shiv-visvanathan | SabrangIndia

Undermining India’s institutions: How the Modi regime ran one red light after another

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 10:48:15 +0000

From the corruption watchdog to universities and even the Army, the government's meddling habits are wrecking democracy.

An institution is a framework of values, a structure of ritual tied to a vision marked by accountability and responsibility. An institution is a tradition of performance that anchors governance and democracy. An organisation is an act of doing, an instrumental activity around a specific set of goals. An organisation becomes an institution when it acquires an equality of values. A commitment to the normative becomes an essential part of institution-building. Without norms and values, an organisation is merely an impoverished institution.

One begins with this little lecture in civics and governance because one often senses that an urge for decisiveness or an image of efficiency subverts the value frames of the Narendra Modi regime. Modi mouthed all the right sentiments before he came to power. He, however, feels that his majoritarian government has a right to cut corners, to violate principles, to achieve what he personally dubs as national goals. It is like watching a policeman, who is supposed to be the traffic custodian, drive gleefully and indifferently through a series of red lights, making a mockery of law and order.

The institutional red lights in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have been many. First, he did not take the appointment of the lokayukta regime seriously, here or in Gujarat. He quickly saw the anti-corruption watchdog as an institutional impediment and decided he did not want speed breakers to his regime. There was a complete shamelessness to his disregard for the lokayukta, which should have triggered warning bells. Instead, Lutyens’ Delhi welcomed him as a new epic hero.

Modi’s contempt for the institution of the lokayukta was direct. He pretended to be dead to the idea of the ombudsman. But his contamination of other institutions has sometimes been carried out by his more than enthusiastic colleagues. Former Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani and the corruption of the university comes next to mind.

Playing with education

One realises the sense of a spoilt system even in India. When a regime comes to power, it offers its loyalists and their lackeys plum appointments. The Modi government was open about slotting its people at the helm of the Nehru museum, University Grants Commission, and Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, signalling an ideological shift. But its attempt to alter university syllabi contaminated the few wisps of pluralism that remained, especially with its harassment of dissenting academics in the name of sedition. This attack on the academe was in line with the government’s critique and dismantling of environmentalist groups, literally stating that history and development should flow the way the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party wanted.

The continuous use of the idea of security undermined free thought and violated both the spirit of civil society and the university. The battles over Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Hyderabad were blatant attempts to deinstitutionalise the university. Modi’s bully boy tactics led to a surprising resistance, creating heroes out of students such as the late Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula and former JNU student body president Kanhaiya Kumar. The transfer of Irani to the textile ministry in July was an admission that the government’s attempt to tamper with the university was not as successful as it intended. It also revealed that India has academics still committed to the pluralistic idea of the university.

The university has been more defined than the scientific establishment in challenging the diktats of the regime. Modi’s dreams of big science in space and nuclear energy have found few open critics. The slow whittling down of a wide variety of scientific projects has attracted little debate in scientific institutions. In fact, some of the leaders of space research have openly wooed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, making one wonder what happened to the grand traditions that Satish Dhawan and Vikram Sarabhai had set. One must add that the BJP’s wooing of former president and scientist APJ Abdul Kalam might have turned the scientific establishment into a soft target.

The Army approach

More embarrassing than the treatment of the university and the scientific establishment is the regime’s engagement with the Army. Part of it lies in the bumbling or intransigence of that sector of the bureaucracy. But part of it is a policy narcissism that the regime knows best.

Its choice last week of General Bipin Rawat as the next Army chief, superseding two senior officers, has urged people to ask whether the government still wants political neutrality in the Army echelons. Rawat’s continuous forays at his colleagues, questioning their competence, made the Army seem like a faction-ridden cabal. Finally, the Army’s decision to violate protocol and the government’s decision to violate protocol and seniority to appoint a junior general in command raised protest from the Army itself.

In all these instances, the Modi regime was ham-handed, convinced that some institutions are made for meddling. These decisions invoked no ritual of transparency. The BJP behaves like a dentist when it comes to certain institutions, riding rough-shod over the pain and confusion that inflicts.

Meddling habit

The only institution the regime has been wary about is the Supreme Court. While the controversy over judicial overactivism continuous, the party has been more than respectful of the judiciary, sensing that the court is more tricky about its autonomy than other institutions. But even here, the regime has taken to delaying judicial appointments.

Surveying the record, one senses the regime has been happy contaminating institutions. What it fails to understand is that institutional pollution, like river pollution, increases toxicity. Once an institution is damaged, it may be almost impossible to repair it. One wonders whether political parties ever realise that damaging institutions is the surest way to devastating democracy in the long run. Sadly, the realisation might come long after the damage is done. Early warning signals seem effete in the institutional darkness of today.

Shiv Visvanathan is social science nomad.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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Turning point

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:30:00 +0000

The ethics of duty and drama in times of riot

Two events have hung on the conscience of modern India because we, as a society, have not responded to it. It is not easy to respond to violence either as a mnemonic or as a continuing process. Witness and victim almost become irritants testifying to our passivity.

