Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: Why does the Centre always intrude before a state election?

May I humbly suggest that it is time for the Prime Minister to seriously ponder over why his government’s motives and methods are viewed as suspect and mala fide. It is not just Opposition politicians whose hackles are up, it is ordinary people as well. When last week, in the middle of a cold, winter night, bulldozers rolled up to start tearing down ‘illegal’ structures outside a mosque in old Delhi, rabble-rousers started spreading the news that it was the mosque that was going to be demolished. They were believed, and this caused a large mob of angry Muslims to gather and start throwing stones at policemen and the demolition squad.

When a government loses the trust of ordinary people, everything it does will be suspect. And rumors will spread that it is misusing the levers of power to crush dissent. I have argued before that Umar Khalid should be released on bail after five years in prison without trial, but as a law-abiding citizen, I accept the Supreme Court’s decision to deny him bail. What worries me as someone who was in Delhi when the Hindu-Muslim riots he is charged with masterminding happened is that Kapil Mishra, who made a very incendiary speech at that time, is now a minister. He has never been charged with anything despite his speech threatening violence ‘after Donald Trump leaves’ being freely available on social media. He is now Minister of Law and Justice in the Delhi government.

There are other reasons why not just the Government of India, but the BJP is being increasingly distrusted. After people died of drinking poisonous municipal water in Indore, Kailash Vijayvargiya was questioned by a reporter about what had happened. As Minister of Urban Development, it should have been his duty to explain why a pipeline carried toxic water to the homes of the people who died, but instead of answering, he told the reporter to stop asking “ghanta (nonsensical) questions”. This brave reporter reprimanded him on camera about using words like ‘ghanta’, and the minister scuttled into his car and drove off. But why has he not been sacked for the deaths in Indore? Instead, as usual, it is lowly officials who have been ‘suspended’. This minister is the same man whose son threatened to beat up an official with a cricket bat some years ago. He was briefly detained, but a special court released him when the noise died down.

Is it any wonder that people are beginning to lose faith in the government? Whenever BJP spokesmen are asked about some of the bad things that are going on, the only response they have is to say that if there is a problem then ‘go to the courts for justice’. Clearly, nobody has briefed them yet on how slowly the justice system works. The backlog of cases in Indian courts is estimated to be 5 crores. The Supreme Court alone has a backlog of 90,000 cases.

The point being that going to court is almost as futile as appointing commissions of enquiry. These commissions usually take so long to deliver their reports that often the people affected by some gross injustice, like the widows of the Sikhs killed in the pogrom after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, wait decades for justice. Ten commissions of inquiry were set up to investigate that pogrom, so, by the end, almost no witnesses were left alive and, in any case, the word justice had lost all meaning.

What should worry the Government of India now is the growing mistrust between it and us the people. There is such a miasma of mistrust between us and the government that it is scary. Most people I meet tell me these days that they believe all politicians are corrupt and deceitful. More important than winning West Bengal is to win back the trust that has been lost. Or there will inevitably be other chief ministers who will join Mamata Banerjee in calling someone as revered and powerful as the Home Minister ‘nasty and naughty’. This will make the Modi government look much worse.