REPUBLIC Day 2019 was the fifth Republic Day under the Prime Ministership of Narendra Modi and the mood of the country was anything but celebratory. The customary Republic Day eve address of the President, the pomp and grandeur of the Republic Day parade, the long list of Padma awardees and Bharat Ratnas may suggest that it is business as usual. But if we look at the larger picture emerging from outside of Lutyen’s Delhi, we can easily see India’s continuing descent to an ever deeper crisis. Seven decades ago when the Constitution came into existence, the words Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity highlighted in the Preamble of the Constitution promised a new world. Today we are only reminded of how far away India has been pushed from those cherished ideals.
Just on the eve of Republic Day Haryana reported yet another case of lynching. In yet another case of a Muslim youth being targeted in the name of cow-smuggling, 24-year-old Naushad Mohammad was chained to a power supply pole and thrashed for hours in Haryana’s Rohtak district. The police stood silent witness and eventually took him to the police station only to keep him chained and frame him under false charges. It is this collusion of the police and lynch mobs which increasingly defines ‘governance’ in state after state. This official patronage also ensures judicial impunity for the perpetrators of hate crimes.
The hastily passed constitutional amendment to introduce 10 percent reservation for so-called economically weaker sections, with economic backwardness defined by annual income of up to Rs 800,000 and agricultural land holding of up to 5 acres had already marked a heavy blow to the principle of social justice enunciated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court added another hefty punch by upholding the Allahabad High Court verdict on the 13-point roster system in university recruitments which effectively negates the provision of reservation for SC/ST/OBCs. Together, these twin blows threaten to undo the entire framework of reservation.
While the weakening of reservation reinforces the caste hierarchy of graded social inequality, the economic policies of liberalisation and privatisation relentlessly widen the gap between rich and poor in terms of wealth and income. The latest figures in the Oxfam report on global inequality indicate tremendous concentration of wealth in India in ever fewer hands. The richest 9 Indians now hold as much wealth as the bottom half of our people. The net worth of Mukesh Ambani alone accounts for nearly as much as the gross domestic state product of Odisha. Viewed in comparison to the central budget, this is just a little less than four times the combined allocation for the ministries of health and family welfare, women and child development and drinking water and sanitation.
While wealth continues to concentrate in a few hands, the banks in India are reeling under the growing pressure of non-performing assets caused by non-repayment of loans by big corporate houses. The government has done its best to protect these loan sharks by all means possible, from refusing to publish the names of defaulters to enabling them to flee the country. Just when the CBI initiated some action in the ICICI loan scam, none other than Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who is currently undergoing treatment in the United States warned the CBI against what he called investigative adventurism and the CBI officer probing the case was shunted out to Ranchi. And now Cobrapost has exposed a whopping Rs. 31,000 crore financial scam involving the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL), a key donor for the BJP.
All-round collapse of governance, systematic assault on the Constitution and an economy tottering at the brink of a disaster – between Republic Day 2015 and Republic Day 2019, the Modi government has pushed India downhill on all fronts. Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it has thrown India into a state of anarchy and despair the like of which has been seldom seen in the past. Contrary to the Sangh brigade’s loud slogans of nationalism, India has never been as divided in the last seventy years of its history. The much vaunted paradigm of ‘cooperative federalism’ has turned out to be an unabashed exercise in coercive and communal centralism, and the result is there for all of us to see.
It is not only that the Modi government has further deepened the suffering and alienation of the people of Kashmir; today the whole of the North-East, Assam in particular, is boiling in rage against the mischievous Citizenship Amendment Act and the southern states too are feeling betrayed on every count. On his recent visit to Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Narendra Modi was once again greeted with the popular cry of #GoBackModi. No Prime Minister in the past had evoked such strong opposition in the southern states. India can move forward only as a secular and federal democracy with policies ensuring social justice and equitable development. The Modi government has been a live demonstration of the disaster that awaits us if the powers that be not only fail to deliver but actively reject this basic framework. And in the process it has given us the battle cry of the 2019 elections: Unite to fight, fight to win.
