The Modi-Shah Game in Kashmir Is to Split Opposition Vote and Pave Way for BJP to Form Government
The only way for the NC-Congress alliance to ensure the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them that, no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government.
File image of Modi and Shah. In the background is an image uploaded by the EC on X, of voters in Anantnag.
Kashmir has one chance to win back the autonomy that it had enjoyed under Article 370 of the constitution. With the first phase of voting for the assembly polls over, it is apparent that its main political parties are throwing this chance away. The Bharatiya Janata Party strategists have known from the very beginning, that they will not get a single seat in Kashmir, and that solid support for the party exists only in a part of Jammu. As a result, it does not have the faintest chance of winning an absolute majority of the Union Territory’s 90 assembly seats. Kashmiris therefore have a real chance – possibly their last – of winning back the autonomy they lost after Modi read down Article 370.
Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are fully aware of this. That is why, from the very beginning, their aim has been to break the Kashmiri vote into pieces, use the BJP’s almost guaranteed 25-seat block of seats in Jammu to emerge as the largest single party, and claim the right to form the government of Jammu and Kashmir. Once the BJP has secured that right, it will seduce, buy, or coerce a sufficient number of independents and smaller parties in Kashmir, using the Public Safety Act, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, and a host of ancillary laws, to seduce or compel a sufficient number successful individuals and small parties to join it, till it has a majority in the J&K assembly.
If the BJP succeeds, it will have five full years to destroy Kashmiriyat – that unique, syncretic blend of Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism, that Sheikh Abdullah and the Maharaja had been determined to protect when they refused to accede to Pakistan but asked for the safeguards (eventually provided by Article 370 of the constitution) prior to signing the Instrument of Accession to India in 1947.
When, realising their folly, Kashmiris begin to rebel against their subjugation once more, Delhi’s crushing response will reignite armed militancy in the valley and bring various ‘Lashkars’ sponsored by Pakistan back into J&K. Kashmir will then sink back once more into the hell in which it had existed from 1990 till former prime minister, the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee went to Srinagar in 2003, and held out a hand of reconciliation towards Pakistan, from that city.
The Kashmiri intelligentsia is fully aware of this, but has been made powerless to prevent it by the illiterate and irresponsible behaviour of Kashmir’s main parties, the Congress, and the National Conference. It should have been apparent to them from the moment the Supreme Court mandated a return to full statehood for Kashmir that if they wanted to protect J&K’s autonomy, they would have to fight the elections as a single coalition, with a single common platform – the release of all Kashmiris held without trial in jails all over India, and restoration of Kashmir’s cultural autonomy, i.e Kashmiriyat.
This required the NC and Congress to join hands with the People’s Democratic Party. Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the PDP, understood this from the very beginning but the Congress and the NC did not, and still have not understood the need for doing so. Indeed, the NC has continued to make her a major target of attack in Kashmir.
As for the Congress, Rahul Gandhi’s preference for being in the United States to lecture the Indian diaspora for 10 crucial days from the September 7-16 – after paying a single visit to a single constituency to campaign for a single candidate in Kashmir – and his refusal to go back there while the BJP ensures, step by step, the fragmentation of the Kashmiri vote, speaks volumes for his political naiveté and lack of awareness of the role he needs to play.
Neither of the Abdullahs has spoken out against the reign of terror that the BJP unleashed on the Kashmir valley for four long months before it read down Article 370. Neither of them has protested against the prolonged imprisonment of every Kashmiri who has dared to speak out against the actions of the Delhi-imposed administration, during the president’s rule that followed.
Neither protested against the specious meaning that the Supreme Court attached to the word ‘temporary’ to vindicate the reading down of Article 370, when it had to have been was obvious to the judges that this referred only to the fact that it applied only to a part of the princely state of Kashmir that had acceded to India, and that the rest had still to be liberated from Pakistan’s illegal occupation.
It should have been apparent to them that the BJP, knowing that it could not win a single seat in Kashmir, would do its level best to split the Kashmiri vote into as many fragments as possible. It had already split the Peoples’ Conference by tempting, or coercing, assassinated leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s son Sajjad into joining them. It had also done this with businessman and former friend of Mufti Sayeed, Altaf Bukhari, by forcing him to choose between defection and jail.
The pathetic performance of both Omar and Sajjad in the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency – their combined vote did not even come close to that of Engineer Rashid – seems to have convinced the BJP’s strategists that releasing other Kashmiri radical leaders and allowing them to stand for election would split the Kashmiri vote into many more irreconcilable pieces, and severely dent the NC-Congress combines share of the vote.
The BJP coined this strategy only after witnessing the doubling of the number of votes cast in Baramulla, in comparison to 2014, and the fact that virtually all of the increase went to Engineer Rashid. But even there, it hedged its bets by releasing Rashid only after the first round of nominations had been completed. By the time he came out of jail, Rashid was able to nominate only 12 candidates to fight the assembly elections, against the 18 assembly segments of the Baramulla Lok Sabha constituency where he had gained the largest number of votes.
This was a product of careful calculation. For if Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party won all the 12, seats neither the Congress, nor the NC would be able to form a government without its support. But, recognising that incarceration has endowed political activists with the halo of martyrdom, the BJP’s strategists have decided to release more political dissidents from jail, in ones and twos from other parties and religious affiliations to scatter the Kashmiri votes more widely and prevent them from going to the Congress-NC alliance.
The only way for the Congress-NC alliance to ensure that the government of Kashmir remains in Kashmiri hands is to approach every small party and candidate and assure them, that no matter who wins in the most seats in Kashmir, all of them will become a part of the next government of the state.
This will not be as hard as it looks, for far more difficult reconciliations have taken place in other countries. The most striking was the Lebanese peace agreement signed in Doha in 2008. On that occasion, the Christian leader, Michel Aoun, parted company with his more die-hard co-religionists and the American-backed Lebanese Sunnis, and agreed to Hezbollah’s demand to make it a part of the Lebanese cabinet, in proportion to its vote.
A similar, pre-election agreement between the three major parties, Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami would enable a stable government to be formed in Jammu and Kashmir once the results are in.
The NC and the Congress’s Hubris Has Put Them – and All of Kashmir – in a Risky Place
The prospect of a return to popular rule has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, but the decision by the Congress and the NC to leave out the PDP and the AIP could lead to the BJP emerging the largest party in J&K.
NC and Congress leaders on August 26. Photo: X/@JKNC_/Basit Zargar.
This is the second of a two-part series by the author on Kashmir. Read the first here.
Srinagar: If the Congress had returned to power in 2014 under Manmohan Singh, then long before the present day, there would have been no Kashmir problem left to resolve.
This was because, as Thomas Friedman, the veteran columnist of the New York Times, pointed out in an article comparing Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas attack and Singh’s response to the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba attack on Mumbai that killed 175 persons and injured scores more in 2008, the Indian prime minister had done with restraint what Netanyahu has been unable to do with blind reprisal.
The Indian prime minister, he pointed out, had brought remorseless international pressure to bear on Pakistan till it was left with no option but to arrest, try, and reluctantly punish the masterminds behind the attack, and to provide the US and Canadian governments with the information they needed to arrest and punish David Headley, the mastermind and Tahawwur Rana, the financier behind the plot.
This restrained response kept Pakistan in the dock for the next decade and was largely responsible for its being put on the watch list of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism.
Singh’s restraint in 2008 was also the reason why Pakistan turned to India for help in weathering the foreign exchange crisis that the US plunged it into, four years later, when it abruptly cut off all foreign aid and payments after Islamabad reacted angrily to a bungled US helicopter attack on the Taliban in November 2011 that hit two Pakistani military border posts and killed 28 of its soldiers.
India came to its rescue then and used that as a lever for reopening talks to end the Kashmir dispute on the basis of Musharraf’s four-point plan. These had almost come to fruition when the UPA government fell, and Modi came to power in 2014.