In fact, when one sees the prime agents of ’84, one realises that as tigers they are toothless. The late HKL Bhagat, even Sajjan Kumar, had better claims to an old age home than prison. It raises then the question of whether we should pursue these people into dotage.

Even more, it confronts us with the question – should society forget and go on?

There is a therapy in forgetting, a hygiene that does not allow old wounds to fester. But there is a sense of history as convenience which a society cannot allow. Also, denial produces its own pathologies. For instance, the Israeli Sabra’s contempt for the Holocaust Jew was so blatant that camp documents were sold as pornographic literature. The denial of violence comes back as a new form of destiny. Sociologists also banalised the ’84 riots with writers like Emma Vidal pursuing a ruthless ethnography of how widows exploited the situation. While competent as sociology, this form of work blunted the sense of justice by treating the victims as entrepreneurs of their own misfortune. What Ms Vidal forgot is that not all memory can be commoditised. All trauma does not graduate to the circus as a "monster".

The 2002 riots were a bit different from the riots of 1984. The first major difference was that in ’84 civil society and especially academics, university students, groups like the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) rose to the occasion to provide succour to the victim. The state, in Gujarat, treated the victims as recalcitrant citizens of a development process. The riots were seen as part of a logic of development, of an old city sulking in its ethnicity. Worse, there was a blatant sense of exterminism. The local society in general wanted not just to terrorise the victim but also to eliminate him. This psychology in fact contributed to the carnivalesque mode in the aftermath of what was genocide.

What kept memory alive, apart from the efforts of the survivor, was not the media but the defiance of dissenters. One thinks, in particular, of Teesta Setalvad and the defiant testimony of Sreekumar before the Nanavati Commission. It was partly because of their efforts that the court established the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe into the Gujarat riots.

The entry of the SIT was an extraordinary event. It came at a moment of cynicism about law and justice. It worked quietly, almost invisibly. Yet its very adherence to protocols, its readiness to listen, its determined patience created a sense of the law as an occasional oasis of hope. Just like with Sreekumar in the earlier phase, for RK Raghavan enactment of protocols has become iconic of the processes of a decent society.

In a performative way, faith in justice is going to depend not merely on what the SIT unearths but on how Mr Raghavan, in his role as SIT head, behaves. He has to perform the drama of legal interrogation and investigation and he has to do it with immaculate correctness. In an odd sense, Raghavan has to play Raghavan to be convincing. He has created an everydayness about the interrogation, playing the unflappable Jeeves to a legal system that often tends to be empty-headed. As CBI director, Mr Raghavan embodied professionalism and honesty. His was a respected career.

But when, on April 27, the SIT opened the file on 41 new cases, something new was signalled. A Pandora’s box of question marks exploded to encompass police officers, IAS officers, including chief secretaries, and even a few ministers. It was an electrifying moment. A new set of expectations has been created. The demands for justice as procedure, as ritual, as performance and as meaning has reached a new high.

When the SIT opened the file on 41 new cases, something new was signalled. A Pandora’s box of question marks exploded to encompass police officers, IAS officers, including chief secretaries, and even a few ministers. A new set of expectations has been created

Mr Raghavan is not merely a person. He is now a persona. His new role demands an immaculate performance as the circle of suspicion tightens around an elite bunch of officers. Tacitly and explicitly, he has to define what duty is. Is one loyal to a chief minister or the Constitution? Is duty clerical adherence to procedures or following one’s conscience? Is silence punishable? Is a request for transfer an adequate form of dissent? Is duty doing things right or doing the right things?

This drama does not belong to Gujarat alone. It is a truth commission of a different sort, asking why officers meekly follow unjust orders. In a psychological sense, we will have to face the idea that obedience is not enough. Following the psychologist, Stanley Milgram’s questions, one then asks why people obey indiscriminately and what differentiates the ethics of duty from the ethics of obedience.

Mr Raghavan has to enact this entire pedagogy and compress it into a report. If he succeeds, he will become an icon and if he trembles, it is the bureaucracy that will turn iconoclastic, dismissing the SIT as a partisan or incompetent body. It is ethical high drama enacted within the procedural domain. If the rituals are completed with fidelity then a new generation of bureaucracy will face new standards of truth and propriety. They will realise that truth does not die when a file is closed. Mr Raghavan has enacted the first move by summoning one of the members of the SIT itself for interrogation. But the SIT drama is also a challenge to society.

One of the fragments of violence one has lived with is how ordinary people kill and live with themselves. The question is what happens to a society that allows murder as a permissible occasional ritual.

The SIT drama should now be seen as more than a cat-and-mouse game, a record of which bureaucrat got caught and which did not. One sympathises with the families of officers under scrutiny. Communities get ungenerous at these moments. But justice or, rather, the search for justice, can help cleanse our society. We owe the SIT a debt of gratitude for this moment of ethics.

Courtesy: The Asian Age; www.asianage.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, May 2009 Year 15 No.140, Comment

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