It
is not freedoms of Expression and Faith that are under threat; the Constitution
of India and Democracy are the targets
JOHN
DAYAL
There
is an element or irony, which has not gone entirely unnoticed, in the Prime
Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, announcing that what the world knows as Christmas
will henceforth will be celebrated in India as “Good Governance Day”, with a
slew of activities in honour of the
first Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister who was in office between 21998 and 2004. After a ten-year
interlude of rule by the Congress under Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Modi won a
mandate for the second BJP government in New Delhi.
His
agenda was Development, which needed not just economic growth but a ruthlessness
in ensuring that there was no resistance to it. Nothing in the social and
political structures in tribal villages, among the small peasantry and the working class, that would thwart the
engines of such development, big national capital, multinational corporations.
And of that ephemeral thing called Foreign Direct Investment – an omnibus term
that includes traders who make a profit
on borrowing money from the US at a 2 per cent interest and putting it in India
at a 12 per cent rate, others who have laundered Indian money on which they
avoided taxes and routed it back through havens such as Mauritius, and Indian
businesses who settled the blue line in their
units abroad by investing their Dollars and Euros in their Indian
companies for the same reason. The trouble with such FDI, of course, is that it
goes back to foreign lands at the press of a computer key with the same speed
with which it came in when the investor panics.
Many
of the “reforms” to make this dream possible are on their way. Tribals are all
but losing their lands to mining giants because villages could lose their veto.
Trade unions, all but defunct in the
liberalisation programmes the Congress regime
in 2004-2014, now face annihilation. Land acquisition rules will make it
convenient to force projects wherever it is profitable for the cronies.
But
the dream is possibly running into problems not thought of in the rhetoric if
the general elections. And there is opposition to the campaign to end what the
BJP has called, with great derision,
“entitlements” of the common people. They may change the name of the Mahatma
Gandhi National rural Employment Scheme and merge schemes named after Indira
Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi into umbrellas named after Bharatiya Janata party and Sangh
stalwarts, but subsidies to farmers, rural landless, and urban poor are needed
if the 50 per cent, in real time, in
abject poverty are not to rise in a bloody revolution.
And
this forces Mr. Modi to look for other agendas. He does not have to look far. Mr.
Vajpayee’s legacy, and the Sangh Parivar’s dreams, provide handy tracks on which the
prime minister can tread.
The
most dangerous of these is removing the roadblock of the current contents of
the Indian Constitution, or at least those that are seen as a hindrance in the
construction or reconstruction of the
India that was in the scriptures and stories of old. This is something the
Sangh, and even the BJP, has always spoken about, rejecting the document signed
by the Constituent Assembly and brought into force in 1950. They call this document a relic of a
colonial, and Christian, alien thesis which has no place in the Indian culture
in which it has no roots.
The
Constitution has sustained itself now for six and a half decades, but it
remains a fragile document. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that its
basic features cannot be altered. But it permits amendments to bring it in tune
with the times, and to cater to new situations. All Statutes must be relevant
to the age. Constitutional provisions for sort of suspending fundamental rights
by declaring a state of National Emergency have been used in times of the wars
with China and Pakistan, specially in 1971.
But
Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975 showed the Constitution could be suspended, so to
say, even for political, partisan and personal reasons. After her election was
upturned by the Allahabad high court fir using government machinery in her campaign,
she declared a state of Emergency in June that year saying there was national
anarchy and peoples groups were trying t overthrow the government. Till she
revoked it and called for general elections in 1977, the Emergency saw the
country ruled by extra-constitutional centres of authority.
Mr.
Vajpayee too saw much in the Constitution that he wanted changed. His
government never did have the majority in Parliament, specially the Lok Sabha,
to implement his dream project, but he did start the process. The Commission to
review the Constitution was set up by his government, chaired by former Chief
Justice and former Chairman of the National Human Rights commission, Justice M
N Venkatachelliah. Among the proposals before it was one by BJP leader and Vice
President of India, Bhairon Singh Sekhawat who said the election process must
be changed so that parliament and state legislatures had fixed terms for five
years, all the elections were held on the same state, no-confidence motions had
to be backed by an alternative “confidence motion”, and that the two Houses of
Parliament would directly elect the Prime minister in case a party did not have
a clear majority.
Mr.
Venkatachelliah did not suggest anything so drastic, but he did call for electoral
reforms as a matter of urgency.