Modi’s government lost no time in turning the clock of Indo-Pakistani relations back to where they had been in the early nineties. He did this in August 2014 by abruptly ending all communication with the Hurriyat, banning its members from even meeting the Pakistan high commissioner, and resuming heavy firing across the Line of Control on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Five years later he used his brute majority in parliament to end Kashmir’s special status and turn it into a Union territory.
From then till now, Kashmir has been a police state. Police states do have some advantages, for in the short run they are capable of imposing peace upon a turbulent society. This has been so in the valley, especially in Srinagar, which was the cockpit of militancy in the early nineties.
The city has grown rapidly in size. Business seems to be booming and, in the more affluent parts of the city that most tourists visit, there is an absence of the fear that was ever-present in the nineties, of not knowing where and when the next confrontation between militants and the police would take place.
But these benefits are limited to Srinagar and a few other tourist destinations, and even in Srinagar to its more modern and affluent parts. In these areas, armed police or Border Security Force (BSF) personnel are no longer stationed out in the open at key points and intersections. Instead, they patrol the city discreetly from armoured cars that move slowly and unthreateningly through the streets. This change has virtually eliminated the sudden “crossfires” that killed or injured hundreds of civilians over two decades from the nineties till 2010.
In most of Srinagar, therefore, life is almost normal. But in the rural areas, a different kind of peace is maintained through constant patrolling by the Rashtriya Rifles and the BSF, and frequent arbitrary arrests and incarceration of suspected militants, almost always in jails far from home. Experience has taught them to concentrate on the youth, of whom as in the rest of India, up to four-fifths are unemployed.
During a visit to Pulwama, this writer saw a rounding-up operation in progress. Half a dozen or more young men were being led away in shackles. The villagers were standing around, angry but helpless. Their fear and anger was palpable, but so was their helplessness.
The one bright spot in this sorry tale is that the army and the BSF have become more discriminating in their exercise of force. The data that the army command regularly releases show that the spontaneous mass militancy of earlier years has been replaced by an organised, low-level infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, who use caches of arms, much of it flown in by drones, from Pakistan and logistical support from disaffected youth.
An idea of the scale on which this is happening, and the degree of Kashmiri involvement, can be had from the annual and monthly statements released by the army command in Jammu and Kashmir. Its release on January 13 this year revealed that of 76 terrorists killed in encounters in 2023, only 21 had been locally recruited.
The decline in local participation is welcome but the numbers of local youth being killed is still sufficiently high to maintain tension and alienation in the rural population.
It is in these conditions – of an uneasy peace bought by force – that Kashmir is holding its first election after ten years. The prospect of a return to popular rule, even though Jammu and Kashmir is still a Union territory, has breathed new life into Kashmiri politics, for it offers a chance to end the enslavement that has followed the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019.
Kashmir’s political parties are therefore conscious of the need to avoid splitting the vote in Kashmir because of the BJP’s formidable hold on Jammu, where it was the leading party in 29 out of 36 assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections.
They are also aware that the Modi government is deliberately holding this election at a time when J&K is still a Union territory and the lieutenant governor has an unchallengeable right to decide which party he will call upon first to form the next government.
If the seats in Kashmir are divided between two or more recognised parties in such a way that the BJP wins more seats in Jammu than either the National Conference (NC) or the Congress win individually in the state as a whole, then the governor will be well within his rights to call upon it to make the first attempt to form the next government. After that, Modi’s ‘friendly persuasion’ machine will go into top gear.
All Kashmiri parties are acutely aware of this, so the Congress and the NC have immediately formed a seat-sharing alliance, with the former putting up 32 candidates, and the latter 51. They are fighting each other in only five constituencies where their local leaders could not be persuaded to agree to a seat-sharing arrangement. They have called this a friendly contest because no matter who wins they will still be a part of the same coalition.
The two parties of consequence that they have left out of their calculations, and therefore of their alliance, are Mehbooba Mufti’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Engineer Rashid’s Awami Ittehad Party (AIP).
Boycotting the PDP at such a pivotal moment in Kashmir’s history simply did not make sense. It is true that Mufti Sayeed lost most of the following his party had gained between 2002 and 2014 by trying to make a coalition government with the BJP in 2014, when he had no real need to. But voters do not hold grudges forever, and this year’s Lok Sabha elections had shown that the PDP had remained the largest party in five assembly segments in South Kashmir.
What is more, Mehbooba Mufti had offered not to put up any PDP candidates if the Congress and the NC adopted her seven-point agenda. Since these were very similar to their own agendas, all that these parties had to do was formally accept her offer and offer the PDP the five seats in South Kashmir where it is strongest. But by treating her and her party as pariahs, they have forced her to nominate candidates for 30 seats.
Another formidable contender whom the Congress and the NC have both underestimated and spurned is Rashid’s AIP. Every psephological indicator shows that Rashid owed his colossal victory in the Baramulla parliamentary constituency to the emergence of a huge protest vote that had been absent in earlier elections, for want of a candidate in whom it could place its trust.
The first is the voter turnout in the constituency. At 1.033 million, it was more than double of the 458,000 who voted in 2019. Second, Rashid’s own vote more than quadrupled, from 102,168 in 2019 to 472,481 this year. Third, his vote was greater than that of Omar Abdullah, Sajjad Lone, and the PDP candidate Mir Mohammad Fayyaz put together. Fourth, the AIP was the largest party in 18 out of Baramulla’s 21 assembly segments.
With Rashid still in jail despite being a member of parliament, would anyone like to bet against the AIP winning three quarters, if not more of these 21 assembly seats?
So if the PDP wins five seats in the south, the AIP 15 or thereabouts in the north, and two seats go to other parties or independents, it is perfectly possible that the NC and the Congress may be left with as few as 25 seats in the valley. Whether they are able to form a government or not will then depend on how they do in Jammu.
To sum up, the hubris that has made the Congress and the NC ignore both the PDP and the AIP could easily lead to the BJP emerging as the largest single party in Jammu and Kashmir and claiming the right to form the government.
Were that to happen, it would open the gates in Kashmir for the kind of bargaining that has corrupted democracy in the rest of India. It will also increase substantially the possibility of another intifada in Kashmir at some time in the future.
Kashmir is on the Eve of an Election That Can Decide Its Future
Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Prime Minister Narendra Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.
Congress workers in Jammu and Kashmir stage protests in Srinagar demanding statehood on October 31, 2023. Photo: X (Twitter)/@vikar_rasool
Srinagar: Kashmir is on the eve of the most fateful election in its history. For this election will decide whether it will be able to retain its Kashmiriyat, its unique syncretic identity articulated by Sheikh Abdullah almost nine decades ago – or will see it drowned in the communal and totalitarian tide that is gathering force in the rest of the country.
Today, not only is Kashmir under the rule of a Lieutenant Governor; not only has it lost the protection of its cultural identity that was guaranteed by Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution, but virtually every senior post in the administration and the police is manned by officers of non-Kashmiri cadres, and the whole of rural Kashmir is under an informal version of army rule.
Political dissent in Kashmir has been crushed with a ruthlessness that the rest of India is only now beginning to experience as Modi feels his power weakening. Today, Kashmir is under the Centre’s rule, untrammelled by anything except the will of Modi.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of Hurriyat, and all its council members were among the first to be arrested under the Public Safety Act. They were kept incarcerated for more than a year and released only after they agreed not to make any public statements, thereby not only ending their political careers but also destroying the only organisation in Kashmir that the people of that state trusted.
Mirwaiz Umar Farooq being ushered into Jamia Masjid on Friday, September 22, 2023, by his aides. Photo: Jehangir Ali.
All this was done on the basis of PM Modi’s unique combination of ignorance, arrogance and prejudice. To execute its plan the Modi government chose not to remember that with the exception of the late Syed Ali Shah Gilani and a handful of his acolytes, Kashmiris had never expressed any desire to be a part of Pakistan.
