Politics and passion have a consorting conviviality but invariably propagate a combustive cocktail of destructive vengeance.
Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain hit the headlines following his arrest on May 30 in connection with alleged hawala transactions linked to a Kolkata-based company. This April, the two incidents involving Congress-backed independent Jignesh Mevani in Gujarat and BJP leader Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga in Delhi in May also created a stir, as did the arrest of Maharashtra NCP ministers Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik and Union Minister Narayan Rane of the BJP. The magnitude of alleged offences may range from the trivial to the treasonable but are increasingly being cited as the expanding girth of predatory politics in the country.
The Mevani midnight arrest drama took place over tweets against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and involved two BJP ruled states-Gujarat and Assam - so it went off without a hitch. The Bagga saga was provoked by 'threats' to Aam Admi Party (AAP) chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and conduct ostensibly prejudicial to communal harmony. It entailed the Punjab Police negotiating past a Centre controlled Delhi Police, and BJP ruled Haryana, so came a cropper. Mevani's utterances hurt a Bodoland Council member in far off Assam, and an AAP leader in Mohali got similarly aggrieved at Bagga's fulminations, so the police of four states got into the act blowing public money to avenge the honour of their respective political bosses.
Jain is not only the power minister of the AAP-headed Delhi government but also its election in-charge for Himachal Pradesh which is scheduled to go to the polls along with Gujarat later this year. AAP's energetic entry has turned the ensuing battle of the ballot in both states into a triangular affair. Jain's arrest by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with alleged hawala transactions linked to a Kolkata-based company in a five-year-old case incidentally came a day ahead of the prime minister's road show and rally in Shimla.
Earlier, in April, AAP state chief Anup Kesari, general secretary (organisation) Satish Thakur and Una district chief Iqbal Singh had joined the BJP in the presence of its president J P Nadda and Union minister Anurag Thakur. Familiar poll-time optics are designed to paralyse the opponent. Plagued by defections, AAP had dissolved its state working committee, and Jain was busy re-invigorating the party set-up. In fact, a day before his arrest, he was busy in Himachal attending to a string of field engagements. "I am told my deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia is next on the list of arrests. I would appeal to the PM to arrest the entire cabinet at one go," said an exasperated Kejriwal.
Gujarat, Himachal's poll partner, has witnessed similar erosion with the state Congress working president, Hardik Patel, defecting to the BJP and another senior leader Bharat Solanki taking a 'break' from politics following an escalation of domestic strife into a public spectacle. Solanki was targeted earlier too. Speculation is rife that he, too, has offers from his political rivals.
With Hardik following Alpesh Thakore into the BJP, Jignesh Mevani, a Congress-backed independent legislator soon slated to join the principal opposition party, remains defiant and, therefore, a moving target. If cases against Hardik are now being withdrawn, those against Jignesh are coming to fruition. He is now facing the flak in another five-year-old case in addition to the two cases filed in Assam. On May 6, a magisterial court in Mehsana sentenced legislator Mevani and nine others to three months imprisonment for holding a rally without permission five years ago. Permission for the rally was initially granted and subsequently withdrawn. Though granted bail by the Sessions Court on June 3, there is a bar on his leaving the state without the court's permission. Key AAP leaders - Isudan Gadhvi and whistleblower Yuvrajsinh Jadeja - have already been arrested on different charges earlier.
Is politics now war by other means with an opponent being the new enemy? How else should one decipher when a Union minister (Narayan Rane) crosses the line of civility in language and talks in terms of slapping the chief minister of his own state. Or a chief minister of one state (Bhupesh Baghel, Chhatisgarh) and the deputy chief minister who is also the home minister of another (Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, Punjab) is detained at the airport when he enters another state (UP) only because they belong to rival political outfits. Or when central agencies are used as weapons to target selectively, with states also now waking up to a retaliatory response.
A wrong cannot be condoned, but it is the timing that is a dead giveaway. With opposition ruled states and opposition leaders, or their next of kin and close confidantes finding themselves in the crosshairs of these agencies, particularly in the run-up to elections, their impartiality is coming into question. The list is long. The track record of one of the most feared of them in present times, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), lends grist to the mill. According to a published report, the ED has conducted 1700 raids between March 2011 to January 2020 under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in connection with 1569 specific investigations and has managed to secure convictions in only nine of them over this period.
But there are other worrisome warning signs looming large on the Indian horizon. With politics turning brazenly partisan and states increasingly categorised between the central ruler's own and the opponent governed, the federal structure is groaning under the weight of internal strife and growing discord. The Centre is no longer seen as an impartial elder who would move in to smoothen furrowed brows of squabbling states.
The old precepts and precedences that saw prime minister Rajiv Gandhi include Opposition leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee in a UN delegation so that he could be treated for his kidney ailment in the US, or for that matter, another Congress prime minister, P V Narasimha Rao, sending Vajpayee at the head of a delegation to the UN, are now long-buried niceties of a bygone era replaced by a brazenly combative political narrative.
It is this friction which has both inter-state and Centre-state relations on a short fuse, as was witnessed in the violence in Belagavi - a region in Karnataka claimed by Maharashtra where the alleged defacement of a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji and the vandalising of a statue of Kannada freedom fighter Sangolli Royanna lead to violent protests last December.
Similarly, the Union home minister's suggestion at a meeting of the parliamentary official language committee in April that people of different states should communicate with each other in Hindi, not English, was enough to bring alive old, dormant language fault lines. If UP minister Sanjay Nishad had in the same month stoked a controversy with his remark that those who didn't love the language (Hindi) should leave the country, senior DMK leader and Rajya Sabha MP added to it on Monday with his comment that the language would reduce Tamils to the status of "Shudras while pointing out that states with vernacular languages as their mother tongue were doing well while the Hindi speaking states were not the developed ones.
Politicians in power would do well to remember that when you roll a boulder downhill, it acquires a momentum all its own, beyond their capacity to control. Dividing comes easy; it's the uniting which takes time.
(R K Misra is a senior journalist based in Ahmedabad)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
Deccan Herald is on WhatsApp Channels | Join now for Breaking News & Editor's Picks