Forty Two Years After the Emergency, India’s Democracy is Once Again in Danger
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Then and now
In sharp contrast today, the Narendra Modi government is driving the country towards an Emergency with a cold blooded efficiency that has only unflattering historical parallels. In one of the first speeches he gave after coming to power, Modi referred to his plans for the next 10 years in terms that belied any possibility of there being a change of government or prime minister. Since then, many of his ministers, and his party president Amit Shah, have made similar statements.
This is because they see their function as being the transformational one of exorcising the weakness in the Indian, specifically Hindu, psyche that has led to its centuries of “enslavement,” and of creating a strong, self-assertive Hindu nation that will command respect through its strength, by inspiring fear. Such a transformation will take time.
To distinguish itself from what they consider their weak-kneed, pseudo-secular predecessor and its cohorts of western educated advisers, this government has plunged the country into a campaign of terror against an unarmed populace in Kashmir; earlier, it engineered an undeclared trade blockade upon Nepal for daring to disregard Modi’s advice on the framing of its constitution, and pushed that country into the arms of China; it has greatly worsened India’s strained relations with Pakistan and destroyed all the progress that Manmohan Singh’s government had made towards letting the border dispute with China fade away behind deepening cooperation on the remaking of the post-cold-war international order.
However, these calculated provocations fade into insignificance before the BJP’s systematic assault upon the rule of law at home. One of the earliest incidents was the planting of a doctored tape showing JNU Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar allegedly mouthing ‘Pakistan Zindabad’, at a confrontation with the BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, on the JNU campus and using it to
arrest him and put him in jail. Although voicing pro-Pakistani slogans is not a crime under the Indian Penal Code, and although the tape was exposed by two TV channels to be a fake, the government kept Kumar in jail for three weeks. While he was in police custody, three lawyers belonging to one of the RSS’s shadow organisations, the Adhivakta Sangh, beat him while the police looked on. They then boasted about it to an
India Today reporter who carried out a sting operation on them with a hidden camera. But all the police did to them was to invite them to appear at the
thana, book them and release them immediately on bail at their own cognisance.
Under the benign umbrella provided by another shadowy organisation from the
parivar, the Bharatiya Gau Raksha Dal
, hundreds of cow vigilante groups have sprung up all over the country. These have assaulted countless Muslims, Dalits, truckers and cattle transporters and left at least 10 people dead, six of them Muslims. As Human Rights Watch Director for South Asia , Meenakshi Ganguly
observed, “The mild admonitions from BJP leaders when Muslims and Dalits are lynched over cows sends a message that the BJP supports this violence. Instead of a government that took office on the promise of universal development, it (Modi’s government) now appears to be one unwilling to protect those most vulnerable.”
The Bharatiya Gau Raksha Dal claims that it has 50 affiliated organisations with about 10,000 volunteers. But hundreds of other self-appointed cow protection groups have sprung up all over the country. Delhi is believed to have 200 such groups, and the Una region of Gujarat is believed to have an equal number. On July 1, 2016, 35 gau rakshaks attacked seven Dalits for skinning a cow that had been killed by a lion, in a village adjoining the Gir forest, accused them of slaughtering it, beat them with iron rods and sticks, then kidnapped four of them, took them to Una, tied them to a car, and flogged them publicly through the town. The perpetrators videographed the beating, replaced their screams with an overlay of soothing western classical music, and uploaded their tape onto YouTube. Seven Dalits were admitted to hospital, but the police just looked on.
The BGRD and the Adhivakta Sangh are only small portions of the stormtrooper army that the RSS has assembled. A third component is the Hindu Yuva Vahini of Gorakhpur, which describes itself as “a fierce cultural and social organisation dedicated to Hindutva and nationalism.” The HYV was created by the Muslim-hating firebrand chief minister of UP, Yogi Adityanath. It has been involved in numerous riots, notably one at Mau in 2005, and was called out by Adityanath to help the police in his first action as chief minister – the closure of what he and the Vahini claimed to be illegal slaughter houses.
Adityanath and his Hindu Yuva Vahini have been the prime instigators of the campaigns of ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘Ghar Wapsi’, both of which were designed to show the Muslims of north India their place in the new dispensation, and resulted in scores of attacks on Muslims and several deaths. But throughout the past three years of Modi’s rule, there have been few arrests, prompt releases on bail and almost no prosecutions. The police and the judges too, have by and large learned which side of their bread has the butter.
Strong-arming rivals
But all this pales before this new RSS/BJP’s utter disregard for the canons of democracy. Smarting under his total rout at Kejriwal’s hands in the 2015 state election Modi
launched an assault on the AAP of a kind that has no place in a democracy. This developed in three phases. In the first it concentrated on making the government impotent. Through lieutenant governor Najib Jung, it took the Anti-Corruption Bureau out of the Delhi government’s hand, and closed down the helpline through which the ACB had received 160,000 complaints from the public of extortion by the police and officers of the three municipalities. It followed this with a home ministry circular that took all effective decision making power out of the state governments hands, even on subjects that had nothing to do with the police and land, the two subjects reserved for the central government.
The second phase of the attack was triggered by an extraordinary judgment of a single judge bench of the Delhi high court, that invalidated not one but two articles of the Indian Constitution, 293 and 293A, to bring Delhi (and as collateral damage also Pondicherry) back completely under the Centre’s thumb. Following this Jung seized 400 files and sent anything that could conceivably be considered ‘irregular’, to the CBI to follow up. This was followed by a spatter of accusations of petty irregularities, mostly made through TRP hungry TV channels, and ‘friendly’ print journalists to discredit the government, and
create the impression that it was no better, and probably worse than any other.
Modi launched the third phase with direct attacks on Kejriwal and his deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, accusing them of corruption, money laundering and embezzlement of funds as a prelude to splitting the party and forcing it to resign. To do the latter it used two AAP members, Kumar Vishwas and
Kapil Mishra, who had come to it from the RSS in the heady days of the “India Against Corruption” movement and kept their ties with it. It would be tedious to describe the details of this attack. Suffice it to say that the main charge, made by Mishra, that he had personally seen Kejriwal receive Rs 2 crore of foreign donations from health minister Satyendra Jain at his house on a particular date, was not corroborated by any of the cctv cameras mounted around the CMs house. This has not prevented the Delhi police from filing no fewer than 29 cases against Kejriwal, the elected chief minister of the state.
Kejriwal is not the only opposition chief minister upon whom Modi and Amit Shah have trained their guns. The ministers of Mamata Banerjee, who is the first chief minister to have publicly recognised the threat that the BJP poses to democracy, have been in the gunsights of the CBI, the Income tax authorities and the enforcement directorate for several months. The common thread in all they are doing is their utter disregard for the rule of law and contempt for the conventions upon which democracy rests. Modi and Shah have to know that anything the BJP does to its political rivals can, and will, be done by them to the BJP when they come to power. With scandals like Vyapam in Madhya Pradesh, and the Rajasthan land scam, there will be ample fodder for the opposition to chew upon. So why are they showing such disregard for what can happen to them in the future? For those who have the courage to look ahead, the answer is staring them in the face: they do not ever expect the opposition to come to power. And that can happen only if democracy is extinguished in India.
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was only a momentary flash in the pan. The real Emergency lies ahead.
https://thewire.in/151083/forty-two-years-emergency-indias-democracy-danger