As far back as October 1947, the British High Commissioner to Pakistan Sir Lawrence Grafftey-Smith had reported to London with palpable regret that if there was a plebiscite the people of then undivided Kashmir would ‘most likely opt to join India’. The only thing that might change their minds, he had concluded in his dispatch, was a huge massacre of Muslims by Sikhs in the border areas between Kashmir and Pakistan.
What had been true of undivided Kashmir became doubly true after the separation of POK, with its mostly non-Reshi Islamic population. The rigged election of 1987, and the subsequent outbreak of armed insurgency fuelled at least in part by mistaken perceptions and unfounded distrust in Delhi, were capitalised upon by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to train insurgents and trigger an insurgency that caused thousands of needless deaths in Kashmir.
The sense of disempowerment in Kashmir
But even those nightmare years did not change the Kashmiris’ preference for autonomy within the Indian constitution. This was shown conclusively (much to even Delhi’s surprise) by two independent opinion polls, the first carried out in secret by MORI, Europe’s premier opinion polling agency, in 2003-4 and the second openly by MORI and GALLUP on behalf of Chatham House – The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London – six years later.
These showed that in no portion of Kashmir valley did more than 7.5 per cent of the population say that it would prefer to be a part of Pakistan. A far higher proportion said they wished to remain a part of India, but the highest proportion opted for some form of independence. That was 14 and 19 years after the armed insurgency had torn their lives apart!
The synonyms for Independence in Urdu and Hindi – Azadi, Khud Mukhtari, Swatantrata and Swadheenta – do not have quite the same meaning as ‘Independence’ has in English. The meaning of ‘Independence’ has been shaped by the era of industrialisation and the Nation-State, to mean a complete separation of one territory from another through the creation of clearly defined ‘hard’ frontiers, and controls over trade, travel and immigration.
The Hindi and Urdu equivalents have a far older provenance, that relates not to territory but to the status of the individual – more specifically his or her freedom to make their own decisions.
Innumerable conversations I had with Kashmiris during the height of the insurgency in the ‘nineties, and the years that followed, led back invariably to their sense of disempowerment.
Protests demanding the release of moderate Hurriyat chairman and chief cleric of Kashmir, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq at Srinagar’s Jamia Masjid on June 23, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement.
Naeem Akhtar, an associate of Mufti Sayeed and adviser to Mehbooba Mufti after his death, gave me the most precise explanation of what Azadi meant to him and most Kashmiri Muslims: “ Partition broke our link with our religious and cultural origins. We trace our Islam back to Sufis who came from Iran via the Jhelum valley. Our trade, and our cultural links with the rest of the sub-continent and west Asia, had always been via the Jhelum valley, through Rawalpindi with the south and the passes in the Hindu Kush with the west. To us Azadi means the repair of this break. It is more a psychological than a material need”.
When insurgency raised its head in 1987 Pakistan thought its opportunity had finally come. But when the ISI realised that merger with Pakistan was not what the Kashmiris wanted, it began to assassinate all those in leadership positions within the insurgency who did not want to secede to Pakistan.
Umar’s father, Mirwaiz Maulvi Farooq was the first to be assassinated in May 1990, on the orders of Pakistan’s ISI, barely three weeks after he had given an interview to BBC in which he had outlined the steps India needed to take if it wished to restore peace in Kashmir.
In 1996, when Abdul Ghani Butt, who was then the deputy Chairman of Hurriyat, expressed a desire for the organisation to contest that assembly election announced by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, his brother was killed by agents of the ISI a few weeks later.
Pak-sponsored and financed gunmen assassinated Abdul Ghani Lone, the seniormost and most respected leader in Hurriyat on May 21, 2002, barely two months after he had decided that his ‘Peoples Conference’ would contest the state assembly elections that year even if the rest of Hurriyat did not. The list of eminent Kashmiris who have paid the ultimate price for merely suggesting that there is a road to peace with honour within India, is too long to reproduce.
One of the most heinous killings was that of H.N. Wanchoo, on December 5, 1992. Wanchoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who had become the lawyer for a large number of members of the JKLF who had been jailed by the police, and become known as Kashmir’s most respected defender of human rights.
Wanchoo was shot dead in an auto-rickshaw by three men who had come to him asking for help in getting one of their colleagues released from police custody. His murder attracted worldwide attention and triggered investigations by intelligence agencies of several countries in addition to R&AW and the IB. These concluded that Wanchoo had been murdered on the instructions of the ISI because he had become the single greatest obstacle to it’s campaign of communal polarisation in Kashmir.
This was followed only months later by the killing of yet another hugely respected religious leader of Kashmir’s Reshi Islam, Qazi Nissar, the Mirwaiz of North Kashmir whom Pakistan’s ISI got assassinated in 1993.
Most journalists and intellectuals in Kashmir concluded later that it was these murders that turned Kashmiri Muslims against Pakistan.
Modi destroying every atom of autonomy
By the time Modi came to power, the Hurriyat, under the chairmanship of Mirwaiz Umar, had formally announced its decision to accept the Manmohan-Musharraf four-point plan that was then in the last stages of being hammered out by Tariq Aziz(Pakistan) and Sati Lamba (India).
It had done this through Fazal Qureshi, a senior leader of Hurriyat and friend of Kashmiri martyr Maqbool Butt, at a conference in Srinagar in October 2009. This was not to Pakistan’s liking so, six weeks later, another Pak-hired assassin shot this fine old man in the head, and turned him into a vegetable.
Former JKLF leader Yasin Malik had made it known as early as 1994, that the JKLF did not want to separate from India but wanted a different relationship with it, to be framed after consultations with like-minded people in Jammu and Ladakh. He is now in prison for life.
Shabir Shah, who founded the JK Democratic Freedom Party, and invested his entire political future in trying, and almost succeeding, in brokering a lasting settlement in Kashmir with home minister L.K, Advani, was released from jail only days ago, presumably also on the condition that he, like the Mirwaiz, refrains from politics in the future.
The Modi government has not spared even second and third-rung members of Hurriyat. Shahid-ul Islam, the Mirwaiz’s liaison officer with the media, was arrested in 2017 and has been in Tihar jail without being charged, and without bail, for seven years.
PM Narendra Modi and Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir, Manoj Sinha. Photo: X/@manojsinha_
The Modi government imprisoned Shahid despite the fact that, knowing his closeness to Mirwaiz Umar, two assassins had come to his home in the mid-nineties to kill him, and hastily fired five bullets at him when he guessed their intent and rushed out of the room to save his life. Three of those bullets were still embedded in the walls of his parents’ home years later.
The common strand that bound all of these attacks on Kashmiri political and religious leaders was the anger of Pakistan and its ruthless Inter-Services Intelligence at Kashmiris’ refusal to make a union with Pakistan their goal in their struggle against New Delhi.
All this information, and much, much more, has been available in the files of the Home Ministry and the Prime Minister’s office, but Modi was not interested in peace with Pakistan. For him Kashmir and Pakistan are convenient whips with which to lash latent Hindu fury into a frenzy. To do this he has been bent upon destroying every atom of the autonomy given to Kashmir by the Indian constitution through articles 370 and 35A.
What is important is for the opposition to convey to the public that in the battle to defeat Modi’s BJP in 2024, the differences between Congress and AAP signify nothing.
Arvind Kejriwal (L) and Rahul Gandhi. Photos: Official Twitter handles
In the 12 years he was chief minister of Gujarat and the nine in which he has been the prime minister, Narendra Modi has shown, time and again, that he is built somewhat like a powerful automobile in which the manufacturers forgot to put in a reverse gear. Because throughout these years, his only response to every threat he has faced has been to launch a counter-attack, no matter what it might cost the nation or even his own future.
I had therefore been waiting for his counterattack to take shape ever since the opposition’s success in forming a combined front to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2024, at Patna. I got my answer on July 5. Sharad Pawar had been the convenor who had made the Patna meet possible. So Pawar’s party had to be destroyed first.
