Delhi’s political fishbowl has greeted Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s televised warning that prime minister Modi could get him killed with incredulity. “Has he lost his senses, or is this a clever political gambit in the intensifying the struggle between AAP and the BJP in Delhi”?

Its confusion is partly a product of the way Kejriwal’s statement has been reported—with barely a minute worth of excerpts on the TV channels overlaid with the anchor’s own incomprehension, and in short news items on the front pages of the major dailies. But Kejriwal’s full, nearly ten minute, televised statement is anything but delusional, and conveys an entirely different, chilling, message.

In brief it is this – the Modi government has been trying to incapacitate the AAP government in Delhi ever since its humiliating defeat in Delhi in December 2014, and has been failing miserably. But instead of desisting, it has only become more frantic, harming itself more and more with the electorate. Mr. Modi knows perfectly well that this is happening. So why is he persisting?

Kejriwal’s answer is deeply unsettling: it is because Narendra Modi’s actions are governed by an anger that mounts as his frustration grows. This is pushing him into acts that he knows can only harm his party. India’s national interest has already become a casualty: By imposing an oil blockade on Nepal when it was still struggling to recover from last year’s earthquake, Modi has destroyed India’s relationship with the only Hindu country in the world. He has also reversed a full decade of work by two Indian prime ministers to bring Pakistan and India closer together and end the Kashmir dispute.

Within the nation, Modi’s behavior towards the Delhi government has shown that, when angered, he may stop at nothing to have his way. Kejriwal dramatized this by saying that ‘he might even kill me’. But his deeper message was that when angered Modi showed scant respect for the law and the Constitution.

Is this political theatre a curtain raiser for the battle in Punjab and UP next year? Kejriwal would not be in politics if he did not have them at the back of his mind. But he knows that the credibility of everything he says depends upon his ability to prove his allegations against the BJP in Delhi. He has thrown caution to the winds because he knows that he is on firm ground.

Reports of the BJP’s onslaught on the Delhi state government have appeared in scattered, usually brief, news items spread over almost two years. The underlying issues have been further obscured by being presented to the public as a personal war between Kejriwal and Lieutenant Governor Najib Jung, i.e an opportunistic politician and an arrogant bureaucrat. It is only when we create a timeline for the onslaught that its full, systematic nature gets revealed.

The first conflict occurred as early as March 2015, within four weeks of the new government coming to power. When the chief secretary of Delhi went on leave for eleven days, instead of allowing Kejriwal to appoint his temporary substitute Jung forced Kejriwal to accept Shakuntala Gamlin, the Power secretary, even though this was to be an appointment for only eleven days. The pettiness of Jung’s action led to widespread speculation about its possible causes. But before long it became clear that this was the opening salvo in what was to be a long war.

The conflict was triggered by Kejriwal’s bid to end the rampant, predatory, extortion in all arms of government. During his first 49-day term in office in 2014 his invitation to the public to record any request for a bribe had brought extortion by the police, and municipal officials, down to a trickle.

So in February 2015 one of Kejriwal’s first acts was to set up a helpline where people could report such cases. Within the first 100 hours this received 32,489 calls. Of these 70 were backed with sufficient prima facie evidence to merit being passed on to the Anti-Corruption Branch. Of those 90 percent were against the police or officials of the three municipal corporations in Delhi. By April 18, the ACB had arrested 17 officials of the state government.

The Delhi police had watched these developments with mounting concern. Between April 5 and May 6 the helpline received another 125,000 calls. In an attempt to shelter the police from the deluge the police commissioner, B.S. Bassi, sent three impugned senior officers on forced leave.

But the conflict came to a head on May 1, when the ACB arrested a head constable for demanding a bribe of Rs 20,000 from a used car salesman. In a move that was without precedent the Delhi police immediately filed a case of kidnapping against the Anti Corruption Branch of the State government. Three days later the Police commissioner, B.S Bassi, phoned the head of the ACB and asked him not to forward the case to the vigilance department, but to transfer it to him for a departmental inquiry.

When the ACB chief, S.S Yadav, demurred, Jung demanded that the ACB should report to the LG and not to the state government’s vigilance department. When Kejriwal resisted this, Jung, in another move without precedent, called in a paramilitary force to surround and seize the ACB’s offices, and appointed Joint commissioner of Police Mukesh Meena in Yadav’s place. By choosing Meena, Jung waved a red rag in front of the bull, because Meena had earlier been entrusted with preparing a case against Kejriwal and the AAP for allegedly encouraging farmer Gajendra Singh to hang himself during an AAP rally at Jantar Mantar in August 2014.

Forced out of the ACB office and deprived of control over the police assigned to it, the Delhi government tried to operate the ACB from another location and get policemen from Bihar to staff it. Such transfers of cadres by one state government to another had been requested before and readily conceded, so Bihar CM Nitish Kumar quickly agreed and seconded five police persons to staff it. But Jung stepped in again, asserted that the ACB was now under him, and sent them back to Bihar. The Union Home ministry, unsurprisingly backed Jung, and accused Kejriwal of unnecessarily picking fights with the LG.

On May 21, 2015 the Union Home ministry followed this up with a notification that completely stripped the state government of its power to appoint, promote or transfer of officers in the state administration and vested all of these in the Lieutenant Governor.

A single judge bench of the Delhi High court ruled four days later that in doing so Jung had exceeded the authority given to him by the Constitution in the 69th amendment, which created Delhi State, but since he gave this opinion while hearing the bail application of the Head Constable in the May 1 bribery case, the Central government was able to get an injunction from the Supreme court to disregard it as it had been given on an unrelated matter. Knowing that public anger would serve his cause better, Kejriwal did not file an appeal against the Centre’s notification in the High court, and let the matter rest.

The May 21 notification took away the last shred of the Delhi government’s control over its officers. So when, seven months later on December 30, two senior officers belonging to the Delhi and Andaman Nicobar Service (DANICS) and employed in the State’s Home ministry refused to sign an order passed by the cabinet, stating that they had been given instructions to follow orders only from the LG, Kejriwal decided to suspend them.

Eight days earlier, the Home ministry had issued a notification that had been a year in the making, to protect IAS officers from summary transfers and suspensions by state governments by making these subject to review by the Union Home ministry. This was a much needed reform but did not apply to officers of the DANICS.

Despite that, within hours, the LG sent a letter to the Delhi chief secretary stating that the suspension was ‘illegal’ because it has been done “without the authority of Law”. The Union Home ministry also declared the suspension “ non est” i.e deemed not to exist, at the same time.

