There are many voices cautioning against forming a non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coalition as it may be unstable and easily brought down by the massive money power enjoyed by the Sangh parivar. This concern is well-placed. There can be no doubt that a cobbled coalition will be unstable and its fate uncertain.
However, I don’t think we have any option except to take that risk. Here is why.
The first and immediate priority of the country is that the massive punitive power of the state should be immediately taken out of the hands of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah and their fellow travellers, who have used state power for a decade to attack the constitution and its core commitment to democracy.
It would be extremely foolish and dangerous to allow them to continue to hold such power in the new parliament even for a minute.
Especially after the latest confirmation that they have lost the support of the people at large, they will waste no time at all in using this power to end democracy and firmly cement a dictatorship in India.
The coercive power of the government must therefore urgently be put in the collective hands of a new government, which should take urgent steps to protect the constitution.
The new government must take immediate steps to free the current victims of politically-biased selective investigation and prosecution from prison, prosecution and investigation (activists, journalists, academicians, minorities and other ordinary people whose only crime is that they have an independent mind). There cannot be any delay in this.
The implementation of the draconian new criminal Samhitas that come into effect imminently on July 1 must be immediately halted. I have written on the dangers of these new laws in some detail. There cannot be any delay in this.
Several raging fires including Manipur must be urgently doused. State persecution of Dalits and religious minorities should be immediately stopped and its victims immediately freed from investigation, prosecution and imprisonment.
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Policies against academic freedom must be immediately reversed. Poison-pill curricula, syllabi and learning material intended to spread communal hatred must be urgently withdrawn so that hateful and anti-historical myths and lies are not poured into young minds in classrooms for even one more minute than absolutely necessary to take remedial action.
Steps to protect the independence of oversight bodies including the judiciary, the Election Commission and state audit agencies must be urgently taken, and the recently enacted law which brings the appointment of election commissioners under the control of the executive branch must be promptly repealed.
The subverted 2021 census must be carried out without any delay, including in it a national social community census. Reservation for the representation of unrepresented communities must be protected as envisaged in the constitution.
We need to recognise that we are at a 1977 moment.
The main challenge in 1977 was to reverse the 42nd Amendment and cleanse India of the authoritarian and dictatorial culture of governance, including torture, imprisonment and censorship by the state, that had been implanted into the DNA of governance in 19 months.
The failures of the unstable coalition that replaced the draconian emergency regime in 1977 were many, as a result of which it imploded. However, full and historic credit has to be given to the 1977 coalition for reinvigorating democracy by enacting the 44th Amendment, which reversed the 42nd Amendment.
In so doing, there can be little debate that the 1977 government, in their brief and tumultuous tenure, made a significant contribution for the protection of democracy that stood strong for nearly four decades, until the present regime came to power in 2014 with their explicit agenda to overthrow the republic and install a Hindu rashtra.
What we are facing today is not 19 months, but 120 months of emergency, with the systematic dismantling of independent institutions on a scale much larger than in 1975-1977 and the addition of a new explosive element: a heavy injection of deep religious hatred and division that has put us on the brink of a religious civil war that can devastate the country.
A new, non-BJP government must enact a comprehensive constitutional amendment to protect democracy and the rule of law – a 2024 equivalent of the 44th Amendment.
This constitutional amendment must, amongst other matters, include in the constitution much stronger provisions to protect secularism, federalism, socialism and democracy.
It must provide constitutional protection against selective prosecution. It must explicitly safeguard the freedom of civil society organisations, the press and the academy. It must reform our parliamentary system to ensure that never again will the votes of a mere 15% of the whole population be sufficient to acquire power in a first-past-the-post system and overthrow the republic.
There are many other urgent areas of reform, such as strengthening the legal framework to combat corruption, and judicial reform. On these, there may not be consensus amongst the 303 non-BJP MPs. These should be duly debated openly and a consensus should be evolved quickly for effective action.
The choice before the 303 non-BJP MPs and the country is stark: (a) either ally with the BJP so that this draconian, coercive power is retained without a break in Modi’s and Shah’s hands, and trust them to spare you from it (good luck!); or (b) remove coercive power from their hands and keep it in your own hands for the next five years.
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Let us not forget that the reason that the country elected some 303 non-BJP MPs is very simple – they want an immediate change of government in the Union.
I visited the vicinity of several polling booths on election day in Kerala, for example. Voters in Kerala I spoke to said clearly: we are voting for change of government in Delhi (“ഭരണ മാറ്റം” [bharana mattam]). Many Left voters voted for the Congress only because they saw that as the best way to achieve a change of government.
Ideally, this should be a glue that will keep the coalition together for at least a couple of years if not the full five years.
We know well, and have been constantly saying for the past few years, that the anti-constitutional ideology of the present government presents an existential threat to our life and liberty and the survival of the republic.
Given this, is there any moral justification for allowing the present government to stay on in power for even a minute after the people have put some 303 non-BJP MPs in parliament? Should the duo be allowed to continue to hold power with impunity and immunity, or should they and their collaborators be held accountable under the law for the crimes they have committed?
We will be failing the voters if there is no change of government. They may lose faith in electoral democracy – what little is left of it.
I must make it clear that these views are not expressed from a partisan political point of view. Nor are they in ignorance of the foibles and failures and unholy agendas of many of the parties of the “303” that have collectively landed us in this terrible mess to begin with.
Rather, the view here is driven by the pragmatic lessons learnt from Justice H.R. Khanna’s view in his dissent in ADM Jabalpur, which demands that we must all be very realistic about the threats to the constitution and to democracy and our civil liberties, and be unhesitating and uncompromising in taking timely action to defend the republic.
G. Mohan Gopal is an advocate, Supreme Court of India and a renowned legal academician.
