insults, innuendos and threats to get through to the tweets of those who either need assistance themselves or know somebody who is stranded.

Swara wrote in a tweet, Compiling info about which migrant labour is stuck where & needs to go where, making calls to each of them and coordinating with govt. efforts is tiring coz we have to sift through FILTH in my comments section which I never do! Its like searching for phone numbers in garbage!

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Swara Bhasker on the migrant crisis: Have to sift through filth on social media to reach the needy - The Indian Express

Updated: May 29, 2020 9:59:05 am

It is with great anguish and dismay that we write to you as the citizens of India and senior members of the Bar. The Supreme Court (SC) has a pivotal constitutional role in protecting and safeguarding the fundamental rights and freedoms of the citizens of this country, and particularly the vast swathes of our population who eke out a living near or below the poverty line or minimum wage. The SCs constitutional role and duty assume even greater importance in the time of a crisis, such as the present when the entire country and its economy was locked down from March 24 by an order of the central government. More than 75 per cent of the Indian workforce earn their livelihoods in the informal or unorganised sector, and for them, a stoppage of economic activity in the Medium, Small and Micro sectors has resulted in an immediate loss of livelihood and the means of sustenance.

The lockdown was imposed on March 24 without any consideration being paid to the plight of these poor, especially migrant labour earning their livelihood in the major cities, and for whom social distancing was and is a utopian impossibility. These poor citizens were faced with the prospect of being cooped up in small cramped tenements/rooms or on the pavements, without any employment or livelihood or even a definite source of food and were thus compelled to start walking back to their home states, often thousands of kilometres away, with little children, family members or elderly parents. They were forced to do so as the central governments lockdown had precluded them from taking trains or buses back to their home towns.

While hearing public interest litigation on the plight of the migrant workers, Alakh Alok Srivastava v. Union of India, the SC considered the Status Report filed by the learned Solicitor General, representing the Union of India, which referred to the governments circular dated March 29, prohibiting movement and transportation of migrant labourers and a direction to shift them to relief shelter homes and relief camps instead and the Solicitor Generals statement before this Court that as of March 31, no migrant person was walking on the roads in an attempt to reach his/ her home towns villages. The SC, vide order dated 31.03.2020, expressed satisfaction at the steps taken by the Union of India to combat COVID-19 and proceeded to observe that the migration of labourers working in the cities was triggered by panic created by fake news that the lockdown would continue for more than 3 months. As a consequence of the Courts failure to intervene, even though the number of COVID cases was only a few hundred at the time, the millions of migrant workers were unable to proceed to their hometowns. This enforced stay in cramped quarters only exposed poor workers to a higher risk of infection. Moreover, the governments statement has been clearly shown to be contrary to the facts. Several reports suggest that more than 90 per cent of migrant workers did not receive government rations in many states and were suffering from dire food shortages.

The SCs failure to intervene in March resulted in a massive migration of millions of workers by early May they were fed up with being virtually incarcerated for the previous six weeks. By this time, the COVID infections in the country had crossed 50,000 and a significant number of migrant workers were also infected. Even at this stage, the government initially sought to obstruct their travel/movement on foot or by trucks. Subsequently, the government agreed to their movement by bus and trains (Shramik Specials). However, even when the arrangements were made, onerous conditions were sought to be imposed on them, such as obtaining a medical certificate after getting themselves tested at great cost to themselves. When arrangements were made to transport them by road, they were often left at the borders of the receiving states, which at times were unwilling to make any further arrangements for them to reach their homes, almost as if this was not one countrty with a common citizenship. The right to life, liberty and freedom of movement of these hapless poor millions was rendered virtually meaningless.

On May 15, a three-judge bench of the SC dismissed an application seeking immediate directions to all the district magistrates to identify the migrant workers who are walking on roads, provide them with appropriate food and shelter facility and facilitate their travel back to their home states free of cost. Without going into the merits, the said application was dismissed and it was left for the state governments to sort this out. We respectfully submit that this institutional deference to statements made on behalf of the government and the Courts apparent indifference to this enormous humanitarian crisis, would if not rectified immediately, amount to the Court having abdicated its constitutional role and duty to these teeming millions of poor, hungry migrants.

Amid the executive-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, the Court cannot retreat into self-effacing deference, leaving millions of Indian citizens, especially those who are poor and vulnerable, to the mercy of the executive, reminding us of ADM Jabalpur when detenues were left to the tender mercy of the executive with Diamond bright Diamond hard hope that something would be done.

