New Delhi: Painting a grim picture of the country under the Modi government, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has said India has fallen way down the list of nations deemed liberal democracies in the past decade and the BJP has systematically dismantled democratic institutions.
In her memoir Belonging A Journey Of Love, Gandhi says ideological forces behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi are undermining a system that for close to 80 years has held intact a diverse population, a tapestry of different languages, beliefs, and customs in a delicate web of unity.
It is this fabric, essential to our unity and freedom, that’s now threatened by an authoritarian force bent upon changing the very nature of our country, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson says in the 526-page book.
Gandhi says in her scathing indictment that she could have predicted from the gigantic scale of the new prime minister’s first swearing-in that this was going to be a very different kind of government.
One percent of the country owns more than 40 percent of its wealth, the biggest gap in six decades, but the Modi government has yet to release updated data on poverty. It has failed to come forward with any new ideas of governance and instead has adopted no less than thirty of our UPA-era programmes — but retitled under catchier names and considerably reduced in scale; some of these welfare schemes the prime minister himself had earlier criticised, she says.
Gandhi cites the examples of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan of the erstwhile UPA government to buttress her point.
The government’s own audit agency, the Controller and Auditor General (CAG), has pointed to widespread misuse, corruption and failures in implementation, Gandhi writes.
The NDAs claim to provide a corruption-free government rings hollow in the face of such disclosures. It has hugely accelerated investments in physical infrastructure, building on what we had begun in the UPA. However, the distribution of these assets has mainly benefited a few industrialists with close ties to the PM, giving them the lion’s share in important sectors of the economy and inviting the term ‘crony capitalists’ as a description of the regime, she alleges.
Many of these projects have wantonly disregarded their devastating environmental costs to our already vulnerable rivers, mountains, and forests, Gandhi writes.
Politically, over the past decade, I’ve seen India fall way down the list of nations deemed liberal democracies. Under Dr. Manmohan Singh, our country was inching up the ladder in economic, social, and political league tables. That’s been reversed in several key indicators, most tellingly in freedoms, democracy, and the media, she says.
Discussing the role of the media, Gandhi writes, I’ve noticed similar depressing trends in other countries of the developed world, but the role played by our mainstream media has sunk to blatant partisanship. TV anchors and private channels were once mostly credible and independent, offering viewers a variety of points of view. Today they’re no better than propaganda arms of the government.
Paid troll armies brand as ‘traitors’ and ‘anti-nationals’ members of the public who dare to uncover corruption, to speak out or criticise the prime minister and his policies, she says.
Many dissenters have been imprisoned on false charges without bail or trial. I remember a time when India was known for high-spirited democratic protests, where across the land people could freely and peacefully express their points of view. This sometimes spilt over into confrontation, even on occasion violence.
But the freedom to speak out, to gather in protest, was part of a long standing democratic tradition, barring the twenty-one months of the Emergency. In this dispensation’s twelve years, the space for public demonstrations has been severely curtailed; even peaceful protests by students, teachers, farmers, and women of the minority community have been crushed, and many activists languish in jail for years, again without due process.
She also claims in the book that the RSS has brought most educational institutions under its ideological control, from the rewriting of school textbooks to the appointment of university vice-chancellors, causing lasting damage to our educational system.
I also remember my mother-in-law’s press conferences in the main hall of Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi, with her facing a battery of newspersons from both the Indian and foreign media. Rajiv and other prime ministers held press conferences regularly, often fielding tough questions. On their visits abroad, a media contingent would travel with them and interrogate them freely at the end of the tour. It is not so now, she says.
Prime Minister Modi hasn’t held a single press conference in the 12 years that he’s been in office, she points out.
The BJP has systematically dismantled our democratic institutions, she alleges, adding that they’re unwilling to acknowledge that the opposition has a vital role to play in a democracy.
They’ve pushed draconian laws through Parliament by expelling opposition MPs or just bulldozing bills through without any discussion. The ruling party has captured the government’s executive agencies and uses them to intimidate or threaten opponents with warnings of tax raids, trumped-up legal cases, or outright imprisonment without fue process, she says.
Gandhi also alleges that brutal attacks on minorities as well as Dalits have increased exponentially and mostly gone unpunished ever since the BJP came to power, A telling example of the prime minister’s autocratic methods was his sudden announcement in November 2016 of a currency demonetisation, she says.
Since the operation had been carried out under a cloak of secrecy, even the banks hadn’t been prepared for the resulting avalanche of currency exchange demands. None of the stated objectives of the move were met. while at one blow it threw trade into disarray, shut down vita sectors of the economy, and drove millions to hardship, Gandhi says.