The drama over voting for the Rajya Sabha seat in the Himachal Pradesh Assembly has revealed, yet again, the Narendra Modi government’s method of playing politics: Brazen use of the state apparatus to seize power and subvert the rules of democracy from within.
Congress MLAs who voted in favour of the BJP were allegedly placed in the protection of the CRPF, India’s central police.
Question: What role can the CRPF possibly have in Rajya Sabha elections?
Answer: In Modi-style politics, the police, Enforcement Directorate, governors, returning officers, in short almost all institutions of state, are pressed into service to make life impossible for political opponents.
Back in 1975, the Allahabad High Court disqualified Indira Gandhi’s 1971 win from Raebareli for using the services of her private secretary Yashpal Kapoor (then a government servant) for her election work. Today when Raj Bhavans, law enforcement agencies and police are deployed against the BJP’s rivals, Indira Gandhi’s act seems to be a mere traffic offence.
Also read: Modi is following Indira Gandhi playbook—election wins are personal triumphs, CMs don’t matter
Alternative power centres
Let us examine how the Modi-led BJP plays politics through state or government power. In Himachal, the Congress had more numbers than the BJP. The BJP chose a candidate designed to break the Congress, a former Congressman. Then some Congress MLAs who had cross-voted were allegedly transported in a CRPF and Haryana Police convoy to a government guest house in BJP-ruled Haryana. It was a sorry spectacle of cross-voting politicians being guarded by none other than India’s central police.
The police have acted against the BJP’s political opponents earlier too. The Assam Police has arrested Congress politicians Jignesh Mevani and Pawan Khera—Mevani for a tweet and Khera for flubbing Modi’s name. Should Opposition politicians be at the mercy of security agencies? Do the police in the US arrest politicians for speaking against the President? The Modi government seems to live by the dictum: L’etat c’est moi. (I am the state)
Governors are similarly pressed into service against the BJP’s competitors. In non-BJP states, Raj Bhavans are emerging as alternative power centres. In 2019, Maharashtra governor Bhagat Singh Koshiyari swore in the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis as CM in the early hours of the morning in a secret ceremony after the Ajit Pawar faction broke away from the NCP. Koshiyari did not wait to ascertain whether Fadnavis had enough numbers. In Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, governors CV Ananda Bose, RN Ravi and Arif Mohammad Khan have all been accused of playing a partisan role. There have been protests against Ravi and Khan in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Last year, Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann moved the Supreme Court against the Punjab Governor’s refusal to give his assent to state bills, leading the SC to rebuke the governor for “playing with fire” and “putting the parliamentary form of government in peril”. Former SC judge Rohinton Nariman even publicly accused the Kerala governor of “sitting over bills” in the “traditionally minority government state”.
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Misuse of institutions
Toppling non-BJP governments or ‘Operation Lotus’ is synonymous with the misuse of state power. One recent example is that of Jharkhand. Hemant Soren was arrested by the ED moments after he resigned as chief minister, which pushed the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-Congress-RJD alliance government to the brink. The ruling alliance’s MLAs fled to Congress-ruled Hyderabad in fear of Operation Lotus.
Repeated ED summons to Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, and Delhi Lieutenant Governor regularly finding fault with the union territory’s elected government, is another example that shows how constitutional institutions are working to weaken non-BJP leaders.
The Opposition is often not allowed the time to prove its strength even when it has bigger numbers. In 2017, former BJP Mahila Morcha chief and then Goa Governor Mridula Sinha hurriedly invited the BJP to form the government even though it had fewer seats than the Congress. In the same year, the Congress emerged as the single largest party in Manipur but Governor Najma Heptulla (a veteran Congresswoman who had joined the BJP a decade earlier) invited the BJP to form the government first when four members of the Naga People’s Front declared their support for the BJP.
Governance, the chief duty of constitutional functionaries, is often given short shrift in the BJP’s anything-goes drive for power. In Madhya Pradesh, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the Congress’s Kamal Nath-led government was toppled, and BJP’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in as the CM by the Governor and BJP veteran Lalji Tandon in a hush-hush manner.
There are other examples of misuse of institutions. A statutory body like the National Commission for Women finds no reason to call for President’s Rule in violence-torn Manipur but does so in West Bengal where a responsive state government is arresting the Sandeshkhali accused. Perhaps the starkest example of the weaponisation of state power to stymie the Opposition was the recent Chandigarh mayoral poll in which the returning officer, Anil Masih, a member of the BJP’s minority morcha, was caught on camera defacing ballot papers to enable the party’s victory.
Also read: Duties, duties, duties. Modi is going back to the Indira Gandhi Emergency era
Masterstroke or red card
When a single party controls all levers of government and there are no neutral umpires, then there is no level-playing field. It’s like a football match where one team commits foul after foul, but the referee shows the red or yellow card only to the other team. In any game, the players and spectators accept certain rules. What happens if one of the teams suddenly tries to change the rules while the game is being played and a section of the media covering the game hails this as a “masterstroke” to vanquish the other side? Should the public endorse the change in rules so that only one team keeps winning?
Yes, the Indira Gandhi government was known for using Raj Bhavans to play partisan politics—such as in the 1984 dismissal of NT Rama Rao by then Andhra Pradesh governor Ram Lal, known as a “marionette” of Indira Gandhi.
But the Modi government has taken these tendencies to their maximalist heights, and unlike in Indira’s time, there is no outcry in the media today. The Modi government is trying to become omnipotent by using the instruments of democracy to weaken the very democratic structure that enables the existence of a multi-party system. Who will show them the red card?
The writer is a former journalist and MP-elect (Rajya Sabha), All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)