The weapon that Modi has used is the one he has been using with increasing frequency against his political opponents and critics in civil society. This is the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, in which he made eight draconian amendments in 2019 that have given his government virtually unrestricted powers of arrest, detention and attachment of property, and all but abolished the habeas corpus, the right of the accused to remain free until convicted of a crime.
Since then, Modi has been relying more and more heavily upon the PMLA to ‘persuade’ his political opponents to betray their parties and join the BJP. His destruction of the Nationalist Congress Party has run true to form: four of the nine defectors – Ajit Pawar, Praful Patel, Chhagan Bhujbal and Hasan Mushrif – have been under investigation on a variety of money laundering and bank loan scam charges, and have had hundreds of crores worth of their properties sequestered. Now that they have become honourable ministers of the government and ruling party of the great state of Maharashtra, one can presume that these charges will disappear like the mists of the night at the rising of the sun.
That this has been Modi’s revenge on Pawar has been endorsed by no less eminent a journal than India Today, which has also warned that Bihar is next on the prime minister’s list. India Today has also surmised that this is only the beginning of a campaign that will be launched in other opposition-ruled states as well. Its purpose, the weekly has surmised, is to show to the people how unworthy of trust their representatives are and to remind them that only a party with a clearly stated ideology can be relied upon to fulfil its promises.
This is the challenge that the opposition now needs to meet. With the Lok Sabha elections less than nine months away, its first task must be to reassure the electorate that the unity achieved at Patna remains undented by the developments in Maharashtra. To do this, it needs first to highlight the progress it has made in removing the obstacles that have hindered the move from competition to cooperation. To say that this has been impressive would be an understatement, for the conclave reached an agreement not only on the yardsticks it would use to decide which party would contest which constituency, but agreed to leave the even more thorny issue of leadership to be decided after the elections. It also recognised the need to present an alternative vision of India’s future to the BJP’s Hindutva.
Despite these impressive achievements, doubts about the stability and longevity of the coalition have continued to persist. These have been fuelled to some degree by the absence of the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha, and of Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, but their main cause is the explicit refusal of the Aam Admi Party to endorse the Common Declaration because it did not include a commitment to vote against the Delhi ordinance. Kejriwal need not have insisted upon this, because the ordinance is outrageous anyway, and would hamstring the Congress and BJP too, were they ever to come to power in Delhi. What is more, it was openly mischievous for Narendra Modi had lost this battle in the Supreme Court once already and was bound to do so again. Its sole purpose, therefore, was to give the simmering hatred of the AAP within the Delhi branch of the Congress an occasion to surface and thereby throw a spanner in the works of creating a unified opposition.
Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi’s failure to recognise this, and readily concede to AAP’s demand, was therefore a chink in opposition unity that virtually invited exploitation by the BJP. That is the chink that it is now trying to widen.
What is hard to understand is why this simple request has proved an obstacle to unity when much more serious obstacles have already been overcome. The only explanation is the impact that a concession by either party would have had upon its own party cadres. Despite the cementing and revitalising impact that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has had upon the Congress, its unity remains fragile.
In large parts of the country including, notably, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal, its repeated defeats at the hustings have made it virtually cease to exist. It cannot therefore be blamed for fearing that after suffering three successive Vidhan Sabha poll defeats, its cadres in Delhi are also headed out of the door. Ajay Maken’s relentless attacks upon AAP are therefore attempts to stem the rot, and the leaders of the Congress cannot be blamed for not reigning him in, because of the effect this could have upon the party’s cadres in other states where its dominance is endangered or has disappeared.
But Maken’s attacks upon the AAP have created a mirror image of the problem he faces within the Congress for Kejriwal within his own party. For through its silent endorsement of every attack that Modi has launched upon Kejriwal since 2015, Maken had made it virtually impossible for Kejriwal to join the opposition without some overt act of support for AAP in its constant battle with Modi.
What is important is for the opposition to convey to the public that in the battle to defeat Modi’s BJP in 2024, the differences between Congress and AAP signify nothing. AAP does not need the support of the coalition to rout BJP in either of the two states that it now governs. In Delhi it won 67 and 62 out of the 70 vidhan Sabha seats with a colossal 54% of the vote in 2015 and 53.6% in 2020. These are figures that the Congress did not even come close to matching either at the Centre or in any of the states from 1947 till 1989. In Punjab, AAP won 92 out of 117 seats last year with 42% of the vote. Against this, the Congress, BJP and Akali Dal together won only 23 seats with 23.9%, 6.6% and 18% of the vote, respectively.
The message these results send is unambiguous: whether the AAP joins or does not join the coalition formally in 2024 will make no difference to the number of seats it will win in the Lok Sabha.
Nor is there the faintest chance that AAP will enter into any post-poll alliance with the BJP, for not only has it suffered more at Modi’s hands than any other party, but it would destroy every tenet upon which its meteoric rise has been based. These are its complete disregard for caste, creed, colour and gender in its policies and governance, and its commitment to serving the poor instead of being served by the poor.
Finally, AAP will contribute more to the saving of Indian democracy by refusing to compromise on its demand for support in the Rajya Sabha and being willing to fight alone if necessary, than by making any of the compromises that will be necessary to become part of an alliance of political parties. For it will demonstrate to the entire nation that the era of entitlement politics, in which candidates demanded votes from the electorate on the basis of their caste or creed, has ended and that of service politics, in which votes have to be won by serving the people, has finally dawned.
The fact that the planned joint opposition in Patna was postponed has created rumours that such unity may not be achieved before 2024. This fear, however, is almost certain to prove groundless.
Rahul Gandhi at Roosevelt House, New York. Photo: Twitter/@RahulGandhi
The postponement of the the grand opposition meeting that had been scheduled for June 12 in Patna to June 23 has revived anxiety in India’s civil society that this could signal second thoughts in the Congress on the terms on which the unity need to be forged. This is in spite of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge having stressed the importance of uniting to fight the BJP in 2024, in his inaugural address to the AICC in Raipur three months ago, where he had advocated the formation of an alliance based on the ‘UPA model’ of 2004–2014, and had cautioned the rest of the opposition against forming a ‘Third Front’.
Since then, however, talk of a UPA-type alliance has almost disappeared from the Congress’s political lexicon, but no alternative proposal for government formation in the event of an opposition victory has taken its place. It is not surprising therefore that the postponement of the grand opposition meeting scheduled to take place in Patna on June 12 to June 23, has once again aroused dormant fears that a formula for unity might still elude the opposition when decision time arrives.
This fear, however, is almost certain to prove groundless. The evidence for this, if any were needed, is to be found in the speeches of Rahul Gandhi during his six-day interaction with the Indian diaspora in the US, and question-answer sessions that followed. Thanks to Youtube, all of these can be seen in their entirety by those who were not physically present. So we are in a position, unique in human history, of being able to judge a speaker’s sincerity and character in a way that was unthinkable even half a century ago. And ever since he began his Bharat Jodo Yatra, Gandhi has been passing this eyeball test with flying colours.
In his speeches in the US, Gandhi displayed a palpable sincerity that is the polar opposite of the dissembling and compromise that characterises Indian politics, and for that matter most democratic politics in the world. In all of them his theme was the same – India’s innate strength, its durability and its pride has rested, throughout its history, upon its unquestioning acceptance of, and comfort with, its ethnic diversity and religious pluralism. This comfort, he told his audiences in California, Washington DC and New York, is the secret of the phenomenal success of the Indian diaspora in integrating themselves with their adopted countries. Gandhi reinforced this message through his unaffected display of pride in their achievements in the US .
But the message he hammered home most consistently is the one that is most relevant to India’s future. This was that while the BJP and RSS were constantly harping on a largely imagined past, the need of the hour was to chart India’s path into an uncertain future. In a graphic phrase that bids to rival his ‘nafrat ki bazaar’ aphorism, he likened Modi to someone driving with his eyes glued to the rear-view mirror of his vehicle.