This completed the destruction of the executive powers of the Delhi administration. Emboldened by this notification, 200 officers of the DANICS cadre, supported by the IAS officers association, decided to go on a day’s leave en masse,in protest against the suspensions. Kejriwal condemned this as yet another conspiracy against Delhi’s people, but the Modi government did not stop there.

To rub still more salt into the wound the Home ministry began to transfer state government officials in critical positions without warning and without informing the chief minister and his cabinet, let alone seeking their permission. These included an officer who was supervising the establishment of CCTV cameras at critical places across the city to ensure the safety of women; another who was overseeing the regularization and development of unauthorized colonies and, most galling of all, officers from the personal staff of the chief minister.

And as if all this was not enough, over the past 18 months the CBI has called in no fewer than 150 state government officials for ‘questioning’ on issues it claims it is working on. All have been humiliated by being forced to wait from morning to night in the anterooms, and then being called in during the last hours of the day to be roundly abused and threatened.

Legislature paralysed

The centre’s lack of cooperation with Delhi is total. Fourteen bills passed by the cabinet have been sent to the Central government for assent, but the Centre hasn’t passed even one of them. These include three bills on education and three bills designed to enforce the law on minimum wages set for Delhi.

Administrative measures needed to implement government policy have also been routinely blocked by the LG. These include regularizing the employment of 15,000 temporary teachers; raising the land acquisition compensation in Delhi from the present Rs 54 lakhs per acre to the prevailing market price of Rs 3 crores, and engaging Akshaya Patra, the well-known NGO headed by Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy that runs midday meal schemes for 1.5 million children, to run Delhi’s mid-day meal programme.

Till the end of 2015, the Modi government had resorted only to non-cooperation to hamstring Kejriwal’s administration. On December 15, 2015 it went on the offensive. At 9.00 a.m. that morning the CBI entered the Delhi secretariat, sealed all the three floors of the building, allowed no one to enter any office, including that of the chief minister, and began to go through the office of his principal secretary, Rajendra Kumar, an officer whom Kejriwal had picked because he had one of the cleanest records in the IAS..

The CBI claimed that it had not entered the chief minister’s office, and had only raided Kumar’s adjoining office and residence to investigate a charge of graft in five contracts placed by the Delhi government for a value of Rs. 9 crores with a company to which Kumar was allegedly linked. But the action was hasty, and stank of malice, for what it chose to ignore was that the charge had been leveled by a disgruntled AAP member, Ashish Joshi, who had been unceremoniously expelled from the Delhi Dialogue Commission.

Despite the existence of a long record of insubordination, insult and acrimony between Joshi and his seniors in the Delhi Dialogue Commission, and therefore a possibility that Joshi’s charge was mala fide, the CBI carried out no preliminary investigation of the accusation before shutting down the secretariat, raiding Kumar’s office, and invading the highly sensitive files kept there.

This omission was all the more inexcusable because the full record of the reasons why Joshi had been sent back to his parent cadre, the Indian Post and Telecommunication Finance Service, was available in the Union ministry of telecommunications. Nor did the Home ministry explain why a minor case of graft had not been handled by the Delhi police, but sent directly to the CBI.

The conclusion is inescapable: the Centre simply did not want to forego another opportunity to harass and humiliate Kejriwal. All niceties of law and procedure were cast aside and, on July 5, Rajendra was arrested and taken to jail where he was sweated by the police for five days in the hope of wringing a confession out of him, followed by another 17 days in judicial custody. Since then the principal secretary’s post in the CM’s office has remained vacant because no IAS, or any other cadre, officer is willing to put his neck on the guillotine.

Attack on AAP MLAs

The Modi government has not confined its attack to the administration. In the past year the Delhi police have arrested no fewer than 11 out of the 67 AAP MLAs in the Delhi assembly on a wide variety of charges ranging from rioting, slapping a Jal board worker, sexual molestation and domestic violence, to cheating and land grabbing, rioting, assaulting a public servant, making casteist remarks against an NDMC worker, and instigating the burning of copy of the Quran.

Only one of these, against former Law minister Somnath Bharti, merited being taken seriously because it had been filed by his wife. At the other extreme are two cases, against Mehrauli MLA Naresh Yadav and Okhla MLA Amanatullah Khan, filed while I was interviewing Kejriwal on July 24–both bear the fingerprints of a frame-up by the Delhi police.

Yadav was arrested for having instigated the burning of a copy of the Quran, on the word of the three RSS activists who were actually caught committing this desecration. Why three RSS men should have heeded the exhortations of a Muslim belonging to a party that is the BJP’s sworn enemy, is a question the police did not bother to ask.

Khan was similarly arrested on the word of a woman who claimed that he had threatened her with rape and murder when she went to him to complain against power cuts in Okhla. Even more shocking than the arrest was the summary sentence passed upon him by a city court on the basis of the woman’s word alone, of one day in police custody. AAP posted a video that showed her telling someone on a mobile phone that the Officer in charge of the Okhla police station at Okhla had urged her to accuse Khan, but by then Khan had become a registered sexual offender in the records of the police.

There is no way of telling who convinced the prime minister, or the Home minister, that this would be a good way to discredit the Kejriwal government. But what no one believes is that the BJP government is doing this out of a sudden respect for the law. Modi had promised to cleanse Indian politics of crime and corruption, but their election affidavits show that 98 out of the BJP’s 281 MPs have criminal cases pending against them. Sixty three of these face indictments for one or more of the six most serious crimes in the Indian Penal code — murder or attempted murder, dacoity, arson, rape, kidnapping, and the illegal possession of arms.

One of Modi’s ministers, Nihalchand Meghwal, has been facing a charge of rape along with 16 others, since 2011, but this has not been sufficient to prevent Modi from inducting him into his council of ministers and refusing to release him to face prosecution in a Jaipur court.

And while the guilt or innocence of the 11 indicted AAP MLAs will be decided by the courts, few of the voters of Delhi could have failed to notice this strange concentration of crime in one small party in one small state. Against 70 in Delhi, there are 4,050 MLAs in the remaining Vidhan Sabhas of the country. The total number of cases registered against them during the past 18 months does not add up to 11.

Had Modi’s persecution of Kejriwal’s government been the only example of his disregard for the niceties of the law and the constitution, it could have been ascribed to personal enmity and overlooked. But from his government’s strenuous efforts to exonerate and rehabilitate the Gujarat policemen indicted for the killings of Ishrat Jahan, Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Tulsiram Prajapati, to the framing of a case against Kanhaiya Kumar and the physical assault on him, as well as on journalists and JNU professors, by RSS affiliated lawyers who roam free today, to the constant drumbeat of persecution of Indian Muslims, there is a pattern emerging that bodes ill for India’s future.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and author of Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger, Can China and India Dominate the West?

