Modi-Shah Face Dilemma As Their Stormtroopers Cross All Limits of Propriety

Amit Shah’s stormtroopers – often described as agent provocateurs and the establishment’s hatchet men – come from different backgrounds and with their own goals and career aspirations. After eleven years in power, they are everywhere in the system.

Among them are career politicians, rejected ministers, governors seeking better positions, educationists, those heading government bodies and panels, and retired judges seeking panel assignments.

Unquestionable personal loyalty and readiness to do the hatchet man’s job are their stock in trade, which is politically taken advantage of by the Modi team.

And the stormtroopers are well-taken care of and rewarded. The Modi-Shah establishment has been adept in cultivating and patronising the chosen ones.

Committed civil servants and those like CBI/ED chiefs get special extensions of tenure until the courts intervene. Former ED director Sanjay Kumar Mishra, whose tenure was marked by the largest number of prosecutions of opposition leaders, got three extensions.

Among the political stormtroopers, Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar is undoubtedly the pioneer. As a Janata Dal leader, he became a minister in the Chandra Shekhar government and then a Congress MLA, and went to the BJP when it was on the upswing.

As governor of West Bengal, he set the playbook for ambitious governors like R.N. Ravi of Tamil Nadu, Arif Mohammad Khan of Kerala and C.V. Ananda Bose of West Bengal. Each of them dream of becoming vice president like Dhankhar or of attaining other powerful positions.

Those like Ravi continue their role despite repeated Supreme Court strictures. Now he has established a direct liaison with Dhankhar by personally inviting him to open the vice chancellors’ conference at a hill station. However, the two-day meeting was boycotted by most of the invited vice chancellors.

Anurag Thakur has been an aspiring political stormtrooper but got snubbed by not being included in the new Union government. Yet he occasionally makes his presence felt.

Among chief ministers, Himanta Biswa Sarma has been the most active. He single-mindedly concentrates on the Union government’s divisive initiatives.

Since the Gujarat elections in 2022, the BJP began choosing a new crop of rootless leaders, preferably first-timers, as chief ministers. Look at the new picks for Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and now Delhi’s Rekha Gupta.

Veterans like Vasundhara Raje were sidelined. This was to discourage the emergence of local political fiefdoms and make sole dependence on Modi as the only vote catcher.

The new chief ministers are so powerless that they cannot think of anything other than daily full-page advertisements with Modi photos in Delhi dailies to please the leadership.

Devendra Fadnavis is the lone exception. However, his decision to introduce Hindi in primary classes to keep Shah in good humor had to be dumped due to public backlash. His decision to introduce the CBSE syllabus has raised similar objections.

However, this time, Dhankhar has crossed all limits. The vice president is a high position in the country’s constitutional scheme. Holding the high position, he has chosen to denigrate the Supreme Court.

Again, perhaps he thought he was taking the lead in a line of attack on the judiciary which the entire party would soon follow.

But the Shah team has been more realistic. They concluded that any no-holds-barred attack on judiciary at this stage would not go well with large sections of public opinion, especially the middle classes and the intelligentsia. The latter still holds the judiciary in high esteem. With the bulk of people still having faith in the Supreme Court, a clash with the higher judiciary will have a bigger political backlash.

Intriguingly, Nadda’s clarification on the official party line was confined to those like Nishikant Dubey. It did not refer to Dhankhar. Perhaps this has been an attempt to save the vice president from opposition attack and thus avert a bigger impasse.

Otherwise, Dhankhar’s fulminations against the judiciary have been more focused and call for sharper reprimand.

Also read: Dubey’s Assault and Nadda’s ‘Distancing’: How BJP’s Double Messaging Undermines India’s Democracy

The vice president of the country has questioned the Supreme Court’s powers to set a ‘timeline’ for the president to dispose of Bills as overreach and the misuse of Article 142 as a “nuclear missile against democratic forces”.

