NEIGHBOURS: HASINA’S LESSON FOR NEW DELHI

It could just be a coincidence. Barely 24 hours before Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was compelled to flee Dhaka, India’s home minister was making a statement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inescapable durability beyond 2029. Just as Sheikh Hasina had come to entertain notions of indispensability, the prime minister’s right-hand man appears to have convinced himself — and probably his boss — that India is doomed without Modi at the helm.
On Sunday, [August 4], Amit Shah was telling an audience in Chandigarh: “The opposition may try and make as much noise as it wants to. Let me make it clear that in 2029, it is again PM Modi who is coming to power.” Such undiluted arrogance. Such a sense of entitlement.
Of course, the Union home minister’s primary purpose was to signal to all the democratic and constitutional stakeholders not to take too seriously the rebuff the electorate has administered to the Modi regime in the Lok Sabha elections two months ago.
Of course, with an invigorated opposition making its presence felt in parliament, the Modi coterie has every reason to feel worried that many in the judiciary and bureaucracy may not be all that enthusiastic about implementing their agenda of vengeance.
Of course, the Modi establishment cannot be unaware that murmurs of unease and defiance within the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], starting from Lucknow, are gathering a critical mass.
Sheikh Hasina was also recently “elected” under an arrangement that lacked credibility. The opposition parties had boycotted the poll process. There was no pretence of any free and fair vote.
In our own country, there were many voices who felt that, given the Modi regime’s stranglehold over the Election Commission, the anti-BJP parties should stay away from contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha poll. It was the Supreme Court’s verdict on electoral bonds that persuaded the cynics to have some faith in the overall constitutional scheme of things. Even then, the Election Commission of India failed to earn the unqualified respect of all.
And, this precisely is the obligation of the opposition — to put on notice every stakeholder, from the president of India to the chief justice to the speaker of the Lok Sabha to the chairman of the Rajya Sabha to every governor, that if democratic voices of dissent are not allowed to be raised, then the only noise that prevails is the crowd in the street. What happened in Dhaka should sober up the Modi-Shah groupies.
In an interview to the Indian Express (August 5, 2024), Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus had observed of the Sheikh Hasina government: “The government is a lie-making factory, continuously lying and lying and lying, and they just start believing in their own lies.” A familiar strain in every elected autocracy.
A similar weakness has marked the Modi government’s approach to fact and figures. It rejects all international reports and opinions; it even dismisses international standards and yardsticks of democratic health. Civil society and its critiques are dismissed as the handiwork of those who want to create instability and/ or bring a bad name to Mother India.
Refusing to heed the voters’ admonitory slap across their face, Modi’s commissars are now trying to throttle all independent voices in digital platforms. It can only be hoped that the Modi government’s overreach will have to pass the test of judicial scrutiny.
The past 10 years have made it abundantly clear that the Narendra Modi project has had no answers to the problems and complexities of national governance. Apart from self-praise and self-promotion, Modi’s decade long tenure in government is one of inefficiency, insensitivity and incapacity, because it was premised on the fallacious and arrogant assumption that one honest, incorruptible helmsman could fix the “broken” system.
After 10 years, India remains as, if not more, corrupt a place it was before 2014; in 10 years, it has become more unfair, more unequal and more undemocratic a place.
In Bangladesh, every good impulse, every healthy tradition, every admirable protocol, every vital institution had been suborned in the interest of the glory and power of one individual. We have come very close to flirting with the Bangladesh model. The self-corruption of the establishment has eaten into the Modi sarkar’s pretensions.
The Bangladesh events make it imperative to remind ourselves that irrespective of whatever home minister Amit Shah asserts, democracies do not elect kings or emperors. Democracies choose prime ministers and presidents, all drawing legitimacy and authority from the constitution.  A democratic government is an accountable government.
The BJP and RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] will make a terrible mistake if they think that they can get away with misusing constitutional processes to suborn institutional arrangements, anchored in democratic accountability.
It is the historic conceit of every autocrat to think they would be able to bring unprecedented prosperity and peace in their land, if only they shut down the nagging voices from civil society and the carping critics in the opposition.
Sheikh Hasina is not the first and will not be the last ruler to fall in this illusional trap. Every ruler commits this folly, only to find either the army or angry mobs storming the presidential palace.
No one can be confident that the Amit Shahs and the JP Naddas [current BJP president] of our world, who traffic in political arrogance, have the wisdom and sagacity to draw appropriate lessons from Sheikh Hasina’s flawed model of personal rule. But one can be confident that India’s constitutional institutions will regain their vitality and assert themselves against the Modi regime’s uncured waywardness.
The Dhaka denouement need not be replicated in New Delhi.
The writer is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune group of newspapers in India
By arrangement with The Wire
Published in Dawn, EOS, August 18th, 2024