Fake encounters have become common but India needs to get back to rule of law, however weak and slow it may be.

DG Vanzara in a file photo. Credit: PTI

In her 22 minute televised press conference attacking the UPA government’s decision to revise the home ministry’s affidavit to the Gujarat high court on the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing, Union Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman hurled not one but two accusations against the Congress. The first was that it had ‘created a charade’, of an innocent girl being killed in cold blood by a brutalised police, when it knew from its own intelligence inputs that she had been a member of the Lashkar-e Taiba cell that had been sent from Pakistan to kill chief minister Narendra Modi. As my article in The Wire showed last week this was pure political jousting.

But in the furore that followed Sitharaman’s second, more serious, allegation slipped into peoples’ minds through the cracks created by the first. This was that by unleashing the CBI on the case, and allowing it to interrogate officers and men of the Gujarat police endlessly in their search for evidence with which to discredit the Modi government, the UPA had divided and demoralised the police and security agencies, and harmed the country’s security.

To make this accusation Sitharaman glossed over the fact that the CBI had had to be brought in because the reaction of the Gujarat government to affidavits presented to the Gujarat High Court by two ‘whistleblowers’ in the government, S.P. Tamang, chief metropolitan magistrate of Ahmedabad, and Satish Verma, member of the Special Investigation Team set up by the Gujarat high court after it received Tamang’s report, showed that it had no intention of indicting its own police personnel.

Both had presented evidence to the court that the four had been killed in cold blood at least six hours earlier, and that whatever the other three might have been, Ishrat Jahan could not possibly have been a Lashkar terrorist.

Debate on faked encounters

When Gandhinagar took no action it left the Centre with two choices: turn a blind eye, or turn the case over to the CBI. It started out to do the former but in 2009, with faked encounters in Punjab, Assam and Kashmir already a subject of anguished debate in the country and media empowered by satellite TV and internet, this option was closed. Embarrassing Modi was a bonus.

Why did Gandhinagar make itself complicit in the killings? The short answer is that by 2009 faked encounters had become a part of India’s unwritten code of criminal justice. When the Ahmedabad CBI court dismissed the CBI’s charges against former home minister Amit Shah, he did not say “God and our courts are just, I have been vindicated”. He said , “these accusations were politically motivated. There have been far more encounters in other states. Gujarat has had the fewest encounters, and also has one of the best records in maintaining peace.” Why, he asked in short, were we singled out?

However repugnant one may find his reasoning, it would be less than just to dismiss it out of hand, because ‘encounters’ have been the Indian State’s way of dealing with dangerous criminals and insurgents since well before independence. In the 1920s Sultana Daku was caught and hanged by the British under due process of law, but large numbers of others simply disappeared. After independence, in its half century long bid to clear the Chambal ravines the Madhya Pradesh Police killed more than 500 dacoits. A majority, police sources told me then, were killed after being captured. It was to avoid this fate that others surrendered.

In 1980 and 1981, during the chief ministership of V.P. Singh, the UP police killed more than 2,000 dacoits in Uttar Pradesh. The newspapers of the time were rife with accusations of fake encounters and the deaths of innocents. But that campaign did curb the menace of dacoity in the state and open the way for its development.

Integral part of counter insurgency

In more recent years fake encounters have become an integral part of counter insurgency operations in Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East. In Punjab, in particular, this policy was forced upon the police by the acute shortcomings of the criminal justice system, and by the insurgents practice of killing judges, and the families of high profile policemen to paralyse the this criminal justice system.

The insurgencies have all but ended, but the practice of letting the police be the judges and executioners of persons considered too dangerous to allow back onto the streets, has taken on a life of its own. Today, dozens of bodies are being recovered from the state’s irrigation canals every week. According to Inderjit Singh Jaijee, the human rights activist who brought this to light, many are farmers who have committed suicide, but the majority are what he terms ‘missing people’. At a time when Punjab is being overwhelmed by drug smugglers with powerful political patrons, the possibility that many of these are captured drug smugglers cannot be ruled out.

Initially Kashmir suffered less from the disease of fake encounters than Punjab. But, contrary to what Kashmiris had expected, fake encounters, extortion and other crimes committed by the police multiplied after 1996, when the elected government shifted the responsibility of ‘mopping up’ the remaining ‘terrorists’ from the security forces to the police. Today it is their frequent misuse of power in the rural areas, and continuation of the bestial practice, also adopted in Punjab, of awarding prize money to those who bring in the heads of alleged terrorists, that is mainly responsible for the resurgence of terrorism in South Kashmir.

In Gujarat, the growing disquiet in civil society was not stoked, much less manufactured, by the Congress. It became the focus of civil society’s disquiet because none of the conditions that had made people condone the shortcuts employed by other state governments existed there. Gujarat did not face an insurrection, and the handful of home grown and imported terrorists who came there after the 2002 riots had not even tried to kill judges or policemen’s family members.

Turf wars between smugglers

It had a large and variegated Muslim population with a prosperous middle class component. The communal riots that it had experienced every few years since 1969 had been triggered by turf wars between rival gangs of smugglers and illicit liquor vendors, and not religious passion. Had the riots of 2002 not taken place the state would in all probability, have remained entirely free of terrorism and encounters, whether genuine or fake.

The Godhra train burning and the riots that followed changed everything for they were the very first to be covered by television. Previously people had only read circumscribed reports. This time millions actually saw the burnt bogey of the Sabarmati express and the corpses being carried out from it. Nearly 2,000 people died in the riots that followed, and for the first time the killing was fanned by pure communal hatred.

Without waiting for an enquiry Modi and his cabinet jumped to the conclusion that the Godhra train burning was the work of Muslim terrorists and adopted a pro-active policy of prevention in anticipation of terrorist reprisals.

The custodial killings that occurred between 2002 and 2005 ,for which 32 police officers and men await trial today, were the outcome of that policy. They were therefore not only morally indefensible, but actually increased the threat of a future communal insurrection by showing Muslim youth how casually their fundamental right to life could be taken away from them.

Nirmala Sitharaman is right when she says that the controversy over the Gujarat encounter killings has demoralised the security apparatus of the country and seriously weakened it’s security. But curiously enough, the officers and men indicted for them blame the Modi government, and not the Congress for their plight.