Constitutional
experts and the then Opposition party, the Congress, as well as the Left group,
saw a greater conspiracy. They said a fixed term for elected representatives is an attempt to
introduce a presidential form of government, which has been BJP's pet
prescription for India's ills. As India
Today recorded, “The proposal to bring in an alternative formation along with a
no-confidence motion had no takers in the 1998 debate, which Vajpayee lost by a
vote.”
Mr. Modi has made
it amply clear, if not in so many words then by other means, that he is very fond
of a presidential system. Among his first few actions was to chose a cabinet of
persons with little political strength on their own, his keeping all major
decision-making powers to himself, his orders asking all Secretaries heading
various central ministers to report to him directly and approach him when they
wanted to him bypassing their Ministers,
and finally getting an Act of Parliament changed to get a man of his choice as the head of the Prime Ministers
Office. For all practical purposes, the concept of a Government run by a
Council of Ministers with Cabinet responsibility is no longer operative. Mr.
Modi is the Government of India.
He will, of
course, not have his way right away, but he sure can try to bulldoze some important
laws. The BJP has a clear, but bare, majority in the Lok Sabha and unless such
groups as the All India Anna DMK of Tamil Nadu and the Biju Janata Dal of
Orissa back him up together with the current partners in the NDA [The Trinamool
Congress is now a strong enemy after the CBI targetting Ms. Mamta Banerjee and
her cabinet colleagues in the multi billion rupees Sharada ponzy scam] even
moving a major Constitutional amendment in the Lok Sabha will be impossible. He
does not have the numbers.
In the Rajya
Sabha, the combined opposition is twice as numerous as his BJP and allies. But
the situation will change drastically in the net biennial elections, and in
less than four years, the BJP may well be in an absolute majority.
What happens when
Mr. Modi prepares for the 2019 general elections is anyone’s guess.
But meanwhile,
despite his rather curious call for a “ten year moratorium” on caste and
communal violence – not an end to such mayhem, just a postponement – he has maintained
a resounding silence on voices from his huge army of supporters and ideological colleagues that in affect call
for a throwing away of the Constitution and all its basic values, speedily
those relating to freedoms of relgion and belief, and in fact of citizenship.
The Constitution’s first few sentences group the freedoms of Expression and
relgion in one phrase.
There are now open
calls for religious cleansing if Bharatavarsha. And their shouts find an echo in the pronouncements
of Mr. Modi’s ministers. As Dr. Faisal Devji, Director of the Asian Studies
Centre at the University of Oxford says, ”More interesting than the shifting
balance of power between the BJP and its “family” of non-state Hindu
organisations, however, might be the fact that Hindu nationalism has never
possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic state, for
instance, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure,
Hindu nationalism has no alternative political model, apart from an insistence
on the dominance of majoritarian culture and concerns. And this is its triumph
as much as tragedy, since the absence of a distinctive theory of state
repeatedly casts Hindu nationalism back into a social movement, one that can
only make claims on cultural and demographic rather than constitutional
grounds.”
On
18th December 2014, which is the official National Minorities Day,
Mr. Rajeshwar Singh, the head of the Dharm Jagran Manch [Faith awakening forum]
declared on national television news channels that the Manch had set a 2021
deadline to cleanse India of the “alien
Islam and Christianity”. Another group said Christians would not be allowed in
the Himalayan regions, sacred to the Hindus. The hate speeches went viral on
social media, and then in the major newspapers across the country.
The
Indian government has so far not indicated if Mr. Rajeshwar Singh is being
prosecuted under India’s strict laws against religious discord, used so far
largely to target Christian pastors, and
in recent months, Muslim youth active on
Face Book who vent their anger against the State.
But
members of the Union Council of Ministers, and official spokesmen of the
Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, which controls much of the Indian provincial
governments, have been voluble in support of the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar is
a very large and almost Omni-present family of Hindu militant organisations
created by the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in the past two decades, of which
the Dharma Jagran Manch, the Bajrang Dal and the powerful Vishwa Hindu Parishad are among the
more prominent groups with aggressive
cadres.
Political analysts have said it would be erroneous to assume that under the government
of Mr. Modi, the RSS has reoriented its goals. Each time the BJP assumes power,
its ideologues get emboldened. Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power in New
Delhi when major attacks took place on Christians. Over 30 village churches
were destroyed in Dangs in Gujarat on Christmas Eve in 1998. Australian leprosy
worker Graham Staines and his sons were burnt alive in January 1999, and of a
Catholic priest Fr George Kuzhikandam in Mathura, not too far from New Delhi,
as he lay asleep in his church in June 2000. Christmas eve violence in 2007 in
Kandhamal, Orissa, was a precursor of the 2008 pogrom, was when the BJP was in
power in coalition government. Mr. Modi has made no bones of the fact that he
was a leader of the RSS, and continues to profess its ideology.
