Senior opposition leaders like Mamata Banerjee have sounded a warning: the Narendra Modi regime has plans for the widespread arrests of opposition leaders – thus breaking their backbone – before the elections.
“You call yourself a sadhu… you are nothing but a zamindar of thieves,” Mamata hit out at Modi.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), some of whose ministers in Delhi are in jail, said that by the time the elections arrive, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) will have put all opposition leaders behind bars.
The AAP’s outburst came soon after some of its MLAs and councillors were allegedly put under informal house arrest on February 2 by the Delhi police. This was presumably to prevent them from participating in a protest against the Union government-sponsored outright riggings in the Chandigarh mayoral elections.
In tune the with the existing political mood, the Punjab and Haryana high court had refused to intervene in the mayoral elections. But later, the Supreme Court, for a change, came down heavily on the ‘murder of democracy’ by the returning officer of the election in favour of the BJP.
Opposition must be prepared for more gambits
With the arrest of Hemant Soren, the Modi regime has put one opposition chief minister in jail. The idea is to deprive Soren’s party of its chief campaigners and thus paralyse its campaign network. The ED has already put senior ministers like Manish Sisodia and Satyendar Jain in jail. Ministers are being targeted in states such as Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand.
As per Modi’s game plan, Soren’s arrest was to be accompanied by another iteration of ‘Operation Lotus’, where legislators from Soren’s party would defect en masse to the BJP and the state government would be pulled down. However, this failed to work.
Another gambit that elected dictators normally resort to is flabbergasting the opposition by suddenly coming out with mega scams involving its senior leaders. This was successfully experimented with in Chhattisgarh during the last assembly elections.
Just four days before the assembly polls, the ED dropped a bombshell claiming that the promoters of a betting app may have transferred Rs 508 crore to the state’s then-Congress chief minister Bhupesh Baghel.
Immediately, Modi and other BJP leaders began tom-tomming the ‘massive scam’ with prompt media support. This strategy helped in suddenly changing the voters’ mood.
This time, the opposition should be prepared for such gambits by the ED or the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on a much bigger scale. The opposition fears that Shah has specially directed the investigating agencies to be ready with Chhattisgarh-type bombshells for the Lok Sabha polls.
Another preferred gambit in the toolkit of elected dictators has been last-minute swoops on opposition leaders to disrupt their campaign. Closer to home, Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina, who became a fifth-term prime minister last month, jailed thousands of opposition activists before the country’s general election.
Official voter participation in the election was barely 40% (though the true figure is believed to me much lower). The US also had officially criticised the violation of democratic rights in Bangladesh.
But Modi’s India approvingly maintained a stoic silence.
Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah have successfully experimented with another gambit: blocking the opposition’s already meagre sources of election funding. This was done by way of arrests as well as the search and seizure of funds during the campaigns for assembly elections.
For instance, there were no claimants for Rs 700 crore seized in Hyderabad.
Apparently, the target of the enforcement agencies is the opposition. They won’t dare touch the ruling party.
Also read: How the Enforcement Directorate Has Become an Excessive Directorate
Agencies’ ‘laundry list’
The ED and the CBI have a devious track record. During the Modi years, they became the chief instrument of repression. Political opponents were targeted on unsubstantiated grounds. Their raids have become an everyday occurrence. Hardly a day passes without the ED raiding or serving notices on opposition leaders.
A petition filed by 14 opposition parties in the Supreme Court highlights how Modi has ruthlessly misused the ED and the CBI against his political rivals.
During the ten-year UPA rule, of the 26 political leaders probed by the ED, only 14 (or 53%) were from the opposition, the petition said. On the other hand, the percentage of the ED’s opposition victims shot up to 95% under the first nine years of the Modi regime – of the 121 political leaders investigated, 115 were from the opposition.
Similarly, the petition said that while 60% of political leaders the CBI investigated between 2004 and 2014 were from the opposition, the number rose to 95% after 2014.
Detailed analysis shows how tendentious the ED and CBI’s witch hunts against the opposition are. According to the petition, during the UPA, cases were filed in 93% of raids conducted by the ED, whereas under Modi, of over 3,000 raids conducted, prosecution materialised only in 29% of them. In the rest of the cases, the ED could not produce a solid case.
