Kisan Modi.

Demolishing democracy

MODI: Murder Of Democratic Institutions

Faraz Ahmad | New Delhi | 5 April, 2016 | 07:20 PM

Ever since the BJP led by Narendra Modi has returned to power they have been systematically demolishing the credibility of all the institutions that protect our civil and human rights. Beginning with the attack on the independence of the Supreme Court, Modi and his government have gone after the National Green Tribunal, the Right to Information Act, the National Human Rights Commission, the National Commission for Minorities and even NGOs. Modi has thumbed his nose at Parliament, even dissenting students have been sent to jail and the media is once again learning how to crawl.

In a democracy it is the principle that all are equal before the law and the institutions that administer the law are run on rules that apply equally to everyone that gives credibility to the government. When the government, in the pursuit of its political agenda, itself starts undermining those institutions in a very public way it sends a message to the people that the institutions and the courts are no longer a guarantor of their freedoms and rights.

Institutions are integral to democracy. Destroy the credibility of these institutions and you will destroy democracy.

In 2011 at a press conference Ravi Shankar Prasad, then spokesman of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the current Telecom minister in the NDA government, charged the UPA government with humungous corruption in the allocation of 2G spectrum and licenses to telecom companies based on the leaked report of the then Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai.

This was the second time the BJP had relied on a CAG report to base a huge attack on a Congress government. In the late 1980s the BJP had used the CAG report by the then CAG TN Chaturvedi on the purchase of the Swedish Bofors howitzer to paint Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister, as the most corrupt politician of his time.

When in power, the BJP rewarded TN Chaturvedi by first making him a member of the Rajya Sabha and then the Governor of Karnataka.

I asked Prasad whether he would reward Rai in the same way as and when the BJP returned to power. Prasad lost his cool in the open press conference but refused to commit.

After exploding the ‘2G Scam’ the CAG had another expose with the ‘Commonwealth Games Scam’. And then Vinod Rai and the team at the CAG were able to do what no one else had done until then. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who until then had an impeccable reputation for personal honesty, was tarred with the black brush of the ‘Coal Scam’.

The Congress was not able to recover from these exposes and corruption, policy paralysis and a faltering economy combined with an eroding vote base to deliver the worst defeat for the party in the 2014 elections.

On 23 February 2016 Vinod Rai was appointed the first chairman of the newly created Banks Board Bureau, which will advise the government on top-level appointments at public sector lenders and ways to address the ballooning problem of corporate debt going into default.

Is there a quid pro quo the nation was not told about?

The process of erosion and undermining of institutions began 2013 onwards when it became evident that the BJP, succumbing to Sangh pressure will be fielding none other than Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate and Modi’s climb to 7, RCR looked certain to all the political analysts. Modi had risen to power on a wave of resentment against the UPA government, on the strength of a noisy campaign condemning the UPA government as corrupt and other Opposition leaders standing up to him like Lalu Prasad as corrupt and criminal with the promise of a clean corruption and crime free government. But come the elections he put aside all such pretensions and patronised the likes of Satypal Singh former Police Commissioner of Mumbai from whose residence a call girl racket was running while he was heading the law and order machinery of the metropolis and when it was exposed the Police Commissioner feigned ignorance.

But then Satypal Singh drew inspiration from the VIP treatment Modi gave to the accused in the Muzaffarnagar anti-Muslim pogrom including Sanjeev Balyan and Sangeet Som. Balyan a first time MP was made a Union minister, while Sangeet Som was sent up to UP assembly on a BJP ticket. Recently BJP state executive member Umesh Malik spilt the beans publicly saying, “During the Lok Sabha election, the embers that rose from Muzaffarnagar spread to the state, and from there to the entire nation. The embers that you created made Narendra Modi the Prime Minister.”

Modi rode in on the slogan of giving a clean corruption free government. But the very first paper he put his pen to was to sign the appointment of retired bureaucrat Nripendra Misra as his Principal Secretary. On the face of it he was emulating Atal Bihari Vajpayee who had appointed Brajesh Mishra his principal secretary. But there was an important difference between the two. Brajesh Mishra was not carrying any baggage whereas there were serious allegations of impropriety and subtle suggestions of involvement in the ‘2G Scam’ against Nripendra Misra from the time he was chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority.

