The James-Justice Test

Will they, for example, pit the Government of India in a bare-knuckles fight against its own National Human Rights Commission NHRC? Will they let Narendra Modi do so? Hire the best lawyers and take on Justice Anand? And meanwhile Venkaiah Naidu files a defamation case against him for bringing Gujarat into disrepute? God knows the BJP does enormously better in terms of legal acumen than the Congress whose legal stars spend more time blocking economic reform on behalf of vested interests than wasting it to further their own party8217;s cause or ideology. So it might just work. But is that why they created an institution like the NHRC to begin with?

This is a tricky one. The next time the Pakistanis, or a Scandinavian NGO or Amnesty International or even some US congressional committee raises the issue of human rights violations of our armed forces in Kashmir the same government and its spokesmen will respond by holding forth on the independence, wisdom and firmness of the same NHRC. As long as we have our own watch-dogs like the NHRC and the free media, what business do you have to lecture us on human rights, or something like that. Yet, meanwhile, the ruling party8217;s president would continue accusing the same NHRC of joining the conspiracy to defame the only state where his party has won a clear election victory in the past five years. It simply won8217;t work that way.

It is easy to see how day-to-day politics and rajdharma come in conflict with each other. Resolving this is the true test of a leader8217;s statesmanship. Or you walk into contradictions that haunt you so painfully. It is funny, therefore, that another reminder of this self-defeating contradiction came, almost at the same time as the NHRC8217;s approach to the Supreme Court to reopen the Best Bakery case and to transfer all other riot cases outside Gujarat. At around this time last year, Narendra Modi was mocking 8220;James Michael8221; Lyngdoh as some kind of a Christian satan messing up Gujarat8217;s dream of Ramrajya. Now his party has to congratulate him on winning the Magsaysay Award.

Since October last year, his own bosses 8212; and the rest of us 8212; have been extolling Lyngdoh and his Election Commission for its firmness, independence and courage, and basking in the glory of the election he held in Jammu and Kashmir. So many leaders of this very coalition have hailed it as the cleanest election in Kashmir8217;s history. It has been acknowledged to be so internationally. Vajpyaee, Advani, George Fernandes, even K.S. Sudershan and Narendra Modi would ask you to celebrate the fact that this is perhaps one of the four or five most significant and positive turns in our history since the liberation of Bangladesh. Would it have been possible without one 8220;James Michael8221; and his Election Commission? Would this election have had the same legitimacy if he had not, just a month earlier, stood up to Modi and his abuses so nonchalantly? Would so many Kashmiris have braved the terrorist threat to vote if the election was being conducted by a lesser man, and a lesser institution?

How the government now responds to the NHRC8217;s intervention may yet give a good indication of its own tolerance of watchdog institutions and it may yet sully its book. But the fact is that, Modi apart, this government has been far more tolerant of the institutions than any in the heady days of the Congress. Barring the Minorities Commission, where the original crime is the choice of a light-weight chairman, and the Cattle Commission which has mercifully been wound up, we have lately seen institutions of checks and balances acquire greater stature and power. The courts have been more activist than ever and we have not seen any real effort to undermine or infiltrate them with fellow-travellers. The Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra may have repudiated Justice Srikrishna8217;s report on the Bombay riots but that hasn8217;t stopped his march to the Supreme Court bench. This president is making Rashtrapati Bhavan unprecedentedly activist. Even his predecessor successfully blocked the use of Article 356 to dissolve the Bihar assembly. It is perhaps a part of the same, growing institutional 8212; and constitutional 8212; maturity that Article 356 has not been used, to settle political scores, even once since Narasimha Rao dismissed the four BJP-run governments in the aftermath of the Babri demolition. And occasional abuse, and Tehelka apart, this government has put up quite nicely with an increasingly nosey press, including 24-hour television news. Even this newspaper has got away entirely unscathed with a lot of embarrassing exposes, from the petrol pump scam to the Best Bakery cover-up, without, I must add in all fairness, a single threatening call or one piece of vindictive action by anybody who counts for anything in this government.

Certainly, you would not have expected the senior Mrs Gandhi to have put up with such an interventionist Supreme Court, such troublesome Election Commissions and certainly not the media. At the Express, we are still dealing with cases filed by her and Rajiv Gandhi. She would have packed the courts with stooges and loyalists 8212; as she tried during the Emergency. Rajiv, too, had a low threshold of tolerance with such 8220;interference8221; and one of the lowest points in his prime ministership was his undermining of the same EC for the 8220;crime8221; of holding five bye-elections with electronic voting machines. The Congress happened to lose all five and Rajiv successfully hauled the EC to court on the ridiculous plea that the law until then defined a ballot as a piece of paper.

You wonder why the Congress, which is still blocking parliamentary proceedings over Ayodhya, has been so silent on Best Bakery and the NHRC8217;s embarrassment of the Modi government? Is it because in the Congress worldview the plight of a few Muslims in Gujarat is of less electoral value than the chance to salve its own Babri conscience by making noise in Parliament? Or is it because it still, temperamentally, sees institutions like the NHRC as an avoidable distraction in the business of politics and governance?

That question is for the Congress to answer and it will probably respond by saying that my whole argument is flawed. That the NDA8217;s greater tolerance of the institutions is no more than the limitations of a smaller majority. I would however like to believe that it is more a function of the fact that the NDA is led by people like Vajpayee and Advani, whose politics matured during the Emergency in Mrs Gandhi8217;s jails, just as that of Nehru and his generation did in British prisons, and who want to be remembered as democrats. This week8217;s events 8212; the honour for Lyngdoh and the NHRC intervention in the Best Bakery case 8212; will test that commitment. Will they now advise Modi to submit and comply to the NHRC8217;s will, most humbly and on bended knee, and not embarrass himself, and them, further by fighting it in the Supreme Court? And will they then also remember one 8220;James Michael8221; Lyngdoh when they finalise the Republic Day honours next year just before he demits office? After all, he won us much more than an election in Kashmir and contributed more to India8217;s cause than all the 8220;friendly8221; journalists in the world put together.

E-mail the Author