Siddharth Varadarajan: In Modi 2.0, Democracy Has Been Quarantined
never before in independent India has there been such impunity for those connected to the establishment. If you are a member of the ruling party or support the government’s political agenda, you can advocate violence and even carry it out, spread hatred against religious minorities, humiliate and abuse the poor, without worrying about being asked to render account in a court of law
To understand what
Narendra Modi has done to India in the first year of his second term as prime
minister, I want you to consider the contrasting fate of two young people,
Amulya Leona and Anurag Thakur. Leona, still in her
teens, has been in jail for three months now, charged with sedition and other
serious crimes for simply shouting ‘Long Live Pakistan’ and ‘Long Live India’ from
the stage of a public event in Bangalore. If Leona spoke about
living, Thakur, who is junior minister of finance in Modi’s government, spoke
about killing.
From the stage of a
public event in Delhi, he exhorted a crowd of Bharatiya Janata Party
supporters to shout “Shoot the Traitors”. The ‘traitors’ were not an
abstraction but the women and men of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere who had been
protesting the government’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act. A few days later, in
fact, someone actually fired on the protestors at Jamia
Millia. However, the police has yet to file a case against Thakur, let alone
seek to take him into custody. “The time is not right”, a top law officer of
the government told the Delhi high court when asked whether the police intended
to register an FIR against the minister.
Leona and Thakur are
not alone. Not since the
emergency of Indira Gandhi have so many people across India spent so much time
in custody for political reasons than in the past year, and never before has
the sword of arrest and detention hung over more heads. One former chief
minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, is now into her ninth month of
incarceration.
At the same time,
never before in independent India has there been such impunity for those
connected to the establishment. If you are a member of the ruling party or
support the government’s political agenda, you can advocate violence and even
carry it out, spread hatred against religious minorities, humiliate and abuse
the poor, without worrying about being asked to render account in a court of
law. In New Zealand, an Indian origin Justice of the Peace was sacked for advocating an economic boycott of Muslims in
India. In Uttar Pradesh, two MLAs were caught
on camera doing the same thing on the ground, yet they got to keep
their jobs and the police insisted there was no reason to file charges.
In many parts of India
today, the right of the people to mock or even criticise their leaders no
longer exists or hangs by a slender thread. Last week, the police in Madhya
Pradesh registered a criminal case against a journalist for
referring to the prime minister as a ‘gappu’, or braggart. In Agra, a
man who called the Uttar Pradesh chief minister a ‘dog’ has been charged with sedition. Last month, a young photographer in
Kashmir was threatened with arrest under the Unlawful Activities
(Prevention) Act as a terrorist for a photograph she posted on
Instagram in 2018.
In Andhra Pradesh, a woman who asked a series of
embarrassing questions about the recent industrial accident in Vishakapatnam was arrested by the police. The purpose these
‘individual’ cases serve is to scare others into silence. The amended UAPA has
also given home minister Amit Shah the power to designate any individual as a “terrorist” without a
trial or even the filing of charges…..
see also
CBI court
raps Amit Shah for non-appearance in fake encounter case
Neelabh Mishra - Modi Sarkar, beware of tampering with the Constitution / Soli Sorabjee: What we need to guard / Arun Shourie: "What we are going towards is a pyramidal decentralised mafia state"
Neelabh Mishra - Modi Sarkar, beware of tampering with the Constitution / Soli Sorabjee: What we need to guard / Arun Shourie: "What we are going towards is a pyramidal decentralised mafia state"
Ajmer blast case: Two including a
former RSS worker get life imprisonment
Julio Ribeiro - Burying Karkare: I cannot let these forces go unchallenged
Julio Ribeiro - Burying Karkare: I cannot let these forces go unchallenged