Our Constitution does not impose any educational standards for becoming an elected representative of the people and even becoming a minister. So there is no constitutional impropriety in choosing Smriti Irani as the country’s education minister. But how hollow and ridiculous it appears that while you impose restrictions on poor rural OBCs, Dalits, Adivasis or Muslims seeking Panchayat membership in Rajasthan, you choose a dubiously-literate as the country’s education minister.

But she enjoys tremendous clout because she knows as long as she is fulfilling the RSS agenda she can ride roughshod over anybody. So complying to ABVP wishes she pushed for punishment for Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad Central University (HCU) who was ultimately driven to suicide and followed it up with an attack on JNU sending the JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar to jail based on false and fake video footage aired on biased TV channels.

But even before that her attempt to throttle the plurality and autonomy in higher education was visible in the University Grants Commission (UGC), the primary institution responsible for allocation of grants related to and maintenance of standards of higher education in India, controversial proposal, at her instance —to introduce a Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in Indian universities. Students and teachers have opposed it and held joint protests leading to even fisticuffs between Left and Right wing student organizations. The CBCS is seen as a mechanism to promote private capital in the higher education sector in India.

Prakash Javadekar became union environment minister in May 2014 and within no time it was apparent that the last thing on his mind was environment protection. On July 22, less than two months after assuming office the Environment ministry issued a notification reconstituting the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL) without appointing the mandatory number of non-government members on the new board and refused to give reasons, in reply to a starred question from a CPM member in the Lok Sabha. The process was so arbitrary that taking cognizance of the development the Supreme Court stayed the decision through an order dated August 25, 2014. Undeterred by the apex court rebuke for destroying the environment, the environment ministry issued an office memorandum on July 28, “easing” conditions for coal extraction.

In the first meeting of the reconstituted Standing Committee of the NBWL, Javadekar announced that projects would not be held up due to “frivolous” reasons. Immediately the reconstituted NBWL standing committee cleared most of the 140 proposals before it. The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2006, became another casualty with Javadekar’s assumption of office. The public hearings by the EIA for projects affecting the ecology, mandatory under the Act, were reduced to a farce. A notification from the Environment Ministry on June 25, 2014, amended the process, exempting certain categories of projects from the EIA. It reduced the impact distance from the existing 10 km to just five km, to facilitate building of roads and other sensitive infrastructure in the north-east and west, bordering China and Pakistan, according to the EIA Resource and Response Centre.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) is a statutory body to protect environment but the minister has been having a running feud with the NGT since he assumed office. The latest is the way NGT orders were flouted by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who held his Art of Living show on the Yamuna bed thumbing his nose at the NGT.

But much before that, the environment ministry had issued a notification in May last year, modifying and reducing the mandatory 10 km distance for any construction activity around the Okhla Bird Sanctuary to a mere 100 metres hugely benefitting top builders like the Jaypees, Supertech, Amrapali and others.

Last week two cattle breeders of Jharkhand were hanged to death from a tree while herding cattle by the Gau Rakshaks ostensibly on the suspicion that they could have sold or were taking the cattle for slaughter. This is not the first instance. The Gau Raksha Samiti activists have created an atmosphere of terror all over the country. In September, 2015 days after the Muslim festival Bakrid in Dadri within the National Capital Region (NCR), a mob broke into the house of Mohammad Akhlaq ransacked his house dragged him out and lynched him and assaulted his son Danish so badly that the young man was hospitalised for several months just on the suspicion that they had beef in the refrigerator.

Every other day truck drivers carrying cattle are being accosted and if not killed outright, brutally assaulted even in Jammu. Similar incidents are reported from Najafgarh and other suburban areas of Delhi but the silence of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is deafening. When some journalists approached the NHRC on the Akhlaq killing it pleaded that it could not act since the matter fell under the purview of the National Minorities
Commission. “Dadri incident is a very serious violation of human rights and some complaints have come to us. But, under the statute, we have no jurisdiction to take cognizance of violation of human rights if another commission has already taken note of it,” pleaded the acting chairperson of NHRC Justice Cyriac Joseph.