According to the AAP, Union government agencies such as the CBI and ED filed 230 cases against its leaders over the past ten years but did not have enough evidence to prove a single case in court.
Consider the long list of opposition chief ministers and former CMs under Modi’s witch hunt. Hemant Soren is already in jail. The ED and CBI have been vigorously trying to trap two other CMs: Revanth Reddy of Telangana and Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala.
The BJP’s Sangli MP, Sanjay Patil, has said the ED ‘wouldn’t go after him’ as he is with the BJP. Photo: Facebook/mpsanjaykaka.
Among the former CMs being targeted are Bhupesh Baghel, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Ashok Gehlot, Sachin Pilot (a former deputy CM), Akhilesh Yadav, Farooq and Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti, Nabam Tuki, Okram Ibobi and Sharad Pawar.
As against this, the agencies have not initiated any action against BJP leaders or their allies. The moment a charge-sheeted opposition leader joins the BJP, all cases against them are withdrawn and they become a paragon of virtue. BJP leaders are never raided or prosecuted.
“I get sound sleep as there are no inquiries,” Maharashtra politician Harshvardhan Patil said. His colleague Sanjay Patil said: “The ED won’t come after me since I am a BJP MP.”
There many such boasts by the relieved victims of the ED.
Shashi Tharoor’s list of ‘laundered’ defectors included such big men as Narayan Rane, B.S. Yediyurappa, Suvendu Adhikari, Himanta Biswa Sarma (now the high-profile Assam CM), Bhawana Gawli, Yashwant Jadhav, Yamini Jadhav and Pratap Sarnaik.
Added to this was another list which included Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Ramesh Pokhriyal.
Then there are others like Mukul Roy of West Bengal, who the ED and CBI first targeted in a big way, then went on to ‘forget’ about the cases against him when he defected to the BJP and finally relaunched the cases after he returned to the Trinamool Congress.
The ED and CBI under Modi have been resorting to such cloak and dagger operations that has been part of those conducted by all hardened dictators: allegedly threatening people to give false statements to implicate victims in false cases and extorting leaders using middlemen.
There have also been allegations of the ED being used to settle personal scores. Punjab CM Bhagwat Mann says: “They intimidate us by threatening arrests or sending ED summons … ED officials tell us they don’t have evidence against our leaders, but they are compelled to conduct raids … they have orders from the boss. I told them take what you find from our house. We will split it 50-50.”
Also read: With Low Conviction Rate, ED Is Nothing More Than a Caged Parrot That Can’t Get Anyone to Sing
The ED had the apparent temerity (and, allegedly, due authorisation) to negotiate defection deals with such veteran politicians as Arvind Kejriwal and Tamil Nadu speaker M. Appavu. The former said that BJP leaders offered to withdraw all cases against him provided he defected to the BJP.
The Tamil Nadu speaker said for three months, he was threatened by ED middlemen.
Late last month, Kejriwal came out with the revelation of an Operation Lotus by the BJP in Delhi to lure away seven AAP MLAs. They were each offered Rs 25 crore and tickets for next elections if they defected to the BJP side, he alleged.
The MLAs, Kejriwal said, were told that the ED will arrest him soon and the AAP government will be toppled. For his revealing this, the Delhi police went to his residence to serve a notice to him demanding evidence for his claims.
When the police reportedly insisted that they hand over the notice in person to Kejriwal, AAP leaders present there sought to know under which law they were required to serve the notice directly to him.
Some time ago, Shah had alleged that Meghalaya leader Conrad Sangma was the “most corrupt” chief minister. This was before Sangma became a BJP ally. AAP leaders ask why the CBI or the police – as in the case of Kejriwal – did not serve notice to Shah. They ask: Why such double standards?
Misuse of the ED and CBI has been so widespread that former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh’s Bhupesh Baghel had said there were more ED officials on the prowl than stray dogs.
Some ED officials have been caught outrightly bribing their victims.
The BJP leaders’ day-to-day involvement with the ED has led to other associated pernicious trends. There have been cases where BJP leaders used the ED to settle personal scores. In Tamil Nadu, two Dalit farmers who were involved in a land dispute with a BJP leader were summoned by the ED. This is not an isolated case.
All told, no prime minister in India has ever so brutally weaponised the ED/CBI against the opposition.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.