RSS
affiliated groups have launched a campaign to convert the poorer Christians and
Muslims to Hinduism, a process they call Ghar Wapsi, or home coming under their
argument that every Indian is actually a Hindu, and Christians and Muslims are
those who have strayed, or have been bought over by missionaries. In turn, the
Sangh groups have called for a war chest for the Ghar Wapsi, earmarking Rupees
500,000 for every Muslim they convert, and Rupees 200,000 for every Christian.
The different rates are presumably because Muslims are felt to be more
difficult to “persuade’ for a change of faith.
In
the central Indian State of Chhattisgarh, where some months ago radical groups
enacted villages banning the entry of essentially Christian pastors and
religious services other than those of the Hindus, the focus is now on Catholic
Schools. In its Bastar Tribal region, Christian schools, which are otherwise in
great demand, need to install statues of the Hindu goddess of learning,
Saraswati. And priests running these institutions can no longer be called
“father’, but need to be called “Pracharya”, a teacher. Protestant pastors are
now beaten up, home churches raided almost as a matter of routine, with the
police looking on, or an active participant. Santa Claus, of course, has been
proscribed. Needless to say, the State has been governed by the BJP for the
past 12 years.
The
fact that the Sangh Parivar runs over 57,000 ideology based schools for
children in villages across several states, and specially in areas populated by
Tribals and the Dalits, groups once called Untoucbable, makes available a cadre
of youth and their parents ready to do their bidding.
The
BJP’s response has been to suggest that the religious cleansing deadline needs
to be seen in the context of fiery speeches by Muslim TV evangelists and
western campaigns to spread Christianity. The government’s senior minister, Mr.
Venkiah Naidu, a former president of the BJP, has called for a national law
against religious conversions. These laws exist in six states, and have been
passed by two more states but yet made cleared by the Governors. It is a matter
of a few months before they too are brought into force. These laws have also
led to some considerable violence against religious groups in the years they
have been in force.
United
Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteurs for Religious Freedom have slammed
these laws as infringing the basic rights of freedom of faith and belief,
enunciated in the UN bill of Rights, and in fact, an important part of the
Indian Constitution.
Other
ministers have suggested an immediate enactment of a Common Civil Code,
seemingly a good thing, but rooted in the unsubstantiated premise that Muslims
can marry four wives at a time, are breeding too fast, and will outnumber the
Hindus soon. The law will also impact on Christian personal laws and customs,
particularly in rural populations where tradition and custom are the glue that
holds their society together.
Mr.
Modi’s minister for education, the former TV actor Mrs. Smriti Boman Irani, who
has ordered a revision of text books, particularly of history, to incorporate
more of ancient Indian traditions including references of Hindu sacred texts.
Various important councils in the ministry are now chaired by luminaries wedded
to the thesis that India is the fountainhead of all knowledge in the world. The
BJP and the Minister hold Hindu sacred texts are the 5,000-year-old source of
knowledge on such diverse subjects as plastic surgery, aviation, nuclear
weaponry and genetic engineering.
Her
officials passed orders earlier this month that Christmas Day will now be
called “Good Governance Day” in honour of the birthday, not of Jesus, but of
Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first BJP Prime Minister who ruled from 1998 to
2004, and is now critically ill and has not been seen in public for several
years. Academic institutions from junior schools to Universities were keep
their doors open and organise social programmes for the students, supervised by
the teachers. Christmas was not to be a holiday any more.
An
outcry by Church and Civil Society, an acrimonious clash in Parliament where
Mr. Modi still does not have a majority in the Upper House, Rajya Sabha, forced
the government to dilute its order. Christmas remains a Holiday, but the
“educational” programmes of declamations and other activities will also be
held, with Principals and officials told to report to the government that they
did indeed comply with the order.
Muslims
and Christians feel they are being encircled in a vicious and tightening
noose, in the villages and small towns
by Sangh cadres who have the police on their side, and nationally by the
Federal and State governments who seem to endorse the hate campaigns and the
violence.
But for
Civil society, the threat is to the Constitution of India which ahs evolved as
a great international democratic document that protects the subcontinent-sized
country’s hundreds of cultures, languages, races and faith. All too many people
in office and heading Sangh groups have
said the Constitution is a
British inheritance that has no place in
Hindu Rashtra, the Land of the Hindus.
Without
a State of Emergency being declared, the Extra-Constitutional Centres of
authority seem to be active.
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