Vanzara’s letter

Their monumental sense of betrayal was captured by D.G. Vanzara, director-general of Gujarat’s anti-terrorism force and widely known as its ‘encounter specialist’, in the letter of resignation from the India Police Service, that he wrote from jail on September 1 2013. Forfeiting all his post-retirement benefits Vanzara wrote:

“To the best of my knowledge, nowhere in any part of the country, such a big number of police officers were/are arrested and continuously being kept in the jails for such a long period of time except in the state of Gujarat. The most notable part of the whole episode is that they are made to suffer in the jails, inspite of the fact that they had been, and are, loyal soldiers of this government who fought incessant war against Pakistan inspired terrorism with complete honesty, integrity and sincerity without falling prey to any of the mundane temptations…. 

With the passage of time, I realized that this government was not only not interested in protecting us but it also has been clandestinely making all efforts to keep me and my officers in the jail so as to save its own skin from CBI on one hand and gain political benefits on the other…..

‘I, therefore, would like to categorically state in the most unequivocal words that the officers and men of Crime Branch, ATS and Border Range, during the period of years between 2002 to 2007, simply acted and performed their duties in compliance of the conscious policy of this government … we have simply implemented the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from the very close quarters.” 

Vanzara’s letter contains no tinge of remorse, but also none of communal rancour:

“A monstrous episode of Godhra train burning and equally horrible post-Godhra riots in Gujarat provided a pretext to Pakistan based terrorist outfits like Let, JeM and D gang under the direct supervision of ISI, to “convert Gujarat into another Kashmir” by exploiting the sentiments of the muslims all over the world.”

Listing 14 bomb blasts, five assassination attempts and two fidayeen attacks on the Rath Yatra and the Swaminarayan temple at Akshardham, he concludes: “I can say with pride that my officers and men not only successfully prevent(ed) Gujarat from becoming another Kashmir, but were also instrumental in providing a solid atmosphere of durable peace and security in the state”. 

The bulk of the letter is a violent diatribe against the Modi government, and Amit Shah in particular, for having abandoned his police force when it most needed their support.

“This government suddenly became vibrant and displayed a spur of sincere activities only when Shri Amitbhai Shah, former MOS, Home, was arrested by CBI. It (engaged) Shri Ram Jethmalani, the most learned, senior most and highest paid advocate of India … and got him released on regular bail within (the) record time of 3 months of his imprisonment.

In contrast, when I, along with Rajkumar Pandian and Dinesh M.N, was arrested by the CID Crime, forget about providing the legal services, nobody from the government bothered even to provide a lip service to us or to our family members.  (The) Gujarat police … used to be one of the finest … in the country till the coronation of this government in Gandhinagar. Today the same proud police … stands totally shattered and demoralized (by)….. the continuous betrayal of jailed police officers since last six years”. 

Gujarat is not the only state in which the police feel betrayed. Within weeks of the end of the Khalistan insurgency in 1993 the Punjab police was assailed by a spate of indictments for carrying out fake encounters. The feeling of betrayal this generated in the police was highlighted when a senior superintendent of Police, A.S Sandhu, threw himself in front of a train to express his protest.

Re-instating indicted policemen

Today the Modi government is frantically trying to make amends by bailing out and re-instating indicted police officers. P.P. Pandey, police commissioner of Ahmedabad in 2004, was not merely released but is now the director general of police in Gujarat. Former assistant commissioner of police ( crime) in Ahmedabad, N.K. Amin, has been made the superintendent of Police for Mahisagar district.

Vanzara, who was released on bail in December 2014 on condition that he did not enter Gujarat, has been allowed to do so . He was greeted with flowers on his return to his village by no less eminent a person that DGP P.P Pandey, and is now being wooed by the BJP to join politics, while still being indicted for murder.

Modi does not seem to realise that the further the government goes down this road the more will India become a country that is not only without law, but one that flaunts its disregard for the very concept of law. When this realisation sinks in abroad, India will become not only an economic but also a political pariah.

This must not happen. The first requirement for containing and repairing the damage that has already been done is for all political parties to admit their culpability and jointly resolve never again to allow anyone in police custody to be killed, or punished in any other way, than through the due process of the law. Existing laws, like the National Security Act, allow incarceration for long periods. Prisoners deemed to be too dangerous to be incarcerated in their home state can be sent to jails in distant parts of the country. If it is deemed necessary to protect judges and witnesses, trials can also be held in these locations, and conducted in camera.

None of this involves rocket science. If it hasn’t been done so far—if government after government has continued to take the easy route of killing inconvenient prisoners, it is because clever lawyers have made a fine art out of subverting justice by raising procedural issues that make trials last forever. As Pakistan is showing with its 21st constitutional amendment and military tribunals, this too can be got around, although at some cost in terms of fairness and equity. But some legal process, however restricted, is a huge improvement over sanctioned, extra-judicial murder.

Raising a ruckus over P. Chidambaram’s “second affidavit” in the Ishrat Jahan case will not make the truth about encounter killings go away

The bodies of Ishrat Jahan and others who were allegedly shot dead in police encounters

Sixty-nine years after its birth, India’s democracy is facing a mortal threat. A government – and a political party – with little respect for the law is using the law to harass and humiliate its political opponents. It may not be the only government in India to have done so. But it is the first Central government to do so, and it is pursuing its vendetta with a disregard for consequences that is threatening to tear the seams of democracy asunder.

In less than two years it has dragged Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, its principal opponents in the nation, and in Delhi, into court on flimsy charges that no self-respecting judge should have entertained. It has sent the police into Jawaharlal Nehru University, something no previous government had done, and arraigned JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on the basis of a doctored video that its own propaganda factories have produced; it has kept the Patidar agitation leader in Gujarat, Hardik Patel in jail for 80 days, repeatedly denying him bail.

It is now contemplating dragging former home minister P. Chidambaram into court on the charge of having changed an affidavit the Union home ministry submitted to the Gujarat high court on the Ishrat Jahan encounter in 2009 in order to strengthen the case being made by the Central Bureau of Investigation against the then Gujarat home minister Amit Shah and a score of indicted Gujarat police officers and men. The Modi government’s opportunity to do this arose on February 12, 2016, when the 26/11 mastermind, David Headley, stated – while ‘cooperating’ with Indian interrogators – that the 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan was not an innocent bystander but a member of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Armed with Headley’s statement and a junior home ministry official’s claim that he had been coerced by his senior into preparing the second affidavit, Union home minister Rajnath Singh has sought to suggest that there was no fake encounter, that Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber and had been killed in a genuine shootout, and that Chidambaram fabricated evidence in order to create a case against Modi and Amit Shah.