As for the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) it took belated notice of the Dadri killing. Three members, including its chairman Naseem Ahmad visited Bisadha village of Mohammad Akhlaq almost a month later and prepared a bland report. The NCM anyway lacks any penal provisions but in the face of daily occurrence of such communal assaults even taking cognizance of and pulling up the government appears to be too strenuous an exercise for the Commission.

Remember the kind of frenzy raised against the then UPA government both at the Centre and in Delhi over the Nirbhaya rape incident? There has been no let up in rape incidents in and around the Capital including the Muzaffarnagar communal rapes, but search the National Commission for Women (NCW) website for any reports of the NCW having taken cognizance of that or other atrocities committed against women and any subsequent action and there is absolutely nothing there.

These and such other bodies are quasi judicial bodies supposedly enjoying certain degree of autonomy.

But the first message the Modi government sent out after assuming office was to push for abolishing the collegium system of appointment of High Courts and Supreme Court judges and replace it with the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). The Act was hurriedly carried through the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha in the very first session of Parliament, bringing the government in direct confrontation with the judiciary. It is another thing that the apex court set it aside, on the grounds that it sought to compromise the independence of judiciary.

The much maligned UPA government had done some yeoman by bringing in the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The BJP office at Ashoka Road used to have a dedicated RTI cell at its headquarters 11, Ashoka Road. There is a gentleman Vivek Kumar Garg, a publisher based in Daryagunj a lawyer and an RTI activist and trainer for the BJP, all rolled into one. In the good old days his job was to train the BJP fellows how to ferret out information which could put the UPA government in a spot and raise a hue and cry in and outside Parliament.

But now a Delhi journalist Pushp Sharma is being hounded by the Delhi Police for seeking and putting out information on how the Ayush ministry refuses to appoint Muslims as Yoga teachers. Sharma had sought through a series of RTI applications the number of Muslim yoga teachers and trainers hired for foreign assignments during the first World Yoga Day on June 21 last year to which the Ayush ministry purportedly replied that “As per government policy no Muslim candidate was invited, selected or sent abroad.”

Among some of the early acts of this government was the offloading of Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai while she was flying to London in January 2015 to make a presentation to the Indo-British All-Party Parliamentary Group regarding her campaign with local communities in Mahan and the alleged human rights violation at Mahan in Madhya Pradesh. She later told the media, “I was told by the immigration officer that I couldn’t fly out of the country, even though I had a valid six-month visa. When I asked him why, he refused to give me a reason. Upon insisting, he took me to his senior officer, who in turn told me that I was on a database issued by the Government of India of individuals who can’t fly out of the country.”

Soon after Emergency the then information and broadcasting minister in the Janata Party government LK Advani had disdainfully swiped the media saying when they were asked to bend they crawled (before Indira Gandhi). Today TV channels have overtaken newspapers in becoming the new opinion makers. Before the Emergency the Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP started an English daily from the Capital, called The Motherland with senior Sangh leader KR Malkhani as editor. It folded up soon after Emergency. But even Motherland put some semblance of fair and objective reporting.

But one can’t say the same for Modi’s favourite channels like ZeeNews whose owner a former rice trader Subhash Chandra flaunts his RSS connection and whose anchor Sudhir Chowdhary has been behind bars for attempting to blackmail the owners of Jindal Steel and Power Limited. Then you have Arnab Goswami who believes he alone represents the Nation, but choosing to hide from the nation that his father Manoranjan Goswami contested the 2009 general elections from his home state Assam on a BJP ticket thanks to his successful lobbying with Advani. And then there is Rajat Sharma; those seeking access to Modi are said to approach him more than any minister in Modi’s cabinet. That’s what the fourth pillar of democracy has been reduced to.

Institutions are run on the basis of accountability. But as soon as the BJP came to power it has given short shrift to any semblance of accountability. Why else would it choose a tainted cricketer like Sreesanth as its face for the coming Kerala assembly elections?

Modi’s track record clearly shows that he is a master of re-packaging and the master of political marketing with little or no regard to uphold the sanctity of democratic institutions.