Seeing
Stars in the Daylight
The
PM, the CJI and the Threat to Justice and the Freedoms of the people
JOHN
DAYAL
As
every child knows, Five Star is the name of a chocolate-coated Caramel bar. It
is very bad for oral health, dentists say. Five Star hotels are better, as they
need to have a swimming pool and an alcohol bar to qualify.
Five
Star activists were unheard of till Good Friday this year, though occasionally
a few had been lampooned as Page Three ones, perhaps referring to their
sartorial elegance.
Like
many other acronyms – those smart sounding words that expand into some terrible
explanatory sentences – and phrases such as ‘Make [not Made] in India’, it got
instant approbation from fans of the man who had coined it, Mr. Narendra Modi,
the Prime minister of India., going viral on Indian cyber space.
It
should worry Indian citizens. It hides mindsets that are dangerous for
democracy, impacting on just about every facet of it ranging from justice,
civil liberties, to environment and constitutional relationships between
the executive and the judiciary. Within
days, it has started becoming visible, not perhaps unexpectedly given the
similarity some have seen between utterances of the head of the judiciary and
the head of the government. The sequence of events is frightening.
Mr.
Modi made his remarks while addressing the chief justice and judges of the
Supreme Court, the chief justices of state high courts and all the chief
ministers in the country. That he called the meeting on Good Friday was reminiscent
of the Good Governance Day he had ordered on Christmas 2014 to honour former
prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee who had also just been awarded the Bharat
Ratna, the country’s highest civil honour. The chief justice’s acquiescing in
the timing of the conference – and his defence of it – raised s stink when one
of the supreme court judges, Mr. Kurien Joseph, object, saying the day was holy
to the Christians as much as no official work was done on some other days that
were holy to people of other faiths.
The government’s
Press Information Bureau has not yet given an authenticated English
translation, and therefore one has to go by reports in the print media, which
quote the Prime Minister as saying, "The
judiciary is not as fearless today as it used to be ten years back. Are
five-star activists not driving the judiciary? Are they not attempting to do
so? Judges fear what the reaction of five-star activists would be when they
render justice as per law and as per Constitution. It is not difficult to
dispense justice as per Constitution and law. But while doing so, judges must
differentiate between perception (created by social activists) and fact."
Chief Justice of India H L Dattu apparently rebutted
the PM's perception and later told the Times of India, "Judges today are
as fearless as they ever were." But Mr. Dattu’s words have lost some of
their force because his comments in other situations. But some link Mr. Modi’s
remarks to two judges - Justices S J Mukhopadhaya and N V Ramana – being
removed by the chief justice from hearing activist Mumbai-based activist Teesta
Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand's petition seeking a directive to Gujarat
Police not to arrest her for alleged embezzlement of funds meant for riot
victims. Setalvad's counsel had sought replacement of the judges by pointing
out that they had invited the PM for the weddings of their children.
As the paper pointed out, Modi himself was in
the eye of a Supreme Court case for three years. With the help of Setalvad, Mrs.
Jakia Jafri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was killed by a
rioting mob in 2002, had filed a petition accusing Modi, then chief minister of
Gujarat, of deliberately failing in his constitutional duty to protect innocent
minorities during the 2002 riots.
It is a different matter that the Supreme Court
-appointed special investigating team had gave Mr. Modi a clean chit. The
Bharatiya Janata Party president, Mr. Amit Shah, got his own clean chit from
the Central Bureau of Investigation in due course.
The words Mr. Modi uses matter, and matter a
lot because they get translated into actions that impact on common people,
often with great violence.
Mr. Modi’s
most authentic biographer, the journalist
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyaya says in his analysis of the challenges
facing the judiciary: “[Modi] is a man who is guided by vested interest and not
of a man who must uphold the world’s longest-written Constitution. Mr. Modi has
popularised the phrase “five-star activist” the way he introduced the label of
the “news trader” or “bazaru survey” to the political lexicon of the country.
Peering through Bvlgari spectacles and keeping track of time on his Movado
watch while clothed in crisp, signature linen Modi Kurta, the Prime Minister
cast aspersions on the judiciary while forgetting that he, in fact, personifies
five-star culture. He used the contentious phrase thrice, implying on each
occasion that the judiciary had become pliable and could be moulded by groups
with suspect funding. He contended that such groups were masquerading as public
litigants and were determining the nature of verdicts, thereby implying that
the judges no longer had a mind of their own!”
According to Mr. Mukhopadhaya, “In each “project” that Mr
Modi has on hand there is a different enemy. In 2002, when he had to win the
polls, enemies of Gujarat were giving the state and the people a bad name and
Mr Modi became the crusader for ‘Gujarati asmita’. ‘Mian Musharraf’ became a
moniker for more than 40 lakh people in the state who practiced Islam. In 2007,
there was a Sohrabuddin lurking everywhere. In the run-up to the parliamentary
polls, “news-traders” were the hurdles in the path of Mr. Modi taking India
back to the golden ages. The hatred towards journalists was allowed to develop
to such an extent that trolls became common and even led to physical violence
against journalists. Mr. Modi has a
problem with public interest litigation. But he is not the first politician to
argue that judicial activism is hampering growth and acting as an obstacle to
government. Most recently, Mr. Modi’s trusted aide and chief resource manager
during the Lok Sabha campaign, Mr. Piyush Goyal, said judicial overreach was
responsible for stunting growth. He contended that growth cannot be allowed to
stagnate because of obsession with environmental protectionism. Specifically,
he claimed judicial overreach or sensationalisation can cause more damage than
growth.”
