Bangladesh crisis: The long cable

It could just be a coincidence. Barely 24 hours before Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was made to flee from Dhaka, India’s home minister was making a statement about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inescapable durability beyond 2029. Just as Hasina had come to entertain notions of invincibility, the prime minister’s right-hand man appears to have convinced himself — and probably his boss — of Narendra Modi’s irreplaceability.

Amit Shah told 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 entitlement.

Of course, the Union home minister’s primary purpose was to signal to all democratic and constitutional stakeholders not to take too seriously the rebuff the electorate 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, starting from Lucknow, are gathering critical mass.

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 altogether. 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 is precisely the obligation of the Opposition — to put every stakeholder, from the President of India to the chief justice to the speaker of the Lok Sabha to the chairperson of the Rajya Sabha to every governor, on notice that if democratic voices of dissent are not allowed to be raised, then the only noise that prevails is the mob on the street. What happened in Dhaka should sober up the Modi–Shah groupies.

In an interview to the Indian Express (5 August 2024) Nobel laureate Prof. 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 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 on 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 is premised on the fallacious and arrogant assumption that one ‘honest, incorruptible’ helmsman could fix a ‘broken’ system.

After 10 years, India remains as corrupt as it was before 2014, if not more; 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.

Events in Bangladesh make it imperative to remind ourselves that irrespective of whatever 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 will make a terrible mistake if they think they can get away with misusing Constitutional processes to suborn institutional arrangements anchored in democratic accountability.

It is the historic failure of every autocrat to think he would be able to bring unprecedented prosperity and peace to his land if only he could shut down nagging voices from civil society and carping critics in the Opposition. Sheikh Hasina is not the first and will not be the last ruler to fall into this illusional trap. Every ruler commits this folly, only to find either the army or angry mobs storming the palace.

No one can be confident that the Amit Shahs and J.P. Naddas 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 incurable waywardness.

The Dhaka denouement need not be replicated in New Delhi.

This article first appeared in The Wire