He illustrated this by referring to the train accident in Odisha. Within hours of the disaster, the BJP’s spokespersons were busy pointing out that there had been similar, serious accidents during the Congress’s rule too, and in highlighting a train collision at Ariyalur in November 1956 that had claimed 140 lives. What they chose to ignore was the response of the Nehru government whose railways minister resigned, taking constitutional responsibility for the tragedy. Even though the technology for avoiding such tragedies that the world has today had not even been dreamed of then. By contrast, no minister in Modi’s government has done so today, even though that technology has been in general use for decades.
What makes this omission inexcusable is that at the tail end of the UPA government’s rule, a committee headed by Sam Pitroda had recommended installing an anti-collision system on all of the 65,000 kilometres of railway lines in India. But till the time of the Odisha accident an entire decade later, the Modi government had installed anti-collision digital equipment on only 1,000 km of railway lines.
In 1956, the Congress minister who took responsibility and resigned was Lal Bahadur Shastri. The party remembered this and made him India’s prime minister after Nehru’s death.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Gandhi’s speeches in the US was their tone. Narendra Modi’s speeches, both at home and abroad, are designed to create awe and fear. Gandhi’s speeches have reflected a desire to start a dialogue. In all of them he has emphasised the need for joint action by political parties in India – not to win an election or throw out a rival political party, but to save India’s ethnically diverse and religiously plural democracy from crashing in ruins.
If there had ever been any doubt left in people’s minds about his motives, this tour of the US should have erased them. For Rahul Gandhi, saving India’s democracy comes first. His personal status within it comes a long, long way second.
This is the understanding of the Congress’s motives today, with which the major opposition parties need to assemble at Patna on June 23.
The prime minister is spending almost 11 times as much on meeting the same need as the Delhi chief minister. Is that because his job is 11 times as onerous as a chief minister’s? Or is it because Modi’s ego is considerably larger than Kejriwal’s?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. Photos: PTI
Narendra Modi must be in seventh heaven. His bete noire, potentially his nemesis, Arvind Kejriwal has been found to have feet of clay. For years now, Kejriwal has tirelessly contrasted his own simple lifestyle, and his party’s serving of people, with Modi’s endless preoccupation with himself, and exclusive concern for the industrial health of the super rich, such as the Ambanis, the Adanis and the Tatas.
Ten days ago, Kejriwal had used the one weapon against Modi that a dictator has no defence against: satire and ridicule. Charlie Chaplin, the greatest comedian of the 20th century, had used this against Adolf Hitler in his immortal 1939 film, The Great Dictator. Kejriwal had done this ten days ago with a 20 minute story he narrated in the Vidhan Sabha, titled “Chauthi Pass Raja”. This was having the same effect in India as The Great Dictator had had in the US: videos of the story have garnered millions of views. The release of data to show that the CM’s house his government is building costs Rs 45 crore was Modi’s counterattack!
But will it succeed in denting Kejriwal’s hold on the people of Delhi? The commercial media’s gleeful acceptance of the estimate as gross extravagance by a man whose ego has finally outstripped his unremarkable physical stature, was only to be expected in a country where investigative journalism has been strangled to death. But surely, some newspaper needed to contrast that story with the cost of Modi’s own pet project, the Central Vista Redevelopment project, which is Rs 13,450 crore, i.e $1.7 billion.
This redevelopment is to spread over 20,866 square metres and have a total built up area of 64,500 square metres. Within it the prime minister’s house complex will cover 36,268 sq ft (more than 4,000 square metres) and cost Rs 467 crore. This is more than ten times the amount estimated for the Delhi chief minister’s proposed housing complex.
The prime minister’s new office and residence will be on a site covering 15 acres. It will contain ten four-storey buildings that will accommodate not only his residence, but the living quarters of his Special Protection Group and his private office complex.
This is no different from the present arrangement in (the former) Race Course road where these functions are spread over 4 buildings set in lawns that cover approximately 16 acres. This arrangement has comfortably served five previous prime ministers from Rajiv Gandhi to Manmohan Singh.
Despite that, Modi’s reasons for the complex closer to Parliament House and the prime minister’s official secretariat are understandable, because of the rapidly increasing traffic on New Delhi roads, the worsening traffic jams being caused by it, and therefore the increasing vulnerability of any cavalcade to a terrorist attack.
Construction for the Central Vista project. Photo: Oishika Neogi
What necessitated reconstruction of CM residence?
But these same considerations, multiplied many times, were what necessitated the reconstruction of the chief minister’s residence. For Kejriwal had categorically refused to move into Raj Nivas, the residence of the British chief administrators of Delhi, and later of chief ministers after Delhi became a state, pronouncing it too grand and too large for him and had, instead, chosen to stay at what used to be the Delhi Vidhan Sabha speaker’s residence at 6, Flagstaff road in old Delhi.
All those who met Kejriwal at home in those days will remember that 6, Flagstaff Road is a single floor house with a small front lobby that Kejriwal had turned into an informal meeting room, a central living and dining room, and three bedrooms spread around it, one of which was occupied by his father and a computer. That was all!
The entire house reeked of dilapidation. Considering that it had been built in 1942, barely a decade after the British shifted their capital from Calcutta to Delhi, this was hardly surprising. So, having lived in a similar house in New Delhi, in the 1950s and 1960s, I was not surprised to learn that the ceilings of all the three bedrooms had begun to leak.
Those who are accusing Kejriwal of having been corrupted by power today, need to ask themselves why this surfaced only in 2020, seven years after AAP first came to power in Delhi? The short answer is that when he chose 6, Flagstaff Road over Raj Nivas, Kejriwal did not realise that the chief minister’s house needed to serve also as his main office.
This had been understood by the British as far back as in 1906, when they built the first office-cum-residence Raj Nivas on what was then the Ludlow Castle Road, and is now the Raj Nivas Marg.
After Independence, with an ever-expanding city and increasing state regulation of civic life, this complex became too small by 1988. Both wings of Raj Nivas where therefore completely redesigned and expanded into a residence-cum-secretariat at great expense in 1995.
This background is necessary to understand why the conversion of 6, Flagstaff road from being simply one chief minister’s choice of a home, into the official residence of all future chief ministers of the state is costing Rs 45 crore. Kejriwal had chosen it as an unpretentious home to live in. But a chief minister’s home can never be private. On the contrary it has, necessarily to be a mini-secretariat that can receive information and transmit decisions instantly, as and when the chief minister needs it to do so.
In 2015, when Kejriwal chose to live there, it was a home without an office. In the next five years this lacuna was filled by the ad hoc addition of temporary rooms constructed between the gate and the entrance to the house. These sufficed till 2020, when the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed. The shut down of the entire Delhi secretariat did not lead to shut down of work. On the contrary, with the need to open COVID wards, arrange medication, oxygen and ambulances, and look after tens of thousands of migrant workers suddenly rendered destitute, 6, Flagstaff road suddenly became the pulsing nerve centre of government.
I cannot even begin to imagine how his administration coped with the crisis from the ramshackle bunch of huts I had seen at Flagstaff road. But that experience, without a doubt, taught Kejriwal a hard lesson: he had to choose between looking and acting like a leader of the poor ever in search of votes, and a leader who wished to deliver service to the poor and save their lives. It is not therefore surprising that the first order for refurbishings worth Rs 7.09 crore, was issued on September 09, 2020.
Once it was decided that 6, Flagstaff Road would be the permanent official residence of the chief minister of Delhi, another need arose that had been largely overlooked in Kejriwal’s first years. His was for quarters for his personal security staff. It was this need that had caused the present official prime minister’s residence to expand from 5, Race Course road as his home and 7, Race Course Road as his personal office, to include 3 and 9 Race Course Road as well.
