WARESPEDIA

The installation of Manmohan Singh as India’s first Sikh prime minister by the Congress and the appointment of many high-ranking officials from the community in the government and military has evidently failed to turn their visual appeal into a political asset. The fact that Dr Singh has shied away from contesting a Lok Sabha poll after being defeated in the only one he ever faced has added to the lore that Congress satraps, who have ruled India in the name of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, prefer a weak, malleable candidate to a popular self-assured challenger.

(Irony is worth noting: Mrs Gandhi was unseated as MP, and therefore as prime minister, by the Allahabad High Court for an electoral meeting dais she erected with public funds. She used the emergency to undo that. The parliament should allocate enough funds for as many daises as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may need if only it will lure him to contest a Lok Sabha poll.)

It is widely believed that Indira Gandhi was a dictator at heart. This is an easy surmise and probably an inaccurate one. The seeds of dictatorship are in fact more widely shared in free India. Moreover, most political parties that have ruled the country singly or as coalition partners have shown dictatorial tendencies. To have some idea of this, consider the fact that two supposedly anti-terror laws were passed without discussion under Dr Singh’s premiership just last year.

Rights activists saw the induction of the laws following the late November terror attacks in Mumbai as potentially eroding the country’s federal structure and limiting fundamental liberties.

Parliament – meeting under the shadow of the November 26-29 attacks on India’s commercial hub resulting in close to 200 deaths – approved the legislations with no considered debate and the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) of Prime Minister Singh pushing them past amendments tabled by several parliamentarians.

One law, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) Act, seeks to establish a new police organisation to investigate acts of terrorism and other statutory offences. The new agency will specifically investigate offences related to atomic energy, aviation and maritime transport, weapons of mass destruction, and left-wing extremism, besides terrorism. Significantly, it excludes right-wing terrorism, which many feel has become a greater menace in India.

The other, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment (UAPA) Act, substantially changes the procedures for trying those accused of terrorism, extends the periods of police custody and of detention without charges, denies bail to foreigners, and reverses the burden of proof in many instances. Dr Singh inherited the zeal for dictatorial laws from his predecessor former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, whose six-year rule saw the militarisation of the Indian state in an unparalleled way. The Vajpayee phase of hardline Hindutva was arbitrary and selective in the administration of penal laws.

Journalist Iftikhar Gilani’s seven-month ordeal in Delhi’s Tihar jail and S.A.R Geelani’s incarceration on the death row before the Supreme Court freed him as innocent in the parliament attack case, presents only a glimpse of the havoc the draconian laws under POTA laws of the Vajpayee era would wreak.

The Congress promised to repeal the POTA but eventually made only cosmetic changes. Civil liberties activists were appalled at the new laws, which they described as draconian and excessive in relation to the measures India really needs to take to fight terrorism.

‘The UAPA Act is particularly vile, and will have the effect of turning India into a virtual police state,’ said Colin Gonsalves, executive director of the Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network. ‘It basically brings back a discredited law, POTA of 2002, except for admitting confessions made to a police officer as legal evidence.’

Mrs Gandhi’s emergency rule was criticised the world over and at home by practically all the opposition parties except the pro-Soviet faction of Indian communists. The new laws, introduced by Messrs Vajpayee and Singh, however, have a tacit endorsement from many of those who had slammed the 1975-1977 dictatorship.

Whereas Mrs Gandhi had sought to tackle the rightwing Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the then highly vocal Anand Marg with the laws she promulgated during that period, the new acts have the support of the RSS in particular and on some facets even the mainstream left. In fact the entire gamut of class resistance from business tycoons, smuggling syndicates and feudal princes whose rights she abridged joined hands with rightwing obscurantism to turn the tables on her legacy. That the mainstream left has subscribed to the definition of terrorism and left-wing extremism is an unexpected development.

The two words Indira Gandhi added in the preamble of the constitution were ‘socialism’ and ‘secularism’ which today define (some say mock) her legacy. Pro-business Home Minister P. Chidambaram, considered to be the hero of the neo-elite, made a telling point during a recent public speech in which he distanced himself from the bills enacted during the emergency, which presumably also include the changes Mrs Gandhi made in the preamble.

If she stands accused of targeting her political opponents, who primarily included the Jana Sangh and the RSS apart from the then pro-China left, it must also be said that she sent many a don of smuggling syndicates to prison. In the context of the socio-political developments that followed, such as the isolation and massacre of Sikhs and Muslims (after her she was gone) not to forget the brazen abdication of the law by the state when it allowed the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, it is tempting to ask whether the opposite of a police state in India is a criminal state. Not a soul has been brought to justice on the Ayodhya issue, while what should be seen as potentially open and shut cases against rightwing marauders in Gujarat, Delhi and Mumbai have dragged on when they have not been abandoned.

I have read that on October 31, radio, television and print media will reverberate with the message of Indira Gandhi as Congress plans to rekindle her memory by observing her 25th death anniversary as ‘martyrdom day.’

There would be advertisements in the memory of the late leader in all three medium of mass communication while hoardings would be put up in metro towns. Radio jingles and TV and print will have ‘national integration’ as the theme. Her speeches would be relayed. According to one report her famous speech where she spoke of pledging every drop of her blood for the nation, which was seen after her assassination as being a premonition, would be a choice.

At the same time, the party has also decided to continue the ad blitz days later on her birth anniversary on November 19. Reports said advertisements would be given to convey ‘her message to the youth.’ The Congress publicity committee met recently to thrash out the plan. Party general secretaries Rahul Gandhi and Digvijay Singh, who is also the chairman of the committee, Mukul Wasnik besides Anand Sharma and other party office-bearers attended the meeting.

To encourage the Congress party’s firm measures to turn India into a hardline police state, the RSS has sent its message of salutations to Mr Chidambaram. Considering what all can be achieved without overtly subverting the constitution it is fair to conclude that Indira Gandhi didn’t really need the emergency. All she needed was a sleight of hands, which to her credit, she was not adept at.