Dangerously inflammatory statement

Union commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman has gone a long step further and claimed that the purpose of the changed affidavit was to invite ‘the enemy’ to launch more terrorist attacks to assassinate Narendra Modi because they cannot fight him politically. “They are happy to play with the enemy… they wanted to quietly watch a terror plot bloom in order to eliminate a political opponent.” she said in a carefully prepared, 22 minute televised statement.

https://youtu.be/lAGW99Yuql4

If this allegation were true, the Congress would be guilty of having violated the first principle of democracy – the replacement of the ballot with bullets. It would therefore provide a moral justification for the BJP to abandon democratic politics as well, and resort to brute force to destroy its opponents.

Sitharaman’s accusation therefore needs to be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny possible. If it cannot be substantiated, it will rank as the single-most dangerously inflammatory statement made by any politician in India’s 69 years of independence.

Fortunately this allegation fails to cross the very first hurdle it encounters: a complete absence of motive. Had Chidambaram revised the first affidavit in late 2013, there would have been room to doubt his motives, for the Congress was clearly on its way out and the BJP had chosen Modi as its prime ministerial candidate. But in September 2009, when the home ministry filed its revised affidavit, the Congress had just won a huge victory in the national elections four months earlier, and the next Gujarat state election – where it would have to pit itself against Modi once more – was still more than three years away.

The BJP had lost a sixth of its 2004 voter base in 2009 and Modi had yet to replace L.K. Advani as its national leader. The economy was also at its peak, with GDP growing by more than 9%, industrial growth close to 14% and employment growing by 7 million a year. Inflation was also close to zero. So what could the Congress conceivably have gained from inciting the assassination of Narendra Modi?

Sound reason for revising the Ishrat affidavit

Second, the sequence of events in 2009 shows that there was a perfectly legitimate reason for the home ministry to order the filing of a second affidavit on September 29.

Its first affidavit, submitted at the beginning of August, had dismissed the LeT’s later retraction of its claim that Ishrat Jahan was one of theirs, and firmly backed the Gujarat government’s claim that there had been a genuine shootout. But five weeks later, on September 7, Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang submitted a 243-page report on the killing to the Gujarat high court, prepared on his own initiative, that made a very convincing case that the four alleged terrorists had been kidnapped and brought to Ahmedabad a few days earlier, and killed in cold blood a day before the alleged encounter.

The crucial piece of evidence he cited was the pathologist’s finding that when the bodies were examined, they were already in rigor mortis, which had set in about six hours before the reported time of the encounter. Tamang gave a two-page list of police officers and constables who had been involved in the fake encounter.

More convincing even than the evidence he adduced were the precautions that he took to keep his findings secret from the entire city. In an unprecedented departure from practice, Tamang did not employ a stenographer, and did not use a computer, but wrote the entire 243-page report in long-hand. Tamang clearly did not trust even his personal staff and the inviolability of his computer. There can be no more eloquent testimony of the atmosphere of terror that the Gujarat police had created to keep its misdeed secret.

The Tamang report and the circumstances in which it was prepared may have delighted the Congress, but it also made it impossible for the home ministry to keep ignoring the LeT’s retraction of its initial claim. The revised affidavit did not reverse any conclusion it had reached in the first. It simply removed sections that referred to Ishrat Jahan.

Did the BJP only seize the opportunity created by David Headley’s identification of Ishrat Jahan as a suicide bomber? Or did it create it? Conspiracy theories are inherently repugnant but in this case the second possibility cannot be ruled out.

Headley’s confession has been accepted as gospel far too readily. “Jahan was an LeT member, Pakistani-American Headley said in his sensational disclosure while deposing before Special TADA Court Judge … on Thursday”, one online journal asserted.

In fact he did nothing of the sort. The video of this portion of Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam’s interrogation, uploaded to YouTube, shows that Headley did not volunteer the admission. Nikam led him to it by the nose, asking no fewer than four leading questions, to name Ishrat Jahan a terrorist. The last two of which were “do you remember her name” and “was it Noorjahan Begum, or Ishrat Jahan, or Mumtaz Begum”.

Noorjahan and Mumtaz are names rarely, if ever, given to girls today because they were the titles, not names, of the wives of Mughal emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan. Noorjahan’s real name was Mehr-un-Nissa, and Mumtaz Mahal’s was Arjumand Banu. What is more, begum is a form of address reserved for married women. There is no possible way David Headley would not have understood what Nikam wanted him to say. How he, and his former ISI handlers in Rawalpindi, must have chuckled when the storm broke!

What is the compulsion that has made the BJP, if not coax David Headley into indicting Ishrat Jahan as a terrorist, then leap upon it a full 12 years after she was killed? The answer is that Ishrat Jahan’s is not the only fake encounter to have taken place in Gujarat during the tenure of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Thirty-two officers and men of the Gujarat police, including six senior officers, are either out on bail or have been languishing in jails for up to eight years, waiting to be tried for no fewer than five separate fake encounter cases.

When these come up in court, as they must one day, they will reveal that between 2002 and 2007 the crime branch of the Ahmedabad police had become a “killing machine” (a term senior New York Times correspondent Mark Mazzetti had coined for the CIA) not only for terrorists from Pakistan but also for eliminating other criminals whom the rickety and deadlocked judicial system could not punish, and, in some cases, even people unconnected to wrongdoing of any kind who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nothing reveals the damage that the five cases together can inflict more clearly than the “encounter killing” of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in November 2005.

Killing of Sohrabuddin

Sohrabuddin and his accomplice Tulsiram Prajapati were straightforward gangsters and assassins for hire. Both faced a number charges of criminal extortion from marble mine owners in Rajasthan and Gujarat, arms smuggling, and murder. According to the CBI, Sohrabuddin was taken off an interstate bus, along with his wife Kausar bi and Prajapati, taken to a farmhouse outside Ahmedabad, and killed in a staged ‘encounter’ – allegedly as a terrorist who was planning to assassinate Modi.

Three days later Kausar bi was strangled, taken to Illol village in Gujarat – the home village of D.G.Vanzara, director general of the state anti-terrorist task force – and cremated there. (The killing was later admitted by the attorney general of Gujarat before the Supreme Court). Prajapati, who was a crime branch informer, was initially spared.

