The Economist - USA (2020-11-28)

The EconomistNovember 28th 2020 BriefingDemocracy in India 19

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the constitutionality of this innovation,

which allows unlimited, anonymous do-

nations to political parties. Other big ques-

tions its judges have yet to take up include

the imposition last year of direct rule on

Kashmir and some 140 legal petitions

against the Citizenship Amendment Act of

2019, which by inserting religion as a crite-

rion for citizenship undermines the secu-

lar nature of the Indian state.

Sleepwalking into authoritarianism?

Slow, uneven and arbitrary justice are not

new to India. Yet its courts have often tried

to check executive power. It was a judge’s

ruling that Indira Gandhi, perhaps India’s

most powerful prime minister, had cheat-

ed in an election that prompted her in 1975

to plunge India into a 21-month Emergen-

cy, during which she threw opponents in

jail and ruled by decree. Legal profession-

als now liken the current moment to that

darkest period for Indian democracy. “This

government has done so much damage to

personal liberty,” says Ajit Prakash Shah, a

former high-court judge. “But the courts,

especially the Supreme Court, have

watched this indiscriminate and violent

trampling of dissent like mute spectators.”

It is not only the courts, alas, that seem

eager to stay in step with the government.

Many cogs in India’s institutional machin-

ery are not merely complacent, but have

grown complicit in a project that threatens

to turn the country into a one-party state.

At least during the Emergency the threat

was clear, says Tarunabh Khaitan, vice-

dean of law at Oxford University and au-

thor of a paper, “Killing a Constitution with

a Thousand Cuts”, that details India’s insti-

tutional decay. “What we have now is a wolf

in sheep’s clothing,” he says. “There is no

full-frontal big-ticket attack on democracy,

but there are multiple, simultaneous at-

tacks on all fronts...We are sleepwalking

into authoritarianism.”

Of the ostensibly independent institu-

tions that are now compliant, India’s police

stand out. Despite individually humane

and honest officers, the impression Indi-

ans hold of the force is that its main pur-

pose is to protect the powerful and perse-

cute the weak. A case in point is the Delhi

police’s management of communal riots

that racked parts of India’s capital for three

days last winter, leaving 53 dead.

Top officers in the force, which before

Mr Modi’s government stopped releasing

statistics comprised just 2% Muslims in a

city with a 13% Muslim minority, had been

filmed standing next to a bjppolitician at a

rally where he threatened to attack protes-

ters, mostly Muslims, holding a peaceful

sit-in against the new citizenship law. Dur-

ing the violence, police were filmed throw-

ing rocks and torturing captured Muslim

youths. More than two-thirds of those

beaten, shot and hacked to death were

Muslim. Yet Delhi’s finest have declined to

register complaints against bjpmembers

for incitement. Their investigations have

focused on a purported Islamist-Marxist

conspiracy to foment unrest in order to

embarrass Mr Modi at a time when he was

hosting President Donald Trump.

An amendment made last year to the

Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (uapa),

a draconian law from 1967 that allows the

state to label and then ban groups as ter-

rorist, now empowers the government to

designate any individual as a terrorist. The

state may hold suspects indefinitely with

no right of bail, confiscate their property

and implicate any associate as an accessory

to terrorism. During India’s harsh lock-

down to combat covid-19 last spring, police

in Delhi quietly rounded up scores of

youths alleged to have been involved in the

riots, and charged many under the uapa.

Having enjoyed a stranglehold on the

Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house, for

six years, and more recently acquired con-

trol of the upper Rajya Sabha, Mr Modi’s

government has passed a slew of other laws

not only to expand its powers, but to dilute

those of potential challengers. One thorn

in its side has been a law from 2005 that up-

holds citizens’ right to obtain information

(rti) from state officials. Seen as a big ad-

vance for transparency in a country where

mandarins remained aloof and unchal-

lenged, the law created an independent

commission to ensure that requests from

the public receive a response. The number

of requests runs at over 1m a year.

In 2019 the government amended the

rtilaw. It reduced the tenure and prestige

of the role of the commission’s chief. Small

wonder that the commission is rejecting a

growing number of information requests

from the public, citing “insufficient docu-

mentation”, even as the number of pending

requests has swollen by 50%. Having fre-

quently neglected to fill empty seats on the

11-person commission, the government in

October tapped a journalist whose chief

works are two books that glowingly laud

the “Modi model” of government.

Such appointments are a prerogative of

the executive, one that previous leaders

have scarcely been shy of exercising. More

unusual under Mr Modi has been his al-

most axiomatic choice of candidates with

Hindu-nationalist credentials, often from

his home state of Gujarat, and his insis-

tence on inserting loyalists even into insti-

tutions that had been seen as sanctuaries

from party politics. Twice Mr Modi has re-

placed heads of the Reserve Bank of India,

the country’s respected central bank, after

they expressed less than fulsome praise of

his economic policies. As India’s latest

comptroller and auditor-general (cag), Mr

Modi reportedly passed over seven senior

secretaries from within the organisation

and instead parachuted in a retired official

from Gujarat. The caghas a record of hon-

est and incisive reporting, but has raised

hackles by exposing government waste.

Modi operandi

In 2016 Mr Modi similarly ignored institu-

tional precedent in the Indian army, lifting

General Bipin Rawat over the heads of two

senior officers to appoint him its top com-

mander. Last year, following a change of

rules that stretched the retirement age,

General Rawat was promoted to chief of

staff of India’s combined forces. The army

maintains a tradition of keeping a distance

from politics that makes it almost unique

in its region, but observers have detected a

growing tendency for officers to weigh in

publicly on civilian matters, and retired

soldiers whisper reproach against officers

for “cosying up” to politicians.

Mr Modi has made a spectacle of his

own commander-in-chief role as no other

recent prime minister, and also minted

electoral gold from pre-election military

Troubling trends

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