This Court has the power bestowed by the Constitution of India under Article 142 to undertake any measure to do complete justice. The show of helplessness does no justice to the motto of this court Yato dharmastato jaya. We believe that the survival of Indian democracy and the rule of law, particularly in the current COVID-19 pandemic, is dependent on the Court actively fulfilling its constitutional obligation.

The migrant workers crisis is continuing even today, with millions still stranded on roads, at railway stations and state borders. We urge the Supreme Court to intervene and ensure that adequate transport arrangements, food and shelter are immediately provided by the Central and state governments free of cost. At this time, we recall the words of Martin Luther King Jr. who said: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

This article first appeared in the print edition on May 29 under the title Your Lordships.

P Chidambaram, Anand Grover, Indira Jaising, Mohan Katarki, Siddarth Luthra, Santosh Paul, Mahalaxmi Pavani, Kapil Sibal, Chander Uday Singh, Vikas Singh, Prashant Bhushan, Iqbal Chagla, Aspi Chinoy, Mihir Desai, Janak Dwarkadas, Rajani Iyer, Yusuf Muchhala, Rajiv Patil, Navroz Seervai, Gayatri Singh, Sanjay Singhvi. Full version of this article is available at indianexpress.com

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A letter to justices of Supreme Court, from senior members of the Bar on the migrant crisis - The Indian Express

Broadcaster and leading Brexiter Nigel Farage called it an invasion. Which is stretching it.

He is right that over the past three years, an increasing number of migrants have crossed the English Channel, landed somewhere on the Kent and occasionally Sussex coastline, and entered the UK illegally. In 2018, the Home Office said 297 people were known to have used this route. In 2019, the figure stood at 1,890. By May this year, the figure already stands at 1,590. Its a significant development, although one no doubt exacerbated by the pandemic-induced closure of other migration routes.

But both in size and intention it does not constitute an invasion. At the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, Italy alone had received over 50,000 boat-borne migrants by June that year. The UK, so far as we know, has received just over two per cent of that figure. And as for the migrants intentions, its safe to say they are not interested in conquest. Many are simply and understandably seeking a better standard of living than that offered by their often wartorn homelands (which are usually the historical recipients of Western military intervention), let alone the miserable migrant camps in which they found themselves at Calais.

There is undoubtedly a problem here, though. A combination of the UN Refugee Convention, international maritime law and French authorities willingness to move a problem on, means that UK border forces end up in the position of being legally obliged to escort hundreds of migrants a year into UK territory, where they will then wait months and years for their applications for asylum to be processed. And thats just the ones who get caught. There are likely to be many more a year who escape the attentions of the UK Border Force, rendezvous with traffickers in the UK before being put to low-to-no paid work in, say, a city-centre carwash. The principal and possibly sole beneficiaries of this infernal arrangement are not the migrants, of course theyre the human-traffickers charging several thousand pounds a head for the crossing, and their criminal associates, extracting more and more in the course of these undocumented individuals precarious, black-marketised existence.

But painting this as an invasion is unhelpful. It overstates and misrepresents the problem of illegal migration. And it dehumanises the migrants, transforming them into a malign force, indeed into invaders.

Yet those willing to dismiss and ignore Farages concerns, as yet more proof of the bigotry, xenophobia, racism etczzz of the wider Brexit vote, are the bigger problem here. With assorted charities to the fore, such as Refugee Action and Care4Calais (which once blithely tweeted the quote Brexit, Donald Trump and facism make these such dangerous times), this constituency consistently presents those making the perilous Channel crossing as helpless victims. Victims of the traffickers. Victims of the countries from which they were forced to flee. And, above all, victims of those across the world, and especially the UK, whose prejudices, nativism and sheer closed-mindedness have erected real borders between people. Or as one commentator put it of the inhabitants of Kent: Brexit has cracked us open, allowed our strongest feelings to come out There are still people who offer help and welcome [to migrants], but they are not running the country.

So while some on the right are using the so-called UK migrant crisis to showcase their patriotism and concern for the nation, their opponents are also using the migrants. Theyre using them to showcase their openness, their compassion, their superior virtue. Indeed, theyre using these bedraggled figures, collapsing on to Englands shorelines, as symbols both of the folly of borders and nations, and of the cruelty and narrow-mindedness of all those who cleave to them. If some on the right have dehumanised those crammed perilously into small dinghies for five grand a pop, then so too have their opponents. And whats more, in doing so, in encouraging others to make that same crossing, they play into the hands of the traffickers and all those who seek to profit from migrants desire to make a better life for themselves.