No one doubted the police version of the Sohrabuddin killing till, a year later, drunken police officers boasted about it in front of a journalist, Prashant Dayal, who published a well-researched report in a Gujarat daily, Divya Bhaskar. Four weeks later, on December 28, Prajapati was killed in another staged encounter whose details were recounted in excruciating detail by the CBI in its charge sheet against Amit Shah.

These were the three ‘encounter killings’ for which the CBI indicted Amit Shah – then Modi’s home minister in Gujarat, in 2010. Dayal believed that the Gujarat police had carried out a Rs. 2 crore supari – contract killing – of Sohrabuddin, then killed his wife to silence her, and killed Prajapati in order to eliminate the sole remaining witness.

In its indictment of Shah, the CBI presented evidence of Amit Shah’s involvement. It also submitted cell-phone records, and audio and video tapes that, seemingly, implicated Shah in the conspiracy to eliminate Tulsiram Prajapati. Shah was arrested, but immediately granted bail and remained the home minister of Gujarat. But a dozen officers and men were sent into judicial custody.

This is simply not the kind of publicity that Modi can afford, either as the leader of the BJP, or as the prime minister of India. Nor is it, in the Information Age, something that India can. For the plain truth, which public trials of the indicted officers and men will reveal, is that there is hardly a state in the country where fake encounters have not become the police’s way of dealing with insurgents, terrorists and criminals.

This is the dirtiest side of India’s corruption-ridden democracy. The BJP’s leaders knows trading accusations with rival political parties is not the way to exonerate themselves. They also know high-profile trials that expose this pattern to the world  – and their own culpability – need to be avoided. The Narendra Modi-Amit Shah strategy is to try and contain the damage by making the encounter cases simply  disappear. That is not going to happen. What could disappear, if this no-holds-barred, law-be-damned effort continues, however, is democracy itself.

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former adviser to V.P Singh.

The RSS is sparing no effort to create a sense of siege among Muslims; it is stirring this cauldron of despair at the nation’s peril

Sword-bearing RSS volunteers march past portraits of KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar. Credit: Shome Basu

Even as Prime minister Modi lauds the plurality of India and the profound peacefulness of Sufi Islam, the RSS and its cohorts have been sparing no effort to drive a deep wedge between the Hindus and Muslims in our country.

A single day’s newspaper tells us that the student Umar Khalid found, while being questioned in jail, that his interrogators had already decided his guilt before they talked to him, because he was a Muslim whose father had been an activist of the now banned SIMI. Anirban Bhattacharya was repeatedly cajoled by his interrogators to get all charges against him dropped by pinning all the blame for the February 9 sloganeering on Khalid.

Waris Pathan, a Muslim MLA, In Maharashtra is suspended from the state assembly for refusing to chant Bharat Mata ki Jai. On the same day four Kashmiri students are arrested in Rajasthan because someone reported to the police that they were eating beef in their hostel.

In Jharkhand, two Muslim cattle traders are murdered by a gang of criminals, and the public and the media immediately conclude that the killers belong to a cow protection group.

In Delhi the BJP MP from Agra, Ramshanker Katheria, (who is a member of Mr Modi’s council of ministers, no less ) publicly warns the UP state government that Agra will see a ‘different kind of Holi’ if cases lodged against one BJP and two local VHP ‘leaders’ for making hate speeches against Muslims, comparing them to ‘rakshasas’ who need to be cornered and destroyed’, are not withdrawn before the festival.

All this news appearing on a single day evinces no shock because, from Ghar Wapsi, to ‘Love Jihad‘, to throwing beef into a temple, to killing Mohammad Akhlaq, to changing the name of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi, such inflammatory statements and actions have become routine in the past 21 months.

Intimidating dissenters

What is relatively new is the brazen attempt to intimidate anyone – like Kanhaiya Kumar or Teesta Setalvad – who has the courage to take up cudgels in defence of the freedom of speech, thought, justice and legal process; the administration of punishment to them through harassment, torture and beatings while in judicial custody, the cancellation of licenses and denial of access to funds.

Beneath all of this runs one leitmotif : The Muslims are not ‘us’. In anthropological terms, they are the alien ‘other’ and don’t belong in a resurgent Hindu India. The Muslim conquest of India was an aberration, and its impact on Hindu culture must be erased.

The damage was real, but was done aeons ago by rulers and generals now long dead. What does the Sangh parivar hope to gain from making people who are not even their lineal descendants pay a price today? Does it think that the community will take this lying down forever? And if it does not, can India be purged of 190 million Muslims?

No matter what its motives are, if it persists it will push the country into civil war and force it to disintegrate, as the states in the south and east scramble to insulate themselves from the virus being exported ­­­from the north. Instead of a Hindu rashtra India will become the world’s largest failed state.

This may sound alarmist but beneath the surface calm, changes have been taking place in the structure of the Indian economy and society that have been weakening our collective faith in the possibility of a prosperous future. These are being felt most acutely by the youth, who have their entire lives ahead and do not see how they will traverse it. The need of the hour is to reverse these changes so that they can begin to hope again. The BJP/RSS is doing the exact opposite.

Muslims’ worsening plight

Partition made the first serious dent in India’s syncretic culture by planting resentment and suspicion in Hindus, and a wary defensiveness in Indian Muslims. With the pre-partition Muslim elite having largely opted for Pakistan, the community desperately needed educational and economic assistance to recover their place in Indian society. But a bitter legacy of Partition was the Congress’s adamant refusal to even consider the reservation of jobs and seats in schools and colleges for Muslims, as this was the tool the British had used to split the Indian social fabric.

V.P Singh was among the first to recognise the long-term damage this had done. He understood that a rural peasantry newly empowered by the Green Revolution was demanding reservation in government jobs and colleges not for the sake of a handful of poorly paid sinecures, but to create an urban base from which their children and grandchildren could acquire the education that was the only avenue to the modern world.

But he too shied away from making an overt commitment to the Muslims on this incendiary issue. As a result, in the 1990s the rate of urbanisation among the OBCs surged ahead, while that of the Muslims actually declined. As the Kundu commission noted, a process of ‘exclusionary urbanization’ set in.

The full impact of six decades of neglect was laid bare by the Sachar committee, which found in 2006 that not only was Muslim enrolment in secondary schools and colleges well below their share of the population, but their representation in salaried jobs was less than two-thirds of the national average.

The imbalance was even worse in the Central government where despite being 14.4% of the population Muslims filled only 4 percent of the senior police and paramilitary posts, only 3% of the IAS, 1.8% of the IFS and perhaps most importantly, only 6% of the posts in the constabulary. The situation was equally grim in the universities, banks and central Public sector undertakings.

