With the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, the hugely popular serving chief minister of Delhi, Narendra Modi has crossed the lakshman rekha – that uncrossable, invisible line – between the Rule of Law and the rule of a tyrant.
He has been edging towards this, step by step, ever since he came to power in 2014.
Now, with his third election battle imminent, he has finally crossed the line. Modi had shown scant regard for this line even when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, where he shored up his popularity by constantly stoking communal tension in the state.
Modi has used democracy to capture power – only in order to destroy it. Hitler had done the same thing in Germany in 1933, Mohammed Morsi in Egypt in 2012, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey in 2016.
Modi moved cautiously during his first term in office, consolidating his none-too-strong support base within the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh by taking up long cherished programmes of the latter such as the crusade against the bogey of love jihad, the ruse of ghar wapsi and the law to abolish triple talaq.
In his second term, he pushed the Citizenship Amendment Act, the abolition of Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 in 2019 and a uniform civil code for all Indians, regardless of their religious affiliation.
These achievements should have sufficed, but paranoia is an incurable condition.
In 2019 Modi won 303 seats against 282 in 2014, making the BJP the first non-Congress dominant party in the Indian political system. But this did not assuage his gnawing insecurity. In the succeeding four years he turned the National Investigation Agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and above all the Enforcement Directorate into weapons for use against the leaders of all the main opposition parties, giving them the choice of being sent to jail without trial and with little hope of bail, often without framing a single actual charge against them that they could bring to a court of law, or joining the BJP.
Also read: The Great Crossover: Opposition Leaders Who Joined the BJP After Action by Central Agencies
By this stratagem, Modi broke one opposition party after the other, till there were only regional parties left relatively unscathed. The sole exceptions were the Congress, the Trinamool Congress in Bengal, and the Aam Aadmi Party. Now Modi has turned his guns upon these last holdouts for democracy.
Though that was not their intention, by answering the summons of the ED and allowing themselves to be questioned for over several hours, Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi have implicitly accepted Modi’s supremacy. Now Modi has turned his guns on the last but-one holdout, Arvind Kejriwal.
Kejriwal has fought Modi tooth and nail since his first day in office after his party’s sensational victory in 2015, in which it garnered 53% of the votes and won 67 out of 70 Vidhan Sabha seats. To further sharpen the contrast between itself and the BJP, AAP has projected an image of having done a lot for the people with little money.
To Modi this was unacceptable. Since then Kejriwal has been his bête noire, to be destroyed by any means possible.
As I have noted before, AAP’s new liquor policy – the case over which Kejriwal is arrested – made the government get out of the liquor trade altogether. The government decided the number of retail locations and principalities in each zone and put these up for auction. The retail locations were evenly spaced to ensure that every mohalla, and every section of the population, had equal access to a liquor shop. It then auctioned the liquor shop locations.
In the first auction, the government garnered Rs 5,300 crore from the auction of locations in the more affluent 20 zones, and Rs 3,180 crore from the auctions in the remaining 12 zones. The lower paying capacity of the poorer areas was automatically reflected in the lower bids for these locations. The government expected to garner over Rs 10,000 crore a year from the sale of liquor in the capital. This was almost double the average of Rs 5,500-crore recorded in the previous three years.
If the entire liquor trade was privatised, and all allotments were made through public auction, where did the space remain for graft and favouritism?
Modi’s godi media are putting the blame on Kejriwal for his arrest. If the Gandhis were willing to suffer hours of interrogation, why did Kejriwal refuse to heed seven summons from the Enforcement Directorate? Kejriwal’s reason should have been obvious: he was elected by the people of Delhi to govern them and look after their welfare. Within the sphere of his duties he had done so. In matters that did not involve policing law and order, he did not have to answer to any higher authority than the people who elected him.
Kejriwal’s courage in confronting Modi’s tyranny has provided a torch with which to light the fire of battle in the rest of democratic India. And it seems as if non-BJP parties are responding. The Biju Janata Dal in Odisha has decided against an alliance with the BJP. The INDIA coalition has sprung to life again in defence of Kejriwal. What is more important is that the Congress and other members of the Alliance have realised at last that the crucial challenge before them is not the allocation of seats in each state but the framing of a national policy that will give the assurance of jobs, and greater job security to the 80 million persons who have dropped out of the labour force in sheer despair after the onset of global recession in 2010-11 when they rejoin the labour force. Modi has found no solution. That is why he has fallen back on stirring communal prejudice and animosity to shore up his support base for the next election.
The victory that he expects in June will enable him to achieve this lifelong ambition – to get there he has been destroying every constitutional safeguard that Indian governments and lawmakers have painstakingly created since the first day of Independence. Only a united opposition that uses every medium to reach the people and inform them of the danger they are in, will suffice. Even then one can only hope that it will not be too little, too late.
Prem Shankar Jha is a veteran journalist.