It is also the need explicitly stated for the PM’s residential complex Modi is setting up on the edge of the Central Vista lawns. Modi is therefore spending almost 11 times as much on meeting the same need as Kejriwal. Is that because the prime minster’s job is 11 times as onerous as a chief minister’s? Or is it because Modi’s ego is considerably larger than Kejriwal’s?
The Supreme Court is the last pillar of Indian democracy but it knew an adverse finding against a sitting prime minister would hasten the collapse of the entire edifice.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
The Supreme Court of India has taken several questionable decisions in recent years.
But its June 24 judgment dismissing Zakia Jafri’s appeal against the court-appointed Special Investigation Team’s exoneration of Narendra Modi from his share of the responsibility – as chief minister – for the 2002 Gujarat riots, and therefore of responsibility for her husband and their relatives’ death in the Gulberg society massacre, is the most questionable of them all.
Questionable may well be an understatement: a better word could be ‘destructive’. For with this judgment, the Supreme Court has destroyed whatever faith civil society had retained in the fairness of Indian jurisprudence. For not only did Justice Khanwilkar and his fellow judges dismiss Zakia Jafri’s petition with two contemptuous words – “without merit” – and noting caustically that “the present proceedings have been pursued for [the] last 16 years”, they devoted a significant amount of their judgment to vilifying Teesta Setalvad, founder of Citizens for Justice and Peace and Jafri’s adviser since 2006, Sanjiv Bhatt and R.B. Sreekumar, two officials of the State Intelligence Bureau whose testimony Mrs Jafri had been relying upon in her quest for justice.
Nor did the learned judges stop there, for in a key paragraph they virtually invited the government to prosecute these three on the grounds that it was they, not Modi’s Gujarat government, who had concocted ‘a larger conspiracy to keep the pot [of Modi’s culpability in the Gujarat riots] boiling”. And they did this when Bhatt and Sreekumar were not even petitioners in the case and Teesta’s own locus as a petitioner it refused to accept! This attack on members of civil society who were not even appearing before the court, could well be a precedent not only in Indian but global jurisprudence.
The learned judges’ intemperate recorded judgment is not the only worrying aspect of this case. For the judgment is 416 pages long, but the Gujarat Police arrived in Mumbai to arrest Setalvad within a day of its being given. The arrest of Sreekumar and the re-arrest of Sanjiv Bhatt, to discrediting whom the judges had also devoted more than 50 pages of their judgment, followed within hours.
Did the Gujarat Police have speed readers in its service, or was it, perchance, able to somehow access a copy of the judgment before it was pronounced? However improbable this is, the mere fact that the suspicion exists, and is being voiced, highlights the depths of distrust that have now developed between the highest court and ‘l’etat civile’ – civil society – that, has been protecting individual rights and constitutional freedoms in other democracies since their inception, and has been doing so with increasing vigour in India as the danger to it from Modi-ism has developed over the past eight years.
On June 28 , three days after Teesta’s arrest, former Supreme Court Judge Madan Lokur asked in these columns, “Did the Supreme Court intend or suggest that Teesta Setalvad should be arrested?” If it did not then it was incumbent upon it to say so. But the court has remained silent till this day, thereby reinforcing the suspicion that this was indeed what the three judges on this bench had in mind. Through its silence, therefore, the court has made itself a party to the wholesale destruction of habeas corpus – the right of citizens to freedom until proven guilty of a crime punishable by imprisonment – that is the cornerstone of democracy and has been under especially heavy attack since the Sangh parivar came to power in 2014.
Why has the Supreme Court stooped so low? Ever since judges began accepting lucrative post retirement posts after giving judgments that were to this government’s liking, civil society has begun to suspect the worst. Justice P. Sathasivam, a highly respected chief justice of the Supreme Court with several benchmark judgments to his credit, had set the ball rolling when he accepted the governorship of Kerala 16 weeks after he stepped down from the court in 2014. In April 2013, Justice Sathasivam had quashed the FIR against Amit Shah in the Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case and ordered that it be treated as a supplementary chargesheet filed for the killing of Sohrabuddin and Kauser Bi. Since Shah was already on bail in the latter case, this was a major relief for him as it meant he could not be arrested again as the CBI had wanted to do. Did Sathasivam not realise that when he accepted the governorship of Kerala, he would be reinforcing civil society’s fear that Modi and Shah were intent upon suborning the highest court of the land?
Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi strengthened this fear when he followed in Sathasivam’s footsteps and accepted nomination by the Modi government to the Rajya Sabha with equal celerity. Civil society’s suspicions hardened still further when former CBI director R.K Raghavan, who had been kept on as the head of a redundant SIT for another five years, was appointed India’s high commissioner to Cyprus within five months of resigning from it on ‘health grounds’ in April 2017. Raghavan had accepted these sinecures despite the fact that his own SIT had commented adversely on Modi keeping the three senior-most civil servants who had attended the controversial late night meeting at his home on February 27, 2002 in post-retirement posts through the entire period of the investigation, to shut their mouths.
The shock aroused all over the world by the Supreme Court’s latest dismissal of Zakia Jafri’s petition are therefore understandable. But assuming the worst about the Khanwilkar bench’s judgment will serve no purpose because it will only hasten the catastrophe that civil society fears the most. This is the collapse of the last pillar upon which the battered remnants of our democracy still rests.
To understand this fear it is necessary to look at the case from the judges’ point of view. Zakia Jafri’s plea was not about the Gulberg massacre. The Supreme Court had monitored this, and eight other specific cases. The Gulberg trial had resulted in 24 convictions and 32 acquittals. Zakia Jafri’s first information report (FIR), which she had submitted first to the Gujarat police after the riots, and when it took no action, to the Gujarat High Court, had accused the decision makers in the government of Gujarat of actively conspiring to let the riots happen. The wording of the FIR was explicit:
“I beg to bring to your kind notice the deliberate and intentional failure of the State Government to protect the life and property of innocent denizens of this countrythrough a well-executed and sinister criminal conspiracy amongst the accused above named, that resulted in the breakdown of Constitutional Governance in the State… since 2002, when a mass carnage was orchestrated by the most powerful in the State Executive using pressure and connivance of the State Administration and Law and Order Machinery there …..”
Heading the list of 62 conspirators was Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat, and since 2014 the prime minister of India. This petition created a serious problem for the Supreme Court: How to avoid a truly serious “judicial overreach” that would destroy the position the court had built as the final guardian of citizens’ rights when these were threatened by actions of the executive or enactments by the legislature.
This role was not spelt out anywhere in the constitution, but had been created by the court itself as India’s democracy had matured and in some respects soured, in the decades that followed. The constitution had spelt out the original, appellate and advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in Articles 132-134 and 143-144. Its appellate jurisdiction allowed it to entertain appeals in civil matters in cases that ‘involved a substantial question of law of general importance’, and in criminal matters if a high court had, on appeal, reversed the order of acquittal of an accused and sentenced him to death, or had withdrawn for trial before itself any case from a subordinate court.
These were highly restrictive clauses, but their severity was mitigated by a clause that allowed the Supreme Court to give ‘special leave to appeal’ if it was satisfied that a case warranted it. It was under this last, omnibus permission that it had assumed the role of protecting the rights of citizens as the shortcomings of Indian democracy began to surface. Its adjudication under this provision transformed the court from being the court of final appeal on points of law, usually affordable only to the rich and powerful, into the final guardian of the rights and freedoms that have been guaranteed to the people in the constitution.
In two memorable lectures given under the auspices of the Palkhivala Foundation in 2007 and 2017, Harish Salve, a former solicitor-general of India, traced the origins of judicial activism to what he labelled “the Krishna Iyerisation” of jurisprudence in India in 1970s. In Salve’s words, “before him the Supreme Court was the Supreme Court of India. Justice Krishna Iyer made it the Supreme Court for Indians”.
