India Behind The Lens (News Centre)

The law that gives Robert Vadra, an ordinary yet highly controversial citizen, unfettered powers to cross Indian borders and security points unchecked, is the draconian SPECIAL PROTECTION GROUP ACT 1988.

In its brief history of Independence, free India wrote one of the most shameful acts of Parliament when it gave its approval to the SPG Act.

While certain portions of the Act are necessary to protect important citizens and the lives of their families, the fact that the SPG is unanswerable to anyone makes it a highly powerful yet unaccountable force in a democratic nation.

It is an unaccountable police force with the world’s best weaponry at its disposal. Not even the Supreme Court can call on it to justify its actions. How can this be allowed in a democracy, the creation of an unanswerable secret police?

Thus RTI applications asking for justifications that give Robert Vadra Security check privileges at airports are treated like barking dogs and ignored!

The SPG is not answerable and will not answer!

The conduct of the SPG itself is not above reproach. Why did it give Vadra such freedom in the first place?

Is Robert Vadra too ashamed that his wife, a woman, goes through without checks while he has to wait? Why do others travelling with the Gandhi family have to go through checks and Vadra cannot? Is it a macho ego issue or does he have other businesses that are helped by this exemption?

The US TSA (airport security agency) does not exempt anyone from checks, not even Presidents or Prime Ministers. The claim that SPG is styled on the US security agencies is hollow. Queries to it are replied immediately with the unequivocal answer that no one is exempt.

The US law allows state secrets but only for a limited period of time. However, the SPG Act and actions can never be questioned.

Does this not infringe with my rights as a citizen of this country. What if in an act of vengeance I am picked up by SPG and disappear. No Police Station will even approach the SPG for an explanation or with a query because they are not allowed by law. All employed by the SPG and the SPG itself are exempt from answering to any authority of the State or the Judiciary.

Will the Supreme Court hear my case in case I am picked up? No. It cannot summon the SPG.
Thus, how can the Supreme Court allow the SPG Act in this format? Can it accept this article as a PIL challenging the validity of these provisions of the Act that provide immunity to the SPG and its personnel and strike them down as illegal?

Imagine a scenario where a political party has an absolute majority and an ill motivated corrupt leader, (like Indira Gandhi trying with the Emergency). Cannot she/he expand the SPG scope and force from the present 3,000 and misuse the agency completely. Cannot they bully judges and political leaders into doing their will?

Most countries that overthrew Communist regimes continue to struggle with the new versions of the old secret police. Russian democracy is bogged under the jugglery of ex-KGB Vladimir Putin and its cronies and a weak judiciary and parliament.

Robert Vadra is inconsequential. Appealing to his sense of justice or intellect seems like a foolish idea. He is already enjoying the demoniac side of the SPG. Given his sorry personal life, appealing to him to do the right thing for the sake of posterity and a democratic future of the country, also sounds foolish.

Maybe telling him that the wrong he is doing to the SPG with his mother-in-law Sonia Gandhi’s tacit support is going to gobble him in the future may help!
Yevgenia Albats, the famous Russian journalist says that Glasnost in Russia was the idea of the KGB and Gorbachev was its tool. The powers of the KGB reduced the courts into clerical offices; none of the KGB was accountable. They even tapped the offices of the President and other official dignitaries. What about allegations that Pranab Mukherjee’s offices were tapped. Who had such access to them?

Even today, in India, we are still trying to nail the perpetrators of the horrors of the Emergency including our infamous President Pranab Mukherjee.