By M D NALAPAT
The bugle has been
sounded and the proclamation read out by very civil, left-liberal
individuals that India in 2018 has returned to the dark days of the
Emergency of 1975-1977. The uproar is over the arrest of a few activists
by the police because of their alleged links with Maoist insurgents,
and for their alleged involvement in a plan to assassinate the Prime
Minister. The Congress, the only political party to have actually
imposed an Emergency, is outraged at the curbing of civil liberties by a
very “dictatorial” government of Narendra Modi. In the process, it
seems to have forgotten that the Congress-led UPA government during its
2004-2014 stint in power arrested some of these same activists—and many
more—apart from mounting stringent action against NGOs it alleged were
front organisations of the Maoists. Such a memory lapse may or may not
be a deliberate strategy at a time when the Congress is cutting its
cords with the past and reinventing itself under its new India-born
president, a process that apparently includes taking itself out of the
1984 riots. But then such memory lapses are common among all political
parties, whether they be in power or in Opposition, and are accepted as
an intrinsic part of the way politics is “played” in India. The problem
here is much larger in nature—that matters of national security are
becoming the “happy” hunting ground of politicians and activists; that
Indian polity is getting so deeply divided into “left” and right” that
the breach seems irreparable; that the security and law and order
machinery is being unable to think ahead and pre-emptively act where it
comes across situations judged inimical to the interests of the nation.
More often than not, the police are failing to follow procedure and
perform due diligence to build water-tight cases, thus giving scope to
opponents to paint them as a vindictive force pursuing “soft targets”.
Maoism was India’s gravest internal
security challenge according to Dr Manmohan Singh, when he was Prime
Minister. It continues to be the same with Narendra Modi as Prime
Minister. It was in Manmohan Singh’s time that “Operation Green Hunt”
was launched and the Salwa Judum came into existence. But what was
missing in Manmohan Singh’s time was the virulence with which activists
have banded together at present to vociferously paint the current
dispensation as a threat to civil liberties, as a fascist regime. The
current uproar is in keeping with the narrative that left-liberal groups
in India have been trying to build assiduously over the last four
years, ever since the Modi government has come to power. It’s a
different matter that their ferocity is also accompanied by an
unwillingness to give space to any alternate world view, or give a
chance to someone outside their “comfort zone” to be at the helm of
affairs. This becomes starkly apparent when they speak out in unison if
the civil liberties of their interest groups are affected, but go
completely silent when someone from the opposite end of the spectrum
gets affected, for instance, when persons belonging to the “right” are
persecuted in states such as Kerala and Bengal. Moreover, when these
civil society members relate the Rafale deal with the arrest of the
activists, as Arundhati Roy and others are doing, they, perhaps
unwittingly, act as force multipliers of the principal Opposition party,
which has been trying to pin down the government on the deal. In the
process, they dilute their claim of neutrality and objectivity at the
altar of partisan politics. As for their claim of evidence being
concocted about an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister, such
conclusions are best left for the courts to draw.
There is no denying that the police in
India have often been found to be boasting of much more than they can
deliver as evidence. So it is incumbent on the police and the agencies
to provide clinching evidence to take their case forward. Lest they
forget, the procedure followed by the police in making the arrests has
already come for questioning in court. In fact, Indian law and order and
other security agencies have often failed to build fool-proof cases
because of the lackadaisical attitude of investigating officers or their
inability to withstand political pressure coming from across party
lines. Their reputation will take a further hit, and the government will
be embarrassed apart from coming under severe criticism, if the police
are unable to prove the specific charges made, and not talk in
generalities of the arrested activists being Maoist front-men and women.
In general, civil rights should be upheld and liberty assured, save in
exceptional cases. In such a context, the Supreme Court decision to
ensure only house arrest for the five charged with grave crimes by the
Pune police is laudable. Indeed, such a form of incarceration should be
more widely resorted to rather than clog the jails. And in such
circumstances, having police personnel live inside a residence is an
invasion of privacy and property rights, the same rights that the “Left”
doctrine rejects in countries ruled by them. As to whether the five
sought to be arrested are in that exceptional band or are innocent, only
the courts can decide.
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