In his 2007 lecture, Salve highlighted four pivotal issues on which the Supreme Court did this. A decade later he identified three more. But in 2007, and again much more forcefully in 2017, Salve also warned that judicial activism could create its own perils. Chief of these was that the more citizens came to rely upon it to enforce the rule of law and ensure justice and equity in governance, the greater would become the risk of popular disillusionment if it failed.
But Salve also did not hide his concern that ‘where the Court steps in too often, it builds up hopes that it will not be able to deliver’. ‘The court has neither the sword nor the purse’ he warned. ‘If popular will turns against it, the institution (will be) destroyed’. He placed the blame for this squarely upon the legislatures and the central and state administrations, accusing ‘those in power (who) cannot arrive at a consensus on (abiding by the spirit of the constitution and) keeping the judiciary above suspicion.’
With the BJP’s ascension to power at the helm of the Union, the abuse of citizens’ rights became normal so the chasm between the executive and the judiciary widened rapidly. Zakia Jafri’s appeal to the Supreme Court in 2017 made it unbridgeable because its principal accused was now the Prime Minister of India. This put the Supreme Court in an impossible position: Not entertaining her petition would have further eroded the confidence of the public in the judiciary’s guardianship of its rights. But reopening the case would create a constitutional crisis.
The open rancour that its judgement displays towards civil society activists reflects its extreme discomfort with the position in which it found itself. It could not ignore the fate that had befallen the victims of the Gujarat riots. It could not therefore deny Zakia Jafri another hearing of her case. But it also knew that if it conceded her request for a fresh inquiry, Modi was even less likely to step down for its duration than Indira Gandhi had been in 1975. The risk of another head on clash between the executive and the judiciary that could, this time, bring India’s democracy to a permanent end, was therefore immense.
This could be the reason why the Khanwilkar bench summarily dismissed Jafri’s appeal. It did this by concentrating upon the process, and not the content of the investigation, and finding no fault with it. It concluded, unsurprisingly, that due process had been followed: The Supreme Court had created the Raghavan SIT; the SIT had submitted a report; the report had been criticised by the court’s Amicus Curiae; the court had sent the report back to the SIT for revision in the light of his comments; the SIT had submitted a revised report indicting some more people but confirming Modi’s exoneration ‘for lack of prosecutable evidence’. This is what the bench finally upheld.
Judgments made in hindsight are seldom of any real value, but one needs to be made because crimes like the one committed in 2002, can occur again in our increasingly polarised communal society. The cause of justice would have been better served if Zakia Jafri had accused the Modi government not of criminal conspiracy, but dereliction of “chain of command responsibility”.
Command responsibility is one of the oldest precepts of law in the world, for its origins can be traced back to Sun Tzu’s 6th century BC masterpiece The Art of War. It entered into modern international law when it was codified in The Hague Convention of 1899 and updated in the convention of 1907.
While conspiracy requires proof of commission, establishing chain of command responsibility requires only proof of deliberate omission, i.e a conscious failure to act in accordance with the law. It was used in 1946 after the Second World War, to indict General Yamashita, who was the Japanese governor of the Philippines, because his soldiers committed innumerable atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war.
The concept was refined to avoid misuse two years later in a celebrated American case labelled the HighCommand Case, where the US Supreme court decided that for a commander to be held criminally liable for the actions of his subordinates “there must be a personal dereliction” which “can only occur where the act is directly traceable to him or where his failure to properly supervise his subordinates constitutes criminal negligence on his part based upon a wanton, immoral disregard of the action of his subordinates amounting to acquiescence.”
There is a tonne of evidence that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad intended to use the unfortunate Godhra train burning incident in which 59 Hindus perished to launch a pogrom of Muslims the next day, but the entire case of criminal conspiracy against Modi and his principal lieutenants rested upon the remark Modi was alleged to have made in his late night meeting with police chiefs on February 27, 2002, advising them not to prevent the inevitable Hindu backlash that would occur the next day. Whatever one may choose to believe about the motives of the participants in the meeting, legally this case became untenable when all the participants in it claimed that the principal whistle blowers, Sanjiv Bhat, R.B Sreekumar and Haren Pandya had not been present at the meeting.
So when the SIT exonerated chief minister Modi for lack of prosecutable evidence, Zakia Jafri would have been on much stronger ground if she had launched a fresh case against the Gujarat government based upon a precise enunciation of the chain of command responsibility doctrine. To prove this, all she would have needed to show was that, knowing full well the backlash that was bound to follow after the VHP had taken over the bodies of the deceased, and consciously allowing it to do so, the government had done nothing to prevent it.
Such a case would have been difficult to disprove because in 2010, Citizens for Justice and Peace – the organisation founded by Teesta Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand – had unearthed cell-phone records which showed that “Ahmedabad police commissioner P.C. Pande had spoken to joint commissioner of police M.K. Tandon six times during the period when the latter was present at Gulberg Society and the mob was growing restive. Though Tandon was accompanied by “striking force” equipped to disperse a riotous mob, he left Gulberg Society without taking any corrective action and his departure led to the massacre …”.
That opportunity has been missed and will return only when Modi and the BJP are no longer in power.
The new recruitment scheme will slowly change the character of the army and also provide well-trained ‘non-state actors’ to further the political agenda of the ruling Parivar.
PM Narendra Modi. In the background is a train anti-Agnipath protesters set on fire. Photos: PTI and Reuters
In eight years as prime minister, Narendra Modi has made surprise his favoured tool for reinforcing his hold on power. He did this in September 2020 with the farm law amendments. With Agnipath, he has done it again. Its government claims that it is a “transformative military reform”. Supporters say it had become necessary to limit skyrocketing pension liabilities that were preventing the acquisition of modern weaponry. BJP leaders also claim that the 75% of Agniveers who are discharged will return to civilian life imbued with discipline and a sense of national purpose. The country will gain from this.
If that is so, then why has it been met with a storm of protest? Why are the youth of the country, whom it is supposed to benefit, its main opponents? Why is the protest most fierce, and sustained in, Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan? Are these not precisely the states in which the BJP is in power, or has established a firm presence in the past seven years?
Shortly after posting my article on how government formation in Kashmir could promote better India-Pakistan relations, I read an article by a distinguished former Pakistan High Commissioner to India, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi. I felt that this needed to be shared with a wider audience in India. Hence this post:
The need to rethink, radically
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi
A state of “no war, no peace”, with a neighbour several times our size provides no context to pursue counterterrorism policies. That too against organisations we have ben using as proxies and which have done us no end of harm diplomatically and domestically.
Another all-parties conference; a dash to Kabul; a rage of hangings; a 20-point National Action Plan to succeed the still-born Nacta and NISP; a committee for every point of the NAP; subcommittees for every committee; an overall oversight committee led by the prime minister who proclaims zero tolerance; a defining moment; a do-or-die challenge; an unending jihad against jihadis; eternal cooperation with the military which is invited to discharge his responsibilities; military courts of dubious value and still more dubious constitutionality.
“Democratic” political leaders who until recently were locked in mortal combat are now united in complicit support for a “soft coup” and a resurrection of the doctrine of necessity.
The Supreme Court judges realising the gravity of the situation met under the chairmanship of the chief justice to assess how the prosecution of those accused of terrorism could be prioritised and completed expeditiously. They have, accordingly, agreed on an eight-point plan. Their plan has been summarily shoved aside by the 20-point plan. So much for the rule of law! Will the Supreme Court now accept amendments to the Constitution that are against its “basic structure” and clear intent and purpose? The superior judiciary is not incompetent. It has been impeded by those who would now supersede it.
There has been no collective and public (civil and military) leadership apology to the bereaved families and the nation. No acknowledgement of responsibility — indeed guilt — for bringing about a state of affairs in the country that directly and indirectly made the atrocity possible, if not likely. How can anyone say “this is a watershed moment” or “we have at last turned the corner”? Our 9/11, no less, have been so many self-inflicted tragedies in our short history including the fall of Dhaka, military surrender and the break-up of the country. There has been the loss of the Siachen Glacier and the fiasco of Kargil. There has been the intermittent war in Balochistan over decades. There were unprincipled deals ceding control in a number of Fata areas to dangerous militants.
