Even as the dust was about to settle on the Supreme Court’s judgment restoring the Delhi government’s control over administrative services in the National Capital Territory (NCT), the Union government promulgated an ordinance transferring the elected Delhi government’s powers over the NCT’s Group I officers to a statutory body comprising a majority of bureaucrats appointed by the Union government.
The statutory body will control matters regarding the transfer, posting and vigilance of the NCT’s Group I officers. Its members are Delhi’s chief minister, chief secretary and principal home secretary. The ordinance also makes the Lieutenant Governor (LG) a final and independent authority for all such decisions.
With this ordinance, the curtains have fallen and the string master has been forced to reveal himself in the open. The lie to the supposed LG-CM conflict has been given away.
The conflict – the continued encroachment over the elected government’s turf, the stalling of the elected government’s key projects by different LGs, the persecution of the elected government through a volley of departmental inquiries, vigilance cases and CBI inquiries – was never about any particular LG’s ego issue with the chief minister, but always about the mandate handed to the LGs by Narendra Modi’s regime.
When an LG failed to obstruct, a different one was brought in. When a long-held practice or convention proved to be a hindrance, it was swiftly ignored (as in the case of taking over the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) from the government), or overturned through gazette notification (as in case of the 2015 notification vesting control over services with the LG).
And now when a Supreme Court constitutional bench’s judgment and interpretation came in the way, it still stood no chance at persuading the Modi government from letting go of its power in Delhi. As a result, the prime minister himself – who has to approve any ordinance – has risked a confrontation with the Supreme Court.
This ordinance and the pathologies it exposes are disturbing at so many levels. It demands forceful and unequivocal criticism from any true democrat. This critical scrutiny must not be confused by propaganda, demoralised or exhausted by the now-normalised routine assaults on democratic sensibility.
A disregard and fear of the people’s will
On the face of it, by disempowering elected government and empowering unelected bureaucrats and political appointees, the ordinance reveals a brazen contempt and disregard for the people’s will.
It will, as so well-articulated by the Supreme Court in its services judgment, erode bureaucratic accountability to the elected government, weaken the power of federal entities and deny the people of Delhi the right to effectively control their own destinies through a government they directly elect, which had the power to implement the peoples’ will.
But deep down what the ordinance reveals is Modi’s cynical relationship with the people’s will and his fear of losing power. For his regime, the people’s will is at best an instrument to be used in service of power pursuits when convenient, and disregarded or subverted elsewhere when inconvenient (like in Delhi through this ordinance). He is fine with the populace when they are with him, but will disempower them if they go with his opponents.
Erosion of democratic norms
The Indian constitution has a few anti-democratic instruments embedded in it because of the imprint of the Government of India Act, 1935, the nascency of democracy at the time of the Indian constitution’s formulation, the unique challenges of creating a nation state in a poor, disturbed neighbourhood, the constitution makers’ relied on the prudence of the future regimes.
Ordinance-making power is one such anti-democratic instrument that has grown out of fashion in most other mature democracies, but remains in the statute book in India. However, its use is supposed to be sparing and in those cases where due to pressing urgency, the far superior alternative of a well-deliberated law where the opposition and the society, too, had their say isn’t available.
But by hastily promulgating the ordinance to overturn a carefully deliberated, well-reasoned Supreme Court judgment and that too at midnight of the day the Supreme Court went on vacation, the regime has again eroded democratic norms a step further. As the ordinance was promulgated without any urgent requirement, it furthers the trend of reducing parliament to a rubber stamp. And insofar as it evades immediate judicial scrutiny, it again exposes a political brinkmanship that doesn’t shy away from weakening any norm or institution in pursuit of its agenda.
All this displays a belief in the brute deployment of power for partisan ends instead of a rule by discussion that democracy is supposed to be.
Routine assaults on democratic sensibility
This constant subversion of democracy in Delhi also impedes its development.
Firstly, the welfare projects in Delhi have been held hostage to this constant encroachment of the elected government’s powers, as the state machinery is more invested in settling this political score instead of working towards the welfare of the people.
Second, the encroachment by the Union government is also inefficient for itself, as it forces it to invest energy in grabbing power instead of using the power it already has more efficiently.
Third, the Union government’s insistence on snatching power in Delhi will practically lead to Delhi being ruled by unelected bureaucrats, who are distant from the needs of the people and have no imperative to perform – an inefficient elected government loses power, but an inefficient bureaucrat at worst gets transferred. This will thus hamper the well-being of Delhi.
The same Modi who campaigned against Lutyens’ culture and the ‘babu Raj’ has gone out on a limb to empower these bureaucrats. So all this begets the following question: what has all this subversion of the constitution and the people’s will, all the lost welfare of Delhi, been for? Wasn’t Modi the fakir who rules for the people’s sake, as told by his billion-dollar propaganda machinery?
Instead, his inability to overcome political narrow-mindedness and share power with political opponents for people’s welfare reveals lust for power as his only guiding motto.
The republic stands at a perilous moment. The regime is impatient and afraid of its shrinking power (the setbacks in Karnataka and Maharashtra being most recent). Therefore, it has traded its chisel for a sledgehammer to demolish the safeguards that preserved democracy in a region where few democracies survived.
Can our institutions (the judiciary, political parties and the media) and the people rise to the challenge posed by the regime to the supremacy of the people’s will? This and much more will be decided in the coming weeks in how we respond to this ordinance.
Praneet Pathak is a keen observer of Indian democracy.