The UPA government responded to the shock the report gave it by mooting an Equal Opportunities Commission and creating a Ministry of Minority (note, not Muslim) Affairs. But six years later, no perceptible dent has been made in the structural disadvantages of the Muslim community.

A study of actual disbursements till the end of March 2011, showed that of the allocation till then of Rs 3,780 crores for minority concentration districts, only Rs 846 crores actually reached the districts and only Rs 131 crores had reached the intended beneficiaries. Despite this, when the Ministry of Minority Affairs asked for Rs 58,000 crores in the 12thplan, it was allocated only Rs. 17,323 crores.

The Muslims fared no better in raising concessional bank loans, for these were monopolized by Sikhs and Christians who secured 47% of the funds when they made up 21% of the minorities. Muslims who made up 69% got only 44%.

It would have been surprising indeed if being at a perennial disadvantage had not created dissatisfaction, and a feeling of being discriminated against in Muslim youth who found their path into modern India severely constricted. Wahhabi Islam backed by an abundance of Saudi money and flashy new mosques offered a new sense of purpose and source of hope. Gradually, but relentlessly, it began to erode the Sufi base of traditional Islam in India.

But even this would not have not have dented communal harmony had Pakistan not intervened. Determined to take revenge for the splitting of the country in 1971, it began to actively encourage insurgency and dispatch of terrorists across the borders of Punjab and Kashmir.

As all governments that have faced armed uprisings have learned, state responses to terrorism tend invariably to be indiscriminate. In India, this has meant sudden descents upon Muslim neighbourhoods, sustained, unfriendly interrogations, and an automatic presumption of Muslim involvement even when, as in the Malegaon idgah bomb blast and the burning of the Samjhauta express, the victims are all Muslims. The casual ‘elimination’ of terrorists in staged ‘encounters’ sowed fear and anger, especially in young Muslims just when they had begun to realise that the economic resurgence of the country was passing them by. Quite suddenly, therefore, the ground beneath their feet began to quake.

The Gujarat riots gave a new twist to the  fear of young Muslims because for the first time in their lives they felt that the state had not protected, but actually targeted them. Ahmedabad, therefore, created India’s first home-grown Muslim Islamist terrorists.

Roots of Indian syncretism

Indian syncretism has survived despite this because it is based upon an easy acceptance of diversity.  In the mosaic that is India, Tamils, Bengalis, Mizos, Nagas, Manipuris, Odias, Punjabis, Parsis, Bohras, Memons, Christians – everyone feels different. We are comfortable with being different and demonstrate it by unselfconsciously wearing different headgear, different cuts of beard and moustache, different lengths of hair, even different lengths of pyjamas. We wear different clothes, build little temples, mosques, and shrines to Jesus or one of the Sikh gurus, wherever we wish. We spread prayer mats on a busy road at midday in order to pray, and some of us even walk down the street wearing no clothes at all.

This comfort with diversity makes India the envy of European nation states which were created through enforced cultural homogeneity. But this is what the RSS mistakes as weakness, and is bent upon erasing.

The Muslim community has responded to their Muslim baiting by consolidating its vote and building closer ties with the opposition. But it is defenceless against the economic impact that programmes like the ban on beef, and the liberalisation of the economy are having upon its future in a period of unending jobless growth.

There are 3,600 legal and 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses in India, that export 2.4 million tonnes of beef and buffalo meat valued at 4.8 billion dollars. The ban on cow slaughter is threatening the livelihood of anything up to half a million families, the majority of whom are Muslims. While the ban on beef exports has received a great deal of attention all over the world, its even more deadly impact on the leather industry has been all but ignored. Maharashtra’s ban on the slaughter of all cattle and its spread to several other states has starved the industry of hides. According to the industry, by June 2015, 98 tanneries had shut down in Kanpur alone and 150,000 workers had lost their jobs. Here too most were Muslims.

The ban has also affected farmers and cattle herders – Dalits, and OBCs – to whom aged cattle and male calves rendered surplus by the spread of tractors and automotive transport, have been an important hedge against sudden financial need or drought. Today, as large parts of the Deccan are reeling under one of the worst droughts they have ever experienced, the price of cattle has crashed and this source of succour has been cut off.

Perhaps the most serious and least noticed setback has come from the ‘scissors’ effect on the profitability of the  power loom industry from falling tariffs on imports after economic liberalization, and the simultaneous, relentless annual increases in the minimum sale price of cotton decreed by the state governments. While this is killing the power loom industry all over the country, in Maharashtra whose two centres, Bhiwandi and Malegaon, account for three quarters of the power loom industry, the vast majority of the workers are Muslims.

These are three exemplars of an even more terrifying crisis that Muslims in particular face. This is the assault upon the entire artisanal sector of industry – fine textiles, embroidery and handicrafts, by cheap imports from China. From Kashmiri carpets, Pashmina and Jamawar shawls, to Lucknowi Chikan, Hyderabadi Bidriware and  Kancheepuram and Banarasi saris, all are facing shrinking markets as mill-made alternatives, domestic and foreign, push their products out.

Muslims are the prime sufferers in every case because only 23% of them have salaried jobs against 34% of the Indian work force. Three-quarters are therefore self-employed, as against two-thirds of all Indian workers. What is worse, while many of the Hindu workers, both salaried and self employed, own small pieces of land in their villages, very few of the Muslims do. They have, therefore, nothing to fall back upon when their traditional skills become redundant.

So let us see what future a typical 18-year-old 12th pass Muslim boy faces. He finds it difficult to get into the army; he will almost certainly not get taken into the police. He is unlikely to qualify for a lower grade clerical post in the government, given that 52% of these are already reserved for OBCs and Dalits ; his schooling has not equipped him for any of the traditional skills his family excelled in, and in any case these skills being made redundant. So how long will he be able to hold out when a recruiter offers him 400 dollars a month to join a jihad somewhere in the world, even India, to ‘save Islam’? The RSS is stirring this cauldron of despair at the nation’s peril.

Prem Shankar Jha is a Delhi-based author and commentator

Kanhaiya Kumar’s battle cry that the fate of India lies in the hands of its poor and oppressed may turn out to be more true than even he has bargained for.

Students within the JNU campus celebrating the granting of an interim bail and subsequent release of their union leader Kanhaiya Kumar, March 3, 2016. Credit: Shome Basu

What began on February 9 as a small protest meeting at JNU to mark the hanging of Afzal Guru has ballooned into a struggle that is without precedent in the country’s history. This is not the first  nationwide polarisation we have seen. Remember the debate over the Indo-US nuclear deal? Or Anna Hazare’s fasts unto death over the Lokpal Bill in 2011? But this polarisation is different. Those had occurred over what India should do, but this is over what India should be. The struggle that has begun now is over defining the soul of India.