The government on 9th April 2015 suspended
the registration of Greenpeace under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act.
In its order, the government claimed that Greenpeace had “prejudicially
affected the economic interest of the state”. The order has also frozen seven
of Greenpeace’s bank accounts. The Home Ministry’s charges against Greenpeace
are based on financial technicalities relating to incorrect reporting of the
foreign contributions it has received
Not that Greenpeace,
NGOs and the Church were not warned early.
Within
days of taking over , In May 2014, the Modi government started action against NGOs,
leaking an Intelligence Bureau report which claimed a host of NGOs, including
Greenpeace India, were working against the interests of the nation at the
behest of foreign powers and that their activities had cost the country 2-3% of
GDP. In response to that, the government
has cancelled more than 2,300 NGO registrations in its nine months in
power, citing violations of the FCRA.
Greenpeace
India activist Priya Pillai was barred from flying out of India on Sunday
despite a valid visa, a move described by the campaign group as
"bullying" but justified by government sources. Priya, a senior
Greenpeace campaigner, was on her way to London when immigration officials
stopped her and stamped "offload" on her passport. This incident came four months after another
British Greenpeace staff member was stopped from entering India and put back on
a London-bound flight.
On
5th March, 2015, the
government banned 69 NGOs from receiving foreign funds under Foreign
Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA), out of those 30 NGOs run by Christian and
Muslim groups. They were said to be working against the interest of the nation,
based on intelligence reports. Andhra Pradesh topped the list of banned NGOs
with 14 in the state. Of the 69 blacklisted from receiving foreign
funds, 14 are from Andhra Pradesh, 12 from Tamil Nadu and five each from Odisha
and Gujarat. The others are based in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Jammu and
Kashmir. Manya are are run by Christian institutions, one is an Islamic
education association. Minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju said in
reply to a question in Lok Sabha. He said intelligence agencies reported
adversely against NGOs such as Tuticorin Diocesan Association; East Coast
Research and Development Trust, Thoothukudi; Centre for Promotion and Social
Concerns, Madurai and Greenpeace Chennai.
On 7
April this year, Bertha Foundation of the Netherlands is the latest advocacy
group to be included on the list of foreign donors that require clearance from
the Union Home Ministry for funding non-governmental organisations. It was
targeted for funding Greenpeace, among others. The others in the prior-approval
list are the U.S.-based 350.Org, Mercy Corps (which operated in Kashmir), Bank
Information Centre, Sierra Club Foundation and Avaaz.org; the Netherlands-based
ICCO Stretegische Samenwerking, HIVOS, Catholic Organisation for Relief and
Development Aid and Inter-Church Peace Council; and the Denmark-based Danish
Institute of Human Rights and Danish International Development Agency. While
350.Org, Climate Works Foundation, Greenpeace International, Bank Information
Centre, Sierra Club Foundation and Avaaz.org take up environment issues, some
of the Netherlands-based advocacy groups purportedly operate in the Northeast
States, according to media reports.
The
Ministry’s website says NGOs receive Rs. 11,000 crore in foreign
donations a year from over 150 countries. The government does not keep any
records of foreign money received by the
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh or its associate groups, largely from Hindu groups
in he US, the UK and Europe according to those who monitor the Sangh Parivar.
Sometimes, at least, the
Chief justice Dattu seems to agree with the government and the IB’s perception.
In July last year, hearing a Public interest litigation, he famously said
churches damaged during the anti Christian pogrom in Kandhamal, Orissa in 2008
were not entitled to any compensation as they got sufficient funds from western
countries. “You
know Mr. [Colin] Gonzalves, most of the churches get funds from foreign
governments. So it is not proper for you to ask for chairs in the church or
church bells,” Justice H.L. Dattu, heading a three-judge bench, told Colin
Gonzalves, who appeared for the riot victims.. The senior counsel argued that
as the churches were damaged by rioters, the state, Odisha, should compensate.
There
is, of course, absolute vindictiveness of the government against Greenpeace, Collectively,
this implies starving activist NGOs from carrying out their work which
the government sees as impacting its effort to create an India where no
environmental activists, trade unions or human rights groups would be
able to question foreign and national capital and industries or the
policies of the government.
Minority groups, seen by
the Sangh Parivar as foreign agents – the West in the case of the Christians,
and Mid East countries in the matter of Muslims, are also seriously impacted, and
perhaps will suffer the most in the long run. Minority groups carry on much of
their educational, health and empowerment work with some of their funds coming
from their international fraternal organizations and from other funding and aid
agencies for humanitarian and development work. This will be of course
seriously impacted if curbs are placed
using the FCRA. This has been a persistent threat, and in fact the FCRA
has become an instrument to blackmail if not coerce and threaten NGOs carrying
out such work to keep them in “line”. Activists have found their work severely
impacted both by restraints on friendly groups that support human rights work, including training
seminars, advocacy, and by documentation and by the aggressive and often
threatening environment created by
religious-nationalist groups.
Philanthropy is
apparently not an Indian trait, though charity is. There will funding for
religious work and for temples for sure. Wakf will take care of mosques and
madarsas and there will be some donors for churches and church functions. . But
there will be little or no corporate CSR
or other groups donating generously
for human rights and empowerment
activity. That will be a severe blow to human rights work in the country, and
therefore, will impact on the quality of democracy in India. It will also
deeply hurt India’s image.
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