Is Modi now demonetising democracy?
The arrests and branding of rights activists as ‘urban Naxals’ are a reflection of the intolerance and polarisation prevailing in India
Narendra Modi has been prime minister of India for over four years. He has used his tenure as a laboratory to test the Constitution and surgically probed the institutions that make up the world’s largest democracy. The latest chilling saga was the arrests of human rights activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, activist-journalist Gautam Navlakha, and three others. Modi’s government is intolerant of dissent and used the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to dub the activists ‘urban Naxals’. It took the intervention of the Supreme Court to reduce the sentence to ‘house arrest’ and advise the government “that dissent was the safety valve in a democracy and if plugged the pressure cooker will explode”. Imagine the absolute power of the government to dub anyone speaking for the rights of tribals or Dalits, the most marginalised people in India, ‘urban Naxals’ and jail them.The government used its pliant media to spin a fake letter and an incredible plot to kill Modi. Interestingly, after finding the maximum traction in the cheerleaders of the media, government prosecutors did not the raise the alleged plot or the giveaway letter in the Supreme Court. The ‘plot to kill Modi’ has paid dividends to Modi since his Gujarat days. It has now got an all-India release. Modi conflates India with himself and his government and anyone opposing him is heaped with loaded pejoratives. It began with ‘sickular’, a twisted form of ‘secular’ much favoured by Modi’s troll army for any dissenter. Then it moved on to any dissent being dubbed ‘anti-national’ and now the term de jour ‘urban Naxal’.
Like all wannabe dictators, the Modi government has leached all significant terms of their original meaning. If Indira Gandhi, another prime minister, who imposed emergency and who seems to be Modi’s role model, was told by adoring sycophants that ‘Indira was India’, much the same thing is currently going on. It is worse as Arun Shourie points out that “Indira used the law to impose emergency — this diffused undeclared emergency is creeping and slowly taking away all freedoms”.
Modi seems to want an India in permanent attrition with its citizens. He creates new enemies and targets for the state to attack with authoritarian crackdowns. Polarisation against the Muslims was ensured by the beef law, and the so-called cow vigilantes had seeming state protection. Lynchings in the name of the cow are everyday affairs. The Dalits and tribals and those who fight for them are new targets. A list is doing the rounds, and I am proud to feature in it. But, the list is chillingly reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy crackdown in the US. It is now a crime in India to possess the well-known book What is History by E.H. Carr, which is part of the history syllabus in Delhi University. This was part of the Pune police’s evidence against Bharadwaj. Having read this book as part of my history honours course, I am now wondering am I a criminal in Modi’s new India?
A government that brands a university ‘anti-national’ as the government did with the well-respected Jawaharlal Nehru University is anti-thought. It is intellectually bankrupt to attack students as enemies of the state. From the universities, the Modi government targeted the most venerable pillar of a democracy — the judiciary. In an unprecedented event, four judges of the Supreme Court warned that “democracy was in danger”.
Modi had already wrecked the institutional autonomy of the Reserve Bank of India by his voodoo economics measure — demonetisation. He has now moved on to trying to demonetise democracy. Will Indian democracy survive? The jury is out.