Thats the problem with this rather confected outrage over illegal immigration in the Channel. It exemplifies the way in which immigration has been turned into a means of political showmanship. On one side, the virtue-signalling cosmopolitan; on the one other the flag-waving patriot.

But at least the flag-waving patriot is on the right path namely, defending the importance of borders. For these were never merely lines arbitrarily drawn on a map, dividing and antagonising us for ever more. Rather, like the boundaries between humans and animals, and good and evil, they indicate something substantial. They are the territorial expression of a political community, a means by which we as a people constitute ourselves as such, the means by which we judge what we value and what we dont. They are the bounds within which the laws, mores, and, deeper still, the everyday rituals and features of our public life and culture develop and bond us to one another. A national territory is not merely a physical space. It is the domain in which citizenship from our rights to duties pertains and has real meaning. Get rid of the borders, or render them meaningless by encouraging and even celebrating their transgression, and you undermine what it is to be a citizen. Indeed, you undermine what it is to belong to anywhere at all.

That, in a sense, is the predicament in which we find ourselves. Too many, thinking it the right-on, woke thing to do, oppose borders. They see them in terms of Trumps much-trumpeted wall, as a bigoted means to keep them out. And they therefore see migrants as a means to undermine these expressions of bigotry and closed-mindedness. But in doing so, in green-lighting the transgression of borders, they imperil the very meaning of citizenship and civic belonging.

Ironically, if we are to have an open and generous immigration system, one which wipes out the market for human traffickers, it needs to be something citizens of a post-Brexit UK support. It needs to be something democratically agreed upon. Something that a political community values. And for that you need the very thing the virtue-signallers decrying borders are undermining a citizenry.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

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The shallow exploitation of the migrant crisis - Spiked

Railway officials found the body of a migrant labourer lying in a toilet of a Shramik Special train in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, The Indian Express reported on Friday. The officials found the body while cleaning the train in the Jhansi railway yard on May 27. The worker had boarded the train on May 23 to travel to Gorakhpur.

The Jhansi-Gorakhpur train left Jhansi on May 23 and reached Gorakhpur on May 24. Its rakes were then sent back to Jhansi for maintenance and sanitisation on May 27, the officials said, according to PTI. The deceased was identified as Mohan Lal Sharma, a resident of Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. His family members said he worked in Mumbai. On the route from Jhansi to Gorakhpur, Basti comes before Gorakhpur.

We got information around 10 pm Wednesday regarding a body being found in a train at the Jhansi railway yard, Jhansi Government Railway Police Inspector Anjana Verma said. We immediately rushed there along with a medical team. The body was found in the toilet of the Shramik train and it had decomposed and was smelling. His face had swollen and we kept the body at the mortuary.

Railway officials added that at no point during the trains journey did any railway authority receive any call from the train for medical help. The Government Railway Police have sent Sharmas body for an autopsy, and have taken samples for testing for coronavirus infection.

Railway officials said Sharmas Aadhaar card, some documents and cash were found on his person. The first opportunity for maintenance and sanitisation for the railways was when the rake reached Jhansi on May 27, when the staff recovered the body, North Central Railway Spokesperson Ajit Kumar Singh said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began a long journey home on foot after March 25, when the Centre imposed a nationwide lockdown to combat the Covid-19 crisis. However, some died on the way. After much outcry, the Centre started Shramik Special trains from May 1 to ferry migrant workers. However, some labourers still continued to travel home on foot or in private vehicles. The fourth phase of the lockdown will end on May 31.

There have been reports of migrant workers dying in terrible circumstances. The Patna High Court on Thursday took note of a widely-shared video of a child trying to wake up his dead mother at Bihars Muzaffarpur railway station.

The video that went viral earlier this week showed the child playing with a cloth covering his mothers body as announcements of train arrivals and departures continued in the background. The woman, identified as Arbeena, had reportedly died of extreme heat, hunger and dehydration. They had arrived in Bihar from Gujarat in a special train for migrant labourers and her family claimed she had fallen sick on the train due to lack of food and water.

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Migrant crisis: Labourers body found lying in toilet of special train four days after he boarded it - Scroll.in