Republican India on the 74th Republic Day, January 26, 2023, is witnessing how the RSS Pariwar Union Government is keeping in place an electoral façade, using lucre, ill gotten canny, manipulations of satraps, cautionary threat, outright purchase of elected legislators, false propaganda, even more false promises, the hobgoblin of “enemies” within and without endangering “national security” to grab state power and then proceed to coopt and emasculate all the official agencies whose statutory and constitutional writ it (government) is to preserve and protect the constitutional scheme and the rule of law without fear or favour.
Other most important frontal attack is on the basic structure of the Constitution of India, which is historic protection against dictatorship by propounding the law that no authority including Parliament could have the power to amend any provisions of basic structure in view of the fact that the Constitution of India is supreme and Parliament is its creature. Government’s strident move to interfere in the appointments of judges of High Courts and the Supreme Court through the Collegium system of the apex court is seen to capture the judiciary to complete the process of control and command over all the public institutions built to preserve, protect and ensure effective functioning of the rule of law based constitutional democratic frame of governance so that justice, equality, liberty and fraternity as enshrined in the Constitution prevails equally and alike for all citizens.
Another worrying scenario is ever peaking of the discriminatory politics of hatred, division, religious polarization, toxic communalism, unprovoked attacks on the minorities, attacks on their livelihoods, denigration of our women, bashings of Dalit and tribal that the RSS Pariwar has been indulging in brazenly to gain electorally or to consolidate majoritarian votes in a secular (religious neutral) polity. All these have fractured our democracy, which belies India’s G20 motto derived from Maha Upanishad, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” and theme “One Earth One Family One Future” during its rotational presidency this year. One finds such laudable motto and theme of G20 obnoxious with no correlations with the country’s ground realities. Yet another worrying sign is law enforcement agencies of police and others having become partisan and communal. Judiciary, especially the lower courts comprising districts and subordinate courts, too have by and large fallen victims of fear, hatred, communalism, discriminations, blackmail and divisive politics with public faith in them drying up fast.
Gaps in service delivery, lack of accountability and poor efficiency of civil servants, are manifest deficiencies that the government has not addressed. At the operational level, a culture of performance is lacking in government employees. Archaic standards are used to measure performance. Some changes needed to promote good governance; responsibility and accountability should be enforced in government functioning, a move from wide discretion, the absence of transparency and the current trend of centralization. In this context, the two actions of the government, formation of PM CARES Fund and Electoral Bonds, are marked as secret entity with no accountability thus undermining the rule of law based system of democratic governance within the ambit of public accountability.
These two entities are outside of the ambit of the transparency law, the RTI Act, 2005. Funds for PM CARES were raised under coercion from government employees, public sector employees and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) of corporate sector. And yet PM CARES is out of the purview of public accountability. So is the case with Electoral Bonds for contribution to political parties, where companies fund against a secret Code to which the State Bank of India, where it is deposited, is privy. Government also accesses the Code to know which company or organization has contributed to which party. Those who contribute to opposition parties are brought under the scanners of official agencies to browbeat them, terrorise them and tarnish them among the people, thus stifling democracy, undermining accountability with attendant opacity and discrimination. It is also anti-democracy and erodes level playing field for all political parties. No wonder, RSS Pariwar Union Government has garnered 58 per cent of the total funding from companies for itself, thus strengthening its money and muscle power to browbeat other parties. Both the entities are curse and blot on democracy.
Country’s minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, have faced tumultuous time since 2014. From the hijab ban in February 2022 in Karnataka, continuing attacks on livelihoods to the discriminatory communally driven release of those convicted in the most horrendous Bilkis Bano case, Muslims have been facing a range of challenges. Christians faced the highest levels of targeted violence on record. Withdrawing subsidies on educational loans from the government banks for students for studies abroad from minorities comprising Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis by a recent order issued by the Ministry of Minority Affairs has compounded their plight. In yet another anti-minorities stance, the Ministry discontinued the Maulana Azad National Fellowships for minority students. This raises a question mark over the relevance of a dedicated Ministry of Minority Affairs, created in 2006, by Dr. Man Mohan Singh government to provide specialized focused attention to the all round uplift of the national minorities. Added to this, US based global Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its latest annual report released on January 12, 2023, has detailed human rights abuses and concerns in about 100 countries. It reported in the case of India that BJP ruled States in 2022 increasingly used home demolitions against Muslims as a measure of extra-judicial collective punishment, as administrative highhandedness to silence dissenters and protesters, state governments justifying demolition drive as a deterrent against law and order concerns. Simultaneously, BJP governed States spared majority community.
In yet another anti-minority stance of the RSS Pariwar, minorities are seen as not a part of the nation but only because of the tolerance of the majority. This together with the RSS Pariwar’s other anti-minorities’ approaches and ill treatment have placed India with a multiple components of castes, communities, religions, languages and their diversity, in a catastrophic isolation in the comity of nations. Ill-treatment of minorities by the RSS Pariwar is a fantastic denigration and demolitions of the country’s history and its present. This also ignores the multiple pluralistic nature of the country. Also makes RSS Pariwar Union Government’s public governance model most appalling as it has substantially reduced the vision of India. It has narrowed the understanding of India as just Hindu India and as a Hindi speaking India in such a way that it would be sad if there is no alternative!