For sixty nine years India has defined itself as a pluralist, secular, ethnically heterogeneous country  that has built its nationhood by accommodating diversity. This is now being challenged in earnest by the BJP or, to be more precise, the RSS, (the distinction between the two that was so sharp in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s years has all but disappeared). The RSS has begun to fear that far from staying in power  for ten years, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had confidently predicted shortly after the 2014 elections, the BJP may well lose its majority in 2019. This has left it far too little time  to implement its long cherished agenda for uprooting India from its pluralist-secular moorings and turning it into a “Hindu Nation”.

Its fears might run even deeper for after its shock defeats in Delhi and Bihar, it cannot be unaware that it may meet the same fate in Punjab and UP next year as the consolidation of the opposition that took place in Bihar is likely to be repeated there too. Those defeats, were they to take place, would turn the Modi government into a lame duck administration for the next two years. This is a possibility that the Sangh Parivar does not seem willing to contemplate.

The many attacks

How high the stakes for it are is revealed by how far it is prepared to go. Conspiracy theories should be treated with great scepticism, but everything that has happened since February 9 has the stamp of premeditation. When the Union Home Ministry decided to arrest JNU Students’ Union (JNSU) leader Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition after four full days to search for seditious matter in his 23-minute address to JNUSU, it did so on the basis of a single Zee TV video clip  aired on February 10 that purported to show that students at the meeting had shouted ‘Pakistan zindabad’ slogans.  Last week a magistrate’s court ruled, on the basis of a forensic examination, that the tape was a fake and that the words Kumar was shown to have been spoken had been pasted on from another sound track.

This immediately raises the question about who doctored the tape? If someone was prepared to go so far, can we be sure that the pro-Pakistan slogans at the February 9 afternoon meeting had also not been planted? Can we even be sure any longer that the entire fracas at JNU was created not by Kashmiris from outside JNU, as presumed by Harshit Agarwal, an uninvolved third year student who posted a video of  the entire meeting on the web, but an ABVP ‘false flag’ operation from the outset?

Undaunted by this setback the RSS has hit back through its newly discovered star orator, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani. On the day after Kumar gave his second speech in defence of democracy, the constitution, the rule of law, and the freedom of speech and thought, Irani counterattacked by turning the defence of her government over the death of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad  into a wholesale attack on anti-national and leftist elements, accusing Vemula’s fellow students of deliberately preventing the police from cutting down his body as he hung from the ceiling fan, and preventing doctors from seeing him for a full 12 hours, in order to ensure his martyrdom for their cause.

Her vitriolic speech went viral on the internet and Modi hailed it with the two-word tweet, ‘satyamev jayate’. Only a full 24 hours later did Indians learn that everything she said had been fabricated. Vemula’s family and friends said his body had been cut down from the fan as soon as it was discovered, and that the chief medical officer of the university had arrived within four minutes of receiving the students’ call, had examined him and pronounced him dead. What’s more, as the doctor said, when she examined him he had already been dead for several hours. The police had not been prevented from seeing his corpse, much less from trying to revive him.

But by then the Sangh Parivar’s attack on ‘anti-national, left-wing, Muslim-loving, pseudo-secularists’ was in full swing. While Kumar was in jail and his colleagues in hiding, the Sangh Parivar had posted another video that purported to show some  JNU students yelling pro-Pakistan slogans during a  clash between them and the ABVP. But students at the university had already recognised some of the slogan shouters as prominent members of the ABVP.

A few days later another clip went up reporting that thousands of empty liquor bottles and used condoms were recovered from JNU every day. And not perhaps by coincidence, Chandan Mitra, the Oxford-educated editor of the BJP’s mouthpiece, The Pioneer, sermonised that the time had come to close down JNU altogether.

The common thread that runs through these attacks is a casual disregard for the truth, and a willingness to use any lie, any rumour, any prejudice, any person and any means to serve the higher purpose of converting India into a Hindu State. Irani claimed that everything she had said in parliament was from the Hyderabad police report. But a comparison of what she said with what appeared in the report shows that she saw only what she wanted to see and filled in the blanks from her preconceptions.

Pervasive hyper-nationalism 

More than anything else it is the Sangh Parivar’s total lack of concern at being caught lying that reveals the depth of the danger that Indian democracy faces, for it shows that facts no longer matter. Only myths matter because, with executive power already in its hands, these are all the BJP/RSS  needs to persuade the army and the police, even large parts of the judiciary, to do its bidding.

To say this is not to imply that the army, the judiciary or the police, will not demur if asked to enforce another Emergency. But their minds are being systematically prepared. The danger that they could be asked to do so is therefore too real to ignore.

How deeply the appeals to hyper-nationalism have resonated within the power structure of the country is reflected in the judgement handed down by Delhi high court Judge Pratibha Rani while granting bail to Kumar. Prefacing her judgement with a patriotic song she made it clear that she was granting bail only because the defendant was unlikely to abscond or be able to obstruct the dispensation of justice. But he had associated himself with unpatriotic slogans and actions, and needed to be educated in nationalism. What is more, she opined that mild doses of anti-nationalism should be treated through education. More severe cases may need surgical excision, as becomes necessary with gangrene.

Nowhere did this learned judge elaborate what constituted anti-national behaviour. Nor did she explain what she meant by the chilling word ‘surgery’. What she did not bother to hide was her virtual direction to a lower court that it should find Kumar guilty of sedition ‘for his own good’.

Days later, while admitting a criminal defamation case against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, a district judge   made ex cathedra remarks that have all but pronounced him and five other Aam Aadmi Party leaders guilty without the benefit of a trial.

If this is the resonance that the BJP/RSS’s campaign can create in a judge of the Delhi high court, what is it creating in  the middle class? Internet provides us with a crude yardstick. Till last Wednesday noon Kumar’s post-bail speech had received 884,000 hits, while Irani’s speech in parliament had received 3.6 million hits. As for the Hyderabad chief medical officer’s testimony demolishing Irani, forget the TV anchors, even I have difficulty remembering her name.

Kumar’s battle cry that the fate of India lies in the hands of its poor and oppressed may turn out to be more true than even he has bargained for.

 Prem Shankar Jha is the Managing Editor of Financial World and a senior journalist.