These militants have become today’s monsters responsible for the school atrocity and murder and mayhem of every kind in Pakistan. There has been Abbottabad leading to national humiliation and isolation abroad.
Have we responded to all this criminal impunity with a greater concern for national security, governance and leadership? Why, or rather how will it be any different this time? Well, because enough is enough! Our cup of patience runneth over! The leopard will at last change its spots. Inshallah! Indeed, we have a plan for it. Mashallah!
We know the history of inquiry commissions in Pakistan. Even so, why has our suddenly “united” civil and military leadership not immediately sought to “break the mould” by establishing a genuinely independent, repeat independent, and competent commission to inquire into all aspects of how December 16 came to pass? Such an inquiry should, needless to say, seek to ascertain who bore the greatest responsibility for the political and security milieu, as well as the specific lead-up circumstances, including lapses, that resulted in the tragedy. It should make a meaningful and comprehensive set of concise, relevant and mutually reinforcing policy recommendations that are continuously monitored and reported upon to the nation on a weekly basis by our “born-again” leadership.
Counterterrorism in Pakistan has to be part and parcel of a comprehensive state and, indeed, societal transformation process. Yes, this is a longer term effort. But given our truly rotten circumstances, unless our action plan is embedded in a simultaneous commencement of this longer-term and much bigger project, it will lose direction, momentum and credibility very rapidly.
Solemn assurances to the contrary are rhetorical and meaningless because outside this broader transformation context they cannot be credible. This credibility of our counterterrorism commitment will also need to manifest itself in our foreign policy.
Take Afghanistan. Unless we deny the Afghan Taliban and their various cohorts and networks safe havens, sanctuaries and cross-border supply routes on our territory, how do we expect our commitments to President Ashraf Ghani and his government to be taken seriously? How would we play an acceptable role in a peacemaking and political reconciliation process in Afghanistan if the government in Kabul has grave reservations about our reliability as a partner?
If the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan are viable inside Afghanistan without our assistance we can still play a constructive role in facilitating reconciliation without seeking to use them as a check on India’s influence. If a terror-prone Afghan Taliban once again takes over Afghanistan, with or without our deniable assistance, it will be the TTP and not us who will gain “strategic depth”.
Take India. We need to have a predictable working relationship with it despite our continuing and significant differences on Kashmir and other issues. We will need to develop and implement modalities for managing our differences on Kashmir and building essential bilateral and regional cooperation to confront the challenges of the 21st century.
A state of “no war, no peace” with a neighbour several times our size provides no context in which to pursue counterterrorism policies against organisations we have been prone to use as ‘proxies’, and which have done us no end of harm diplomatically and domestically.
Unless we radically rethink our external policy strategies how will we develop a credible counterterrorism policy and transform our economy and society? There is no indication of any of this in the national action plan. Will we finally do what we say and dismantle the whole infrastructure of terror inside Pakistan? Will we begin to rationalise our India and Afghanistan policies and come across as credible to ourselves and the international community?
In memory of our lost angels: You were the faces of tomorrow
Our living dreams of today.
May you help transcend our sorrow
May you abide and show the way. Published in Dawn from Karachi and The Tribune from Chandigarh.The writer is a former Pakistani ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan.
Despite the setbacks the BJP suffered in the bye-elections of August and September, there was never any serious doubt that it would emerge as the winner in the Maharashtra and Haryana elections. What has come as a surprise is the magnitude of the victory. Not only has it gained an absolute majority in the Haryana assembly, but it has come close to doing so in Maharashtra inspite of breaking its alliance with the Shiv Sena. The doubling of its share of the vote in Maharashtra, and its tripling in Haryana, confirms its pre-eminence today. The message of these elections is therefore unambiguous: five months after the May elections the ‘Modi wave’ has not begun to retreat.
The reason is not hard to seek. In May the country had been suffering from a recession that had stalled industrial growth and completely stopped the growth of employment for the previous three years. Modi promised to revive the economy and offered the ‘Gujarat model’ as proof that he could do so. Desperate to see a ray of sunshine in their lives huge numbers of people believed him and voted for the BJP. As a result the BJP’s share of the national vote increased from below 19 to 31 percent.
Today people continue to believe Prime minister Modi’s promises despite the fact that there has been absolutely no improvement in their condition in the past five months. They do so because with his common touch, now amplified a million-fold by the media, he has struck a chord in their hearts. The message he has managed to convey is that his government will not make decisions for the poor, he will allow the poor to set their own priorities. So they are prepared to give him more time.
But the ‘Modi wave’ is only a relative one. The BJP’s share of the vote is still only 27.8 percent in Maharashtra, and 33.2 percent in Haryana. Thus it still owes its win to the utter disunity among the secular parties. This is most clearly visible in Maharashtra. The vote of the Congress and the NCP, together, fell by only 2.1 percent. As had happened in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in December, 11 out of the BJP’s 14 percent gain in vote took place at the cost of independents and unrecognized parties. The message this conveys is the same as the one that the four major state elections in December conveyed: that voters are no longer prepared to waste their vote by giving it to people who have no hope of winning.
The Haryana election has delivered a different, but equally important message. Here two thirds of the increase in the BJP’s vote has come from the Congress. As in adjoining Delhi last December, this is a vote born out of pure disillusionment. In Delhi the beneficiary was the Aam Admi Party. In Haryana, since AAP did not fight the Haryana elections, it has been the BJP.
For the BJP, the message is clear: the entire country wants a revival of the economy. If the BJP cannot deliver this, its honeymoon will not last much longer. What is more, were faith in Mr Modi’s promises tocollapse, the rejection of the BJP will be severe.
For the Congress these elections have shown that unless it makes a herculean effort to pull itself together and present, or at least lead, a credible alternative to the BJP, its vote will keep slipping away. Its introspection must start with why it has lost every election since last despite having poured four times as much money as the Vajpayee government into programmes of ‘inclusive development’. This introspection is necessary because the collapse of growth is the only reason that the Congress’ pundits did not offer during its soul searching conference after its defeat in May.
Accepting that chasing the phantom of inflation at the cost of growth was the main cause of its election debacle will not set anything right, but it will at least carry the reassurance that such a thing will not happen again were it to come back to power. However the Congress would do well not to bank upon the BJP’s non-performance to bring it back to power as the default option for the electorate. Mr. Modi’s government has not done anything tangible to revive the economy yet, but it would be foolish of the Congress to hope that it will not do so in the coming four years.
But there are other areas in which the Congress can build an alternative platform that will attract the voters to its banner in coming elections. Among these are the destruction of the nexus that has developed between crime, black money and politics in the last fifty years; empowering the common man against the State by amending article 311 of the constitution to allow people to prosecute the state for the dereliction of its duties; providing security to the poor through social insurance, instead of throwing money at them in the hope that some of it will stick, and acquiring land for development in ways that will make the owners and users permanent stakeholders in development instead of its victims.
The Congress also urgently needs organizational changes: if there is anything it needs to learn not only from its defeat in May but the absolute disarray in the party since then, it is that the days of relying on the Gandhi-Nehru charisma to win elections, have ended. The current generation of the family neither has the acceptability nor the sheer grit (that Indira Gandhi had in abundance) to pull the party out of the morass of defeat. The Congress needs a compete remake, and the remake has to start with its present leaders formally handing over power to a younger generation of central and state leaders who have the long vision, and the perseverance, to rebuild the party democratically from its roots.
Hi, my name is Prem Shankar Jha. I am a journalist and author based in New Delhi, India.
In the last decade I have become more and more concerned about where the world is heading and I am curious to explore interactive formats with you in order to share views and concerns.
Please do not hesitate to be in touch.
