Shikha Mukerjee | When Opp. Rules Streets, Govt Behind Barricades

By taking possession of the streets, by challenging the obstructive and coercive power of the police and paramilitary, the Opposition has delivered a powerful message to the rulers: People’s politics cannot be confined by barricades. Converting the core government territory of Lutyens’ Delhi into a fortress is not the answer to the discontents reflected in the protests.

Slapping multiple cases against the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge by accusing them of defamation cannot halt the increasing intensity and expansion of the protests across India and in New Delhi. Calling protests “anarchy” and protesters “anarchists,” is infructuous; it calls attention to the failure the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Narendra Modi administration to defuse the crisis of credibility that the street protests embody against its decisions, choices, policies and actions.

The street rallies, the meeting at the Ramlila Ground in New Delhi and uncertainty over permission from the Delhi Police to allow a mock court and trial of the chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for perpetrating “political genocide”, as critics have described it, through the deletions and exclusions under the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, are not acts of anarchy. On the contrary, such mass mobilisations are legitimate demands for a government and a system of governance that is not anti-people, or at the very least, not champions of a process that has disenfranchised 13.37 crore Indian voters.

The counter-strategy drawn up by the Bharatiya Janata Party to hit the streets in a series of rallies across its domain in North India to “Save Democracy — Defeat Anarchy” is a bizarre idea. As the ruling party at the Centre and in 20 states, either independently or in coalitions, why would a legitimately elected party need to “save democracy” and “defeat anarchy”? It does not matter that Amit Shah will lead a rally in Karnal in Haryana and Yogi Adityanath will hold a rally in Lucknow. Neither of these places are the nerve centre of the nation. The first rally in New Delhi was a staged turnout, reeking of righteousness and minus the spontaniety of the Janat Mantar rallies.

If BJP has the nerve, it should organise the biggest ever public rally in India, if not the world, as befits a party that claims to be the biggest in the world. That rally should be addressed by Mr Modi as the helmsman of the BJP. It would signal that the party and Mr Modi are acknowledging that there is an accountability to the people that goes beyond the schedules of elections.

The street protests are about holding the Modi government accountable. The relationship between ruling party and the people is not limited to the intense engagement during elections and campaigning. It extends beyond that. For acts that the people or a section of people consider to be misdemeanours, there must be accountability. That accountability is not be confused with elections and results. It is a pity that the BJP cannot conceive of democracy outside the calendar of elections and inside legislatures where it controls the majority.

The discourse of politics is not easily confined; it must and it does cross the flimsy boundaries that the BJP has drawn up to defend itself from aderse public scrutiny. It is easy for Mr Modi to jeer at Mr Gandhi as a “failed product”. It is difficult for Mr Modi to counter or challenge the failed product atop a barricade. Indulging in name calling, “anarchist” to be precise, is all noise and entirely meaningless.

Since 2014, the Modi administration has never had to deal with public discontent on a multi-state, multi-party scale; street mobilisations on one specific issue — SIR and disenfranchisement of crores of voters and the earlier demand for the dismissal of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan over examination paper leaks — are evidence that there is a demand for accountaility of government outside the BJP-controlled Parliament.

Election politics and the politics of discontent are different from each other. Winning an election does not make the discontent and the discontented disappear. The Congress and Opposition parties within the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance have lost elections to the BJP, for control of the Lok Sabha and about 20 state Assemblies and Union Territory legislatures. In some states the leading regional parties have been reduced to wraiths of their original selves, as in Maharashtra and in West Bengal.

Even so, there is opposition to the ruling dispensation that, instead of declining after every electoral defeat, seems to have reconstituted itself in forms of public protest that are different from the organised movements of political parties. The Cockroach Janta Party, that began life as a cheeky satire and pushback against the slurs cast on India’s youth by the judiciary, is one significant instance of how the public chooses to represent itself, outside the legacy formats of elected representatives.

Abhijeet Dipke is at par with Rahul Gandhi in some ways; the BJP as the government does not take either of them into long-duration custody; they are detained and set free. The moral of that story seems to be, the bigger the leader, the less the risk of being jailed. It points to the timidity of the Modi government.

Undeclared as the State’s repressions are, with abundant use of draconian laws like the UAPA, NIA, till recently sedition, raids by “agencies” controlled from either the Prime Minister or the Union home ministry, larger-than-lifesize leaders, at the national or state levels, have been, mostly, off limits. This distinction, of snaring the smaller fry and allowing the big fish to escape is so very different from the Emergency years; then, leaders like Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani were locked up, as were former Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Jayaprakash Narayan, Chaudhary Charan Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Gayatri Devi, Vijaya Raje Scindia and others.

By forgoing the hassle of taking the big fish into custody, even as some like Rahul Gandhi are accused of being anarchists, failed products, anti-nationals, stooges planted by the “foreign hand” to destabilise Modi’s India, the rulers are playing safe. They can pat themselves and tell the nation that democracy is flourishing because there is freedom to protest. It is a different matter that finding spaces for protest is increasingly more difficult, in New Delhi, in Kolkata, and elsewhere. Getting permission to protest is also more difficult, often requiring the intervention of the judiciary. It is not routine politics that perturbs the government; it is the politics outside the routines like countrywide street protests on SIR deletions that stumps the BJP; its playbook has no set response to an emerging phenomenon.