AN INSIDE TAKE ON A ROAD MAP FOR THE CONGRESS
At last I can see signs of life in the Congress! Having lain inert for months, it’s starting to twitch. Unless I’m horribly mistaken, the dormant giant is stirring itself out of slumber. If it actually stretches, raises its head and attempts to stand up, that can only be good news.
Now, you can’t have failed to notice how a succession of Congressmen have started expressing concern about the state of the party and suggesting what needs to be done. Some have spoken before, like Shashi Tharoor and Abhishek Singhvi. Others have darkly hinted at why the Congress hasn’t appointed a successor to Rahul Gandhi. Sandeep Dikshit claims that senior leaders are “scared” in case the job goes to a rival. They prefer the continuation of an interim arrangement. But none has been so clear and comprehensive as Manish Tewari.
First, he disagrees with Tharoor and Dikshit that the Congress needs to immediately elect a new president. “There’s an overwhelming consensus in Congress that we need Sonia as president for the foreseeable future,” Tewari said in a recent interview he gave me for The Wire. Having steered the Congress to two election victories, she has the skills to tackle the present crisis. According to him, the majority of Congress Lok Sabha members of Parliament (MPS), general secretaries and working committee members agree. He says this is also true of the Youth Congress and the National Students Union of India. The only people he can’t speak for are the Congress’ Rajya Sabha MPS.
Second, Tewari says that the really urgent task is to amend the party’s philosophy so that it is in sync with the needs of the country on critical issues. The ones he has identified are secularism, nationalism, entitlement and privilege as well as the Congress’ economic thinking. He says it needs to convene a series of Pachmarhi-style conclaves for this purpose. The process could take a year or more. Sonia must continue till it is completed.
Tewari believes there’s a need to go back to the original constitutional definition of secularism as “a strict separation between church and State”. Over the years, it’s been reinterpreted as sarva dharma sambhav in the mistaken belief secularism is part of a 1,000-year-old Indian tradition. He insists it’s not. He says it’s an import from the West, deliberately introduced into the Constitution by BR Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. The problem with sarva dharma sambhav is that it dilutes secularism, and thus permits a slide towards the majoritarian positions of the Right. Only the restoration of the original interpretation can stem this descent.
On nationalism, Tewari says the challenge is to define a concept which is different to the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP)’S Hindutva-based vision but also more appealing. He suggests this can be done by borrowing and building on Barack Obama’s concept which is defined by the phrase ‘Together we are one”.
Tewari believes there is “a general revolt in the country, especially in the youth, against entitlement”. The Congress has to respond to this. He suggests it should start by distinguishing between entitlement and legacy. The Pilots, Scindias, Deoras and Chidambarams are products of legacy, not entitlement. The Congress must articulate this and convince the country.
However, it’s on how the Congress’ economic philosophy must change that Tewari is most forthright. The party ushered in economic liberalisation in 1991, but continued with socialist rhetoric for the next three decades. Consequently, there’s a huge mismatch between the economic policies it implemented and the language it speaks. This must be bridged if the Congress is to appeal to millions of young Indians who are aspirational.
I’m not sure how many Congressmen will endorse Tewari’s views although he makes a lot of sense. What’s more important is that his comments are an undeniable sign that the Congress is awakening and attempting to revive. I only hope this sleepyhead doesn’t doze off again.
The recent riots in Delhi were the latest in a series of the police failures to uphold the law during the demonstrations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or the CAA. These failures do not come as a surprise. They are the inevitable consequences of something I have written about in this column several times before — the relentless attack of politicians on the autonomy of institutions, and the failure of police officers, civil servants, public sector managers, and others to resist the attack. Writing about the Delhi riots, distinguished retired police officer Prakash Singh, now chairman of The India Police Foundation, said, “Police response invariably reflects the bias of the ruling party”. In his book Police and Politics another distinguished police officer, Kirpal Singh Dhillon, pointed out that the police, far from having gained autonomy at Independence to become a force which serves the public, remained a colonial force which served the government.
The most tragic outcome of the police handling of the anti-caa protests has been the death of 42 people including two policemen. The most blatantly political police act was unnecessarily barricading roads to spread chaos for commuters, thus creating hostility to the Shaheen Bagh sit-in, giving the Bharatiya Janata Party its main issue in the Delhi election campaign. After visiting the sit-in, former Chief Information Commissioner, Wajahat Habibullah, told the Supreme Court (SC) in an affidavit, “There are numerous roads that have no connection with the protests that have been barricaded by the police unnecessarily abdicating their responsibilities and duties and wrongly laying the blame on the protest.”
The police’s loss of their rightful autonomy and its impact on their functioning has long been recognised. In 1977, the Janata Party government established the National Police Commission. In its reports, it maintained that “political control over the police had led to gross abuses resulting in erosion of the rule of law and loss of police credibility as a professional organisation.” However, when the commission’s reports were published after Indira Gandhi’s return to power, they were sent to state governments by the Centre with the recommendation that no notice should be taken of observations about the political system or the functioning of the police because the commission was “unduly critical.”
Because, broadly speaking, no notice was taken of the National Police Commission’s criticisms and recommendations. In 2006, in the case of Prakash Singh v the Union of India, the SC issued six directives to state governments to ensure they did not exercise undue influence on the police. But Singh himself said, “the old order prevaileth.” This is born out by last year’s Status of Policing in India Report compiled by Common Cause and its partners. About a third of the police personnel interviewed had experienced political pressure on several occasions.
The most common punishment for the police who don’t bow to political pressure is suspension or transfer. The report quotes an example — the majority of the investigating staff of a police station in Himachal Pradesh were transferred for issuing challans to vehicles of local politicians. The officers who lead Delhi’s police can be transferred anywhere in India. Is it going too far to ask whether the fear of a punishment transfer, or worse, the humiliation of a suspension, delayed their controlling the rioting until the arrival of the National Security Adviser gave them a clear indication of the action the government wanted them to take?
THE MOST TRAGIC OUTCOME OF THE POLICE HANDLING OF THE PROTESTS HAS BEEN THE DEATH OF AT LEAST 42 PEOPLE