West Bengal’s dictatorial chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s latest horrific act against a professor who had only forwarded a perfectly harmless cartoon about her has understandably aroused outrage across the country and beyond. Noam Chomsky has felt constrained to protest. For this there are two reasons, apart from the sheer illegality of what Ms Banerjee has done or is allowing her cohorts to do. For one thing, the latest scandal is not an aberration or isolated incident. It is but the continuation of a chain of similar events that include brazen denial of a rape. Moreover, at one stage during her shenanigans, the chief minister walked into a police station angrily to order the release of some of the goons of her Trinamul Congress who had been arrested for violence against political opponents. It is noteworthy, therefore, that in the present case, too, before her police arrested the Jadavpur University professor, Trinamul Congress hoodlums beat him up badly. To make things worse, it later transpired that a disputed payment of `17 lakh had fuelled the attack. After the uproar two of the accused persons were arrested but let off within two hours. But by that time another professor was hauled to prison for joining an anti-government rally.
Secondly, any expectation that after the humongous public protests the lady would change her ways would be a classic example of the triumph of hope over experience. Arrogance of power in India is more lethal than it is in other parts of the world largely because of the political culture we have allowed to grow over the years. Ms Banerjee’s rule may be more like that of the Borgias but many other political parties when in power do not behave much differently.
Witness the performance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh after it was voted to power with an impressive majority. Hardly had election results been declared and the swearing-in of Akhilesh Yadav as the chief minister was still far off when SP workers at nearly a dozen places went berserk and thrashed everyone they had a score to settle with. One stalwart shot at a block development office for filing a case against him. Mr Yadav’s repeated promises of firm action against law-breakers have amounted to naught. The cry is that “goonda raj” is back in Uttar Pradesh.
No less mortifying than Ms Banerjee’s misdeeds in Kolkata (her partymen have accomplished in 34 weeks what the Marxist cadres took 34 years to perfect), is the sordid drama staged in Bombay, now called Mumbai. Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti “dared” Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar to enter Mumbai to celebrate Bihar Day. Later, he changed his mind and announced, “I have allowed him to come here (to attend the function) but on the condition that there would be no political speeches. He has accepted this.” Is the Maximum City being ruled by a duly elected government or by self-proclaimed warlords having contempt for citizens’ fundamental right to reside wherever they like?
Other equally heart-rending examples need not be cited. The short point is that those who ascend to high office only after swearing that they would “uphold” the Constitution get busy immediately to undermine every constitutional and democratic norm. Under these circumstances, who can blame mobs, motivated or mindless, for following the example set by the rulers who think nothing of throwing to the wind the rule of law, the sine qua non of democracy?
Equally distressing and deplorable is what has come to be known as “suppression of dissent” but is, in reality, much worse because people’s fundamental right to freedom of expression is sought to be destroyed. The spirit behind the hounding out of so great an artist as Maqbool Fida Husain continues to haunt the Indian cultural landscape. Only the other day at Delhi’s Alliance Francaise an exhibition of photographs had to be closed down because a handful of people, who perceived a suggestion of homosexuality in these, called in the police. Some days later when the organisers of the exhibition planned to reopen it, they were warned that they would be liable to arrest for exhibiting what had been forbidden. The Salman Rushdie episode during the Uttar Pradesh elections, when the standard bearers of secularism surrendered to Muslim bigots, is still fresh in the public’s mind. But for the dawn of wisdom in the Union home ministry at the last minute an eminent American historian living in India for the last 40 years would have been thrown out because in a scholarly work on the life of Sri Aurobindo he had said some things unacceptable to the saint’s devotees.
There is yet another aspect of the assault on the rule of law, for which the blame lies squarely on the leaders of the Union government. Three of its ministers, all Congressmen, flagrantly violated the Model Code of Conduct during the Uttar Pradesh polls and earned a reprimand from the Chief Election Commissioner. Have they received even a mild rebuke from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi?
Where will this unending downhill slide towards lawlessness lead us? Unfortunately, the prospect does look deeply disquieting, indeed bleak. However, an apocalyptic view needs to be avoided. For, as eminent sociologist Andre Beteille has underscored, in all democracies there is a “tension between the rule of law and the rule of numbers”. Most other functioning democracies have found the right balance between the two. This country did too, during the Nehru era. It was, sadly, a towering leader like Indira Gandhi who tried only to “suspend” the Constitution, not abrogate it. But she did not succeed. No one else would. Yet it is time that instead of paying ritual homage to B.R. Ambedkar (April 14 was his birth anniversary), those ruling this country paid heed to his sound advice that constitutional morality was not a “gift of nature; those working the Constitution must cultivate it”.