The judges, who are ‘not accountable’ to any authority, were acting like a ‘super parliament’: “So, we have judges who will legislate, perform executive functions, who will act as super parliament and absolutely have no accountability because the law of the land does not apply to them,” he said.

The Modi-Shah-duo’s hatchet men have crossed all limits of propriety and political sagacity. They have questioned the basic precepts of our constitutional system. Dhankhar, himself a lawyer, has taken exception to the very principle of the separation of roles, the limitations of various arms of the constitutional system and inbuilt checks and balances.

Dubey, most outspoken next to Dhankhar, has a shakha background from childhood. He was more reckless and said Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna “is responsible for all the civil wars happening in the country”.

Another sweeping charge of Dubey’s has been that “parliament should be closed if the Supreme Court itself begins making laws.”

He was joined by the new Kerala governor, who talked of judicial ‘overreach’. Those like Uttar Pradesh’s Dinesh Sharma, Kailash Vijayvargiya and West Bengal BJP general secretary Agnimitra Paul joined the cry even as party president J.P. Nadda issued a clarification.

However, Nadda’s clarification raised more questions than it answered. Dubey is a long-time MP and should know the implications of what he said on record. To charge the chief justice of India with inciting ‘all civil wars’ in India is a serious matter. He still continues with indulging in outbursts in similar style. The least the leadership should have done was to seek a clarification from him. They didn’t. Why?

In the case of Dhankhar, who holds a high constitutional position, the transgressions are more reprehensible. Himself a qualified lawyer, he should know what he is saying. And he has been persistently lambasting the judiciary on every available platform ever since he was made vice president and chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

Sitting in the vice president’s office, Dhankhar slammed the Supreme Court in December 2022 for junking the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). He argued that the higher judiciary could interpret the constitution only when a “substantive question of law is involved” and that it should not “run down” its provisions.

The way the judiciary had acted had no parallel in history, he claimed while addressing a seminar.

Also read: Dhankhar Says ‘Parliament is Supreme’, But What Does the Constitution Say?

Dhankhar was surprised that there was not a “whisper” of resentment in parliament when its own decision on the NJAC Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. Parliament, he said, reflected the will of the people.

He began his offensive against the apex court right in his first address as chairman of the Rajya Sabha in December 2022. Parliamentary sovereignty is under threat, he warned MPs.

Later, addressing the presiding officers’ conference in January 2023, he also questioned the Supreme Court’s 1973 Kesavananda Bharati verdict.

The two hyperactive stormtroopers have pushed the leadership in a difficult predicament. Dubey formally obeyed the shut-up order but continued the hate campaign in a different mode. Ironically, he mocked Assam chief minister Sarma as someone in ‘chains’ for questioning him.

Do the BJP as ruling party and the prime minister agree with Dhankhar’s interpretation of Article 142 of the constitution as the judiciary’s “nuclear missile against democratic forces”? Do they subscribe to his allegation that the judiciary has been intruding into the functions of the executive and of parliament?

Do they agree with the vice president’s views on the separation of powers of the different arms of the state and the principle of checks and balances?

The makers of the constitution through its various Articles repeatedly emphasised the judiciary’s powers to ensure that no arm of the state encroached on the other’s domain. Article 32 gives the apex court powers to ensure that fundamental rights are not violated. Article 13 also provides it powers to strike down a legislative decision if it violates fundamental rights.

Does the top two repudiate these Articles and endorse the vice president’s interpretation of the powers enjoyed by the elected governments, and that these governments and not the judiciary – which he said ‘is not accountable to anyone’ – should have the upper hand?

In terms of realpolitik, it is a bad policy for the duo to disown their loyal henchmen. But in the Supreme Court, can the government take a position that the parliamentary majority or the ‘people’s will’ is supreme, and not the constitution, as Dhankhar repeatedly asserts? This is the BJP duo's dilemma.

P. Raman is a veteran journalist.

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